Resources for Empaths, Highly Sensitive People & Energy Healing
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The definition of a highly sensitive person is someone who experiences acute physical, mental, or emotional responses to stimuli.
An Empath is someone who understands the mental or emotional states of others in a way that defies conventional science and psychology.
Empaths have the ability to sense the feelings, thoughts, and energies of people, plants, animals, places, or objects. In addition to sensing, Empaths absorb the energy of those around them. Empaths often experience stress or illness if they are bombarded by too many negative emotions. Empaths can also use their abilities to help others by imagining themselves in someone else’s situation and connecting with them on a deep level.
Being highly sensitive comes with a variety of strengths and advantages. At times, it can also lead to overstimulation and exhaustion…. eventually becomes too much to handle in their physical bodies, and the stress may manifest itself as exhaustion, anxiety, depression, or physical illness. eelings and sensations, stimulus, from outside starts to feel like a blaring foghorn that makes our heads ache, our bodies want to recoil, and our energy deplete.
I have special interest in this area being a high level of sensitivity overwhelm
A lot of the clients who come to me are sensitive - people who have a gift for intuitive insight into the feelings of others. Basically, they can feel what others are feeling. Often, they come to me with one or more physical ailments, or anxiety or depression. Usually, it's related to their being an empath, and to the wear and tear on their energy, psyche and body that happens if this intuitive gift isn't managed or taken care of properly.
They are what happens to a body that experienced too much when younger (or in generations past) and did not have the space, time and support to process that “too much” so that it could be integrated and turned into wisdom.
This deep understanding of and insight into other peoples' emotions is an intuitive or psychic gift. It's a beautiful intuitive facility to have, although often people with this ability don't even realize that it's a gift. They think it's normal. But if you're an empath, you're wired differently than others. It's truly a special capability. Because in many cases your ability to sense the emotions of others can wear you out.
First, recognize that you are one,
Second, learn some strategies and skills. self-care strategies for keeping yourself in good shape energetically, physically and emotionally.
The trick is not to shut out the energy of everyone and everything else. Rather, you want to learn to be in control of what you let in, instead of being at the mercy of your sensitivities. For many people, one of these techniques will work better than the other. Try them both and see which feels best.
The Zip Up This is a technique from Donna Eden.
Christopher Wallis - psychic protection
master contract
Breathing techniques
Hara
Sensitivity as a superpower and aliveness — a birthright within us all. Esp love the part about trauma and not just letting the label of “empath” or label of anything really, keep us from being with one another in a deeper way. So many are carrying around deep grief, and feeling overwhelmed by all the “crazy” around them. I love the curiousity in the questions, they help me feel safe and loved to explore deeper feeling states so that there can be not only connection but CONCERN for ourselves and one another. Again, deep work to get closer in a moment of intensity or challenge as opposed to seperate. Love this part... “notice if what you are naming as being an empath isn’t maybe about the impact of trauma. Highly activated trauma is like a parallel stream to feeling the deep life connection of all things. Highly activated trauma means that we can get quickly overwhelmed by the stimulus of other people’s feelings.
” Why is so important for counselors/teachers/healers to keep looking in the mirror. It can get super sticky if we aren’t willing I definitely see how this term is used self-righteously. The thing that I wonder though, is that we do know that people have differing levels of vagal tone which does cause some to have thinnner skin and therefore feel more intensely, get their nervous system thrown off kilter more easily, and so there is a spectrum of sensitivity. Western society seems to be more damaging to those with lower vagal tone and more practice and vagal toning is necessary. I’m guessing she isn’t equating sensitivity and empathy, but this almost feels like she’s throwing the baby out with the bath water and I imagine there’s more to explore here. I DO however agree that people use their perceived special abilities in a capitalistic way and I’m thrilled she brought that up. Great article to begin an important conversation! hank you so much for you response. I relate a lot. It’s really important to understand our own frame. And I do believe vagal tone is a hugely important thing to look at b/c lower vagal tone leaves us more susceptible. In indigenous cultures, each person was seen for their own unique constitution and gift.
It’s important not to forget that we are all in fact unique. But that never means that anyone is above anyone else or anyone’s gifts or more valuable than anybody else’s. That’s the part I feel she left out. I work with a lot of highly sensitive people and they tend to feel incredible shame because of their unique constitution. I think the author, though, to be fair, is talking more to the people that elevate their “special abilities”. And that is very valid. And important!
Given that it is ONE consciousness playing, being an “empath” is the norm rather than an exception. And the way the word is used to glorify certain abilities is what is unhealthy. It is just another tool the separate mind/body complex uses to maintain separation. The author is correct in concluding that when the “empath” is overwhelmed, drained etc by sensing “others’ stuff, it is their own unfinished business which if they healed- the “other” would automatically heal or at least they would be in a more optimal place to facilitate any healing. A true empath knows there are no others.
Sensing the feelings, the life force, the thoughts, the pulse of another person, another relative like a plant or an animal, is not supposed to overwhelm you on a daily basis. It’s also not supposed to be something that gives you the power to “know more” than those around you. It’s not supposed to be a burden, a drain, or an insight that makes you special in the most capitalist sense. It’s just tuning in to a part of life that is always there.
We don’t and won’t all do it the same way but sensing these things is just another way of being alive.
How to be - ethics - We were not raised to be in right relationship with life around us, to feel that deep underlying connection, and to then know how to be polite and respectful with those lives we feel.
Most of us reading this article were not brought up with cultural practices and protocols for dealing with the information that comes from life around us. Sometimes it is overwhelming. Sometimes we do get a download that can knock us off centre. But this is not the norm of it, this is the sometimes.
. Dear beloveds who call yourself an empath and feel it as something that takes energy away from you, that makes you exhausted and unable to be in the chaotic mix of real people in real time, whether with a group or just one:
notice if what you are naming as being an empath isn’t maybe about the impact of trauma. Highly activated trauma is like a parallel stream to feeling the deep life connection of all things. Highly activated trauma means that we can get quickly overwhelmed by the stimulus of other people’s feelings. Literally, our emotional physical selves are full. We are carrying too much around inside and so we can’t take on anything else.
traded as a kind of elitism. There is something so dangerous about turning this experience of connection into something fragile, something that has to be protected, the overwhelmed deeply spiritual empath in our midst. There is nothing unusual about feeling the suffering (or glory) of another life. This is how we are designed, to live in intimate relationship with all life around us. This doesn’t mean we are naturally kind or caring or attentive to that life. It only means that we are designed to be intimate with other life forms. To be attuned to them. To feel them, their joy and suffering, their presence and absence. This is why we have to learn ways to hold this information, to be in right relationship to the life around us.
This is also why we have to heal, to get the support we need to integrate the trauma we carry so that we are not in a feedback loop of loud noise on top of loud noise that means, in order to survive, we have to separate ourselves from the rampant expression of life. gainst the awareness and knowing..
Please don’t call yourself an empath as though this makes you different from others around you. Instead, notice that you are feeling the life around you. And then ask, for what purpose am I feeling this? What are the stories and projections I am bringing to these feelings? If I am overwhelmed by what I am feeling, why am I overwhelmed? What is not finished inside of me, what needs care and support, so that I can come back to sensing life around me as a gift rather than an act of harm?
intensity of what they experience from other people makes it difficult to be in large groups. I had heard this before and so I asked them if we could go deep with this, rather than just assume that this was some essential quality they had, something that would not change. They said yes and so I asked questions. They listened to their body. They listened to these sensations and feelings that they were picking up from others and what came up as they sat there was grief. Deep gut wrenching grief, about their life and the lives of their people and about the lives around them.
We all need learning to be in right relationship to this mix of life.
As long as we can not feel/sense/be these things, assume that this connected sensing is our normal and teach each other the protocols and processes for being in respectful relationship with it, then we will continue to destroy the earth that is here, even as the earth is, without confusion, feeling us, responding to us, sensing us, even when we can’t do the same in return.
I want to add something to this piece. I want to remember right now and in front of you, every single person I know and don’t know who already knows what is written here and lives with the impact of severe trauma and/or is neurodivergent. I know that this means the experience of connection is one that does and can cause pain. That literally too much sensation and stimulation, too much connection, can cause harm. I see you within this story, too