The Human Experience: A Roadmap for the Sensitive Consciousness
- SHAE
- May 10
- 5 min read
“Expressing the fact that you’re having a human experience is not a gross inconvenience.”
This was the foundation of Season 1 of SENSI.
It was about legitimizing the experiences that sensitive people have been shamed for, and humanizing the traits others see as nothing more than a stereotype.
It’s a simple truth, yes, but my framework can get heady and verbose. Because of that, I want to pause here and break down the framework of this podcast because it not just a random collection of episodes.
I have created it as a deep dive for people who are tired of surface-level advice.
Season One: The Stereotype of Sensitivity
Last season we addressed the character traits we had been stuck with — or typecast as, and
Legitimizing those experiences,
humanizing them, and
being able to show up without shame.
It was me basically saying:
“I won’t shame you, and I won’t be shamed myself. Here, I will expose myself so you can find safety if you can’t yet find it within yourself.”
This is incredibly powerful.
Once that safety is established, acknowledging our faults or missteps is no longer an act of betrayal. It no longer feels like we are forgoing self-preservation.
Once we hold our experiences in their rich and real nuance, no one can tell us they don’t matter.
So it is no longer a threat to realize:
how and when we are wrong,
the ways we have behaved inappropriately,
gone too far,
lacked boundaries,
caused harm to others, and even (and maybe especially)
perpetuated our own suffering.
The Turning Point: Freedom to Define Ourselves
To define ourselves anew, we must acknowledge how we have been responsible for defining ourselves thus far: How have we held this identity, how have we been responsible for maintaining it, and what have we gotten out of it?
That is where our power lies.
In us. In our actions.
If we don’t want other people to identify us in some way we better start with ourselves first: how do we identify? AND do we know that there is so much more that we can identify as?
To do this we must be willing to accept pain.
We must be willing to let go of our grudges — even though they have served purposes.
We have to let go of who we have thought ourselves to be, our past, our expectations of others.
We have to grieve what hurts us. We have to let it in and let it through.
To expand beyond these experiences, to get more out of life, to broaden who we are and live differently, we have to be willing to meet pain and let it change us — and let it change us for the better.
This is the only way we get to the other side and experience rapture — to experience freedom and integration. Embodiment and change. Expansion and transformation.
Without the shame, the stereotype, the denial, and other people’s rationalization as our first touchpoint of life — the first lens in our perspective, limiting all else we can see … what then?
We are free in a way we have never been — and in a way we may not have ever had a model for.
And that is scary.
How does one be a sensitive person… well?
Season Two: The Steeze of Sensitivity
To use a delicious hip-hop term (so much communicated in so few letters!)
In other words, what is fucking cool about being a sensitive person? What does it give you that you would miss if you didn’t have it?
Now that we have freed ourselves from the old, we have space for the new. A new path — symbolically, and in the course of this podcast.
The new path begins at the beginning. And the beginning is a big bang.
A nothing to a something.
A lack of awareness to consciousness.
If we take things — stories, identity, experiences, pain — back from these predetermined order of operations, meanings, and value judgments that we have been stuck in, socialized to, constricted by, that we’ve misunderstood and despised… what then?
What sources us? What guides us? How can we understand ourselves?
The Domain of Subtlety
I’ll tell you this: Sensitivity is a place of subtlety
It is the domain of energy. Of impression. Of delicateness. Of vulnerability [4].
So we began this season with energy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but as a sensitive person — whatever reason it is that you are sensitive — The Large Imposing Forms being plopped down on vulnerable possibility, the big boots trampling over a seedling, is against our nature.
When current convention is put forth as the ultimate source of rhyme and reason we cannot sense subtlety.
Possibility is squashed. It is vanquished. And we lash out because we feel deprived of any sense there is in life and living.
Re-entering the World of Forms
So we’ve undone it.
We’ve taken our identities back to openness. To possibility.
We have cultivated our awareness of this state of being again.
We have expanded our concept of it by sitting in it.
And remembered what no one else was there to model for us.
And a perfect way to elucidate what this is, is with the topic of episode five: Imagination.
From this new vantage point, we take our first step back toward form:
A waking up. An awareness that is aware of itself.
Episode 6: Conscience
The awareness and its ability to discern. This is huge because discernment is related to judgement. A “this” is different from “that”. Dualistic thinking. Form based thinking.
Episode 7: Stories
“We are meaning makers,” as I declare in episode 2. We feel and see meaning, justice, potentials in our minds eye so quickly. We are moved so quickly. This is just another tool of our subjective experience.
Episode 8: Solitude
If forms are discreet — a this or that — there is the ability to be alone. Separated from the rest. The all. This consciousness is not a collective consciousness. It is isolated and distinct, and therefore has the potential for anti-social behaviour.
Coming Back into Wholeness
At this point — to use an evolutionary analogy — we have grown legs and climbed out of the water.
We have re-entered the world of forms. We are a functioning human being.
We are a discreet experience of consciousness — as we were to begin season one but this time we are living from the intelligence that sensitivity offers us…and that is a very different proposition.
That is what we are building throughout this season:
Living through sensitivity, not in opposition to it, which is, I believe, human nature.
I would love for you to be a part of the journey.
Transcribed from SENSI: Empowerment for Pussies, Season 2, Episode 5: Imagination
Be on the lookout for the release of A Private SENSI Podcast: SENSITIVITY & THE ARCHETYPE.
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