Empathic Abilities
All of the clair abilities can be taught and enhanced through training. Empathic ability, however, cannot. It appears that one is either born an empath or not, though certainly everyone is capable of feeling empathy and sympathy for people according to their situation. Feeling empathy, though, is not the same as being an empath.
Empaths are immersed in the others’ emotional fields, so at times they can feel like they are swimming in an ocean of feelings in a crowded room. It takes time for most empaths to realize that this is not something that others have experienced their whole lives.
When empaths enter a room, they are surrounded by and float in a field of the energy of everyone present. It’s like swimming through energy, and the more people in the room the thicker it feels, especially if anyone is upset and emotional. The difference in emotional intensity can range from feeling like being in crystal clear, pure water to drowning in the angry seas or sinking into quicksand.
If unaware of being surrounded in this energy, empaths will just feel overwhelmed by whatever emotion others are expressing. They may find themselves becoming sad or excited very quickly. Empaths truly experience the highs and lows in life, though many times the emotions are not their own but the rising tide of energy expressed by those around them.
It is extremely helpful for an empath to understand what empathic psychic abilities are and how they work. Otherwise, empaths will continue to pick up and absorb this energy, which can affect them in a negative fashion and cause them undue stress.
Many empaths don’t know they are one. They just feel overwhelmed being around other people, and some try to escape the overwhelming emotions by self-medicating using alcohol, drugs, and prescription drugs to treat anxiety. (Talk to your healthcare provider if you are struggling to deal with mental health challenges.)
Are you an empath? Empaths have intuitive abilities with the added feature of being very sensitive to the emotions of others or even emotional energy that has been trapped in a room or building.
The following questions are indicators of empathic ability. If you answer yes to any or all of them, you may be an empath.
• Do people open up to you everywhere you go and consider the space around you safe? Are you often described as a people magnet? Are animals and babies naturally drawn to you, and do they relax in your company? Wherever you go, are people attracted to you? Do they feel comfortable around you, like they know you, even when it’s the first time they’ve met you? After an encounter with an empath, most people walk away surprised to have found themselves opening up and sharing their deepest thoughts, fears, and secrets to this stranger. When they are done, they walk away in a daze, shocked that they opened up in this way but feel better by having done so.
• Do you have more intense emotional reactions to television shows and movies than others who are watching the same shows? Does watching or reading the news depress or overwhelm you at times? It’s very difficult for an empath to see anyone or anything being hurt, and it doesn’t have to be in person. Seeing a photo of cruelty or watching it portrayed in movies or on television is very painful to someone with empathic abilities.
• Do you tend to have a wide variety of friends from all walks of life, being able to see the good in each of them, even when their lifestyles do not match yours?
• Do you tend to describe experiences by how they feel, such as a blue Monday or a snuggly Sunday morning? Do you “feel” fall coming or sense “magic” in the air?
• Do you develop stomachaches or other flu-like illnesses that come on quickly yet don’t have traditional accompanying symptoms, like a high fever? Have you been around someone who is ill and began to take on their pains, aches, or illness out of sympathy? Empaths can develop physical manifestations of others’ illnesses if they are not careful about what they absorb. They can also become ill often if they are not able to release the toxic energy from others that they are absorbing.
• Do you wake up feeling great, head out to run errands, and find that you feel exhausted and overwhelmed after only a short time of being at the mall or in a crowded store? Or do you find that you’ve been out somewhere and now find yourself anxious, worried, or depressed, but when you stop to ask yourself why, you cannot find the source or reason?
• Empaths aren’t always psychics, but they all have some level of intuitive ability. Are you very attuned to déjà vu, and do you have very detailed and emotional dreams? Empaths can sense at times that something bad may be about to happen to a person, but they don’t always have precognition of what actually will occur.
• Do you know what people are truly feeling, even when they are trying to hide it? Can you feel their emotions and the truth of what they are saying, even when they are lying to you or others directly? Most empaths have to deal with knowing the true intention and energy that others are emitting, even though it may be hidden under a façade.
• Have you been described as a healer in some way? Some empaths are naturally drawn to physical healing, while others do what is described as soul healing. Empaths have the ability to take away pain in one form or another. Trained empaths know how to do this without causing harm to themselves. Untrained empaths often take on the pain, causing themselves undue stress and trauma.
• Are you sensitive to your environment, whether it’s crowded or not? For example, I can pick up on the local consciousness energy at 5 p.m. on a Friday when the rush of excitement is released as people rejoice when leaving work for the weekend. Does having a routine at work feel imprisoning to you? Most empaths tend to be drawn to more creative lines of work in which they can create their own hours and schedules. Empaths have to feel free and don’t do well in confining environments or in a strict routine. It’s difficult for them to work in a cubicle all day or in a restrictive environment. They learn better by absorbing and feeling the experience rather than by rote memorization. They are the true definition of a free spirit.
• Do you find that some places have bad energy, while others are warm and welcoming? Are you uncomfortable staying in a place that doesn’t feel right to you, when others are not bothered by the energy of a space at all?
• Are you sensitive to used furniture, antiques, and estate jewelry? Most empaths can sense the energy in tangible items like this that hold a lot of energy absorbed from years in a home or being worn by the owner. Do cluttered spaces bother you and make it hard for you to focus and work? Most empaths need calm and serene surroundings in order to recharge their energy.
• Is your alone time important to you? Do you feel the need to pull away and be reclusive for a while in order to recharge your batteries and feel restored? Empaths find great solace in nature of some kind, whether it be the beach, mountains, or forest. They might also need time alone doing one of their favorite activities in order to recuperate after being in large crowds.
• Does seeing people unhappy really bother you? No one likes to see another person suffering or feeling unhappy, but empaths feel physical pain as a result. If they can do something to help the person, they feel compelled to do so. If empaths have an interaction with a person and feel that they caused the person suffering or discomfort in some way, it haunts empaths until they can find a way to make the person feel better.
• Do you have a deep understanding and compassion for humanity? Do you understand that many times when people act out in a negative way, they are expressing their deepest fears? This understanding allows you to continue to love the person while not approving or accepting their actions. The empath understands that while the person is directing angry energy toward the empath or another person, the energy is truly a reflection about what the person is experiencing internally.
How to Process
and Release Empathic Feelings
Empaths feel the emotions of every person they are around. They may not even like the person whose emotions they are feeling or care what is going on in a particular circumstance or argument. They may completely disagree with the person who is emitting energy, but they still feel all of the associated emotions. They don’t have a choice to care or not to care, though in general most empaths are very sympathetic and caring and deeply want to help people feel better.
People with empathic ability seem to be born with it rather than gaining it during their life. It appears that having an empathic nature is some type of genetic trait that some people carry. Born an empath, I found the flood of others’ emotional energy very difficult to deal with as a child; it was overwhelming to discern which emotions belonged to others and which were mine. Over time, I would compare people’s energy emissions to different types of music. For example, my mother was an artist and very emotional person, and I always felt all of her emotional intensity both around her and in our home. When she would be very excited, the energy would burst out of her in high notes, like jazz. On the other end of the spectrum, my grandmother was a very low-energy person who rarely showed any emotion. Her energy would play out more like a somber tone by Beethoven during a discussion.
Can you see how clairaudient ability is experienced in almost all psychic abilities? As an empath, I sense the different type of music expressed energetically by each person through their aura. I’ve often been able to accurately describe which people in a group get along better than others by tuning in to the sound vibration and musical emanations expressed in their aura and seeing which two or three people are harmonizing to the same type of musical notes. In the description of my mother and grandmother above, their energetic vibrations were extremely different. My mother and grandmother had a great deal of difficulty communicating with each other; they didn’t seem to understand each other’s language. Their harmonic energy vibrations were so opposing that it was hard for them to understand what the other person was saying or feeling. It’s like introducing a hard-core heavy metal music lover to someone who loves country ballads. Energetically, they don’t often see eye to eye on things, and this can cause conflict. I often explain this in consultations with clients when they ask me why they have difficulty connecting and communicating with another person in their life. If the person does not find a way to speak the other person’s language, conflict becomes the standard protocol in that relationship.
The most interesting thing about being an empath is that you gain a deeper understanding of each person as you see how they process thoughts and information emotionally. You see the buildup of emotions of people who tend to fly off the handle or have a short fuse. You can feel it, and if you can see auras, you see the energy buildup in the emotional body of the aura. If a person doesn’t like to express their emotional feelings to others, you can see or sense the wall as it goes up and they attempt to block their emotions from being released outward, going cold as they freeze their emotional energy and lock it down inside.
You also feel every emotion that a person is experiencing, whether or not they are outwardly expressing it to others. So in a room of people, you feel the man who is seething with anger before it bubbles outward from him, and you can literally feel the woman who has poisoned herself with jealousy, who hasn’t yet shared the ugly thought that she plans to say to hurt the other woman in the room. You see and sense these emotions around each person you are around.
When these emotions are directed toward you personally, they literally cut to the core of your being, and you experience a deep emotional and psychic pain.
Many empaths find it difficult to be in hospitals, where there is so much pain and grief. Empaths are born with these traits, and since most of their parents are unaware of why their child is so hypersensitive, they don’t receive any training on how to handle this type of psi ability. They also have very little understanding of or compassion for how overwhelming it must be to feel emotions at such an intense level. Those who don’t experience this kind of feeling have a difficult time understanding or sympathizing with what an empath experiences on a daily basis.
When I was a young empath, I could enter a room of people and read the temperature of the room by the energy that everyone was giving off. I could tell if my father was soon to be erupting in anger and when my mother was in a state of high anxiety. The energy would wash over me and enter my auric field, where I would experience the emotions that both were emitting. Because I didn’t know how to release this energy or what to do with it, it would stay in my auric field. I would gather too much and end up with a stomachache.
Holidays with large gatherings of family were the most challenging. Invariably, I would be so overwhelmed as I psychically picked up all this energy without releasing it from my physical and aura body that I would become physically ill every Christmas. I would exhibit flu-like symptoms and have an upset stomach to the point of vomiting. My mother would put me in bed, lamenting that she couldn’t understand how I could get so ill every Christmas.
Over time, I developed the only coping skill that I subconsciously knew: creating a wall of energy around myself where I did not allow all of my energy to be accessed. I retreated behind the wall, keeping some of my emotional energy safely tucked away and allowing the wall to block some of the intense energy bouncing around me.
There were times when the emotional intensity of everyone was so high that I wanted to leave the room. Since I was not always able to escape the situation, I learned how to put up a block around myself so that I wouldn’t have to feel overwhelmed by the energy pinging around me.
In my late twenties, I finally learned how to properly raise and lower my auric shield so that I could learn how to deal with the challenges of the world as an empath.
What It Feels Like to Be an Empath
Emotions are like water. Water is a strong force of nature that can do great damage at times. Think of a giant tsunami wave smashing against the shore. Strong emotions hit empaths just like a giant wave that can emotionally knock them down.
Seawalls are built to protect against waves, but keeping a wall up all the time takes a great amount of energy. It is necessary to do this sometimes, such as when you are under a psychic attack and someone is directly sending negative energy to you. It is important at those times to put up a wall of energy that will bounce the negative energy back to the sender or stop and zap it into nothingness.
Sometimes as a psychic you need your energy fields to be open wide, allowing you to get a clear read on what other people are emitting energetically. During these times, you will feel all of the emotions in the area, and it’s important to be able to discern which emotions belong to you and which you are picking up from other people. It’s a trade-off as you learn when to open the floodgates and when to close the locks and allow very little to filter in during very emotionally intense situations.
One fascinating thing I’ve noticed in my years as an empath is that being around rain blocks this ability for a while. It has to be an intense rainfall, coming down hard. Something about this intense natural energy cleanses away the emotional energy from the area and creates a neutral zone during the time of the rain. This can be a very relaxing and restorative time for empaths. I love a good rainfall, and during a storm, I soak in the energy.
Those of you who are empaths know exactly what I’ve been describing in this chapter, and I’m sure the journey has been much the same for you.
As an empath, you’ve probably already learned how to put up some kind of shield to protect yourself when the energy overload is too high. If you’re looking for ways to release the energy you pick up on a daily basis, you’ll find tips on how to remove this energy from your auric field in chapter 8, “Psychic Self-Defense and Cleansing,” and in my book The Awakened Aura.
Benefits of Being an Empath
As an empath, you see firsthand that your thoughts are not hidden. Rather, they are reflected all around you in your life, and this universal law applies to everyone.
Everything you think is reflected outward and then created in your life. Each person creates their reality in some part. If you are displeased with any portion of your life, the awareness quickly sinks in that, according to this principle, you have taken part in creating and attracting this series of events into your life.
This concept forces the awakened person to take a deeper look at their life and consider what part they played in each aspect of it. This is challenging from the perspective of the ego, through which we’ve wanted to believe that everything that we have perceived as bad was done or caused entirely by others. We all want to believe that we are good people who do no harm to ourselves or to others. To accept the idea that some of the negative events occurring in our lives are a direct reflection of our thoughts, words, actions, and deeds is to embrace the fact that no one can “make” us angry. Instead, we make the choice to be angry, and no one can make us happy or sad. Rather, we choose to have this emotion.
In some cases, we have brought this karma back with us from a previous incarnation and thusly have attracted these experiences to us again in order to learn and master this lesson and move forward.
When this is understood, it becomes pointless to keep up a wall in an attempt to avoid the experiences and difficulties of life. They are created to help you to continue on your path of development and evolution.
Empaths provide compassion and understanding to others, with the wisdom that this experience will soon pass, which allows the soul to be free to move on to new experiences.
As an empath, you can show others that each experience, no matter how unpleasant, does eventually end, and it ends more quickly when people work through their fears so that they are ready to see and speak their truth.
Ask the person you are interacting with to consider examining their thoughts and beliefs about a certain aspect of their life if they dislike it. Then ask them to make a change in this area and begin by changing their thoughts about this experience.
Transforming an experience begins with changing one’s mindset. The person will need to embrace the understanding that each person is in charge of their emotional well-being and how they choose to be affected by each person and situation. We do not have to be who we once were—we can choose to begin anew today.
We are the creators of our destiny, and this choice to be a conscious creator occurs every moment of our lives. It is our decision as to whether it will be done consciously or unconsciously. When this is understood, people can no longer place all the blame on other forces for the situations surrounding them.
To be conscious creators, we must take a deep look at our lives and then begin to change the picture with an overhaul and reconstruction of our minds. This in turn helps us move our focus from preoccupations like worry, fear, stress, and anxiety onto positive energy vibrations of love, peace, joy, and abundance.
As an empath, you can easily sense when others have made this shift. It shows in their aura, and you feel it in their energy frequency. Helping guide someone to understand what is happening to them emotionally and then assisting them in making this shift in their thinking is invaluable in many ways. This is one of the greatest gifts of a person with empathic ability.
This is the path not just of empaths but of all people with psychic ability, as they use the information they are given to help people see what is occurring around them and how they can move forward to have a better outcome in the future.
Exercise: Use Empathic Power
to Dissipate Negative Energy
If you are an empath, it’s important to get trained so that you know how to deal with and make use of your abilities. What I’d like to share with you now is a technique that I was taught for diffusing the emotional energy in the room when needed, to the benefit of everyone. If you are in a room where a situation is escalating into a tense situation, as an empath you can help diffuse this energy and slow things down.
When you sense this energy building up, step to one of the corners of the room. Relax your body and mind and take three big breaths. Breathe in to the count of three, hold the breath to the count of three, and then release the breath to the count of three.
Then visualize a white-light protective field of energy forming around your body. (More information on creating this field can be found in chapter 8, “Psychic Self-Defense and Cleansing.”) Call in your guides and ask for divine order, divine wisdom, and divine guidance in this endeavor. See the white-light protective field of energy turn into a giant bubble that forms completely around your body. This bubble is filled with the pure white light. As it forms, visualize the color gold also adding into the mix in order to purify the energy even further.
Then visualize your white-light energy field expanding widely as it fills with the magnificent pure, bright, white light intermingled with the warm, gold color. As the force-field bubble builds around you, the glow emits around your body. Now take your right hand and pull some of the light energy from the bubble. Hold it in your right hand. The bubble in your hand is filled with warm white and gold light. Release this bubble from your hand and let it float around the room. As it moves around the room, it grows larger. The light is so bright and strong that its warmth begins to fill the room, and each person is affected by the pure, higher love of this light. The light allows each person to relax in the warm flow of this energy. The bubble warms the room, which then gathers and holds the energy vibrations as they fill the bubble. If people still need to emit their emotions, they are able to do so in a safe environment in this light. By releasing their emotions, they are also able to get the energy off their chest, as the saying goes.
This bubble will typically last between five and fifteen minutes, depending on how strong you make it. When it dissolves, it carries away most of the energy with it, leaving the room feeling a bit deflated afterward. It’s important to remember that you must release the bubble from your field. You don’t want to absorb this energy directly.
This way, instead of polluting the energy and vibration in the room with anger or forceful energy, the people in the room are releasing the energy and allowing for some healing to come in around their emotional field.
This is the superpower that empaths have. They are able to gather and transcend emotional energy. Empaths, when properly trained, can harness the energy others express, hold the energy in a white-light field of energy, allow people to express their emotions, release the pain and fear creating the emotion, and then allow the emotional outbursts to be released gently. It dissipates into small droplets and is absorbed into the earth.
Exercise: Advanced Negative Energy Dissipation
Here’s the advanced technique of what to do after you’ve filled the room with the pure white light. You should only try this technique after mastering how to work with all of your auric fields and how to work with energy in this capacity. Otherwise you risk taking on too much energy in your fields.
As you build the white-light energy field around yourself, release part of it as a cloud, formed from the brilliant, white light tinged with gold. This cloud is filled with charged energy that you direct to capture any emotions that are headed your way or zinging around the room. The energy acts like a magnet, attracting the distribution of emotions. Once this energy has been gathered from whomever is releasing it, hold the cloud, which has an extended cord tethered to your white-light energy protective field, next to you. This cord is one that you create in the etheric realms. It is not connected directly to your body, and you do not receive any energy from this cord into your fields.
Continue to expand your white-light energy field into the room, sending vibrations of warmth, love, compassion, and understanding. This settles the energy vibration in the room, which allows anyone in the room to feel comfortable to now open up and share what has been troubling them.
Sometimes when a person releases a strong negative emotion, it is directed at a person in a subconscious attempt to poison and hurt them with the energy. When this angry energy is released and hits its target, it also boomerangs back to the person who sent it out.
So the person who explodes and releases this anger sends it out like a lash of lightning to strike another. The emotion rumbles out like hot lava pouring around them. The energy leaks out and fills all of their energy fields in the aura, causing more pain to their emotional, mental, and spiritual fields. Not only is the angry person hurting their target with their angry energy, they are also causing further damage to themselves.
When an empath has been properly trained and knows how to capture this energy explosion when it occurs, it has two side effects. First, the energy does not hit the person it was directed at, so this person does not feel the intense effect of an energy blast. Second, the energy blast does not return to the person who released it, so it no longer returns to damage them further. Instead, it is held in a cloud of white light, where it is being transmuted into small particles of energy until it becomes so benign and impotent that it falls out of the cloud and drifts down into the earth, where it is easily absorbed.
When empaths know how to do this, they can then be open to the person who released the energy if this person wants to talk about it. Because this person has not received the backlash from the energy they sent out, they will be experiencing a new empty feeling.
They are now in touch with a deeper part of their soul that is not masked by the anger. This is an important moment, as it gives this person the opportunity to truly release a deeply seated emotion.
If empaths decide to capture this energy in a cloud, they must do so with the understanding to be prepared to spend the necessary time with this person to help them through their awakening of being back in touch with their emotions. They also should be prepared to help the person get counseling if needed, depending upon the situation. This is not a beginner type of situation; advanced training on how to create this cloud and release the energy should be taken.
There are also times when the person is so volatile or damaged emotionally and mentally that it is not appropriate to attempt to communicate with them or engage with them in any way. Each situation must be handled according to careful psychic discernment and only after years of training in this technique.
In many cases, an empath does not know the angry or emotional person and is just in a public space with people being highly volatile and emotional, such as a work situation or a party.
Here, empaths can create the same white-light protective shield and create a filter around themselves in front of this shield. Think of it as a window with a screen.
The screen allows air to flow in through the window while keeping out pests. As empaths move around the room, they are able to pick up on the energy being emitted from each person, like air through the screen, but the filter blocks the larger, more intense emotions from being able to move past the filter and hit the empath directly.
This filter can be kept up for hours, though not days, and it does take some energy to do so. Empaths will need to rest afterward and recharge their energy, which is done by having some peaceful time alone doing what they enjoy doing most.
After spending time in a heavy, emotional situation, take a shower to remove any sticky or residual negative energy, breathing deeply to release the energy. Then visualize it going down the drain with the water. If it has been a very trying experience, you may wish to begin with a salt bath first, as salt will immediately absorb and remove the negative residue.