Why True Healing Takes Both Inner Work and Outer Work When You're a Highly Sensitive Person

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why lasting healing as a highly sensitive person requires both lifestyle changes and inner work, and how the two together can create powerful momentum. I.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why inner growth can stall without key outer changes that support your nervous system. How simple shifts in rest, pace, and environment can make your inner work more effective. What healing looks like when both your inner and outer world begin to align. This is an addition of strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

If you know me, you know that one of my biggest loves is my inner life. My inner world. I love meditating. I love the nuance and the subtlety of exploring that inner world. And I’ve built a lot of my life around that interest because it’s something that is important to me, something that inspires me, something that I love.

And a lot of highly sensitive people also love this. We by nature are interested in the inner world. Our inner life is often very rich, what can happen? What happened to me is that I made that such a priority that I missed out on some of the other parts of life that balance that inner direction. When I was in my twenties, you’ve probably heard me say I lived in an ashram and I spent many long hours meditating every day, and I made a lot of progress in terms of the increasing depth in my meditations and the experience of settledness and the increasing joy inside of me.

And that was all very meaningful to me, and it still is. I still meditate. The problem was that it was not fully balanced for me, and this was particular to me. I’m not saying ashrams are not balanced. They can be, but for me it wasn’t. And I can think of a couple different ways that it wasn’t balanced for me.

One was the way I was eating. I was, I switched to vegetarian food at that point. And I wasn’t really smart at how to do that, and I wasn’t actually eating enough protein and I didn’t know it at the time. I knew I was always hungry and a little bit, sometimes shaky and easily hypo, hypoglycemic and that kind of thing.

But it’s okay, it’s, I just focused, keep meditating and that was my. My whole direction, which is great. Sometimes it’s great to just go all out in one direction and not worry about some of the other things. But the problem was over time, I actually ended up creating a fair bit of toxins in my liver.

And when I saw a doctor at one point, it was like, oh my goodness, what have you been doing? And I’ve never drunk or did drugs or anything like that, but hey, toxins build up just from not taking care of the body. And so what my experience was is that when I was in that kind of state of my body, it was actually harder to settle into meditation.

And once I figured out how to feed myself the amount of protein that I needed and take care of myself, that way, my body became more balanced and it supported me in my meditations. So this is just a simple example of how. Even though inner is really such a important part of life, the outer part of life, the body in this case is as important and it supports the inner supports.

The outer supports, the inner yeah. They both support each other. Another example of this was how, even though I was following what one part of me wanted, which was that. Depth and going inward. There was another part of me equally powerful in a way that wanted to be in the world. I think about my mom and my dad.

They were very opposite. My dad was super into meditation and he was the one that got me into it. My mom was super into service, serving others, and she was very much outward, didn’t take time for herself. But somehow got energy from serving others. And so I have both parts of me. There’s a part of me that is very worldly like my mom, and there’s a part of me that’s very otherworldly like my dad.

And when I was only focused on the inward direction, there’s a part of me that’s not happy, not waiting, not not not satisfied. And I remember the image that came to me at that time was, it’s like there’s, I’m a horse that wants to run and I’m holding myself in the pen and I’m not running.

And so the feeling was just on one level, a little bit of frustration. So this was an interesting lesson for me. It took a long time to finally find my way with it, but where I eventually left the ashram and started working for myself, having a business and. And some part of me started to relax ’cause there was a part of me that wanted to run, wanted to perform, wanted to do well in the outer world, and allowing that part of me to live and to breathe and to have its life was as nourishing to me as sitting quietly and allowing that part of me that wanted to go deep and have it have its life.

So it’s, I. The idea again, that inner and outer both together, they work together and they support each other. And also it’s follow your own nature. My nature was not a pure aesthetic. My nature was not born a pure acetic for some reason. I have an aesthetic tendency, but I also have a worldly tendency and I have to honor that.

I think I got caught on the idea that. Being aesthetic was better somehow, or being like a monk was better, being completely inward was the higher path. And there’s some argument and maybe even truth in some of that, but was it the higher path for me? That’s really the question. In some ways it was perfect.

It was perfect for me while I did it. And it was good that I did it, but it wasn’t perfect. Perfect for me. I needed a little bit of both, and discovering that and almost finding the humility to step down from the highest path to just my highest path was an interesting process. Another example of how the environment, like we could say, the outer part of your life, your environmental.

Area the world that you live in. The actual external part of life is essential for the inner to be thriving. Has to do in my relationship, I have a very loving partner and he wants to do everything together and I need breathing room. I need space. And it used to frustrate me. I used to just go along and, but I wouldn’t have any time for myself, which as highly sensitive people, we all need. And I did inner work on it. I wrote my frustrations, I questioned my thoughts. I found compassion for him. I started finding tolerance in me. I found ability to be taking care of myself even. When I’m not fully alone I found a lot of things and that’s huge.

That’s the inner work, but equally as important as accepting that situation and not getting frustrated by it was coming to a place where I could actually create some space for myself, actually start taking up space in the relationship. And that meant for me, closing my door, having office hours where it was like, don’t disturb me during that time, or saying no to playing too much pickleball.

He would just wanna play every day, and that was too much for me. Or creating a wind down time for me, just for me at night. It’s no, it’s not time to go right to bed. I need to take this time to wind down and if I don’t, I’ll just sit there and be wound up in bed. Or doing more of kind of workouts that I like to do, taking care of my body the way I like to.

These are things that are divergent from where he would want to be, and it might seem like I was causing ripples in the relationship. But what happened is when I took care of my outer environment and made it more aligned with who I am. Then my inner life became quieter and my outer relationship with my partner became better.

So sometimes you have to take steps in the outer world to make a difference in your inner experience. Likewise, you have to take care of the inner if you’re only taking care of the outer. That’s not it either. And so that’s what I want to emphasize here is that both are important. I. I like to think that I have one foot in the ashram today and one foot in the world, and that works for me.

That’s just my particular path and I love the routine that my partner and I have, and I love the long meditations and I love my work, my job, and the constant learning. I love my exercise and I love good balanced food. So when I talk about. Inner and outer. These are, this is a little taste of what, I think of stress management for highly sensitive people as resting on three pillars.

One is understanding yourself as a highly sensitive person, which is, there’s a lot to understand and that can give you self-compassion. And then I also talk about lifestyle changes and skill development. Just learning the skill of how to say no, I. That’s not something that just comes from meditation.

It didn’t come that way for me anyway. It can help, certainly meditation helps everything, but there’s a skill. There’s some skills, how do I say no in a way that’s kind, but also firm and so that, and many other things that you can do to balance your life. I call those external changes. They’re lifestyle changes or skills that you can develop.

And then the third pillar is inner work or spiritual development, where you are actually looking at the things that are holding you back, questioning your own thoughts, opening yourself to a deeper level of awareness and becoming more free from needing things to be any particular way. This is what happens when you challenge yourself, you.

Loosen your attachments and you move beyond the ego in a way, and that is also essential for stress management. So all three of these together, understanding yourself, taking care of yourself, living a balanced life, and doing your inner work and your meditation. These are what I consider to be the most important areas to focus on when.

Looking to reduce stress in your life as a highly sensitive person. So the feeling I’m left with today is that outer and inner work together, the spirit is the foundation of life, but the body has to be balanced too, and the environment and everything in the environment for optimal experience. In this episode, we looked at why inner growth can stall without key changes.

In the outer world that support your nervous system, just proper diet. For example, we looked at how simple shifts in rest, pace, and environment can make your inner work more effective. Even just having a closed door for some part of your life, some place where you can have some alone time can make a big difference in how you are in relationship.

We looked at what healing looks like when both your inner and outer world began to align. Then you’re doing something that is taking care of your outer world and doing something that’re taking care of your inner world, and they’re talking to each other. They’re communicating. There’s value. Value in both of them.