The Empath (That's You!)

The Empath

I know some days you feel cursed. I know at times you're exhausted beyond words. I know when your eyes have been turned outward for too long, it can feel as if your soul is climbing uphill in a mudslide. Not fit for this place. Unable to fathom how people can just live from day to day without asking big questions, without any self analysis or passion to grow. I know you feel heart break and often tear up when witnessing another's pain or overwhelming joy. I know you want to rush to save others even if it means risking your own life. I know you enjoy celebrating others wins so much you’ve considered carrying pompoms in your purse.

I know you've known from the day you were born that you're connected and here to be of service but my God some days it feels like you'll never be able to help enough and your body, mind, and spirit are so tired. I know you may wonder what the point is of living like this, when it seems the work only continues to multiply.

But babe, close your eyes just for a minute (if you're not driving! haha) Breathe in deeply through your nose and watch your chest expand with the warm light of your courageous heart, and remember those moments. The heights of exhilaration and gratitude that so many people try to reach for a lifetime, yet with you they spark from your spirit in a matter of seconds.

The moments you feel a wave of sun breaking through the clouds, reminding you that just as powerful as the waves of pain, you can also weep uncontrollably with an all-encompassing joy, lost in celebration and awe of life itself.

The notes of music that pass through you like strong winds whipping and curling around tall city buildings, covering you in goosebumps and elevating you with each harmony. The way laughter rings in the deepest caverns of the soul and you see the spaces in each of us just waiting to be filled with love. The way your eyes meet anothers and you feel their spirit exhale and fall into love, into understanding, into compassion for their own wounds, and in those moments- you remember who you are.

You remember what you came to do. To be of service. To stand in your highest power and see others in their own. You see through the facade, through the masks we each wear to survive lives we can't make sense of. You see through the trivial discomforts and into where the pain truly began and how it's led to entire generations living in normalized struggle and turmoil, separation and competition.

You see my love we don't see and feel like many people, and that's exactly the way we're meant to be. The way we intended to be on this earth because we came to be comforters and healers of the human spirit. We aren't meant to make-due with the current situations of the world. We aren't meant to pick this side or that. We aren't here to repeat old traditions as best we can no matter how praised they may be.

We're here to bring in an entirely new way. An entirely new vision and intelligence that can only come from the compassionate wisdom of the heart that sits high above all the noise. This is where we're meant to meet people.

But you see, to navigate this life and be able to translate and understand the struggles of the human spirit, we must learn to unlock the shackles on our very own spirits.

We need street smarts to gain trust in ourselves and practice discernment so we can learn to be of service and not enslavement. Our own lives serve as our roadmap and manual.

We will experience neglect, abuse, loss, sickness, abandonment and hopelessness. We will witness evil up close in people we love and in worlds others may not acknowledge so we learn not to look away in fear.

We will see, feel, hear, and both physically and psychologically translate energies and worlds that others may not be able to perceive just yet. We will feel crazy at times because 70% or more of what we experience will be imperceptible to people around us- but we need this.

It's vital we learn to make peace with opposing perspectives and believing ourselves first before there’s tangible proof and it becomes general consensus.

For some, there will be bumps and bruises to learn from along the way that may have gone almost unnoticed, and for others it will be as if we entered this world being dropped into a war zone. Some literally. We will witness the tragedies of the wounded child that turned against themselves and embodied the very monsters they feared.

We will experience darkness others could never imagine and many of us will not think ourselves very strong because we've never known any other way. We will experience our sensitivities and our higher sight as a curse for as long as it takes, but we are meant to stretch beyond this.

Our beliefs of the world may become tainted in fear and pain as we try our hardest to remain positive with gritted teeth and attempts to regain strength by sheer determination. We may wonder what we were ever meant to learn from having our spirits pushed to the edge of losing all hope.

But there's always been a knowing.

In order to bring compassion into the whole of humanity, we may personally experience the extremes of the human experience. The level at which we are stretched to one side, we will equally expand into the other. So as much as our sensitivities will feel like a curse at times, we are meant to equally experience the blessing and liberation.

We have known such unshakable faith and love, and see beauty so effortlessly, but can lose sight of it when we become overwhelmed with tasks we thought were our responsibility to address one by one.

By going through this we are being taught that we are truly invincible. That we are infinite. That many of us came here carrying a higher vibration engrained with the highest intelligence of truth and love, of the universal power that has no end and acknowledges no separation or fear. We are here to honor it, allowing it to open us up to who we truly are by unfolding our lives and uncovering our divinity beneath every layer. We are here to be divinely human.

The old ways of separation, of cutting cords, of protective shielding and fear will no longer allow us to reach our potential. To thrive and live as we truly are. They suited us at times of survival, but they will only take us so far.

This is where so many of us find ourselves. Exhausted with survival tactics but being told over and over again we must practice this. Say that three times. Pray to this deity once in the morning and twice at night and take our salt bath just to keep going.

But no matter how incredible the assistance, if we're doing it from a place of surviving and accommodating an external world while justifying our own suffering in order to serve others? It's only a band-aid.

That voice in you, that dancing child that knows there is truly nothing to fear? They are wise beyond measure. Beyond tradition and lineage.

They are the child of the stars.

The one that knew exactly why you came here to rise above the darkest nights and teach the world to sing again. The child, the you, the one that you've envisioned in your daydreams, has been dancing and begging you to join them in that higher wisdom. In that higher intelligence where we can celebrate our liberation and not fight for who has the greatest access to a power that belongs to each of us in the first place.

Our fears are only afraid of letting go of the reality they’re accustomed to, a belief system that we were never meant to thrive in.

We are each being called to lead now. To step into our sovereignty and rise collectively by trusting our own compassionate wisdom and contributing from living our truth. Not by finding another leader to follow or master to lean on.

It's not a punishment, but necessary that we are angered and agitated by pain and injustice, that we learn to leave behind old relationships, old beliefs and old roles in order to build our own foundation in ourselves.

Anger grants us the audacity to stand up and speak even when we're still afraid.

When we face these fears, when we free ourselves to stand on our own, we free one another to rise out of imprisonment. Your healing heart creates waves that cross oceans!

It is not avoiding the bigger picture or below a true spiritual path to focus on your own personal healing!

In fact, we often romanticize prioritizing the bigger picture or others in order to avoid our own pain and changing our own lives, when in fact it is the exact reason you are here! Your life is sewn together meticulously with every single lesson and healing salve you are specifically meant to bring into this world!

The best thing you could possibly ever do for the world is to heal yourself! When you heal, you shift the trajectory of possibility for all of humanity. You open new channels to love that were once sealed shut to avoid humanity's pain.

We've always known this right? But it tends to take time for the things we know to sink down, to integrate, and to digest into the place where we live them. We practice them. We walk and talk them.

If the cord cutting alone was suffice, if the clearing of the Akashic records was suffice, if the bubbles of white light and epsom salt baths and invoking the guardians did the trick and revolutionized lives permanently? We wouldn't be where we are right now.

We may need antibiotics to kick an infection, but if we find ourselves refilling the prescription monthly... we need to check our immune system. It doesn't mean the antibiotics don't work it just means they aren't the long-term solution. This is how it works with many new age fixes and strategies. It’s not that they don’t serve a purpose and bring relief! But they’re meant to be used as needed- not as a way of life.

We are not here to survive. We are here to revolutionize.

Each stage of our lives and of ourselves, are meant to be outgrown. To be juiced thoroughly and provide all the nutrients necessary, and then serve as compost. Were you wrong to babble and coo as a child? Absolutely not! You had to learn to use your voice, to make sounds and express delight and joy and ask for comfort and sustenance. I think life continues on that way but as we age and become adults, for some reason we can find ourselves pressured into this belief that we're supposed to pick what will work for us from here on out, what is right and what is best, and stop there. No more learning curves and curiosity allowed. Make a decision. Pick a lane. Be an adult and stick with something.

But where we stop, we stop growing. And growth and healing is what we are perfectly made to do. It isn't so much something we have to force into action, but to stop fighting against.

Narcissists are actually quite the catalysts to awaken us to our deepest wounds that we’re avoiding in ourselves and trying to heal in others- because we thought that was the right thing to do…They light a fire underneath us to finally face what’s buried beneath the surface of our own skin, so we can stop encountering and battling it outside ourselves.

After an initial appearance of this personality? They'll show us as many times as we need em to. As many times as it takes to use that fire which we usually stoke in attempts to heal others, and instead finally light the wick of our own higher purpose to become the person we've known we're meant to be! To create and invite the love and divinity within ourselves that we want to see the in the world.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding and fear around what it means for us all to be connected and what that actually means about deep empathy, and I get it. It’s nearly impossible to wrap the brain around. But I believe this is what causes so much fear and judgement around human emotions. Emotions can make a real mess of intellectual matters because their very nature is to stay in motion, not neatly packaged and labeled where we can feel we have full control and sit comfortably and say, “I’m good, they’re bad, end of story, I win.” This black and white us and them thinking is the very basis of things like politics and war.

So just think about that for a second.

From that perspective, feeling deeply? Not being afraid of emotions? Is dangerous to an entire system.

What we are unafraid to feel, we are unafraid to see. And what we are unafraid to see, we are unafraid to understand. And what we are unafraid to understand, we can no longer call separate from ourselves. We can see through the eyes of others, and we can hold compassion for perspectives even when they do not match our own. We recognize everything as a part of ourselves, the brightest lights and the darkest evils. We can no longer live with a false sense of control and linear grading systems of what it means to be sane and good but instead, recognize that we are each living translations of the universal language of love. Some will harden and shrink in denial of their worthiness to it, and others will expand in its light.

The trouble with this paradigm shift is that it requires we move beyond our former protective boundaries that construct our societal beliefs in mental health and separation, and before great change, we often go through great denial.

This is why we’re seeing a sudden obsession, push, and even worship for our current mental health system right alongside its breakdown. We’re clinging to something that we subconsciously feel falling away. It’s no longer working because we’re asking bigger questions and rapidly outgrowing the framework.

There has never been more mental health diagnoses, more prescriptions, and yet more suffering.

So much of human suffering comes from beliefs that define success and happiness by how well we can avoid pain. Intellectualizing and glorifying a deep seeded belief that we must fight against pain and quickly rid ourselves of any discomfort in order to survive.

As Empaths we will often reach states of confusion and feeling stuck because we are simultaneously experiencing life from the highest intelligence of the heart, while trying our best to be responsible by making decisions from the fears of the world. In doing this we are breathing in wisdom and insight intended for growth, but restraining ourselves from transforming it and translating it back out into the world.

This is why many of us feel that we’re constantly holding our breath literally and figuratively. We may regularly experience shallow breathing and even develop weak digestive systems and poor circulation from an ongoing lack of deep diaphragmatic breathing. In doing this, we also disconnect from our power centers in our solar plexus, sacral and root chakras, feeling unsafe to be ourselves and trying to move through the world without causing a ruckus from the energy we feel trying to flow through us. This is when we’re embodying the codependent, the people pleaser, and the martyr. This is when our sensitivities feel like a curse rather than a blessing.

We will find ourselves in moments of rage, despair, exhaustion, confusion, physical illness, self-doubt and shame, all because we aren't living up to a broken belief system that could never allow the spirit to thrive in the first place.

Imagine if Van Gogh or DaVinci laid awake every night envisioning their creations, weeping tears of joy over insights and dreams they felt pulsing from within, but woke up every day to do the responsible thing and work the family business. Once again, hushing the intelligence of their spirit to do what was right according to family members and society.

We are meant to live, not survive and cope. We’re meant to expand and grow from each mountain we climb with excitement, to exhale back out into the world every transformation of pain into compassion, and strife into wisdom.

From this place, even witnessing the deepest wounds, we are tapped into a place filled with excitement for opportunities of growth.

We feel the presence and absence of love so deeply, because we are meant to speak it's intelligence out into the world by integrating its wisdom and truth into our own lives.