Start Here: Where Symptoms Are Symbols and the Body Speaks Softly

For Sensitive Souls who live at the corner of Grounded Ave and Woo-Woo Way.

🌸 Storytime

Six-year-old me trembled as I swallowed my sobs.

A single tear slipped onto my Book About Me, smudging the crayon letters of my name. Mrs. Monahan turned away to return papers to the other kids—oblivious to the earthquake she’d just caused inside my little body.

But to me, it was a big deal. A huge deal.

This was my very first book.
My name. My voice. My heart.
And she had crossed it out.

TERI LEIGH LEE RASMUSSON

Scrawled in red ink.
My name—violated

I put my head down, hot tears pooling underneath my cheek. My throat tightened. My stomach curled into a knot. My whole chest caved in.

If my name was wrong… maybe everything about me was wrong.

At the end of class, I quietly dropped the book into the trash.

That night, my throat started to hurt.
By morning, I had completely lost my voice.

When my voice returned, it came back smaller, quieter.
I stopped raising my hand.
I stopped telling stories out loud.
I pulled a shimmery little cloak of invisibility around myself.

I stopped speaking, which meant I wrote even more. With a pencil, no one could cross out my thoughts. On paper, I could say what I felt without someone telling me it was wrong. The page never mocked me.

When your voice is taken, your body whispers.
And if you listen long enough, those whispers turn into spells.

🧚 Are You a Sensitive Soul?

I was the quiet kid who felt everything too much and said very little.

Maybe you were too.

Did they call you “too emotional”?
Did you cry when you didn’t even know why?
Did you pick up other people’s pain like it was your job?
Did you get stomach aches before school? Or sore throats that no one could explain?

And maybe—like me—you learned to hide behind perfection.
Be a good girl.
Be responsible.
Don’t rock the boat.

You tried to hold it in, hold it together, hold your breath.

You want to feel seen—deeply, weirdly, exquisitely seen.

You want connection. You want to know your grief, neurodivergence, spiritual visitations, complex ancestry, or bodily spirals aren’t too much, but something to lovingly accept, and even celebrate and elevate.

You are navigating complex emotional + spiritual questions and want a companion who speaks “body + energy” fluently.

You’re grappling with not-quite-fitting labels, grief, estranged relationships, soul visitations… and asking: What does this mean in my body? How do I carry it? How do I transmute it into something beautiful or nourishing or clear?

You want spiritual insight + sensory language + symbolic decoding.

You are enchanted by sensory metaphors and subtle magick.

Everything is connected. Everything has meaning. Everything you feel, sense, know and own inside yourself is deep, intimate, poetic, and symbolic.

✨ The Lesson

That one red pen scarred more than a piece of paper. It rewrote my relationship with my own voice.

For decades, I learned how to control my expression. Perfectionism.

But perfectionism inside a highly sensitive body is an impossibility.
Everything was always not right, not enough, not worthy, not. . . good.

In truth, my nervous system didn’t want perfection.
It wanted permission.

Permission to be messy.
To say too much.
To cry.
To shake.
To be exactly as sensitive as I am.

Years of yoga, mindfulness, and spiritual awareness later, I discovered the secret:

The symptoms are not problems.
They’re the poetry of the body.

When we listen to the body while it whisper—
we never have to hear it scream.

🌀 What is MindfulSense?

MindfulSense is a practice of paying attention to what your highly sensitive body and nervous system is trying to tell you—to what your intuition saying through your five senses. . . and the merging of your five senses into one, not your sixth sense, but your full sense, your mindful-sense.

• It’s the water over your hands as you wash.

• The click of your seatbelt locking into place.

• The sigh you didn’t know you were holding until you let it go.

This newsletter is where I share healing in tiny, tender doses through the stories from my clients, from my own life, and from the deeper language our bodies speak.

🦋 About Me

I’m TeriLeigh. I’ve spent over 30 years helping sensitive souls feel at home in their bodies again.

I’ve taught over 200,000 students, worked with 2,000 clients, and whispered into the ears of aching backs, frozen shoulders, and tight throats for decades.

I’ve been a teacher, writer, chakra elder, soul whisperer, shamanic misfit, and sparkle-stirrer.

A few fun facts:

🌹 I look up word origins just for gits and shiggles.
🏊‍♀️ I was a synchronized swimmer—I can still hold my breath for two minutes.
🐾 I talk to dogs like they’re lifelong friends. (Because they are.)

💌 Subscribe

If you’ve ever had a mystery symptom no one could explain…
If your body holds memories your brain forgot…
If you want rituals and reflections that speak your energetic language…

You’re in the right place.

You don’t have to be fixed.
You’re not broken.
You’re a brilliant, blooming, body-full being.

Let’s listen softly.

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