For this post, I suggest curling up with a cup of tea on the couch. Maybe read this on the beach or your patio if you’re so lucky. This one may end up being a chapter in my first book. Just letting you know, it’s a doozy.
Also, before I start this story, I want to review and/or introduce you to Joseph Campbell’s concept of The Hero’s Journey. I believe we will each go one at least one in our lives. It is exciting to see so many women now waking up to this journey for themselves. I woke up to mine some time ago.
Right now, I would say that I am somewhere between part 5-8 of my journey. Some days I swing wildly between parts. Some days I’m firmly in one place. But I believe we are here to learn and to teach as much as we can. When my journey scares me, I try to remember that.
I want to share with you the journey of how I came to accept my sensitivity as a Superpower. Both my sister and I have been very sensitive since we were little girls. By the time I entered middle school, I learned that sensitivity was not viewed as a positive thing by the Ordinary World.
Here’s how I found out:
One day at lunch, my girlfriends staged an intervention and told me that the group no longer wanted to be my friend because I was “too sensitive.” They went on to explain that I cried too much and was too emotional.
I was blindsided. I felt confused and abandoned. At 12 years old, I turned away from my emotional life. I concluded that it had to be a bad thing if these people who were my friends were telling me so. I also turned away from deep friendships with women, as I felt betrayed by what I thought was sisterhood. I felt that if anyone should understand what it was like to feel deeply, it should’ve been other girls. Yet, they were the very ones telling me that something was wrong with me.
I dealt with this trauma the way most kids do. Silently. I learned to navigate the Ordinary World the way girls are trained: I was “good.” I did well in school. I used my natural charm and humor to have acceptable relationships. I shined in appropriate ways (through music and extra-curricular activities). What I didn’t know, was that I was suppressing my superpower: my deep emotional life. I was refusing my call to adventure.
By high school, I was pretty disconnected from my body and its intelligence. I developed a chronic illness and I lived from the neck up. I didn’t want much to do with feeling.
But here comes the exciting part of the journey. I went off to college, fell in love and moved to New York City. I had no idea that waiting for me here were an army of mentors; my own Obi Wan Kenbobis that would help me embrace my body again. They would teach me to listen to it deeply. They would teach me that accessing and constructively channeling my emotions made me even smarter, more interesting and more powerful.
They would teach me that I had superpowers.
My list of mentors and teachers is so long that I could write a book solely about them (and maybe I will!). Through them and my own rigorous spiritual work, I also opened up to having profound friendships with women again.
One of those women is named Betsy Cohen. Betsy’s own hero’s journey is fascinating! She went from social worker to Brooklyn’s first famous hipster psychic (yep, you read that right). She has learned to embrace her intuitive power and she lives from that place everyday. When I met her last year, I had no idea that she would become one of my closest friends and an integral part of my own journey. She listened intently as we sat on my living room floor and I shared the story about my separation from my friends. She witnessed me as I cried for my younger self (I had never let myself do that before). She was an essential part of my healing, helping me to open up and trust myself. Betsy propelled me toward embracing my sensitivity and my own intuition as Superpowers.
I’m gonna get feminist on you for a minute: I firmly believe that part of the reason why being sensitive and intuitive are not widely embraced is because they are thought of as feminine. These traits are mysterious and illogical and that frightens people. When Betsy told me she was a “psychic”, the word was jarring. Society associates this with something dark or impossible, and I am a product of society. If we go back far enough in history, we know that women have been persecuted for thousands of years for their emotional life, their intuition and their psychic minds (and some men, too!). The Ordinary World places emphasis and importance on logic and reason and linear thinking rather than circular concepts of time and place. We are taught to fear what we do not understand, thus, the emotional life of women is greatly feared. Women and men fear this in others as well as in themselves, which might be the greatest tragedy.
Despite all of the fear, many of us have a grandmother, an Aunt, a church Mother, someone we know who tells us she had a dream about us and we listen to her. Why? No matter how we deny it, all of us know we have a connection to something bigger that might not make sense, but it isn’t any less real.
All of us have this connection. Women and men. Our emotional and intuitive intelligences are just waiting for us to tap in. They are waiting for us to answer our call to adventure.