The blessing of empathy
by Sarah Brown

A friend and I were talking about empathy the other day. She had read somewhere that empathy is a curse, rather than a blessing.

Now I believe empathy is a challenge, because it takes some patience and time to understand what you're doing, but it is invaluable for a healer. Empathic people pick up the energy of those they are dealing with. The challenge is to understand (and remember in time) that the energy you are feeling is not your own.

So, if you think about someone and start to feel anxious, the chances are that the anxiety is being carried by the person you are thinking about. The fact that you are feeling it means that you can shine a light on it and help the person to drain it away.
But if you feel the anxiety and don't remember in time that it isn't yours, then you might start to apply it to things in your own life, and make it your own.

This is why the early life of a healer may be an extremely challenging experience. The healer is a sponge for all that negative energy floating about. Until she learns that it can be handled by staying present, and that it is not about her, she may live under a cloud of high emotion and turmoil. But the blessing is that that very turmoil, when she has understood it, will stand her in amazing stead and give her a wonderful insight into suffering, so that she can help other people out of it.

The notion of harm

Many schools of healing teach about “protection”. But I don’t teach that, because I don’t buy into it as a concept. Protection implies that we can somehow be harmed and therefore need to shield ourselves against it. But the fact is that when all shields are down, and we are shining light freely, there is no harm that can occur to us.

We can’t be damaged, but we can perceive that we are.

Catching a problem

Healers often pick up dark energy, creating an ache or pain where they have experienced recurring aches or pains in the past. But all that’s happening is the dark energy is finding the “weak spot”. As soon as it has found it, the person instantly buys into the fact that the shoulder or lower back or hip or knee is “playing up again”. This instantly gives the dark energy a home.

Healers with a history of mental struggles rather than physical ones will start to believe they’ve plunged into depression again.

It’s them. It’s who they are. Their sense of self tells them that they suffer from this pain, whatever it is, and therefore it belongs to them.

But it doesn’t, unless we give it a home.

Getting past the judgment sticking point to break the habits of a lifetime

The pain is a habit, that’s all. And as such it can be broken. Now, when I say that, the person I am saying it to has an instant temptation to judge herself, or to think that I am judging her. But there isn’t any judgment here. We aren’t taught this as children, so why should we know it? In fact, we are often taught that we are the poor victims of our aches and pains, that there is nothing we can do about them. When someone starts to say there is, the ego likes to jump in to keep things just as they are already. So it judges. “If it’s so easy,” it might say, “then I must be a rubbish person for suffering like this.” Or, alternatively, “It’s not true. I didn’t do this to myself on purpose! How dare you suggest such a thing?” Or any number of similarly negative responses.

But these responses aren’t true. People rarely consciously choose to cause themselves to suffer. The choice is generally made at an unconscious level. However, we can, consciously and purposely, break the habit of suffering.

It takes practice and discipline and time. It takes the opening of the mind to the possibility that the things we have always believed and held to be true might not, in fact, be so. It takes the abandoning of our idea of self.

Now here we hit the limitations of one article on the subject, because the ego has thousands upon thousands of ways to create illusions. I will endeavour to show a principle, and invite you to explore it in your own way. If you want to discuss it with me as applied in a more specific way, you can always contact me via my website www.healingthroughenlightenment.co.uk or, if you are happy for me to discuss it for the benefit of others too, my blog, www.healingthroughenlightenment.blogspot.com.


An example

Let’s imagine you have always been prone to shoulder pain. This is extremely common in healers, because we love to try to carry other people’s burdens for them. (We can’t, and we shouldn’t try, but that’s a whole other subject.) Someone comes in to see you with a problem, which essentially means that they are carrying some dark energy which they think is their own. I call this turbulence, because it is energy that prevents us from feeling settled.

You work on this person, and they leave feeling a lot better. But your shoulder has started to ache and you’re feeling a bit drained.

The first thing to remember is: it isn’t you. You’ve picked it up, but it isn’t you. You are whole and perfect.

Therefore it is a cloud of the dark stuff and it is preventing you from seeing yourself as whole and perfect. But you are.

Now, we don’t disperse clouds of the dark stuff by telling ourselves they aren’t there when patently they are. That would be illusion, and illusion only creates more dark stuff. That’s why, when we try not to feel our pain, we often feel it more acutely.

So the thing to do is to shine a light upon it. We do that by putting our whole attention into it. Do the opposite of what you want to do. Feel it, rather than trying not to feel it. Breathe into it, breathe out from it. Let it get more intense if that’s what it needs to do. Imagine a connection of light from the crown of your head to the spiritual sun. Allow this light to flow through you and into your pain. Allow that funnel of light to take the dark away with it.

As with anything, the more we do this, the better we get at it. We open up channels which become more and more powerful each time.

Gradually, we disperse the pain in this way and see ourselves once more. No longer “I am a person with a shoulder problem,” but simply, “I am.”

The more we work with light in this way, dispersing dark energy, or converting it to light energy by shining light on it, the more we are releasing ourselves and the earth from the tyranny of an imbalance of dark energy.


Darkness and light

There is dark, and there is light. Of course there is. But it needs to be in balance. The dark can become overwhelming if we allow it to. Because healers are empathic, we pick this energy up and take it on board. And that’s when we get overwhelmed and out of balance. If we can remember consistently to process it in this way, we can become freely flowing channels of light. A channel of light doesn’t get energy stuck in it. A channel of light lets energy in and lets energy out, and shines like a beacon for all the world to be helped and comforted by.

The process of becoming selfless is not just a mental one. It is a bodily one too, and a spiritual one. The more we can break these blocks where dark energy can set up shop and become stagnant, the more we can free ourselves from a false notion of self attached to the body.


A mental pain

I have applied it to a physical pain, but now let’s look at how it applies mentally. Let’s imagine your pattern of behaviour has always been self doubt. Someone walks in for a treatment and you start thinking all sorts of thoughts such as: “Am I doing this right?” “Have I forgotten something?” “What does this person think of me? Does he think I don’t know what I’m doing?” etc, etc. If this is your pattern, then these thoughts are very familiar to you because they come from a notion of self. It may be that you have overcome a lot of self doubts, but still, the arrival of this person has brought them hurtling to the surface again.

It’s exactly the same as the shoulder pain. It isn’t you. It’s just a cloud of dark stuff which is preventing you from seeing you. It is more than likely that the self doubts are not yours, but belong to the person who has arrived for treatment. So remember that your thoughts are not you, stop buying into them, and breathe in light from the spiritual sun, fill your heart up with it, and send loving light to the person you are treating. See what happens to your thoughts.


A spiritual discipline

The difficult part of all of this is remembering. And the trick, if we have forgotten, is to forgive ourselves, when we do remember, for having forgotten. Getting cross for forgetting is another way that the ego keeps us in the dark.

There is also no reason to blame the person who has brought it to you. Every piece of the dark stuff that you process makes you stronger. It makes you more understanding, more compassionate, more detached from ego. It is a huge favour that your clients do you by giving you this opportunity to suffer! It is certainly not a cause for blame.

So, if you have struggled with anxiety, fear, depression, anger, despair, aches, pains, etc, etc, remember this. All turmoil is simply an excess of dark energy. It merely conceals your true self. It isn't you. Don't allow yourself to be tempted to think that it is.

For you are a being of light. Shine it out for the rest of us.


Check out Sarah's Profile here