LEARN TO RECOGNIZE WHEN YOU ARE EMPATHIZING
One of the biggest challenges to our spirituality is to get our empathy under control. Because empathy occurs involuntarily, most times we have no idea that we are empathizing a vibration. The challenge for us is to recognize when we are empathizing otherwise, we will simply be reacting to whatever we pick up from others while thinking it is our own feeling. This creates chaos in our emotional grounding and distracts us from assessing which feelings are of our own making.
One of the difficulties in knowing that we must discriminate empathized feelings is that many of us have no belief in the fact that they might come from someone else. This is something that we must simply accept as fact. Those who are strictly oriented only to the tangible world will refuse to do this let alone accept a belief that it is even possible. They will simply assume that what they feel is of their own making and react accordingly.
Since the feelings are intangible, we have no reference point to use as a “separator.” We must find another way to separate our own inner feelings from those that come from outside of ourselves. I have an exercise that will enable us to do this.
We can begin by planning to attend a personal event that might affect our feelings. First pick an event that might have an emotional impact on you. This may be an anticipated family gathering, toxic or not, or perhaps a career meeting which has the possibility of creating stress for you. Minutes before the event find a quiet space to be in, like your car, a quiet waiting room or even a quiet space outside the building away from people. The idea is to retreat into your own quiet space. When you do, slow your breathing and when you have done so pay special attention to how you are feeling in the moment. Do your best to be able to verbally describe your feelings to others as if you had a necessity to do so. This will solidify your thoughts and become your personal emotional baseline to reference against what you might empathize in the imminent event. Now, proceed to the event.
Participate in the event like you normally would and acclimate yourself to your surroundings. After you feel that you have become “saturated” with it, remove yourself and find a quiet space like an unoccupied bathroom, or step outside to an area where no one will disturb you. You might even return to your car again. Most of us find our car our safest space outside our home. Close your eyes, slow your breathing and conduct the same assessment you did before arriving. Do your best to be able to verbally describe your feelings to others as if you had a necessity to do so. Compare what you feel now to the emotional baseline you established before the event. The difference of what you feel between then and now will allow you to discriminate what feelings you have empathized from the event. Be careful not to confuse your reactions with what you are feeling. Pay special attention to how you now feel in the moment. You now can sense the difference between your own feelings and what you have picked up from the event. The more you practice this, the quicker and more adept you will become at separating your own feelings from those you pick up from others and the environment. Don’t rule out environments as generators of what you might pick up. Environments that have had strong emotional experiences embedded in them or that have recently occurred in the space will temporarily retain an imprint of emotional intensity until it is either replaced by a different vibration or wanes off due to the naturally changing daily energies. Those energy changing times are sunrise, high noon, sunset and midnight.
This simple exercise should do a great deal in allowing us to emotionally settle into our own vibrational space and recognize when we’re picking up from others or the Genius Loci AKA "spirit of the place." Disconnecting from the outside world’s emotional chaos will do wonders for our efforts to tune into the subtler vibrations in the universe thereby making our path toward awareness much shorter and eminently more enjoyable.