5 Health Tips for Empaths and HSP

Empaths

Because my emotions/sensitivities affect everything about how I live, the decisions I make, what I will and won’t do, and how well I do my work, I’ve learned (the hard way) that if I don’t take care of my energy moment-moment-, day-by-day, I create a sort of etheric straight jacket around myself that renders me pretty useless.

When I first started learning/researching things that could help me as an empath, I noticed a common theme: hide and “protect” — defensive strategies galore. But with my job, I HAD to be around people, so I needed to learn not just how to put a bubble of protection around me, but how to line-up with the best energetic version of myself and those people as possible.

Many empaths think “shielding” and boundaries are their only forms of power, but that “solution “carries within it the very vibration of “the problem” (“I pick up negative energy that I need protection from” – is implied). But when we do this, we forget the most important part of the equation of this vibrational reality: YOU CAN’T PICK UP WHAT YOU’RE NOT A MATCH TO! So shouldn’t the solution for ANY empath involve raising your own energy so as not to be a match to low vibrations?!

If you stay in a disempowered, fearful vibration, you will be a match to people taking advantage of you and wanting to suck your energy. But if you do the work to keep your own energy clean (in the form of shadow work, emotional healing, physical exercise, healthy food) you can use your powerful sensitivities to attract incredible experiences into your life. Truly stepping into your power an empath is learning to open your sensitivities wide– to their most subtle perception, to breathe in the world around you – to experience what it’s like to live as a sensitive/empathic being that is deeply engaged and in love with the world – empowered and in energetic mastery. You get to come out of hiding and LIVE.

If you believe your sensitivities make you vulnerable and weak, you will emit that energy signal out to others. Therefore, one of the first health tips for ANY empath is to start seeing (and believing) how your sensitivity is a strength, how it can benefit you and make your life more enjoyable, how your sensitivities can help you enjoy life more, and when you tune-in and use them, how it can help you consciously manifest the energy you want to play with.

We are NOT powerless and there is SO MUCH MORE IN OUR CONTROL than most empaths ever allow themselves to realize.

Here are my tips for daily energetic hygiene, to keep empathic sensitivities keen, sharp, and working FOR you (rather than against you):

1. Tune-in to your energy regularly: Anyone who has taken my classes or read any past articles know I harp on this more than anything else. If you don’t know HOW you are feeling, you can’t move in a direction that is balanced/healthy/soothing. Many empaths have trained themselves to tune their feelings out (so as not to be overwhelmed by them) but this actually works against us in more than one way. Remaining ignorant of our own emotions causes us to overcommit and burn-out, ending-up in situations that drains our energy further (from lack of attention to what our energy bodies are actually capable of), or, on the flip side – causes agoraphobic tendencies, further weakening and suppression of our stronger, more masculine energy (which is what guards and protects our feminine, receptive sensitivities – I’m not talking about gender here folks – just energy we ALL have). Ask yourself every morning when you wake-up (and throughout the day whenever you think of it) “What do I feel? What do I need? AND “What would somebody who loves themselves do?”

These three questions can change your life.

2. Drink lots of water: When we are highly sensitive to energy, our physical bodies are the first to take the brunt of energetic excess and auric clutter. One of the most important things we can do for ourselves is to TAKE CARE OF OUR BODIES, and drinking water is the simplest place to start. I like to prepare a jar of water infused with organic cucumbers, basil, and berries, and drink a full glass every hour. If you have to, set a reminder on your phone so you don’t forget. When you do this, you ensure that your body is not only hydrated, but constantly flushing unwanted toxins/energy. It also forces you to draw attention to yourself/your body, which gives you another great opportunity to check-in “what do I need?”

3. Do regular energy cleanses: I like to imagine a white vortex of energy spinning around me, clearing and cleansing my aura. Visualization is power, and it helps to focus regularly on having our auric fields cleared, strengthened, and sparkly. Also, when you tune-in to your auric field, pay attention to how it feels. Being empathic means you are sensitive to subtle energy, and this can be used to your benefit when it comes to energetic health and attracting experiences. Pay close attention to how your auric field feels, and use the power of meditation/visualization to strengthen your magnetism, expand your energy outward (so you’re not contracting and drawing others energy in) and keeps your energy clean so you attract clean energy in return.

4. Strengthen your vibrational boarders by balancing alone time with socializing: A lot empaths feel they need to hide from the world, but if we spend too much time alone, this can cause emotional and energetic imbalances. It also fueles a powerful resistance of “outside” energies. What we resist, persists, as they say, and the solutions for being empowered as an empath is not to resist, but to overcome.

Use your alone time to really tune into your energy, feel what you need, and meet those needs (on the most subtle, energetic level). Then, before you go out, set intentions to expand and allow your positive energy to attract the same energy back to you. Imagine your energy field as powerful and expansive. As soon as you shrink within your “protection” bubble, you put out the “I’m weak” vibe – which is a perfect match for vampiric energy.

Exposing yourself to other people’s energy regularly (and intentionally) helps you practice expanding your energy out into the world, and learning what it feels like to attract powerful, uplifting experiences. If you are a constant match to energy vampires, remember that YOU are the one fueling that connection by not strengthening your vibrational boarders through RAISING your energy. Raising your energy provides an energetic barrier – like energy matches like energy: period. If your vibe is high, it is simply not a match to low energy. You don’t need a “bubble” of protection – you need STRONG POSITIVE, LOVING, EMPOWERED vibes. This can only come through EXPANDING OUT, not shrinking IN.

Obviously, pay attention to how you are feeling. If your energy is low and weak, build it up before you go out through connecting with nature, music, a salt bath and essential oils. Don’t pretend to feel strong when you don’t, but don’t use your empathic abilities as an excuse to hide from the world, either.

Make sense?

5. Use your words wisely: Begin saying affirmations out loud that uplift and empower you. Words are powerful, and I recommend using phrases that draw attention to your strength (not your weakness). So many empaths talk about themselves in incredibly disempowering terms (“I’m too sensitive. I can’t handle people’s energy. I can’t go out in groups. I feel everyone’s pain, etc.”). Feel what kind of an energetic signature those words put around you. Constantly voicing what you can’t handle fuels a strong victim vibration, which makes you, once again, a PERFECT match to energy vampires and predators. Sadly, the word ‘empath’ itself has nearly become synonymous with “victim.”

Does it feel empowering to talk about yourself like that? Start changing your vocabulary about your gift, Here are some examples:

*I am an energy Jedi Master

*I can sense the deeper, more subtle energetic vibrations of love, peace, and joy, making those emotions all the more easy to flow into my life

*I deeply feel and engage with all life forms

*I have emotional mastery

*I am a powerful magnet for love and loving people

*I attract positive people into my life

*I thrive in groups because I can tune-into and feel people’s joy and happiness, which further fuels my joy

*I am a powerful feeler, and this is a strength

Feel the difference?

I hope these tips remind you of the badass, peaceful warrior you are!

If you want to learn more about empowering your empathic abilities, check-out these online classes!

Happy Wednesday!

4 Ways to Transmute Difficult Emotions

Uncategorized

Check out the article I wrote for ModBod:

Emotions can be overwhelming. Feelings like sadness, anger, grief, and loneliness can seem unbearable, especially when we live in a society ill-equipped in understanding the purpose and function of human emotion.

The typical formula is suppression, repression, denial, or some form of intellectual or spiritual bypass. We’d just assume not have any emotion, than to feel the painful ones.

Unfortunately, we need our emotions to function optimally as a human. Emotions are an integral part of our internal guidance system, and when we ignore or suppress them, we cause major damage not only to our mental health, but our physical health as well.

Here are 4 tips to deal with difficult emotions:

1. Allow yourself to feel: The reason difficult emotions feels so…well…difficult, is because we resist them. We want to feel good, and when emotions arise that conflict with what we want, we typically suppress, repress, or bypass. The resistance between what we feel and what we want to feel causes immense intensity in the emotional body — this is because the emotions are being held back. When we release into the emotion, the pressure eases.

Emotions are meant to be felt. They are our vibrational indicators and are necessary for our survival and happiness in this life. Emotions let you know where you are (vibrationally) in relation to where you want to be. When we resist how we feel, our guidance system has to resort to other measures to get our attention (like sickness in the body). Give yourself permission to feel what you feel. Feeling is not failing.

2. Validate how you feel: Once we allow ourselves to feel what we feel, validation is crucial. Often we feel as if our emotions are out of context: perhaps we feel we are overreacting, or maybe we’ve been told we’re just “too sensitive.” But emotions are always valid. We feel what we feel for a reason. The intensity of what we feel may not be directly related to what is occurring at the moment, but the emotions come from somewhere, and they matter, nonetheless. For true healing to take place, the emotional body must be trusted. You don’t have to act on the emotion for validation, simply tell yourself “What I feel is okay.”

3. Release the emotion: Now that our emotions have been felt and validated, it’s time to let them go. Emotions, once felt, must be released. Release is not the same as suppressing or bypassing. It’s not forcing yourself to feel differently or ignoring the pain. Release is about allowing our emotional body to run efficiently. Emotions are meant to flow. When we block the flow, it causes imbalances in the body and (as noted above), sometimes illness. If you’re having a hard time releasing an emotion, it probably has not been fully validated. Go back to step 2 and take time to validate how you feel. Deep trauma takes time to heal.

4. Direct your focus toward relief: Relief goes hand-in-hand with releasing emotion. Once you’ve let an emotion go, ask yourself what you need and give attention and focus to the feeling of relief. Your internal guidance always knows what it needs, and it’s always speaking to you. You may have to practice listening, but it will communicate. What do you need? Maybe it’s a hot bath, a walk in nature, or dinner with a friend. Don’t hesitate to pamper yourself after the release of a difficult emotion. Taking care of your emotional needs is how you develop trust with yourself and build a strong emotional body.

Emotions can be powerful tools, but terrible masters. Treat them with respect but don’t fear them. They are your friends and comrades in this life experience. Welcome them in.

Empaths Forgot Their Power

Empaths

Empaths: Sensitive people whose primary mode of communication is vibrational – highly responsive to energy.

Conflict: Most have used this ability to hide or manipulate rather than feel and thrive. We call this “helping others.”

When I first realized there was a name for what I was, I read as much as I could about what it meant, and was immediately discouraged.

The message?

You’re basically the most vulnerable person on the planet. Good luck with that. Don’t forget to “buckle up” with your “shield of protection.”

Great. So I’m sensitive (already been told that my entire life).

But perhaps the most nauseating part of it all was reading the many blog forums and online articles where empaths and Highly Sensitive People (HSP) glorified their terrible boundary issues and blood doll status as if it were a badge of service to the planet.

Ugh.

I can’t say this is true for everyone, or that how I’ve learned to thrive as an empath will work for everyone. All I know is the prescribed classic remedy of “shielding/protecting/coping” didn’t work for me. At all. And in fact, it made things worse.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

I’m no more special than anyone else because I’m sensitive. Nor am I more vulnerable or weak. People develop acute empathic abilities for all sorts of reasons: some are born that way, others learn to read people’s emotions as a means of survival due to abuse. Whatever the reason, being an empath is no more special than being good at playing instruments or sports. It’s just part of the human diversity.

I’m not trying to take away the importance or power of this gift, but I also don’t want to elevate it as a super human ability, and here’s why:

Many empaths have a deep, core sense of unworthiness, and while it is important that we learn to see our value, it is equally important not to believe that being ultra-sensitive makes us more special than others. This only breeds further isolation and elitism, which is counter intuitive, really, because the mere fact that we are extra sensitive to other people’s energy is a reminder that at a fundamental level, we are all one – we’re all connected. Deep healing, then, comes from harmonizing with that energy around us, not creating separation from it.

Second, when empaths set themselves apart from the rest of humanity as the “sensitive” ones of the planet, we typically end-up glorifying co-dependent relationships and unhealthy boundaries because we falsely believe that everyone’s happiness depends on us and we develop a sort of “helper” complex.

Or we take the shielding/protection advice and hide ourselves from the world, believing the only means of survival is to go into the psychic’s version of the “witness protection program.” We disengage from relationships and “normal” life and call it “coping with our sensitivities.”

These are two of the most common pitfalls many unskilled and unhealed empaths stumble into (and I was no exception). The problem is, helping or hiding from the world is not thriving.

Those who take the “helper/light worker” title often end-up further blurring the lines with unhealthy relationships, creating a sort of dependency on other’s needing them and identifying their ability to disempower others (by creating emotional dependency) as their empathic “gift.”

Allowing others to suck your energy dry is NOT what it means to be empathic.

You can’t make your life better (and you certainly can’t get empowered) by trying to make others happy. Making others’ happiness your primarily focus doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you a blood doll.

What to Avoid:

Don’t become an energetic food source for others. Not only is it unhealthy and unsustainable for you, it is the equivalent of energetic suicide. If you make others believe you’re the only one who can make them happy, heal them, or save them, you do them a diabolical disservice: you disempower them.

Hence the drama with empaths and narcissists since the beginning of time.

Reminders:

It is not your job to change the world (or others) and you couldn’t even if you tried.

The only person you can ever truly change is yourself. Self-mastery is the greatest gift you can give to others, because when you do it, the world sees it can be done. You become an inspiration. You make empowerment attainable.

The only reason you would choose to come into this world with highly sensitive vibrational abilities is to learn how to USE them, how to navigate with them, in order to facilitate your own self-evolution. When you evolve, you “upload” (in a manner of speaking) the codes for self-evolution/mastery into the human consciousness grid. When others see it can be done, they have more belief that they too, can have self-mastery. Running around trying to fix the world will only give you more people to fix (and will drain you of your power in the process).

The world doesn’t need to be fixed. This reality works exactly as it was created to. It gives us what we put out. It perfectly reflects “us” back to us. This is why it is so useful for our self-evolution. And this is why self-mastery is so crucial. The only way we will ever truly have enough power in the world to make a difference is through mastering our own lives, first.

This is not to say that loving others is not important. No doubt the planet could use more love. But altruism isn’t the same as dependency. In order for people to learn, they have to be free to walk their path. God loves us enough to give us that freedom, and it’s crucial we give it to others. When we do help, it should be because it feels good to do so, not because we need to be needed or because we feel obligated to do so. Even when Jesus healed he said “Your faith healed you.” The emphasis was always empowerment.

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

The Problem:

We simply got lost. We forgot our true purpose is inner mastery.

Most of us focus our attention on the external world, feel too much, shut down, and that’s the end of it.

We tune-out how WE feel and make other people’s emotions our primary focus because we think that will make us feel better. Feeling other’s emotions and trying to ‘fix’ them seems much easier, because it’s less threatening. Our own emotions, quite frankly, scare the shit out of us.

Why? Because we’ve been told our entire lives that to feel too much is to be weak. And most of us have untold amounts of heartache, pain, and even abuse we’ve never looked at. Our sensitivities make us feel too vulnerable.

The problem is, focusing on others doesn’t actually make us feel better. Sure, it distracts us, but it doesn’t set us free. It doesn’t empower us, and it certainly doesn’t empower anyone else.

At best it gives us a temporary sense of worthiness by being “needed” or loved for what we can do for them – at worst it fuels co-dependent relationships that bleed us of our power. We’re left with nothing but emptiness. And that emptiness is too unbearable to feel, so we bury it, along with every other emotion that would indicate we are OFF COURSE, and go back to allowing others to feed on us. Being an energetic food source gives us a feeling of worth and purpose – for a moment, anyway – an empath’s equivalent to a drug fix.

After the effects of the ‘fix’ wears off, we feel weak and lonely. We may have a lot of “close friends” but we feel like they don’t know us at all – not our true selves anyway, because how could they? We’ve buried our true selves along with all of our emotions. We fixate on the external world and expend our energy to its never-ending need, giving what little power we have to a cycle that can NEVER give back to us. It’s unsustainable, and it’s energetically barbaric.

So what’s the solution?

Here’s what I’ve learned:

FEEL. FEEL. And FEEL!

The biggest mistake empaths make is to shut off their emotions.

But the ability to feel deeply IS our power. It is the power of humanity as a whole. When you allow yourself to feel the emotional space WITHIN and communicate back to the world with your strong, finely tuned, highly sensitive capabilities, you create a sort of empathic dialogue with the energy around you and begin to learn what it means to create your own reality (or really, just line-up with a reality that is best suited for your growth and evolution). When you create a harmonic internal realm, the external begins to harmonize around you. That is how you bring more peace and love to the world. This is true compassion. It starts within.

This is a vibrational Universe, after all, and emotions are the strongest vibrational indicators we’ve got at our disposal. When you look at it his way, emotions, and the ability to feel deeply, becomes our super power.

Don’t believe feeling deeply makes you weak. Vibrational sensitivity gives you the power to move anywhere on the grid you wish. It’s not a matter of brute strength and it certainly has nothing to do with “logic” – it is vibrational intelligence.

This is as simple as asking yourself (in any given moment) what feels good and what doesn’t. Then moving in the direction that feels most empowering. But you will never know what that is unless you TUNE-IN!

So how do you tune-in?

GO WITHIN.

Go within. Allow yourself to FEEL where you are, without judgement or identification. Emotions are not YOU — they are simply your indicators. They help you know where you’re at so you can get to where you want to be.

Give yourself the sustaining, nurturing power of your own presence. Love yourself enough to be free from the emptiness of co-dependency.

Don’t allow the world to make you feel your emotional capacity is a weakness. Don’t believe the lie that being empathic is an acute form of vulnerability. And NEVER shut your heart down.

Feel.

Emotions are your greatest tool.

Use them.

Click here for online classes on empowering empaths.