“As I wake today…”
An empath’s journal entry. My relationship with my care for the world.
Enjoying this? Thank you! It’d be great if you could like or restack this post so more people can find it on Substack 🙏
Do you have tea in hand? Perrrfect.
Because today’s piece is a journal entry I wrote some morning some amount of time ago. Working with the energy I had woken up with.
It’s an experiential ride sorting through:
what’s mine?
what’s other’s?
what’s the collective’s?
Ultimately working with my care for the world.
Fellow empaths & sensitivos—do you see yourself in this? I would love to hear from you.
with love for any and all energy that’s with you right now,
Liz ❤️
Being an empath in this world
Sorting through where I end and another begins has been a lifelong school of practice for me as an empath. Add in being in relationship with a highly complicated, multifaceted, multidimensional world and this task is taken to the next level.
Whether you want to use the word “empath,” “feeler,” “clairsentient,” “sensitive soul,” there are those of us who naturally feel just a bit more than the average Joe. “Highly Sensitive People” is a term coined by Dr. Elaine Aron whose research estimates that we make up 15-20% of the population. She says that the trait that sets us apart—a Sensory-Processing Sensitivity trait—can be found in over 100 species in the natural world.
Our role in collective healing
I’m of the humble belief that us empaths have a unique role to play in the world these days, especially when it comes to collective healing. The turbulence of these times we live in is speaking to us. Empaths’ abilities to listen below the surface of things can help us unearth deeper messages within it all. If we know how to work with it.
But that can be more easily said than done! Especially when it comes to transformational times that are shaking up everyone’s proverbial snow globes. But I guess the challenge in it all—the way it pushes and pulls us—is where the transformation lives, in that friction and fracturing.
This is a journal entry that touches on this. I hope you enjoy.
As I wake today I notice a stirring in me many layers deep.
Stirring is quite a tame word in light of how it feels. It’s like a parfait of images and feelings weighing heavy in my mind’s eye. The weighty-ness of it held in my body.
I turn to my Angels for guidance. “Sort it all out,” they say. “Create buckets.”
Okay.
There are other people’s energies.
Their pain, really. This happens to me regularly. A pulling in towards someone else’s grief. An acute awareness of another’s hidden corners.
I’ve been confused by it most often throughout life. What does this mean? These days I understand it to be my psychic sensibilities as an empathic healer. A spiritual role many of us play. I don’t know how many, but I know we are a thing. We play a role, and have a specific role to play.
So I hold healing space for it. For these layers that are not mine. But that I’m in relationship with at this moment. That I am in touch with so clearly. The tangibility of it all is palpable.
An openness guides how I hold healing space. I make sure to not get too close in the way of absorption. Instead I hold a steady sense of self. Of my spiritual self’s texture and edges. Preserving that contact with my own boundary, my own beginning and end in pursuit of being a healing presence for the energy that’s before me. Holding loving, prayerful space for the healing movement, in whatever form per God’s will, the energy needs to take.
Then there’s a personal layer.
Intertwined and mucked up with the energy of another. I see this layer clearly, as my own.
I see the way the energy of another’s wiggles its way down my core pinging and dinging parts of me that require my care. Parts that are susceptible to getting hooked and taken for a ride.
“Ah..” I say, “hello there, dear ones.” Gently taking them by the shoulders. “Let’s take care of you..” as I get them a cup of tea.
And then there’s a wider, deeper set of energy.
Energies, really. A quasi-solidified realm of energy…
It’s my care for the world. For how to be of service to her. How to be a guardian of all I’ve inherited. How to steward that which I’m part of.
The pressure of this care actually makes me floaty in this moment. I feel bits and parts of me delicately dissociating from my body, as if trying to give me proper space to be with all that’s here. “Thank you for your intention, dear ones… But I need you down here with me.” With just a bit of space. Enough space where there’s some slide and glide between us. So we can dance and move like well-limbered muscles across tendons.
Yes, this care is expansive. It reaches all corners of the earth. Because I’m aware of so many freaking corners. And how this corner connects with that corner to feed into that corner over there. It’s why this energy is an inherent blob although filled with so many multiples. My health connected to my food connected to my consumerism connected to the climate. My use of the word “my” sending me into a small black hole of self-scrutiny and doubt—“My use of ‘my’ is part of the problem” I sunkenly say as my head gets heavy.
Every move I make is equipped with a critique-readied jet pack prepared to blast me through a tunnel of finger pointing and shame. All these tiny people in my head making me feel bad. Specific people in my orbit serving as characters in this charade.
Questions upon questions bear down on me as I’m propelled through space. Looking for some solid land for my footing. I’ll even take a toe. Just something for these parts of me to rejoin to.
And then I find it.
*Sigh*
An off gas of tension as I find a small exhale. Some of the dizziness loses steam. The aloneness starts to fade.
God.
I find a wholeness in the heart center of my body that brings me warmth, coziness. I know this is where I belong.
I don’t leave this intergalactic journey with a bunch of answers.
Maybe not even an answer within the way I’ve been taught to conceive of what an answer is. But I walk away with a felt sense that carries me forward. A felt sense that is my guide post for where to go. Which direction is up. Where the winding road is taking me.
It’s at this point that the questioning slows down. I begin to see what’s around me again. And can take small pinky-toe-type steps that look more like a dance.
A dance that includes throwing my hands in the air like I just don’t care. Even though I do—I really, really do.
But it’s actually a gesture of surrender. Of letting my hands flap terrifyingly gleefully in the wild rush of air around me on this wooden roller coaster of loving life that I’m on. Trusting this time-tested seat belt that clicked me into safety. Trusting my dad and the adults around me for putting me on this ride. Leaning into it all, letting the cotton candy smear on my face remind me of life’s sweetness. “Just enjoy.”
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