Are you highly sensitive and feeling like you want to leave your body & float away?

If you are a highly sensitive person, you might be feeling drained and exhausted right now. Maybe, you have tried doing grounding exercises like visualizing your roots going down into the earth, but your attention is really fragmented.

You just can’t establish that energetic connection with the earth. NOTHING seems to work. You feel as if you’re way up in your head.

So, what are you supposed to do when you are feeling like this as a highly sensitive person?

We are many months into the pandemic and the uncertainty is taking a toll. You might be feeling as if you just want to escape into your head, away from all the craziness happening in the world.

You might be feeling as if you Don’t Want to Be Here, that you just want to disappear up into the air or retreat into a cave.

And on top of all that, it might be feeling really hard to do grounding practices. Your attention feels scattered. It wants to flit away. You just can’t seem to focus.

In the past few months, I have had many moments of struggle with my own grounding practice. It’s felt very hard to stay in the moment.

Recently, the California fires came within a few miles of my home and although we were safe and far away enough, I’ve had moments of real panic and overload (which I didn’t realize was panic until afterward). 

And so, lately, it has felt really hard to stay in my body. And my grounding practice has felt almost impossible. It’s as if my attention has been jumping up and down, and I just cannot connect with the earth.

But this challenge with grounding has also nudged me to deepen my understanding of which practices work at different times.

Grounding is only one of several energetic skills. And different energetic skills are required in different situations.

Grounding is our connection to the earth and the physical plane.

But when we are feeling so anxious and unsafe that we don’t even want to stay in our own body, another energetic skill is required.

That skill is Centering.

Just as Grounding is our connection to the earth, Centering is our connection to our body.

For highly sensitive people and especially if you are a sensitive person who has trauma in the past, staying in our body can feel HARD. We might have a tendency to float away into our head and into the safety of our imagination when the world becomes threatening.

While this is a coping strategy, it also leaves our bodies undefended.

They are still picking up on energy and can get frazzled by all the incoming information because there’s no connection with our own essential self which can help make sense of everything that’s coming in.

So, it’s really important to find that center from which we relate to everything else and to bring our awareness back into our bodies.

Centering is the skill to practice in a situation where you are feeling as if you want to leave this body and just float away into another world or disappear so no one can find you.

So, How do We Center as Highly Sensitive People?

To center, breathe in and out as you visualize a column in the center of your body (from the top of your head to the base of your spine.)

Depending on the exact way in which you are intuitive, you might actually visualize and see this column in your imagination, or feel it in a more kinesthetic way, or sense it.

If you have never paid attention to your center (and many of us haven’t), it can feel new to do this. You might feel like you are doing it wrong, or you might come across emptiness in your center and not want to sense it.

But paying attention to your center, however “imperfectly,” will bring your attention back into your body.

Instead of jumping all over the place, your attention will find its anchor inside your body.

Once you have centered, THEN you can ground.

If it still feels hard to sense/visualize the center of your body, simply breathing and paying attention to how your breath moves inside your body can help you center.

The breath is the first entry point for our connection with our bodies.

So, if visualizing the column feels hard, just pay attention to your breath. Let the fragments of your attention come back as you breathe in and out.

If you do this for even 5-10 minutes, you will likely feel a lot better later on in the day even if nothing seems to be happening right then. Then, you can come back again and do a little more.

This gentle bringing back of our fragmented attention can navigate the ships of our bodies away from the rocks of anxiety.

If you have been trying to ground but finding it almost impossible because your attention is so unstable, then do Centering FIRST.

Once you are connected to your body, you can connect to the earth and let the earth’s energy nourish you.

Grounding is An Essential Skill. So is Centering.

When one energetic skill doesn’t work, it’s not because it’s not helpful, it’s because it’s not the right skill for that situation.

Grounding and Centering do different things. So, it’s important that we practice both.

It’s only with experimentation that we can really understand whether we are losing touch with our own self or with the ground beneath our feet.

I hope you give this a try. If you want to learn more about grounding, check out this detailed post I wrote about it.

As a highly sensitive person, you are tuned in to the emotional and the energetic world. And trying things out and getting information from your own body will help you understand what you need in the moment.

Trust yourself. There is something good inside us, that points us in the direction of true north. I hope you will follow it.

I hope you give Centering a try if you are feeling scattered and grounding hasn’t worked. I feel your pain. I know how hard it is to keep trying and not having things work. It’s challenging and rough right now, but I know that if you go slowly and gently and are as kind with yourself as you are with others, you will be able to do this.

Sending you my prayers and wishes.

With love,

Ritu

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which combines personal stories with practical tools to help highly sensitive people channel their deep sensitivity. Sign up for Ritu’s newsletter for two free chapters of The Empath’s Journey.

You can find The Empath’s Journey here.