Ritu Kaushal's Blog, page 20

Sharing an Amazing Book on the 5 Personality Patterns.

Recently, I read the book The 5 Personality Patterns by Steven Kessler. It’s one of the best self-help books I have read in a long time. Of course, like any other book, there were a couple of things I didn’t quite agree with. But on the whole, it’s a very insightful book that I highly recommend you read! It talks about the defensive patterns we develop as we grow up to ward off feelings of stress and overwhelm. These patterns become our go-tos when we are going through difficult times.

We...

Interview with Mark Pierce, author of The Creative Wound.

This week, we welcome Mark Pierce, the author of the book The Creative Wound to the blog! The title of this little gem of a book jumped out at me on Twitter. It’s a book about creating your own medicine as an artist, about putting a soothing balm on your hurting spots, about, in Mark’s words, “healing your broken art.” 

If you have a creative wound — if your creative talents weren’t considered important growing up, if they were thought of as “less than” or superficial, if you have always f...

Sharing Some Good News!

I wanted to share something happy and joyful today. It’s my honor to be nominated for the REX Awards, instituted by the United Nations and iCONGO in India. This award is given to people across different fields – Social Change, Innovation and the Arts – who are impacting the lives of people around them. I came to know of my nomination sometime back and received the confirmation certificate today.

In my writing journey till now, from the time I hesitantly started my blog almost six years ago...

You Are the Expert on You.

Recently, I had an interesting experience with something I had written being plagiarized. This piece on introverts that I wrote many years ago (it was actually the first guest blog post I ever wrote) for the Tiny Buddha website got plagiarized by someone who posted it on Medium.

I wouldn’t have come to know of this at all if a kind reader who had also seen the original piece hadn’t reached out to me on my Facebook page and told me about it. Someone had copied not just the piece but even the...

3 Fantastic Lessons My Writing has Revealed to Me.

After The Empath’s Journey came out a few months ago, I wrote this post for Lauren Sapala’s wonderful blog on the 3 Things I Learned as an INFP Writer Working on my First Book. I talked about how throwing our hat over the fence is good for INFPs, how our multiple interests don’t make us dilettantes but can help us create richer work, and what I learned about the writer’s “voice” while writing my first book.

These were, of course, just a few of the things I learned during the gestation of th...

Boundaries for Empaths: How to stop the suffering, build strong barriers, and stop being so nice!

I have been thinking of doing a new kind of post for some time now with a round-up of helpful links & resources for emotional empaths and highly sensitive creatives. The idea is to cover a large piece of ground that might help you connect some previously unconnected dots. 

In this first post, I want to talk about ideas and resources that can help us set better boundaries as empaths and/or Highly Sensitive People. 

Like other empaths, boundaries have been a big challenge for me in my own life...

Are you a Lion Believing You are a Sloth?

Queer Eye on Netflix has to be one of my favorite shows right now. This season, I have been letting myself watch only one episode at a time instead of gobbling up all the episodes all at once as I did with the previous season. For those of you who are not familiar with the show, five beautiful (both inside and out) gay men dubbed the Fab Five give “lifestyle makeovers” to a person who has been nominated (by family members or friends).

This usually lovely but scruffy person (mostly men and s...

A Fantastic Question to Ask for Authentic Writerly Success.

There is so much advice on writing out there, and if you are an intuitive INFP or INFJ writer just starting out, it’s easy to get lost in the morass of what you should be doing. Sometimes, someone states their opinion with so much confidence about the one right way that it’s easy to forget to ask some very basic questions: Is this person anything like me? Does their approach, their style, the way they think resonate with who, I myself, am?

Is this the way I would work best?

I think these...

INFP Writers, Your Book is Not Your Baby.

The Empath’s Journey, my book on highly sensitive people and emotional empaths, is out and about in the world, and it seems like a good time to reflect back on it. One of the things that helped me complete it was figuring out which ideas about the creative process were helpful for me personally.

While there is a lot of writing advice out there (some of it conflicting) and while I admire many different kinds of writers, when it comes to my own writing, I have discovered that I need to mostly...

My Book on Empaths and HSPs: “The Empath’s Journey” is Out Now!

The Empath’s Journey, my book on empaths and Highly Sensitive People, just released. It combines personal stories from my life as an emotional empath with practical insights from different psychological theories including the works of Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Jeremy Taylor, and many others. It’s my hope that this book will be both a believing mirror for empaths and HSPs who have felt misunderstood and also provide helpful insights and tips and tricks.

More Details Please. Is this a Book for All Empaths?

This book is not an introductory book that defines what an empath is and so on, so if you are looking for an introductory book, this isn’t the one. It’s also not a book that delves into the mind of the narcissist although it does talk a lot about building boundaries. So, if you are looking for a book on narcissists and identifying red flags about them, this isn’t the book for you.

What this book is though is a behind-the-scenes look at an empath’s life. It covers my six-year journey after I relocated from India to the United States in mid-2012 and found, once again, face-to-face with the feeling that I was “too sensitive.” I noticed numerous little details about the new culture I found myself in that left me feeling more and more overwhelmed. Was it really such a good thing to be highly sensitive?

As I wrestled with these questions in my own life over the next several years, I also started assembling a toolbox to manage overstimulation and started to re-frame what my sensitivity meant for me for the first time ever in my life. The Empath’s Journey weaves together these stories from my own experiences with concepts and ideas from Art Therapy, Depth Psychology, and Cultural Studies.

It talks about strengthening ourselves and becoming more self-protective. It talks about getting in touch with our intuition to cut through overwhelm and to make the decision-making process easier. It talks about paying attention to our dreams as the bridge to the unconscious so that our Shadow doesn’t get large and looming, so that our buried resentments at boundary violations don’t spill out and damage our lives. It talks about both the beautiful aspects of being sensitive and also crosses into uncomfortable territory. The other side of giving too much is feeling used-up and angry, not full of love and light. It asks hard questions that are sometimes glossed over. Is there really such a thing as being intuitive, as being an empath, or are we just codependents with unhealthy boundaries? It talks about all these things and many more.

If you have ever felt lost and misunderstood as an HSP or emotional empath, I hope The Empath’s Journey will be your companion as you re-frame those old stories about sensitivity that can so choke us. If this feels like the right book for you, you can check it out here. It’s available worldwide on different Amazon stores.