Talk And Practice On Carrying What Isn't Yours

Some people move through the world with a permeable boundary between their own internal state and the emotional atmosphere around them. They absorb. They leave interactions carrying something that wasn't theirs when they arrived, and then spend hours, sometimes days, processing emotion that may not be their own.

This session combines a talk on the mechanism of emotional absorption with a guided practice that builds the specific capacity to locate the boundary: to distinguish, with some precision, what was already present from what came from outside.

Keywords: empathy, emotional absorption, highly sensitive person, HSP, boundaries, people pleasing, emotional exhaustion, mindfulness, MBCT, self-awareness, nervous system, emotional regulation, inner work, shadow work, personal growth

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this talk and practice on carrying what isn't yours to carry. If you feel like you relate to those people who absorb and struggle to find where they end and where others begin, Then this talk is for you. See, There are people who move through the world with a particularly permeable boundary between their own internal state and everyone else's. They walk into a room and pick up the atmosphere before anyone has said anything. They leave a difficult conversation and carry it with them for the rest of the day. Some people might call this overthinking. But it's sometimes not overthinking. It's that something from that exchange is still sitting in the body. And then they'll find themselves exhausted after spending time with certain people. Or anxious after a phone call in a way that doesn't quite match how they felt before it. What this is called, Absorbing. So if you recognize that, Stay with me. And if you do recognize it. You've probably also experienced the confusion it creates. Because the feeling is real, The anxiety is real, The heaviness is real. The agitation is real. But when you examine it carefully. You're not entirely sure it belongs to you. You're not sure if you were already feeling this, Or if you picked it up somewhere along the way. The human nervous system is, At a fundamental level, A social organ. It evolved in the context of other nervous systems. We regulate each other through tone of voice, Through micro expressions, Through the quality of someone's breathing in the room. And no, This is not metaphorical. It is physiological. When someone near you is in distress, Your nervous system reads it. When someone near you is calm, Your nervous system reads that too. For most people, This system operates in the background and self-corrects. But for people with a more permeable boundary, And this is not a pathology, It is a variation, Often one developed in environments where reading others was important for safety. The regulation is less automatic. The signal from outside comes in. And it doesn't fully separate itself from what was already there. The result is a kind of layering. Your own emotional state sits underneath a layer of what you've absorbed. What you've absorbed from people, From environments, From the collective mood of a room. And because the absorbed layer feels like feeling, It's very hard to sort out which is which. Now, There is a distinction between primary experience and what the mind adds to it. So the primary experience is what's actually here, The raw sensation that directs impression. And then the secondary experience is the story, The evaluation, The spiral the mind builds around it. So we can borrow that distinction here and extend it. There is what you were feeling before the interaction. There is what the interaction brought. And there is what the mind does with both of those. Usually it does this by fusing them together into one undifferentiated state that feels unquestionably yours. The capacity to separate those layers, To ask with some precision what was already here and what came from outside is the central skill this session is building. People who absorb tend to respond to their emotional states as if everything they feel is internal information about themselves. So when they pick up someone else's anxiety, They treat it as their own anxiety and ask. What am I anxious about? When they pick up someone else's low mood, They treat it as their low mood, Their own low mood, And they ask, What's wrong with me? Now that's not an accurate read of what's happening and it leads to a very particular kind of exhaustion. It's the exhaustion of constantly processing emotion that isn't yours as if it were. And so this brings us to the question of. . . What is mindfulness? So mindfulness is. . . Seeing clearly. It is the quality of attention that can distinguish what's actually present from what the mind has added. That quality of attention is what allows you to look at a feeling and ask, With genuine curiosity rather than judgment, Where did this come from? Not to dismiss the feeling nor to decide it doesn't matter because it came from outside. But rather to hold it more accurately. To know what you're actually working with. What we're going to do in the practice is build that discernment directly. We're going to be doing this through the body, Through sensation, Because the body in present moment awareness is more honest than the narrative mind about what's actually here. So try not to analyze. Try not to produce more layering and just come into your body. Now I invite you to come into the practice whenever you're ready. And find a position where your body is fully supported. Let your hands rest. Let your jaw release any holding it's been doing. Take two breaths. Notice these two breaths indicating a transition between talking and noticing. Before we do anything else, I want you to get a read on your own state. Right now in this moment before the session has added anything to it. Scan the body from the feet upward. Look for information. What's the quality of this moment internally? Is there anything that's already present? A heaviness? A restlessness? An ease? A specific sensation somewhere. Try not to interpret it. Try not to explain it. Just map it. This is your baseline, What's here before any particular influence. Now bring to your mind a recent interaction. A conversation situation can also be a person. After which you felt different than you did before it. It doesn't have to be a dramatic difference. But something that made you notice that something shifted. Let the situation be present without replaying the content of it. What I mean by this is don't think about what was said. Instead, Notice what happens in your body when you bring it to mind. Where does it land? Is there something in the chest? The throat, The stomach. Quality of contraction. Or weight. Or activation. Stay with the sensation and the sensation itself. Now with your attention on the sensation rather than the narrative, Ask this question and let the body answer it rather than the mind. Was this here before? This is not an intellectual exercise, But rather a genuine inquiry. Was some version of this sensation present before that interaction? Or did it arrive with the interaction or after it? You may not get a clear answer, And that's okay. The inquiry itself is the practice, The act of turning toward the question with curiosity, Rather than just accepting the feeling as an unexamined given. Whatever you found, Whether it's clearly yours, Clearly absorbed, Or some combination that isn't fully legible, I would like you to try something. Imagine you could place it in front of you. Create some space between you and it. Enough space to see it rather than just be inside it. From that slight distance. What is actually yours here? What do you need to feel, Process, Or address? And what can you acknowledge as having come from outside? As real, But not requiring you to carry it indefinitely. There is no correct answer. The practice is the discernment. The act of looking carefully rather than absorbing without question. Take one breath. Slow breath out. And come back to the room. The capacity to locate the boundary between yourself and what you've absorbed is not something that you either have or you don't. It is something that develops through exactly this kind of attention, Turning toward the question repeatedly, Without demanding a clean answer every time. What you practice today is the beginning of that. The boundary becomes clearer, The more often you look for it. I encourage you to spend 5 to 10 minutes with one or more of the following questions after this session. You can write without editing and without being precise. So the first question is, Think of a person or environment that reliably leaves you feeling heavier, More anxious, Or more depleted than before. What specifically do you think you're absorbing and when did you first start noticing it? Second question. Is there a feeling you carry regularly that, When you examine it honestly, You're not sure originated with you? What would you change if you stopped treating it as your own to solve? And the final question, What does it mean to you to have a boundary? Is a clear sense of where you are and where another person begins. And what would that feel like from the inside? Thank you so much for listening. Namaste.