Vibrant Days… Flourishing with Sensory Processing Sensitivity
Greetings precious people,
It’s a lazy, hazy, crazy day of summer and I’m thinking of you near my garden. Amazing how a place can modify one’s insides. Here are some random thoughts I thought you might find interesting:
-Wondering how highly sensitive people are being impacted and how they are positively impacting, what’s unfolding in the world.
-Discovering my body is becoming more sensitive to just about everything especially caffeine, humidity, smells, fabrics, and water temperature. Also aware of how happy my body is when it’s strength training, dancing, resting, looking into someone’s eyes, or sitting in silence.
-Delighting in the newly-revised hsp scale. I feel even more known, honored in some way and less pathologized. Check it out (hsp-r)
-Very excited about expanding my Riverbank in person groups to include Barrington in addition to Batavia. Every highly sensitive person deserves to spend some time with other highly sensitive people! There really is nothing like it.
Summer love to each of you.
Candy
Your Aesthetic Life by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross
So what does it really mean to live with an aesthetic mindset? Imagine just one day in your life where arts and aesthetics are seamlessly integrated. Your morning routine might include simple sensory choices to begin your day. Smell informs as much as 75 percent of our emotions, and you’ve selected favorite scents to wake you up.
In the shower, you sing a tune that you can’t get out of your head, and this activates multiple brain areas, all of which are connected by complex neural networks. Even just humming becomes an act of pleasure, activating the vagus nerve and engaging the parasympathetic system to help you feel good. Your brain is humming, too, now, and you begin to feel good as endorphins are released. And as the warm water quenches your trillions of skin cells, a sense of calm washes over you, activating your nervous system, improving balance, and putting you in an alert, cognitively ready state of mind for your day.
You have a daily art practice that is as vital to you as exercise and meditation routines. Art, you now understand, isn’t only a hobby, it’s a conversation with yourself, a way to connect your mind, body, and spirit and to support your health and wellness. Some days, it’s just twenty minutes of sketching or doodling to reduce cortisol after a challenging or stressful experience. Other times, it’s something tactile, like sculpting with clay, knitting, or gardening, where your mind wanders and you are in a flow state. The sensation of working the clay, the yarn, the soil, in your hands stimulates skin and nerve endings and ignites the body’s internal sensory receptors. Through sensorimotor pathways, you feel instantly attentive, awake, and receptive. Art-making here is not about the end product. It is a process, an active way of being and knowing.
As your day progresses, should a headache hit, a dose of dance and movement helps; when anxiety rises, tuning forks in C and G create a sound wave that soothes the fight-flight-freeze response and elicits relaxation.
On this day, you make time to be in nature. The sunrise, a red cardinal alighting on a branch, wind in your hair, the yellow freshness of daffodils, all inspire a brief pause to appreciate the awe of the natural world. Being reconnected to nature’s rhythms supports and sustains us, and you are now more aware that these simple everyday aesthetic moments activate neurochemicals already in your brain, like dopamine and serotonin. The beauty of the natural world is motivating and mending you in small ways.
In the evening, you make plans to see live music, catch a dance or theatre performance, or visit a local arts venue with friends. It’s great to be together, experiencing and enjoying a range of art forms, but that’s not all. You are gaining empathy and perspective, being immersed in new feelings and ideas, enhancing the conditions for flourishing.
At the end of the day, there is the intentional art of making a meal. There is more music that soothes the mind, whether you are creating it or listening to it. You might watch a sunset or a moonrise. When you are ready for bed you dress yourself in fabrics that feel good on your skin, while the sounds of nature lull you to sleep.
The arts have the ability to transform you like nothing else. They can help move you from sickness to health, stress to calm, or sadness to joy, and they enable you to flourish and thrive. They can lead you to profound altered states, changing your very physiology.
The arts have always offered the highest form of hope, and science is now providing new knowledge that each of us can immediately use.
Just as your brain waves oscillate with the electric energy of rhythms, just as sound and color vibrate through you, the personal choices of your aesthetic life feed and support your unique self.
📣Announcing: Riverbank Series North monthly in person groups beginning in September in Barrington. Reserve a spot today in our monthly process groups that will meet third Tuesday of each month from 10:00-12:30 beginning September 16th, 2025 continuing til February 17th, 2025. Details coming sign up today–minimum 3 and maximum of 6 per group. Reach me with questions.
📣Riverbank Series South monthly group begins Saturday September 20th, 2025 in Batavia. Reserve a spot in this monthly process group with new start time of 9:30-12:00. This group will meet the third Saturday of each month in my office (or outside weather permitting), and go through February 21, 2025. Reach me with questions.
What made me cry:
Song I have on repeat (still imagining all the hsps in the world gathering in one place):
What I’m pondering:
“There is nothing more important than what is happening in this moment.” ~ Lou Gallagher
