To find peace as an HSP, it helps to use the HSP label—then let it go.

As we start a new year—and I send you my most heartfelt wishes for a wonderful one—I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of being highly sensitive. To be clear, high sensitivity is a genetic trait. It’s real. It’s not a fad. More than that, the HSP label can be incredibly helpful. It points us towards a comprehensive set of self-care insights and strategies.

Take me, for example. Finding out I was highly sensitive did not change my life overnight, but it did set me on a journey towards more and more peace, joy, and sustainability. In the years that followed, I took a variety of steps based on my growing knowledge of my sensitive nervous system, passing along what I learned to my clients. Along the way, I —

• Learned about four basic aspects of the trait (deep processing, overarousal, emotional intensity, and sensory sensitivity)
• Made steady progress on the four HSP life tasks (learning about the trait, reframing my life with that new knowledge in mind, healing old wounds, and spending time with other HSPs)
• Mastered skills for self-regulation, which is key for HSP well-being
• Learned how to recognize, value, and act on my spiritual intuition, as it became my most trusted resource
• Created a more joyful, sustainable life (including building more breaks into my day, providing plenty of time for sleep, meditation, and restorative reflection, and maintaining several Focusing partnerships in which I can do the deep processing I need to do.

There was more, of course, including food, exercise, work, and healthy relationship habits. We need a comprehensive package to care for our HSP selves in a loving way. Realizing you are sensitive is the first step to opening the package.

We are more than our sensitivity

Clearly the HSP label can be incredibly helpful. Essential, even. We need to know all this about ourselves, in order to take care of ourselves well, especially when our needs can seem so different from people around us. Otherwise, we try to conform. This is even more true if you’ve gotten the sense, implied or explicit, that there must be something wrong with you if you need, say, more sleep than your college roommates.

But—just as each of us is more than our gender, our ethnicity, our nationality, our education, our social standing, our hair color, height, weight and more, we are so much more than our sensitivity. The HSP label becomes a problem when it begins to define you. You can tell a label is defining you too much if it begins to weigh you down, hold you back, or set you apart.

In other words, you need to learn to wear the label lightly—to use it when it’s helpful to you. But then—can you let it go? Yes. Some of the millions of HSPs in the world never even put the label on in the first place, because they happen to be born in circumstances in which they are naturally supported. They are accepted as they are, and as a a result, they accept themselves as a matter of course. Then they simply do what they need to do to care for themselves, without questioning it or judging it—just as you might put lotion on your dry skin, without judging yourself for having dry skin in the first place.

Use the label, then let it go

For those of us who did not organically absorb those skills and attitudes, the HSP label is highly useful…as long as you don’t get too caught up in it. The spiritual teacher Vimala Thakar wrote this*:

One says, I am sitting down in silence, but the bird disturbs me. The bird won’t disturb me unless I concentrate upon it. I attend to it and call it a disturbance the moment I judge it, evaluate it, the moment I have concentrated upon it. So I say, It disturbs me, it distracts me. The moment I say that it distracts me or that it disturbs me, it indicates that I have been resisting.

There’s a certain amount we can do—and should do, if we can—to manage the challenges that come with high sensitivity. For example, my life got easier overnight when we moved into our first house and I was no longer subject to other people’s noise. But not everyone can buy a house, and in any case, we simply can’t control all the external stimuli in the world. What we can do is choose not to resist it. I love the way Vimala Thakar expresses this:

Resistance is inverted concentration…I wish that you could see the beauty of this. Unless you form a relationship of resistance, there cannot be disturbance and distraction.

No resistance, no disturbance. Can you see, then, how I’m walking a razor’s edge when I define myself as “an HSP who is bothered by x, y, and z?” It’s useful information at first. Once I’ve made the relatively few adjustments that truly are under my control, though, I have only one viable option left: to let go of resisting “what is.” Then I can find peace in the midst of anything.

To overcome disturbance and distraction, cling lightly

I know this is a paradox. After all, I teach people about the HSP trait. Yet at the same time, I’m suggesting that you hold to the whole concept of sensitivity as lightly as you possibly can, with threads as fine as the most gossamer spider silk. Use the information associated with the label, but don’t get wrapped up and stuck in the concept. The whole reason we are doing all this is to be free.

Photo by Degaharu on Unsplash
*Thakar, Vimala (2003): Blossoms of Friendship, Berkeley, California: Rodmell Press.