I keep hearing people refer to themselves as ’empaths,’ which I find really interesting, since the features attributed to empaths are spiritual qualities all feminine soul types share:
- Feeling and absorbing other people’s energies;
- Sensitive to and often getting overwhelmed by the environment;
- Possessing great intuition and clairsentience;
- Drawn to holistic and alternative healing as well as metaphysical subjects;
- Compassionate and good listeners, prone to caring for the underdog;
- Highly creative and solution-oriented;
- Connected to animals and nature;
- Dreading routines and rigid structures;
- Needing activities or time to recharge;
- Holding codependent or addictive tendencies.
A feminine soul is inherently wired toward receptive, creative, and intuitive qualities, so it’s clear that all of these empathic features belong to the Feminine on different levels of manifestation. For instance, being receptive will show on the physical aspects as sensitivity to clutter, crowds, or chemicals in food or the environment, and on an emotional level through compassion or feeling other people’s emotions. Being creative, you resist any attempt to restrict or limit your self-expression; and your intuitive or empathic qualities also show on an energy level by making you feel drained as a result of being too open or lacking boundaries.
Of course, how these qualities affect you will depend on how wounded or self-empowered you are, since your journey is individualized. But in an overly masculine and dysfunctional world, feminine souls tend to feel overwhelmed by the lack of love we witness everywhere, and not just because it’s painful to observe, but also because we feel the wounded Feminine on the planet. In fact, we’re here to express and heal it through our own transformation, to bring in a new cycle of light and love.
Now, expressing it may be unpleasant—as it translates into anxiety, depression, and other mental and physical imbalances—but it pushes you to delve deeply within to allow your essential nature to emerge as a more integrated soul. That is, of course, if you don’t suppress it or fall prey to the temptation to escape the pain through some type of addiction, which only makes things harder, as you further cut off from yourself.
Your Suffering Isn’t Really Yours
As many of my spiritual teachers have pointed out (from a place of true enlightened consciousness), pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. It wakes you up from what, you may ask, if we’re all just trying to be happy? Well, it’s trying to make you aware of your disconnection from Consciousness and nudging you to find a way to re-align with it. We’re all vehicles of divine will: the more we fight this, the more we suffer. But as we suffer we also look for ways to get out of suffering, until we start looking within to find inner peace and joy.
But how can you overcome your resistance when you feel things so deeply and the imbalanced energies around you also affect you deeply? By fully embracing the Feminine within you, which is receptive but flexible and fluid as well, and holds the creative potential of Infinite Consciousness to manifest in endless forms and shapes and realms. So the more rigid your way of thinking and the more attached to your desires and expectations or resentment, well, the more you suffer.
An excessively masculine world feeds these aspects of the ego-mind that want you to remain fixed in your self-images and identification with the physical senses. You may believe that pleasure is the aim of life, but it brings disappointment and pain in the long run. I’m not saying you should be a martyr; that would be another ego-based self-image. But you must develop the emotional flexibility to free yourself from your own mental constrictions, to accept things as they come and let go when it’s time to let go. Through this process, you chip away at what’s not real and discover the true YOU.
The pain you suffer isn’t you; it’s just energy passing through you. Your ego-mind wants to own it because that’s how it maintains the illusion of its existence: ego is a wounded layer or ‘pain body’ that keeps you fixated to sensory perception—when you hold on to it. If you step back, into a more spiritual view, as a witness of what you’re experiencing without identifying with it (or believing it’s the only possible state of mind), it becomes fluid energy that you express without getting attached to it. It comes and goes, like waves in the ocean, without keeping you stuck.
Similarly, self-awareness and self-love set the boundaries you need to keep your energy clear around other people. In other words, it’s your own belief system that either lets your energy leak or your mental and energy fields absorb what’s not yours. Being aware of where you end and others begin, by touching base with how YOU feel and want YOU want no matter what others do or say, helps to draw a clear line between compassion and self-sacrifice. Energy boundaries are essential to feel whole and emotionally free.
Being empathic is a quality of the Feminine the whole planet will increasingly experience as we transition into a higher dimension and new planetary and cosmic cycles. So being an ’empath’ as a separate identity really makes no sense, since it refers to the qualities of the soul most prominent in feminine souls. As the Feminine and Masculine become more balanced, everyone will awaken to these aspects as well.
If you want a more in-depth view of your soul type and spiritual yet practical healing tools to help you navigate a dysfunctional world without feeling out of place or stuck in suffering, I encourage you to read The Indigo Journals: Spiritual Healing For Indigo Adults & Other Feminine Souls. Not only will you understand your empathic and receptive qualities; you will also acquire the knowledge and tools to fully embrace who you are and break free from a codependent, victim-like mentality that makes you feel vulnerable and overwhelmed. Click here to get your copy now!
When we empower the Feminine within, everyone benefits, because we contribute new mental and vibrational patterns to balance the collective mind. Contact me today if you’re ready to embark on a highly individualized process to develop the emotional and spiritual freedom you’ve been yearning for but seeking outside of yourself, and help restore the Feminine on the planet!
© 2016 Yol Swan. All rights reserved.