My story
Before I can tell you what I know and how I know about sensitivity, I wanted to tell you the story that put me in touch with my senses in the first place. It is not just a good story, but it also ties together many elements of the journey that many sensitive people have.
My regular dissociation states—when I “disappeared” during times of big feelings meant that I was pretty out of touch with what I was feeling or needing for much of my young life. I was always in my head or spaced out . And it wasn’t without consequences.
While navigating the world without proper guidance or healthy coping mechanisms, I had to rely on what I had. And what I had was a very sharp mind and a bull-like will. Though aloof for much of my childhood, I was also intense and fiercely curious about the things that caught my interest.
Solitude was my constant companion, and I preferred doing things my way. Feeling unsafe in the world I was born into, I turned inward and imagined one of my own. I created art, sculpted little figurines, and crafted toys I would talk to, often building spaceships in my mind to carry me to faraway lands. Later, while my approach became more practical, I never conformed to being a "by-the-book" person.
What I wanted, I just went for—blinded by my drive but detached from the reality of both my body and my environment. Not because I was so sure of myself—or so ambitious, but rather because I was living in my own world and got easily fixated on my next thing. Naturally to many sensitives, another reason for it was that I didn’t have any limits. I just didn’t consider that I could say no to any expectations, that either I had or others had for me.
At times (and on the surface), this worked out well; I simply followed through to get into the university I wanted or to land jobs. I never had a plan B, shooting wholeheartedly like a bullet, through any discomforts or opposition. I definitely wasn’t a classic overachiever, but through adult years, I was often obsessed with an important project or a personal mission, I was on track to get to. It’s as if, like a dog, I was always sniffing, seeking out my trail.
I still hear the stories of how radical, intense, and stubborn I was about whatever I got into my head. Where I lacked acceptance of the present moment, I made up for it with a flaming determination.
Needless to say, with the ability to push against challenges and do hard things without listening to anyone's advice, I didn’t consider myself weak or sensitive until much, much later. Like many who excel at distracting themselves with the outside stuff, I too, thought I could go on like this forever. Except that I was sensitive—extremely so. Yet all I could do, not knowing what else to do with it, was ignore it altogether.
So how did it happen that the subject of sensitivity and interconnectedness is something I now specialise in? It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for a serious disease that saved my life.
There I was, boldly stepping into my thirties, freshly moved to London, making a head start on my big career as a busy designer in a PR marketing firm, when it all started. And as I write this, I can’t help but chuckle at how cliché it sounds. Just watch any Hallmark movie to see how many transformation stories originate from PR, advertising, or marketing firms.
It was late December (most of my breakthroughs happened in wintertime, you see), during a well-deserved holiday break in 2012. My partner at the time and I were taking our seats on a coach to visit friends in Brighton for Christmas Eve celebrations. That’s when I felt the pain for the first time. It wasn’t very strong, but I knew something was off. I’d had various back pains before. I’d also had three pelvic surgeries by the age of 30. But this felt different, and I immediately knew it. I told him I wouldn’t go, and we made our way back home.
The following two years brought me to my knees and finally got me to pay attention.
Soon after the Christmas incident, my body started to collapse at a fast pace. Initially, it was pelvic pain, then back and leg pain, dizzy spells, and blurry vision. An unknown disease was consuming my life, forcing me to give up the new job, my passions, new friends, and any fun activities I could have enjoyed in this amazing, vibrant city.
Prior to the illness, I’d had a pattern of overworking for years, with various mysterious symptoms and health problems cropping up. And I didn’t have much fun back then because I was entirely focused on work and my art. The disease scared me, but mostly because it interrupted my plans.
Through the common dissociation experienced by sensitive people and empaths, I had split my personality. I developed a highly functioning persona that took on tasks, pursued goals, and fulfilled expectations.
On the surface, I appeared to be a perfectly normal adult, more or less succeeding and accomplishing things. But it was a mask. In fuelling this performing part of me, I buried my sensibility and all emotions or instincts that didn’t support my objectives.
For many years, I lived in that trance-like state of consciousness, so clouded by perceived obligations that, in hindsight, it scares me. It was as if I had turned myself into a machine of the highest perfection and enslavement, serving a deluded drive toward whatever goal I envisioned.
As long as a desire or need served my creative goals and ambitions, it was obeyed. All other instincts—those that might lead to delays, redirections, pauses, or stopping—were automatically rejected without my conscious awareness. I didn’t entertain doing much of anything for fun, relaxation, or pleasure.
Very sensitive people don’t always look like what we imagine. Many live this life before they can ever be recognised as sensitive. I call this the shadow stage of sensitivity, which seems to be characteristic of the most sensitive individuals, whose extraordinary consciousness was so misunderstood by others that it needed to split apart.
Some are high achievers and workaholics. Many, withdraw into the world of ideas, and disconnect from people. Others yet, become roughened, others turn to addiction, easily blending into the crowd.
After all, humans invented so many ways to distract themselves from their feelings. At first sight, they might not come across as stereotypically sensitive. During this stage, they themselves wouldn’t even identify as feeling or intuitive people.
Naturally, to my confused mind, I was in complete denial of my pain for the first few months. It terrified me, but I only thought about its impact on my work. It wasn’t just ambition. Fear of not making it in London would mean that I couldn’t afford living in London. I would have to move back to Poland, or worse yet—seek help from my parents.
I was struggling so much that I couldn’t sit without horrible pain. Even with all the suffering, I tried to ignore it and hide it from my colleagues. I found it hard even to consider not working or taking as little as a short break.
My controlling mind created more and more tension in an attempt to numb the pain, which quickly became unbearable and, in hindsight, entirely counterproductive. I pushed through for as long as I could. And when I couldn’t any longer, I gave in. My strong will was no longer enough.
I was in shock that I, regardless my high hopes, couldn’t continue doing the one thing I cared about—working. Instead of showing any compassion to my sore and tired self, I felt defeated.
Without going into much detail, I spent the following year and a half visiting specialists, running scans, doing physiotherapy, and falling deeper into a dark place. I couldn’t sit even for one second, so I lay down or stood up. Shortly after, I couldn’t even do that without piercing pain and spasms. My life shrank to staying at home almost all the time, wallowing in despair and fearing how I could continue living.
And even though, technically, I wasn’t doing anything, I was always busy—busy googling answers, busy despairing, busy thinking, busy going to doctors. Even during the sickness, I was restless. Some days, I googled late into the night about my health issues, obsessing over every new symptom. It was impossible to release the desperation to find answers.
The doctors’ updates were not encouraging. They offered me nothing but pills I abhorred, a psychologist to help me cope with depression, and a pain clinic. I knew I was just another number in a file to them, but it was my life crumbling before my eyes.
It seemed that, throughout my life, I couldn’t rely on anyone to help, except now my boyfriend who promised to pay the bills from his own salary. Still, I’d always felt like I was going alone against the world, which explains my anxious nature. So in this moment too I could only count on myself to fight for myself.
But I was so weak and depressed. I was losing my mind trying to find the right diagnosis, hoping it would promise some resolution. Although I received reports, scans, and diagnosis of all the things that showed wrong with specific parts of my body, no one could tell me what to do with all that.
With my hope wilting week by week, I continued going to a highly recommended physiotherapist on Harley Street, paying steeply with my hard-earned savings. One day, after the treatment, she routinely confirmed the next Wednesday’s appointment at 5 p.m. Then, without lifting her head from her planner, she casually added that perhaps I should consider “some sort of surgery”. I was just putting my clothes on. Hearing this, I froze, completely baffled.
“Your condition is not something I can help you with. Your body won’t heal on its own either,” she added.
I finished dressing but didn’t say anything. As soon as I left, I started crying. I thought to myself, as if addressing her directly, “I’ve been coming here for a year with this condition. If you know you can’t help me, why are you booking me for the next session? And what kind of brilliant surgery are you suggesting to help my entire body from falling apart?” I started fuming.
More than her greed, I was infuriated by the idea that my body wouldn’t heal. This was the last time I set foot in her office. In that instant, something shifted in me. Although I’d been despairing for so long, this one sentence brought out anger in me. And rage was exactly what I needed. It shook my powerlessness out of me and rekindled the sheer fire of my spirit. It cleared my mind of all the “nonsense of being sick”.
“How dare she tell me that I can’t heal? No one can decide that. No one can tell me what I can or cannot do”—my fierce nature coming back to life as I growled almost out loud on the street. “No person has the right to decide what my body can do without my say in the decision,” I continued mumbling to myself on the Underground journey home, with a force I hadn’t felt since my earlier years. I will never forget this volcano of power that bursted the bubble of weakness. I felt the deep truth of my conviction, which allowed me to shake off the depression and despair in a single afternoon. And, momentarily, I stopped feeling pain. I stopped being numb. I let myself feel big, raw emotions.
That day also turned out to be the day I resolved to stop going to any doctor appointments altogether and began tapering off the pills I was on.
Soon enough, I read on a health forum about an urban legend where someone supposedly healed using the mind-body connection. I immediately knew that would be my path to healing. And so it was.
Not knowing the first thing about the world of holistic healing or meditation, I followed my fire to find my path. Almost immediately, a book by Dr John Sarno came into my life and gave me a direction to follow. Alongside it, I discovered other modalities and bet my life on consistently following them into full healing.
The essential aspect of my healing came from connecting with my body—listening to its feelings and whispers. During the process, I taught myself yoga using online articles and photocopied pages that a friendly healer gave me. She even drew missing poses as stick figures for guidance. I studied how to practice the poses as well as I could. And I was noticing some principles. My vivid imagination helped me add layers of symbolism and embody various archetypes.
I became as strong and unshaken as a mountain. I felt the speed of flight as Locust. I roared like a lion, expressing my dormant power. Warrior. Cobra. Dog. Eagle. Fish. Crocodile. Bridge. Child. Ten deep breaths in each pose, then another. I made my own rules, and I followed the ones that seemed to benefit my progress. My creative spirit came alive as I felt the power of each symbol inhabit my sore body and transform the feeling.
Then came the most important pose—the corpse pose.
Each day, after a 45-minute exercise session, I lay down to relax for 45 minutes in corpse pose. Every time I did it, I symbolically died to be reborn again. It was as if I cast a spell on myself. When I gave attention to each of my body parts, I could feel every cell in my body regenerate and burst with vitality, delighted to be alive. Happy to be seen and appreciated. “Seeing myself”—as if for the first time anyone really saw me, was deeply healing, even though the pain didn’t subside for weeks. I simply knew I would heal. I had no shadow of doubt about it.
I’d never felt this deep stillness and sense of connection before. I guess I’d never really inhabited my body as fully as then. It felt like home, that I never had. Unconditional and nourishing. Finally, I surrendered to being, and I connected to something larger than myself—something universal that was deeply healing. Accessing the qualities and symbols transported me. I think it was so intuitive for me because of my dreams from earlier years.
As a child and young teenager, I used to dream a lot, often about personified animals. The most bizarre stories of martens stashing their gold, two-headed turtles, magical bears, ethereal singing dolphins, and many other creatures visited me at night. I shared dream adventures with them. They always left a mark on me, so much so that even in my most practical days, I found myself daydreaming about those nightly journeys to fantastic lands. Now, through yoga, I actively pulled those symbols into myself and allowed them to nourish me.
Doing my morning practice and evening journaling seemed enough. Instinctively, I let myself trust that the healing was occurring, even if the evidence told me otherwise. As I settled into a ritual and chose to trust, my nervousness and anxiety eased, and I let go of control. It was as if the healing had completed at the very moment I decided it would. The following months were just a formality.
Let me be perfectly honest, though. The surrender didn’t happen all at once—it never does. It took me a few weeks to be able to lie down and be still. My mind kept coming up with stories and reasons why I shouldn’t. Like a puppet moved by some invisible hand, my muscle memory compulsively tried to get me up and make me do something, acting out the energy that had wound me up during all the previous years of being on the go.
Aside from that one book, which I read over and over again, and a few yoga articles, I didn’t read anything to satisfy this new growing appetite. Somehow, I stopped googling and obsessing. I stopped asking why and how.
Asking “why” is not only a sign of curiosity; it’s also linked to an inability to reconcile a situation—something very connected to trauma. Trauma shatters our lives, as we can’t make sense of or “understand” why or how something happened to us. Sensitive people—those idealistic, deeply empathic individuals—often ask “why” for both of these reasons. These gentle beings have a hard time understanding, “How could anyone do such a thing?” Hence, the ever-present echo of a “why” that they carry with them.
I can only make the connection in hindsight, but it tells me I was, in fact, moving out of a lifetime of trauma.
During my yoga sessions and body scans, I noticed how frequently my mind was leaving my body. And now that I knew how good it felt to be embodied I “missed myself” when it was gone. And back then I didn't even try to “embody myself”. I had no clue about those words back then. I simply followed what felt good, or even what felt better.
I realised that I had to regularly coax my attention back. I needed to bring it to my body, and I came up with a new phrase that allowed me to recover from each distraction: “I’m here and now. I’m here and now.” That was my mantra—something I still tell myself today.
It wasn’t until much later that I realised this localisation in time-space awareness is what allows a sense of embodiment.
My patience grew. My attention to experience and focus improved. I slowed down. I moved past the restlessness that had consumed my mind and body for so long. I began to sense the limitations of my body and feel into what it needed, while gently challenging myself to expand my capacity to stretch and strengthen with love. As I grew quiet, I finally got to hear my body. And I was talking back to it.
This was new for me. No longer was I pushing myself to do anything, as I always had.
I guess I was lucky not to have money for a yoga school where I might have been distracted by others, compared myself to them, or given my power away to an authority figure. Instead, I was alone with my body. For the first time, I gave it full attention, to the extent that was possible for me then. Full attention to my experience of self.
Throughout the process, I was blinded by my felt sense of certainty—a certainty that had no logical explanation. I just chose to trust that path. Despite the lack of evidence, the setbacks, the continued pain, or even new symptoms, nothing distracted me from following my “protocol”. And boy, were there many setbacks.
I kept validating my faith simply because I’d chosen to, even on the days when I got worse. At times, when I completely opened my emotions to my awareness, I could feel my pain disappear instantly. This was very encouraging. Rage, sadness, regret, a sense of being lost, and shame—I allowed myself to feel them. I couldn’t feel them fully back then, but it was enough to move me back to my body.
Being with my physical experience and journaling about the emotions I was slowly melting away decades of freezing and rigid dissociation into a softer state of developing sensitivity. Coming back to myself for the first time was a revelation—it was like finding a new friend for life.
Three months in, I was about 70% healthy. Not only that. At this point, I was the happiest and most invincible person I had ever been. My mind was clearer than it had ever been. The disease seemed like a blessing that had changed me completely. It allowed me to see a way of being that felt so comforting and true.
With so much peace I stopped caring that I wasn’t totally healthy. As it happens, this detachment from the outcome—allowing the pain and all kinds of uncomfortable sensations that used to make me panic—paradoxically made them disappear altogether.
Within the next couple of months, I regained my full health and vitality. Actually, that’s not entirely true. The truth is, I had never felt so healthy or strong before. Regardless all the authorities telling me that I was not going to heal, I healed. And it was my intuition that led me to it.
In these several months of healing, I took up painting. I’d never been into painting, even though I had a master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts. But art was something that had always been with me, ever since I was a toddler. It was the only way I could express myself in a home that didn’t allow expression.
Initially, I didn’t understand this language of my sensations or feelings. It was all new to me. Most of the time, I was pretending and assuming what one might feel after experiencing a life like mine. At the time, I found a way to interact with my body as though it were a conscious being, and the shifts became evident—sometimes even at the very moment I was talking to it. I stopped forcing it by sheer will and began attuning to its limitations and drives. When my grip loosened, my body loosened. I was receiving feedback to any of my attitudes. Even though it was just the beginning, I became curious about what it was telling me.
Through this pretending to feel, I gave myself permission to open to what was deeper and could be healed in the years to come—a permission to experience myself and shed light on unmet needs and repressed feelings. Slowly, I felt more, and I could sense how the energy of my emotions was changing. I could also feel how the pain shifted when I talked to my body.
After that I knew there was more to it than what I could grasp at the time. Even the author of the magic book didn’t seem to know—or at least never mentioned—the source of the power that came from journaling about rage. I studied some books about the topic of healing by engaging with emotions.
Everything I got my hands on was saying the basics of what I’d long known, but I felt there was so much more to it! What was that energy that allowed me to in the instant have my pain disappear? And how about body awareness— what was it so nourishing and healing about it?
As the years passed, I kept experimenting and did some more reading. But I realised that my body didn’t want to read—it wanted to express and create. It didn’t want to take in any more information or stimuli.
When I opened myself to feeling, I started to experience all the things I had shut off so long ago—anxiety, fear, anger, and a sense of limitation—all to the degree I was capable of feeling them. Yet, with these also came access to more pleasurable feelings that I had missed out on while bracing against discomfort.
I became absolutely exhilarated by this transformation and set out to understand more deeply the mysterious forces that had helped me heal. Several months after my complete healing, I returned to work as a graphic designer and developed my art practice. But I diligently continued my daily practice and my experiments in a practical setting, making many observations.
I changed my priorities and made different choices about how I approached work, knowing that it had to be sustainable from then on. My wellbeing came first. My body—and the feelings it used to communicate with me—became my compass.
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.
