Your Empathic Gifts: The Clairs
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
henri j. m. nouwen, the road to daybreak
When he was just five years old, my youngest son crept into bed with me late one evening.
“Hey, Gabe,” I whispered, making room for him, knowing this would be a tumultuous sleep full of little kid kicks and mutterings. “Couldn’t you sleep?”
“No, Mommy,” he said. “You are upset. I thought I could make it better.”
How would a five-year-old know what his mom in the other room is experiencing? Along the same lines, how does anyone—like you, for instance—know what others sense, feel, or need without tangible proof?
We might ask other related questions about our ability to sense, feel, or know what is really going on outside ourselves in ways that seem uncanny or unusual. See if you can answer some of these in the affirmative:
- Have you ever had the experience of knowing what someone else is going through, even from a distance? Or knowing that someone is struggling even though they don’t look upset and haven’t expressed a concern?
- Have you ever tossed and turned all night because you just knew something was going to go wrong the next day, and then it did go really wrong?
- Do you sometimes sense another’s bodily aches, pains, or illnesses as if they were your own?
- What about those disastrous get-togethers? You know the ones. You start the day in a perfectly good mood, and then you talk with a friend who’s going through a hardship. By the time the conversation is over, you are so depressed, you’re sagging—and your friend is fine.
You might also wonder about some other strange experiences you’ve had (none of which you would eagerly share with your doctor or therapist):
room rage: You’ve only to enter a room (old houses are the worst) to sense what might have previously occurred there, from heated arguments to physical violence. (And it doesn’t help that you can sometimes sense the former—and deceased—inhabitants.)
weather “woo woo”: Your body picks up on nature’s stirrings before Doppler radar does. Way before a storm hits, you feel like you’re plugged into a wall socket.
planetary improprieties: Who needs to read an astronomy or astrology column? When Mercury is going retrograde, you are already experiencing the communication snafus that correlate to the shifts of this special planet.
lucy lunacy: You are the Lucy character in the Peanuts comic strip, and everyone is lining up, ready to pour their hearts out to you; the doctor is in. The problem is that you don’t even make the five cents Lucy gets for the advice you dispense. In fact, all you ever get is drained and worn out.
healing heart: Do you feel like you walk around with your hands at the ready, waiting to share healing with the world? Do you sometimes have to sit on your hands to keep yourself from helping everyone?
doctor dolittle: Remember Doctor Dolittle, the fictional character who could talk with the animals? You might not know how to formally speak animal—or plant, rock, or mineral—but you can sure sense what they are feeling.
honesty, schmonesty: Your ability to sense whether others are being truthful rather than hypocritical is highly developed. It’s like you have an internal honesty barometer—one that alerts you to other people’s lapses of integrity.
empathic exploration 1 Look to Your Own Experience
These and many other sometimes mystifying experiences are all aspects of the wondrous, beautiful, and sometimes overwhelming abilities I described in the introduction, the psychic empathic gifts—the three sets of mechanisms at work in the subtle-body experience of empathy. Before we discuss those further, I invite you to take your first empathic exploration. The following questions will help you assess your own subtle-body experiences with empathy and how you feel about them.
- Can you recall a time when you entered a house and had a sense of what recently occurred there between inhabitants? Did you trust your perceptions?
- Have you ever held an object and perceived information about its owner? Were you able to prove the accuracy of your ideas?
- Do you frequently perceive a difference between how others act and what you feel they are truly experiencing emotionally? Which type of information—the way the other person appears or your feelings—has usually proven the most correct? Think about what this tells you about yourself and your giftedness.
- Can you remember an experience in which you switched emotions with someone? For instance, they started your time together feeling sad while you were happy, and by the time you were done with your exchange, you were sad and they were happy. What do you think this says about your empathic abilities?
- Is there someone in your life who seems to sap your energy? Describe how this happens for you and what you would like to be different in this relationship.
- Have you ever understood another’s motives before they are able to do so themselves? Think about how you have used this information.
- How often do you sense what is occurring with animals or the other inhabitants of nature? Review what you usually do with this information—and what you might be able to do with it.
- How frequently do you sense the presence of invisible beings? Own your reaction to these beings; do they most frequently seem frightening or beneficent? Would you like more of these experiences, as long as they are positive?
The extraordinary sensory gifts and abilities you are using (whether consciously or not) when you have such experiences offer ways of knowing what is occurring in the environment around you, and not just with people but also with animals, other beings, objects, plants, planets, and even energies and entities across time. And the ways in which you use these gifts in your sensing of the world around you is a big factor in determining your empathic style. As I mentioned in the introduction, I have identified a total of six different empathic types or styles. You will learn about these in detail as you progress through the book, beginning in Chapter 4.
Some of us employ only one or two of our subtle empathic abilities and some use more, but we are all empathically gifted. We are all “wired for sound,” the sound being the songs and sensations of the universe. When you take the time to explore this invisible sensory world in your own life, what you learn can make all the difference in your empathic experiences from this point forward. You can choose to consciously develop all empathic styles or just your strongest ones. You can learn to rein them in or direct them toward what’s best for you, engaging the world empathically in healthy ways.
Perhaps when you were growing up, people found your subtle abilities a little uncanny and deemed them “weird,” so that’s how you judge them yourself now. Maybe being empathic has never benefited you, only exhausted or controlled you. Or maybe your innate empathy, expressed through one or more of the styles you will soon learn about, is humming along just fine, and you want to deepen your understanding and exploration of it. No matter where you are with empathy, you can only benefit from enhancing this innate gift that invites compassionate bonding with the world around you.
What Is Empathy?
Empathy is typically defined as the capacity to share and understand others’ emotions and needs as if they were our own. It also allows us to identify with others’ ideas and experiences, as well as imagine what something or someone could become.
Yet empathy is so much more than this!
We often picture an empathetic person as someone who can walk in someone else’s shoes. It’s like you slip off your own moccasins—or boots, snowshoes, or sandals—and don another’s. Because you can empathize, your capacity for caring about that other person, and perhaps even making a difference in his or her life, is greatly enhanced. This is why empathy is so often linked to compassion, or the ability to alleviate another’s suffering.
Most of us have experienced empathic moments when we really feel what others are going through or understand what is occurring in their lives; maybe we’ve even followed a corresponding inner prompting to help. Because we can sense the private dilemmas of others, we may know exactly how to help them untie those knots. Empathy can stretch us in other directions, however, taking us beyond our comfort zone and into areas that aren’t always considered “normal.”
Some empathic people bond so completely with another person that they almost become that person in some ways, and this can go beyond the emotional and intellectual realms. They might take on someone else’s physical injuries or childhood experiences. They might even tune in to potential future events, from catastrophes to job promotions to routine tasks. In fact, I had one client who was so empathic with her daughter that she moved heaven and earth to reach her by phone one day. When she did, she frantically blurted out, “Before you get that haircut, think again. You’ll never be able to keep it up.”
The daughter had been daydreaming about styling her hair in a 1960s beehive and had not discussed the plan with her mother. Meanwhile, her mother had been walking around for days imagining that her own hair was swept up in the archaic cone, obsessing about how challenging it would be to keep the shape smooth and under control. The mother had literally taken on her daughter’s cosmetic fantasy, and when she finally figured out that she was empathizing with her daughter’s idea and not her own, she rushed to “save the day”—or at least her daughter’s hair.
As this example points out, there are many types of empathy. We can sense another’s potential futures, thoughts, feelings, and needs, but sometimes the “other” isn’t a person at all. Certain types of empaths have a wide relational range of motion. Sometimes they slide from sensing an aspect of another person to sensing the movement of a planet, the feelings of an animal, or the memories captured in an object.
I once worked with a young boy—I’ll call him James—who could sense the energy in toys. He had only to pick up a toy that had been used by another child in order to assume that child’s sense of reality.
This extreme sensory empathy enabled James to deeply understand other children’s needs and lives. His serious brown eyes glowed as he discussed the time he had held a little girl’s doll during first grade “show and tell” and knew that her mother was really sick. “Abby needed a hug,” James explained. “So I gave her one, and that helped her a lot.”
There were times, however, when James felt overloaded. “Sometimes I don’t want to know something about other kids,” he shared. “Especially if I don’t like them.”
As James discovered at such a young age, being empathic isn’t without challenges. What we sense, we might become, perhaps to our own detriment, as was the case with one woman I worked with who was so empathic that she refused to leave her house.
“I can’t help but know what everyone I meet is going through,” she complained. “I once sat on the bus next to a homeless man, and I felt as if I’d been as mistreated by society as he had been.”
Her empathic gifts were highly disturbing to her. Her discussion about her empathic sense of the homeless man concluded with this observation: “I got a dose of the misery of daily humiliation and ridicule. Not only did I feel how sad he felt, but I also felt the presence of dark spirits around him telling him he didn’t deserve any better.”
The psychic empathic gifts can be as startlingly brilliant and insightful as they are overwhelmingly challenging and confusing. All in all, the subtle experience of empathy reminds me of a gripping poem by Walt Whitman called “There Was a Child Went Forth,” which begins like this:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, or for many years or stretching cycles of years…
Deep within each of us lies the ability to become what we are not: to hold this energy—the feeling, sense, and substance of it—for a day or for part of a day or perhaps for even longer. This is our empathic self.
During our time together through these pages, we will explore empathy from several angles, including empathy’s physiological evidence as a biochemical ability and empathy’s function as a social agreement, or a means to create safety within the tribe. First, however, it’s important to embrace the subtle realms of empathy at their highest level, as the spiritual gifts that allow us to intuitively receive and interpret information from outside ourselves and send spiritual messages outward. As is often said, we are spiritual beings here to have a physical experience. Empathy is a vital pathway for continually transforming our physical experiences into the spiritual lessons they are.
Empathic Abilities as Spiritual Gifts
Nearly every religion and culture emphasizes our spiritual nature. We are spiritual beings that travel the universe through our souls; our body is a temple for these heavenly based aspects of ourselves. Our spiritual gifts are the conduits that link the very spiritual elements of our true being with the concrete and grounded aspects of our material nature.
A variety of terms are used to describe the spiritual gifts. These include psychism, intuition, mysticism, subtle abilities, ESP, the supernatural, the paranormal, the sixth sense, and energetic abilities. Of these, I really like the last term because it explains how we are able to tune in to situations, people, objects, and celestial forces—and past, present, and future—in inexplicable ways. We do so energetically. We can sense what is beyond our ordinary five senses because we are made of energy.
Energy is simply information that moves. Everything inside 3-D reality is made of energy. Your phone? It’s a phone because the information encoded within its molecular and energetic structure tells it to be a phone. The voices you hear over the phone? They are made of energy, or information, moving at a certain speed.
Beyond our common points of reference, there is a lot of energy that isn’t as measurable as the weight of a phone or the sound of another’s voice. This is the spiritual or psychic energy that we’re able to tune in to through our spiritual gifts.
Of course, we receive and send a lot of messages through our typical five senses in any given moment. We gaze at the world through the lenses of our eyes. We hear the birds and crickets because our auditory system is able to tune in to these creatures. We look forward to a meal that smells tangy and pungent and will taste equally satisfying. And we know we are loved when someone strokes our hair or touches our skin in a certain way.
Our spiritual gifts, however, attune us to energy or information that lies outside the bounds of our five senses. Because of these gifts, we can access and track information that flies faster than the speed of light, which links us to people we’ve never met or bonds us with someone on the other side of the world—information that sometimes comes from a future we’ve yet to imagine. Our spiritual gifts enable us to gain intuitive insight from the Divine and know, for example, what it might be like to soar like a hawk or burrow like a rabbit.
Our spiritual gifts aren’t separate from our sensory abilities. In fact, we wouldn’t be able to hear God’s whisper or receive a revelatory dream or just “know” when we’re supposed to reach out to a friend if we weren’t able to decipher the spiritual, subtle information through our bodies. Energy is energy. A thought is a thought. Reality does not divide cleanly in half—spiritual on one side, physical on the other. We need to understand that the two “halves” are merely interconnected ways of knowing along the same continuum. A biological equivalent to this is the information sharing that happens through the molecular structure of our DNA—the double helix.
In short, we are spiritual beings who must continually make spiritual energy more physical, and we are physical beings capable of spiritualizing our physical energy.
In many ways, we are a lot like computers. Our bodies are like compact and efficient 3-D laptops. They can receive and store data and retrieve it. But they are only going to pay attention to the information they are programmed to accept by their software.
Some of this information is entered manually, much as we type into a word processor. We can think of this as equivalent to using sensory-based energy or information. But some kinds of information simply appear, much like email or an instant message. This information, which we still inevitably need to decipher through our normal senses, is similar to psychic or spiritual energy. It moves faster and travels in ways that appear magical when we perceive it through our normal filters.
In a nutshell, our spiritual self can do instant messaging, while our physical self has to operate manually.
The Three Categories of Spiritual Gifts
As I indicated earlier, there are three main forms of spiritual gifts involved in empathy, the psychic mechanisms that do the instant messaging.
The first category is the bodily empathic gifts, through which empathy registers in us physically. There are five of these: clear sensing (clairsentience), which can manifest emotionally or mentally; clear tasting (clairgustance); clear smelling (clairscent); clear touching (clairtangency); and clear knowing (claircognizance).
The other two categories are clear seeing (clairvoyance) and clear hearing (clairaudience), each of which, as I explained in the introduction, I consider a set, or “family,” of gifts because each can manifest in multiple forms. A person with the gift of clairvoyance, for example, might receive visions when awake or asleep, pictorial revelations, or imaginative images that provide insight and inspiration.
Every one of these gift families allows us to receive and share information that can go backward and forward in time, to know the seemingly unknowable, and to create change without lifting a finger.
Maybe you don’t think you are gifted in any of these categories. Surprise! That’s simply not true. We are all able to connect with spiritual or psychic information, although many of us don’t always know we are doing so. Maybe you haven’t been taught how to recognize or label this spiritual information, or perhaps it scares you, so you ignore it. Or you might live at the other side of the spectrum and feel constantly overwhelmed by spiritual information rather than blessed by it. In any case, we are all born with the ability to send, receive, decipher, and handle spiritual energy.
But there is a common misconception that leaves many people thinking they don’t have any spiritual gifts because theirs fall into the bodily empathy category. Clairvoyance is an obvious spiritual gift; after all, clairvoyants perceive images that no one else can see. Throughout history, many a king and pauper alike have consulted clairvoyants—who were sometimes called oracles or diviners—to focus that inner sight on their own concerns. Clairvoyant images are still considered visions from the Divine, revelatory tools by which to steer one’s life, and this gift is often portrayed in the popular media of the day.
Clairaudience also merits a lot of press time, even on television, though you may be less familiar with the term than with words that are more commonly used to describe people with this gift: mediums, transmediums, channelers, and people with the gift of telepathy. These people can read minds, talk to the dead, or deliver messages from the “other side.”
These “glamorous” gifts often outshine their bodily cousins, whose grounded capabilities can sometimes seem mundane or pedantic in comparison with the high-flying images or insightful words that come through the clairvoyant or clairaudient gifts, respectively. Yet empathic ability, with all its subtlety, is no less important.
Empathy is fully dependent on our material bodies, as you will see when you dive into the next chapter. This means that by engaging empathically, we fully engage with the physical aspects of life. Empathy encourages bonding and thus promotes our ultimate spiritual purpose: to learn about love. And all forms of empathy invite us to move beyond our individual selves, promoting expansion beyond our limited egos and the stretch into higher consciousness.
In spiritual circles, however, the bodily empathic gifts aren’t always seen as measuring up against the better-known clairvoyance and clairaudience, and this skewed viewpoint can make someone who has a rich experience of bodily empathy feel “less than.” Until we get beyond this judgment, it will be difficult for us to fully access and develop our empathy, no matter which gifts are our strongest.
All Spiritual Gifts Are Created Equal
Many of the empaths I meet feel confused or even apologetic that they are not clairvoyant or clairaudient. Even individuals with all three gifts can seem underwhelmed by their bodily empathic abilities in comparison to their visual or verbal aptitudes. “Can’t I just cut out my bodily empathic gifts and see pictures?” asked one of my intuition students. “It’s so much easier.”
I can relate to feeling at least a little jumbled and even slightly scornful, as I used to have this attitude myself. Bodily empathy often leaves us more perplexed than perceptive and more muddled than demystified. There is a simple reason for this: it can be hard to separate our empathic sensations from our personal reactions. In contrast, it’s easier to visualize a psychic picture or hear an intuitive message and know that it doesn’t originate within us.
For instance, think about the last time you were in a great mood—that is, before you started talking to someone who was irritated. You suddenly realized you were feeling irritated too, yet only now noticed that your mood had changed. You might not have connected your attitude change with what is truly a gift if recognized and developed: the ability to feel what someone else is experiencing.
The body that is sensing what another is going through is your own. It can be very hard to distinguish which bodily sensations, sensitivities, emotions, or perceptions originate inside you from those that started in someone (or something) else. Now perhaps you can understand why it seems easier and clearer to simply receive a picture or a message.
So empathic information can baffle us, causing self-doubt. It can also be harder to relay bodily empathic information than clairvoyant or clairaudient data. Plain and simple, it’s more challenging to work with kinesthetic (sensed in the body) information than visual or verbal.
Imagine you are trying to tell your boss that his approach to a project isn’t going to work (let’s assume you’re willing to risk saying anything at all). It doesn’t sound very powerful to say “it doesn’t feel right to me” or “your idea turns my stomach.” Compare these to “I see this process going down in flames” or “if I could offer guidance, it would be to say that you should try a different method.”
While the gifts of clairvoyance or clairaudience might seem more striking or dramatic, the body-based sensations of empathy showcase what is fundamentally human about us: our senses, feelings, consciousness, bonds, and knowledge. Foundationally, they assist us in being what we really are—divine beings exploring a human experience, the basis of which is love, or connection. And, of course, empathy joined with an image or a word only enhances our ability to understand what our clairvoyance or clairaudience is sharing with us.
Can there be a more loving act than to sense another’s joy or despair, to know how they feel and what they need? To link with the worlds of nature and of spirit? To embrace another so completely that we become as if we are one with them? It is the kinesthetic kinship of empathy that allows us to bond with someone or something without losing ourselves in the process and invites what is arguably the most important quality in the universe: compassion.
In fact, it is in the name of compassion that you have been gifted with empathy, and your body is a perfect vehicle for the empathic experience. The empathic capacity of the human body is the subject of chapter 2.