Are You a Sponge, an Antenna, or a Sanctuary? The Invisible Architecture of Sensitive People
NEURODIVERSITY, NEURODIVERGENT, HSP, AURIC BODIES, BOUNDARIES
If you're an empath, autistic, ADHD, highly sensitive, or gifted, you've probably been told your whole life that you're "too much" — too sensitive, too intense, too reactive, too slow to recover.
What if the problem isn't that you're too much, but that your energetic body is built differently than most people's, and no one ever taught you how to care for it?
I've found that most sensitive and neurodivergent people fall into one of three energetic architectures: the Sponge, the Antenna, or the Sanctuary. Each one describes how your subtle body interacts with the world — where you're porous, where you're reactive, and what you actually need to feel whole.
A Quick Map of the Subtle Body
Most energy traditions describe layers of the human field extending outward from the physical body. While different systems count and name them differently, a useful simplified map includes:
The Etheric Layer — closest to the skin, governing physical sensation, vitality, and sensory processing
The Emotional Layer — holding feelings, emotional reactivity, the felt sense of our own and others' inner states
The Mental Layer — thoughts, beliefs, cognitive patterns, the structure of how we think
The Astral Layer — the bridge between personal and transpersonal, governing relationships and heart-connections
The Celestial and Causal Layers — our connection to the divine, to purpose, to universal consciousness
In a "typical" nervous system, these layers nest neatly inside each other like Russian dolls, each one contained and protected by the next.
In neurodivergent systems, certain layers are thinner, more porous, more reactive, or more expansive than the standard blueprint accounts for. This isn't pathology. It's difference. But without understanding how we're different, we can't possibly know how to care for ourselves.
So — which architecture is yours?
Adobe Stock Image: Astral Bodies and Chakras
The Sponge: Empaths and the Porous Emotional Field
If you're a Sponge, your emotional and astral layers lack clear membrane differentiation between "my feeling" and "your feeling."
Empaths aren't reaching out to sense others. They're being intruded upon. Other people's emotions don't wait to be invited — they press in, flooding the field before consent is given. This is why empaths often feel invaded rather than curious, compressed rather than open.
Walk into a room with a strong collective mood — a church service, a tense family dinner, a political rally — and you're not just sensing an atmosphere. You're being pressed upon by something with weight of its own. (This is the realm of egregores — more on that in future posts.)
What helps: Julia Taylor Shore's "jelly wall" visualization — imagining your field as a semi-permeable membrane like a jellyfish, able to sense what's outside without absorbing it. The goal isn't to block connection but to create differentiation: feeling others without becoming them.
The Sanctuary: Autistics and the Overwhelmed Etheric Field
If you're a Sanctuary, your etheric body — the layer governing sensory experience — is hyperporous or hyperreactive. It's not emotions flooding in so much as everything: sound, light, texture, electromagnetic frequencies, the subtle buzz of other people's nervous systems.
Meanwhile, your mental layer often develops thick structure as compensation — organizing, systematizing, creating cognitive architecture to manage the sensory chaos below.
I call this architecture the Sanctuary because that's what you need: not emotional armor, but a controlled environment where your etheric body can rest without constant input. This isn't withdrawal or avoidance. It's sacred enclosure. It's a space where your nervous system can regulate without being battered by stimuli.
What helps: Intentionally creating low-input environments and treating them as sacred. Noise-canceling headphones, dim lighting, weighted blankets, time alone — these aren't indulgences. They're the conditions your etheric body requires to return to baseline.
The Antenna: ADHD and the Scattered Mental Field
If you're an Antenna, your mental and etheric layers are built for reach. Where the Sanctuary builds walls, you build antennae — reaching outward, scanning for novelty, sampling the environment in multiple directions simultaneously.
Your etheric layer is often under-boundaried in time rather than space. Transitions blur. The present moment is either completely absorbing or impossible to locate. Energetically, your field "leaks" forward and backward rather than holding steady in the now.
The result isn't intrusion but dispersion. You don't get flooded — you get scattered, exhausted from overextension rather than overwhelm.
What helps: Grounding tethers that work with your wiring rather than against it. For some, this is somatic — movement, rhythm, touch. For others, the tether is internal: connection to parts, to core Self, to soul. If you want to try something new, instead of "grounding down," try grounding in — finding the central axis that your scattered antennae can return to.
When You're More Than One
Some people are clearly one architecture. But many sensitive people are a blend — and this is where it gets interesting.
The HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) is often a Sponge-Sanctuary hybrid: etheric sensitivity plus emotional permeability, but with an intact mental layer. HSPs can think clearly about what they're feeling — they just feel too much of it. The layers are thin but coherent. The structure is sound; it's just built of gossamer instead of canvas.
What helps: Honoring the processing time your system requires. HSPs need longer to digest experience — not because something is wrong, but because they're taking in more data. Build decompression time into your rhythms. Treat it as necessary rather than indulgent.
The Gifted / Twice-Exceptional often shows a different pattern entirely: significant expansion at the mental and celestial layers — the capacity to think in vast, complex, rapid patterns and to access transpersonal states with ease — while the emotional and etheric layers remain underdeveloped or feel unbearably slow.
This creates the "too much, too fast, too intense" experience from the inside. The upper layers are your native home. The lower layers — the ones that deal with feelings, bodies, material reality — feel like swimming through honey. The mundane is genuinely exhausting because it requires you to dramatically slow your frequency just to operate there.
What helps: Grounding up rather than down. Instead of forcing yourself into earth-based heaviness, find your tether through soul, through the divine, through the central axis of your own being. Let the celestial anchor you, since that's where you're most coherent anyway.
Wherever you land in this framework, the invitation is the same: stop trying to fix what isn't broken. Your energetic body isn't a problem to solve. It's a configuration to understand — and once you do, you can finally give it what it's been asking for all along.
Hi, I’m Catherine. I’m so happy to share this time and space with you.
I’m a counselor and self-trust coach living on the Emerald Coast of Florida, on the unceded land of the Muscogee. I am a creative, mystic, and neurodiverse adventurer. I love writing, creating, and connecting.
I love helping folx Befriend Your Inner Critic, Become Your Own Best Friend, and reclaim your untamed soul. I enjoy hearing from you and walking alongside you on your journey.
With a full heart,
Catherine
