I wanted to take some time to talk about being intuitive versus being an empath. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it between workshops and my “Ask me October” Series (which you can see over on my instagram page – link is at the bottom of my site or here). It was something I struggled to understand in the beginning because everything was so overwhelming and mixed up for me.
An empath is someone who absorbs or picks up energy from other people. They are aware of others feelings and can start to feel their emotions right along with them. There is a difference between being empathic and being an empath. Empathic people offer condolences or grieve with their friends. They offer help and support.
Empaths absorb the grief and feel it deeply as if it were their own. They live the same experience without having the same connection to the event or circumstance.
How do you know you’re an empath?
Do you find yourself crying right along with a friend who is upset or getting off a phone call with a distraught friend and feeling like you can’t shake the grief even though?
Do you notice sudden strong feelings come over you when you are out in a crowd?
Are you the person your friend turn to whenever they need advice or need to vent?
Do strangers start talking to you about deeply personal things after just meeting you?
Do you regularly find yourself crying with sappy commercials?
Do you pick up physical pain from someone you love when you are around them (like they have a headache and when you leave them you have a headache)?
Do you get overwhelmed easily in your intimate relationships?
You don’t understand how someone could not put other people before themselves?
Are you easily able to tell if someone isn’t being honest?
You have a strong desire to help everyone that you see is in pain?
If you answered yes to a few of those you are probably and empath.
So how does that differ from being intuitive?
Intuitive people are connected to a different energy. They will get direct information or have a sense of knowing about a situation. Without explanation or even needing to be around someone they will just know things about them. They can often hear, see, or sense energy or have a connection to a higher sense of just knowing.
Maybe you notice things about someone that they haven’t told you?
Have you found yourself knowing what someone does for a living without them ever telling you?
Do you get a feeling about what will happen if you take one way home from work vs another?
Do you ever see a little movie daydream play out in your head and then later see those exact events play out in real life?
Maybe you meet a friend’s significant other and immediately know what issues will come up in their relationship without knowing anything about them?
To me it feels a little bit like tapping into stuff that is in the back of my mind. I’m not always aware that I know it until I check in and look for it. Kind of like having access to a catalog of information.
It is possible to be both intuitive and an empath.
So how does that work?
When I sit down to do a reading with someone and I open up to their energy I might start feeling some of the stuff that they have been feeling. I usually put a little bit of a boundary up there. Then I tune into the energy around them, which is a different frequency than their emotions. This is where I get most of the information about what is going on with them. I will start to hear short messages or sometimes even full sentences of what would help them.
Over the next couple weeks we will be talking about navigating the holidays as an empath. We will discuss how to put up boundaries and how to manage your own energy through the hectic holiday season.
Hopefully just reading this lets you know that you are not alone.
Tune in Mondays through the end of the year for a new blog post every week, with helpful tips and tricks for all my woo-woo friends.