How do you know you're empathic?

Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. One of the the biggest ways I recognize my empathic abilities is to have thoughts or feelings randomly and spontaneously churning up inside me. My initial reaction to this is "where is this coming from?" I also use it as a tool in my work. When I am working with a client and I feel pain in my body, I will go to the same place on the client's body and work in this area till it eases in me. 

What happens to you when you’re in a crowd? How many thought are not your own and what are your own feelings? Do you tend to be chameleon like? Or do you feel overwhelmed when you're in a crowd? Do you tend to have addictive behaviors? These are all signs you are empathic. 

There are many tools to come back to yourself wholly. Here are a few ways to help:

1. Exercise

2. Go for a swim

3. Take a refreshing shower, then turn the temperature to cold just before ending.

4. Sit on the ground under a tree with your back against the trunk.

5. Leave the crowd for a short time and then return.

6. Know you are feeling everyone and know it is also a part of you. 

7. Brushing your body with your hands, or feathers, or the dry brush technique (Ayurvedic technique).

For each person, empathy can show up differently or in a multitude of ways. One person can be an embodiment while another can have an understanding. We have many ways to feel someone. Here are some examples of the different ways we take in ...“ to empathize”. 

1. 1.Suddenly feel “not like yourself”. Once when I was sitting in my office with a friend and we were each doing computer and office work. All of a sudden , I became very hyped up. I was chattering on senselessly, feeling hurried and confused. I decided I need something from upstairs. Of course forgetting what I needed once I was up there, I came to realize, I was back to my calm steady paced self. I know I had embodied my friend because this is who she is. I had the honor of being her and understanding how she goes through life.

2. 2.When we go through life’s experiences or even the feeling of when someone massages a muscle and it feels so good and so relieving, It is the experience and the memory of the experience we bounce back into. The memory becomes alive, the thoughts and feelings awaken in the cells. This the time when you can say “ I truly understand”. 

3. 3.Taking on someones pain karmically. Say for example your friend was in pain from an abusive relationship. You both just finished dinner and she was going home and you were headed toward your car. Then you open your car door and you bash your knee. You just made her life a little bit easier. I’m not saying every time you bang your knee it means your helping someone. In this particular case, it is so.

4. 4.Consider mob mentality as empathic ability for a cross section of the group to feel and think the same way.

5. 5.I have a friend who gets migraines and every time he has one, he smells and feels death and violence. I feels the abuse of women and children in the world. Yes, emotions have smells.

6. 6.On the lighter side and could be considered a cheap date,  I’ve been in a bar situation and not drank anything and felt totally drunk, so loopy I could barely stand up. As the crowd grew it became more intense. Talk about being an easy party girl. But, as soon as I stepped outside it cleared. 

Seeing, feeling and observing yourself are keys to unraveling the mysteries of your empathic abilities.

ERK-ing

Encapsulated rapid karma. What does it mean? Let's take the word Karma first, it is about your destiny. It comes instantly or over lifetimes. It is a cause and effect cycle. Some people have intense karma whereas others seem to have a charmed life. Then there are many of us who fit into the multitude of levels in between. 

The next part of ERK-ing is lucid dreaming or what I used to call awake dreams. Lucid dreaming is being present in a dream. Knowing, managing, and directing the dream. To activate this place we can practice through meditation or self hypnosis. Other ways would be to take medications or special herbs. 

Then we have healing events throughout our life whether its intentional as in a therapeutic session, planetary movement, or just letting life teach us. Later when we go to bed, nap or meditate dreams erupt. A feeling like you are participating in a dream. Personally, I will dream of people from my past and/or present life. Some rare instances I will tap into a past life. There's a sense of I am me but a different me. My appearance and/or my emotions are altered.

ERK-ing is about processing emotions, events, relationships, and painful moments in our lives which we don't have time to "deal with" in our daily routines. There is also a detachment to it too, as in, it doesn't feel like it belongs to us or it's outside of us. 

ERK-ing happens naturally. When my dreams changed, it was about 15 years ago. My intension was to connect to my intuitive and psychic self. What I didn’t realize is, it also meant connecting to my own healing. Over the years it has supported my life and the changes I’ve gone through. 

Once when I was meditating, “where’s my pain” which was a typical mantra at the time, I felt this crushing squeezing pressure on my right side of head and right shoulder. Then my whole body felt it. I realized I had visited my own birth. My thoughts about my mother, her pain, and who I “needed” to be in this life. And that is where the origin of a certain belief came in. 

These days my ERK-ing dreams come randomly at night through my dream time. 

Please feel free contact me if you have any questions.