Big Feelings, Big Joy | The Haven Book Club

Our Haven Book Club returns this week. We will explore Big Feelings, Big Joy: The Essential Practices to Reclaim Your Strengths as a Highly Sensitive Person.

Written by licensed psychotherapist April Snow, the book draws on her clinical experience with thousands of Highly Sensitive People (HSPs). She also shares her own lived experience as a highly sensitive person. Big Feelings, Big Joy offers encouragement, validation, and practical tools for understanding sensitivity as a core part of who we are. April shows us how to accept, value, and nurture sensitivity rather than resent it or try to change it.

In our 60-minute HSP book club meeting, we’ll explore some of the book’s core ideas. This will allow us to hold it as a light to consider our own backgrounds, experiences, questions, and challenges.

Some of the areas we’ll explore include:

• What April means when she describes highly sensitive people as having ORCHID characteristics
• The items on April’s HSP Essentials Checklist
• What Tending Practices and Calming Portals are, and how they relate to everyday life
• How April’s advice pushes back against some common ideas in the wellness and personal development industries, and hustle culture, and why this might be particularly important for HSPs to explore
• Why “get more sleep” might be more complicated than it sounds for highly sensitive people
• How to protect non-productive downtime and daydreaming without turning them into another way of being productive
• The line between intuition and anxiety, and how April suggests distinguishing between them
• What it means to make “no” a default answer, and how this can create space around decisions
• The impact of cumulative emotions on rumination and overwhelm, and how April suggests finding our way back to ourselves when things feel “bigger than the moment”
• What it means to savour positive memories during difficult times, and why highly sensitive people may be particularly able to experience greater joy from smaller things

A Conversation with April

Ahead of the Book Club, I’ll also share my podcast conversation with April about the book. So even if you haven’t had time to read it, there will be plenty for us to get our teeth into.

As with all Haven gatherings, you’re welcome to come as you are, however you need. The session will be discussion-based and facilitated by me (Andy Mort), with everyone given space to share if they want to. It would be lovely to hear from you, but there’s no pressure to speak.

We’ll also keep exploring any topics, questions, and ideas that come up in The Courtyard afterwards, so the conversation doesn’t end when the session does.

The call will be recorded for paying members to catch up with afterwards and will be available for 30 days after the session.