The medical intuitive I started working with asked me once, a couple of years into our work together, “What made you trust this work when you didn’t trust anything or anyone in your life?” And my answer, so vividly and still to this day, is that it was the first time in my entire life that I felt seen and valued for who I really was. She really saw me at my core. And all of the things that I had thought were “wrong with me” or “needed to be fixed”, I learned were at the core of who I am, and who I am meant to be. There is such power in being seen, and being validated for who you really are. Without judgment. It was like a drug. I wanted more and more of it. I liked seeing myself through her eyes, and though the guides’ eyes. I learned I was valuable just being me. Without having to do anything or be anything for anyone else. And I am so very grateful because it is one of the most significant things in my life that brought me back to myself.
Every two weeks like clockwork for 2 or 3 years, she broke me open emotionally. The sessions were intense, as she guided me to feel and process emotionally (more than mentally) all kinds of things that had happened to me throughout my life, but within a day or two of each one, once I had recovered, I felt stronger. I felt more connected to myself. I felt better able to maintain my own center in relationship to others. I felt a stronger sense of self, and that felt really good. I started to really feel my own value as a human being.
Around the 2.5 year mark I started to re-discover that I am an empath. I really started to feel it without knowing what it was within about 9-10 months, and it was pretty confusing and overwhelming. But within about 2.5 years, I was able to identify it more readily and I was able to name it. I discovered that I had shut that part of me down when I was about 5 or 6 years old. It was too hard to feel everyone else’s emotions in my house during that timeframe and so I turned my empathic abilities into being able to feel into other people’s expectations to determine how to please them, and I built all kinds of defense mechanisms to protect myself from feeling the depths of my ability to feel both my own and other people’s emotions.
For anyone who doesn’t know what an empath is, it is someone who feels incredibly deeply, and also feels the emotions of other people, animals, nature, technology, physical ailments and/or physical spaces. These feelings are felt in the body of the empath as if they are their own, even when they are not. If the individual doesn’t know they are an empath, it can be really hard to distinguish what is actually your stuff vs. other people’s stuff. So empaths can be easy to manipulate emotionally and can have a hard time developing a strong sense of self. It becomes much more of a gift than a curse when the empath learns how to manage it and use it as the gift that it is intended to be. And to do that, it requires doing your own healing work and developing a strong sense of self. Approximately 20% of individuals are empaths, and I think there are more and more in the newer generations.
During this part of my journey, I was learning how much of my life I had spent in my head, completely cut off from my emotional and physical bodies. This work helped me tremendously to get out of my head and spend more time being and feeling, and valuing my ability to just be and to feel so deeply.
A whole new world of modalities opened up to me. I started learning about energy and how sensitive I was to it. I took a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course where I learned about meditating and developed a daily meditation practice (for a while anyway…I’ll confess I’m not super consistent with it all the time…but I go back to it when I need to and it’s an important tool in my toolkit). I started learning about modalities like Reiki, and Tapping, and have developed a robust toolkit that I can use whenever needed in both my own journey and in my work with others.
This was my path, but each of us has our own ways of getting to where we need to be in this life. Guides, Teachers, Mentors of all kinds show up to help us on our journeys (and we show up to help others on theirs too). We just have to be open to it and feel our way through what resonates with us.
I am tremendously grateful for each and every teacher I have had in my life, and to all those yet to come. I have learned on this journey that each and every person who comes into our lives is there for a reason. Everyone we interact with teaches us something about ourselves and the world around us. And we have the potential to learn the greatest of lessons from those relationships that are the most difficult for us. Each one gives us an opportunity to exacerbate our wounds, or to heal them. There is much power in learning that, and it has allowed me to look at all of my relationships differently as a result.
Now it’s your turn – when is the first time you remember being REALLY seen and celebrated for who you are at your core? Or started to shift your perception that what you had previously believed were weaknesses were really your super powers? Let me know in the comments below!