In The Empath’s Journey, I share an interesting exercise from energy teacher Anodea Judith’s work. It’s called Drawing the Body & it can help us stop getting stuck in our heads as highly sensitive people.
This exercise can also help us understand, without intellectualization, what is going on energetically in our bodies.
As a highly sensitive person, this is a way to sense what our own body feels like.
Basically, you draw what your body feels like to you. You don’t have to know drawing or make some high art here. Just a basic, childlike drawing is good enough! You might draw a thin, stick-like figure. You might draw a puffed-up figure. And so on and so forth.
This is what Anodea Judith has to say about this exercise:
“A fearful, contracted person may draw a very tiny body, using only a quarter of the page, where an overly expanded person may need several sheets of paper. An under-formed, collapsed person may draw ethereal swirls with no concrete form at all.”
When I tried this exercise many years ago, I drew an out-of-proportion large head, which was no surprise to me.
I used to ruminate and overthink a lot. So, it was natural that my felt sense of my head was that it was a lot bigger than the rest of my body. But in this exercise, I also drew a very small area of the heart, as if my heart had contracted.
As a person who felt a lot and was always overgiving to others, this was quite a shock to me at that time! I had never considered that I could be out of touch with my heart and yet be bobbing up and down in an overwhelming sea of emotions. I had thought that because I was giving to other people, it meant that I would automatically be large-hearted.
Isn’t that what we are told about giving and generosity?
But when I did this exercise, I realized that my heart felt small and tight just because I was giving too much. I realized something I wrote about in The Empath’s Journey:
The heart lives on a balance of giving and receiving.
It’s a lesson I am still learning. In the past year or so, I have actually not given enough of what my heart needs to it. Yes, I have become a lot better at not overgiving to others. But I still struggle with giving myself enough of what I love: good words, beautiful music, prayer and so on.
So, I feel like my heart has been feeling tight and constricted once again. And once again, I am trying to fill it up.
But coming back to this exercise of Drawing what the body feels like, this is a great example of how what we think we feel is often different from the reality of what’s happening energetically inside.
I think drawing helps us connect to a pre-verbal, intuitive part of us that isn’t taken in by rationalizations and intellectualizations. It knows exactly where we are at a given moment.
Give this exercise a chance if you are too much in your mind as a highly sensitive person and want to reconnect with your body.
And give drawing a chance if you want to connect with your intuition and access your felt sense. It’s an amazing tool to access the creative, intuitive part of us!
P.S. Anodea Judith is also one of my favorite teachers ever! Check out her website here.
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