Yoga Taught Me That I Am Not Crazy

*trigger warning: this article discusses mental health treatment and sexual trauma

Yoga taught me that I am not crazy, and I know that may sound a little crazy!  As a highly sensitive human, I often thought something was wrong with me because my feelings felt so big compared to everyone else’s. I had plenty of mental health professionals slap a label on my emotionally sensitive “condition”, send me home with a low dose of Prozac or Xanax, and wish me luck. I am not saying there isn’t a place for western medical interventions - I think they may have been necessary, given my resources at the time, to allow me to move out of fight/flight after suffering through sexual trauma to begin to heal and process my experience. For that, I am grateful. AND, the social stigma around mental health treatment and anti-depressants/anti-anxiety medication caused others and then me to question my own sanity. Was I crazy to feel so much?

It was a question I had asked myself before. I felt sensations since childhood that I thought no one else felt, and I wondered “Why isn’t anyone talking about this?”

When I am in the forest, I feel the trees breathing.  They pulse, and when my eyes are closed, I hear them speak.  I know when the birds and squirrels are watching me, I can feel their eyes gazing at me, and I love to peek out and catch them stalking.  The rocks tell me stories, the flowers sing me hymns, and the breeze blows through my skin. I feel it in my marrow.    

As a child, I could feel the emotions of people around me, though I didn’t know at the time that was what I was feeling.  My heart would race unexpectedly, my eyes widened, and I would watch people. I would see their emotions and feel their secret stories. This was often confusing and overwhelming for me, especially when people weren’t expressing their emotions verbally (so I was “hearing” whatever was UNspoken).  I found ways to manage that overwhelm with little games in my mind - math games, superstitions, and geometric puzzles.  This made me quite suited to other exercises of the mind, like math, physics, and languages, but none of that helped me to make sense of the unseen and unknown. 

As an adult, I have recognized that I also, at times, feel the physical sensations of others around me.  If someone is feeling nauseous, for example, I may also feel nauseous, and then when I move away from them, the sensation passes.  If someone is having a physical pain in their body, I often feel that pain (particularly someone with whom I have an intimate connection).  At times, this happens from many miles away - the physical proximity doesn’t seem to affect the connection. And when my loved ones experience trauma, I often feel the trauma, unable to shake this seemingly random sense of dread. Maybe you have experienced something similar and shrugged it off as coincidence?

What if it is actually a window to ultimate truth?

When I began to study yoga and subtle energy, I slowly realized that the sensations I experience are not crazy - they are natural and beautiful. Everything is connected, after all, through an energetic tapestry, and maybe I happened to come into this life more aware of it. Or, maybe, my childhood experiences heightened my awareness - I’m not sure. I am sure, though, that every one of us has the ability to tap into this energetic field. When we sit in meditation and allow our bodies and minds to rest, we create space for intuitive wisdom to rise. The more we sit, the more it rises.

The other day, I was waiting at a stop light near my house, and I noticed the tree on the corner. Suddenly, everything around the tree faded, and I saw this tree in that spot, before anything was built there. A man was nearby on horseback, there were shrubs all around where there is now concrete, the sky was so much bigger, and the tree seemed happy, even joyous. Two weeks later, I drove by, and a construction crew was demo-ing the nearby old gas station and cutting down the tree. Later that week, it lie uprooted, like a carcass, roots exposed on the concrete slab. I felt sick with sadness and honored that the tree had shared its story with me.

Intuition, the ability to see beyond the sense-perceived reality, is not some skill only the psychics, mind-readers, and fantasy characters can hone. It doesn’t require a magic potion or drug as an access point. It, like any skill, requires only interest, practice, dedicated effort, and a little bit of faith that you aren’t crazy.