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.
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.
- 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.
About the Author
6 Tips for the Best Bath & 12 Ingredients to Add
When people think of an ideal way to relax, a nice hot bath is usually what comes to mind. However, there are a few lesser-known tips and tricks that can take your bath from a simple relaxation to a full-blown healing, medically therapeutic investment!
Before you dive in, however, be sure you follow these tips for the best cleansing bath you’ve ever had:
1. Some like it hot…but not too hot!
How hot can you stand it? For some, if it feels like bathing in a bubbling cauldron of bliss, it’s just the right temperature. But did you know that superheated baths actually get your nervous system revved up? In actuality, there’s a threshold of heat where the relaxation is just a bit of an illusion. If you’re pregnant, this is especially important; keep your baths to a maximum of about 37˚C (100˚F) — just barely above body temperature!
Not only is your nervous system…well, a little nervous, but homeostatically it can be a bad idea to start boiling your system. Contrary to popular belief, if you can’t sleep, a piping hot bath is actually more likely to keep you awake than soothe you to sleep.
The most relaxing baths are not quite piping hot. If you are bathing for sedation or specifically to help you sleep, keep the temperature easy on your body.
2. Keep it cool
Ever feel wilted and sluggish after a hot bath? You may have even gotten a headache afterwards. Avoid this post-bath syndrome by keeping your head, hands, feet, or all three cool with a cold washcloth, ice cubes wrapped in a towel, or pouring cold water on these spots on occasion. They are your body’s ideal spots to release heat, which is important.
Your body isn’t actually too fond of getting too hot when it doesn’t have a chance to release heat. This creates an artificial fever. An artificial fever has its uses, but it can also have some unpleasant side effects, such as headaches. Give your body some opportunity to shed some heat. Your core body temperature will still go up (and you’ll get the benefits of that), but it will cause less physiological stress. You may be quite surprised at how much this improves your experience.
3. Make it a massage time
Treat yourself completely with a little self-massage, perhaps to release tension in trigger points. You can try something like a self-abhyanga massage after your bath, or you bring a ball into the bath with you and trap it under your body to apply pressure to stiff and aching muscles. Simply run a warm bath, and trap a ball between your body and the bottom or back of the tub to rub your back muscles — your buoyancy allows for excellent control over moderate pressures without being too intense.
4. Stay hydrated, my friends!
Guess what? Even if your bath is only slightly warmer than your body, your systems start to attempt to cool you off in the way it knows best: sweating! You can end up losing a lot of valuable fluid this way, so do yourself a favor and drink plenty of liquids before, during and after to replenish your body.
Choose liquids that are indeed hydrating rather than any diuretics, such as caffeinated tea, alcohol (sorry, bath wine!), or coffee. Instead, try a refreshing cool lemon water! This way, you will also help avoid a post-bath headache.
5. Lower back love
If you have lower back pain, a hot bath is the treatment for you! It’s even better than trying to ice it (which might even be on the harmful side).
The myth that a hot bath will only worsen the “inflamed” back is simply not true. The great majority of low back pain is essentially muscular in nature, contrary to the popular and mistaken view that it’s usually caused by something “mechanical” like a intervertebral disc herniation. Specifically, the cause of most back pain is myofascial trigger points (“knots” in your muscles), which can cause far more grief than most people realize — and yet they are relatively treatable. A little reassurance, rubbing, and a hot bath go a surprisingly long way, even with the most horrendous case of low back pain. A hot bath is amazingly good therapy for back pain, and the price sure is right.
Once again, trigger points are eased by heat, and usually irritated by cold.
6. Deep bath breathing
What better place to “blow off steam” breathing than in the bath? Controlling your breath moves energy throughout your body, and with the right technique, can be a hugely helping hand in relaxation.
Conscious, deeper breathing is always relaxing, grounding, and embodying. It can make you more comfortable in your own skin. But it seems to be particularly effective in a hot bath.
Now that you’re a bath pro, discover what bath ingredient is best for you! For example, did you know that by adding tea bags into your bath, you can help your body balance its energy and hormones, aid in clearing it of toxins, and also provide the anti-aging benefits of antioxidants? Check out this infographic, and see what ingredients you’d like to start trying.
