You Don’t Have to be an Emotional Sponge
One key tip to not let your empathy overwhelm you.
A few days ago, I was watching a video clip about the heart wall in The Emotion Code. That got me thinking:
I wonder how my heart is communicating with the rest of my body?
Almost immediately, I felt the sadness, the sadness I sometimes felt for the past few years when I connect to myself. The sadness I felt before when I had healing sessions with my teacher Alain Herriott, and this same sadness was brought up during healing and reading sessions by other intuitive practitioners too.
This time, I stopped avoiding it and wondered about letting it in.
I stopped asking my mind where and who this sadness originated from.
The sadness didn’t feel as sad as I expected. It felt like it was relieved to be felt and released through a series of yawns and tears.
I wondered what it might be about for my heart to communicate harmoniously with the rest of my body. The energetic barrier felt smaller.
After I allowed this unknown sadness to move through me completely, I had this clear knowing that I had been feeling the combined grief of my extended family and my own grief over losing our beloved family members over the years.
Years of unknown grief
My maternal grandmother passed away when my first child was 4 months old while my husband was overseas at that time. I was too busy trying to take care of my baby while needing to attend the funeral wake for the entire week, being surrounded by my mom, aunts, uncles, and cousins who were also filled with grief.
A few months later, we moved to Massachusets, USA, as my husband had been accepted by MIT to work on his post-doctoral degree for two years there. Within those two short years, my husband’s grandfather and uncle passed away, and my favorite uncle passed away too while I was pregnant with my second child.
I’m so relieved to finally release most of this grief by allowing myself to feel through it.
Do you tend to absorb others’ emotions like a sponge?
I learned that I am energetically wired to sense others’ emotions intensely. If I don’t pay close attention, I tend to keep holding onto these energies like an emotional sponge!
I guess over the past few years while trying my very best to take good care of my kids, I kept pushing away this grief and thus kept it by my side through these years without a proper release.
How can I stop hurting myself from feeling feelings that are not mine?
This is a topic that people who are sensitive like me are deeply concerned about:
How can we tell which emotions are ours and which ones are from others?
How do we pull ourselves out of others’ emotional dramas so we don’t get hurt unnecessarily?
I find that Empaths get hurt from the emotional energies of others when they do either of these two things:
- They start feeling the beginnings of those feelings, then allow their minds to panic and do things desperately to guard themselves. They get hurt because they leave their own auras and get lost in the low frequencies of mass consciousness.
- They think they need to dive deeply and drown themselves in the feelings of others in order to release these feelings. They get hurt because they leave their own auras to focus entirely on the person(s) they are feeling the feelings from.
The common pattern here is that by leaving their own auras, they have stopped being themselves.
Know that when you are being you, nothing can harm you.
Know that you feel because this is a beautiful part of the human experience.
By sharing my personal story of feeling and releasing grief, I would like to share with you this truth:
It is safe to feel feelings that are not yours.
My experience as an intuitive healer has taught me that it is safe to feel feelings from others as long as you focus on doing this first:
Reconnect to yourself:
1) feel safe and loved in being yourself,
2) then feel your feelings lightly without judgement.
Start tuning into yourself more often and feel what you feel in a light and gentle manner. This can look like:
- Sharing your thoughts and feelings freely with your trusted circle of friends
- Doing some free-writing, like a mind dump
- Drawing intuitively
- Singing intuitively
- Moving/dancing intuitively
Stop judging what you feel so you can allow yourself to process, release, and integrate these feelings more easily.
Honor your superpower of empathy and be gentle with yourself.