Ryan: Hi. My name is Ryan Rose Weaver. I'm the founder of In Tending, a place where parents and caregivers find inner clarity, contemplative community, and collective liberation.
In this presentation, I'll be speaking specifically to mindfulness and sensory processing sensitivity, which is something that I know a lot about for personal reasons, and about how mindfulness can help us take our place in the modern world.
We'll talk about how mindfulness and sensory processing sensitivity intersect, and then there'll be a guided meditation that's trauma-informed and specifically for sensitive humans like you and me.
I live on the ancestral lands of the Nipmuc, also known as Central Massachusetts.
Sensory processing sensitivity is a big way in which my neurodivergence shows up. It's been a gift for me. It's also been a challenge, and I know many of you can relate to this.
So in this season of my life, I am really gratified to be able to offer the fruits of my lived experience as well as my professional expertise as a K12 educator and as a meditation teacher to folks who are looking for ways to work with both the joys and the suffering that can come from being a sensitive human in a world that sometimes feels too loud, too fast, too everything.
I invite you to just take a moment to check in with yourself.
How are you hoping that mindfulness can support you in this season?
What's made that hard in the past?
Hopefully, we can honor those intentions together.
Some clarity when it comes to mindfulness. What we're talking about today is a 2,500-year-old time-tested tradition.
It originated in India. What I'm leaning on is the work of two key researchers who have taken teachings directly from those teachers in the Buddhist lineage and adapted them to our Western context.
Jon Kabat-Zinn developed mindfulness-based stress reduction at UMass Medical School in the late '70s. Most of the studies that have been done on mindfulness have been based on his work.
Another field that's based on a 2,500-year-old tradition is the field of self-compassion meditation, and the leading researcher in this field is Kristin Neff.
When we are talking about mindfulness, we're talking about both the pursuit of increased clarity and the pursuit of increased compassion for ourselves and for others. They're both equally important, and they're both equally common outcomes of mindfulness practice.
They've been compared to two wings of a bird.
When we talk about the health benefits of mindfulness, I want to ground us in the research. If you are a sensitive human, three key benefits for your mental health of doing mindfulness include a sense of mental rest.
You can step away from sensory overstimulation. You can step away from this experience of being porous or sponging up others' emotions in social situations. You can find a place of solitude, and you can reground in the breath and the body as physical sensations that are happening in the present moment.
It also helps with emotional regulation. So even if we are overstimulated, we're less likely to shut down or blow up if we have an ongoing mindfulness practice.
It also decreases anxiety, which is something that many of us sensitive humans experience simply because we're so open to the world. And if we're worriers, increased mindfulness practice can help us interrupt those patterns, which then can really lead to increased mental health.
When we do compassion-based meditation, it can increase our levels of oxytocin, which is the love hormone, and this leads to feelings of greater belonging and connection.
And this is really key for highly sensitive people. Often we receive the messages that we're too much or we're not, enough, right? Not tough enough, not resilient enough.
Engaging in practices that reconnect us to ourselves and the collective can trigger the kinds of hormones that remind us that we do belong and that we're safe.
I want to zoom out and speak about why these practices can be so helpful for us as sensitive humans.
Attuning to the Earth really is a birthright for us. It makes use of some of our innate gifts . in the past, sensitive people would have been able to make very key nuanced distinctions between different things in our environment.
And you can think about how adaptive a trait that would be, speaking in terms of evolution for people in our communities thousands of years ago.
So retuning our attention really returns us to this lineage of people in history and allows us to step out of this modern moment in which our gifts aren't as valued, and they don't always have as much of an opportunity to come forward.
Why might it be so hard in the modern world for us to see these gifts as gifts?
It's a very loud, bright place, and that wasn't always the case. We might have gotten a lot of negative reinforcement for the times when we really just needed to take a break from all the noise.
In doing mindfulness and coming back to ourselves and coming back to our place on this Earth, we can remind ourselves that we have always belonged here. And that these bright lights and these loud sounds have been here for a much shorter period of time than humans who are sensitive and attuned to the Earth.
As a practitioner, there are some elements of mindfulness that feel genuinely more difficult for me than for less sensitive humans. I have a strong sense of interoception like many other sensitive people, and that means that when there is pain in my body and I'm meditating, those sensations may be stronger.
If this sounds like you, Making mindfulness trauma informed means knowing that you always have a choice. You don't have to tough it out. You can turn towards these sensations, and in my experience, when I turn towards sensations of pain or hunger, it can be interesting. We can notice when these sensations arise. We can notice when they peak and get stronger, and we can notice when they fall away.
And it can be a reminder that sometimes things change in our favor. We can experience a lessening of pain, not by doing something about it, but by sitting and doing nothing for a little while. That said, we can actually choose to shift our focus to something that is more sustainable as an anchor.
If tuning to breath doesn't feel good, you can attune to sounds in your environment. If sitting meditation doesn't feel good, you can lay down. It's a completely valid meditation position to take, and it's one I encourage. if walking meditation isn't accessible, you can wheel.
Doing these meditations that I'll offer in a different position or moving versus staying stationary can often change the entire experience.
If you're like me, again, you may have received a lot of negative messages over time about your sensitivity.
Sometimes we have these inner critics that are really protectors. There trying to make sure that we don't get in trouble, we don't get yelled at, we don't do it wrong.
But in mindfulness, this can be counterproductive because there is really no wrong way to sit and follow the breath. So again, you have a choice. If you find that an inner critic arises as you're trying out this practice, you could turn towards it. You can say, "Thank you for protecting me, but I don't need you right now.
You can wait outside the door."
Or you can turn towards a more caring presence and invite a more caring presence in to protect you and to affirm you, and we'll practice that today.
This is today's practice invitation. It's going to have two parts. First, we'll anchor and gather awareness, so there's that clarity piece, and then we'll touch in with connection and compassion.
Two wings of a bird. So for sensitive humans, this is the specific practice invitation that I would offer to you. Try this on your own after this. It could be two minutes and two minutes if you don't have very much time. It could be five minutes and five minutes. Or you can work up to maybe 15 minutes, 15 minutes.
Allowing this balance of gathering in and then offering compassion in place of criticism.
So I'll invite you now to begin with me.
Choosing one of the positions that I mentioned. You can find a place to sit.
If you're in your office chair or you're in your car, you can ground into the earth through the feet, making sure that feet are flat on the floor. If you'd like to lay down, do it. Just make sure that your back and your feet are well supported. You might even wanna tuck something under the knees for extra comfiness.
Choosing a posture now that will allow you to feel held by the earth, letting it do most of the work.
And just taking a few breaths in this posture. And next, we'll choose an anchor for awareness. So if you like the idea of attuning to sound rather than an anchor inside of your body, you might just identify a sound now.
Maybe the sound of the wind outside, traffic on the street.
You can stay here or you can move into the body, just exploring the body to see where there might be places of neutrality, where there might be places of tension.
So noticing first the feet and where they touch the earth.
And the seat and where the hips meet the earth.
Just seeing if you can offer one to 2% more of your body to the embrace of the earth. Just letting gravity hold you a little bit more.
And drawing your awareness now from seat up to spine.
The small of the back. The stacked vertebrae.
The solidity of the skull.
Just noticing these places of solidity in the body that are made of the exact same stuff as the earth beneath.
Letting those parts return to the earth. Sinking in just a little bit more.
Noticing the shoulders. If they're tipped forward, which can sometimes happen when we spend our days in front of computers, just rolling them back and down
and letting gravity take the weight.
Letting there be ease in the jaw. You can tuck the tip of your tongue behind the teeth. Just let it fall open.
Letting the space between the brows be soft.
Really embracing that opportunity for mental rest.
Taking a few breaths here. If you
find that the attention is straying, that the inner critic is arising-
You can turn towards that and bow and say thank you. And then return to the anchor you've chosen.
Noticing sound.
Feet on the floor.
Mindfulness is like this. It's less about maintaining some sort of laser-like focus on the anchor you've chosen, and more like just putting things back in their place again and again, gathering the mind.
And from this more gathered place, there's an invitation now to turn from that sort of ongoing radio program in the mind that's monitoring and offering feedback, this constant self-improvement program that's running, and shifting now to a sense of basic goodness that you don't have to earn.
Bringing your awareness now to the earth around you,
and the sensory experiences that are arising without any special effort from us, no earning it.
Noticing if your eyes are open, if there are any new colors or sights out your window that weren't there before.
Last week, last month. What's new?
New flowers, new bird. These might come with new sounds as well, sounds of the season.
Are there any other sensations, smells, tastes that you associate with the season you're in?
New plants arising and making their way to our plates.
New weather patterns might bring changes in temperature that feel good or precipitation that is coming to nourish the beings around you.
Allowing yourself to settle into this cornucopia of abundance, all of these sensory experiences that we can feel so deeply. Just savoring.
And for the things that are harder to savor, and then we can just acknowledge, this too.
Allowing ourselves to settle into what Mary Oliver called our place in the family of things.
Like the flowers, we too are held by the earth.
Like the birds, we too have our place we don't have to earn.
Can we let the earth hold us just a little bit more.
And from here, I will offer three questions that researcher Kristin Neff offers in her self-compassion meditations that allow us to connect with the qualities of:
mindfulness, noticing what's happening.
Common humanity, remembering we're not alone in these sensations and experiences.
And kindness. What's the medicine?
I'll repeat each question more slowly and offer space for you to contemplate the answers for you. In this moment, turning not towards the inner critic to answer them, but to this warm, generous Earth who is holding us.
What hurts right now?
In body,
in mind,
in relationship,
in the collective.
Who else feels this?
Feels these same bodily sensations.
Has these same challenging thoughts.
What's the medicine?
What does this moment need, if anything?
The answer may be something obvious or it might surprise you.
It might be a word or an action, but it might just be a gesture. A hug, hand over the heart.
What's the medicine?
Repeating the questions as many times as you like.
From here, we'll begin to ascend out of this practice.
And as we come back into shared space, acknowledging that this is a practice that reconnects us to our lineage of sensitive humans on this earth. Of healers, foragers, leaders who could trust themselves and who were trusted to know not just what was needed for themselves, but for the collective.
Interesting that you too have this knowing and that this is part of your gift to the earth.
That there's reciprocity between what you're receiving from her and what you have to offer. And this reciprocity, this agreement is timeless.
Thank you for your practice.
If you have questions about this meditation, DM me @ryanroseweaver on Instagram.
The two researchers that I've cited have books. Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Fierce Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff have both been helpful to me in my practice.
I'll conclude by offering some opportunities to continue this inquiry. Visit ryanroseweaver.substack.com. Sign up for my newsletter. The freebie that comes to your inbox is tips on getting your own meditation practice started.
If you like the idea of practicing meditations like this in community with other people who are also sensitive, who are also thoughtful, check our community tab where I list opportunities to sit together in circle, go deeper with some of this.
I'm wishing you all the best in your practice. Thank you.
