HSP 1 group course 2022

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Where does the concept high sensitivity come from?

In 1996, Elaine Aron, a well-known psychologist, brought the concept of high sensitivity into the world and made it known in its depth and relevance over the next decades. We consider high sensitivity to be a very special form of perception of the self, a level of self-perception that is differentiated into many facets. Not easy, but full of potential. That is why it fits with the signature of high sensitivity that not someone else, but a highly sensitive person herself, Elaine, became the spokesperson for highly sensitive people.

Highly sensitive, is that me? Yes, hopefully!

Forgetfulness, tension, anxiety, self-doubt, burnout, restlessness, loss of control, psychosomatic issues, dependence on substitute gratifications, compulsions to act, compulsive thoughts - who does not know that?

But that has nothing to do with high sensitivity. This is life, or our body, which provides us with 1000 different types of stress. In 1912 Rudolf Steiner already gave the exercises to alleviate these conditions. Our ABSR courses are based on these exercises.

High sensitivity is the polarity of it, so to speak! Here it is our inner being that challenges us. How do we want to deal with its signals? We all know them: over-excitability, perfectionism, getting lost in the many possibilities, boundary problems, excessive and stressful emotionality, indecision and worrying, overstimulation. A seemingly chaotic diversity under which we quickly feel helpless and overwhelmed.

But it's worth taking a closer look. If we can get through it - and we'll get through it! - the transformation into the positive, the fulfillment, is not far. Have a look at the diagram below. We tried to put together a few threads. We deal with them in the topics and exercises of our eight-week HSP course. Try it out, you will be amazed to experience how much it helps to approach these topics so systematically. And how much fun it is!

Why do we use musical Elements in our HSP courses?

In our course for high sensitivity we work with the vowels and - this is special compared to the other courses - with the intervals of music. Why?

Rudolf Steiner described this very nicely:

• Language is a going out into the world, into the awakening soul qualities of the world. It is meeting the senses, encountering the world.
• Music is an inner awakening and a taking action in this process: Like gliding into the going out. And thus you encounter your own spiritual, your own creative activity.

The vowels can be assigned to the seven themes of high sensitivity: The A creates soil, the O brings light and warmth, creates harmony, the I creates spaces of freedom, the E brings strength and sets boundaries, the Ei is the path to the self, the Au creates a powerful relationship between inside and outside, the U leads me to my deepest depths. With the vowels we work to ensure that the body becomes a home for us, that we can live our I in the here and now and contribute to our surroundings in a good, helpful way.

But our I is not easy to grasp. We are always on the move. For example, sometimes it is “here” when we wake up, during the day, or “there”, somewhere far out when we're asleep at night. But if we're honest, we're never quite here, and never quite there, but mostly somewhere in between, on the way between here and there. In music we can feel this: we experience being on the way outside as a major, and on the way to being here as minor. In music we feel our self, our I, on its journey! When I feel into a musical movement, I feel myself. 

The musical intervals are taught in our group courses only. First you get to know the movement of an interval and to feel its quality. Then we try to have this feeling present during the corresponding vowel exercise that we do with the arms or legs. The vowel exercises are available as videos, the interval exercises we practice in the Sunday meetings where you get the replay soon after.

In the video I show an exercise with which we - in a slightly different form - will complete the 8-week course for highly sensitive people. The eurythmy in this video is a spontaneous answer to a request at our Eurythmy request concert this year: "Thinking - led by the I".