Are you an Empath? A Highly Sensitive Person? Welcome!

Well, who is an empath?

1. You, because something inside you led you here.

Seriously. Some people reserve the term “empath” only for the highly intuitive and sensitive person who feels too much most all of the time and is pretty overwhelmed by it. That’s not the whole story, but there’s a good possibility that your own highly perceptive nature is what landed you here. Welcome.

2. Now the details get finer…

You really may be someone who is unusually sensitive to the world around you, often feeling others’ experience as your own.

You may pick up others’ emotions and moods, physical sensations, and thoughts. You might notice that you “know” facts, history, and have a deeper sense of what is going on.

And your empathy might not be restricted to humans. You can sense the experience of other living beings—animals, plants—and even the elements of the earth itself, such as its rocks, air, water…

So you might be an über-empath—someone who really does pick up much more of what is experienced than most.

Whether you consider this perception as psychic, paranormal, or highly sensitive and intuitive, you notice that you perceive a lot more “information” than the “average bear.”

3. Here’s a definition of an Empath that you may find startling. Certainly different.

 You are an empath who comes across as emotionally shut down and/or clueless.               

• This may stem from the fact that a) you come from a background where it was NOT OK to have feelings. Anything other than thinking—or just being a robot in the background—was not be acknowledged or developed.

So the development of your native empathic capacity is lying in wait.

• It may be because you are SO perceptive that your nervous system blows quickly—Too hot! Click! Shutdown! It’s like your empathy has retreated into hiding.

Our nervous systems have this built-in circuit breaker. Often this quick shutdown response developed to protect us from too much trauma. We will talk about this hyper-shutdown in greater detail later on.

The main thing for now is that if this is you, you definitely belong here too.

4. Frankly, we are all empaths because we all have brains and nervous systems, which are how we “sense” the world and its beings. We all perceive some things more acutely than others—and (often our loved ones know this about us better than we do) can be clueless about others.

So what is your experience as an Empath? Where do you fall on the line from über-empath to empathic-shutdown?

 

P.S. If you haven’t already, click below to make sure get the free

Empathic Resilience Meditations

and get the word when my first course, Build Better Boundaries, goes live. Empaths are vital in an overstimulation AND shutdown world, and we need to be health, happy, and have resilient boundaries!