Are you a highly sensitive person who often feels like an Outsider?

Sometimes, as highly sensitive people, we might find it hard to get our needs met. We might feel very different from others. We might sometimes feel like we are on the outside, looking in. We might think that no one hears us or understands the intensity of our emotions.

We might also be lonely for many other different reasons – maybe we have had a major illness and feel like no one can possibly relate, or maybe we have suffered a huge setback like losing a job that we find almost impossible to share with others. Or maybe, something about our lives has changed completely and we find ourselves disoriented, feeling lost and ungrounded.

Four years ago, my life changed dramatically when I moved from India to the United States.

The move brought wonderful, exciting adventures. It also brought a chilling loneliness at certain times, the kind of loneliness that makes you feel disconnected from everyone around you. This loneliness, with its need and its gnawing, gnashing force has brought me face to face with my own lack of skill at nurturing myself.

It has prompted me to start searching for a refuge within myself, an inner space that can nourish me at times when outside sources are hard to find.

This search has brought me back to finding a form of meditation that works for me as a highly sensitive person.

I have tried meditation in the past but never practiced it for a long time. It felt hard to keep up. It felt like work. But as I have started looking for a way to create an inner nest, I am finding that some paths are nudging me back to it. Sometime late last year, I read an article by the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach in which she described the experience of a practitioner who was finding it hard to meditate.

She suggested a lovely exercise to him, a way that could help him get back to himself and find presence in his own beating heart. The suggestion she made was this: Say to yourself: “I care about your suffering.” Repeat this idea so that you can offer your own loving presence to the hurt and lost parts of you. As the man did this, holding space for his own hurt and loss, over a period of time, he found an entryway into presence, into a deep refuge within his own self.

This simple idea of extending compassion to yourself as a meditative practice made me curious about Tara Brach’s work.

I discovered that what she teaches are ideas and concepts from a Buddhist meditation practice called Vipassana or Insight Meditation. This felt surprising because I had done a 10-day Vipassana course in India almost 15 years back and not really understood Vipassana like Tara Brach was explaining it.

In the course, I had kept quiet for most of the 10 days except for a little conversation with the teacher (like the course demanded), tried to follow the precepts of not killing any living creature (like ants) at least for those 10 days, and tried to practice Vipassana – what I remember most is trying to watch the sensations in my body while bringing the awareness of “This too shall pass” to everything that was happening. At the end of the course, I had felt better. There had been a moment when I felt real gratitude for the first time in my life. This gratitude didn’t feel like the heavy, obligated feeling that I had always imagined it to be. It felt like appreciation. Something about the meditation had touched some part of me, brought me closer to my own being and this presence could appreciate (even if for a moment), this moment of being alive, of being able to engage with what was happening around me.

By the end of the course, another wonderful and surprising thing happened. My vision improved. I could see better without my glasses.

So, I got many things out of the course. But once I left, I didn’t keep it up for long.

Meditation can feel like another thing we are adding to our To-Do list as sensitive people who are already overwhelmed by doing too many things.

It also felt ascetic. It brought up spaces and feelings that weren’t pleasant, feelings that I didn’t want to deal with. The resistance to not feeling those feelings grew and expanded. I lost touch with why I wanted to meditate in the first place. I was finding it hard to do, and I couldn’t quite separate and identify the strands of my resistance. Also, I didn’t try very hard.

What appeals to me about Tara Brach’s work is that she explains a way of staying with difficult feelings and sensations in a self-compassionate way. She shines a deeper light into Vipassana principles than what the Volunteer teachers at that course in India had been able to do.

I could do this practice. This felt real. In fact, it was exactly what I needed. This simple, effective little exercise of extending some of our own compassion to ourselves has nudged me deeper into Tara Brach’s work. For someone like me, someone who is both a highly sensitive person and an empath, and who often feels like it is easier to give than to receive, this holding space for my own hurt and suffering feels like a radical act. I am also someone who crosses the line from real giving to murky people-pleasing often. Pleasing myself, extending some care to myself feels like something I need to learn.

Maybe, as someone who is a highly sensitive person, you are at this point too. Maybe, you need to find a way to take care of yourself first instead of becoming a bleeding heart for all that ails the world. Maybe, you have started realizing that your first responsibility is to yourself and taking care of your needs. Maybe, you find yourself getting resentful when you over-give and wonder why that care is not being returned to you.

If you feel like this, then learning how to find a space inside yourself that nourishes you could be extremely helpful. I am finding that the meditations and exercises suggested by Tara Brach are helping me self-soothe, an emotional skill that I want to develop as an HSP. Maybe, you are looking for something like this too. If you find yourself overwhelmed by emotions, then Tara Brach’s work and Insight Meditation could help you as well.

I hope to create a habit of meditating, and through it hopefully create what Tara Brach calls a True Refuge inside my very own being

Stay tuned for more updates on my experiments with meditation.

If you struggle with self compassion as a highly sensitive person, AND if you find yourself blaming yourself even for not being able to take good care of yourself, you might like this article I wrote on HSPs and Developing Self Compassion for Maria Hill’s Sensitive Evolution (previously called HSP Health) website.

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