Judith Blackstone - Belonging Here: A Guide for the Spiritually Sensitive Person

ALSO BY Judith Blackstone

Books

The Subtle Self

The Enlightenment Process

The Empathic Ground

The Intimate Life

Audio

The Realization Process

Judith Blackstone, PhD

Introduction

Spiritual Sensitivity

ALTHOUGH WE ARE all capable of spiritual awakening, people who are drawn to the spiritual path often possess, from their earliest years, a particular kind of openness or sensitivity. This may take the form of heightened perception, abundant energy, exceptional emotional depth, or the ability to see into the truth of situations. Each of these gifts can be an entranceway into the subtle, spiritual dimension of life. They can mature into the unconditional love and clarity of spiritual realization. But when they appear in childhood, they may also produce difficulties such as conflicts in our relationships, a low tolerance for sensory stimuli, or a feeling of being at odds with the values held by our surrounding culture.

The various challenges that spiritual sensitivity may produce, and the protective strategies that we use to cope with them, can interfere with our development, and remain with us as adults. They can become obstacles in our personal and spiritual lives. They may cause us to feel alienated from the world around us and also from ourselves. Even people who have followed a spiritual path for many years may find themselves unable to proceed past a certain point in their spiritual awakening because of the impact of these early problems.

All children must find ways to cope with the challenges of their environment, the limitations or lapses in love and security that are present even in the most loving, secure families. But spiritually sensitive children face a unique set of challenges. From early on, they live in a dimension of perception, emotional experience, and insight that is not shared by most of the people around them.

Sometimes, they even look different than other people. Their bodies often seem softer or more permeable than other peoples bodies. Their eyes have depth and luminosity. Their faces and bodies are often fluid and expressive, and their emotions can rock the room with their intensity. They may appear to be deep, as if they were looking out at the world from a deeper place inside of themselves.

Especially in childhood, their softness may cause them to feel weaker than their peers. They may become the targets of bullies or relegated to the outcasts on the fringe of their school society. They may grow up feeling extremely self-conscious about their differences from other people. For example, I work with a young man who always contracts his body inward, as if to hide from sight. He feels unable to stand up to the judgment of other people, and yet, deep down, he knows that he is gifted, in a way that is difficult for him to describe to other people.

People who are spiritually open are deeply impacted by the world around them. They are usually highly empathic, experiencing the emotional and even physical suffering of others as if it were their own. They may be so aware of the suffering in the world, that it feels selfish to them to pursue their own happiness.

Another manifestation of spiritual sensitivity is an abundance of energy. All healthy children have a lit up, animated quality, but spiritually gifted children often stand out as remarkably radiant and strong-willed. This can also make them more difficult to manage, more demanding, and less compliant than their siblings.

People with abundant energy may experience themselves as larger or more powerful than others. As children, they may even feel more powerful than the adults in their lives. Some people with this sense of extraordinary power grow up afraid to experience or express the fullness of their being, for fear of alienating or injuring other people. By adulthood, they may appear particularly timid or apologetic, as a way of masking their vitality. They often express the concern that they are too much for other people.

Energy can be experienced as vitality, and it can also be experienced as fluidity. When people feel internally fluid, rather than feeling powerful, they may experience themselves as extremely malleable and impressionable. Instead of feeling like enclosed, separate entities, they feel permeable, like everything around them can come into them, and as if they can leak out into the life around them. They may feel that they merge with or even become the identities of other people they encounter. Im like a chameleon, a woman told me. I become my surroundings. Although there is sometimes pleasure in the experience of becoming, or merging with other people and things, there is also confusion and exhaustion, a loss of our own moorings, as if we were blown about by the wind.

People who are very fluid can also become easily ungrounded or diffuse. As children they may use their abundant energy to rise up above their bodies or expand outward from their bodies in order to lessen the impact of painful or overwhelming circumstances. As adults, this chronic ungrounded condition may cause them anxiety and disorientation. They feel that they have no foundation for their abundant energy, and no sense of connection to the earth. I worked with a woman who could barely feel her feet on the ground; she felt most alive in her head, or even above her head. She often complained of a lack of support from family and colleagues, and of having to make everything happen herself. This complaint stopped when she felt the support of the ground beneath her feet. She said that everything she did seemed to require less effort when she could feel herself resting on the ground.

The depth and openness of spiritually sensitive children means that they can be easily and deeply wounded, for example, by a parents fleeting expression of anger, disappointment, or disengagement. As one woman said of her relationship with her parents, I could feel every shift, every nuance of their emotional states. These children may be intensely affected by events that have much less impact on their siblings. As a result, they may become the identified patient, their pain or outrage a source of bewilderment or ridicule from other family members.

Spiritually sensitive children can also suppress their experience or their self-expression with particular depth and force of will. In order to defend themselves against emotional pain, or to mold themselves to fit in with their family and peers, they may create deep fragmentations and constrictions in their bodies. As a result, there is often a striking degree of imbalance in their personal development: as adults, they present an unusual mixture of maturity and immaturity, openness and rigidity. A person may be extremely compassionate and capable of deep emotional contact with other people, and at the same time, be so severely constricted in their pelvis that they avoid intimate relationships. Or someone may exude exceptional wisdom and kindness, and yet feel so constricted in their voice that they cannot express their own needs or insights.

Children sometimes express their spiritual sensibility directly, describing experiences such as visions of subtle light, out-of-body flights, and other phenomena. If their reports of the spiritual realm are met with disbelief or censure from other family members, they will sometimes search for a context for their experiences. I know a man who, as a young child, always saw light around people. Although his parents dismissed his claims, he noticed that this light resembled the angels haloes that were painted on the walls of their church. He kept this association to himself, but he was intrigued by this resemblance of ordinary people to angels, and comforted by the knowledge that what he could see had already been seen and recorded by other people. This explanation served him well. It allowed him to maintain and develop his subtle vision, which contributed to his exceptional ability as a healer when he grew up.