Many people who are energetically sensitive or empathic don't realize it, and mistakenly believe that what they feel inside belongs to them when it actually may belong to someone or something else. Sensitives pick up the energies around them, sometimes from pretty far away...even as far away as across the globe. Amazing, right?
But not when you realize that we are made up of the same elements as the rest of life, so we resonate with the whole of it on some level...which means we are not truly separate from anything in this reality. Isolating ourselves or trying to ignore what we feel doesn't make it stop. In fact, it may intensify it.
It's our job to sort what's ours from what we're picking up on that belongs to others. But most of us aren't taught how to sort this. There's a shamanic tool called shielding that helps us. Shielding is a way of setting an energetic boundary around you, so you can distinguish what's emanating within your auric field versus what's emanating outside of it. When something originates within your auric field, it's yours to deal with. When it doesn't, it's not. At least, not directly. Nice, huh? Shielding is a technique members of the After A Breakup HELP program learn and practice. But I digress…
Energy has to move. To stay physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and energetically healthy, we must move the emotional energy we generate or absorb through and out of our body system. To move it, we first have to recognize it's there, own it, embrace it, examine it, and then we can release it, whatever "it" is.
The key is knowing how to release our emotional energy in safe and constructive ways. This means we do not direct it at anyone or anything, or indulge it. Instead, we emote it in productive and neutral ways...like crying, screaming, dancing, creating, ceremony, journaling, laughing, or moving our body in some way.
These are just a few examples. In the After A Breakup HELP program, members access an entire list of healthy ways to emote grief, anger (which work for anxiety and fear too), and even joy that don't cost anything, are safe, and productively move emotional energy out of the body. This is essential because most of us carry around an "emotional storage tank" that must be emptied in order for us to stay healthy and operate from a state of presence in our relationships and lives today.
When we don't do this clean up, the emotional baggage stored in our tank rears its head where it doesn't really belong, causing us to react in ways that don't really help and often can hurt. The challenge is that our emotional response patters are deeply ingrained habits that we often don't see in ourselves. Until they're pointed out to us or cause us enough pain to get our attention, we tend to overlook them...which isn't helpful in relationships.
Cultivating a healthy relationship dynamic means we look inward at our own patterns, preferences, and tendencies first, before pointing our finger at anyone else. I've learned that what we usually end up noticing is how our own choices and behaviors led to our experiences, and that other people involved are never 100% to blame, even as we may want to blame them. All relationships involve an inter-dynamic. When we finally accept responsibility for our part of things, we reclaim the power to change them. And that is when our spiritual journey truly begins.