by Ora North
Your gifts do not make you a sacrificial lamb. Your sensitivity does not make you a martyr. You are more than that. If you deny yourself your autonomy, you deny the world of what it truly needs: you.
Validating Your Feelings
The isolation you feel as an empath can make it very difficult to feel like your pain is being seen by others. Since it’s impossible for others to see the full extent of that pain, even when they want to, it’s incredibly important for you to be willing to see your own pain.
More than anything else, feelings simply want to be witnessed and validated. Feelings are fluid and passing, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important or powerful. (Our world is run by emotions, remember?) I often use the metaphor that feelings are like a toddler experiencing the world, calling out for Mom to watch.
Mom, look! I’m doing a spin.
Mom, look! I fell down on the stairs.
Mom, look! My finger is hurt.
Mom, look! I drew a picture.
If Mom looks, the toddler feels seen and validated that they are learning and experiencing life. Mom doesn’t necessarily need to do anything in response. Sometimes Mom will need to bandage up a wound or embrace her child in her arms, but other times nodding and saying, “I see that, wow!” is enough for her to make her child feel validated and happy. However, if Mom completely ignores the child, the child feels isolated and alone in their experience of the world.
Our feelings work the same way. They show us that our spirits are still as pure as a toddler’s, diving into the raw experiences of life and reacting to them. As we grow into adults, we lose the value of emotions in favor of logic and expectation, and we stop witnessing the feelings of others and of ourselves. This is especially true with pain. In a culture that promotes binary emotional landscapes, we are expected to highly praise and validate success and happiness, while hiding, disguising, or invalidating pain. We’ve been trained to push that pain away. We’ve been trained to be the mother who refuses to look when her child calls.
Not witnessing your pain can permanently alter the landscape of your life, like a toddler who is ignored for too long. In the Do the Work section of this chapter, you’ll be invited to start seeing and validating all of your emotions.
The Art and Practice of Your Empathic Gift
Ah, there is this beautiful moment, this magnificent point in time when you have released everything you have into the wind, and you not only feel everything, but you also feel nothing. You feel perfectly held and perfectly free. You have found that axis point where creation and destruction meet, and no effort whatsoever is needed. You are reaching and receiving, and simultaneously letting go and offering. You are calm and complete, and yet so amused and touched by your own intricacies.
This is the spirit of art.
This is the gift of authentic expression.
This is the gift of creative flow.
This is a gift that’s available to you as an empath.
In the same way that a painter paints and a writer writes, an empath feels. The act of feeling, for an empath, is not just a by-product of other people, but a solitary art. The empath is not just a sponge for other people. The empath is a solitary artist.
When you pull yourself away from everyone else, when you find yourself alone with your own mind and your own heart, when you pour out all the feelings you have been brimming over with, you find something incredible. You find the true core feeling of being an empath: the deep, mysterious, wild emptiness of nature and creation. Here, everything and anything is possible. Here, you move mountains with your mind and sink ships with a song. You build cities from ash and make flowers bloom with your sex. You open minds and change hearts and serve justice on a platter. Anything and everything is within your power.
This might seem like a far cry from the overwhelmed and unseen empath you may be accustomed to being, but I assure you, it’s inside of you. You see, a funny thing happens when you begin to witness your own pain. The more you honestly witness and validate the pain you feel, the more your pain wants to go to work for you. When your pain feels truly seen, it wants to transmute itself into something beautiful and productive. In the same way that you would treat your feelings as a toddler—simply desiring to be witnessed—you can treat your feelings as an artist, looking for an avenue to express yourself creatively.
As you read this book, keep this in mind: inside of you is a deep well of creation, and you are a solitary artist of feeling. We’ll talk a lot about your experiences with other people and their feelings, and how your empathy has royally messed up your life, as those are things that are here to be witnessed and validated. In many ways, being an empath really is like being a sponge for other people’s feelings and experiences. But you are so much more than that, and my real hope is for you to go beyond and through your experience of others, into that point of transmutation and creation. My real hope is for you to start seeing yourself as that solitary artist, forever curious about the way you experience the world and the way you feel about this weird experience as a human. In doing this, you will discover your art of feeling, and through your art, you will find your truth and your mission. In your art of feeling, you will find yourself as you were always meant to be.
Do the Work
What if you could strip away all the labels and roles you have taken on as an empath? What if you peeled away the mother, the healer, the teacher, the husband, the daughter, the artist, the brother? What would you be? What would be left of your purpose? Would the very existence of “empath” disappear without those roles to play for others? Who would you be? And what would happen if you named and validated all your feelings? These exercises will help you answer those questions.
Name Your Labels
In your journal, make a list of all the labels in your life, whether they are self-appointed labels or given to you by others. Include all of them: the positive, the negative, and the neutral.
Take a look at your list, and notice how many of them are given to you because of your relationship to other people. Notice how many of them are used to explain your social position in life.
One by one, cross out each label, as if they don’t exist anymore. With each one you cross out, imagine that label doesn’t apply to you and notice how you feel. Imagine that the purpose you have within each label dissolves from the world as you cross it out. Does it feel good to let that purpose dissolve? Is it a relief? Does it feel terrible to lose it? Notice each feeling you have.
When you have every label crossed out, sit in the idea that none of those things make you who you are. If you’re not those things, who are you? Journal your answer to that question, allowing yourself to express your reactions, no matter how positive or negative they may be.
Name Your Feelings
At the end of the day, take your journal out and write about all the feelings you felt during your day. Try to remember from first waking up until this point. Write down every feeling you can remember, no matter how insignificant it may seem.
At the start of the next day, commit to carrying your journal with you. Every time you consciously experience a feeling, jot it down in your journal. You can decide if you’ll explain the reason for your feelings in your journal or not, but make sure to write down each one as you experience it, even if you experience a feeling more than once.
Now compare the two days. If you did the exercise with as much effort as you could, you’ll find that your second list is much longer than your first. You’ll realize that it’s nearly impossible to write down each and every feeling as it happens throughout the day because there are so many. On the second day, you were asked to be much more present with your feelings as you were feeling them; whereas on the first day, you probably only remembered the prominent ones, letting most of the feelings slip through unnoticed.
The point is that unless we are intentionally trying to be present with our emotions, we let most of them
slip by unseen, or worse, we tell ourselves not to feel them. This exercise can illuminate how unexplored our emotional landscapes can be, and how our upbringing and our culture can condition us to believe they’re of no importance or value.
Every feeling you wrote down, however small or insignificant, came from either a place of internal strength or internal wounding, or a combination of the two. Those sources of feeling are what rule you day in and day out, whether you realize it or not. They make decisions for you, they embark on relationships for you, they find and lose opportunities for you. They operate on conditioned neural pathways, not conscious choice. Pay special attention to the “bad” feelings on your list, and refrain from judging yourself on how many of them there are. This is an opportunity to check in with the hidden pain you feel on a daily basis.
Wouldn’t you like to be more involved in your life? Wouldn’t you like to understand yourself so well that you could confidently be the master of your own fate? You may not be able to journal every feeling you have every moment, but you can certainly increase your awareness of those feelings and be able to notice and acknowledge them as you move throughout your day. You can begin to shift how many of your feelings you allow yourself to experience, and honor the ones you would usually push away.
Chapter 2:
No Light Without Darkness
“So you’re an empath too?” she asked, smiling sweetly.
“I nodded, returning a meek smile of my own as I stroked the edges of my coffee cup cautiously. I couldn’t remember why I’d agreed to this meeting. Curiosity, perhaps. Her social media platform was one covered with glitter, unicorns, and positive thinking. She wore a white T-shirt that read MAKE MAGIC HAPPEN. She signed her e-mails with xoxo Love and Light.
“That’s so awesome,” she replied, tossing her perfectly curled blonde hair. “Isn’t it such a gift? It’s so much easier to work with people and help them see their own light. I mean, I’m also a psychic medium, so I have an extra edge, but being an empath is so great.”
I cringed imperceptibly at her words. For the briefest moment, I wanted to hold her face in my hands and shake the glitter out of her brain.
I couldn’t tolerate another “spiritual” person telling me about the gift of being an empath. If this was such a gift, why was I so jaded? Did a gift receipt come with this? What’s the return policy? Did I lose my place in line at the shiny, trendy, law-of-attraction-mala-bead-wearing-Bali-traveling-Reiki-master shop?
How could I tell this bubbly spirit-entrepreneur that being an empath was an unspeakable and unbearable burden? How could I explain that every time I connected to the inner pain of my friends and loved ones and strangers, I instantly burst into tears over the raw intensity of that pain? How could I tell her that her words lacked authenticity in her positivity, that I wanted more from her? More honesty. More realness.
“Yeah, it can be,” I finally answered in an even tone, processing my inner dialogue on my own.
I waited for her to tap into my true feelings, to feel the reality of the other end of this conversation, to use her empath skills to discern the truth of the pain I felt. But she didn’t. She carried on, talking about one of her clients that she had recently helped and how the universe conspired to bring them together. She gushed about the law of attraction and manifesting abundance and how important it was to be a warrior for the Light.
She stopped, looking up past my shoulder for a moment. “Your guides are telling me there’s something you need, and that you and I were meant to meet for this reason,” she stated seriously. “Maybe to do some life coaching with me. Let me tell you about this package I’m offering…”
My guides most certainly don’t talk to strangers, I thought. But I kept that to myself.
After all, I was no “psychic medium.” I was just an empath.
There’s a tendency to only focus on the positive and the light with self-growth, to only embrace the side that manifests abundance and makes magic happen, but the most important aspect of working with your empath nature is being able to work with your personal shadow. Without acknowledging your darkness, your self-growth is stunted by half. When you learn to balance both the light and dark in equal measure, and you know how to navigate the new age distortions, your path forward toward self-realization is more grounded, more powerful, and, ultimately, more real.
Real People Have Shadows
Most of the new age platitudes that have gained popularity in the last decade have shared the same basic message: stay in the Light at all costs, don’t let yourself stray into the darkness, and focus on positivity all the time to raise your vibration.
How can we stay in the Light all the time when half of our lives are literally spent in the dark? At the end of each day, night inevitably falls, and when it does, it brings a whole new landscape into view. Beautiful creatures of the night emerge, and the world is dimly lit with stars and moonlight. Things that looked one way in the stark light of day transform into a completely different scene. The darkness allows us to see things in a different way, and the same goes for our own darkness.
It was the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who developed the concept of the shadow archetype, which he described as “the unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself.” Basically, your shadow is made up of the parts of you that aren’t as desirable as the “good” parts. It’s your dark side, and it’s likely that you’ve been taught that your dark side must be rejected or ignored completely.
We all have a dark side, and pretending we don’t doesn’t actually make it go away. In fact, the more you reject your own darkness, the more it will find a sneaky way to infiltrate your actions. If you don’t befriend it and allow it space, it will manipulate you for its own purpose.
If you find yourself following self-destructive patterns for no reason, that’s your shadow creeping out. If you lash out at your loved ones in an uncharacteristic way, that’s your shadow creeping out. If you find yourself unconsciously self-sabotaging every good move you try to make, that’s your shadow creeping out. If you find yourself always looking for the upper hand in your relationships, that’s your shadow creeping out. If you feel irritated and claustrophobic regularly, that’s a sign your shadow is expanding to a point your body can no longer contain it.
When you choose to consciously work with your shadow instead, you will be able to break your self-destructive patterns and discontent. Knowing and dealing with your own darkness will also give you the insight and discernment to deal with other people’s darkness, which is an essential skill for the empath. If you do not have the eyes to see yourself, you will certainly be blind to others.
Carl Jung also described the shadow self as “the seat of creativity.” He believed the shadow encompassed not only the unconscious negative parts, but also the unconscious positive parts. Some of our greatest gifts and greatest strengths can only be uncovered when we willingly uncover our weaknesses and pain first.
Connecting with your shadow self could be one of the biggest turning points in your journey as an empath.
Lightwashing: Choose Your Own Adventure
In a world now overrun with gurus touting the divinity in positive thinking and the law of attraction and manifesting abundance, the real gritty bits inside of ourselves are being completely overlooked or, worse, intentionally dismissed. I began to use the term “lightwashing” to describe the act of taking any real emotion that may be difficult and covering it with trite displays of affirmations, positivity memes, rainbows and unicorns, and fake smiles. This is the bubbly twenty-something life coach who tells you that your boyfriend abuses you because your vibration is too low, or the handsome meditation expert who tells you that your desire for love is simply a manifestation of your insecurity, or—my favorite—the healers who tell you that you must kill your ego to become truly enlightened. In the quest to become enlightened beings, we’ve i
dealized the nonhuman and demonized the human, effectively promoting the idea that we must rid ourselves of our humanness to be spiritual masters.
Emotions, unfortunately, fall into the category of humanness. This means that emotions, mostly the “negative” ones, are included in the things we should get rid of on our way to enlightenment. This is especially bad news for empaths, since they feel all the emotions all the time. How tragic to hear that the primary way you experience your life is something you need to get rid of!
One of the ways you can empower yourself as an empath is by connecting more with your humanness, and seeing it as part of the whole of divinity rather than separate from it. Lightwashing will not work for you. Positive thinking to cover up your bad feelings will not work for you. You need to feel. You need to feel it all.
The Distortions of New Age Thinking
There are a few common new age distortions perpetuated by gurus and teachers today, and they are all guilty of lightwashing. Let’s break them down.
Always focus on the present and the Now.
While being as present as possible is usually a good thing, you can’t truly focus on the Now if your painful past is still calling. Having unresolved issues from your past will prevent you from being able to stay present, and will actually skew your view of your life.
When you first face your past and the scary emotions you find there, you then can clear out that persistent energy and focus on the present in a healthy and rewarding way. If those things aren’t cleared, they will crowd you so much that you won’t even have room for the Now. This is especially important for empaths, since every experience brings with it its own deeply felt emotion, and if you don’t deal with those emotions, they’ll continue to color the experience of your Now.
If you’re feeling sad, use positive affirmations.