Unlocking Your Empathic Energy Flow
This is part three of a five-part series on energy and Thriving as an Empath. Did you miss any of the blogs?
Life is not happening to you. Life is responding to you.
Empathic Energy Handling
Empaths, unlike non-empaths, have a collective consciousness. We think in terms of “we” rather than “me,” and more importantly, we experience life as “we” rather than “me.” Our ability to sense all the energy around us and our desire to be a collective create conditions for unconscious merging between ourselves and the people in our lives. The problem with unconscious merging is that we pick up the energy bits of others, particularly those bits that others don’t want – pain, sadness, fear, jealousy, anger, and so on.
Natural Healers
In addition to our collective consciousness, empaths are natural energy healers, even without formal training. This unique combination of traits means that when we’re going about our daily lives, we’re also unconsciously clearing the energy in our environment. We naturally heal people and environments, often without realizing it. Untrained empaths will run energy by bringing all that energy into their own systems and transforming the environment to a higher, more comfortable vibration. However, what comes naturally to us can also damage us. Our systems can get jammed up or damaged, leading to exhaustion, hormonal imbalances, and eventually illness.
Then our systems get jammed up or damaged in a variety of different ways causing exhaustion, hormone imbalances (especially to the adrenals), and eventually illness. Before I discuss how energy blocks and damage affect people, I want to give a general explanation of the different systems. There are some great books on the Teachers & Resources page if you would like more in-depth information about energy medicine.
The Human Energy System
At the most basic level, we are all energy. The human energy system is a multilayered tapestry, but I want to provide a general explanation, so I am going to simplify. Our energy system is comprised of three main parts; we have an aura, a chakra system, and a meridian system. Each part is important, has a purpose, and contributes to our health and wellbeing.
Meridians
Chakras
There are hundreds of chakras in and around the body, but we’ll focus on the seven main energy centers. Chakras govern sets of emotions, organs/body areas, and archetypes. They can have various levels of activity, and their flow is critical to our health. Chakras affect both our emotional and physical well-being. If they’re blocked or unbalanced, we can experience anything from tiredness to severe health issues.
Aura
Donna Eden describes the aura as “a multilayered sphere of energy that emanates from your body and interacts with the atmosphere of the Earth.” A healthy aura protects us from harmful atmospheric energy while attracting energies that help our systems function better.
Vibration
Vibration is a measure of your overall energy system in hertz, the unit of measurement for frequency and sound. Every person has a particular vibration, and each feeling we have has a particular vibration. Your vibration is an expression of your energy system’s health. High vibration leads to joy and thriving, while low vibration leads to illness and negativity.
Clearing Your Energy Blocks
These are the building blocks of our energy system and how blocks and imbalances form. For empaths, auras are the most easily affected because we have permeable boundaries. We easily merge fields with different people, experiencing their energy as well as our own. As we collect negative debris, our energy system tries to process it as if it’s ours, leading to exhaustion, irritability, and health issues.
Remember, expressing emotions is all physics, for every action (or inaction), there is an equal and opposite reaction (or blockage). The same is true for our emotions, when they remain unexpressed you can think of it like an untreated infection. It may be ok for a while but eventually, the infection grows big enough not to be ignored. Your organs can shut down, you get a fever, maybe your appendix bursts. When you collect emotional energy the same thing happens, at first, you function just fine but over time you become exhausted, irritable, perhaps you get stomach aches or migraines, however, your body expresses it, this is the overload of emotional energy. Each energy system handles emotional energy differently, let me explain each.
Auric Damage and Healing
As we move throughout our day to day life, we pick up junk from other people and places around us. It happens all day, our aura is an ever evolving energy system. Its health requires regular maintenance. The aura is our outer shield, our protective bubble. Our aura can get shredded, penetrated, filled with junk that doesn’t belong to us, people can tap into our aura and suck energy from us and other unintentional and intentional damage can occur. Maintaining optimal health and good energetic boundaries requires empaths to be actively involved in cleaning and clearing our aura. Meditation can clear an aura but so can a long walk in the woods. Just like being in bad environments can hurt our auras, being in good environments can heal our auras.
Chakra Imbalances, Blocks, and Healing
Chakras function like a vortex funnel. Each chakra has attributes unique to that center and manages our emotional and physical body. Our chakras react to our emotions, they can get sticky, clogged, blocked, or shut down. When our chakras are blocked we can struggle to have enough energy in that region to be healthy. This can be something like feeling tired or it could be something like heart disease if a block is left untreated for many years. Meditation and energy exercises can help keep our chakras balanced and running clean. Again our regular maintenance allows us to stay on top of the health of our physical body.
2 Type of Meridian Blocks and Healing
Meridians are the most insular part of our energy system because meridians run our energy and do not pick up other people’s energy first hand. They can, however, be affected by energy brought into the aura that has entered the chakra system. This type of energy block is can to cleared with meridian massage, acupuncture, or a regular practice of tracing the meridians.
The second type of meridian block occurs when we experience emotional trauma in our lives, the death of a parent, the abandonment by a friend, or a public embarrassment, we can create energy blocks within the meridians by not fully processing our emotions. If left untreated, these blocks can affect us for years to come. When one meridian is blocked we depend upon other meridians to pick up the slack, thereby over-taxing those other meridians as a result. When you can experience those emotions and allow yourself to move through them fully, you can release both the trauma and loosen the patterns of behavior that don’t serve you.
This type of clearing work can be achieved through energy healing including acupuncture. If you are an empath I advise seeking out an energy healer to begin the process of unwinding some of the more difficult patterns, as we don’t always see our own patterns and trauma very clearly. We have protections and blind spots to what we perceive as threats to our safety.
Bringing it home
Those are the basic building blocks of our energy system and a brief introduction to how blocks and imbalances form. For empaths, auras are the system that is most easily affected by the fact that we are empaths. Our desire to be a collective means we have permeable boundaries to our aura. Our permeable boundaries allow us to easily merge fields with different people in our lives. When merged we experience all of their energy as well as our own. When we leave each other, empaths often retain the negative pieces that our friends and loved ones don’t want to face or process for themselves because empaths are healers and attract energy that needs healing.
As we collect the negative debris, our energy system tries to process it as if it is ours, it can’t unfortunately. We are only able to fully process and transform our own energy. So as we try to process it, the energy moves through our aura to our chakra system where it can get bunched up and clogged. The more people we interact with the more debris we collect. The longer we try to process energy that isn’t ours, the deeper into our system it goes. And this is how an empath can overload the system and compromise our health.
A special note about the meridian system
The meridian system blocks are more of a problem for empaths because of our sensitive natures. We are more deeply affected by emotional trauma than non-empaths and live in a culture that doesn’t have an appreciation for emotional processing. We live in a stiff upper lip society, so empaths have trained themselves to bury stuff for as long as possible. It is still a subject of debate in the medical community that unprocessed emotions contribute to physical illness and disease, despite the fact that scientific research has proven this to be true. So an illness like chronic fatigue is difficult to diagnose and even harder to treat with traditional medicine. And many diseases from breast cancer and heart disease to MS are difficult to treat and heal without including emotional trauma clearings.
As I mentioned above, regular meditation, grounding, and energy exercises are the tools to combat the energy overload empaths experience. One of the most important tools for an empath is creating and maintaining energetic boundaries. Putting energetic boundaries in place helps combat the permeable boundaries problem, you are reinforcing your aura so you pick up less debris. So far, I haven’t found any tool or device that turns empath-ness off, but it is ok, once an empath stops fighting against their sensitivity and learns to embrace it, work it, and manage it–they THRIVE.
If you are looking for specific tools please first refer to the Teachers & Resources page or contact me directly. The next installment Self Awareness is the Key will discuss the importance of self-awareness when you are an empath.
Thriving as an Empath is a five-part blog series. If you are ready to begin the journey to becoming an Empowered Empath, download the Four Practices for Claiming Your Empath Power.
