The Gifts of Sensitivity
Hannah Green
Dear Community,
Happy New Year! I am off to a rather slow start. I am still emerging from a long first bout with covid. The last of my symptoms are hanging on after about six weeks. This has been an emotionally cathartic experience. I have made the most of the veil being thin by allowing all kinds of feelings to come up, be felt and released. I am grateful now for a new perspective and to have my energy mostly back. Sending a warm hug and wishes for good health to any of you dealing with illness, I know there are so many of us right now.
I am a sensitive person. I bet if you are reading this, you are too. The truth about my sensitivity and sensitivity on the whole is constantly dawning on me. For a sensitive person, living is similar to swimming. We need sea legs. We need to constantly move with waves of feeling that pull us, move us, lift us up and pull us down. Perhaps this is why the little mermaid has captivated me so completely since I was a little girl. I have had the John William Waterhouse painting of a mermaid on my wall for as long as I can remember. She tries to live on the surface and ultimately must return to the feminine depths which are her birthright. She is at home in these watery depths and she is constantly moving in harmony with it's waters.
In Jungian terms sensitivity refers to the "intuitive function." Jung said the building blocks of our personalities lay in four functions: thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting. We are a spectral combination of these elements, manifesting as strengths and liabilities accordingly. Jung defined intuition as "perception via the unconscious."
Sensitivity or the intuitive function is the ability to tune into subtleties and be deeply perceptive. We tune into and perceive cues from other, both positive and negative. We receive intuitive information from nature, objects, images and environments. Studies have also linked sensitivity to a rich inner life, a greater than average cognitive depth of processing and increased physical sensitivity. I believe this refers to a kind of thoroughness of processing sensitive people seem to engage in and indeed often require. We need time to digest, feel and think it through. In our culture, this can be difficult, It can make us feel out of sync with the mainstream. Jung puts it in the following way:
"A sensitive and somewhat unbalanced person, as a neurotic always is, will meet with special difficulties and perhaps with more unusual tasks in life than a normal individual, who as a rule has only to follow the well-worn path of an ordinary existence. For the neurotic there is no established way of life, because his aims and tasks are apt to be of a highly individual character. He tries to go the more or less uncontrolled and half conscious way of normal people, not realizing that his own critical and very different nature demands of him more effort than the normal person is required to exert." (Jung 1916, para. 572)
It takes time, great willingness, faith and effort to accept and expand into our sensitivity. One of the practices I am constantly deepening into is the art of self awareness. This has amplified over the last 20 years. To name a few practices that have focussed on tracking sensory experience and expanding awareness...Vipassana retreats in my 20's, working with Somatic Experiencing, Gestalt training in the awareness continuum, active imagination, and finally bringing all of this together in learning to track and release emotions as a spiritual practice. This practice of connecting to emotions as sensations in the body and with images in the psyche positions us to receive direct information from the unconscious. This connection expands our intuitive and perceptive abilities and I believe sensitive people have increased capacity for this.
These abilities also link to increased experience of what Jung called the numinous. A central tenant of Jungian psychology is that the numinous heals, a fact that shamans and healers have known through the ages. The word numinous is an invented word, coined in 1917 by a German professor of theology, Rudolf Otto, in his book Das Heilige (translated in 1923 as The Idea of the Holy). He wanted an adjective that described objects or experiences that are "holy" without the common associations with morality and "goodness" that holy usually conjures. This is important because as Jung described, encounters with the numinous can contain a big mixture of emotions, both positive and negative. A numinous experience is one that goes beyond our rational mind and brings us into relationship with something far greater than ourselves. It catapults us beyond our previous state of consciousness. Therefor a numinous experience can be experienced as sublime, expansive, joyful, blissful but also humbling, scary, disorienting or bewildering.
These numinous experiences often transform and heal us. So in therapy we look for and find the numinous in dreams, in waking visions and “active imagination,” in the numinous quality of our client/therapist relationships and relationships in general, in spontaneous artistic inspirations, and in synchronistic events, which become unusually common when we open to our sensitivity. Through depth work that embraces numinous experience we link the personal to the universal, which gives life meaning and is healing in and of itself. It is no wonder that sensitive people or people who identify as highly sensitive tend to do well in depth or Jungian oriented therapy.
For me it is important to recognize my strengths as a sensitive person for several reasons. One is that I want to be of service, and to develop my particular gifts I must recognize what they are and continue to nurture them. The other is that I have had a distorted view of sensitivity, growing up in a culture and to a certain extent, a family in which these qualities were considered problematic. I was always out of step in school and never quite able to sync with the usual well worn paths in life. My family loves and appreciates me very much, but raising a sensitive child, who requires a high level of attention and attunement is a major challenge for a mother of five, a practical career driven father (and a completely absent birth father.) I am still learning to own my sensitivity and not buy into the old idea that I am a burden or "too much." I try to develop it's associated gifts and be compassionate and patient with it's challenges. It's easier to do this with my clients than with myself, but I keep working on it.
As I am finishing up this email I am in Amsterdam. Yesterday I went to the Van Gogh museum to bask in his sublime sensitivity. It was hard for me as the museum was overcrowded and I always find a busy museum unpleasant. I want to sensitize to the art and for me this is in direct conflict with being in a crowd. Sea Scape near Saintes Maries de la Mer (see below) really captured my attention. I have not yet made my pilgrimage to this place in France, where Mary Magdalene is said to have arrived in a rudderless boat to live out the rest of her days. I am excitedly anticipating that this Spring. Remembering that he painted this scene and spent much time in this particular area created a sense of empathy and kinship. The little boat moving through the colorful and turbulent water made me think about sensitivity and navigating waves of emotion. I loved that he wrote his name in contrasting red paint, as if to say "i am here." "I have a sense of myself within these waters that I do not control."
Van Gogh was taken with the colors of the Mediterranean Sea. He wrote that it ‘has a color like mackerel, in other words, changing – you don’t always know if it’s green or purple – you don’t always know if it’s blue – because a second later, its changing reflection has taken on a pink or grey hue’. This is how I feel about emotion: it is a moving adventure.
In Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes (also below), we see his connection with the numinous turn an ordinary still life into something sublime, alive and holy in it's celebration of life.
I will end with this sweet quote from Jung, who always gravitated to working with highly sensitive people and of course is one of the great sensitives of his time. I am wishing you good health. I am wishing you time and space to engage in the depth of processing that is most nurturing and productive for you.
"This excessive sensitiveness very often brings an enrichment of the personality and contributes more to its charm than to the undoing of a person’s character." (Jung 1913, para. 398)
...Exactly :)
Take care, Hannah
Otto, Rudolf (1958), The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press.
James, William (1961), The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Collier Books.
Jung, Carl (1956) “Symbols of Transformation,” Collected Works, 5, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
