Magic Forums

Can you feel what others around you are feeling? Are you sensitive to your surroundings? When you lay your hands on someone, do your hands know right where to go to help that person? Perhaps you are an empath.

Being an empath is a double edged sword (ouch! yes this hurts to be on that blade). It can be both a curse and a blessing (a curse to me on most days). On one hand, you have the ability to intuit exactly what you need to do to make someone comfortable. On the other, it is easy to lose track of what you need, because you are so accustomed to caring for other's comfort before caring for your own. You have easy access to information about what is going on with the people around you, but sometimes it is hard to know your own mind (something I do a lot, I forget about myself).

Some people would love to learn how to be more empathic, while others would love to learn how to retain the best parts of that skill, while managing the more difficult aspects.

If you know what those around you are feeling, then you know how to adjust what you say and do to make them comfortable so that they are safer people to be around, both emotionally and physically. An empath can be a chameleon, shifting tone of voice, conversation styles, body posture, and choice of tactics and actions to help the people that are around them to feel more at ease. The problem with this is that they often lose track of what is actually authentic and true for themselves.

Empaths tend to care take their environment as a way to care take themselves. This is a pretty roundabout way of doing self care. Doing or saying something that will make someone else angry or sad is uncomfortable for an empath, so that they often avoid confrontation in order to avoid feeling other people's uncomfortable emotions (I'm too timid so I hide a lot of the facts that stare me in the face). It is easy for them to lose track of the fact that they themselves are feeling uncomfortable.