Chapter 5

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Tools for
Compassionate Empathy

Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm. As you grow older you will discover that you have two hands: one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

sam levenson

The empathic gifts described in chapter 1—all the clairs you read about there—are wonderful tools for connecting with the world around you, but learning to use them can be confusing. You might tend to be sympathetic rather than empathetic, for example. Or you could be susceptible to any of the other experiences that masquerade as empathy listed in Chapter 3, such as personalization or emotional contagion. Perhaps you inadvertently shut down some of your empathic gifts or you only feel comfortable using those that make up your strongest empathic style. Maybe you fit into one of the clinical categories of individuals with impaired empathy or you are in a relationship with an impaired empath and don’t know what to do.

The good news is that no matter where your empathic gifts lie on the continuums of accessibility and compassionate usefulness, you can develop them. You can make them stronger and more beneficial for yourself and others. The goal of this chapter is to provide you with three basic but vital tools that will help you accomplish all of these aims: to call forth, apply, and even heal your empathic gifts. With these tools at hand, you will be able to discern

You will have a chance to use these three basic tools throughout the rest of part II, but now it’s time to receive them. Open them as you might open three presents that have been carefully beribboned and tinsel-wrapped just for you, for they are gifts that you can use forever.

The Three Primary Tools:
The Empath’s Medicine Bag

There are three techniques I use all the time, both personally and in my intuitive healing practice. I teach them to classes and clients and describe versions of them in my books. In fact, they are the primary tools I use for establishing boundaries, dealing with challenging situations, and opening to divine guidance. Here I have customized them for the purpose of cultivating empathy. They are as follows:

1. Spirit-to-Spirit

2. Healing Streams of Grace

3. Five Steps to Compassionate Empathy

As you read through these techniques, I invite you to think of ways you can put them to work in your life right away. They come fully alive when practiced.

Tool #1: Spirit-to-Spirit

This is my favorite technique, the result of twenty-five years of cross-cultural study, shamanic studies in other countries, and scholastic research. You can use it for any reason and at any time, and it is an especially useful way to empower yourself empathically.

The technique involves a three-step process that enables you to affirm the highest and most wise part of yourself, affirm the same in others, and then call upon the Greater Spirit, which we call by many names: God, Allah, Christ, the Divine, the Mother, the Holy Spirit, or a Higher Power.

step 1: Affirm Your Own Spirit

Your spirit is your essence, the spark of the Divine that you are. When you decide to interact empathically from your spirit, you automatically come from your personal best. You also activate the part of you that can make the most effective and loving decisions about empathy: what to pick up on (or not) as well as how to respond. By anchoring your empathic processes in your own spirit, you also include yourself in the equation. The Divine would never decree that you receive an empathic message or respond to intuitive information that is harmful to you.

The easiest way to affirm your spirit is to breathe deeply and concentrate on your heart. Your heart is the center of your energetic anatomy, your home of love, and the easiest place through which to access unconditional intelligence. Simply say within yourself, “I affirm that my spirit is in charge of my empathic process.”

step 2: Affirm Others’ Spirits

Everyone—and everything—is an expression of the Divine, including you. Through this step you acknowledge the inner goodness and insight of another person, a group of people, natural forces or beings, entities or angels, or anything else, for that matter. You can even connect with your invisible helpers if you are alone.

To affirm others’ spirits, simply breathe into your own heart and ask the Divine to tap into the spirits, seen and unseen, who can work toward the highest goal. Then say or think, “I call on the highest spirit of all involved in this empathic process.”

step 3: Affirm the Presence of the Greater Spirit

This step humbles us. It states that we are setting aside our egos and asking that the Divine—and only the Divine—provide us the empathic information, guidance, and suggestions for actions we need to take. Through this step we put aside our personal agendas and give permission for the Divine to manage all aspects of the empathic process, including providing others and ourselves with protection and healing.

To affirm the Greater Spirit, simply believe that the Divine is completely present and give permission for the Divine to take charge of the process you are involved in. Promise to follow the Divine’s lead, and know that all will be well.

You can use Spirit-to-Spirit in many ways—by itself or integrated with the other techniques described in this chapter—and I will teach you how to do this. Here are a few suggestions for how to apply it as a stand-alone technique.

Tool #2: Healing Streams of Grace

In my investigations into the most successful healers across time, I found a common thread: they have all believed in the power of love to heal. Many were actually able to perceive beams or strands of unconditional divine love surrounding a person in need. When these beams of light entered a person, that person would heal or shift. But a person who was unable to recognize or accept these rays of love remained unaffected by the good wishes.

I believe these streams of light represent grace, which I define as “empowered love” or “love in action.” Grace is available for everything and everyone, from the tiniest blade of grass to the most exalted of world leaders. It can even be applied to heal our issues of worthlessness and to sway us toward the highest truth of all: that we are completely and at all times connected to our highest source, which wants only the best for us.

The keys to accepting these invisible yet palpable blessings are to feel worthy of unconditional love and to know that love is empowered to create transformation.

As empaths we can feel and sense these streams of grace and use them to help others and ourselves. They are the perfect antidote to feeling overempathic; as we surround ourselves with streams of grace, we elegantly establish appropriate boundaries. They are the answer to a call to help others, as we can send healing on a wave of blessed kindness. We’ve only to ask the Divine to share streams of grace with us to prosper from their assistance.

These are more than “energies.” I believe they are bands of consciousness emanating from the Divine that will perform the will of the Highest One for us. While I usually apply these streams of grace for healing and protection, you can also use them for intuitive and empathic protocols, including radiant empathy. The protocol for opening to streams of grace is easy—it, too, is just three steps:

step 1: Ask the Divine to Provide You with Streams of Grace

I usually use Spirit-to-Spirit first so that I know I’m in a self-loving, open place. I then request, usually through my heart, that the Divine open me (or anyone else) to any and all streams of grace needed at this time. I usually ask that the Divine deliver this grace in such a way as to override any resistance, assisting the parts of self or other that are both willing and not willing to change. (People are usually unwilling to accept love if they feel unworthy or undeserving, for example, and assisting in areas of such resistance invites a healing of the deeper wounds and issues.)

step 2: Accept with Gratitude

Gratitude is a big yes to grace, most often shouted silently. It also invokes a humble attitude and acquiescence to the Divine rather than personal will.

step 3: Give Permission for the Streams to Shift

As time goes on, these bands of energy, which psychically appear as various shapes and colors of light, will finish their job. You can ask the Divine to remove the streams of grace that have done their work and continue to adjust streams that should continue working, controlling the intensity and strength of these remaining streams of grace until they, too, are automatically released.

How can you apply streams of grace to empathy and radiant empathy? Following are several ideas. I recommend you always begin these applications having already completed all three steps of Spirit-to-Spirit, as this will assure a healthy attitude and clarity of purpose.

President Barack Obama once shared some lovely words that I think mirror the combined use of Spirit-to-Spirit and healing streams of grace: “But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people, and do our best to help them find their own grace.” 44

This might be “all we can do,” but it is often enough.

Tool #3: Five Steps to Compassionate Empathy

Sometimes we have to be really methodical about how we use our empathic gifts. This is especially true when we want to perform healing, apply our empathy to specific purposes, use radiant empathy, respond to another’s need, break an empathic pattern such as pity or sympathy, or work with our own or another’s empathic impairment. Under these situations we can use the following five steps:

step 1: Acknowledge the Empathic Information

You can’t effectively decide what to do with empathic information until you have acknowledged you are receiving it. You may have already completed Spirit-to-Spirit when the information comes to you, or you may do Spirit-to-Spirit right after you realize you are getting empathic information. See “How Do You Know It’s Empathy?” on page 112 to help you figure out whether you are receiving empathic data and, if so, what type it is.

step 2: Conduct a Compassionate Assessment and Ask for Assistance

Once you sense you are receiving empathic information, you must determine its message and meaning. You also have to decide whether you should be sitting in the recipient’s seat and whether to respond or not. Both activities require the application of compassion—toward the other as well as yourself.

There are two phases to this step, both of which are necessary to assure that you frame the information correctly and with the right personal boundaries.

Phase 1: Sense the importance of this information to the other(s) involved. Empathy involves grasping what an event or situation means to the other, not to ourselves.

Phase 2: Sense how your inner self feels about this data. There are many aspects that might respond to empathic data, including your soul, mind, spirit, and even inner child. Some parts of you are healthy and can deal with almost anything. Some are wounded. It might be injurious for you to interact with certain threads of empathic data. For instance, someone might be dealing with memories of sexual abuse and trigger your own memories of abuse. If you find yourself reacting in phase 2, you have several choices:

You can now continue to see what the empathic information is telling you.

step 3: Ask for Divine Response

This step is critical and is sometimes easy to skip. Before you do anything to respond to a perceived need with external action, ask the Divine to serve that need. The Divine might send a healing stream of grace, do nothing, or tell you what you should do, either practically or by means of radiant empathy. Any action you take will be more powerful and beneficial if the Spirit moves first.

step 4: Take Action with Humility

At this point, you might sense that compassion will involve taking action. Sometimes the action is focused outward and sometimes it might involve prayer, sending a healing stream of grace, or even shifting your own attitude. Humility is key to refusing the temptation to “play God” and think you can fix someone else’s life all by yourself. Remember that you are a part of the play, not the only actor.

step 5: Surrender the Outcome

Whether or not you take an action (outwardly or inwardly), the last step involves surrendering. To surrender involves serving as a witness to another’s change while not taking on the responsibility for that change. For instance, you might be led to give money to someone who has no food, but you don’t know if that gesture will provide them everything they need or merely fill a hole. Surrendering will help you steer clear of sympathy, emotional contagion, and all other energetic forms of codependency that can keep you hooked into a plight that isn’t yours to shoulder.

How Do You Know It’s Empathy?

Sometimes it can be hard to figure out whether you’re receiving empathic information or manipulative messages or tuning in to your own thoughts, feelings, and memories. Following are some general guidelines about empathic information that can assist you with discernment.

Promptings of Empathy:
How to Recognize Divine Guidance

Sometimes you don’t know if you’re receiving spiritual guidance or not—an all-important factor in accessing the Divine when using our three techniques. In general, however, all divine messages, whether sent directly from the Divine or delivered by a divinely appointed messenger, are loving and kind. You might feel frightened by the content of the communiqué—if you’re receiving a warning of an imminent accident, for example—but the messenger does not scare or threaten you.

Yes, we can receive empathically delivered messages from otherworldly beings. These can include angels, deceased relatives, being from the natural world such as fairies, and other spiritual entities. They can empathically sense what we are going through and respond to us. As well, through our empathic senses, we can feel what they are sensing and respond to them. For instance, my spiritual guides often communicate care, concern, or compassion to me. Unfortunately, there are otherworldly beings whose motives are dark or negative. They can prey on the unprotected or unaware person and absorb our energy or send harmful or inaccurate sensations to us.

Divine revelations, unlike harmful ones, never bulldoze or shame you. They are respectful toward all concerned and encourage respectful behavior. A divine memorandum also aligns with our commonly held set of universal ethics. There is no verbiage implying that you’ll go to hell if you don’t follow the bullet points, and there are no hidden clauses. You will never be asked to kill or cause injury to self or other. In other words, you can follow divine instruction with a clear conscience.

There are methods for sensing divine guidance that are unique to each of the empathic styles. Knowing these can help you sift through the empathically related messages or sensations you receive and figure out which are divinely approved.

Physical Empathy

If you are a physical empath, the Divine speaks to you by sending sensations into your body. These sensations might be knocks, aches, touches, jarring sensations, gentle taps, or even aromas and tastes. For instance, the Divine might warn you of impending disaster by freezing your movements or alert you to a potential car accident by making you feel as if you are already in one. The Divine could tell you to turn left at the next stoplight by applying pressure to your left hand. As well, you could receive messages from the Divine through the external world. A person with a broken arm might talk with you at a store; you sense their pain but also get the impression that the same could happen to you if you aren’t careful.

Emotional Empathy

The Divine communicates with emotional empaths through feelings, stirring emotions, and urges that help you know what to pay attention to and what to do.

Every feeling actually holds its own meaning and provides a certain set of instructions. Joyous feelings affirm, telling you to keep doing what you’re doing or to celebrate what is occurring. You can embrace and follow signs or omens that bring you joy without doubt or further analysis. Sadness encourages you to look for the love underlying a perceived loss, and anger says it’s time to set boundaries. Fear suggests that you think through an action or idea, preparing yourself to do something different, while disgust insists that something or someone is bad for you. Guilt asks you to examine your own agendas and behaviors, and shame shouts that you are stuck in feelings of unworthiness that should be cleared. (You can use the “Self-Healing for Empaths” exercise on page 122 to help you heal shame.)

Mental Empathy

The code word for a mental empath is knowing—the gut sense that tells you what to pay attention to. If you are a mental empath, the Divine will send you messages that leave you with a sense of understanding in your body. Essentially, mental empathy is the mind-body connection in action. Your stomach might tighten if a situation or person is bad for you, or butterflies might start leaping in response to an idea that is accurate.

The key to comprehending these messages is to slow down, breathe, and consciously raise these sensations up your spine to your mind so that you can better understand them. In fact, I suggest that mental empaths ask the Divine to translate their body-based knowing into words, songs, or sounds that can be spoken aloud or written down. Many mental empaths have the gift of clairaudience and can turn their intuitive knowledge into words, and it is good to practice this. Because of this affiliation with clairaudience, you might receive messages through physical reality that are spoken by others, blared over the radio or television, or read in books. You will feel a tingly sensation when these communiqués pertain to you.

Natural Empathy

Nature constitutes a significant expression of the Divine and is a playground for divine creativity. As a natural empath, you can receive inspiration or direct messages from the Divine through any or all natural phenomena or beings.

For instance, animal lovers often receive messages from animals that appear in dreams or even in waking life. Each species in the animal kingdom represents a different concept of reality, which means that if a flock of crows appears outside your window cawing away, it would be wise to figure out what crows signify and pay attention to that theme. (There are many books about the meaning of power animals or totems, as they are often called. You can always Google “the spiritual meaning of …” when researching.) Because crows herald change, for example, when they are unusually present, you know that change is on the horizon.

Individual natural beings can carry personal messages as well. For instance, whenever I’m feeling scared when I’m traveling, a dog will appear out of nowhere to help me. I was once on a trip visiting fifty stone circles throughout the British Islands. Several of these circles were literally in the middle of nowhere—truly—surrounded only by sheep, cows, and sleeting rain. I was often frightened, and each time I was, a dog appeared and remained with me while I tromped around. At least ten such times, the dogs were white with a blue and a brown eye. I am told that dogs with two differently colored eyes can see into the natural world and also the mystical planes.

Other natural forces can hold messages or deliver divine signs as well. A blowing wind can seemingly force you off a path, only to set you on the correct one. A sudden sunbeam can transform into a spotlight showing you where to walk. I was once about to enter a friend’s house when I found it suddenly drenched with rain from a cloud that was only releasing on that house. I decided to visit that friend on a different day.

Many shamanic empaths are also highly gifted natural empaths, and because of this they can interact with the otherworldly aspects of nature, not only the 3-D versions. If you have both gifts, it is helpful to know a bit more about the supernatural beings that might intermingle with you. In general, paranormal beings from nature come from these three worlds:

The Divine can compel beings from any and all of these realms to provide the naturally based shamanic empath with insights, healing, and information.

Spiritual Empathy

The spiritual empath is equivalent to a sensor that responds to various moods of shadow and brightness. Your body actually plays the part of the sensor, registering spiritual information without the intense physical jarring experienced by the physical empath, the emotional wash of the emotional empath, or the mentalism of the mental empath. You simply know what the Divine thinks, believes, or is communicating through the ineffable presence of grace.

The best way to confirm you are receiving a message from the Divine is to trust only those sensations that are accompanied by a feeling of unity with the Divine. Many spiritual empaths rely on the powers of prayer, meditation, and contemplation to provide them with this discernment. Prayer involves talking to the Divine, meditation is receiving messages from the Divine, and contemplation involves basking in the presence of the Divine. When you are accomplishing all three activities at once, you are truly in flow with the Divine and can trust all communications you receive.

Many spiritual empaths also attune to the clairvoyant abilities, receiving images, pictures, and colors in relation to their revelation. This gift of sight can help you interpret the exact message the Divine is communicating.

Shamanic Empathy

The shaman might receive messages in all of the ways I have already described. The distinguishing feature of the shaman is that the Divine often employs mystical dimensions to deliver messages.

Nearly every religion or spiritual tradition is based on shamanic influences. The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish holy books are replete with prophets who deliver information from God to the people through visions, dream interpretation, divining tools, channeling or clairaudience, and interactions with angels or the deceased. They also feature healers, depending on the tract, including Elijah, Elisha, Moses, and Jesus, who perform seeming feats of magic.

This supernatural sphere is the realm of the shaman, who can pluck the Divine’s directives from the wind and then turn and summon a spirit to perform healing upon someone. Likewise, the shaman can hear God in the fluttering of a dragonfly’s wings and predict an oncoming storm. Because of the breadth and scope of this interactivity, the shamanic empath, more than any other empath, must be truly cautious when discerning whether a message has come from the Divine or is, instead, a willy-nilly comment from a passerby spirit or an insertion from a dark force. I recommend that shamans continually center their consciousness in their hearts, the inner haven of grace, and ask the Divine to announce itself with a particular mantra or sound, vision, or touch of the spirit. If the message is loving and this code is triggered, the shaman can be surer of its divine origin.

No matter our particular type(s) of empathic gift, we can make daily use of the essential tools shared in this chapter. Upon rising, I conduct Spirit-to-Spirit, asking the Greater Spirit to hold me in goodness so I can be of service throughout the day. Immediately upon sensing another’s mood, plight, or need, I engage Spirit-to-Spirit again, even if I’m in a queue at the bank or at my son’s baseball game. I ask what I am to do with what I’m aware of, if anything. Sometimes I am called to follow through on each of the five steps to compassionate empathy, then to go all out and speak a word, offer assistance, or say a prayer. Yet other times I attend to myself, requesting that the Divine handle a situation via healing streams of grace. And always, I concentrate on the final of these five steps: surrendering. To surrender is to acknowledge that sometimes it is enough to simply sense, feel, or know, and that something greater will take care of the rest.

These three special techniques will serve you well in your personal and professional life and also play a vital role in healing, the act and art of transformation. If to heal is to make whole, which is the subject of the next chapter, empathy is key to recognizing that wholeness already exists, whether we are currently able to perceive it or not.

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