I took a quiz recently that told me I’m an empath. For those of you who don’t know, being an empath means that you have an uncanny ability to feel the energy around you. You may get overwhelmed in crowded spaces, have a smaller capacity for social interaction, feel your feelings very intensely, and easily pick up on the energetic pulse of those around you. I can relate to that, and I’m sure that many of you can too. But what if being an empath was less about being different, and more about simply embracing what it is that actually makes us all human in the first place?
In a world where we are increasingly disconnected from each other, we’ve forgotten how to live properly on our planet, and overwhelming fear seems to rule our days, it makes sense that many of us have turned away from our feelings and have instead immersed ourselves in a big ol’ dose of distraction. As a species, we have become shockingly good at ignoring our body’s cues, pushing down any emotions deemed bad, and banishing uncomfortable interactions. We’ve been distracted by technology, brainwashed by the media, and lovingly programmed by our parents in an attempt to keep us happy and safe. Unfortunately, it worked. We’ve become so disconnected from ourselves that we’ve forgotten who we are at our core.
Humans have always had the ability to feel the energy around us. We have instincts to keep us safe, intuition to discern what is right for us, a plethora of emotional cues to behaviour, and even the ability to communicate non-verbally (body language anyone?). When we are open and aware, using all of our faculties, there really are no limits to the energetic messages we can receive. We can accurately read the energy in the room. We can discern when it’s time for us to leave a social event. We can allow ourselves the gift of being overcome with emotion (especially around the beauty of life), and we can tell when someone is lying to us. All in all, that sounds an awful lot like being an empath.
The truth is that being an empath is not something new, nor is it a spiritual gift bestowed upon the few. It is our intrinsic ability to acquire information about ourselves and our environment in subtle ways in order to survive and thrive. What some of us have been experiencing is nothing weird or different … but a return to who we are and a remembering of what has always been.
So what if going forward, we let go of the idea that being an empath makes us weird? Let’s face it – feeling all the feels is innate to who we are and it’s time we started trusting that. Listen to your gut and follow what it says. Confidently say no when something feels off. Honour what your body is telling you and embrace the waves of truth that ripple through. Open your heart and your mind to the long forgotten whispers that can carry you back to the truth of who you are and all that you can be. You are an empath. You are an intuitive. You are human.