Ep 6 - Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) and Creativity with Rayne Dowell

My guest Rayne Dowell and I have a conversation about highly sensitive people (HSPs) and how they approach creativity.

Music Credit: 

Reflection Flow by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/58328 Ft: Javolenus, Rocavaco, Siobhan Dakay

 

Links mentioned in this episode:

HSP World

The Highly Sensitive Person website

Sensitive the Untold Story, the movie

Alanis Morissette

Podcast episode where Alanis interviews Dr. Elaine Aron

 

Books mentioned in this episode:

Unmasking: A Page-Turning Espionage Thriller, by Rayne Dowell

The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, by Dr. Elaine Aron

The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You, by Dr. Elaine Aron

The above are affiliate links.

 

Transcript:

Thomas: Author Pearl Buck once wrote, "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature, born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy as an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism, the overpowering necessity to create, create, create.

So that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange unknown, inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is creating." 

Thomas Hello, and welcome to the Creative Shoofly Podcast. I'm Thomas Beutel. This podcast is about my creative process and one thing I've found is that I really get in my way a lot when it comes to making art and being creative. I want to do this podcast because I know it will force me to think more deeply about creativity. I'm hoping that doing this will push me and challenge me to create better art.   

Thomas: Today, I've invited a guest to talk about the relationship between the highly sensitive trait and creativity.  My guest is Rayne Dowell. She is co-creator of HSP world and also an indie author.  She's published a book called Unmasking, a Page Turning Espionage Thriller. I've read it, it actually is exactly that it's, it's definitely a page turner and it's thrilling to read.  

Hello Rayne, how are you doing today?

Rayne: I'm doing great, Thomas. Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Thomas: I'm so glad to have you here to talk about this. You know, we both identify as having the HSP trait. HSP stands for Highly Sensitive Person. And I'm wondering if you could just speak for a moment about what the HSP trait is.

Rayne: Okay. So what it means to me? 

Thomas: Yeah. 

Rayne: Yeah. Okay. Sure. For me, the sort of the way I find easy to relate to it is, basically having a nervous system that's highly tuned. So as opposed to 80 to 85% of the rest of the population. So having a nervous system that's highly tuned, that's gonna mean noticing subtleties in my environment.

That's going to