Windstorms and rainbows : some insights into intuitive empathy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote this post a while back after a day I was down way deep in suicidal depression.  I have noticed that feeling passes if I can hold through it, which is what I was trying to get at with the idea of a windstorm followed by a rainbow.  Its either trash or post this or leave it in drafts.  I decided on no 2!

When the flood of my feeling carries me I am learning that I just need to follow it.  I have noticed a pattern of how deeply I dive at times, how crushing the depression I feel can be.   I have those deeply intense experiences of yesterday when I pray and a higher power comes into my heart saying powerful words and I gain a recognition or a new view which hurts as it enters me with like a birthing pain and then carries me over and through, breaking me open to new or deeper realisations.

The next day I feel as if a rainbow is shining on a landscape grown resplendent with tears I have shed of the deepest ancestral grief. My critic naysayer says I am having a bi polar moment even though I have never been diagnosed with this condition but I rise and fall like the waves and then know myself not to be solid substance but a mass of fluid particles that shift and move and flow and I also know myself to be part of nature.  I watch nature mirror me in many ways and feel myself a part of her.   I speak to my Mum and she tells me her body is feeling a certain way and I am aware that energetically we are picking up on each other.

Last week I listened to some CDS on intuitive empathy. I recognised myself.  I thought of how much of the addiction recovery pathway is about substituting emotional and spiritual experience for alcohol we previously learned to use as a defence and question if we who reached for this solution were trying to live as intuitive empaths without knowing that is what we were, open to nature, sympathies and energies others were not.  Feeling with an acute sensitivity that the world led us to believe was wrong in some way.

Judith Orloff who spoke on the CD Positive Energy Practices is just such an intuitive empath and now uses that recognition in her healing with others who suffer from so called emotional difficulties and mental disorders.  She made some interesting points about how being around draining or sucking energy can lead us to come away from some encounters with others feeling either depleted or ‘off’ energetically.  Something that really struck home is that we can come away from such encounters feeling ravenously hungry.  According to Judith this is sign something has happened to our energy during the encounter.

Getting a handle on the part our intuition plays in picking up energy and other signals  is essential for intuitive empaths as many of us can suffer from emotional, mental and even physical illnesses if we are not aware of how we are being negatively impacted due to our sensitivity.  We may also suffer because we were led to believe there is something wrong with us for being wired this way when really intuitive empathy is a gift if we learn to understand and use it well.

I know that lately as I touch deeper into my grief which is actually a shared family grief, after I spend time with family I come away bathed in grief.  I leave those encounters crying because some realisation is opening up and shedding.  I am not sure if it the other persons pain I am picking up in addition to my own.  Years ago a very valuable therapist alerted me to the fact I may be a carrier or conductor of other`s feelings and emotions. That emotion would have to resonate with me to feel it surely.   I sometimes think this kind of intuitive empathy can be a gift, sometimes it feels like a curse.   I would never not want to be so sensitive but at times I would like the flood to leave me alone and not drown me or blow me away.  That happens to me less when I can get back into solitude and process the encounter as well as residual feelings.  I am better not to reach for food but to connect to my heart and body at these times.