When the World Gets Under Your Skin | How to Find the Way Back to Yourself

There are times when the world feels much too loud.

It gets inside you.

The headlines.

The fear.

The arguments.

The suffering.

The endless stream of people telling you what is happening, what it means, what you should fear and what you should believe.

After a while, it can become hard to know where the world ends and you begin.

I know that feeling.

I know what it is to realise that I have taken so much in that there is barely any space left inside me that has not been touched by it.

I have become saturated with it, right down to my very bones.

The world feels particularly intense at the moment. I feel it. I bet you do too.

If you are sensitive, intuitive or empathic like me, or simply someone who feels things deeply, you may be noticing just how much of that intensity is finding its way into your inner world.

I know I do.

There are times when I can feel overwhelmed by the sheer weight of what is happening around us.

Too much suffering.

Too much noise.

Too much division.

So much drama fearmongering and contradiction that after a while you barely know what to believe anymore or even what is true.

You scroll, you listen, you try to make sense of it, but instead of feeling clearer, your head is spinning like a game of blind man’s bluff and someone has turned you around one too many times.

Sometimes it honestly feels as though you are drowning in an invisible sea of energy, desperately trying to break the surface just long enough to take a breath.

I know that feeling too.

I know what it is to take too much in and suddenly find that I have begun carrying what is happening in the world in my mind and in my body.

The tension is there.

The fear is there.

The sense of helplessness starts creeping in.

When Caring Slips Into Rescuing

For those of us who feel things this deeply, especially in times of upheaval like these, there is a trap we can fall into before we even realise it.

We feel the fear, pain or tension around us so strongly that we start carrying it as though it is ours.

Then we want to make it stop.

Sometimes that means trying to fix another person. Sometimes it means wanting to fix everything we see wrong with the world.

Not only because we care, but because we can feel the pain of it inside ourselves and want that pain to stop.

If I can fix what is happening out there, perhaps I will stop feeling it in here.

That is where caring can covertly slip into rescuing.

The bottom line, in essence, is this: we are not responsible for rescuing the world.

That does not mean becoming indifferent.

It means knowing where our responsibility ends and another person’s begins.

Each soul has their own path, their own choices and their own lessons to meet, especially in a time when so much is asking us to evolve. There comes a point where trying to remove another person’s struggle becomes interfering with something that may be part of their path to walk.

Yet for spiritual people, standing back and allowing another soul to walk their own path can be incredibly difficult.

Why?

We carry the pain.

We feel guilty when we put it down.

We can even start believing that suffering alongside everyone else is proof that we care.

It isn’t.

Sometimes the most responsible thing we can do is recognise what is ours to carry, what is not, and stop trying to take responsibility for what belongs to someone else.

Finding Your Feet Again

There are times when I realise I have become so pulled into what is happening outside of me, and so consumed by the pain of it, that I have almost disappeared from my own life.

That, for me, is usually the moment I know I need to come back home to myself.

To sit in my own body again.

To notice the room I am actually sitting in.

To feel my feet on the floor.

To look out of the window and hear the birds still happily singing.

To remember that life continues to happen all around me, regardless of the noise.

That although there may be chaos out there in the world, in this exact moment I am here.

I am here, and I am okay.

This is presence.

Not escaping. Not pretending. Not forcing myself into some better feeling.

Just being here, in this body, in this room, in this moment, exactly as it is.

Presence does not ask me to look away from what is happening outside of me.

It asks me not to abandon myself in the face of it.

There will always be things beyond my control.

What I can control, though, is whether I stay present enough to be there for myself and notice what all of this is stirring up within me.

That is the part I can still take responsibility for.

The first thing I need to know is whether I am still rooted in myself, or whether the world has pulled me so far into its noise that I have lost sight of who I am.

“Realize you yourself are the power you have mistakenly given to outer conditions. - Neil Goddard

Where Are You on the Scale of Consciousness?

That moment of noticing matters, because it gives me a way to recognise when my inner state has started to contract under the weight of everything I am absorbing.

David Hawkins described how consciousness can shift from more contracted states into more expanded ones.

I find this particularly useful when I notice myself being pulled into lower emotional states. They become a kind of inner barometer, showing me when the world outside has got too far under my skin.

As a sensitive person, I can absorb far more of what is around me than I realise.

Sometimes I have become so enmeshed with what I am picking up that I have lost sight of what is actually mine and what is not.

In those moments, I can ask myself: what am I actually feeling right now?

What has happened inside me since I started taking all of this in?

Have I become more conscious, more discerning and more able to respond to what is actually mine to respond to?

Or have I simply become frightened, flooded and powerless, infected by the very atmosphere I have been absorbing?

That distinction matters.

So take a minute.

Actually stop.

Look at the diagram of the Scale of Consciousness below.

Then look inside yourself.

After sitting with it for a moment, ask yourself honestly: do I feel contracted or expanded right now?

Where are you on the scale?

Not where you think you should be.

Not where you would like to be.

Where are you really, in this moment?

What are you feeling in your body?

What has all of this noise, fear and uncertainty been doing to you beneath the surface?

Be honest with yourself.

Did you even realise you were feeling this way before you stopped long enough to notice?

Sometimes we become so accustomed to carrying the tension that we do not realise how deeply it has affected us until we finally turn our attention inward.

If you found yourself at the more contracted end of the scale, the next question is: how do you begin to shift it?

Finding Your Way Back Up the Scale

To do that, we cannot always force or positively think our way out of what we are feeling.

Sometimes we need a practice that supports us in moving from those more contracted states into something more expanded, without denying what we are genuinely experiencing.

That is why I have decided to share one of the meditation practices I use within my coaching work as a complimentary gift for paid subscribers alongside this article.

It is a practice I return to when I need to get out of the noise and back into myself.

Use it when you have read one headline too many.

Use it when you have gone down the rabbit hole of trying to work out what is true and what is not.

Use it when somebody else’s fear has lodged itself somewhere inside you and you are still carrying it hours later.

Use it when you realise you have spent so long absorbing the fear, opinions and emotional weight of the world around you that you have somehow left yourself behind.

Feeling everything so deeply does not mean you have to lose yourself inside it.

You can be affected by what is happening in the world without allowing it to pull you downwards into a spiral of contraction.

You can care without taking responsibility for what is not yours to carry.

You can witness suffering without making suffering your permanent inner state, or sacrificing yourself to it like some kind of sacrificial lamb.

That is where the shadow of the Martyr can creep in: the belief that caring requires suffering alongside everyone else, as though our own pain somehow proves the depth of our compassion.

You can step away from the noise without becoming indifferent.

That is part of learning how to live as a sensitive person in this world without being swallowed by it.

What Am I Feeding?

That is the uncomfortable part I have had to face: it is not only happening out there.

Some of it is happening through me too.

The very states of consciousness I am struggling under can become the ones I am unconsciously feeding with my own life force.

I cannot stop the headlines. I cannot stop the fearmongering, the arguments, the endless opinions or the people who seem completely certain they know what is true.

I cannot make the world less harsh simply because I am struggling with how deeply that harshness is getting to me.

What I can do is notice when I have gone too far into it.

When I have read too much, watched too much, absorbed too much.

When I can feel the fear sitting in my body.

When I realise the anger has got so far inside me that I am struggling to feel the love and kindness in my own heart.

When the darkness I have been looking at for too long has begun to colour the way I see everything.

That is when I have to ask myself:

What energy am I giving to this now?

There comes a point where I have to be brutally honest with myself: am I still being myself, or have I become so consumed by the frenzy that I am now feeding the very egregore sustained by those lower states of consciousness within the collective?

That matters to me.

Not because I believe I should sit serenely while the world burns and pretend none of it touches me.

That would be denial, with spiritual bypassing masquerading as consciousness.

It matters because I want to see this world as it is, not as the darker illusionist would have me see it.

A world where beauty is still there, if we have the eyes to see it beneath the spell that has been cast.

I want to be able to look directly at darkness, name it for what it is, and still return to my true essence rather than let that darkness decide who I become.

“When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.”— Joseph Campbell

That is what this Scale of Consciousness practice helps me with.

It reminds me of what has been there all along beneath the fog, waiting for me to see it again: the Divine within me.

A bloody great big spark of Divine gorgeousness.

That is who I am underneath all the noise.

The world can frighten me, overwhelm me, even make me forget it for a while.

Yet it cannot truly take that from me.

That spark is mine.

It is woven into what I am, given to me by my Creator, and nothing and no one can change that.

Remembering that changes the way I meet everything outside of me.

It reminds me that I am not responsible for carrying the world or rescuing it.

Choosing What I Give Life To

That does not mean I have washed my hands of the world.

Not by a long shot.

It means I am learning the difference between caring deeply and becoming consumed by what I cannot control.

I am responsible for what I contribute to it.

As someone who takes my spiritual path seriously, I believe that contribution carries a certain weight too.

If I want to see change for others, then I cannot keep unconsciously feeding the very same lower states of consciousness that I am praying for the world to move beyond.

At some point I have to consciously withdraw my energy from it.

Not because I do not care.

Precisely because I do.

I want the spark of the Divine within me to be stronger than the darkness I witness in the world.

That does not mean pretending darkness does not exist within me too.

It does.

It exists in all of us.

It is part of being human.

Yet I also believe I am capable of becoming more than these contracted states I sometimes find myself caught in.

That is part of my Divine birthright: the freedom to choose which wolf I feed.

I get to choose which one I give life to.

Which one I strengthen.

Which one I birth into the world.

I know which one it will be.

How about you?

Which one will you choose?

Whichever way you answer that, choosing what you feed within yourself, and what you bring into the world, does not mean you have to do it all by yourself.

Sometimes we remember who we are in the company of people who see us clearly, even when we have lost sight of ourselves.

You Do Not Have to Walk This Path Alone

It can make an enormous difference simply to know you are not the only one who sometimes feels overwhelmed by how deeply this world gets under your skin.

To be able to say, this is how all of this is affecting me, and be among people who understand without needing you to justify it.

No defending why you feel so much.

No explaining what you see.

That is the spirit of The Attunement Circle.

A place where we can have the conversations that are difficult to have elsewhere without having to look away from the world in order to remain spiritual.

Where we can speak honestly about what we are perceiving, what we are feeling and what it takes to remain ourselves when the world around us feels anything but normal.

If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can upgrade your Substack subscription here to access the practice and join me inside The Attunement Circle, where we make space for exactly these kinds of conversations.

Alternatively, you can join The Attunement Circle directly through my learning portal and membership site here or my main site here.

Returning to the Divinity Within

A guided Scale of Consciousness practice for those moments when the world has got too far under your skin.

A way to step out of the noise, return to yourself and reconnect with what has been there all along beneath the fog.

I hope the practice helps you come home to yourself when the world makes you forget who you truly are.

Enjoy

From Me to You

Thank you for reading, and for being part of the Awakened Scapegoat community.

I hope you found something here that you needed today, and perhaps the reassurance of knowing that whatever this world has been stirring in you, you are not alone in it.

There are others here who understand.

Much love, Caroline xo