Embracing Our Empathic Nature: Shifting from Feeling Overwhelmed to Empowered

When Empathy Takes Over

Standing in line to check out, my body was rapidly shifting from feeling just fine to being in real trouble; waves of nausea, vertigo, and pain radiated from my heart to my arms. 

Glancing up, I saw a little bench just past the cashier. Collapsing into the bench, my eyes drifted up to where my cart was still waiting in line, and I noticed that there was a young woman behind where I had been just moments before that I hadn’t seen before. She was in a wheelchair, completely collapsed inward, had oxygen support, and looked as if she had almost no life force energy, with a little hospital band around her wrist. 

Instantly, it all made sense. I had accidentally empathically crossed streams and absorbed her energy, which was now running as if they were my own body’s rhythms, sensations, and thoughts. 

Between her energy running full force within me and my own reaction to realizing what was happening, my system was exploding with colliding forces of shadow pity, messy compassion, and anger. All my protective Parts were about to engage and drive me even further off the proverbial cliff into total nervous system dysregulation. 

Remembering the Return to Sender Practice

Thankfully, at that point in my healing journey, Spirit was helping me develop a new self-care practice that was designed to help “reclaim” my empathic pathways for moments just like this, called “Return to Sender”.

“Return to Sender” is a healing practice that helps us remember to compassionately hold up an energetic stop sign to our nervous system and survival mechanisms when we are emphatically absorbing another’s Beings field based on old protective mechanisms. It calls on the healing energy of the Sacred Witness to help us engage with the lifelines of grace and healing support that are always present so that we can release that which isn’t ours, tend to what is, and restore our own “self” within our whole system – body, mind, heart, and soul. 

Hearing the Sacred Witness Within

As I said a silent prayer for help, instantly, I felt my heart fill with more space and heard the Sacred Witness’s voice guiding me, “Michelle, remember to be kind to yourself, you’re losing balance for reasons that we can uncover and tend to later. Right now, let’s return her energy and reclaim your nervous system, body, and fields so that you can stop hemorrhaging. Then once home, we can circle back around to what Parts of you are feeling threatened and running old survival programs that empathically interweave you with others like this.” 

Within a few breath cycles, the Sacred Witness, the Healer energy within us all, helped me gather all the energy and sensations that belong to the other woman, plus any others I had unknowingly picked up, and support me as I returned them with love and compassion, calling back my own innate rhythms and essence to take their rightful place once more.

My body quickly shifted back to running with only my own energy and rhythms. Standing back up, I rejoined the line, able to hold my own field rooted in love. Later that day I asked for the support of the Sacred Witness again as I dropped into a deeper compassionate inquiry to help me witness and heal the different aspects of me that didn’t know they could hold healthy boundaries within my subtle energy field; releasing their hidden old conditioning that it was my job to absorb the fields of others that are suffering in order to survive.

Reclaiming and Rewiring our Empathic Pathways

If you have experienced incidents like this, you are most likely running a higher level of your empathic wiring. 

Being an Empath or Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) can be amazing! It helps us:

• Connect deeply and communicate with animals, plants, and other types of Beings. 
• Have the ability to sense, feel, see, know, and listen at levels of depth that witness what others often overlook or undervalue.
• And go beyond interacting with the world only through our physical five senses into connecting with the worlds around us, seen and unseen, through our Soul-senses. 

And it is often experienced like a curse:

• Feeling like our bodies do not “belong” to us. 
• Having a hard time helping our nervous system transition out of survival mode,
• And viewing daily life like a gauntlet, where simply going to the store or hanging out with friends can be anxiety-creating, because parts of us feel so raw, exposed, and unsure of whether or not we will be energetically hijacked or not, and why.  

Here’s the good news: we are not stuck, fated to experience our empathic sensitivities running only in survival mode. We can evolve our empathic wiring to run more and more from our Soul-Level ways of being. 

Step One of Evolving Empathic Wiring – Returning that which isn’t ours.

On my own journey of evolving and liberating my empathic pathways from being Survival-Led (running off old trauma-responses and survival level programs) to being Soul-Led (letting Spirit intuitive guide me in what and how I empathic sense and “read”), Spirit helped me understand a key Soul-Level truth that changed everything for me: we can’t transmute, heal, or break down that which isn’t ours. 

Meaning, that the first step on any journey to evolving our empathic wiring and reclaiming our own Body’s rhythms, begins with the same place that the Sacred Witness helped me connect with sitting on the bench; creating a more literal space inside ourselves so that we can witness what is happening energetically within us, engage with Soul-Led healing guidance, return as much of the energies that are not ours back to their original sources, and restore our own innate “system”. Each time we do this, we are evolving our empathic senses into a new way of operating, creating healthier energy boundaries rooted in love. 

Creating Your Own Returning to Sender Practice

I’d like to share with you one of the first exercises I teach clients on their journey to embrace their empathic senses, creating their own Return to Sender practice. 

The exercise is simple, yet so powerful. 

Ask for the Sacred Witness to help guide you in developing a set of mantras or phrases that you say to yourself when you feel empathically overwhelmed or entangled (just like I did sitting on the bench). These mantras can help you consciously cue your survival system to remember there is a different way you can respond to what is happening in that moment, other than your conditioned and trauma-response programming. 

To help inspire you, here are some sample mantras that clients have developed with this exercise that you can make your own: 

• I am not responsible for holding anyone’s energy but my own. 
• I am not responsible for ensuring anyone’s inner states, moods, or well-being but my own. 
• I can offer clean compassion, grace, and healing light to others without having to absorb their field in return. 
• I have permission to “return to sender” any and all energy, thoughts, inner states, and ways of being that do not belong to me. 
• I return these energies to them with love, compassion, and healing light. 
• I release the need to know, understand, or track what is happening with what I am returning and ask for my own Soul’s Guardian to help me let go and release any and all shadow attachments different parts of me may have in releasing these energies at this time. 
• Ask for Reiki light to help replace and refill my own field with my Soul’s essence and rhythms that will serve me in creating more harmony and wellbeing within. 

You may also want to listen to a free guided recording of the “Return to Sender” meditation that I share with clients in my healing course, Evolving the Empath, as a great resource to inspire you, too.

The Gift of Being an Empath

Being an Empath of HSP is truly a wonderful gift, personally and collectively! I believe that as more of us wake up and connect with all beings (human and non-human) through our Soul-Led empathic senses, it will help usher in the collective healing and transformational change we need. Yet, for us to embrace and share our connections in healthy ways, we first need to reclaim and rewire our own empathic system so that we feel at home and LOVE who we truly are – body, mind, and soul.

TAKE ACTION: Next steps, if you are feeling called to continue evolving your empathic wiring I have two amazing offerings that are a great next step: FREE mini-master class Healing your Inner Critic; and Evolving the Empath, an on-demand healing course to help you reclaim, rewire, and feel a home in your Body, plus receive 20% off with the code AWAKENED just for Awakened Magazine subscribers.