Meeting people without losing yourself
Staying connected with yourself and feeling balanced is relatively easy when you’re by yourself: when you’re meditating or doing what you love.
As soon as you connect with other people, all kinds of things happen that cause you to go outside of yourself and lose your connection with yourself. This can result in feeling depleted, sad or overwhelmed afterwards.
Here are 3 tips to help prevent this! They help you stay more connected with yourself and your own balance, whether you are connecting with people who are triggering you or with people you love to be around. Because in both cases, connecting with others can result in ‘over-connecting’ with others and ‘under-connecting’ with yourself.
Step 1) Prepare yourself by taking time for YOU before you connect
You can help yourself a LOT with a good preparation. This doesn’t need to take much time. Make sure you take a few minutes to really connect with yourself and your body. There are many ways to do this. For example:
- Use a grounding meditation to ground yourself and connect with your body and the Earth (click here for my free grounding meditation)
- Take a few conscious, deep breaths and feel the breath going down into your belly
- Move your body: a few yoga postures, tai chi movements if you know them or just a few stretches for your body. FEEL what happens in your body. And breathe.
Step 2) Take breaks to prevent blending with others
When you connect with other people, you will most certainly lose some of your connection or awareness of yourself. That’s fine. You can come back any time! It really helps if you take short breaks in between. Restrooms are perfect for this :) Or maybe you can even take a few conscious breaths while you are listening to someone.
The most important thing is to regularly check back in with your body. How are YOU feeling right now? Your breath is always a great anchor. Another trick is to feel your feet consciously. This immediately grounds you into your own body. Or do a quick bodyscan, just moving your attention through your body from head to toes (or the other way around), observing what you feel in each part of your body.
Maybe you know the experience of ‘blending’: you connect so deeply with the people around you that you take on their feelings and start to lose awareness of how you yourself are feeling. These mini breaks help prevent this. They help you to reinforce your connection with yourself and your body, preventing you from connecting too much with the others and losing yourself.
Step 3) Come back to YOU afterwards
When you are back home, take some time to digest what happened. If you move straight on to the next thing on your to do list, you risk bringing along whatever happened before into the rest of your day. You then might get further and further away from yourself and your own inner balance. Which is not a comfortable feeling!
You just need a few minutes to come back to you. For example:
- Take a few deep breaths to (again) feel your body
- Ground yourself
- Consciously let go of any emotions, energies or opinions you may have picked up from other people (in my course Thriving with Sensitivity you learn how to do that!)
- From your heart, imagine radiating your heart energy through your entire body, filling up any empty spaces, until you feel yourself radiating with light and your own heart energy
So basically there are 3 important things to remember:
- Prepare yourself
- Take breaks in between to re-connect with yourself
- Don’t just rush into the next thing: take time to come back to yourself when you get back home
We work with all of these steps in my online course Thriving with Sensitivity, where you get guided meditations and exercises to:
- Deeply connect with yourself
- Let go of any emotions, energies or opinions from other people
- Take your place and fill yourself up so that you feel stronger and more balanced
Many participants also experience that they set better boundaries and that their tendency to always please others diminishes. They feel stronger, more confident and more accepting towards themselves and their sensitivity.
You can check out Thriving with Sensitivity here!
All the best,
Irene
