Highly Sensitive and Reiki

As a child, you felt things others did not feel. Moods in rooms. Tension between people who had not said a word. Something in the air with no name. Maybe you spoke of it — and you were told: "You are too sensitive." "You are imagining things." "Don't be so emotional."

At some point you stopped talking about it. But you never stopped feeling.

Today there is a name for it: high sensitivity, or HSP (Highly Sensitive Person). Research by psychologist Elaine Aron has shown that about 15 to 20 percent of the population has a nervous system that processes stimuli more intensely than average. Sound, light, the emotions of others — and, as many highly sensitive people report, also subtler perceptions that are hard to put into words.

Fragile or receptive? 感受

Western culture has a problem with sensitivity. It is treated as weakness. Those who feel a lot are called unstable. Those who cannot filter stimuli are called fragile. The solution offered is usually the same: set boundaries, shield yourself, feel less.

The spiritual traditions of Japan see this very differently. In Shingon Buddhism, the capacity to perceive subtle energies is not a sign of disorder — it is a sign of spiritual maturity. The Japanese word 感応 (Kannō) describes the resonance between a practitioner and the subtle forces of the universe. Those who feel this resonance do not stand at the edge of society. They stand at the threshold of deeper experience.

Eileen Wiesmann, who has walked this path herself as a highly sensitive person, puts it this way: high sensitivity is often treated as something to be "managed." In Shingon Reiki it is recognised as the very precondition that makes energy work possible. You do not dampen the sensitivity. You understand it. And then you use it.

Byosen and Hibiki — the language of the hands 病腺

In Reiki practice there is a phenomenon highly sensitive people understand immediately: Byosen 病腺 and Hibiki 響き. Byosen describes the energetic changes a practitioner perceives in their hands when held over another person's body. Hibiki is the resonance, the body's answer — a tingling, a pulsing, warmth, coolness, sometimes a pulling or pressing.

For most people, perceiving Byosen takes practice. For highly sensitive people, this perception is often there from the very beginning. The hands feel immediately where something is different. The subtle distinctions in the energy — denser here, flowing there, stalling at a certain spot — open up like a natural language.

This is because Byosen perception and high sensitivity use the same channel: the capacity to register subtle distinctions below the threshold of ordinary awareness. What others dismissed as "too sensitive" is, in Reiki practice, exactly the instrument that is needed. More on this in the article Hibiki and Byosen — subtle perception in Shingon Reiki.

Protection and stability — holding your own space 護身

The greatest challenge for highly sensitive people is not the perception itself — it is what comes after. Those who feel the moods of others as if they were their own. Those who are flooded by stimuli in crowds. Those who need hours after an intense conversation to return to themselves. They need more than understanding. They need tools.

Shingon Reiki has its own practice for this: Goshin 護身, the practice of self-protection. This tradition comes from esoteric Buddhism, Shugendo, and Shinto — not a modern invention, but a system refined over centuries inside the temples of Japan. It is not about building a wall around yourself. It is about consciously holding your own energetic space — present, clear, permeable to what nourishes, stable against what drains.

Within the Shingon Reiki community, Eileen Wiesmann works especially with highly sensitive practitioners who walk exactly this path: recognising their own sensitivity as a gift while learning how to stabilise themselves without closing down. This is not a contradiction. It is the core of the practice. For deeper exploration, see the articles Recognising and transforming negative influences and Protection of the soul — Goshin in the Shingon tradition.

Kannō — resonance as a spiritual principle 感応

In Shingon Buddhism there is a word that describes what highly sensitive people experience their whole life long without being able to name it: Kannō 感応. It means literally "feeling and answering" — the resonance between a being and the subtle forces that pervade the universe. In esoteric Buddhism, Kannō is understood as a sign that the practitioner is connected — with the Buddhas, with the bodhisattvas, with the living reality behind the visible world.

What does this mean for a highly sensitive person who grew up in the Western world? It means: what you perceive has a place. It has a name. It has a tradition reaching back over a thousand years. You are not defective. You are not "too much." You are receptive — and in the language of the old traditions this is precisely the precondition for everything that comes after.

Mark Hosak studied the sources that describe these connections in his research at the University of Heidelberg — texts from Shingon, Shugendo, Daoism, and Shinto. Eileen Wiesmann has walked this path herself as a highly sensitive person and today accompanies others on it. Together they bring the depth of the tradition together with the lived experience of the practice.

If you recognise yourself in these words — if you sensed as a child that there was more, and if you still sense today that your perception reaches further than most people around you — then it is no accident that you are reading this. Your sensitivity is not an obstacle. It is the beginning.