Are you an Empath?

When I was a small baby, if my mom would get upset, I would start to cry. If she then picked me up, I would literally throw up all over her. Certainly didn't make her feel any better, but my body was physically reacting to how she was feeling.

The term empath comes from empathy, which is the ability to understand the experiences and feelings of others outside of your own perspective.

As an empath, you take it a step further. You actually sense and feel emotions as if they’re part of your own experience. Someone else’s pain and happiness becomes your pain and happiness.

Sometimes, like in my case, you also feel the physical aliments of others. You might pick up on a headache or upset stomach from a friend of family member and go through the same physical pain they are. 

Being an empath is essentially a form of clairsentience, which means 'to feel'. We begin to feel beyond self. This clair is usually the first sense to start really coming online when we step into this work. What we aren't usually then told is that being an empath isn't the end game - it's just a stepping stone.

You don't actually have to take on all of the collective anxiety and emotion that isn't yours. There is no need to hold onto that and try to figure out how to process it. And in truth, it's not usually yours to transmute. There is however a way to completely release it, sending it back to where it belongs.

Everything that you've been feeling is your senses turning on to be able to receive more external information. It was never intended for you to stay at this stage and hold onto everyone else's feelings. 

The goal is actually to see the messages your body is sending you as information. Your body is asking you to be aware, there is something to pay attention to. Something is going on, and your body is trying to show you what that is. Crazy, right?!

So then, how do you stop taking it all on?

The first step when you start to feel that pain or anxiety, is to ask, "Is this feeling actually mine?", "Is this headache mine?".

If it's not yours all you have to do is thank your body for the awareness, and release it back to where it came from. That's it. If you start to tell your body that now you have a headache you will be cementing this into your reality, and you will have the headache. Instead ask "Body, why are you choosing to feel pain right now, what are you trying to show me?". You might be surprised at how little what we feel on a day to day basis is in anyway our own. 

If you get a yes, that the pain is yours, then you may have some more questions to ask to get to the bottom of it. 

As an energy healer, I actually use clairsentience as tool in my sessions. I can feel into my client's energy field and my body shows me where they're storing emotion and akashic timelines so I can pull them out. But after the session is over, I release them, and send back everything that isn't my own. 

So the next time you start to get a headache, or start to feel anxious, stop and ask "body, is this even mine?", and if it's not, release it and see what happens next!