[MEDITATION] Empathy - Moving Beyond Anxiety

Empaths, like you, are here to make a difference in the world.

For me, hanging out with empaths usually comes within the context of a medical intuitive assessment, in which I intuitively see the high degrees of responsiveness that my client’s nervous system has. Tale-tell signs of a person’s degree of empathy.

Most human beings have some degree of empathy — the ability to understand another person’s feelings; being aware of what they’re going through.

However, empaths are different creatures. Empaths absorb the other person’s energy and feelings and they are impacted more viscerally.

Empaths don't have the same degree of fortitude or filters as do others. Yet, they can cultivate higher sturdier degrees of this gift.

Empaths are permeable membrane-like creatures, endowed with gifted skills such as art, creative problem solving, piercing analytical skills, activism, and humanity/earth-saving insights and passions.

Empaths are natural energetic detectives. If you’re one, you can feel when something is out of sync in a New York second. But you can lose it by merging too much if you’re not able to hold space for yourself and the situation.

Empaths match and merge with energy — nature, people, animals, and the energy of buildings and all man-made structures.

Read through the self-assessment checklist below in the context of: “I’m likely to experience this” or “I’m unlikely to experience this.”

If you answer “I’m more likely to experience this” to 5 or more of the statements below, the likelihood of you being an empath is high.

• When you see someone fall down in public or even on television, you feel electrical jolts tingle from your lower back/pelvis down through your legs.
• You’re the canary in the coal mine! You’re sensitive to common smells others can tolerate or don’t even notice.
• You often pick out a greeting card for that special person based on the level of emotions it brings up in you — including tears.
• You become easily overwhelmed in crowds of people, whether you know them or not.
• You feel your to-do list and experience a physical, over-the-top internal push to get it all done.
• You lean toward perfectionism because you don’t like feeling things out of place. 
• Watching the news or crazy loud movies can make you physically nervous, anxious, or tearful.
• You cry at Disney movies … never mind this question, most people do!
• You’d rather have a delivery or curbside service handover your groceries, so you don’t have to go into big box grocery stores.
• Crowded clanging restaurants leave you jangled and drained, even if you’re with friends and loved ones.
• People, including strangers, ask you for advice and comfort and you feel overwhelmed and exhausted afterward.
• You make choices that go against what you really want when you’re around someone else who wants something different. At the moment, it sounds like a good idea. When you’re not with them, you question what just happened.
• You often eat to silence the nervousness you feel in your belly.
• Others have told you to grow up, get a thicker skin, or that you wear your emotions on your sleeve. (In other words, you’ve been on the receiving end of shaming statements about your ability to feel the world around you.)
• You experience an energetic stickiness or a feeling of being saturated when you’re around other people’s energy and pain.
• You often switch your menu choice to what someone else is having, instead of ordering your first pick.

Okay! How did you do in this simple self-assessment?

There are many styles of being an empath — physical, emotional, energetic, spiritual, environmental, and flora and fauna empaths. We’ll talk about those throughout this series.

I’ll tell you this, empathetic styles like the ones listed above are built into your intuitive system, allowing you to increase and deepen your intuitive perceptions and problem-solving skills.

Being an empath is amazing! …and not without its challenges. 

Yet, it’s oh so delightful to merge with your angels, spiritual guides, plants, animals and people you love in positive situations. Yummy!

Most of us empaths have a combination of the above categories. The question remains, “How do we use these intuitive gifted skills without being drained?”

That’s what you’ll discover in this series. Using the tips and practices I’m sharing with you, over time, you’ll be able to understand where you are empathically in time and space, within a given moment.

Because, you, dearest empath, merge with and experience life very differently than 80% of the population.

Let’s dial in a bit closer now so you can learn to manage these feelings with greater discernment — what’s yours and what isn’t.

Empathy is part of your intuitive system. A very important intuitive radar.

Working with empaths, and being an empath myself, I’ve categorized three primary stages of intuitively-driven empathy. They are:

• Instinctual Empathy.
• Raw Empathy.
• Directional Empathy.

Today, let’s start with Instinctual Empathy — the level of your intuitive empathic system that controls your visceral fight, flight and freeze responses.

With empaths, the nervous system is always at play. Understanding the degree of nervous system excitement and how to shift its intensity is key.

With Instinctual Empathy, the emotions and body responses are panic, anxiety, and fear, to varying degrees. Perspiration, a rapid heart rate, and adrenal rushes come with those feelings, making you want to bolt, take a swing at something, or freeze in your tracks.

Most women, by the way, freeze!

This is a purposeful response if there is a true danger. However, freezing will get you culled from the herd if it’s a day-to-day response. Not fun at all!

You know, that as an empath, it’s easy for your body to become overstimulated with the everyday environment and another’s pain and fear.

How frozen are you?

I’m certain there are things you want to accomplish in your life. Is your empathic gift freezing you?

Do you hear inner chatter like: “What will others say?”  “Will I be rejected?” …on and on. You know that instinctual voice, reflecting the primal fear of abandonment or worse.

There is hope and power in you though!

Let me share a story with you about feeling the fear and rising above it simultaneously. Because we can do this!

One weekend my son, a hobbyist mountaineer, was with a team in the mountains, doing what they do. I was living in Florida, on the other side of the country from where he was.

On Saturday, I started getting panicky and crying, knowing something big was going on with my son. I could feel a frightening fall from a cliff, death, and pain within my son.

I reached out to him via phone. No response. I  wasn’t getting anywhere by being terrified so I shifted my intuitive gears.

I lifted my intuitive perception out of instinctual empathy, and into intuitive analysis.

Even though my body was still reeling with adrenaline, instinctual fear, and panic my mind was steady and focused. 

You can feel fear, while simultaneously experiencing a calm and steady state of mind. I’m not a superhero … but that’s my experience.  It’s a cultivated skill.

I intuitively watched his vital organs, which were heightened, but very functional. He was breathing.

His heart rate calmed down over time. His nervous system, stress hormones, and brain functions, however, were still on high alert and jittery throughout the weekend. His energy was spiked and fast moving.

There was still no contact with him, beyond my intuitive monitoring.

On Monday, I got the call.

My son, an empath himself, and the climbing team came to a spot on the mountain where a climbing colleague had fallen to his death.

They all stopped and deeply regarded this loss and my son felt it all. He broke down in tears at the site and was overwhelmed regarding the fallen climber’s death. He felt it all.

I, in turn, felt the combination of this overwhelming situation — my son’s feelings and the dear man who lost his life and the way in which he died.

I have the same skills you have.  Intuitive skills which allowed me to back down and away from instinctual empathy and panic.

These are higher states of intuitive function, which green-lighted my ability to read my son’s body in detail, so that I knew he was physically sound.

Even though the burning energy of the other climber’s death was entangled in the experience. I could peel the two apart and keep them separate.

You have these skills too and they can be developed.

Instinctual empathy is powerful and necessary for our survival. Yet, empaths need tools to help them move beyond this place, letting their bodies settle down in order to assess what’s really going on.

Strengthening your intuitive mind’s skills is imperative. The most effective way to do that is through the practice of meditation and some specific visualizations.

Meditation allows us to build the strengths of concentration and focus.

Without the ability to focus and hold a steady mind when you’re the scared cat up the tree, you’ll won’t be able to talk yourself out of that tree and calm down.

After I was able to intuitively scan my son’s body and see that his organs were fine, that his joints and bones were solid and articulately normally, I could mentally and emotionally relax.  

This shift offered space and a different perspective of presence. I could then manage the random emotional and energetic impacts I felt throughout that weekend.

I would love to support you in building the skill of intuitive focus and steadiness of mind. That way you can move yourself into a safer feeling and a more comfortable place and remain there more often.

I’ve created a music-free 15-minute meditation for you. It begins with a bit of instruction. A chime will both begin and end the 15 minutes.

This is what I’d like you to consider while practicing this week:

• Use this meditation to help build concentration. Pay attention to the quality of your thoughts.
• Are they stress-filled?
• Do you suddenly have thoughts of a catastrophizing nature?
• Does your to-do list creep in?
• Do you find your jaw tightening up, even after you’ve consciously relaxed it?
• Are other parts of your body filled with chronic tension — your hips, legs, feet, and hands?
• Do you have a feeling of truly sitting within the steady architecture of your body or do you feel as if your body is ready to lurch and move?

Because you’re an empath, other things can feel like danger; yet, you don’t have to live here. You can rise above the stage of instinctual empathy from an everyday perspective. 

You can cultivate a stronger intuitive skill at a higher level and climb back down out of the quaking tree.

As an empath, you always need to care for yourself a bit differently than the other 80% of the population. We’ll talk more about empath’s self-care each week.

For now, engaging in this meditation practice is part of your self-care and training to be a powerful rebel empath — one who can take on their role as a helper, healer, and advocate for others, without losing themselves in the process.

With this practice, you’ll gain a deeper awareness of the qualities of your thoughts. That awareness will naturally strengthen higher stages of empathy and even higher stages and states of your intuitive, conscious mind.

You can do this!

Peace to you.

Peace to your body.

With Love, 

P.S.  A quick tip for calming your body down is to run your hands and forearms under cold water. Gently splash cold water on your face as well. If your sink faucet is stainless steel, glide your hands over it in a back and forth motion. The iron ore in stainless steel is grounding.