[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would like to remind my listeners that I offer a free eight-week email course titled Highly Sensitive People. My email course provides weekly tools that help you feel more whole in a world isn’t exactly made for us and I show you how your sensitivity can be seen as a unique gift and how many others are just like you. To find out more about my email course, please go to my website, amiokpodcast.com. Happy April, everyone. I like to think of April showers bring May flowers to help our garden grow. You are, I didn’t know you have a garden or I didn’t even know you care about growing a garden. But what I’m talking about is how are your showering your garden, your sensitivity this time of year, when everything in nature is in full bloom? The days are longer and warmer. People are outside more, doing more outside activities like hiking, biking, running, swimming, walking, playing sports, having picnics and barbecues. How are you showering your sensitivity this April? As a highly sensitive person do you realize you have a sensitive mind and a sensitive heart that you feel more things than the average person and feeling things more deeply can feel overwhelming? Like you’re carrying a heavy burden and on the flip side of that, it can also feel really good inside our hearts and our minds. It can give us a sense of relief, excitement, hope, joy, motivation, enthusiasm, a reason to live and passion to support a cause. I’ve been doing a deep dive into my own personal healing lately. So even me, as licensed marriage and family therapist, I need to continue and want to continue to grow and heal as a person and human being. Lately I’ve been paying close attention to notice where my feelings land inside my body. I’ve noticed when I feel like I’m carrying a heavy burden, something that’s very overwhelming, I actually feel pain in my heart. That’s what I’ve been feeling lately, a lot of pain in my heart, and it’s actually a physical pain. It physically hurts. it can be just the pain or agony from having a hard conversation with a loved one or a family member, or just the reality of life with family and friends aging, and maybe moving to a different state, a different location and just remembering all the good times we had together. So there’s actually a lot of happy feelings and also a lot of sadness just from those memories will not be the same ever again, because life is happening in real time and people are changing. People are aging and as people age we lose life. And sometimes the pain can be as great on a scale of zero to 10, 10 being high. This physical pain in my heart can be as high as an eight or a 10 and sometimes as low as a five. Then sometimes it goes away. I’ve been really following when it goes away, how does it go away? What have I been thinking about, or what have been doing to make it go away or does it just go away on its own? If we look at the physical body, when we are in pain, let’s save from a fall when riding a bicycle that you fall over and you scrape your elbow and your knee, so this is in our body that we are suffering pain from a bike crash. Our elbow and our knee that’s scraped needs to be cleaned up and attended to. So that could just be as easy as washing it out with water, putting some Neosporin on it and putting a bandaid on it to stop the bleeding and to keep it protected from getting dirt. It may hurt to bend the elbow and the knee. So what is that’s telling us, telling our body is that we may have to walk slower, move slower in order for that area of our body to heal, which makes a lot of sense, just like if we are sick with the flu or cold, our bodies want to sleep and rest more. So I’m curious about what is the emotional pain trying to tell us, trying to tell me? If we think about it, emotional pain can live really anywhere in our body, our big toe, our headaches and our head, our kneecap, our right finger, our right thumb. It can be our Achilles’s Heel, which is like the weak point or the vulnerable point in our body that tends to get hurt over and over again, during our lifetime. It was like, some people say, oh my gosh, my back went out again or I have that pain in my neck again. So emotional pain can be sadness and grief, anger, blame, resentment, fear. It can also be happiness and laughter. Sadness can be the grief about the death of a loved one or a friend, the sadness of a medical condition diagnosis. It can be anger about the loss of a job promotion or not getting a job, blame at the universe that nothing seems to be going our way, resentful at certain people who don’t listen to us, the fear of the unknown. If we look down the other side of this, we flip the coin over and happiness and laughter can be a good joke, the birth of a child, a graduation, a celebration of some kind. We can be so happy that our hurts are inside like a good belly laugh. Have you had that happen to you, you laugh so hard, your muscles and your stomach hurt so much? So what is this emotional pain in my heart trying to tell? I think it wants me to know that I’m suffering right now just like if I were to fall off my bike and cut open my knee or my elbow. My heart needs attention, the most loving and gentle attention ever. That can look like just by talking to my heart, telling it how much I love it, how much I’m thinking about it, caring for it, want something different for it, just placing my hand on my heart. Just knowing that I’m here for myself. Just putting my favorite essential oil lotion on my heart and my chest. It’s very soothing, very gentle, listening to music, talking to a trusted friend, asking my heart what it needs or wants in the moment even if it doesn’t make any sense. So here are some other remedies to help heal emotional pain as a sensitive being. Shower, your sensitivity with love. Whatever that means to you, how would you want to love yourself? Shower your sensitivity with gratitude, just thanking yourself for taking the time, just to listen, to feel, to be understood. Shower your sensitivity with kindness, just being really gentle and caring about yourself. Shower your sensitivity with forgiveness, just forgiving and accepting yourself as you are in the moment. Shower your sensitivity with your passion to live the life you came to live, loving all the places you have gone and all the places you’ll go. Love the lessons you have learned and most of all love where you are right now. Shower, your sensitive mind and your sensitive body. Thank you for tuning in today. Please let me know what you thought of the episode. I love hearing from my listeners. You can send me an email at lisa@amiokpodcast.com and remember to subscribe, rate and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about highly sensitive persons, please visit my website at amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.