As the midsummer abundance of local food continues to flow into our lives, we are sharing the bounty with friends. A few nights ago, our friend from Saint Patrick’s Day hosted us with a meal including tomatoes from her garden with Feta cheese with a berry Balsamic vinegar dressing and a dessert of local peaches in cream. We brought our IPA, which we all enjoyed. After that, we hosted friends for a meal of pasta with our Pesto Genovese, canned tomatoes and other ingredients with a homemade garlic-rosemary spelt bread, a local salad with greens from our Farmer’s Market, heirloom tomatoes from our garden and other local foods, with a tart of local peaches for dessert.

At both meals, our friends discussed their childhood communities in cities a few hours from us. One talked, as she frequently does, of the urban parks that allowed her to spend her childhood playing in nature and later how she led a life close to the Earth surrounded by forests. Another friend spoke of her old community as seemingly empty to her emotionally and culturally; a place where it was difficult for her to feel truly connected to others. As sensitive people, our friends and we share a love of natural beauty, peace, close relationships and an emotional intimacy that often does not fit into the communities created by traditional Western culture.

Communities are essential to our lives and community building is common by proselytizing puritans, philanthropic money-chasers and violent men who “hate who they hate and love who they love.” While these qualities have virtues, they also perpetuate conflict by creating societies of victors and vanquished, rich and poor, exalted and hated. In these communities, sensitive people are often targets of ridicule because our love for peace, harmony, compassion and beauty often interferes with the goals of people dominated by the violent man-money-chaser-puritan aspects.

The failure of these conglomerates of traditional society—the puritans, the money-chasers and the violent men communities—to build peace with other communities and nations is one of the ongoing crises of human history. Communities of common people have held together in hamlets and villages while their larger societies have fought wars and oppressed people different from them for millennia. In perpetuating the traditional hatreds and imbalances of this tragic history, violent men, money-chasers and puritans fall victim of sending out negativity and, consequentially, receiving negativity back.

My childhood saw my sensitivity overlaid by trauma and a patriarchal, small Midwestern community viewing true manhood as aggressive and domineering. When I was twelve, I told a teacher that I planned to become a soldier and would need to be able to kill people to do that. By the time I turned fifteen, my sensitive nature had begun to emerge; I had read “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau and All Men are Brothers by Mohandas Gandhi. I announced I was a non-violent pacifist and became a vegetarian, not knowing anyone who was either one.

In the ten years that followed, I struggled with anger stemming from trauma, a patriarchal view that solving the world’s problems through “righteous” violence was an obligation of manhood and a sensitive inner self that could not endure living an angry and aggressive life. Through my good fortune and with the help of truly kind, compassionate people, my sensitive nature emerged and took over my life. A mysterious spiritual journey has since unfolded, as I’ve tried to live as a sensitive, compassionate man who is flawed and challenged by living in a human world where men are often encouraged and materially rewarded for being aggressive, domineering and violent.

As I learned, sensitive people’s depth of feelings and expansive sense of self does not fit well with the rules and lifestyles advocated by puritans, money-chasers and violent men. A violent man can reconcile risking his life and killing when his leaders tell him to; a money-chaser can live happily with personal wealth while others suffer from poverty and starvation; a puritan can proclaim his father’s books to be holy and believe that his deity condemns people of different traditions, even though he has no personal knowledge of them. These imbalances perpetuate conflicts between groups, which many puritans, money-chasers and violent men casually accept as inevitable and necessary.

Sensitive people experience profound suffering when considering these aspects of the human world and long for a world of peace, compassion and harmony. We experience empathy for people different from us and feel their suffering as our own. Violence sickens us, poverty of others moves us to charity, and judging others simply because they do not follow the traditions of our fathers feels false and hypocritical. Because sensitive people’s feelings and sense of self do not fit into the rules created by the traditional violent man-puritan-money-chaser culture, our sensitivity is often condemned as weakness. Yet, if sensitive people can live our ideals of compassion, peace, love, beauty and harmony, we can live a spiritual life that benefits others, even the violent men, puritans and money-chasers.

Source for Sensitive People sees not doing harm as a way of life. Unless controlled by trauma, sensitive people desire is to live peaceful lives in harmony with others and the Earth around us. Sensitive people often volunteer to help those in need, may become vegetarians or vegans, seek to preserve nature rather than destroy the Earth, tend to avoid people rather than have conflict with them, and are drawn toward lives of art, beauty, sensuality, love and reflection. Not doing harm is a desire of sensitive people and one of our greater virtues. It also has the potential to help us personally, because pairing good works with not doing harm allows our positive actions to return to us without generating conflict that interferes with the Covenant of Good Works.

Recognizing this key part of our nature, honoring it and seeking to reduce the harm we do is a key spiritual path for us, even as out-of-balance societies dominated by men lusting for power-over-others and wealth without regard for the consequences claim that violence and greed is human nature. As sensitive people, we can only excel if we attempt to make peace and live in harmony with the lives around us; it is self-destructive to us spiritually and physically to do otherwise. Seeing all life as sacred and recognizing that all harm sent out is likely to return, if not to us to our children and grandchildren, is central to freeing our lives from the perpetuation of suffering called history.

Most people have little real power in the larger human world, so it is important as sensitive people we seek to reduce the harm we do with the means we have. It is useful for us to consider how we as individuals can reach out and make peace with those who we are supposed to fear and hate; to liberate those who we have power over; to lessen our harmful impact on the natural world; and to care for ourselves, our families and our communities.

This especially means living with the understanding that as sensitive people we need to care for ourselves emotionally in ways that others may not. The face-to-face community that we live in must be supportive of our sensitivity, as the community I currently live in is. Not only must sensitive people serve our communities; in a human world dominated by violent men, money-chasers and puritans, we must find and strengthen communities that respect and honor our sensitive, life-loving natures. By doing this we strengthen our lives and the lives of those around us, as well as the future we all share.