[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. . Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would like to remind my listeners that I offer a free eight-week email course titled Highly Sensitive People. My email course provides weekly tools that help you feel more whole in a world isn’t exactly made for us and I show you how your sensitivity can be seen as a unique gift and how many others are just like you. To find out more about my email course. Please go to my website, amiokpodcast.com. During the month of February, my podcast episodes are focusing on HSPs in love with today’s episode looking at HSPs’ love for animals, especially focusing on horses and equine therapy. I’m so honored today to have a special guest on my show. I think she is one of the pioneers who has brought HSP information to all of us. So I’m really honored to have her on the show today. Her name is Alane Freund. Alane is an international consultant on high sensitivity and a family therapist who helps highly sensitive adults and youth focus on solutions through therapy, consultation, and speaking. [LISA] She has developed numerous programs for highly sensitive people, families, youth, and clinicians who serve them, including her monthly workshops at Are You Highly Sensitive Live. She is known for her widely recognized talk at Google, Understanding the Highly Sensitive Person. Welcome to the show, Alane. [ELAINE FREUND] Thank you so much. I’m so thrilled to be here talking about one of my favorite topics in the world. [LISA] Yay. Me too. I like to ask all my guests, if you could share a little story about how you found out, discovered or knew that you were highly sensitive. [ELAINE] Well, it’s perfect. My story, my awakening story fits in perfectly with the love of animals topic because it happened at the barn. Now I have to say, I grew up on a ranch in Oklahoma and I was asked my entire life, why are you so sensitive? Why are you crying again and told I was just too sensitive. So I’ve always known, but I didn’t know it was a thing until my friend at the barn told me. We were boarding our at this facility and all the women therapists at this facility, there were maybe five or six of us, had become a clan. They knew that I grew up with horses and really trained horses my whole life so whenever they were having a problem with their horse, they would ask me for help. So I was helping my friend, Alane. She was having a really hard time with her horse and as we were talking about what was going on, she started crying a little bit. I said, ah, now that you’re crying, everything will be so much better because your horse will know what your true heart is. After that, she had decided that I was highly sensitive and she was talking to me in the parking lot before we left. She said, “Alane, you’re a highly sensitive person. I think your equine assisted therapy work would be amazing for HSPs.” I looked at her like, “Where do you get off? I’ve been told that my whole life, but I don’t know you well enough to be labeling me.” She said, “Well, have you read the book The Highly Sensitive Person?” I said. “No, never heard of it.” She said, “Look it up.” Well, I went home and I looked it up and lo and behold, my barn buddy was Alaine Aron, the person who literally coined the term and has spearheaded eons and loads of research on highly sensitive people; sold 2 million books on the topic. That began my journey of becoming an HSP professional or as we are now called an international consultant on HSPs on high sensitivity. [LISA] Oh, wow. I love that story. Oh my gosh. That’s wonderful. So what did you do moving forward once you knew that, and then how did you begin to evolve or evolve HSP into equine therapy? [ELAINE] Well, because I’m a highly sensitive person and I always have been, and I’ve been a therapist and in mental health for three decades, I had mostly highly sensitive clients. We think maybe half of therapy clients are probably people with the trait of high sensitivity because we love going deep. We love processing and thinking a lot about things in the world and we make great therapy clients. So I already, it was just sort of like poof, it all came together for me like that. So Alaine and I started working on developing a curriculum for retreats, for highly sensitive people, with the horses. Through that process, I went really fast and just one on one with Alaine learning the about sensitivity. She also had me start traveling with her and helping out at her weekend retreats and workshops, and then slowly but surely had me teaching more and more of them. She’s almost exactly 20 years older than me so she was thinking, I can’t keep doing this. I don’t want to do this much of this. I’ve got to whip a Elaine into shape and some other people too. So I was, and I love science. I’m a clinician without a doubt, but I love science. So I dug in really deeply and quickly to find out what validates this idea, that this is a trait that it’s not a diagnosis and there’s nothing wrong with us. The curriculum we started slow, we just did a day long, the very first time. There was just such an outflowing of interest in this idea of HSPs and horses. I guess the next question is why horses? Why animals? Is that where we’re going next? [LISA] Yes, let’s go there. I love it. [ELAINE] The thing is that this trait is probably, most of our, your listeners know, is found and documented scientifically in over a hundred species. We think it’s probably in every species that there’s a minority who have this strategy that you’re going to do it right, do it once. So they’re more reflective and responsive they’re going to be probably hesitating and sort of slower to act because they’re going to scan their environment first and see what’s up. So it just so happens that prey animals, even the ones who don’t have the trait of high sensitivity are doing this responsiveness. This is how they survive in the wild, how they don’t become someone’s lunch. They have to be scanning and noticing always, but still even among the prey animals, 15% to 20% have this trait and will be the leaders of the herd in terms of keeping them alive and noticing a predator, whether it’s a human or a weird sound. They’re the ones who are going to notice it first and react to it and make a decision to say, run. So in wild horses or horses out in a large, large pasture or space, there might be one on the edge who senses movement in the trees and their head will come up and almost instantaneously the rest of the herd raises their heads. They are following the lead and we call that emotional leadership in the human, highly sensitive people. They’re following the lead of the one who noticed. If that horse spins and runs, then the whole her, and it looks like it’s happening simultaneously. It’s not. They are so good and so sensitive to their environment that they read the change in heart rate, a change in muscle tension, a change in body temperature in their herd mates and react to it and respond to it. That’s how they keep from getting eaten. So in the horse world and especially prey animals, what happens is the sensitive ones are the ones that really keep the herd alive. They’re the ones Elaine often says a sensitive deer is the one who remembers where during drought, there is food to be found and passes that on to the rest of her herd and the young ones, so that it continues; that the herd will know where to go when food is scarce, for example. [LISA] Well, and what would happen if it’s, in a herd, if there wasn’t a highly sensitive, emotional, intelligent leader? [ELAINE] We don’t really know because it pretty much doesn’t happen, but it is basically a genetic imperative, in my opinion, to have high sensitivity in a minority of people. Now, if all of the highly sensitive people, all the people or all the horses or all the dogs had the trait of high sensitivity or all the pumpkin seed, sunfish or whatever, if they were all highly sensitive, there would be no advantage. This is an advantage in genetic development and evolution. So if there were no sensitive, nobody in the herd or the species that had the trait, we don’t have this, we can’t document this scientifically Lisa because it doesn’t exist. But my projection would be that they would be less good at survival now. In humans, I mean, certainly there are families that don’t have highly sensitive people in them, thank God, because they’re going to get things done. If everybody was highly sensitive, we’d all be sitting around thinking about all the problems and not doing anything about it, or eventually we would get to it. But only after, for me, perfectionism is a part of my deep processing. So only after months, if not years of perfecting my strategy. So in humans there are many, many families, probably 80% think maybe, the new research is showing that maybe 30% of people have this trait of high sensitivity, but about half of them are more highly sensitive. Half of the 30 we don’t know. So we say 20% to 30% now. And we need us to be able to really notice and problem solve and pause and we need the 80% to go out, swinging their swords and conquering the world and getting the food and taking the advice of the advisors who are the highly sensitive people. [LISA] Oh, I love that. I love how you just framed that. How do horses, because you work with horses, how do they help HSPs or what does that look like in a session? Can you walk us through that? [ELAINE] Absolutely. So there’s this thing I want to tell you that horses and animals in general, and we see it so clearly, horses, first of all, they represent some beautiful archetypes to humanity, power and freedom and grace. When we got on the back of horses, we had all of a sudden, so much more height and speed and ability to protect our families and hunt. So in human evolution, horses have these huge, important archetype of roles. Highly sensitive people do so much. So I’m not going to say always better, but tend to really do well with animals because there’s not the manipulation, pre-varication, all the different little mind games that humans play with each other, which are perfectly normal. There’s so, they can be so hard for us because we tend to take things really personally, because we really are noticing them and thinking about them and we have such strong empathy. We’re feeling it. Well, with horses they are always where their feet are. They are perfect practicers of mindfulness. They would be eaten if they weren’t. So being where your feet are, lesson is life changing. Sometimes I say maybe for highly sensitive people, mindfulness meditation can be a trap. If you’re doing it and it works, don’t stop . But if you’re trying to do it and you, and you’re trying to say, empty your brain or quiet your mind, you may find it so challenging that it’s practically impossible and so frustrating that meditation isn’t for you. So I don’t necessarily espouse that, but we do need to live mindfully. Living mindfully, being where your feet are, the way the horses teach us means that we’re focused on taking that drink of water or noticing the beauty around this. It helps us get out of our spinning brain. So that’s one of the most important lessons. I think the other one that I would put at the very top of the list is the sensitivity, I already talked about how it’s an asset. In the equine world there are no zero challenges or problems with being highly sensitive unless we take that horse and we try to make it live in human society. Now you might imagine the highly sensitive horse who’s expected to be locked in a stall most of the day and put on the show circuit and behave perfectly and be just very docile and regimented. Those horses if they’re highly sensitive, they’re not going to do well, but in their natural environment, high sensitivity is only an asset in the equine heard. So by exploring the sensitivity of the horses and our own sensitivity in relation to the horses, we get to see how in our natural environment, it’s only an asset. It’s phenomenally true. Are we living in our natural environments? It’s hard in Western and society. I don’t find that most American, highly sensitive people are doing a very good job of living in their most natural environment, but the horses are. And we raise our horses at heart and mind equine. I do what I call holistic horse keeping. So they’re all rescue horses. So like many, if not most highly sensitive people, they have some trauma or stress in their backgrounds. I’ve done a lot of work with them to help rehabilitate them and help them recover. We say they’re walking parallel paths of growth and recovery with our clients and part of holistic horse keeping, even though where we see most of our clients and where we usually hold our reach treats is in domesticity, it’s not out in the wild, we still work really hard to give our herd as much natural environment as they can so that they can be at optimal level of arousal or be their best selves and through watching that at, we learn how to do that ourselves as humans. [LISA] I want to come back to that point you made that, especially living in the United States where we both live that we may not feel maybe at our best or we feel so comfortable or it comes easy for us just to be in our natural habitat or environment. Working with the horses as a HSP, as the client, do you get a taste of what that’s like just to have maybe that freedom or a sense of self inside, I’m just thinking inside yourself, that just feels, oh my gosh, there’s nothing I need to do right now. I don’t have to worry about anything. I can be with myself in this beautiful animal? [ELAINE] Absolutely. I mean, part of it is we look at the horses what is healthy for them. The horses travel in the wild between 30 and 50 miles a day. In the wild humans did that too. Maybe not quite that many miles, but we were always on the move. So we see from movement and a lot of times people think, oh, if the horse is moving, they are unhappy. It’s just not true. It’s they never stand still except for when they’re sleeping. They’re always slowly moving from here to there. So we learned from that, that their natural environment is to be moving. We also, and to be in nature, not to be locked in a stall so we can think about the stall as metaphor for the humans out there. What is your stall that you’re locked into? Also horses as prey animal need to know that your insides and your outsides match. So let’s just sink into that for a moment. I think highly sensitive people we experience frequently our insides and our outside’s not matching. If you’re noticing and having strong feelings and thinking so much about your environment, that you’re in a situation where you got to just tuck it in and get by and look normal then your insides and your outsides aren’t matching. When you bring that to your animal, they find you to be confusing if not even unappealing. Even my dog is the same. My cat is the same. I think animals, they are much more in their natural state and responding in their natural way, unless they’ve been really, really conditioned to leave that space. Some of my rescue horses, I rescued them from the show world and let them become horses again and learn to speak horse again. So we call them, I call the horses authenticity experts because when you come in to the herd and you have, I don’t know what the kinds of things that you might bring with yourself to a session or a retreat with the horses, you might be stressed out, even from having got, have to get there. You have stressors in your life, or maybe you had an argument with your child or your partner or parent and whatever. You’ve got all this stuff and you come into the herd and through the gate and start interacting. You’re trying to be just friendly and present with the horse. You’ve got all this stuff going on inside. We all know what that’s like. As you spend time with the horses, I hate to go out, go here and I’m going to say, I have no idea how or why, maybe I have some opinions, but I’m not going to say what they are, but somehow they know. They know exactly what’s going on with you and somehow they’re able to work with that energy or that conflict, or that stress that you’re bringing and take it from you and transform it energetically. You could hold onto it. If you’re really, really attached to whatever it is, you can hold onto it. Sometimes the HSPs and HSPs in horses will hold onto it for hours because our retreats, they start on an evening and then they go all day the next day and ten a few hours, the third day. We used to do it all in a weekend, but it was, the horses and the humans were so exhausted. We couldn’t function by the second half of the second day. So now we have two nights of rest in between. But eventually you just can’t help, but sink in to the herd. And you can do this, whether you have an animal or not, this sinking in and just being so present in your body in the moment. I like to use a tree. I do tree meditation. A therapist taught me this, or helped me come up with this idea. She didn’t come up with it on her own. She said, what makes you feel grounded? I said, trees. So we came up with this idea that several times a day, I would find a tree and just put my hand against it or lean my shoulder in to it and close my eyes for one minute and just notice and feel that the roots of the tree and the strength of the tree. So you can take this sinking in to nature, to the earth, to the sunshine or to your pet anywhere. [LISA] I love that. I also use tree meditation too. [ELAINE] How do you do it, Lisa? [LISA] Well, either being inside or outside, it doesn’t matter if I’m either or, but just closing my eyes and I just imagine tree roots growing out the bottoms of my feet and they connect my to the center of the earth or the heart of the earth. Then I just add in energy from the earth, just traveling up my tree roots that come in bottoms of my feet, into my body, up into my heart. It just radiates throughout my body and just really becoming synchronized with the rhythm of the earth and the energy. It just really just fills me up and it can just shift me from if I’m sad or angry, whatever it is, just feeling like, okay, neutral or even just really pleasant inside. [ELAINE] I think I see a survey or a study coming on. I want people to email me, HSPs if you have a tree thing. Since you and I, Lisa, both do. Because they’re everywhere. Still on this point, we still have trees everywhere. It’s so accessible. But I do that guided meditation with my clients, both at retreat and therapy clients with the horses where we do what you just described, reaching down into the earth and bringing the earth energy up and spreading it and diffusing it through our body and then bringing it into a focal point, wherever that is for the person; maybe it’s their heart, or maybe it’s their center, their core. Then we send it out into the horse’s body and through their legs and down into the earth, bringing up the earth energy into the horse. The horses are doing it automatically that we visualize their process. Then we allow the horse to work with that energy and that groundedness and share it so we create an entire loop horse, human, earth. It’s phenomenally grounding and healing to do that work. [LISA] Oh, wow. I can imagine. I’m just, as you’re talking about, I’m just picturing that and I just thought, wow, I like to try that. [ELAINE] Come and try it anytime. You’re most welcome. We also meditate with the horses and it’s pretty fascinating. We do this at every retreat and the horses, when all the HSPs start to really settle in to quieting and grounding in a meditation, just being their most authentic self. We usually encourage people to choose a word or a concept to meditate on. When we do that, the horses settle, their eyes close. Sometimes they form themselves into a really quite symmetrical formation, or sometimes they split off and focus on individuals in the group, but they always meditate with us. That meditation often will only do five minutes and you feel like you’ve been meditating for two hours because of them joining with us in it. [LISA] Wow. That sounds really peaceful and calming. I wanted to ask you about, do the horses, do they look forward to working with people? Can you tell? And I’m wondering, like as a HSP if you’ve never been around a horse and that just the presence of a horse can be very overwhelming or over-stimulating and I’m wondering how you work with that. So there was a couple questions in there. [ELAINE] Can you give me the first one again? [LISA] I’m sorry, do the horses look forward to working with people? [ELAINE] Thank you. The horses love the work. Now, these aren’t just any old horse sitting in a barn somewhere. I’ve trained these horses to do the work. We can do it with horses who haven’t just by training them. We have this rule in our work that there is no right or wrong question, and there is no right or wrong answer. I call it untraining. So horses can pick up on this, but horses in regular environments will be more likely to try to figure out exactly what the human wants and then try to do those responses because they have been trained, maybe even punished for not doing it. You can imagine growing up as HSPs, the similarities there. So these horses have been untrained. Sometimes it takes years and sometimes it takes a week depending on the horse. They love the work with humans. In fact, I have one that you will meet if you come to retreat here, that if you sit down for too long and just start talking to each other or to me or whatever, and you sit in a chair, he will go and mess with you. It might be as simple as pushing his head into you and getting right between, practically smack dab in your lap so that you can’t see the people you’re trying to talk to. Or he’ll pick up the back of the chair and his teeth, and literally lift the chair out from under you because he wants you to engage with him. They love the work and they all have their different personalities. Just like there is many different ways to be highly sensitive as there are highly sensitive people, it’s true of the horses as well. So some are more introverted. Some are more extroverted. I don’t know if the whole 70%, 30%, 70% of highly sensitive people have been found to be introverts, whereas 30% are extroverts. I like to use those words as verbs, as opposed to actual labels because we all learn how to do the other one if it’s not our natural state, but sensitive people tend to be able to move more fluidly between them. But the horses, some are introverts and some are extroverts. Some are more active, some are less active. They’re sensitive in different ways. But they love engaging with the people. That’s the first question. The second one is, what if you haven’t been around horses or you don’t feel comfortable with horses? I’m going to give you first a little exercise that you can do on your own if you can find horses in your community. A really beautiful thing to do is to take a camp chair, a chair that you can easily move that’s comfortable for you and sit outside the fence where there are horses and sit there for an hour or two, and just observe them and be with them, sink into their experience in the world. Imagine what’s going on for them. As I’m saying this, I’m imagining horses in a pasture together in a group. That might not be possible if there’s only sort of more urban stables where you are, but being with them is every bit as valuable as actually being in interaction, direct interaction with them. It’s just different, not better or worse. We had a client come, we’ve had many clients who were afraid of horses or don’t have any experience with horses and they keep their distance until they feel ready. In general, and I’ll give you this example, a woman came and I think her mother had suffered a very severe injury related to horses. So she had complicated feelings about horses and it was part of the reason she came to HSPs and horses, frankly; was to, she loved them, but she needed to resolve some of this. So she was very hesitant and a little bit fearful. What happened was after she had sort of sat quietly observing for, I would say, 40 minutes, maybe an hour into the retreat, we noticed that one of the horses had zeroed in on her and was watching her. The horse started maybe 30, 40, 50 feet away, quite a distance across the corral from her and slowly over the course of this time, she moseyed very, very slowly, closer and closer. So imagine traveling 40 feet in 40 minutes. Every minute she moved a foot closer, it was that direct, deliberate and slow. Eventually she came right in front of the woman and lowered her head. The woman was actually on the ground. So she lowered her head until it was at the level of the woman’s trunk or especially her belly in her heart, and just stood in front of her with her head about two feet in front of her. She stayed there. I’m sure that if this woman were here, she would tell you that she felt this internal process of transformation happening. Eventually she reached out and touched the horse’s head. It was a profound healing experience for her. The horses are changed by the work as well. So we invite people to participate as little or as much as they like and we sometimes sort of divide when we do retreat. It’s a very small group of people between six and 10 people. When we do the retreat, we’ll split into groups and invite people who want to engage more closely or more actively with the horses to volunteer, to do that while the rest watch. Some people stay watching the whole time and just by being in the corral, they are in the herd and they’re having that experience. [LISA] Wow. That sounds like a really profound healing to me. [ELAINE] It was. I was just, as I always tell people this in my work, whether it’s with a family or an individual or at the retreats, I find my jaw dropping to the ground. I’m surprised every week, if not every day of the things my horses do, because they are uniquely responding to the insides of the people who come here. And one of the things we look for is something unique. We’re always curious when something unique happens. And something unique happens every day. [LISA] When clients have these experiences, with the horse, do they go into their own lives and implement it, assimilate it so that what they’re learning in the therapy is also applied to their personal lives? [ELAINE] Absolutely. In fact, we invite therapists to bring their talk clients out into a session with us. We always say equine assisted therapy is sort of, five sessions is like 10 years in therapy because it moves so quickly and brings the depths up so quickly. The horses hold all of that with such tender care that it’s safe. But also we work in metaphor; that horse might represent your sensitivity and this horse might represent your authenticity, but this horse might represent your vulnerability. So it’s so much easier to access and work on whatever it is or your marriage or whatever it is when we’re working on it through the metaphor of the horses and their relationships to each other. Then there’s a whole somatic piece, as you might imagine. So in the session, transformation happens in the humans, but also the lessons learned are you don’t have to defend against them because they’re not threatening because you’re learning them about the horses. Then they go so deeply into you. We often tell people that when you leave here a session or a retreat, you will find yourself thinking about what happened and processing it deeply. It will pop into your mind at random times. You might even have dreams from the horses. When you do to honor that, because it’s your deep consciousness or sub or unconscious, wherever it lands in you processing the experience and the lessons learned, we encourage people to write or draw about it, or to sit quietly, even on their way home from a session. We live in a beautiful natural environment with tons and tons of open space and encourage people to pull off the road and sit on a hillside or next to a tree and just let themselves integrate the work. It will integrate whether you do it consciously or not. It’ll change you forever. [LISA] It sounds so transformative and also a little scary at the same time, like, oh my gosh is so much going to happen at one time that I’m not going to be able to handle all of this. And it also sounds very gradual and happens at the speed it needs to happen. [ELAINE] Do you know people will come and think, have you ever had Feld in Christ treatment? [LISA] No, I haven’t. [ELAINE] It’s a physical therapy and body work, and it’s also very, very, very subtle. I always recommend it for HSPs. It’s quite lovely. And one of the things that the Feld in Christ folks say is we just want you to notice, but not change. Just notice is there a place in your body as we do these movements that feels like it’s not moving or just, what do you notice? It’s in the noticing that the transformation begins. But whenever I have Feld in Christ treatment, I’m laying there thinking I’m paying what for this? Because so little happens. Then I get up and I walk around and they say, oh, how does that feel? I’m like, I don’t know, it feels the same. What are you talking about? Then the next day, my body is moving completely differently. The equine assisted work is sort of like that it’s slow and subtle and deep. You might think in the moment that you don’t even know what’s happening, or if something’s happening. You’re just enjoying being with the horses. But the transformation is deep and slowly unfolds. [LISA] I love that, especially as an HSP, those deep, deep, deep transformations, and that connection to go deep and feel deep and deeply. [ELAINE] Without forcing. [LISA] Yes. [ELAINE] I’ve had interventions or retreats where I felt like the leaders were harshly interpreting my comments or my dreams and trying so hard to force a transformation or a healing. To me, I feel sort of assaulted by that treatment or that experience. This is much more subtle and HSP friendly, this work, and it brings us back to this topic of why HSPs and horses or why HSPs and animals. Again, I just have to say that animals are just living their natural authentic lives, and we can learn so much from that. My dog is right outside the door of where I’m recording, laying and passed out on the floor, literally guarding the door. When I open the door in a minute and I see him, I’m going to not just notice him and step over him, but just feel his calm, his groundedness, his complete and total in the moment and take that as a model and a lesson for my own life; to just have that moment, to just sit and be. When we just, in loving kindness sometimes we wish all beings to be happy. And I don’t do that anymore. I just wish all beings to be because that’s the lesson I need in my life. I think it’s the primary lesson that highly sensitive people need. [LISA] Yes. I agree. I 100% agree with you. And I’m just thinking of when you’re talking about your dog and this how, I have a dog and I have a cat and it’s like, our conversations, even though I don’t speak dog and he doesn’t speak human, but we can just look at each other and know what the other one’s feeling or thinking. It’s like, you get me. You get me without any words. I just love it. [ELAINE] They totally do. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. Other people have noticed this in their pets, but they’re different with every family member. Because they’re responding to who you are in your core and responding to, and of course I have a highly sensitive dog. [LISA] So do I. [ELAINE] He responds and he chose me. I really didn’t even want this breed, but he leaned into me and sucked me in when I met him. But he responds to every person, everything that people say, the tone, the energy of each person. He’s different with all of us and just so perceiving everything that’s going on. It’s a beautiful thing. Parents often ask me, should I get my sensitive child a pet? I like to say it’s really wonderful to have animals in your household. If you have a sensitive child who is trying to go to school or do normal Western culture life, giving them responsibility for a pet is probably going to just add to their overwhelm, but teaching a fourth, fifth, or middle school sensitive child, letting them have some lessons in dog training with your family dog that is going to ennoble and ground them. So we have to always be careful about adding too much. Maybe we should say this for adults too. Adding too much into our lives, contributes to our overwhelm and our over arousal. At the same time, we can be processing so deeply about whether we’re going to get a pet that it could paralyze us for five years into not making the decision. So I always say, we want to make our decisions. We want to be like the horse or the dog to be in your best equilibrium, that part of yourself where you’re really optimal, a level of arousal, you’ve done the right amount of meditation. You’ve eaten the right foods. You’ve rested for a week. You were in silence, you didn’t interact with people and you just really got into your best place. Then your truth is there for you. [LISA] Oh, well, I love that message. Thank you so much for that. So I want to just ask you, as we’re just wrapping up our conversation, what is the most important thing that you’d want listeners to know or take away from our talk today? [ELAINE] I love this, how resilient and highly sensitive people are and how sometimes you don’t feel that way because you’ve lived a life and probably a childhood where you weren’t honored and blessed and treated as though you were the most important person in the world. As a highly sensitive person you’re nurtured and cherished and protected and honored for it. So when we have had some stress in our childhood, or even some stress in our regular life, it impacts us more in other people. It makes us feel like there’s something wrong with us, or like we can’t manage it. But the most important thing is that we are more responsive to intervention. So everything that you do, even listening to this podcast, you’re going to benefit from way more than people who don’t have the trait. So the power and the access to resilience is in your own hands. So when you take care of you, you take all that empathy that you have for the world and put it first onto you then you will experience your sensitivity as the gift that it is. So I plead with you to close your eyes and look into your most vulnerable place. Put your hand over your heart and love that vulnerable, sensitive place in you. When you do, you’ll be able to take care of it and yourself so much better. [LISA] I just have a big smile on my face. That is so beautiful. What a lovely message for listeners to take away Elaine. Where can listeners get in touch with you? Where can they find you? [ELAINE] Well, I now have a helper, so I’m all over social media . During COVID, when I couldn’t teach in person, I started a YouTube channel. So I really would love for people to come find me on YouTube. It’s just my name with my license with just LMFT on YouTube. But if you put in Alane Freund and highly sensitive, you’ll find me. I have a website where you can send a contact form and tell me about your tree experiences or reach out for consultation. That’s just my name .com elainefreund.com. I’m sure that you can find my name in the show notes, because it’s spelled funny. If you’d like to learn more about my workshops that I do every month, one for parents and one for HSPs that’s at areyouhighlysensitive.com. [LISA] Great. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on the show today. Everything will be in the show notes. And thank you my listeners for tuning in today. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about highly sensitive persons, please visit my website at wwwamiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s issues or problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.