Empathy is an Openness to Knowing Yourself in Everyone

Celebrate your innate capacity

Empathy is an openness to knowing yourself in everyone. It is a willingness to let yourself feel, to let energy pass through you and inform you, and to hold on to none of it so that this process can happen again and again.

That last detail is where we go astray.

I’ve been asking myself for a long time how I might be able to stay open without ever shutting down. Half of me thinks that is ridiculous because I am human (and autistic at that). Half of me thinks I could not ask a more perfect question and is so turned on by the pursuit.

I started the journey from addiction to self-awareness eleven years ago. I was in many ways hell-bent on suppressing my agony and expressing it in loose cannon ways – ways I didn’t remember because I was so drunk. Then – likely on some nasty bathroom floor – I was like… okay, either I die or I learn.

I had learned this pretend-you-don’t-have-feelings way of being from the women of my lineage and pretty much all of the people around me who seemed to value an even keel and pleasant or ever-so-slightly celebratory manner over any sudden or surplus emotional expression.

I am very aware I would have been locked up if I had been born a century earlier – one of those women who simply couldn’t tame their hysterics.

Asking this question of sustainable openness has been my drug of choice. I am both obsessed and resistant at the same time and so I can see how addiction forms itself and I can see the elements that exist to play with.

I do not simply want to be on the pursuit of openness… I want to embody it ASAP. I want to be a badass mother mary who can take all the shit from all the people without taking any shit from anybody.

So the question continues.

How can I be a very open person without shutting melting down or breaking down?

How can I implore this capacity in myself without judging myself for not having been living it already?

How can I relearn basic compassion – that I am sure I knew as a wee-one – as fast as possible without burning out and giving up?

The resounding answer has been to trust the repeating patterns and to trust the blaring signs constantly calling to me:

The “random” invitations or free tickets

All the “I-thought-I-already-learned-this moments”

The same numbers or images here and there and everywhere

The same record/artist playing in 88% of the bathrooms and gas stations I ever entered…

Get the picture?

It started to be about listening when I surrendered to the idea that I needed help.

I needed support and guides and guardians, not because I was not enough, but because I was empathic and had zero training on how to wield that power wisely.

I watched my mother wither as the flower of my life and what I mean by that is I saw how draining it can be to continue absorbing, and caring, without releasing. I really could see the sunshine of her insides go cloudy and her energy grow murky – the water of her body completely stuffed with energy that wasn’t hers to carry.

I experienced her refusal over and over and over again. She did not want to hear what I could see. She could not hear that my energy body told me about her energy body and that when she didn’t take care of hers, it made a lot more work for me and that I would rather work together.

I reflected her victim status and became a substance user and abuser. Her rejection has been the most painful thing I have known and yet it ultimately freed me (slowly) from the grasp of codependency and entanglement we are taught is how to care.

We are trained to be victims of our own capacity. We are trained to fight for our victim status and not our freedom.

So a few times in the past years I have taken extended breaks from being in touch with my mother to honor the drive bring in relationship with her awakens in me.

So many friends and family told me, forget about her. She is never going to change. Worry about yourself. Leave her be.

There is wisdom in these directives and yet I would like to state for the record that I feel detached from worry and filled with desire. I want to succeed at this task probably more than anything I have ever wanted.

She was my first experiment on this earth – tracking her, emulating her, relying on her, grieving her… all over and over and over again.

When I learned some of what there is to know about Human Design, I realized my mother is a true Empath. She has no energy pathways lit up around her solar plexus, the emotional Center, which suggests she is a clear channel for environmental energy to pass through and be grounded (neutralized, transformed, transmuted, etc).

I learned I may be empathic but I am not a true Empath. I create charge in my body as I do have pathways lit up around the emotional center and I, along with other family members, were always sending the charge we were producing into the shared environment.

My mother would absorb and absorb and absorb and break down. She was often sick. She would hide sour and cold behind her bedroom door.

I desperately wanted to offer her the guidance I am designed to be able to offer. We have different skills. Plus, it would have been better for all of us too if she hadn’t martyred her empathic capacity and has instead owned it.

Again, we are not and have not been historically trained to be integral empaths or integral emotional charge producers. We have not learned to work together, but we have been suffering together.

So thank you to my Mother, who I am not currently speaking to – the Empath I have paid the most attention to. You showed me my path by denying me what I thought I wanted.

I thought I wanted to do the work together, but really I was simply trained to be afraid to do the work in the loneliness that it requires. I thought I wanted to have been successful at getting through to you as a small child, as an unruly teenager, as a soulful young adult, but really I wanted what I am neck-deep in now.

I wanted to be able to let you go, instead of cling. I wanted to experience the depths of entanglement so I could explain my way out of it to myself rather than fall in line at the entanglement4ever club.

That’s what being empathic is…

Letting other people have their own journey and letting their story move through you in compassionate detachment.

Learning to let go of judgment has been the stickiest lesson of my life. Letting go of judgment is compassionate detachment and is absolutely necessary to inhabit the spaciousness of being an open vessel for energy to pass through as a well-Empath requires for her work in the world.

We are trained to judge.

Judgment has not one positive influence on the empathic system.

Judgment solidifies the energy and creates blocks in the human body so that the energy (personal created or environmentally absorbed) cannot pass through clearly. The energy that cannot pass through accumulates and stagnates.

A handful of years ago my Mother had to have surgery on her heart because her aorta was kinked I’m pretty sure I couldn’t help but say I told you so… because I am still learning to transform being an asshole in my pain and emotional bombardment to being emotionally responsible.

Being emotionally responsible is the answer to my original question.

How could I stay continuously open without shutting down… like, ever?

Through emotional responsibility.

We, the spiritually or healing oriented folks, seem to talk a lot about the mind-body-soul connection, but what seems missing a lot of the time for me is what do we do with all the charge.

We cannot bypass the charge. We must allow the charge to pass through.

And there is the main or central value of the mind-body-soul connection. We become a clear channel for energy to pass through.

I use the words energy, emotion, and charge synonymously.

This is the result of having elevated judgment to discernment.

What I saw of the world as a child was everyone insisting on defining themselves with absolute yeses and nos.

What I saw of the world as a teenager is hard to say and possibly lost forever.

What I saw of the world in the past decade is that a person’s yeses and nos are every in motion because they are made of energy. They are energetic responses to the charge moving through you or being offered to you to allow to pass through.

Learning that the yes or no in the present moment — as offered by your body and not your mind — is the only thing we need to focus on and is continuously available if we can bring ourselves to listen within. This learning has informed my perception of the power of discernment and the hindrance of judgment.

I spent a lot of time judging and punishing myself that I was not able to get through to my mother sooner. I felt like a failure who had consumed rocket fuel and could not give up the mission.

I went to a psychoanalyst and stated that I wanted to be free. He hooked me up to machines and showed me that my breath controlled my heartbeat. That was what happened eleven years ago that convinced me I could give up the substance abuse and probably one day get through to my mom if I mastered myself enough to be appealing (hehehe… don’t think that I’m not noticing all the ego).

The ego doesn’t want change it wants control.

Control is the opposite of freedom.

An Empath is not here to control or help others in any way other than being a clear channel for charged energy to pass through and be neutralized.

An empaths job (all of us – true full-blown empaths or any human with a heart) is to be able to discern when their spongey body needs to be wrung out … and do it.

It may be many many times a day (that’s me).

It may be some other rhythm (that’s where your discernment can play).

So how can I or anyone be continuously open without shutting down?

How can we be successful empaths… rather than sick-feeling empaths full of pain and suffering?

We can take responsibility that charge needs to be neutralized through conscious release – movement, breath, creative expression, etc.

We can notice how the history of society has trained us to be victims of our own emotional worlds and hella entangled with others in having vehemently expelled bodily natural emotional wisdom.

We can reclaim the simplicity of noticing the contrast between our inherent ability and our conditioned refusal of the sensational experience of letting charge actually pass all the way through.

We can begin by harnessing empathy for ourselves.

Have empathy for all the previous versions of you, and offering clear continuous empathy to others without burn out will become increasingly more available.

World peace begins at home, with you and yourself.

I had to see myself in my Mother to get to where I am today.

I had to feel her pain and illness. I had to feel her deep joy and her shallow joy, her confusion, anger, bitterness, and sorrow.

I did not have to and yet I did. I followed the wisdom of my body that said yes to this woman and no to this behavior.

I emulated the behavior anyway because in unhealthy empathy we are extremely reflective of whatever exists in our environment and especially what we focus on.

I chose to be inspired with desire. I chose to maintain desire of successful communication with the woman that birthed me while also learning to allow her own path in this life. I chose to face the fear of being without her and really being with me. I chose to realize I cannot be fully available for empathy if I have overlooked myself.

Now that I have looked at myself and maintained commitment to the endless waves of discomfort that come with unlearning condition that doesn’t even remotely honor your natural skills…

I see myself in everyone. I feel them in me and I let it pass through. I see our superpower.