3 Common Struggles For Sensitive Souls (and How to Navigate Through Them)

Why life can feel hard for sensitive souls

I love to write about the challenges of being a sensitive soul on earth because they are the very things that I face and navigate through.

To an extent, we’re all sensitive in some way. The difference is, some of us wear our sensitivity on the outside of our beings, and some of us bury it deep within ourselves, creating an impenetrable barrier to the vulnerability inside.

We’re all different and unique, and that’s exactly what makes us all so special in our own ways.

Yet, if we’re sensitive souls, wearing our sensitivity as part of who we are, life can feel extra challenging. It can be really easy to look at those people who seem so tough, so put-together, so immune to it all, and wish to have a little less sensitivity and be a little more impervious to life.

But it’s the sensitivity, along with the deep intuition, empathy, vulnerability and truth-seeking, that can be a deep source of power and strength. And we’re not here to shut it down, we’re here to open it wide up.

We’re not here on earth to numb our senses or shut down our feelings. We came here to experience what it means to be human, to live fully in these bodies that allow us to create, sing, dance, and touch the world around us. Being human means feeling everything: the joy and the ache, the love and the loss, the moments that break us open and the ones that fill us with bliss and wonder.

We are here to feel the full range of our emotional capacity, and access the highest ceilings of our consciousness in this lifetime. And if we have access to the soft, undercurrents of the world’s energetic and emotional field through our sensitivity, then we’re in the perfect place.

What’s behind our sensitive nature?

If you don’t know the numbers in your Soul Contract, you might like to check it out so you can see for yourself if you have any of those beautiful sensitive energies in your chart, which I dive into in this YouTube video here.

What I’d also add, before we dive into the three things that sensitive souls can struggle with, is that we can lean into over-sensitivity if we’re not careful, which can make life just that more difficult.

Many of us, due to our sensitive nature, have experienced hardship in our lives, starting from the families that we were born into (who are our training ground) and the challenges and trauma that are just part and parcel of life for us all.

We are here to hone our sensitivity into a superpower, but if we let the trauma of our past overwhelm us, then we need to do the healing work to bring ourselves back into balance. We cannot access our sensitivity as a strength if we are still traumatised from the past.

We are all co-creators, and we therefore all have a responsibility for what we are creating, on some level. We therefore have the ability to co-create a different reality for ourselves. Yet one of the key things that keeps us stuck and frozen in place is trauma that is still blocking out life force in our body.

Trauma release is a really key part of the healing work for sensitive souls, which is why it’s something that I always work in Divine Healing sessions. When we clear it, safely, lovingly and gently, it’s amazing how life can being to flow once more.

No. 1 - Putting up boundaries to manage sensitivity

One of the biggest things we struggle with as sensitive souls is our deep empathy, which can often lead to us always giving, giving, giving, and not being able to put up those strong boundaries against those people who like to take, take, take.

As I said earlier, sensitivity is a superpower, which means we have this ability to sense the deeper emotions within other people around us. This empathy is what creates our ability to sense who needs support, and then look after those who need it most.

Sensitive souls can be very loving and generous with their time and energy, not only because they recognise the suffering in others, but because they have been through it themselves and want to provide that comfort that they once needed.

However, as it is within the universe, there is always the nature of duality, and opposites attract. In this case, it’s common for sensitive, gentle people to attract the attention of people who take advantage of them.

There is a spectrum of people, ranging from narcissists to energy vampires, who emotionally manipulate people for their own means. I’ve written about this extensively due to my own experiences with these people. They can show up as parents, partners, bosses and even friends.

They slip in easily through our softened boundaries, and so it often takes us some time to realise that the dynamic we have with these people is toxic and damaging to us. We all have experiences of these people and it’s these very experiences are our lessons, and these people are our teachers who have chosen to play out this dynamic in this lifetime.

We do not need to fear them or hate them. We merely need to see the situation from a clearer lens of truth and awareness, and then extract ourselves from their manipulative energy. We can then start the work of putting up those boundaries so that people like this can’t so easily sneak in again.

No. 2 - Following through with your intuitive ideas

Sensitive people often have a deeply intuitive channel. This is the channel that connects Source and Soul, and you, the personality (or the Self) are the vessel through which that information flows through and out into the world.

A really common thing I see within myself, and within other sensitive souls, is an inability to allow this channel to flow. Often, we can be really stuck in the mind, thinking things through on a mental level, which can not only be overwhelming, but also really draining.

The mental body is where most of our intuitive ideas get stuck, because the mind jumps in and starts sifting through all the possibilities and outcomes - the ‘how will it happen’ - which gets the idea stuck in a tangled knot inside of us. Often, we picture the metaphorical mountain of the idea that we want to birth into the world, and we get totally overwhelmed with how to even start climbing.

Our minds can paralyse us, keeping us stuck in the ‘thinking’ and in avoidance of the ‘doing’.

Our intuition connects us to a creative channel of pure potential. We’re not meant to keep those insights floating in the abstract, we’re here to anchor them, to give them life and form in the world around us.

Yet, this can be the hardest thing for sensitive souls because we’re still learning how to ground ourselves and allow the flow of our ideas to actually come forth into reality. We’re also still learning how to be resilient in the sharing of our ideas, and of ourselves, in the world.

The key is to write down everything that comes to you. Writing is always the first step as it brings ideas out of the unseen and into form, simply by putting pen to paper. From there, notice which idea lights up your soul the most, and choose to focus on that one. Being decisive helps your energy stay centred, rather than scattered across too many directions.

From there, we can gradually start to take small, gentle actions to make them more real. The trick is to not think of the mountain we want to climb in the distance, but to just take the first few steps in front of us.

No. 3 - Grounding and feeling through the physical body

One of the biggest challenges for those of us who are sensitive is that we can get stuck in feeling too much, but not being able to uncover the real emotions underneath the surface. We’re so plugged into the emotional and energetic grids of the people and world around us, but we can be slightly disconnected from our own inner emotions.

We’re all here to come into our feelings and bring whatever is under the surface up to be released and cleared, but often it can be too painful for us to go deeper into our emotional landscape due to trauma of the past, so we tend to stay on the surface.

The issue with that is we get stuck in the mental body as we’re not grounding into our physical body, which contains all the emotions that we’re wanting to avoid. Emotions are contained in water, and so our emotions sit in the cellular field of every cell in our body.

Ultimately, as sensitive souls, we’re here to tune out of our minds and into our emotions. And if you’re someone like me who can struggle with knowing how they’re really feeling, try this short emotional healing guided process and see what happens.

Being sensitive also means we’re tuned into all the energies and emotions swirling around our environments, which can be really overwhelming.

This can make it really hard to know whether the stuff we’re feeling is ours or the emotional baggage of the people around us. Being in a crowd, surrounded by people, or even being in certain places means it can be really hard to tune out the external energies and bring our focus back to ourselves.

This is why regular energy clearing and space clearing is vital. We need to regularly clear off the energetic and emotional junk that other people carry in their fields so we can come back into our own energy and center.

And this isn’t just limited to the people we’ve been around, it’s also to do with the things we watch, the music and podcast we listen to, the social media we scroll through or the news we consume. Everything is energy and we need to be incredibly discerning with what we are inviting it.

It’s also important for us to spend time in nature, as this is how we can reconnect with the universe. The soothing effects of nature helps us unplug our mental body from the merry-go-round of thoughts.

Honing sensitivity into a superpower

Sensitivity is your superpower, it just needs a little management to make it work for you, rather than against you.

We've been living in super overwhelming times recently, with a huge amount of chaos that is rippling across the energy fields of the earth and tapping right into your nervous system. If there is a time to strengthen your boundaries, clear your energy fields and ground yourself into your body, the time is now.

We’re all here to get more grounded and learn to feel our way through life, rather than think our way through, but it can take a little bit of practice.

The most important thing to remember is to be incredibly graceful and compassionate with yourself as you navigate through finding balance in your life. The biggest thing that holds us all back is the self-judgement and self-criticism, so if we can manage to gently come into greater compassion and understanding of who we are and why we are the way we are, our path forwards will become so much easier.

You’re never alone, even if you feel like it, and in times where it feels like your sensitivity is holding you back, just remember what I’ve shared with you here, and see how much smoother life feels when you start to put it into action.

If you’d like support and guidance on your spiritual and emotional healing journey, you may like to book a Soul Contract Reading, book a Divine Healing session, or sign up to my newsletter to stay in touch for more similar posts.

---

Carry on exploring