Hi! I am Ritu, a San Francisco Bay Area-based author, blogger & writing coach. My book The Empath’s Journey combines personal stories with practical insights to help you in your journey as a sensitive person.
First, my “Official Bio” if you need it. Then, we’ll get into the story of how I got here.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx Speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person.” Ritu is a silver medal awardee at the Rex Karamveer Chakra Awards, co-presented by the United Nations in India and given to people creating social impact through their work. She has been a fellow at Rooted & Written, the first fully-funded conference for writers of color in the United States, with patronage from the California Arts Council. She blogs about sensitivity on her website, Walking through Transitions, where she publishes the popular The Highly Sensitive Creative newsletter. Her work has been featured on The Shift Network, Yoga Journal, Sensitive Evolution, and Tiny Buddha, amongst others.
Sign up for The Highly Sensitive Creative newsletter HERE.
If you are a writer looking for a writing coach, check out my Coaching page for details.
You can get in touch with me at creativecoachingsf@gmail.com.
And here is the extended version of how I started writing about sensitivity and why it matters to me.
As a child growing up in India, I was often called “too sensitive.” During different times in my life, I dealt with my sensitivity by either numbing it, avoiding it, or simply attempting to hide it. There were also some long years when I felt like there was something terribly wrong with me, as if I had a crack running right through the middle of my being, as if I was a pane of glass with a fault running right through it. It took a lot of inner work to let go of this sense of being “wrong.”
In 2012, I got married & relocated to the United States. This was a lovely, exciting new chapter in my life. But with this move, the old ghosts of what it meant to be “too sensitive” came calling. In a new country & culture, I again felt out-of-step and as if it took me a much longer time to adjust to change than other people. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I be more “normal?”
The discomfort of this move ultimately became a catalyst in weeding out my faulty beliefs & redefining my relationship with my sensitivity. I learned about my own needs as a sensitive person & the fact that my sensitivity was an actual trait with its basis in biology. I started becoming friends with myself, experimented with ways to strengthen my intuition and learned how to set better boundaries.
These first few years of my new life in the United States is the backdrop of my book The Empath’s Journey.
I am also a Silver Medal awardee at the Rex Karamveer Chakra awards, co-presented by the United Nations.
I was a silver medal awardee at the 2019 Rex Karamveer Chakra Awards, given by the International Confederation of NGOs in partnership with the United Nations in India.
These awards are given to people creating social change through their work and the 2019 awardees included people from more than 10 countries, including France, Mexico, and China.
As an artist, it was validating to be recognized for my work around helping spread awareness about highly sensitive people. I have been blogging about sensitivity for the past seven years and my work has been featured on Tiny Buddha, Sensitive Evolution, Elephant Journal, and Having Time amongst several other places. The Empath’s Journey was a special highlight in this journey of writing about sensitivity and being an advocate for it.
If you want to know more about me!
As a creative person, I am a magpie. I love to gather bits and pieces & build little nests from what I discover. If you like odds & ends, you might like these tidbits about me:
- My top 5 Strengths according to the Gallup StrengthsFinder test are Intellection, Empathy, Input, Context, and Connectedness.
- I am an INFP personality type.
- One of my favorite books is The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. You can see it in the picture above!
- Rumi, Hafiz, Mary Oliver, and Kabir are a few of my “poetry loves.”
- I work with my dreams on and off. I love Carl Jung’s work, Jungian thought & pay attention to synchronicities.
- Dance is my most natural talent. In a former life, I have performed as an Odissi dancer (an Indian classical dance form) and learned spiritual belly dance, salsa, and tango.
- These symbols and images speak deeply to me: a spider spinning its web, a turtle as the base of the world, a solitary mountain lion, a majestic elk and a joyful hummingbird.
- In fact, I have had real-life encounters with hummingbirds, which I talk about in The Empath’s Journey.
That’s all from me. Thank you for being here. My hope is that you will find a believing mirror in this site. And if you are feeling lost as a sensitive person, I hope it’ll give you some clues to reconnect with your sensitive self & be all that you already are.
Welcome home to your sensitive self!
With love, Ritu.