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A 5-Minute Practice Empaths Can Use To Come Back To Themselves
Empaths pick up on and feel a lot—like the energies and emotions of other individuals, collective energy and emotions, and the energy and physical stimuli of spaces.
Being hyper-perceptive has its benefits, and connecting so immediately and intimately with the world around you can be deeply nourishing. Yet being an empath also has its challenges. It's much easier to get caught up or lost in the energy, emotions, and lives of others when you're highly empathetic.
My book Self-Care for Empaths offers special techniques to help empaths stay grounded in their own energy and connected to themselves. Here's a quick energy check that you won't find in the book. Empaths can turn to it anytime they feel:
- Scattered: If you're having free-floating anxiousness, racing thoughts, or trouble concentrating.
- Worried about someone else: If you're fixated on a friend, colleague, or loved one who is having a difficult time.
- Stuck in someone else's energy: If you have been interacting with someone who is intense or someone who you feel intensely about, or you were absorbed in an issue that is intense, and you're having problems letting go and moving on.
- Overstimulated by collective energy or physical stimuli: If you just left a loud and crowded concert, workshop, sports game, family gathering, or other event and your sensitive system is still buzzing. Or if the collective energy of your office or town or the larger world is on edge and you are feeling it in your own system.
- Drained by overgiving: If you're the type of empath who always goes the extra mile at the office or in your personal relationships and feel depleted after overgiving to others.
Method:
Step 1
Become mindful of your breathing. Slow it down or deepen it to calm your nervous system.
Step 2
Get physically comfortable. Adjust yourself in your seat, get a healthy snack or drink of water, or go to the bathroom if you've needed to for a bit.
Step 3
Do something to ground yourself physically in your own energy. You could put your hand over your heart, gently pat or rub your leg, or fold your hands in your lap.
Step 4
Ask yourself, "What's going on with me?" This question should help bring you back to yourself, your life, your energy, your emotions. Focus on you—what have you individually been feeling or experiencing lately? You might realize there's something you're happy or anxious about, or realize you've been busier or more contemplative lately. Stick to you directly, not as you relate to others.
Step 5
Now ask yourself, "What do I want or need?" Focus on action steps that directly support you, like needing an afternoon off at work or needing a meeting with your counselor or doctor. You might realize you've been wanting to hang out with a favorite pet or favorite friend for a while or that there's a favorite activity like yoga or a creative hobby you've been missing and wanting to engage in.
The takeaway.
Once you get used to doing this energy check-in, you'll realize how quick and easy it can be to come home to yourself. If you're struggling to know immediately what you want or need, or even what you are feeling, step away from the exercise and ask your intuition to provide you with the answer in words, thoughts, feelings, or images at some point during the day. The answer may even come to you as a synchronicity!
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