By Cyndi Dale
Empathy is key to engaging with others in healthy, vibrant ways. It allows connection, bonding, and compassion. It promotes increased creativity, new perceptions, and spiritual support. In short, it is the energy that makes the world go around, while keying us into what’s happening in the world.
In this chapter you’ll learn all the basics required to ease your way into the most exciting relationship adventure possible: the development of your empathic gifts. In order to lay the groundwork, I’ll start with more fully defining empathy while exploring its four major types, which are physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
I’ll outline the various benefits afforded the empathic expert and the reasons that we benefit from consciously developing our empathic abilities. In short, when our empathic faculties are distorted, there are lots of downsides, hence the need for training as well as empathic boundaries.
Everything empathic is easier to perform upon understanding how empathy really works. The short answer is “energetically.” Empathy involves the exchange of energy between two or more beings. After exploring this topic, I’ll further delineate between two types of energy, which are physical and subtle, and showcase the different ways our physical and subtle systems enable empathy. Add to this a laundry list of the various beings you can empathize with, and voilà, you’ll be ready to fully activate your empathic powers.
The Power of Empathy
When I think about the powers afforded us through empathy, I’m reminded of William Blake, one of the most famous English poets. Most likely you’ve read the first few lines of his well-known poem “The Tyger”: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The poet continues to wonder how the same creator that formed the tiger could have also made the lamb. How can these two opposing beings coexist? Furthermore, how can our own tiger and lamb natures coexist? Our tiger self is wild, feral, passionate, and totally self-oriented. Our lamb self is kind, gentle, caring, and ready to assist others without concern for the self. Empathy blends both aspects of ourselves while encouraging the same in others. At least, that’s what happens when we perform empathically in a healthy way. Our tiger self is dedicated to personal survival. While empathy involves relating to others, the smart empath never, ever endangers their own physical, psychological, or spiritual well-being. The challenges of empathy, described in the introduction as over empathy, under empathy, and manipulative tendencies, are averted if we remain aware of our personal needs, even while offering concern for others.
Our lamb self-relaxes our boundaries so we can attune to others. When we resonate with another’s physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual reality, we can “walk in their shoes.” We can accommodate their innermost sensitivities and lift them into a good space.
The fully empowered empath is both a tiger and a lamb, devoted simultaneously to personal security and another’s welfare. This balance requires both conceptual and practical education, and, above all, an open heart. It enables us to be the way we are created to be: a tiger and a lamb, caring for self and other. As you’ll learn in this chapter, the “other” might be another person. Then again, an empathic subject might be an animal, natural being, or supernatural entity, such as the deceased or an angel; it might even be an aspect of yourself! But before we meet our possible empathy partners, it’s imperative to better understand the four basic empathy styles, which I’ll describe with examples:
- You are sitting across from a friend at a coffee shop and your knee starts throbbing. You wonder if you banged it that morning.Then your friend says, “My knee is sopainful that my doctor is suggesting a knee replacement.” All along, you were physicallyempathizing with your friend’s pain.
- Your mom is frowning but you can’t help but feel like she’s hiding something that makes her happy. Later you find out that your sister is pregnant and your mom wasn’t letting on until your sister could tell you.
Your emotional empathy was right on. - Your co-worker says that he likes his job, but your gut
insists the opposite. You weren’t at all surprised when he quit the company to return to school. In the future, you vow to put more faith in your mental empathy. - You feel creepy around your brother. There is something shadowy surrounding him. Finally, he says he thinks he’s affected by a dark spirit. Your spiritual empathy was on point.
Respectively, each of these four examples provides a picture of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual empathy, which I more completely distinguish in the following ways:
Physical Empathy: Sensing in our body what is happening in another’s body. When our body operates as an empathic medium, we might feel another’s sickness, pain, healing state, or any other physical condition, including a positive healing sensation, as if it’s our own. For instance, when sitting in a movie theater, you might actually think you’re being kissed or shot when the same befalls a character.
Emotional Empathy: The awareness of another’s feelings in your own system. When your emotions are stirred by another’s emotions, you’ll feel their anger, fear, disgust, sadness, or joy. You might also simultaneously sense your own feelings. Imagine that you were promoted but a fellow employee, a friend, wasn’t. You can be happy for yourself and still also be sad for your friend.
Mental Empathy: The ability to understand another’s thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions, and also pull information from the universal mind. Quite typically, this data is relayed as a gut sense. Let’s say that you easily sense when another person has a surprise for you or someone else. Blurting aloud your awareness is a certain way to ruin that event, whether it’s a birthday celebration or good news. Your ability to sense what’s on another’s mind is a sign of mental empathy. So is the power to tap into the universal mind, a sort of “computer in the sky.” You know you’re on target when a light bulb goes off and you simply know the answer to a problem.
Spiritual Empathy: The facility for associating with the spirit or essence of a living or otherworldly being. Through spiritual empathy you might attune to a person’s inner essence and subsequently become conscious of their true talents, value system, or spiritual needs. You might also affiliate with a ghost, demon, angel, or the Spirit itself. As well, you might relay a message to someone from an invisible being. For instance, I once sensed that a client’s deceased brother was telling her she’d survive a hard divorce. She knew it was him because the message included a vision of a man singing and cooking; he did both professionally when alive. Some spiritual empaths can also get rid of negative entities or beings. I have a friend who can sense dark presences around her clients; she feels them as hovering figures that turn her stomach. She then uses divine energy to free people from them. Her clients almost always report an improvement in their lives. Are you excited about the broad range of empathic abilities? Their benefits are even vaster than my short snapshots reveal.
