Experience as a teacher
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
- Einstein
Discovering the importance of my sensitivity was just the very beginning. It's taken me ten more years of refinement and learning my “instruments” to be able to even start explaining what's been bubbling up in me.
In the years after my healing, I received emails from others struggling with chronic illness and messages asking for advice. Initially with resistance, I gave them guidance by email, and they observed significant improvements.
Because I saw so much good coming from just a few emails sharing this healing approach, I wanted to make it available to more people—so I created a self-healing programme.
What I taught was explained through the prism of chronic stress caused by self-denial (living inauthenticity), wired in resistance to feeling the body, and emotional repression at its core.
The bulk of the instructions guided my clients to learn how to rewire their response to internal and external stimuli (like pain, sensations as well as circumstances).
Women who came to work with me, struggling with various chronic illnesses for many years—like me, without any help from the medical system—were now healing completely—sometimes after years of struggles, or making big improvements. They were healing pain, anxiety, migraines, sensitivities, allergies… I ran this close-knit coaching programme for a year or so before I started feeling that itch again: I knew that there was more to it. And I couldn’t settle.
Although my teachings were highly systematised and well-researched to help people get on board and follow along (faith is by far the highest currency in healing), I knew that energy and the world of intangibles were much more involved than I could explain or fully understand at that point. I had already taught a lot about embodiment, emotional alchemy, and the spiritual self, but my goal was to uncover the larger backdrop behind it all.
What I felt deep in my bones was that it was about life energy—our emotions, and our ability to interact with it. It was about how we bridge the physical world with the world of energy.
At the same time, I felt that working solely on healing was too limiting for my explorations, and I sensed that the foundations for any imbalance were far more profound. One thing that resounded very strongly in my mind was that I didn’t want to help people fix their problems, but to show how to access their power that allows self-healing.
This stage of my life was an essential preparation for what followed. Thanks to these various interactions I gained a deep understanding of how people relate to their sensory discomforts, emotions, and themselves. It was a period that set me on the path of digging into the work of sensing as a route to personal power. I gave up my coaching, ready to follow a new trail.
Sensitivity, especially coupled with nonconformism makes you quite observant (if not vigilant). Awareness is a natural byproduct of living on the fringes. After all, where do you get a better view on everything that’s going on if not from the outside?
Not all lessons have come from the delicate hunches. Like I said in the previous chapter, most of my life I simply avoided large feelings and disappeared from them. They were too big and I didn’t know how to “be” with that. I had to create a wall from feeling things. So naturally it needed some drastic life lessons to force me to reconnect.
The same energy that organises everything and moves in cycles, transforming all things around us, also dragged me through challenging events that shaped my mind with the forcefulness of a white river. Eventually, these painful lessons brought me to myself in leaps and bounds—much faster than one would want to.
But from what I can see now, my life has been made up of crucial ingredients baked into everything I am and know. While several years after healing from disease were fairly stable, there was more expansion waiting for me. I had some tools and a good foundation to face new challenges and here life didn’t hold back.
The last few years have been an intense school of life—perhaps even harder than the illness I once faced.
Outwardly, everything shifted—relationships, homes, work, and more moves than I can count. Inside, the change was even faster. My mind was shattered over and over by new realisations, forcing me to rethink everything I believed—about the world, relationships, work, and myself.
Almost everything I once knew crumbled into smithereens. Nothing was solid. Nothing stayed the same. Not just because of all the changes coming to my life on all fronts, but because I was different.
The rapid shifts took their toll. For a long time, nothing made sense. Every week, my view of myself and the world changed again. Before I could settle into a new understanding, another wave would crash in, dismantling everything I thought I’d figured out. It was too fast, too relentless. I lost all sense of direction, thrown into a whirlwind of constant resets.
The transformation blurred before my eyes. I could barely keep up, scrambling to make sense of each new realisation. My mind, exhausted from trying to connect the dots, finally gave in. Instead of forcing understanding, I started taking “energy notes” as I went. (Much of this book was drafted that way.)
With time, and through some important practices I took up seriously, I began integrating the “curriculum” I was being given.
Because to an extent I’d learned how to ground this receptivity and start paying attention without being spooked by my internal reactions to the external chaos, I got more in sync with the energetic currents.
My body patiently guided me to observe within my experience, just as well as I’d been used to observing the world around me. Again, amidst the chaos, I was getting back to find my centre. And this time even deeper than before.
My sensitivity has increased exponentially in those last years. And that’s because I welcomed and cultivated it.
This duality of tangibles and the intangibles is a human thing. We all get swept away by the world around us. We get busy and distracted. Yet we also know that there is more to life, isn’t there?
Beyond what’s apparent, we can feel that everything ebbs and flows. A sensitive person always feels that there is another layer, that they can read between the lines.
The invisible patterns of energy that underlie everything around us weave into a fabric of living art, buzzing through all that we can think of. The subtle, unceasing dance of give and take, contraction and expansion, is one of the principles that organises the interconnected network of all things in this universe—a constant exchange of energies.
Everywhere around us, if only we pay attention, we can observe the dialogue—the constant chatter of all things. We can “hear” that chatter even—and perhaps especially—amidst total silence.
So how did I learn what I know so far?
Here is where usually in these kinds of books you would read about life-long work with sensitive people, years of education, or at least a thorough research. Some of you, especially sceptics, might be disappointed to hear that these don’t apply here.
What I learned about sensitivity and the world of energy with its relation to physical reality has come to me mostly through my experience.
Using my awareness that’s felt in and around my body, and connecting the dots of my ongoing observations, I synthesised the ideas that you’ll find in the book.
I’m willing to be wrong for the sake of exploring ideas that could push the envelope of current understanding, even through mere discussion, because that’s how new things get born.
I was fortunate, too, that—even on occasion and in passing—I kept stumbling across remarkable people, tools, and theories. They either corroborated my ideas or helped me expand my understanding, always arriving at just the right moment when I needed to articulate my thoughts.
Fascinatingly, as I locked into my internal experience—the very one that shaped this book—I began noticing striking parallels emerging in the latest research on the brain and nervous system. What I once knew only through intuition is now being reflected in scientific discoveries. So where I find valuable references, I will include them.
You will also see that the ideas I share reach far back into ancient philosophies and much of what you’ll read here has its basis in concepts that exist in nature and have ruled long before humans existed and before any science developed.
But it’s the personal experience that has been my ongoing research and created those insights.
Just as we can sense the world through touch, sight, smell, and so on, we can also sense the energies that underlie the physical world. My body, the explorer, my mind an interpreter.
Through my body, now I can feel—and through my mind I can acknowledge—different sensations that, like a language, speak to me. I can tell if I’m straining or at ease at any given moment. Because I can feel it.
My senses tell me if I’m open or resisting whatever is happening. Through them I know if I’m in exchange or if I’m closed off. They tell me how the situation feels. If I’m tense, I can tell that there is a part of me now active that’s forcing against a thought or circumstance. I get to respond to a thought or a person in a way that feels right.
I can also “taste” the words I’m speaking or writing, even before I do so. As they begin to form in me, I can feel if it’s the right “flavour” or whether I have to search for a better word. These particulars of feeling guide me to what feels better, to what feels more true to me. Many sensitive people do this, as they weigh their words before uttering them.
As I follow the inner sense to sift through for the more appropriate word, I’m searching for my truest expression. It’s as if the feeling takes me to my truth. My truth always feels “the rightest” at that moment.
In this way, I can sense my way through situations, feeling my way towards more ease and less strain. My body, like yours, is a receiver that can sense into both my own inner world and the world around me. Over time, more nuances and messages started coming through me, which I’ll discuss a little later. But it’s through the senses that we communicate with energies.
That awareness has become my teacher, offering me direct knowledge from both within and beyond myself. Of all the authorities available, this teacher has always looked out for me, always concerned with my highest good. Someone I could finally trust.
No lesson has been wasted. Everything has been used, digested, and assimilated into what was needed. It’s hard to say that “I” did it all. What feels more accurate is that something within me guided this entire process.
For as long as I can remember, reading any books made my system resist. I could only read so much before starting to feel anxious, dizzy, or holding my breath. Deep inside, my sensitive mind-body system was already taking in too much information and data. To an oversaturated system anything more activated an internal alarm, urging me to take things slowly and avoid overload. For some years now, I understood that a) I was tapped into other sources, and b) that I was rather designed to create, not to consume.
Likewise, I was also never comfortable with the “sit quietly and stop shifting around” type of learning. As I said before, I was never a “by the book” person and had a fire to do things my way.
Like a baby learning language through direct experience, I too have come to accept this side of myself. This is how I’ve learned almost everything I know—languages, work skills, and more. I’ve always learned best just by observing or directly doing. Now I understand that when I’m learning, my mind is in a mode of soaking in from people and the environment what I want to grasp. And I winged my way through things. Taking in a variety of cues, signals, motions, and connections, my mind builds a layer-by-layer map of a situation.
My resistance to repeat something just because someone told me so is not just my rebellion. It’s how my mind works and how I work.
I needed to analyse, understand, take things apart, make sense of them, and reassemble them through a system that my mind created based on my multi-sensory perception.
As long as I can remember, I’ve been synthesising reality into some sort of keys that allowed me to unlock the situations and be able to function in them. It’s probably why it felt natural for me to start following my experience as a guide. I believe all humans are like that too, but the system forces them to memorise facts obediently, line by line.
Learning, being a whole-human experience, should never be locked in a stiff classroom. It should neither be a “brain” activity, but rather an immersive one, if you ask me.
For most of my school years, I dealt with all the external expectations of being a good student by simply avoiding hard things that didn’t interest me, failing classes, and skiving from school. I was smart, but the way school works, I felt bored, incapable, and not good enough.
Going into the arts to do what I’ve always loved and to follow a more explorative, free path was an obvious choice for me. Much of this stems from how I absorb information—through experience—since I’ve never been able to memorise anything by heart. Working with words has always been a challenge for me (and still is as I write this), which I believe has to do with the inherent limitations and linearity of language. My experience in the arts, however, helped me untangle abstractions and see what lay beneath the chaos. Decades of art practice taught me how to bring order by transforming those abstractions into something tangible.
Many of us associate learning with discipline, and it can certainly be that. But learning is also about intuition.
We can simply see something in our mind’s eye as true or have a subtle inkling about a place or a person. We follow our curiosity, as though guided by an invisible hand, turning a corner only to encounter an old acquaintance who seems to have been on their way to meet us. Whether these insights are sharp or hazy, they remain profound sources of knowledge.
Other times yet we can just spontaneously know. There were moments when I didn’t learn neither from books, nor through interaction with the environment.
With my growing awareness and sensitivity, certain knowings would simply appear within me. (Some might call it claircognizance.) Although highly unpopular in our left-brain-dominated culture, this is a valid way of learning. I had strong confirmations of these spontaneous knowings on many occasions, as entire ideas for models would dawn on me. In other instances, complete stories or myths came to me fully formed.
It’s important to emphasise that these knowings happened without thought or emotion. One moment I didn’t know, and the next moment, I did. They came from beyond my experience, but in relation to it. As if the knowings knew that I needed them to keep moving forward.
Sadly, they never turned out to be lotto numbers, but they were nonetheless life-changing insights and directions. Each time they happened, they brought me closer to maturity and self-understanding.
Information is everywhere. I know it because I experienced it. And there are many established figures that resonate this notion.
Because of my divergence from the norm (and what would that be anyway?) and the struggles I endured within a system that demands people conform to a certain way, I was left with the only path available to me: the path of deepening through subjective experience and intuition.
For a long time I didn’t know how to apply this receptivity outside my artistic practice. I didn’t know what I was doing, but unconsciously, I was collecting data. We take in stimuli so that we can churn something out of them. Be that energy to grow, or something we can express ourselves through. Sensitives process life through so many layers that others don’t.
As a result, almost all that I’m sharing here comes from allowing myself to follow my nature of intuition and direct experience.
With so many amazing books out there, a part of me regrets not having the capability to learn more from them. Another, larger part knows that I’ve been receiving just the right experiences to teach me way more than I could have through theory.
All in all, that’s my design, so for better or for worse, it’s already here. And my path is to do the best with what I have.
The establishment wants us to believe that there are "right" ways of doing things, which are, most of the time, based on linear, left-brain approaches that never worked for me. (Learning is one of them.) Then it judges us for how we apply ourselves relative to these standards. But this is ridiculous.
Everyone is different and there are as many ways of doing anything as there are people. I did try at times, and every time I felt defeated. The way other people do things has never really worked for me. Or when they did (and at times, I was ruthlessly determined to make them work), it was only for a short time before the borrowed ways depleted me.
When I finally stopped resisting my natural way of interacting with life, everything started clicking into place. Understanding came faster. I moved with more clarity and confidence.
Over time, I stopped forcing myself into borrowed ways of being. I let go of the urge to fit in, to follow, to force. Instead, I began making choices by feeling my way into them—not by overthinking, not by measuring against others, but by sensing what was truly mine.
For instance, I could sense when there was a dense—almost claustrophobic stuckness in a particular situation. I could also sense that it required breaking the impasse with a single input. In life, as I observed it, most often required doing something “off the wall,” which inadvertently made the stickiness “unstuck,” releasing it into pieces like small seeds that could sprout into new possibilities.
At other times, when I felt the inner pressure rising, I knew I had to stop trying to force things to change or make sense of them. The fighter in me wanted to grip tightly, to control the outcome. But when I let go—when I released that grip—something shifted. The stress eased. And more often than not, the situation untangled itself without my interference. It was all internal, yet it shaped how things played out.
There is a microcosm in us, call it a training place, where we get to practice many interactions between our inner parts, to be applied later with other people.
Similarly to the previous example, this releasing of a grip could be applied in an intense situation when being in an argument. I noticed that easing my own energy, eased the energy of the other person, disarming their hostility.
To align with the currents of energy, I had to challenge all my previous habits of using my mind (and actions) to control and know everything. It takes long deconditioning of all muscle memory that holds the habits we’re programmed to perform in all the familiar ways. It requires us to be in here and now.
The examples above are not formulas for similar occasions, and it’s not cut and dry. That’s the whole point.
There are patterns and rhythms in how things play out. We can learn new ways of being. But it takes tuning into the present moment and the willingness to try new things without any guarantees. There are no shortcuts.
Conditioned behaviours offer plenty of shortcuts, but they’re a cop-out from living a life with awareness. What worked yesterday, might not work today. Repeating the old ways over and over can only take us so far. Each moment is new, and we are new in each moment.
You see, the way we “taste” the words before we speak, is no different to any other considerations about any choice we make in life. Feeling into them before we proceed, helps a great deal in navigating my practical life situations. But it can also inhibit our natural expression and spontaneity. There are times to consider and times to just let it flow.
The data I had been collecting from my life, put together with my sensitive nature together with my “audacity” to validate what I sensed, despite what I was told—something that until just a few years ago seemed like such a heavy burden—I could finally use it in life.
Taking in subtle information from all around me and translating these perceptions into more obvious and coherent truths was something I had to learn to validate and refine. The more I felt into things, observing my sensory reactions to life, the more I could see various patterns in my days. And it helped me make choices that nourished me more and strained less.
In my years of continued internal practices, I learned not to be intimidated by all the discomforts (movements of energy) that I sensed and grew a capacity for holding the tension of their stirrings while remaining present even with big feelings showing up. I kept growing my capacity to feel the grosser feelings (more on that later) and more nuance.
The more we allow ourselves to feel very bad, the more we have the ability to sense into the tiniest of whispers. As I said, this didn’t happen overnight, but it was how I found a grounded sense of calm and command within.
Through these impressions, I slowly remembered the truth so easily forgotten in our modern days: we are a part of nature. But somehow, we haven’t been acting our part so successfully for quite some time.
As I continued to “listen” I had to recognise that something was doing the talking.
Regardless if I was listening or not, the talking continued. And so the natural conclusion was that there is something far larger than me, and larger than the immediate environment, or the people around me. I’d felt it before when I was playing with yoga symbolism and could feel something so primordial in them that extended far beyond my own little life.
As I tuned into the subtle energies behind everything, I started recognising the language of sensitivity. My old need to control life, to know what was coming next, began to fade. I no longer had to brace myself for every possibility. Anxiety loosened its grip.
With time, I no longer needed to track everything or hold onto the illusion of control. I felt safe letting go.
I became more spontaneous. More free. More myself.
Don’t get me wrong, I would still go off-kilter, and I still do stray. Occasionally I have days when it’s really a challenge and all my energy is used on finding my centre . But with practice, it became much less frequent, and easier to come back to myself. When I do slip, I never lose myself like I used to.
This freedom, combined with my realisation how something bigger holds everything together, allowed me to relax more and enjoy the pleasure of simply being and responding to life moment by moment—most of the time, at least. It’s still a relatively new stage for me, and I know that life has more to teach me.
Sharing about my learning style has a larger purpose. I know that with my obsessive streak, if I could, I would have read, researched, and went down many more rabbit holes. I would love to read loads of books by clever people. I would love to learn from their experiences and enrich my life through it. But I can’t. And so, I learn in different ways.
My design is an example that you don’t have to have any special knowledge or training to create a life-changing inner transformation. Or to learn about the world and innovate. Most people who ever carried any meaningful changes, did that using their own experience. Established methods help. Books help. Teachers help. There’s a great wisdom accumulated in those sources.
But also, you are already tapped into the limitless well of intelligence. I’ll be saying this at the risk of repeating myself: the challenge is that people who are so tapped into the free floating web of information, deny and mistrust the source. They constantly think they need to learn more, looking out for guidance everywhere around them. While those who can’t see beyond the tip of their nose are all too ready to offer short sighted advice and create the rules others readily follow.
I know this may all sound a bit peculiar or abstract at this point. But I believe that what I write will stir something in you too, helping you remember this language as well.
Looking back, I see now that my life was consistently teaching me what I needed to know. I didn’t need to search for a teacher—I had always been learning, directly from experience. What I needed the most was to learn how to validate my experience. And perhaps that’s the whole point: to sense the world deeply, to observe, and to trust what we already know.
The majority of this part of the book will talk about energies, the very same ones that allowed me to write about them. But long before I could distil and write it all down, these energies constellated as a jumble of abstract correlations and graphical patterns scribbled in my mind’s eye. I could feel and almost touch them as true. I observed them as floating connections in my personal life and in life itself.
These existed and matured in me long before the idea for a book even came to exist. Boiling down and translating the floating chaos into a form that makes sense was not an easy task. But really it was the process of coalescing them into a linear language was what taught me about these energies.
The struggle is the path.
Now that you know a bit about me, it’s time I dive into the main framework for understanding the energies I’m talking about.
In the next chapters I will address what I observed in my life as being the main reason sensitive folks have such a hard time living in this world—their natural ability to access different layers and realms of information that less sensitive folks don’t.
Following, I will be sharing the symbolism and energies that make up this duality. Drawing this polarity framework will create our background of understanding for the rest of the book.
Before we get into the next sections, a question for you: Have you heard the saying that people are spiritual beings having a physical experience?
This concept, as old as the hills, has become popular amongst the New Age content. As you reflect on what it might mean for you, I will take it upon myself to offer what I’ve discovered involving our dual nature.
If you like what you’re reading, I would love it if you could share my book with a friend or two.
Sign up to my newsletter to get updates about the Book and other ideas.
