The Gift of Feeling Too Much: Why Your Sensitivity Is Not Your Weakness

In this special class in honour of his birthday, Rabbi Yisroel Bernath explores one of the most misunderstood human traits: sensitivity. While the world often tells us to toughen up and grow thicker skin, Chassidus teaches that the goal is not to suppress our emotions but to refine them. Drawing from Tanya, Torah Or, Likkutei Torah, and the teachings of the Rebbeim, Rabbi Bernath explains that some souls are created to feel more deeply because they are called to illuminate more deeply. Participants discover the difference between being emotionally controlled and spiritually refined, learn why criticism, overwhelm, and empathy affect certain people so intensely, and gain practical Chassidic tools for transforming emotional vulnerability into inner strength, purpose, and closeness to G-d.

Key Points

Why some people are born with “thinner skin and deeper souls.” 

The world’s advice: harden yourself. Kabbalah advice: refine yourself. 

The exposed nekudas halev (point of the heart) and the spiritual gift of deep feeling.

The soul’s descent into the world as a mission of refinement, not self-protection.

The difference between iskafya (self-mastery) and ishapcha (inner transformation).

Why feeling overwhelmed does not mean you are failing spiritually.

Learning to distinguish between the voice of fear and the voice of the soul.

Healthy boundaries without losing compassion.

Transforming criticism, rejection, and emotional pain into spiritual growth.

How sensitive people can become extraordinary sources of healing, empathy, leadership, and light.

Practical daily Chassidic exercises for emotional resilience and refinement.

A birthday reflection on gratitude for the unique mission of every soul.

#Kabbalah #Sensitivity #SensitiveSouls #chassidus #Tanya #Rabbiyisroelbernath #JewishWisdom #EmotionalHealth #spiritualgrowth #InnerHealing #Refinement #Iskafya #Ishapcha #NekudasHalev #soul #emotionalresilience #MentalWellness #purpose #SelfMastery #HeartOpen #BirthdayClass #personalgrowth #chabad #Transformation #DeepSouls 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Good morning, everyone. It is a beautiful day. Today we're going to do a unique class. Something that I've been thinking about doing for quite a while. And the reason why I haven't done it is because these ideas are by no means developed. As some of the other ideas and teachings are developed, these are not developed. But I decided that in honor of my birthday, that I would give a gift. And this is the gift of a class for sensitive souls. I'm calling it the gift of feeling too much. And I want to first talk about kind of who this person is a bit, then go into some of my ideas, and then maybe some practical tips on it. Once again, do not take this as a an authority. This is just me broadcasting live some of the ideas that I've been thinking about, and maybe it will start a new way of thinking about emotions and sensitivity. And really, that's my hope, not only for you, but for myself as well. I want to speak today to people who have spent a long time apologizing for how deeply they feel. People who get hurt too quickly. And I want to ask a different question. What if your sensitivity is not your weakness? What if it's part of your spiritual mission? I've been told in my life that I'm too sensitive. I don't know so much about the horoscope, but I was born in the month of July. Apparently, people born in the month of July are sensitive people. And the world has told me that if you're a sensitive person, you should harden up. You should grow thicker skin. You're not going to make it out there. Stop feeling so much. Don't be affected so much. Be more efficient. Be more like a suitcase and less like a violin. I'll explain what I mean in a second. But Chasidis and Kabbalah, I think changes the conversation. It's really the first time I've seen these ideas. And again, by no means are these developed. But the way I see it is that it's telling a sensitive person not to harden themselves, but to refine themselves. And I think that's a huge difference because if I tell a violin to become a boot, the violin may survive the rain better, but it will never make music. And some souls are violins. And they're not defective violins, and they're not even, they're not inconvenient violins or dramatic violins. They're making music. They're built to resonate. They're picking up subtleties. They tremble. Carry tone. Answer touch. And I think if we mistake that for weakness, then we're going to spend our life trying to repair something that was never broken. Some people are born with thicker skin, and I'm happy for them. And some of us are born with thinner skin, but maybe maybe deeper souls. And the mistake that we make, and it's not fully our fault, the world kind of pushes us there, is that we confuse exposure with damage. We think that because something reaches me more quickly, it must mean that I'm fragile. Could be true, could not be true. Maybe it means that the point of your heart is more revealed. Maybe it means that your soul remembers something that others just ignore or don't even notice. Maybe it means that what feels like quote unquote too much is actually more access. Kabbalah describes the soul as carrying a core point. The analogy is the flame. And in certain people, I would say that point is simply less covered up. It's less covered over. They don't only think life, they they don't walk around the world analyzing data and being cerebral. They're walking around the world feeling it. They're walking into a room and they know how people feel before they even say it. When they hear words, they don't just hear words. They're hearing the music, they're hearing the undertones. They're not just noticing the beauty of this beautiful world, but the beauty enters them. They're not only experiencing pain, the pain echoes. Now, here's something I want to say equally important. And it's hard. And I don't know if I have a full answer for this. Not every sensitive feeling is holy. Not every strong feeling is profound. Sometimes sensitivity is mixed with ego. Sometimes, and this has been a real truth for me, is that often my sensitivity has been mixed with fear or mixed with old wounds, with insecurity, with a craving to be seen, to be noticed. If I'm a sensitive person and I'm leading my life with fear and a desire to be noticed, then it's going to convolute my sensitivity. And so Kabbalah doesn't want to romanticize sensitivity. It actually wants to discipline it. We've been talking about this in Tanya in our Kabbalah for Everyone class. That the goal is not to destroy the heart. The goal is not for the heart to become a stone. To stop feeling. That's not the goal. The goal is Moach Shalit al-Haleh, that the mind should guide the heart, that it should learn the difference between what I feel and what I do. Between what surges through me and what I choose to become. And I want to introduce two concepts in this process of our concepts that we're studying. The concept of Hiska, which is restraint, and his sapcha, which is transformation. Restraint and transformation. First, I stop the fire from burning down the house, and then I learn how to use the fire to warm the house, to use an analogy. I'll explain what that analogy means for a sensitive person. If you're an overly sensitive person, your mission is not to become someone else. Your mission is to become a refined version of yourself. More direction, more clarity, more truth. I'll tell you why I think this is important. Maybe you can relate to this. I think many sensitive people live with a false choice. They think either I stay soft and keep getting crushed, or I become hard and I betray myself. From a Kabbalistic perspective, this would be a false choice. There's a third option. You can stay soft and become strong. You can remain deep without remaining breakable. You can preserve your tenderness without surrendering your center. And what I want to teach today, I'll say it again. It's really not developed, but this is just the beginning of this process. And I want to just kind of open the door today. I want to think, I want to teach five skills that I have thought about and started practicing based on Kabawa. And my hope is that perhaps by giving you these skills that you will develop them further. I spent a lot of time in my life thinking that the world was cerebral. To know more, to obtain more information, to study more. God gave me the gift of being able to understand things, and so I could hide my sensitivity and ideas. But there's a piece of me that was missing in that. And so starting to integrate, starting to embody some of these teachings, this is what came up for me. The first skill is this Do not treat every feeling like a prophecy. A feeling is real. But real is not the same as true. If I walk into a room and I immediat I immediately feel rejected, the feeling is real. But it does not yet mean I was rejected. If a person speaks sharply to me and I instantly feel unwanted, the hurt is real. But the story that I build around that hurt may be fiction. As a sensitive person, I think I may get hit over the head for this. See, I'm so concerned about saying any of this because that's how sensitive I am. I think that sensitive people are often excellent censors and unreliable commentators. We're picking up the signal accurately and we're narrating it catastrophically. So before I say, This means I'm unwanted, or this means they don't care, or this means I am too much. Now I pause and I ask what exactly happened? What did I observe? What did I add? And what part of me got hurt? My soul, my fear, my ego. So what happened? What exactly happened? What did I observe? What did I add? And what part of me got hurt? And I think it's just the noticing, just taking that step back and noticing. Don't treat every feeling like a prophecy. I know people say trust your gut. And maybe for some people that works. But if you're a sensitive person, be careful. Because the trusting of feelings can turn pain into a lot of suffering. That's my first skill. You ready for skill number two? Skill number two is this. Stop worshiping analysis. Some of the most sensitive people, I speak for myself first, become experts at examining themselves, dissecting themselves, explaining themselves, diagnosing themselves. We become curators of our own inner weather. And it sometimes works, but often it doesn't. And this is a learning that I am in no way, even remotely, an expert on. But I'm just starting to learn this. Sometimes I say to myself, enough already, enough. Sometimes it's okay to live simply, to act with sincerity. I don't have to do the next thing and over plan every emotion before it. Would I be offending someone? Would I be worried about what somebody would say or like, and it just becomes overwhelming. You end up not wanting to say very much. You don't have to overplan every single person's response to whatever you're saying before you say it. And to me first, I don't have to understand my entire inner world before I can pray or believe. I don't have to resolve every insecurity before I can call someone who's lonely. I don't have to decode every mood before I can say a chapter or Psalms, before I can give charity, take a walk, breathe like a human being created by God. I think sometimes I'm not drowning in emotions, I'm drowning in interpretation. I think it's emotion, but it's actually not. So my second skill is stop worshiping analysis. Sometimes analysis is good, but often it's not. Three was is probably the hardest in my process right now. The third skill is this guard your inputs. If the heart is the most sensitive organ, then it also needs the purest nourishment. The heart is delicate, it's central, and it's selective. And it doesn't take it doesn't take in everything the way the coarser limbs do. That's how it protects its function. So if you're sensitive, if I'm sensitive, then I need to stop measuring myself by people who can ingest garbage and still function. Some people can scroll poison for two hours and sleep like babies. Good for them. If they can do that, I say to them, my blessing to you is use your superpowers responsibly. But if you if you're if your soul is more porous, then your boundaries are not pettiness. They're protocols. And we have a responsibility to guard our inputs. What enters our eyes matters. What enters our ears matters. Yeah. What I'm saying is you may not be able to watch that movie that other people can watch. And it's okay. You may not be able to see things that other people can see, to hear things, to be part of conversations that other people can be part of. I'm happy for their superpowers. I can't do it. What enters my ears matters. What enters my eyes matters. What enters my conversations matters. What enters my imagination matters. The reason is because I am built for finer work. It's hard because there's kind of this social construct, and you don't want to, because you're so sensitive, you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. And so you end up sitting through a conversation or an experience or a movie which your soul can't handle. And I think the same is with food. There's probably a really good chance if you're a sensitive person, you have stomach issues. And I'm happy for people who can eat anything. I'm just not one of those people. And I think sometimes, and I think of you know, my impulses, and I'm in at an event, and I just want that. It looks great. And I have to remind myself I'm a sensitive person, and I can't just eat anything. So the third skill, I think maybe the hardest skill. You can decide what which one is hardest for you. But this this one is hardest for me. Guard your inputs. Can I go to the fourth skill? See, I I'm concerned of being too much. I don't want this to be too much. The fourth skill is this. Convert sensitivity into empathy. For me, this has been the most beautiful shift in my thinking and feeling. As long as my sensitivity remains trapped inside me, it becomes exhausting. It becomes self-consciousness, overreaction, rumination. It becomes pain. But when I turn the same sensitivity outward, it becomes a gift to other people. And told the Rebbe that she doubted that he could really feel her pain. And the Rebbe used this example of the example of a mother whose child is teething. The mother is not the one whose gums hurt. But when the child cries, she feels the pain as if it were her own. So the question is not only how do I stop being hurt so much? I think the question is also, how do I use what I feel to notice someone else sooner? How do I become gentler because I know what pain feels like? How do I become less judgmental because I know how heavy invisible battles can be? And this wound can become wisdom when it increases compassion. I think there's a lot of people with a lot of sympathy in the world, and I'm happy for their sympathy. They have sympathy for the less fortunate and sympathy for those who are struggling. I'm happy for their sympathy. But for me, sympathy is not good enough. It needs to be empathy. It's I feel your pain. I could feel it. I sit next to you and I could feel your pain. I'm crying with you. And so this is a superpower of the sensitive soul. And it can be turned into the greatest gift to others. I'll go to this to the fifth skill. This is one that uh I've used a lot more recently. It goes like this. When you're overwhelmed, turn the overflow into prayer. The Tanya says that when unwanted thoughts and inner resistance surge, specifically when a person is trying to do something holy, but that that's not proof the person is failing. Sometimes it's proof that something real is happening, that the struggle itself is part of the process. And we've spent a lot of time popping Tylenol for our souls. Just don't want pain. I I don't want I don't want to be in the struggle. I don't want to be in the difficulty. And if you can't sort it out, then that's the power of connection, of attachment looking for attachment. Sensitive souls are often looking for attachment. And if we're looking for that, then we can attach to a higher power. I call it Hashem. God. I call it less God because I think there's a lot of PTST with that. But it's attaching to a higher power. It means that my sensitivity does not have to end in collapse, it can end in conversation. So instead of spiraling, speak. Instead of drowning, direct, instead of saying, Why am I so much? We can say, Father in heaven, higher power. Since I feel so much, show me what you want me to do with it. That's a a different life. I want to say something that I think maybe is even more radical. Kabbalah says that the soul came down here for beruim, for refinement, for clarification, for transformation. Some souls are sent into the world with thicker gloves. And other souls are sent with bare hands. And the bare-handed souls are often the ones who can feel the knots that others miss. They can detect the mixture of truth and false. The mixture of holiness and coarseness, of sincerity and performance. They feel the world more sharply. Because part of their mission is to sort it more carefully. And I think that's why my sensitivity often feels so inconvenient. Of course it does. Every mission in our lives feels inconvenient when it's still unmastered. A singer's perfect pitch ear is inconvenient in a noisy room. A surgeon's precision is going to be inconvenient in a careless world. A poet's heart is going to be inconvenient in a cynical culture. And a sensitive soul is going to be inconvenient in a coarse age. But I think inconvenience is not evidence of irrelevance. Maybe I can be so bold to say this that sometimes it's evidence that my soul did not come here to fit in with the noise. It came here to hear what the noise is drowning out. I'm thinking a lot about these ideas because a birthday is a time to reflect about what matters in life, about my purpose in this world. I think there's this idea that a birthday became a celebration, pop the champagne. Yay, that's not what a birthday is. And I actually would say, even more so, doing that numbs what a birthday is, right? If you want to numb yourself on alcohol or on whatever other things you numb yourself, that's your business. But that's not what a birthday is. A birthday is a conversation, a process that we can have with ourselves to make sure that we are aligned. There's no soul after me, and no soul during my lifetime that has the same unique purpose as I do. And it's reconnecting with the assignment. Why was my soul sent here? What are the challenges of my soul and what are the unique gifts of my soul? Because my purpose is the intersection of my challenges and my unique gifts? Why do I have this temperament? Why do I have this wiring? Is it a gift or is it a challenge? Why this combination of tears and tenderness and overthinking and longing and depth and intensity? What does this have to do with my unique mission in this world? Maybe my task is to take all that raw weather and turn it into a climate for other people. I've realized, and even more recently, with the reactions from my book, that maybe I can put words onto feelings. I can take feelings and I can turn them into words. Responses I've gotten from people were you you've read my mind, and I didn't read your mind. But I do think that if one person does not have to go through the same struggle that I've gone through, then I've made this world a little better for someone else. That if I can take this noisy world and find clarity in it and cut through it, or jump over it, depending on how you want to look at it, then I've done a little better and allowed my purpose to exist. One of the most famous statements the Baushemtav is known by is he said that a soul can come into this world for 70 or 80 years just to do a favor for someone else. If that's the case, then if we could make the path clearer for someone else because of our sensitivity, then that could be the purpose for which we were created. And maybe that's why some of our hardest years feel like too much. Because unrefined sensitivity hurts. The same way refined sensitivity heals. You can heal the relationships because you notice what others miss. You can heal children because you hear what they cannot yet say. You can heal communities because you refuse to let people become invisible. They will be seen, they will be noticed. And you can heal your own soul because maybe what once felt like a liability could also feel like a calling. The goal is to become a tuned violin. That's how I see it. Still sensitive, but accurate. Still, still resonant, but disciplined, still open, but not shattered by every passing wind. And if listening to this today, or whenever you are listening to this, if you remember one thing, I want you to remember this. Your sensitivity is not proof that you're too weak for the world. It may be proof that your soul was sent to touch the world more deeply than others. I want to reiterate that this is by no means coming from an expert. Just a little bit of noticing that I've been doing. And my hope is that I know that once you start noticing, you can't unnotice. And so I want to give you a blessing. Says on our birthday, we have uh an extra mazao. The stars are aligned for us. Masau means constellations, that our constellations are strong, and so therefore, we can we can bless others. I can give you the standard blessing. And that's all wonderful things, and I give you those blessings too. But I want to give you a deeper blessing, more sensitive blessing. My blessing to you today is that may your bruises become your wisdom. May your tears become your prayers. May your triggers become your teachers, become your medicine. And may every deep feeling in your heart find this direction. And may the gift of feeling too much become, with God's help, the gift of bringing more heart, more integration, more connectedness into a world that desperately, desperately needs it right now. And with that, I wish you a beautiful week, a beautiful day, until we meet again. Before I close today, I want to just remind those of you who are in Montreal that I'm going to be doing a very special uh continuation of my birthday, the Shabbat. A whole program, including uh at 9 a.m. in the Chabadaniji Library, we're going to be doing a really special soulful prayer meditation, followed by a whole day of beautiful uh prayers, uh, talks, ideas, and uh, you can get the full schedule from me. Just message me, and I will give you the whole schedule and uh lots more to come. I would love to hear your thoughts on these ideas, and I would love to start developing these ideas. I I have this dream of creating a school for sensitive souls. I've always uh I've thought about it for a while, and I've been scared of that level of exposure in the world. But I I think the world needs it right now. We need it, we all need it right now. So, with that, uh uh for those of you who are here, I'd love to hear your thoughts, and we will uh turn it over to you.