Being an Empathic Warrior: Self-Care and Protection for Empaths
An Empath is a highly sensitive person, often referred to as HSP, but the HSP label is not entirely correct. HSPs are sensitive to light, sound, experiences, and emotions, while Empaths will embody the emotions, experiences, and relational energy of others. This means that Empaths not only feel what you are feeling, but often have intel on how you can untangle your mess and improve your life. When Empaths heal themselves and get beyond their egos, they can become emotional superheroes.
Many Empaths must learn how to set clear boundaries with family members and friends. They have to adopt practices, habits, and rituals that help them clear the emotional debris they often collect through everyday experiences. Empaths are big-hearted, intuitive sponges. It’s not complicated; if you feel it, they feel it.
Because Empaths tend to live with one foot other realms, they sometimes find it difficult living in the real world. To be grounded and happy, Empaths often need:
- Time to consider, embrace and integrate personal and work relationships
- Healthy food and helpful supplements
- Meditation and prayer
- Leisure activities that don’t involve crowds. For example, most Empaths might avoid shopping at Walmart and wild parties on the 4th of July.
Empaths need space and solitude to allow for careful introspection. Empaths also need to regularly express their emotions, which is most often, sadness. If you’re an Empath, you might be shy, spiritually inclined, a lover of solitude, and clairvoyant. You might also love to write, paint, sculpt or dance more than most artists. The fiercest Empaths will cut a relationship cord in the blink of an eye.
If you’re like me, you might be so sensitive and attuned to other people’s emotions and lives, you sometimes experience temporary, physical manifestations of other people’s pain and trauma. This, too, shall pass.
When you finally come to terms with being an Empath, life tends to invite some dramatic, yet overall positive changes. You begin to set better boundaries. You learn what is right for you and what is hurtful. You learn what types of people diminish your quality of life, and you learn how to maneuver through society without losing hope.
Empaths hoping to become spiritual warriors can process the emotions and experiences of everybody around them at such a rate, they can burn through lifetimes of karma in one thrust of emotional expression.
To help me in this process emotions, I watch movies that center around love, complex and deep relationships, and oppression. Because an Empath will naturally embody the feelings of the main characters in movies, I’ll cry from beginning to end. As strange as that might sound, doing so, I shed lots of emotional and psychological debris, and up-level my vibration and awareness. In every instance, crying produces indescribable feelings of freedom.
How to Protect Yourself
If you’re an Empath, you most likely have one or two unique gifts. You can use them to serve yourself and those you love, or you can share your gifts with the world. Whether you’re a full-time psychic or healer, or you just want to keep yourself whole and happy, here are a few tips that might help you:
- Seek ways to nurture your heart every day.
- Keep things simple in relationships, work, and life in general.
- Eat less meat, and only if it’s organic.
- Eat only pasture-raised, non-GMO, happy eggs.
- Eat lots of organic, non-GMO vegetables.
- Eat spoonfuls of pure sunlight powder like Spirulina, Chlorella, Barley grass, Wheatgrass, and Moringa
- Be decisive so that you have flow in your life.
- Let go of the people and things that consistently burn you or trip you up.
- Be less impulsive so that you can better serve and heal yourself. If you’re not whole, it’s difficult to help others do the same.
- Don’t let solitude swallow you whole. Step into the light, often!
- Don’t allow another person’s momentum or conviction sway you from your truth and peacefulness.
- When in the throes of conflict, don’t allow yourself to be manipulated or coerced into becoming someone you are not.
- If you’ve absorbed another person’s energy, dance around the room and try to release it through prayerful movement.
- Don’t take on too many projects, tasks, or relationships at once. If you have too many pockets of energy swirling around you, you might become confused.
- Learn to continually love yourself, even amid the worst mistakes and challenges. When you fall short of this, always try to nudge yourself back to self-love.
- To become resilient, turn to nature, meditation, prayer, and rituals.
- Stay away from people who tell you that you’re too sensitive. They will never fully understand you, and they might fail you at vital junctures in your life.
- Be a little less generous, especially when you know your energy is depleted.
- Seek love and adventures with people who honor your role as an Empath.
- Set firm boundaries with the people who believe that Empaths and other sensitives are weak.
- Confide in at least one loving, caring person every day.
- Dig a little deeper into your faith by seeking the most love-based and light-filled aspects within your religion and spiritual practices.
- Watch movies that make you feel love and provoke your tears.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for affection when you need it.
- Spend lots of time in the water. Whether it’s hot baths, cold showers, lakes, streams or oceans, Empaths tend to revitalize around water.
- See your heart as a beautiful, fragile, and powerful light-being. Love and protect your heart, and seek to express the feelings that live there.
Remember that you are a bundle of electricity, a complex vibration, a spark born from the eternal consciousness’s love of life. Even amid the worst circumstances, be open to the possibilities, embody hope, and seek light and love. These things are your birthright.
The world needs healthy, positive Empaths. If you’re so inclined, you can make a living as an intuitive reader, healer, or psychic. With more healers and Empaths serving creation, our planet stands the best chance of infusing itself with light and love.
I love being an Intuitive-Empath and serving others. Over time, I learned to exit stifling situations and protect myself. I also learned to stop apologizing for my gifts. Now, I can wholeheartedly be myself without judgment. I hope you can, too.
In all things, dig deeply to find your clarity, express your emotions, and honor what you know to be true. Being an Empath is a wonderful thing.
About the Author
How Does an HSP Cope With All the Suffering in the World?
If you’re not familiar with the term HSP, please see the definition for “Highly Sensitive Person” from Dr. Elaine Aron.
With no simple answer, I’m afraid. I’ve pondered my own answer to this question for several years. The following Meditation of Hope and Love came to me during one of my own meditations a few years ago. I use it often…and lately, that means almost daily!
A Meditation of Hope and Love
Find a meditation time – at least 30 minutes, or longer, if possible. You know the criteria – quiet, uninterrupted time and space, preferably your own special place that may have candles or a special feeling of comfort and security for you.
Sit or lie down in a very comfortable position. (I prefer lying, with something light and soft to cover me.)
- Begin slow, deep breathing, focusing on blowing all your breath out – as if blowing out a candle.
- Breathe in deeply, through your nose, to a count of 8 or 10. Hold for a count of four.
- Breathe out, again as if blowing out a candle, to a count of ten.
You want to create a very deep cleansing breath. Notice: You might begin yawning, or drifting off to sleep. Go with whatever feels best for you. There is no ‘doing it wrong’ here. Just keep practicing until eventually you can complete the whole meditation. Now here comes the harder, yet important part.
Begin to allow your mind to go ahead and focus on all the things you have been concerned or worrying about. Like many of you, I have been close to tears each day as I hear about all the suffering in the world.
Lovingly ask each individual concern to patiently wait in line — assuring them they will all have a chance to be heard. In your relaxed state, begin to see each entity forming a line, waiting patiently. As they come up to be heard, assign them a name like Robin Williams, Gaza/Palenstine conflict, Nigerian girls or maybe for you it might be lost job, finances, or whatever else evolves as an appropriate and loving way to remember and honor your concerns.
As an HSP, these kinds of images tend to burrow deep into my inner world and I can begin to feel burdened, lethargic, and sometimes hopeless. Cognitively, I know there is really nothing I can (concretely) do about these tragedies, yet my yearnings for a better world keep my mind occupied.
Now comes the next step in your meditation.
