Quips and Tips for Spiritual Seekers

Empaths are extremely sensitive to other peoples’ energy and therefore need to create healthy boundaries. As caring and responsive people, they instantly tune into friends’ problems, take on family members’ emotions, and carry the pain of the world if they’re not careful. Like sponges, they absorb energy around them making it challenging to be in large crowds.

“Empaths experience empathy and intuition in a strongly amplified or even accelerated manner,” says Elisabeth Fitzhugh, author of the book Dancers Between Realms – Empath Energy, Beyond Empathy. Fortunately, with awareness and practice, people can create healthy boundaries and release others’ energy from their space. For tips on how to do this read on, and for an in-depth exploration into being an empath, read Fitzhugh’s book.

4 Tips for Creating Healthy Boundaries for Empaths

If you’re wondering if you fit the empath profile, read the article, How to Know if You’re an Empath.  If you know you’re highly sensitive to other people’s energy and want to find ways to stay healthy and balanced, try the following:

1. Stay centered and grounded. Being centered and grounded helps to release stress as well as others’ emotions. When you are filled with your own energy, there is no room for other peoples’ energy and emotions to seep in. As you interact with others, stay connected to your own inner experience; feel your energy flow through your body, let any foreign energy release down your grounding, and stay centered in your own light vibration.

2. Be aware of energy boundaries. Our energy doesn’t end where our skin ends – we each have an electromagnetic field around us called the aura. This is our personal space. As you own your aura, you create healthy boundaries for yourself. This will help you to have your own energy flowing freely in your space and prevent others’ energy from entering.

 3. Tune into your emotions. Empaths take on other peoples’ emotions as if they were there own. A friend tells you her husband just filed for divorce and your heart aches. Your brother calls you in a panic about money problems and your stomach twists and turns. You attend a funeral and feel overwhelmed with grief. Tune into the difference between your emotions and other peoples’ feelings. Like musical notes, each emotion has its own vibration unique to each person. Sadness is lighter than apathy; anger vibrates faster than sadness; amusement feels free and healing; joy is light and bright, and enthusiasm takes you even higher up the scale. Get to know your emotions by feeling them and allowing them to flow. With this awareness you will instantly know when you’ve taken on someone else’s sadness, anger or joy; it won’t feel like yours and it won’t feel comfortable. Then all you have to do is let it go, like taking off a scarf that isn’t yours. We can’t process emotions that don’t belong to us.

4. Say goodbye to co-dependant behaviors. With big hearts, caretaking and rescuing becomes the norm for empaths. Instead of sensing and feeling another’s plight, use your clear seeing abilities to look at your loved one’s situation. See who they are beyond their problems and pain; see the spiritual being within who is connected to the Source of all life. Know that just as you have your path to walk, they have theirs. Don’t let their victim mask pull you in to taking on their problems. Allow your friends and family to grow, heal and evolve through their own struggles and triumphs. If you feel tempted to jump in, reflect back on your life to see if you are projecting any of your own unhealed wounds.

Fill up with your own energy vibration until there’s no space for others’ problems and pain, but still room for compassion. Toss away pity and sympathy, and give the gift of love by shining a light on others’ bigness.

Do you have any questions or tips to add on how empaths can create healthy boundaries? Please share below.