Tag: spiritual

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!

The Four of Pentacles, New Age Capitalists, and Buddha in an F-150 Pickup Truck

A look at the New Age fascination with money.

“I wanted to be able to help people financially.  If you have enough money, you can buy health.  A rich man can always find a woman.  If you have enough money, you can buy almost anything.” – Jerry Hicks

There is a very peculiar – and very strong – connection between the New Age/New Thought movement and good old American capitalism.

The Four of Pentacles shows a guy with his feet on money, holding money, and money on his mind, and that’s a LOT of the New Age movement and its leaders.

Mike Dooley, who is best known for his credo, “Thoughts become things,” was an international tax specialist for Price Waterhouse and his primary client was Saudi Freaking Arabia.

Prior to channeling Abraham, Esther Hicks was a business accountant and Jerry Hicks was THE leading Amway salesman in the United States.

Stuart Wilde made a fortune selling Mod clothing on Carnaby Street before he took up Taoism and made another fortune selling books about how spiritual it is to make a fortune.

Even the much beloved Ram Dass was born into a very wealthy family, never experienced a day of poverty or want, franchised his spirituality very successfully and died on his massive estate in Hawaii.

I have to admit that I was somewhat puzzled by the extreme emphasis on money and material possessions when I first stumbled into the New Age movement.  I started my spiritual journey as a young kid in a midwestern state, taking LARGE amounts of LSD, reading Tarot cards, and convinced that it really was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Racism, war and poverty would be eliminated.  We’d all live in peace and harmony and people would really and truly realize that love is all that matters.  Those were my dreams when I was a young man.

Duh.  I know.  It didn’t exactly turn out that way, did it?  Still, there was a nobility and a grandeur to the dreams that I think all young people should have. 

And so, when Mike Dooley talked about his dreams as a young man, I was a bit mystified.  “I wanted to make a million bucks, own my own private plane and travel internationally with a beautiful woman by my side.”

Or Stuart Wilde’s statement that, “Money doesn’t imply that rich people are spiritual but it does infer that poor people probably are not.”

Or the (I’m sure inadvertent but telling) juxtaposition in Jerry Hicks statement, “A rich man can always find a woman.  If you have enough money, you can buy almost anything.”

Esther and Jerry Hicks probably took the wedding of capitalism to spirituality further than anyone else.  Their basic position is that our desire for material goods – for the goodies in life – is what drives us into greater and greater spiritual growth.  In their view, we have a sort of an internal wish list that’s composed of things like boats, cars, money, houses. As we tell the Universe what we want, the Universe provides all of those things on the wish list.

BUT . . . as we fulfill one wish list, another list spontaneously arises and we want even more, which the Universe provides and then we want even more, and so on. 

Oddly, that very process is exactly what the Buddha described as the source of all suffering.  It’s the constant desire for more and more and more, without the realization that more is never enough to make us happy. One wish list will always be replaced by another.

What I eventually realized is that these people – despite being rampant, unapologetic capitalists – ARE spreading a lot of spirituality through the world, no matter how paradoxical that might sound. 

Here’s the thing:  American capitalism is the dominant force in the world right now.  And the lingua franca of capitalism is M-O-N-E-Y.  

Who are the people who are going to all of the seminars and retreats of the New Age gurus and buying all of the millions of books they produce every year?  They sure as hell aren’t Buddhist monks or old hippies.  

They’re business people.  Amway salesmen.  Used car dealers.  Advertising guys.  Executive secretaries and career women.  Their dreams aren’t about world peace or brotherhood; their dreams are composed of F-150 pick up trucks, big houses, ski boats, and, yes, all the women they can buy with their fabulous wealth.

The ironic thing about it is that as they’re attending the Let’s-All-Get-Rich rallies, they’re also getting a HUGE dose of spirituality.  What’s really behind the idea of visualization and manifestation is that the physical world is not at ALL what it looks like.  We really CAN manifest whatever we want, seemingly out of nothing.  Magic really DOES exist.  There IS huge abundance in the world and we can tap into it with the power of attraction.

These are exactly the same people who love to mock California woo-woos and think that psychics and sensitives are crack pots.  But there they are, hunkered down in their split level homes in Nebraska, Utah, and Kentucky, pasting together vision boards and writing out affirmations.

LOL – which is doing magic.  Plain and simple.  If you’re trying to make something appear out of nothing using the power of your mind, you’re casting a magic spell.  Surprise!

It’s all very bizarre and puzzling, but it’s an improvement.  It’s a definite improvement.