Tag: empaths

The Hermit, Introverted Intuitives, and Letting Our Lights Shine

How intuitives emerge from a Hermit Phase.

As an INFJ personality type, I’ve always felt a particular affinity for The Hermit card.    After all, going into Hermit mode is one of the primary defense mechanisms of intuitives and introverts.   When we feel overwhelmed or hurt, we pull up the drawbridge, slam the gate shut, and self-isolate until we heal.  Sometimes that takes a few weeks and sometimes it can turn into years.

I’ve recently begun focusing on another part of The Hermit card, though, which is the lamp that he’s holding aloft.  He isn’t just hiding out anymore – he’s illuminating a path for others to follow.

 INTUITIVES DON’T LEAD

Doing that is NOT something that highly intuitive or empathetic people are inclined to do, for a couple of reasons.  First – and most obvious – is the fact that most intuitives are also introverts.  We’re not the sort of people who want to have a great deal to do with other people, much less try to lead them anywhere. 

In a very real sense, that’s more of the path of the extrovert.  Extroverts love, love, LOVE to charge out into society, organize everything, and tell other people what they should be doing and when they should be doing it. Which is fine, because someone has to put together the Christmas parties, right?  Better them than us.

INTUITIVES AND SELF-IMAGE

Another reason that intuitives seldom assert themselves as, “leaders,” is that many of us have really rotten self-images.  We feel as if we don’t fit in, as if we’re the original square peg in a round hole.  

Some of that flows out of the fact that society is, once again, pretty much designed by extroverts.  Starting in elementary school, we’re told that daydreaming and wanting to be by ourselves is, “bad.”  How many of us received the dreaded report card that said, “Doesn’t play well with other children?”  Yikes.  

That continues into adult life, of course.  Just look at the modern work spaces, with cubicles piled on top of each other and no sense of privacy or personal space.  They’re extrovert heaven and introvert hell and if we don’t like them there must be something wrong with us.  It turns out we don’t play well with other adults, either.

INTUITIVES AND DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES

There’s a further reason for intuitive introverts having terrible self-images, which is – guess what? – our families.  When I first started digging into intuitive personality types I was astounded at the number of people who reported that they had come from dysfunctional families.  And by, “dysfunctional,” I mean families where one or both parents had serious mental issues, addiction issues, or abuse issues.  

Frequently, a part and parcel of being a terrible parent is blaming the child for your bad parenting skills.  A classic example is a parent who gets drunk, beats the hell out of the kid, and then says, “You made me do that.  If you were a better child, I wouldn’t have to beat you.”  The end result is that the kid is convinced that he or she isn’t a, “good,” person and that they’re somehow to blame for the abuse.  We go into life with the basic premise that we’re flawed and unloveable.

INTUITIVES AND COGNITIVE INTELLIGENCE

So, all of these factors (and more) lead the introverted intuitive to feel that she’s in no position to lead anyone, anywhere.  After all, we’re odd balls and we’re just not quite good enough.  But is that borne out by facts?  Consider these statistics from Susan Storm’s article in PsychologyJunkie:

Of all of the personality types, INFJs have the second highest grades in high school.

INFJs have the highest first semester grades in college and some of the highest undergraduate grades.

INFJs are among the most persistent personality types in actually finishing college.

INFJs tend to score well above average in standardized IQ tests.

INFPs and INFJs read more than any other personality types.  While the average American reads 12 books per year, INFJs average 67 books per year.

INTUITIVES AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

While some introverted intuitives are full blown empaths, ALL of them are highly empathetic.  And by empathetic, I mean that they can, “read,” another person’s emotions so deeply and so quickly that they may appear to be psychic.  

When you meet an introverted intuitive, they are instantly scanning your body language, your eyes, your facial expressions, the tone of your voice and even the clothes that you chose to wear that day.  All of this happens so rapidly that the intuitive may not even be aware that he’s doing it.  What’s more, intuitives frequently feel that everyone else must have that same level of perception, simply because it feels so natural to them.  But, no, most people don’t do that.

As Eileen McKusick, author of Tuning the Human Biofield put it, “It’s like having an antenna that goes a little higher than everyone else’s.  We pick up information that normal people don’t.”

COMING OUT OF THE HERMIT PHASE

What usually pulls introverted intuitives out of their Hermit phase is a desire to help other people.  That can manifest as personally as wanting to help a friend who’s gone through a divorce or as broadly as wanting to make some contribution to humanity as whole.  Intuitives are, after all, highly empathetic, which means that we really DO feel other people’s pain, almost as if it were our own.  

In order to help, though, we have to get rid of that old, “I’m not good enough,” self-image.  When we combine our intellectual intelligence with our emotional intelligence, we are actually extraordinarily capable of helping others heal.

It’s estimated that up to 52% of the population may fall into the introvert section of the personality types.  BUT . . . introverted intuitives are a very tiny slice of that.  Only 1 to 2% of the world population are INFJs and only 4.4% are INFPs.  We have unique gifts and unique perspectives.  We just need the self confidence to go along with those gifts. To let our lights shine on other people’s darkened paths.

Animal Companions, Heart Chakras, and Learning to Love

Our pets abilities to heal our Souls.

“I’ve known several Zen Masters and they were all cats.” – Eckhart Tolle

The image in The Fool tarot card shows a person dancing with joy at the edge of a cliff.  It’s meant to portray a Soul that’s so fully in the Flow that, even if she were to dance off of the cliff into thin air, she wouldn’t fall.  It’s a beautiful card, but we seldom take much note of the little dog that dances right along with The Fool.

In her book, “Animal Soul Contracts: Sacred Agreements for Shared Evolution”, Tammy Billups addresses the idea that animals come into our lives for specific reasons and they’re often instrumental in helping us to recover and evolve.  As she puts it, we have a Soul Contract with our animals.  We heal them and they heal us.

She tells the story of a man who was living alone when a stray dog suddenly showed up on his doorstep.  He took the dog in and they formed a strong, loving bond. The one problem was that the dog developed terrible separation anxiety and suffered greatly whenever his new owner had to leave the house.

He finally contacted Ms. Billups in the hope that she could work with the dog and help it to feel more secure.  In the course of treating the dog, though, the man had a sudden epiphany:  every relationship he’d ever had ended up with his lover walking away from him.  He had severe abandonment issues of his own and so he’d attracted an abandoned dog.  He started therapy and, as he learned to deal with his own fears of abandonment, the dog healed from its separation anxieties.

She posits that animals – and particularly that class of animals that we refer to as our, “pets,” – have a very deep and ancient Soul connection with human beings.  They not only mirror who we are, as the dog did with the young man, but they also point us toward a better way of existing in the world.

One thing that they provide to us abundantly is pure, unconditional love.  Getting that kind of love as an infant is vital to the development of a healthy, well adjusted human being.  Sadly, though, we have a lot of people in our world who were beaten more than they were hugged as children.  We emerge as adults who are convinced that (a) we can’t be loved; (b) somehow it’s our fault, rather than the fault of our crazy parents; and (c) it’s never safe to reach out to other people for love.

And then a puppy or a kitten shows up in our lives and loves us unconditionally.  The dog or the cat doesn’t give a flip about how smart we are or how we dress or how much money we have or any of the other parameters we may find in human relationships.  They just love us, totally and unconditionally, for who we are.  And, yeah, we learn that lesson on a deep Soul level:  it’s safe to love and to receive love.  They fill that hole in our hearts that’s been there since we were babies.

Another example that Ms. Billups gives is that highly empathetic people (and particularly empaths) will tend to attract highly empathetic animals.  We run into that sometimes with an animal that literally seems to be peering straight into our Souls when it looks at us.  There’s a sort of a tickle in our energy systems and a voice that says, “This dog somehow understands exactly who I am and what I’m feeling.”

The common bond is that both animals and empathetic people are primarily, “feelers,” rather than just thinkers.  We exist on that energy level of emotions and almost instantly perceive the hidden vibrations in another being.  And the, “training,” that we receive from that kind of an animal is to learn to keep our own vibrations as loving and kind as possible because they’re feeling them just as much as we are.

Which brings me to the part of Ms. Billups discussion that really blew me away, which is emotional support animals.

We’ve seen a fairly substantial increase in the presence of emotional support animals as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Many of the troops were returning home with severe PTSD and social anxiety.  Psychologists found that pairing them with animals – usually dogs – helped to soothe their nervous systems and allowed them to interact more peacefully in social settings.

It makes sense, even on a superficial level.  If we’re feeling extreme anxiety, the presence of a calm, loving animal would obviously settle us down.  Ms. Billups takes that a step further, though.

She says that some animals, especially emotional support animals, are able to hold what she calls a, “transformational healing presence.”  In other words, it isn’t just their presence as a trusted companion that’s calming down the person’s nervous system.  Rather, these are animals that are SO evolved that they’re able radiate calmness, serenity and love out of their very core.

We can actually see that with our own eyes.  The next time that you encounter someone with a support dog in a store, stop and look at the people around you.  Most of them will suddenly slow down, smile, and begin to radiate calmness of their own.  It isn’t just because they think the dog is cute, either.  Rather, they’re walking into that energy field of a healing presence that the dog is holding and it transforms them.

There’s a lesson in there for humans, as well.  It takes work – sometimes a lot of work – but we can become that same sort of a transformational healing presence in the world.  Through therapy, affirmations, meditation, and working with our heart chakras, we can nurture a core energy that’s calm, loving, and compassionate.

We don’t need to develop a philosophy or a method around that.  We don’t need to become gurus or convince anyone that they should behave in this way or that way.  All that we need to do is to build the love in our hearts and radiate it out into the world.

One of the neat things about that is, like the support dog in the store, we can step out of all of that judgment about who’s going to receive the love.  The dog isn’t standing there thinking, “Oh, that one’s a Republican – no love for him.”  Or, “Uh, oh, it’s a liberal, shut down the love.”  It’s there for anyone who wants to receive it, no questions asked.  And if someone doesn’t want to receive it, the dog doesn’t get upset or neurotic about it – she just keeps shining that light.

So I’m going to start paying a lot more attention to the animals in my life and begin actively looking for the messages that they’re bringing me.  Perhaps I’ll put my cat in my lap the next time I meditate and see if she has anything she’d like to add.  I’m guessing she does.

Empaths, Elections, and Staying True to Our Own Energy

Building effective boundaries for empaths.

If you’re an empath and you’ve been feeling kind of sick to your stomach lately, believe me – you’re not alone.  Many of us have experienced the recent election in the United States as something that makes us want to curl up in a ball under a blanket for the next four years.

It’s important for us to explore how this is affecting us from a bioenergetic perspective, though, and not just from a political or emotional perspective.  What is all of this DOING to our energy and our energy fields?

What’s one of the first words that come to mind when we contemplate being an empath?  Boundaries, right?  Boundaries, boundaries, BOUNDARIES!  

Empaths have extremely porous personal boundaries and very leaky energetic boundaries.  In a way, that’s what makes us empaths.  “Normal,” people have fairly strong boundaries and a strong sense of, “I’m over here and you’re over there and we’re two separate beings.”  For a normie, what another person is feeling stays inside of the other person, unless the other person decides to share it.  For an empath, other people’s feelings are constantly flooding into us. It’s very easy for us to merge with those feelings and mistake them for our own.

That’s one of the reasons that many empaths become codependent.  We merge so totally (and so easily) with other people’s emotions that we mistake them for our own.  If someone we’re close to is having emotional or mental problems, we think that we have to manage their drama because it feels like it’s our own. We end up taking care of their lives instead of our own.

So one of the first steps to becoming a healthy empath is to learn to identify our own energy and separate it out from other people’s energies.  We learn this at an early age and many of us become socially avoidant as a result.  We realize that if we’re around people who are angry, depressed, or violent, that we just soak all of that in and it fucks us up.  One strategy we use to deal with that is to just avoid people in general: many empaths become radical introverts.  Which works, but it’s not the BEST strategy, right?  We really can’t cover our heads with the blankets for the next four years.

Can we?  Um . . . no.  I guess not.

We have to learn to separate our energy fields in better ways.

The human energy system is really quite simple to visualize.  As Alla Svirinskaya says in her book, “Own Your Energy – Develop Immunity to Toxic Energy and Preserve Your Authentic Life Force,”  we can think of it as the physical body or core, which is surrounded by a couple of other energetic layers or bodies which are the emotional body and the mental body.  Those other bodies are usually seen as egg shaped, so we end up with a picture of it that looks like this:

For a normie, those extra layers act as a wall to keep out other people’s energy. They filter out negative energies so that they never reach the core of the physical body. For an empath, though, they act as a bridge.  Instead of blocking us off from the emotional identity of people who aren’t us, they allow it to flow right into our personal energy fields which frequently overwhelms us, leaving us confused and injured.

Most empaths are dealing with those dynamics on a daily basis.  What we forget, though, is that our personal energy fields exist inside of larger energy fields.  Any time that you put a group of people together, their personal energy fields are going to merge to some extent and generate a group energy field that’s composed of the collective emotions of all of those people. And we live within those other energy fields.

In a very real sense, we could talk about the vibrations of a particular town or a county or a state.  Those vibrations are the collective energies of the people who live in those places.  Texas, for instance, has a very different vibration than California. And, yes, countries have a collective energy field, too, which is brings us back to the topic at hand:  dealing with this election.

About 72 million Americans got together and voted for a candidate who oozes hatred and anger out of every pore of his orange skin.  THAT is the collective energy that we’re dealing with right now and THAT is what’s making us feel sick.  Put simply, there’s a whole lot of hatred and anger out there in the collective energy field and it’s seeping in to our personal energy fields.  As empaths, we are especially vulnerable to this.

So what can we do about it? Well, we need to remember that the key to being a healthy empath is to be able to distinguish OUR energy from OTHER’S energy.  We need strong boundaries and we need that sense of, “this energy belongs to me and that energy doesn’t.”

Empaths are (for the most part) kind, loving, compassionate people.  That just goes with the territory.  When you really and truly understand another human being on the deepest level, it’s very difficult to stay angry with them.  Or to hate them.  Or to judge them too harshly.

Hatred, anger and judgements are NOT our energies and that’s why they make us sick.

A good strategy for us, then, is to be very conscious of those energies existing inside our personal fields. If we start to feel really, really, REALLY pissed off at the Trumpsters, we can stop and say, “This is NOT my energy.  This is their energy.  I won’t own it.”

Another strategy is to do what Chagdud Tulku called, “antidoting.”  The antidote for hatred is love and the antidote for anger is compassion.  I’m not suggesting that we turn ourselves into human doormats for the Trumpsters.  Rather, we’re just embracing our own nature.  By embracing our own nature, by being as compassionate, kind, and caring as we can, we automatically separate OUR energy from THEIR energy and – surprise, surprise! – we’ve got boundaries.  Suddenly, they’re over there and we’re over here and we don’t have to live in their hatred or let it blend into our energy.

Shazam!

Donald Trump Voodoo Dolls, Recovering from the Election, and the Burning Times

Developing a strategy for dealing with Christian Nationalism and recovering from the trauma of the election.

Well, it’s been a few days since the United States election and many of us are still trying to get over the shock, sadness, and anger of what happened.  Still, it’s important to focus on how we’re going to survive for the next couple of years.  That’s especially true for people who are empaths and intuitives.

IT’S A GRIEF PROCESS

First of all, it’s important to realize that this is a genuine grief process.  Millions of us are experiencing this just as if something we’ve loved deeply has died.  There’s a sense that the America we believed in, the America that we thought we knew and could depend upon, is gone.

If you’ve experienced the death of someone you treasured, you know this feeling.  It’s as if the entire world has tilted off of it’s axis and nothing will ever be the same.  There is deep sadness, anger, and fear.

So the first step is to be as gentle with ourselves as we can be.  Acknowledge and honor our emotions.  Try to do all of the things that a therapist might recommend in the midst of grief.  Stay in the present moment.  Take care of ourselves physically.  Deal with the sadness without descending into depression.  Deal with with the fear without descending into anxiety. Deal with the anger without losing our compassion. 

We have a little over two months to move through the grief and heal our energy.  We need to use that time wisely.

RECOGNIZING REALITY

Healing our energy and staying positive does NOT mean being foolishly optimistic.  We can and we must contribute as much light and love to the collective energy as we can.  That doesn’t mean that we can visualize this election out of existence or immediately change things here on Earth School.  There are some harsh realities ahead and we need to be prepared for them.

IT ISN’T DONALD TRUMP

Donald Trump is a gibbering idiot.  He’s always had serious personality disorders and they’ve gotten much worse.  This is a 78 year male who is morbidly obese, in a constant state of narcissistic rage, and is suffering from dementia.  It’s obvious to any objective observer that he is not going to last for four years in the White House and will either die or be replaced because of mental incompetence.

In a word, Trump is nothing more than a figurehead.  He was used by a political group to seize power in the United States, but he is not in charge of them.  They are extremely intelligent and have planned this meticulously, so there can be no doubt that they know Trump is a paper tiger.

THE CHRISTIAN TALIBAN

The people who are really in charge of this political coup d’état are Christian nationalist extremists.  Many people refer to them as, “the Christian Taliban” because they share so many views with that group.  They are misogynistic to a point where they’re determined to turn women into breeding livestock and take away all of their basic rights.  They are racist, they are xenophobic, and they are fascists.  They have already taken over our Supreme Court and at least one branch of our legislature and now they’ve claimed the prize of the Presidency.  

These are the people who are now running our country and Donald Trump and his supporters mean nothing to them.  

THE BURNING TIMES

Wiccans and Witches refer to the Inquisition as, “the burning times,” in obvious reference to the thousands of people who were burned at the stake.  It’s important to remember that it wasn’t, “only,” witches who were massacred in that period of madness.  It was also Jews, Gypsies, Wise Women, Heretics, and anyone else who didn’t fit in to the mold of, “good Christians.”

We saw a reiteration of that in Hitler’s reign of terror.  The, “norm,” is defined very narrowly as a certain entitled class of people and anyone who is outside of the norm is, “the enemy within.”  Any time that a fascistic movement takes over the rule of a population, they will immediately start weeding out anyone who disagrees with them and they don’t care how brutal they have to be to do that.

IT’S OUR FIGHT, TOO

Am I suggesting that the Christian fascists who have taken over our country are going to start burning people in the public square?  No.  I’m simply saying that – left unchecked – they’re fully capable of it.  

If you’re a Tarot reader, or you like to toss the I Ching or play with Oracle cards, you’re on their list.  It may not happen immediately, but they WILL get around to it.  It’s in their book:

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” – Exodus, 22-18

They will first go after the marginalized minorities and the people who are powerless, but they will eventually go after us, as well.

SPIRITUAL WARFARE

I have no doubt that a certain number of my brothers and sisters here have already unpacked their black candles and voodoo dolls and are busily sticking pins into Donald Trump effigies.  That’s certainly one way to approach the coming threat and I totally understand it if that’s where you’re at.

The problem, though, is that you can’t be an empathic person or an intuitive and carry hatred in your heart at the same time.  Not for long.  It’s not our energy.  It’s not our essence at our core. It will eventually destroy who we are rather than change who they are.

A STRATEGY FOR RIGHT NOW

At this moment, there are only 4 things that we can do:

1 – Heal – Give ourselves time to heal psychologically and spiritually.  If our basic energy is fucked up, we’ll be much less effective when we need to be.

2 – Think and Ask for Guidance – We are much more creative than they are.  We need to come up with new solutions for dealing with this new reality and I have every confidence that we will.

3 – Stand Up and Speak Out – We can’t let this temporary loss silence us.  They are planning to start setting up concentration camps in our country in about two months and that’s just the beginning.  We have to speak out against every single injustice and atrocity that they have planned.

4 – Love – Yes, I understand that getting our heads and hearts into a place of love right now is extremely difficult.  Think of it as energy, though.  The collective unconscious has been filled with a flood of hatred and the ONLY spiritual antidote to hatred is love.  That doesn’t mean we need to go out and hug a Trumpster or even try to send healing to them.  It does mean that we need to generate as much love in our hearts, our auras and our environments as we possibly can as a counter force to their energy.  If they’re the disease, we’re the cure.

And finally, I would just like to say, “Namaste’” to all of you who are reading this.  That translates as, “I bow to the sacred within you.”  Let’s keep that sacred light burning bright.

PEACE AND LOVE – DAN

EMPATHS, EARTHING, AND MEDITATING CODEPENDENTS

Staying grounded as an empath.

So I just received my Amazing Hooga Earthing Mat from the very nice UPS driver and I should be incredibly spiritual after just a few days of using it.  

The basic theory behind them is that our energy systems get in a kerfuffle because we’re exposed to negative people, places, and things and, when we walk barefoot on the Earth, it restores our systems to their natural, harmonious balance.  Earthing Mats simulate that very same energy and get our auras all fluffy and pretty again.

I decided to get one because I’ve recently become aware of the fact that it is of tantamount importance for empaths to stay thoroughly grounded.  If we don’t, we start to dissolve like a piece of salt in the rain.  Earthing is a dandy way to avoid that.

EMPATHS AND EMPATHY

Being an empath is sort of hard to describe to a, “normal,” person.  First of all, of course, being an empath is not equivalent to being empathetic, although most empaths are highly empathetic.  An empathetic person might sympathize with another individual to a point where they can imagine what the other person is feeling and thinking.  Empaths actually experience what the other person is feeling in real time.

Empaths are also not psychics, although most psychics are empaths.  A psychic will focus on another person, “read,” their energy, their emotions and their thoughts, and then weave all of that into a coherent meaning, much like telling a story.  Empaths, on the other hand, are simply bombarded with information about the other person without really knowing what it all means.  We automatically glean far more details about the other person’s energetic and emotional state than what’s on the surface, but we don’t necessarily know how to put it all together.

To make it even more confusing, there isn’t just one type of empath.  There are empaths who actually hear what other people are thinking.  Other empaths feel other people’s emotions as they occur.  Some are telemetric empaths who, “get a reading,” merely by touching a piece of clothing or jewelry that someone else has owned.  A few empaths are highly attuned to the feelings of animals, but won’t pick up anything from other human beings.  Precognitive empaths may get very strong insights about what’s going to happen to a person in the future.

EMPATHS AND EGO STRUCTURE

One thing that all empaths have in common is a relatively weak ego structure.  It makes perfect sense, when we think about it.  Our ego is our sense of who we are, and the first part of knowing who we are is knowing that you’re over there and I’m over here.  Your, “you,” starts with your skin and all of your emotions, energy, and thoughts reside inside of your skin and all of mine reside in mine.  The only way that another human could possibly know what we’re thinking is if we tell them.

Which is very much not true for empaths.  For an empath, what’s going on in the other person’s mind is also going on in our minds, simultaneously with what WE’RE thinking.

All of which can make for a very confusing state of affairs, because we’re never quite sure which part of the conversation is ours and which part is yours.  For an un-grounded empath, there really ARE no significant boundaries or borders.  

There’s an old Spanish expression which goes, “Mi casa, su casa,” or, “My house is your house.”  Now change that to, “My brain is your brain,” and you get an idea of how truly weird it can be for an empath to hold a simple conversation.  Most empaths have to sit quietly after a meaningful exchange and decode exactly what thoughts came from which person.

EMPATHS AND CODEPENDENCY

One of the ways that the weak ego structure of empaths shows up is in codependent behavior.  Codependents tend to revolve around other people, much like the moon revolves around the earth.  Sometimes that’s a result of having been raised in an alcoholic or abusive family.  Sometimes it’s because we have a particular personality type.  And sometimes it’s because we’re empaths who haven’t learned to separate ourselves from other people.  

What happens with empaths is that we become enmeshed in the other person’s energy, in their thoughts, emotions, and their life patterns.  Since empaths already have a weakened sense of boundaries, they can easily dissolve into a more dominant person’s energy system.  In essence, they become overwhelmed and end up as bit players in someone else’s movie, instead of starring in their own.  They not only feel the other person’s emotions, they become the other person’s emotions.

EMPATHS AND MEDITATION

Empaths also need to be very careful about the type of meditation they practice.  

Many types of meditation are geared toward weakening the ego structure.  We’re basically trying to get past that chattering mind stream that prevents us from truly relaxing into deep meditation.  Those techniques involve what’s referred to as a, “bare awareness,” method, where we might focus on our breath or a mantra, or a candle flame, until the chattering mind calms down and recedes into the background.

BUT . . . studies have increasingly shown that meditation is highly correlated with PSI or psychic abilities.  If we tritty trot off to a meditation center for a two week retreat, we’re probably going to be more psychic coming out of it than we were going in.  For a normal person, that involves a significant decrease in ego control and, “becoming one,” with the universe and our fellow humans.

An empath, though, is already wide open and our challenge lies in shutting down some of that in-flow of information.  Deep meditation can destroy whatever barriers we’ve managed to erect and leave us completely adrift in other people’s energies.

Mindfulness meditation seems to be the, “go to,” method for empaths.  It’s a constant reminder to stay in our own bodies in the present moment and to separate from all of the drama out there.

THE EIGHT OF WANDS

Being an empath can feel very much like the Eight of Wands looks.  Wands represent ideas and this card shows inspired ideas raining down from heaven.  For an empath, though, the ideas may be far from inspired and not at all our own.  

If everyone we met was in a perfect, loving place, being an empath could be pure heaven.  We’d just walk around grinning while all of those good vibes poured straight into us. Unfortunately, that’s far from the current state of affairs and a tremendous amount of what we absorb is toxic.

The answers for empaths seem to be strengthening ego structure, not weakening it.  Building boundaries and borders, not letting them down.  And, above all, staying grounded.  Which we can begin to do by planting our tootsies firmly on the Amazing Hooga Earthing Mat.