Self-Healing and Being Empathic

A little known fact that every person who is healing should consider.

If you even think you might be empathic, this is information you need to know if you are challenged in becoming healthy. This concept is known in some ancient healing traditions, but it is not generally know to empaths. If you are empathic and you are not using the gifts for healing that come with your empathic nature, you could actually be contributing significantly to your unwellness. I didn’t know this could happen, until I did healing readings for some people whose illnesses were directly connected to healing energy that was stuck inside their bodies.

Since many of learned to shut down our empathic natures, as a means of protecting ourselves, you might not even be aware that you are empathic. That is what happened to me, so I was an adult before I discovered I empathized with people’s physical and emotional pain. Here is how it worked. I would be feeling absolutely great and head over to a friend’s house for a social engagement. Because there were new people to meet, my friend would make introductions. I’d shake hands with someone, looking into their cheerful eyes and suddenly feel profoundly sad. Then I might be having a conversation with someone and seemingly out of nowhere feel pain in my chest. I assumed I was having problems that were being triggered by other people, until my medicine elder explained to me that while it might be my issue alone, it was also possible that I was empathically picking up their pain.

In later years, as I began doing healing work on others and did healing readings, I discovered that pent-up healing energy in the body can produce physical pain. I could sense people stopping the flow of healing energy in their bodies, and as a result, they were suffering. For example if your empathic response to someone else’s pain is for energy to flow through your hands, and you stop the flow, you could find that your hands, wrists, arms, and joints particularly, ache intensely. Physically, inflammation in the body has many causes including injury, diet, infection, weak immune system, gastric issues, hormones etc. However, if you are an empath, you have one more cause to consider and that is constricted energy flow.

Profound empathy is common for people with healing gifts. Empathy within your own body or emotions is what allows you to deeply understand what is happening for someone else. Some empaths connect with other people’s physical conditions; some with emotions. Still others connect to animals, and there are empaths that connect to Mother Earth. Some empaths have profound relationships with combinations of these four primary points of focus, and others are affected by all four.

I find that earth connected empaths are often the least aware that they have an empathic nature. This makes sense when you consider that recognizing our energetic relationship to Mother Earth has been socially repressed in many cultures for hundreds of years. A person is often and adult on a spiritual path of awakening that includes conscious connection with the earth before realizing they may have a unique bond with the Mother.

Here is an example. A dear friend of mine would get intense migraine headaches, typically lasting for three days. They seemed to come out of nowhere, and did not seem to be related to stress, sinuses or hormones, or any other usual causes of migraines. As I was doing some healing work on her, I kept seeing a vision of a volcano exploding. This seemed like an apt metaphor for a migraine, but I had a sense it wasn’t a metaphor. After the healing session, and with her permission, I shared with her what I had seen.

After our session, she did some research and discovered that a volcano had exploded during the same period she had the headache. The next time a migraine started, she researched again to discover a volcano was about to go off. This time, with the very first symptoms she immediately did some healing energy work with the volcano, and the migraine stopped. She has not had a volcano-related migraine since then.

If you are now wondering if you are empathic or what you should do if you are having empathetic responses, here are some recommendations. If you aren’t sure about how empathic you might be, I suggest you begin observing your life very carefully. In the first chapter of my book, “The Root of All Healing,” I teach the readers how to create simple behavioral charts so that you can record what happens prior to an influx of pain, during the painful period and afterward, so that you can recognize any potential patterns that previously seemed to be hidden.

Secondly, if you notice that there are patterns connected to other people’s physical or emotional pain, animal distress or the Mother Earth, you are going to need to discover your energetic healing gift. You can discover your gifts through internal reflections or with outside assistance from someone else, such as:

Observation—keen awareness about what natural elements or expressions of energy you relate to most and what you have done in the past that made a difference

Meditation—introspective awareness about how energy flows and responds through you

Dream Analysis—Inviting your dreams to show you your gifts and how to use them

Reading—from someone qualified to recognize other people’s energetic gifts and teach you how to use them

Energy Healing—from someone able to identify and show you how to use your energetic talents to help yourself

Once you understand how your energy is responding to the world around you and you know how to properly engage your own energetic healing abilities, be sure to also inquire from a knowledgeable healer about how to use your energy without infringing upon other people’s and animal’s rights to not receive healing assistance, if that is there wish. There are ways to engage the energy properly while respecting others' boundaries. Then, when your energy is flowing freely, you can enjoy peace and wellness while being in balance with your empathic nature.