One of the most difficult things about being an empath is the feeling of isolation and loneliness.
Most people you tell may not understand.
They may either think you’re crazy, dismiss you as a freak or look at your blankly, wondering what the heck you’re talking about. Some will even denounce you as working with the devil. For some bizarre reason, this natural state of being seems to be an abomination and sin in some cultures and religions. (And you could do a series of topics on this, but I’m not going to get into it today.)
Worse still is the feeling and doubt that you, yourself, might really be crazy.
A support network is something that could help a lot. Though, the web has a few groups that cater for other empaths, they are not always active and some of the people are not even empaths. I certainly think the time has come to start such a network.
One day, I imagine a worldwide empath support network with charters in every country. We’re not there yet, but I believe it will happen.
This blog is dedicated to the free sharing of information of being an empath and subjects in all their forms.
Some topics you will like and relate to. Some you won’t. That’s just the nature of blogs.
Also there are various chat rooms that are geared towards the psychic side where you will find other empaths.
The good thing about being an empath is that distance doesn’t make any difference. You can be on the other side of the world and your connection will be just as strong. So a support group is much easier to create than you might first think.
For now, I’m going to share some of the resources I’ve come across in recent times, but please, if you know more, feel free to add them in the comments. (And I will try and include them in this post.)
You can help by sharing this information, including this blog.
Resources updated September 2018. (Not as many as there once were unfortunately).
One of the complaints from Empaths that I hear a lot is that they often feel overwhelmed by too many feelings and emotions.
So much so, it drives them nuts. It is a very real problem, and causes all kinds of issues, including psychic burnout.
You might liken it to one of those old egg catching games from the early 1980s. Eggs would come from four different directions, and you would catch them. Over the course of the game, they would get faster and faster. Let three eggs fall and it was game over.
Depending on your skill and stamina, you could last a long time but eventually fatigue would kick in, and you’d drop the eggs, normally in rapid succession.
To take it a step further, it also can be likened to doing too many jobs at work when you’re short staffed, or understaffed. Unless you are amazingly skilled, you will eventually hit a point where you suddenly no longer are coping, and just going through the motions.
Mistakes happen and you collapse into a heap, exhausted and sick.
This is what it can be like for the Empath on a daily basis. They are hit by too many energies all at once and they go into a toxic, psychic overload where it literally hurts to even think.
To make matters worse, the people around them tend to get angry that their demands aren’t being met, and put additional pressure on the Empath. If there is any protest, they will ask to ignore everyone… but themselves.
Psychic burnout can and often does lead to long term illnesses and mental breakdowns.
Fortunately for the Empath, the Bach Flower Remedy, Elm, will help with those feelings of too much, too soon, too overwhelming.
When taking it, the sense of panic and exhaustion lifts, and a sense of calm and organization tends to take its place.
Elm is a remedy worth keeping in the Empath’s first aid kit. It also works well with Oak (when someone is pushed past their limits) and Olive (long and short term exhaustion.)
In spite of me ignoring my intuition on certain things (such as relationships I wanted to pursue because I didn’t like that answers I got), I have generally listened to it in the past when there was no emotional attachment involved, and I didn’t care about the outcome.
I’ve stated that you can’t always just explain intuition away rationally, so I thought I’d share a story about how intuition can warn you when there is potential danger, even when there is no reason behind it.
As mentioned in previous blog entries, I used to go up to Hanging Rock on a regular basis in the late 80s and early 90s.
It would be either just me and my then friend, Paul, or a group of us in a couple of cars. It was always at night, and we’d always go to both Hanging Rock itself (because the gates would mostly be left open after dark) and Straws Lane, which is a place of weird anomalies that cannot be dismissed as just illusion.
In the early 90s, we had been there quite a number of times. Sometimes we climbed the Rock in the dark and there was even one time when we came back down to find the gates had been padlocked closed. (We got out because I happened to have a hacksaw in my car that day.)
Never once did any of those things bother me. Never once did I sense anything bad might happen, and nothing ever really did.
Except for this one time.
Because memory can be such a fragile thing, I’ve decided to just post an entry from my diary at the time (and edited to remove irrelevant details.)
This entry was written on Sunday 22nd March, 1992.
Yesterday was not quiet the equinox but we decided to go up to Hanging Rock anyway. Paul also asked a bunch of his mates and around eight of us went up that night.
We took two cars. Normally I take my car but Paul felt it was his turn.
It was night, but everybody to climb the rock again. I wasn’t against it but somehow I felt we shouldn’t do it. As we were driving up, Paul remarked: “I’ve got the feeling nothing going to happen tonight.”
I didn’t agree and said so. The uneasy feeling was growing.
We arrived and made our way up to the gates.
I once again stated that we shouldn’t climb the rock. Paul asked why not and all I could say was it was a gut feeling.
The gates on one side the grounds were open. We all got out of the car and heard this unearthly howling sound coming from the direction of the rock.
“That was no animal,” said Paul. After a couple more times, it stopped and everyone promptly forgot about it. I kept it in the back of my mind and kept bringing it up as an argument why we shouldn’t go in.
We also saw lights and heard some sort of music. A bit more investigation revealed there were people inside.
Still, everyone wanted to go inside and climb the rock, regardless.
Once again, I argued against it. I was adamant that we shouldn’t do it. Somehow I knew I wasn’t going to convince them.
I then suggested that the gate could be closed when we come about out and I wasn’t about to climb over barbed wire.
We drove around to the other gates and found those were closed. One of the guys used his keys on the lock and found, to my horror, that it opened it.
“That’s one of your excuses gone,” Paul said to me.
“I still feel we shouldn’t do it.” I replied, with a sinking feeling. No one listened and we drove in through the open gate and down into the car park.
I reluctantly accepted that they were going to climb the rock and I decided to go with them. I felt the rock itself that wasn’t the problem: there was something else.
In any case, I felt they would be safer with me with them. (I always had a sense that I could protect others.)
We started to climb but barely a few minutes later, we saw headlights drive into the car park and stop where the cars were. The lights went out for a few seconds and I heard a door a slam. Then they came back on and a four wheel drive drove up and shone his headlights up towards the rock. He must have seen us for he sounded his horn
We made our way back to the car park and Paul said to what must have been the park ranger: “Is there a problem?”
“Can’t you read,” he said angrily.
“The gates were open,” Paul replied.
“Wake up to yourself. Get out of here,” said shouted back.
He drove off up the track and sat there waiting for us to leave.
“He knew he was wrong. That’s why he didn’t hang around,” said Paul.
But I wasn’t so sure.
When we got the cars, we smelled a strong lime smell that seemed to be strongest in the car. I thought it was odd and could find no rational explanation for it. As we were driving down the road, the driver of the other car, Dean, said on this UHF CB that there was something running down our back window and boot. We stopped to take a look at it and found someone had poured some sort of acid and brake fluid over the boot (trunk) and it was burning into the paint work.
We rushed back to Woodend as fast as we could and pulled up at an all-night service station where they proceeded to wash the acid off. Dean’s car wasn’t too bad and I think we just managed to save Paul’s but it would need a cut and polish to restore the finish.
We spoke to the service station attendant who described the man we met as the park ranger called Guido. He was adamant though that he knew Guido and he would never do something like that.
“You get all sorts of weirdos going up to the rock,” he said. “They have satanic rituals up there and on Straws lane. I even had some guy ask me at midnight were the graveyard was.”
My strong sense was that we were lucky that night. Possibly the ranger scared off whoever had the acid, and even more possibly, my delays may have just been enough for him to call us back before we disappeared from sight on the rock.
Certainly sounds like a plot from a bad horror movie.
My intuition was very clear on what to do, and what not to do, and the important thing to note that, even though it started as a normal journey, I was already feeling that something would happen, and as I said, I don’t scare easily.
I don’t know what it’s like for others, so I can only draw on my own personal experiences here. For me, I find when I’m thinking about a certain course of action, or am doing something; my stomach (in the solar plexus chakra area) will either feel distressed as though something is churning within me. (It’s a feeling resembling fear, even if no emotion is attached.) Or I will feel a sense of joy, connectedness, truth or love.
When it’s the former, it means that actions or situation will not suit my purposes. The stronger the feeling, the less I should do something. When it’s the latter, it means I should follow the actions or situation, no matter how unlikely or insane it might seem at the time.
The thing with your decisions is that other people will try and talk you out of it if they think you are wrong. They will tell you that you’re making a mistake, or that you’ll regret a course of action.
Or if you know something bad will happen, they will try and convince you that you’re being paranoid or negative, or that you’re a wet blanket.
Many tend to accept the advice of others, in spite of what they may feel.
This is a mistake.
Intuition is a sign that you’re connected to your feelings. It’s like saying I wish to head north, but we’re heading east right now and we’ll never reach our goal.
Being told you are being negative might convince you that you should be continuing east, rather than listening to their internal guidance.
Remember, people give advice based generally on what they want, and not what you want.
If things were that obvious, we wouldn’t need our intuition, but they rarely are. When we call forth events in our life, we are also given directions, but those directions might seem wrong because they are pointing you in a different path. That’s when people ignore them and go in the direction they think they should go, or what logic dictates. In the end, often things just don’t work out quite as expected.
As an example, supposing you are at a train station and you need to get to your destination as soon as possible. The train arrives. Your first inclination is to board it, and logic tells you to, but something holds you back. It may be a feeling that something is wrong, or a sudden anxiety. It could even be a resistance in your movement. Perhaps you might even start to stress or panic.
What you need to take notice of is if it feels right to board that train? You listen to your feelings and you decide not to board it.
Five minutes later, another train comes. This one happens to be an express train, and will get you there 10 minutes sooner. You didn’t have that information, but your intuition did.
There are also those times when it’s not easy to tell what of intuition is telling you.
This is because fear can cause interference.
For example, supposing your child is home late, the fear of something terrible having happened to them will kick in and often override your intuitive feelings that all is well. (In which case, I’d recommend the Bach Flower Remedy, Mimulus, for known fears.)
Fear can cause a lot of grief and when you love and care for someone, it can really be hard to overcome and be impartial.
(The Bach Flower Remedies Red Chestnut and Mimulus can really help here.)
I’ve spoken about intuition on and off, but have yet to really explain what it means.
I used to think that intuition was about manifesting and using mind powers. That was back in the 80 and 90s, when there just wasn’t any information around at the time.
My intuition was working fine, but I would just ignore it because I didn’t like what it was telling me.
More importantly, when I was going to try something that didn’t feel right, I thought that it was just nerves, or me being negative, so I thought that if I soldiered on, thing would work out.
They never did.
It wasn’t till around 1994 that I finally started to understand. I’m not sure what caused the shift, but one day, I just somehow understood what I needed to do.
As I mentioned in previous entries, I had finally got to the point where I was so over failing in getting the things I believed I wanted. I was worn down, and had to admit that I just couldn’t brute force my way thought things.
Once I started to trust it, it became one of my greatest tools.
The skeptics out there claim that there is no such thing as intuition. They will put it down to us having the ability to read subtle signs and signals that we’re not even aware of.
Now, there is truth to this, make no mistake, but to dismiss it as all there is to it would be an error.
While we might be very good at reading signs (especially as an Empath), it does not explain how you can know about things where there are no signs to be read.
It doesn’t explain how you could know things that were never spoken of, of things that are happening elsewhere, when you’ve got no prior knowledge of it.
It doesn’t explain why something might feel right today, and then tomorrow it feels bad, even though you’ve received no new information.
If it was a matter of being logical, then most of the decisions I’ve made would not have been made and the ones based on logic would have ensured my life would have thrived.
Logic has gotten me nowhere. Even reading the signs has failed me when it doesn’t match with what I was feeling. In fact, often, what I might be feeling may be totally contrary to what I’m observing.
The fact is, intuition is real, it is powerful and can really steer you through the minefields of life.
The fact that people fear to trust their own feelings shows that logic has very little to do with it, because people tend to take the logical route, or the path that they feel will lead them to the most benefit, even if they don’t feel good about the choice.
In these things, fear is often at the root of our motivation.
Intuition is like your personal inbuilt GPS with full traffic information and where the speed and red light cameras are… well, I’m sure you get the idea.
It will navigate all the obstacles that you can’t possibly be aware of. All you need do is listen.
