You Are Not Behind. You Are Becoming.

Jun 23
5 min read

A hand with red nails gently holding fresh ginkgo leaves in warm summer sunlight, a tender image of becoming and expanding for highly sensitive people learning to allow growth at their own pace — The ginkgo has survived everything. It does not rush its becoming. Neither do you.

Have you ever been in the middle of something that matters deeply to you and felt, all at once, both the exhaustion and the aliveness of it? Not stuck, not lost, but standing at a threshold where everything you have been building is almost, almost here, and your body does not quite know whether to rest or reach forward.

This week I want to talk about that liminal space, the thinness that comes before the bloom, and why it is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something is genuinely, tenderly becoming. Let's explore it together my highly sensitive friend!

Expanding Things Can Be Fragile

There is an Asia Suler's poem I have been sitting with this week, and one line has been living in my chest since I first read it (you can find it in its entirety at the end of this blog post).

Expanding things can be fragile.

A bird's first wings. Spring leaves when they are still thin and new. The first time you reached out to hold someone's hand, not knowing if yours would be held back. These are not weak moments. They are the most alive moments, precisely because something real is at stake.

The Thinness of Growth and Becoming for the Highly Sensitive Person

The poet writes that growth will mean a thinness for a while. And I have been feeling that this week in my own body, in my own work, in the space between all the effort I have poured out and the moment when it finally meets the light.

If you are somewhere in that thinness right now, I want you to know it has a name. It is not failure. It is not stagnation. It is the particular vulnerability of something that is genuinely expanding, reaching beyond the shape it used to hold.

What the Mudra Sequence Taught Me This Week

In my classes this week we moved through a mudra sequence built around one quiet intention: I allow.

We began with arms open and extended, palms facing upward. I allow. An expansive gesture, a willingness to receive what is arriving without bracing against it.

Then we brought our hands together at our hearts in Anjali mudra, I honor what is here now.

And finally we placed our hands on our bellies in Trimurti mudra, holding the place where things are still forming, still tender, still finding their heart shape. I flow with life's changes with openness.

What moved me about this sequence was how much it asked of us.

Not effort exactly. Something more vulnerable than effort. A willingness to be in the becoming without demanding that it hurry up and arrive.

A Practice to Try Right Now

You can do this wherever you are.

Extend your arms gently out to the sides, palms facing upward, and breathe in. Let this be your I allow. Feel the openness of it, the slight vulnerability of a body that is not bracing but receiving.

Then bring your hands slowly together at your heart in Anjali mudra prayer pose. Let them rest there for three breaths. I honor what is here now. Not what you wish were here. Not what is almost here. What is actually, presently here.

Then let your Anjali Mudra hinge forward till the fingers are pointing to the ground, and the palms open to come to rest on your belly in the shape of a heart, with index fingers and thumbs touching. Feel the warmth of your own hands against your own body. And simply breathe. Whatever is forming in you, it is forming at exactly the right pace.

Protect the Place You Need to Become In

The poem ends with an instruction that feels like a deep teaching to me.

Protect the place in the world you need to be in your own precious, extraordinary, breakable, unbreakable becoming.

For a sensitive nervous system, this is not a metaphor. It is a literal, biological necessity.

The expanding thing in you, the new offering, the new chapter, the new version of yourself that is almost ready, needs a protected container to form in. It cannot be rushed. It cannot be forced into shape before it is ready.

This is why the work we do together matters so much right now. Not as self-care in the superficial sense. As genuine protection for something real that is growing in you.

This Is Not a Modern Affliction. Nature Has Always Known It.

Something I return to often, both as a neuroscientist and as a highly sensitive person myself: in every ecosystem, some organisms are calibrated to detect subtle changes that others cannot register. Certain flowers respond to the faintest shift in underground moisture long before the drought arrives. Some root systems sense what is coming through changes in the soil that are imperceptible to everything around them.

The ginkgo tree has survived on this earth for over two hundred million years, through ice ages and mass extinctions, and yet its leaves are this soft, tender, fan-shaped thing that fits in the palm of your hand. Breakable and unbreakable at once. Ancient and completely new every spring.

These are not the fragile members of the species. They are the ones with the most refined perception.

Your nervous system is not wrong or defectibe It is exquisitely calibrated. It simply needs a different kind of tending.

Closing thoughts

You are not behind. You are not failing. You are in the thinness that precedes every real expansion, and that thinness is not a problem to solve. It is a threshold to be honored. Ans. weare there together.

If you want a gentle container to support your own becoming right now, the Mini Bloom Kit is exactly that. Three days, your own pace, your own soft space, a place where your nervous system can soften enough to let what is forming finally find its shape.

👉🌸 Sign up for free here

And for those of you feeling ready to go deeper, something I have been building through my own threshold is almost here.

The Sovereign Sensitive Blueprint opens for founding circle preorder very soon, at a pre-launch price for those who feel ready to step in. I will share everything shortly.

The poem that held this week's teaching:

Becoming

by Asia Suler

"Expanding things

can be fragile

A bird's first wings

spring leaves in green

the first time you reached out

to hold

a lover's hand

Growth will mean a thinness

for a while