Hello and welcome.
I'm Skyler Liberty-Rose and today I'm going to share with you why sensitivity really is your superpower.
My first memory of being sensitive was when I was around five or six years old and I saw a stray dog in the street in London where I used to live.
I remember my heart aching for this dog,
Feeling so sad that it was unprotected,
Uncared for.
Something in me immediately responded to the plight of this animal that I didn't know.
I wanted to cry.
That was my overwhelming emotion,
Deep sadness and the impulse to cry.
But I instinctively knew not to do that,
Not to cry.
Instead,
I stuffed down my emotions and I told myself I'd cry about it later,
When I was back home in my bedroom,
When I was alone,
When it was safe to do so.
And I did.
I sobbed my heart out for this stray dog later in the day when I had peace,
When I had privacy.
I don't have any memories of explicitly being told not to cry or not to show my emotions.
But as a child in a world that placed high value on certain behaviours and personality types and treated other behaviours and personalities as problems that required fixing,
It was no surprise really that I came to view my sensitivity as a weakness.
I was born in the 70s and nobody was really celebrating sensitivity then.
Certainly nobody was really diving into what's at the heart of sensitivity,
Compassion and empathy.
Instead,
It was about conforming to stifling societal expectations.
Girls were expected to be nice and compliant,
But not crybabies.
Boys were expected to lead,
But they weren't allowed to be in touch with their emotions at all.
And for anyone who felt other or identified differently outside of the binaries,
There was simply no space held for their experience.
And so I learned to suppress my sensitivity.
And if you're a sensitive person,
Which is pretty likely if you're listening to this,
Then you know it's not easy to suppress entirely.
It's certainly not healthy.
And so I then learned to default to anger.
Anger was a way of masking my sensitivity.
It was a way of avoiding a more uncomfortable emotion for me.
Of course,
Anger was also frowned upon for females,
But it had the benefit of making me feel less vulnerable.
I believed that it was safer to be angry than it was to be sensitive.
But really what that meant in reality was that I was feeling sensitive and angry.
I wasn't solving anything.
I wasn't learning how to honor who I was or how I naturally felt inclined to move through the world.
I was turning away from myself instead of turning towards myself and getting to understand who I was more intimately.
It was a coping mechanism.
And that's what we do when a society has such rigid ideas about how we should be.
We're forced to devise ways of staying safe within those parameters,
Even when it costs us dearly.
Our bodies,
Our hearts,
Our spirits,
They're always trying to get back to a place of alignment.
And most often our societies are trying to steer us away from that place of alignment.
It's little wonder that so many of us feel conflicted as we navigate our way through the world.
What changed for me was that I got older and I became more comfortable with who I was,
With who I am.
And when I say older,
I mean that this revelation of recognizing that I didn't have to have a personality transplant to be worthy of being in this world has only happened in the last few years.
I'm 49 now and I was probably around 45 when I started to get very specific about my personality,
Certainly my work,
And really truly feel as though I could wholly stand behind that.
Up until that point,
I think there was still a part of me that was running some kind of popularity contest in my head and feeling as though I was coming up short because I wasn't either extrovert enough or tough enough.
What I learned instead,
What I am still learning,
Is that I can be in touch with and in tune with my sensitivity without letting myself be so wide open that I feel horribly vulnerable.
So what does that mean?
It means that each day I take time to do check-ins with myself so that my communication with my heart,
My spirit,
And in turn my body has an opportunity to flow and be noticed.
It's my time to pay attention,
To pay close and loving attention to what is tender,
To what is aching,
To what is whispering so softly that if I weren't to pay such close and loving attention,
I would likely miss it altogether because that whisper is so easily drowned out by a world that seldom makes the space that a sensitive soul needs to breathe and be.
I used to think that my sensitivity was a problem I needed to fix,
A flaw I needed to correct,
And this was reinforced to me from childhood through to adulthood.
And as you likely know,
Sensitivity is a trait that is often scorned and mocked.
It's viewed as a sign of weakness,
A sign that we're not strong enough to cope or tough enough to lead.
Let's just take a moment there.
Let's get curious about what statements like that really mean.
Sensitivity as a sign of weakness suggests that there is no strength to be found when we're able to access and process our emotions.
Isn't that strange that having the ability of heightened awareness is something we've come to associate with weakness?
Sensitivity as a sign that we're not tough enough to lead suggests that we are only interested in leaders who are speaking of a way forward without ever feeling that way forward.
These untruths do nothing but keep us disconnected from ourselves and one another,
From nature,
From what is real and true and unfolding,
From the opportunity to respond to life differently outside of what we have come to know as the norm.
Sometimes we say we want to burn it all down and begin again,
This world that we know to be aching and breaking,
But really the world doesn't need to break or burn any longer.
The world doesn't need to be raised or scorched.
We don't need some kind of perfect illusion of a blank canvas.
What we need is care and repair at the root.
We need to pay close and loving attention.
The ways in which we've become accustomed to defining success,
To defining character,
To defining worth,
They're not helping us.
They're fragmenting us because there's such narrow definitions.
They leave no room for our multitudes and we are made of multitudes.
We need new ways or perhaps the old,
Old ways before we disconnected ourselves,
Before we separated ourselves into segments of worthy and unworthy.
The world needs your gifts,
Your gentle ways and your deeply connected knowing,
Your reverence,
Your heart,
Your natural empathy,
Your innate kindness and compassion,
Your sensitivity,
Which all sounds lovely and dreamy,
I know,
But it can be hard to know how and where to start really embracing our sensitivity.
What I'd like to invite you to do is to start with what feels safe.
I encourage you to find time in every day to take your armor off,
Strip away the barrier that you have placed by necessity,
By way of self-care between you and the pains of this planet,
The hurts that tear at your heart in myriad ways.
Create some time in every 24 hours where there are moments that you claim for yourself,
Where you place your hands on the part of your body where the tender truth of who you are is trying so hard to talk to you without a barrier,
Without a diversion,
Without apology,
Without swallowing down or switching off.
Let your fingertips find that sensitive ache that almost never gets to speak and be heard,
Really heard,
Heard with love and compassion,
Heard without ridicule or judgment,
That lonely part of you that has been pushed to the back of every experience.
It's from that space that we refuel,
We replenish,
We reset and restore so that we're then able to be in the world safely and with impact,
With purpose and resolve,
With more resilience than before because we're not suppressing our sensitivity,
We're strengthening ourselves with it,
We're allowing ourselves to connect with our gifts and we're entering an embodied state rather than disembodying and disempowering ourselves.
When we're in tune with our sensitivity we have more self-awareness,
Yes,
But also more social awareness,
We're more likely to see the subtleties of any given situation,
We're able to be present to what's beyond the surface,
We're able to tap into our emotional intelligence,
We're able to be creative with how we approach problems because we're not daunted by detail,
We're usually at ease with it.
I am at a point in my life now where instead of feeling as though I need to toughen up and become less sensitive,
I lovingly lean into my sensitivity instead and I truly believe it makes me better at what I do.
People tend to resonate with my work,
With my words because I'm sensitive,
Because I'm compassionate and I have an abundance of empathy and I'm imagining that the same traits are true for you too,
That you're also intuitive and perceptive,
Creative and imaginative,
That you have the ability to notice things that not everyone else can or does.
I create time for myself to connect with myself every day,
It's a non-negotiable need for me that as an introvert and as a sensitive person,
I need time alone in peace and in presence and that part is important because sometimes we can have downtime but if we're binge watching a show or numbing out or distracting ourselves in some way,
Then we're missing the intimacy of self-connection and that's a vital piece in helping us be more at ease in our bodies so that we're refueling in the ways that we need and then we feel re-energized and able to continue,
Able to reintegrate with the rest of the world,
To bring value to the rest of the world without depleting ourselves,
Without compromising our own reserves.
Something I use regularly as a tool is to ask myself,
Is this mine?
So if I'm in a conversation with someone who's draining my energy or an environment that feels like it's too much for my senses and I feel as though other people's energy is being projected onto me in a way that doesn't feel good,
In order for me to stay grounded and in a space of alignment,
I ask myself,
Is this mine?
Is this emotion,
This sensation mine?
Does it belong to me?
Does it belong in my body?
Or is it something that somebody else is feeling that I'm inadvertently absorbing?
And asking myself this simple question reminds me to absorb only what I have the capacity to hold.
It's really about inner boundary work and recognizing that we can be sensitive,
Empathetic,
Compassionate humans whose impact in the world is remarkable and healing and we can still have clarity and boundaries about what we bring into our bodies and what we need to do in order to preserve ourselves.
This isn't the same thing as spiritual bypassing or giving ourselves an easy excuse to look away from what we really don't want to address.
It's understanding that being in an activated,
Overwhelmed state doesn't actually help you or the world as it likely puts you into a free state.
But honoring your beautiful,
Sensitive nature and protecting your beautiful,
Sensitive heart means you're able to show up for yourself and others in meaningful ways.
To be a sensitive person is to have the potential to be an incredibly strong person because we're able to feel and we're able to communicate and create change from a felt sense.
It's less about ego and more about empathy.
We need more leaders in this world,
More role models who are feeling,
Who are acting from a space of feeling.
There is nothing weak about that and there are plenty of people who don't have this ability,
This strength,
This superpower,
Who aren't easily able to access or attune to more subtle energy and because of that there is much that they may overlook or ignore,
Much they may be unable to connect with.
Your sensitivity is something to celebrate wherever possible because it enables you to experience the world in ways that others can't.
And yes,
Yes,
There's pain and suffering but there's also exceptional beauty and vast joy.
There's the ability to experience profound connection with the earth,
With animals,
With other people,
With all living,
Breathing beings.
Don't dilute that opportunity because you think your sensitivity is something you need to stuff down.
It's not.
It's its own beautiful language,
Its own incredible energy.
It's a power you can harness and utilize in order to maximize your human experience.
That's pretty special.
I thank you for joining me for this talk.
I really hope it's been helpful for you.
I'd love to know some of the ways in which sensitivity has brought an extra dimension to your life.
Please do feel free to share with me.
I'm sending love from my heart to yours.
