Further, spiritual wisdom leads us to live "in the world but not of it," which means that even as the human side of us is experiencing something intense, there is a spiritual part of us that is just calmly observing. This means the more centered we grow in our higher selves, the more we tend to embody a calm equilibrium at all times.

When we grow to understand that life is just a game - a world of illusions that is just a tiny fraction of our existence - it kind of takes the sting out of situations that used to get us all riled up. While this calm higher perspective empowers us to create whatever we want, suddenly we don't want anything anymore - we're content with where we are and mildly curious about what life will send our way next.

So as we move into higher levels of spiritual awareness and wisdom, feeling mellow is perfectly normal. When we eventually shed all desire, we move beyond the vibrational range of the physical, after which we incarnate on other planes.

It sounds like you're more blocked than enlightened here, however, and there are some healing processes that may help you.

Many highly sensitive people will try to shut down in order to protect themselves from overwhelming energies, or to avoid feeling humiliated or rejected for being different. When this becomes a habit, or when it happens as a result of some traumatic event, the emotional body can get squeezed to the side, which can lead to the emotionally dead feeling you describe.

We have seven spiritual bodies that correspond to the seven main chakras. Moving out from the physical we find the etheric, which is like a blueprint for the physical, and then the emotional body. If we feel overwhelmed or burned out due to high emotional sensitivity, the emotional body can get shut down or pushed aside. This is especially common in natural empaths - people who tend to feel others' emotional energy as their own. These folks may unconsciously block certain chakras in order to try to prevent discomfort.

This dynamic is illuminated in common phrases such as when we say that a person is beside himself, out of it, shut down, closed down, out of his mind, turned off, etc. Some people even say that someone is close-hearted.

By contrast, being open means being receptive to the energies all around us, which can be very overwhelming, especially for sensitive people. We all filter energies to a certain degree, except when we're feeling blissful and totally open, such as when we are in a very peaceful place where the energies flowing in are gentle and pleasant.

The more we open up our chakras to process more energy, the more alive we feel, the healthier we are, and the more fully we can live life. In fact, when we close down or block our chakras, we may eventually experience depression and dis-ease.

When people feel emotionally shut down, the chakras affected are typically the second (sacral) chakra, which governs the emotional body; the solar plexus chakra through which we sense things in our guts; and the heart chakra, through which we love others. So in closing down emotionally, you would indeed close down your intuition or gut instincts.

While it's natural to try to block ourselves from unpleasant experiences in the future, our ultimate goal is to learn that there is nothing to really fear. By shedding the fears behind our efforts to emotionally protect ourselves, we naturally rise above the extreme highs and lows we used to experience. However, when we're centered in a higher perspective, we don't feel depressed and indifferent but peaceful and content. (This is how you can determine whether what you're experiencing is a result of spiritual growth or a symptom suggesting that emotional healing is needed.)

If you determine that you're blocked, there are many things you can try to affect emotional healing. I recommend you begin with hypnotherapy. If I were working with you, I would regress you back to when you used to feel intense emotions and from there, ask your subconscious to take us to the events, impressions, beliefs or decisions that led you to disconnect emotionally. This would both reconnect you with your emotional body and guide you through the process of melting the frozen energies blocking your emotional flow now. Through hypnotherapy, you can also reprogram any fearful, limiting beliefs that led you to try to protect yourself in the first place.

If you are blocked, it's because on some level, you don't believe that the world is a safe place to be emotionally open. Often it is fear of rejection or humiliation that leads us to shut down, which sounds right given what you wrote about people acting like you were crazy. By healing those old emotional wounds and updating your belief system as well as embracing new spiritual growth, you can leave the pain of the past behind and shift into a much higher level of experience.

In addition to hypnotherapy, you might try yoga, which will help you melt energetic blocks so you relax and balance all aspects of your being. You can also see an energy healer for help with releasing blocks, or a shaman for something called soul retrieval. We all tend to distance ourselves from emotional pain by repressing or denying it, which causes parts of ourselves to "leave." One classic symptom of soul loss is the sense of feeling emotionally shut down that you describe. In soul retrieval, a shaman engages with your soul on a higher level in order to retrieve and reintegrate aspects of your being that left when you experienced some trauma.

Finally, ask your own inner being what you need to do to feel better and then trust what you receive. One of the fastest ways to get past our fears of rejection and to reawaken our intuition is to do something "crazy." You clearly have some old fear of being labeled crazy, and have disconnected from your intuition. If you relax and tune in and then act on whatever so-called crazy ideas come to you, you can quickly melt through those blocks and reconnect with your inner guidance system. Similarly, when people feel emotionally dead inside, there is nothing like a true crisis to wake them up. I'm not suggesting you put yourself in danger or wreck your life, but a big spiritual adventure - something way beyond the realm of what you would normally do - may prove just what you need to feel emotionally reborn.

- Julia