Navigating Life as a Sensitive Human
How can you navigate life as a sensitive human? In this episode of Your Superpowered Mind, host Kristin Maxwell welcomes guest Signe Myers Hovem to talk all about this very topic. The concept of being ‘sensitive’ is sometimes looked down upon in society, but actually, sensitivity has a lot of strengths if we allow it to help us! The two talk about the importance of trusting your senses and intuition to guide you in life, finding your own authority and authenticity, and overcoming the challenges you may face as someone who is a sensitive human. Tune in now to learn more about navigating life as a superpowered and sensitive human!
Kristin Maxwell:
Hello, everyone! Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I am your host, Kristin Maxwell. In this show, we explore the process of transformation and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life. Today, I’m really excited to be talking to Signe Myers Hovem about navigating life as a sensitive human. And Signe Myers Hovem is a spiritual counselor, an ITA energy practitioner, and the author of The Space in Between: An Empath’s Field Guide. Signe helps our clients to find authenticity and discover how to be balanced, sensitive human beings, using the power of self-awareness and the sacredness of language to create change and cultivate harmony between one’s inner and outer environments. Signe, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Signe Myers Hovem:
Thank you so much for having me, Kristin.
Kristin Maxwell:
I’m excited. There’s so much to talk about in this area. I’m going to start with my first question, which is always, what superpower did you uncover as the result of mastering your mind?
Signe Myers Hovem:
I think, for myself, the fundamental shift that I discovered was, “What does authority mean?” And that really kind of helped me understand relationships because if you’ve misplaced your authority, you’ve also displaced your voice, and it kind of opened up for me a whole new way of looking at interactions, looking at my own thoughts and perceptions. And so this is ongoing, but we kind of give away a sense of ourselves in our authority when we kind of align to belief systems that come from outside of us, and we don’t question them. I would have to say that, to your listeners, I was someone who somebody was born kind of already questioning authority.
As early as I can remember, I didn’t want to wear a Girl Scout uniform if somebody was telling me that was the only way I would belong, or I was always looking at, “Well, what is your agenda, or, “What is…” So, I’ve always been somewhat curious about authority, and then, as I did more and more of my own work, I started to see the relationship between authority and authenticity that really kind of lives from your center, your core, your authentic self. You really do require your own sovereignty and your own authority.
Kristin Maxwell:
And that is so funny because I love how people are so different. It has never, in my life, occurred to me to go into situations thinking about what people’s agendas are. It is so, so funny. And a lot of your work is around empaths and sensitive humans and such. Do you identify yourself as being a sensitive human being or an empath?
Signe Myers Hovem:
Yes. I would identify myself as both a highly sensitive person and an empathic person, and just to give your listeners kind of a little bit of reference point, a “highly sensitive person,” has kind of been a term coined back in 1989 by Dr. Elaine Aaron, and they’ve gone on to do research and find that there is a genetic marker that makes these individuals have a higher sensory processing and so bright lights, loud noises, things of the physical realm in which we’re using our senses. They can be highly stimulated or agitated by it. That is using your senses on kind of what you hear, what you see, what you feel, busy, crowded spaces, but an empathic person has kind of a heightened sensory perception to what’s energetically there.
They don’t need a physical clue. They don’t need bright light. They don’t need to see somebody suffering. They kind of can feel it, and that is called “empathic intuitive channels.” And so you can see that, on the one hand, somebody who, like myself, is both highly sensitive and intuitively empathic, we have a lot to manage. And that’s why I wrote the book The Space in Between: An Empath’s Field Guide, because for most of my life, I was a bit overwhelmed with my environment and did not quite understand why I was feeling the way I was. And so this is something that I hope people who would like to have a guide will take my book and read it. There’re questions in each chapter to help reflect because the thing about being sensitive is our environments can be almost overwhelming to us, so we need to find our own authority.
We need to come to our center. And ideally, I say a functional empath is somebody who can operate from a neutral channel, or the other word for a neutral channel is “compassion,” because when you come into compassion, you actually aren’t judging. You’re accepting, and you’re offering compassion instead of offering your own energy and depleting yourself and having to deal with many mismanaged boundaries.
Kristin Maxwell:
You just said so much there that I want to dig deeper into, but before we do, we’re going to take a break. I’m going to let everybody know that you can find Signe and her book at smhovem.com, and I will put her website in the notes and on the notes at yoursuperpoweredmind.com, where you can also discover what we’ve got going on at your superpower experts to communities and programs. Hang on. We will be right back, and we’ll talk some more about navigating life as a sensitive human.
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