Being an Empathic Warrior: Self-Care and Protection for Empaths

Being an Empathic Warrior: Self-Care and Protection for Empaths

An Empath is a highly sensitive person, often referred to as HSP, but the HSP label is not entirely correct. HSPs are sensitive to light, sound, experiences, and emotions, while Empaths will embody the emotions, experiences, and relational energy of others. This means that Empaths not only feel what you are feeling, but often have intel on how you can untangle your mess and improve your life. When Empaths heal themselves and get beyond their egos, they can become emotional superheroes. 

Many Empaths must learn how to set clear boundaries with family members and friends. They have to adopt practices, habits, and rituals that help them clear the emotional debris they often collect through everyday experiences. Empaths are big-hearted, intuitive sponges. It’s not complicated; if you feel it, they feel it.  

Because Empaths tend to live with one foot other realms, they sometimes find it difficult living in the real world. To be grounded and happy, Empaths often need:

  • Time to consider, embrace and integrate personal and work relationships
  • Healthy food and helpful supplements
  • Meditation and prayer
  • Leisure activities that don’t involve crowds. For example, most Empaths might avoid shopping at Walmart and wild parties on the 4th of July. 

 

Empaths need space and solitude to allow for careful introspection. Empaths also need to regularly express their emotions, which is most often, sadness. If you’re an Empath, you might be shy, spiritually inclined, a lover of solitude, and clairvoyant. You might also love to write, paint, sculpt or dance more than most artists. The fiercest Empaths will cut a relationship cord in the blink of an eye.

Sensitive: The Untold Story

If you’re like me, you might be so sensitive and attuned to other people’s emotions and lives, you sometimes experience temporary, physical manifestations of other people’s pain and trauma. This, too, shall pass. 

When you finally come to terms with being an Empath, life tends to invite some dramatic, yet overall positive changes. You begin to set better boundaries. You learn what is right for you and what is hurtful. You learn what types of people diminish your quality of life, and you learn how to maneuver through society without losing hope.

Empaths hoping to become spiritual warriors can process the emotions and experiences of everybody around them at such a rate, they can burn through lifetimes of karma in one thrust of emotional expression. 

To help me in this process emotions, I watch movies that center around love, complex and deep relationships, and oppression. Because an Empath will naturally embody the feelings of the main characters in movies, I’ll cry from beginning to end. As strange as that might sound, doing so, I shed lots of emotional and psychological debris, and up-level my vibration and awareness. In every instance, crying produces indescribable feelings of freedom.

How to Protect Yourself

If you’re an Empath, you most likely have one or two unique gifts. You can use them to serve yourself and those you love, or you can share your gifts with the world. Whether you’re a full-time psychic or healer, or you just want to keep yourself whole and happy, here are a few tips that might help you:

  • Seek ways to nurture your heart every day. 
  • Keep things simple in relationships, work, and life in general.
  • Eat less meat, and only if it’s organic.
  • Eat only pasture-raised, non-GMO, happy eggs.
  • Eat lots of organic, non-GMO vegetables.
  • Eat spoonfuls of pure sunlight powder like Spirulina, Chlorella, Barley grass, Wheatgrass, and Moringa
  • Be decisive so that you have flow in your life.
  • Let go of the people and things that consistently burn you or trip you up. 
  • Be less impulsive so that you can better serve and heal yourself. If you’re not whole, it’s difficult to help others do the same. 
  • Don’t let solitude swallow you whole. Step into the light, often!
  • Don’t allow another person’s momentum or conviction sway you from your truth and peacefulness.

thoughtful girl sitting on sill embracing knees looking at window

  • When in the throes of conflict, don’t allow yourself to be manipulated or coerced into becoming someone you are not. 
  • If you’ve absorbed another person’s energy, dance around the room and try to release it through prayerful movement.
  • Don’t take on too many projects, tasks, or relationships at once. If you have too many pockets of energy swirling around you, you might become confused. 
  • Learn to continually love yourself, even amid the worst mistakes and challenges. When you fall short of this, always try to nudge yourself back to self-love.
  • To become resilient, turn to nature, meditation, prayer, and rituals. 
  • Stay away from people who tell you that you’re too sensitive. They will never fully understand you, and they might fail you at vital junctures in your life. 
  • Be a little less generous, especially when you know your energy is depleted. 
  • Seek love and adventures with people who honor your role as an Empath.
  • Set firm boundaries with the people who believe that Empaths and other sensitives are weak.
  • Confide in at least one loving, caring person every day.
  • Dig a little deeper into your faith by seeking the most love-based and light-filled aspects within your religion and spiritual practices.
  • Watch movies that make you feel love and provoke your tears. 
  • Don’t be afraid to ask for affection when you need it. 
  • Spend lots of time in the water. Whether it’s hot baths, cold showers, lakes, streams or oceans, Empaths tend to revitalize around water. 
  • See your heart as a beautiful, fragile, and powerful light-being. Love and protect your heart, and seek to express the feelings that live there. 

 

Remember that you are a bundle of electricity, a complex vibration, a spark born from the eternal consciousness’s love of life. Even amid the worst circumstances, be open to the possibilities, embody hope, and seek light and love. These things are your birthright.

The world needs healthy, positive Empaths. If you’re so inclined, you can make a living as an intuitive reader, healer, or psychic. With more healers and Empaths serving creation, our planet stands the best chance of infusing itself with light and love. 

I love being an Intuitive-Empath and serving others. Over time, I learned to exit stifling situations and protect myself. I also learned to stop apologizing for my gifts. Now, I can wholeheartedly be myself without judgment. I hope you can, too.

In all things, dig deeply to find your clarity, express your emotions, and honor what you know to be true. Being an Empath is a wonderful thing.

Are You an Empath?


Push Away Nothing: The Art of Receptivity

Push Away Nothing: The Art of Receptivity

I received the weekly newsletter from UPAYA Zen Centre via email. It opened with a quote from Frank Ostaseski:

“The First Precept: Welcome everything. Push away nothing… At the deepest level, we are being asked to cultivate a kind of fearless receptivity.”

There is more to the quote and I encourage you to source the rest of it. “Push away nothing.” There was something freeing about that statement. It felt almost paradoxical. We tend to protect ourselves from the experiences and situations we deem bad, harmful, stressful, discouraging. There was a sense of liberation in his statement. I felt as though it contained a secret key. I have found over my years of spiritual seeking, that when I stumble across a paradox or a deeply contrary belief, I am usually stumbling onto something great.

“Welcome everything.” It wasn’t to say that I welcomed awful things. It was when I found myself fighting against what was happening, that I stopped and repeated the words, “Welcome everything.”

Fear keeps us from welcoming everything. There was a time I lived by the phrase, “The garbage you know is better than the garbage you don’t.” (Well, maybe I didn’t use the word garbage). What do we think is going to happen? And why do we assume it is less than what we have now? Perhaps it will be greater than we can imagine.

“Push away nothing.” I was starting a new venture with a dear friend and the timing of this new mantra was perfect. I took it into every challenge and situation that arose in the early stages of creating our vision and bringing our project to life. When conflict came, I welcomed it. When the workload grew, even though it was summer holidays and I had planned to be loafing around doing yoga in the garden and playing with the kids, I welcomed it. When I had to wait for others in order to move forward, I welcomed it. I pushed away nothing but something fell away all on its own. As I welcomed each and every circumstance, feeling and thought, struggle fell away. As I welcomed everything, everything became easier.

The new venture emerged with much work and little struggle. Finally, I made the time to enjoy an end of summer yoga class. The summer work and activity schedule had gotten the best of my back. I altered the poses. Rather than flow from up dog to down, I took an extra plank, reducing the movement in my spine. I lay on my back in a tense version of setu bhandasana, or bridge pose, mitigating back pain by squeezing my glutes tighter. I wondered why my back was in such a state after a long period pain-free. I wished the pain would go away so I could enjoy my practice.

“Push away nothing.” The mantra found me on my mat. I released my glutes and my tension. “Welcome everything.” I breathed deeply into my back and the discomfort. I moved through the remaining practice with breath and mantra, welcoming the state of my body and the opportunity to gently back off from the full expression of the poses. I took seated twist and simply allowed myself to back off. In backing off, I discovered deeper release and the ability to move further into the pose with greater ease. In welcoming the condition of my body and allowing it to guide my practice, I found more freedom and flexibility.

I woke the next morning with more mobility in my spine and my mind. Seemingly counter-intuitive, there is great freedom in Frank Ostaseski’s words. I am grateful he shared them and I adopt them with fearless receptivity.

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