The Gentle Rebel Podcast Where Do You Get Your Sense of Self? (with Chris Niebauer)
Where is the self when no one is thinking about it?
That was the central thread running through my conversation with Chris Niebauer, PhD, who is the author of No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up To Buddhism., and it’s a question that especially resonates for highly sensitive people who often experience the world — and themselves — very intensely.
When we stop thinking, who remains?
Chris suggests that many of life’s challenges are tied to the self-concept — the story we tell ourselves about who we are. But what if the sense of self is just that — a story, built from names, labels, and categories?
Thinking With a Both/And Approach
For highly sensitive people, the tension between self-concept and deeper awareness can be particularly pronounced. The goal isn’t to reject one side of ourselves or the other. Rather, it’s to embrace the dance between the left and right brain — between analysis and mystery, structure and flow.
Integration, not division, leads to a richer experience of life.
Split-Brain Research and Investigating Two Sides of the Mind
Split-brain research, which studies individuals whose corpus callosum has been severed, provides striking insights into how our minds process reality. It shows that the brain’s two hemispheres handle the world differently.
The left hemisphere is typically logical, analytical, and language-based. The right hemisphere leans towards intuition, creativity, and holistic understanding.
Chris recommends The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist for anyone wishing to explore this in depth.
Tools of The Thinking Interpreter
Within the left brain lies an inner interpreter, tirelessly weaving stories to make sense of self in the world. These categorical identities — the athlete, the artist, the caregiver — help us function but can also limit us if we mistake them for our true self.
Highly sensitive people often feel the sting of this more acutely, as emotional experiences become tied to rigid self-concepts.
The right brain, on the other hand, remains deeply comfortable with uncertainty. It knows that the true self is fluid, mysterious, and impossible to fully capture in thought.
Who is Left When Things Change?
If our identity is built on labels or achievements, what happens when circumstances shift?
Thinking, for all its brilliance, is not the totality of being. It is a tool for navigating the world — one that must be used wisely. Without awareness, we risk being used by the mind, becoming trapped in stories that no longer serve us.
For highly sensitive people, recognising this can be liberating.
Thinking Through the Past, Future, and Present
The left brain draws from the past to shape the future. This ability can empower growth but also fuel anxiety and regret.
The right brain is present, flowing only in the now. It doesn’t chase outcomes; it dwells in being.
If the left brain designs the tools, the right brain uses them with artistry. For highly sensitive people, cultivating right-brain presence may ease the intensity of rumination and perfectionism.
How to Engage the Right Brain Without Over-thinking It
We often believe we are thinking all the time, but moments of right-brain flow are far more common than we realise. Chris suggests a simple exercise: place reminders around your home or workspace asking, “Was I just thinking?”
When we catch ourselves in non-thinking moments, we realise that presence isn’t something we must earn. It is always available — waiting for our awareness to tune in.
You Can’t Force The Right Brain to Play With Left Brain Thinking
Trying too hard to “find flow” is itself a left-brain tactic. True flow happens when we stop striving.
Driving while singing to the radio. Walking without urgency. Creating without measurement.
Highly sensitive people, who may overanalyse experiences, can benefit from recognising that playfulness isn’t something to master. It is something to remember.
Don’t Confuse the Symbol for the Thing
Language, a left-brain marvel, enables civilisation. But it also traps us into mistaking words for reality.
Painful labels (“failure,” “burden,” “too sensitive”) only have power if we believe the symbol equals the thing.
True freedom comes when we see language for what it is: a tool, not the territory.
Embracing Non-Dualism in a Binary World
The world feels divided — good and bad, success and failure, self and other. But non-dualistic traditions remind us that separateness is an illusion.
For highly sensitive people, this perspective can soothe the sharpness of emotional highs and lows. The right brain invites us to live in mystery, where opposites coexist and categorisation is optional.
Thinking of Life as an Escape Room
Chris likens life to an escape room. Consciousness has “lost itself” in stories, but clues to the deeper truth are everywhere — in silence, in emptiness, in the moments we forget to strive.
We are not broken. We are explorers, moving through different rooms of experience, collecting pieces of understanding along the way.
Most of Everything is Nothing
Try to conceptualise space or eternity. You can’t. The left brain cannot fully grasp the infinite or the void.
Form and emptiness exist together. Without space, objects would collapse into a point. Without absence, presence would have no meaning.
Learning to honour the unseen — the gaps, the silences — reconnects highly sensitive people to a more balanced relationship with existence.
The Joy of Bad Days
We often wish others “a good day,” as if good days are the only worthwhile ones. Yet meaning often arises from challenge.
Losing something, struggling with uncertainty, facing difficulty — these moments heighten our appreciation when ease returns.
Bad days are not failures. They are part of the dance.
Memory, Meaning, and The Constant Self
The mind spins the story of a single, coherent self. Yet the reality is far more fluid.
We shift roles throughout a single day — the helper, the thinker, the dreamer, the doer. There is no single, solid self. What remains constant is our awareness.
This insight is deeply relevant for highly sensitive people who may feel destabilised by identity changes. Beneath all of it, there is a steady witness.
Playing With The Sense of Self in Story
When we loosen our grip on self-identities, a playful spirit emerges. We can enjoy stories without mistaking them for absolute truth.
Chris reminds us: suffering often arises not from stories themselves, but from holding them too seriously.
Playfulness invites freedom.
Mind 2.0 (Human Creativity and Artificial Intelligence)
As artificial intelligence surpasses human strategic thinking, we must reimagine what it means to be human.
Our deepest value may lie not in thinking better, but in feeling, intuiting, creating, and experiencing the mystery beyond computation.
Highly sensitive people, who naturally tune into subtlety and complexity, are uniquely positioned to lead this exploration into the realms AI cannot touch.
Highly Sensitive People and the Sense of Self
Chris’s reflections offer a profound invitation: to live beyond rigid self-stories, to honour mystery over mastery, and to embrace being over constant striving.
For highly sensitive people seeking meaning, balance, and connection, the journey home lies not in becoming something, but in remembering what was never absent.
Music Inspired By The Conversation
After I finished speaking to Chris, I recorded the piece of music that ends the episode. It is inspired by the emptiness seen in images produced by AI. It feels mournful to me. The lack of any sense of self or subjective being.