I had a pretty weird childhood and I grew up in a weird household, so it’s no surprise that the road I’ve taken (which is only visible where I have already passed because I am creating it as I go) is also pretty weird. And it seems that the older I get, the weirder things get, too, which, to the say the least, is pretty weird. So, keep this in mind – that I am coming from a weird place, having gotten here in a weird way, having started from a weird place.
My mother pegged me as an emapth when I was 6 or 7 years old. I was an extraordinarily sensitive child, easily overwhelmed by crowds, drawn immediately to whoever was in the most pain in the room, and relaying very odd information about people in a way that only a 6 year old could when she has no idea what she’s talking about. Mind you, my mother was recognized as a Master Rosicrucian shortly after my brother was born, when I was 3 or 4 years old, taught yoga, and read tarot cards with eerie accuracy. To say she was an expert metaphysician would be rather coy about the topic. So, I was a very, very lucky little empath child.
Very early on, before I was 10, I knew how to ground, center, shield, cleanse, and modulate energy (if you aren’t familiar with modulating energy, that is essentially controlling the flow of energy). I was already learning to astral project and clear, balance, and manipulate my own chakras. I had been taught pranayamas (yogic breathing) to both clean physical objects and spaces as well as to control my tendency to hyperventilate, had begun reading tarot cards and viking runes, programming quartz crystals, communicating with ghosts, and getting scary people to leave me alone using energy alone. I am not sharing this to brag – this is just the way it was, and it’s important that you know this about me because it explains what I am going to talk to you about shortly- but please know that this amazing education came with a price – I never learned to balance my budget, plan groceries and meals, or, even to cook for myself – and those are important!
At this point, many years have passed. My age is a trifle, I’m still a young buck at a mere 36 years old (and I am JUST figuring out how to budget things and the value of a grocery list – someday I’ll graduate to keeping track of time), but that means I have had 31 years of active empath training, practice, and conditioning -the foundations of which came from someone who was considered a master in a metaphysical fraternal order. That is one HELL of a head start!
So, the following line of thinking started when I met a fellow empath on Facebook who had just opened up. She’s a full blown adult, well out of her 20s (we’ll leave it at that) and thought she was going crazy. I told her how to do the things my mother had taught me when I was little and she had also learned similar things before our conversation and afterwards from other people. One day she told me that it just didn’t work for her – that shielding herself made things WORSE and HARDER. But grounding worked great!
I mean, the grounding made sense because humans need that regardless of how their brains work, so, yeah, duh. …But shielding made things WORSE? She said it was better when she just let the emotions flow through and around her instead of fighting them. And I got to thinking….
It had been a very long time since I shielded. Well over a decade. In fact, when I had gone into the corporate world (that was a bad idea and I don’t recommend it), I NEEDED every bit of my empath ability just to survive. I absolutely needed to know instantly if someone was about to rain down some abuse on me and if it was something that I could solve, prevent, avoid, or redirect. My boss was SO extremely abusive and such a menace to everyone around her that I could tell when I walked into the office building whether or not she had come into work that day, without seeing a single soul, just by the vibe in the building.
Of course, this wasn’t something I was doing consciously or a decision I had made – it was just something that I did instinctively, something that had happened – it was survival.
I’m sure it is no surprise to learn that I left that job when I had a nervous breakdown, which, looking back, I am grateful for. I am in a much better place now and maybe if I hadn’t had been so damned stubborn about making that job work, Universe wouldn’t have had to get so rough with me while trying to grant the very thing I had been begging for – relief, salvation, and happiness. But that’s another tale.
Since then, I have been wide open. WIDE OPEN. FREAKISHLY open. I’m not uncontrolled, I’m just open. I seem to have a thing about walls and thoughts. I only am “monitoring” or “aware” of who (or what?) I am sharing a room with or who I am thinking about. I can tell if a friend is having a bad day when they walk into the room without seeing or hearing them, regardless of the size of the room or how many people are in it. I can tell what kind of emotional state they are in when I see I have a message waiting for me on Facebook. If I am worried about them, I can “check in” with them just by thinking about them.
And this is the way I want it. This is how I want to operate. I know exactly how everyone is doing when I pass them in the grocery store, but instead of being hit in the gut by it, I let it flow off of me, through me, “like water off a duck,” just like my new empath friend was doing. Instead of having to fix it, instead of taking it on personally, I toss them a bit of energy, wish them well, and then I let it go and continue about my own business.
I don’t know what my point here is. But I’ve been wanting to share this for months now, and it’s been niggling away at me. Maybe I want to tell all the new empaths out there (when I was younger, no one knew what an empath was, and now it seems that everyone is one AND THAT’S A GOOD THING!) that it isn’t a curse, it isn’t a life sentence for some unknown crime, and it isn’t torture. You don’t have to put yourself on “lock down” forever. Yeah, figuring out what is going on can be rough and pretty awful, I’m not going to lie about that, but it isn’t going to be awful forever. It is also USEFUL. It is POWERFUL. You can do a LOT of good in the world, and not just as the world’s energetic septic tank (which seems to be what people are teaching these days), but in much more direct, immediate kind of way that you can pick and choose if it pleases you to do so and without being a freaking martyr if that isn’t your thing.
So hang in there. It’s gonna be okay. Weird, awkward, and a little messy, but it’ll be fine. You got this. We got this. It’s gonna be okay. I’ll get into some of the cool-ass benefits some other time. 😀 But keep your chin up, keep going forward, experiment, make mistakes, own that shit. It’s gonna be alright. We got this.
