So You’re An Empath! Three Things You Should Know About Owning Your Space

It happens nearly everyday. A friend’s cat has died and you feel her grief and start to cry. A colleague at work is angry. Even though she isn’t saying anything, you feel her anger and it is overwhelming. A relative’s giddiness has you feeling giddy for no reason of your own. Sometimes you even feel people’s energy when they are not anywhere near you. When these experiences happen too often, you feel like you are on an emotional roller. You become emotionally drained, and for problems that are not even yours to solve. You are an empath, and you know it. But you don’t know what to do about it, or how to protect yourself.

Being empathetic is a gift, though it may not feel as such when you feel like you are being controlled by other people’s emotions. How do you make the leap from being overwhelmed to protecting yourself, and then to being able to help someone you know is in emotional distress? You who are born natural empaths may feel that it’s beyond your control to protect yourself because feeling overpowered may have been your experience for years.

Fortunately, there are several techniques that you can learn to protect yourself and still be a sensitive, caring person. Just as you are being affected by someone else’s energy, these effective techniques are energy techniques. You manage your energy by using intention, visualizations and thoughts. Yes! Your intention, your ability to visualize and your thoughts are very, very powerful. Instead of being manipulated by other people’s thoughts and emotions, you can use you own energies to protect yourself.

How You Allow Foreign Energy Into Your Space, and What You Can Do About It
There are several factors regarding how you (unconsciously) set your own energy that allows foreign energy to swoop in and take over. I’m going to discuss three of the most important factors. The first factor is that your space is wide open and receptive, especially if you are an “open” person. You are open to communicating and being friends with people. So your aura, your personal energy space, is open like a satellite dish. The wider the dish, the more receptive it is.

Here’s what you can do about it. Sit down in a chair and put your feet flat on the floor. To get a sense of how far out from your body your personal space extends, first feel as if you are pulling it all the way in to your skin. Most people feel that this is too tight and they can’t breathe. The next step is to keep your attention point in your head while you expand your aura very slowly outward, in all directions. Do this until you can no longer keep your attention in your head. Open your eyes and guesstimate how far your aura is out from your body. Any aura extending out more than two feet will be fairly porous and vulnerable to foreign energies. Close your eyes again and experiment with opening and closing your aura. Notice how this feels to your body. How far out can your aura go before you no longer feel centered and safe? Try this expansion and contraction when you are talking with people, or at work, or just running errands. Just notice for yourself what and how you feel.

The second factor regarding how you set your own energy field is that you don’t know how to release or let go of other people’s energies which have invaded your space. It just swirls around and around, perhaps making you feel dizzy and confused. Your energy field needs a grounding cord. Just as a grounding rod connects a building into the ground to carry current safely away from a circuit in the event of an electrical surge or a lightning strike, a grounding cord will carry unwanted emotional or foreign energy out of your space deep into the ground where it gets neutralized.

Here’s how to create a grounding cord for your body. Sit down in a chair with your feet on the ground. Get a sense of the weight of your body being pulled into the chair by gravity. If the chair wasn’t there, you would just fall down. Imagine a circle around the whole area where your body meets the chair. Let the circle fall down and create a strong tube all the way down to the center of the earth. Let your energy move in a downward direction down the tube. Intend that you are releasing everyone else’s emotions, demands, judgments and problems down this tube. You are grounding their energy out of your space and into the earth. Once again, you will have very interesting results practicing this when you are conversing with someone who is emotionally upset or controlling. Notice how you feel when you do this. It may take some practice, but grounding is very powerful.

The third factor that is important for an empath to know about is that it is very important to fill up with your own energy after releasing other people’s energy. When you own your space with your own energy, you will be less vulnerable. To replenish your own energy, sit down in a chair with a firm back and put your feet flat on the floor. Visualize, create or imagine a golden sun about one foot above your head. Use it like a giant magnet and intend to call back all of your energy that you might have left in other people’s space, or at work, or running errands. Call it back from all time, space, persons, situations and things, back to your golden sun! Watch your sun get larger and larger, brighter and brighter. When it’s about to burst, have all that energy shine down onto you, or flow down through your space, and absorb it. Absorb it into your aura and your body. You can fill up like a bathtub. Send some down your grounding cord to clean it out.

Practicing these psychic tools with other people in a classroom setting makes the experience of the tools even more powerful. Psychic Awakenings offers fun classes and workshops designed especially for people who are sensitive and empathetic. More information can be found at www.PsychicAwakenings.com and Meetup.com/Psychic-Awakenings-Seattle.