24/03/2024
"I wish you the healing you deny yourself."
This thought came to me yesterday and I used it in today's loving kindness meditation.
I have been reflecting on the idea of The Empath. Loosely defined, an empath is often described as someone who can feel others' emotions and understand their experience.
But more and more, I wonder.....so many of us who identify with this....is it really feeling other's feelings and experience or is feeling that in the other actually resonating and awakening our own unresolved pain? Because very seldom do I hear "I'm an empath" and then have the person go on to describe feeling other people's JOY.....or, you know. any of the variety of happy emotions.
Do you also identify as The Fixer, The Healer, The Wise One? A heavy introspection coming from the shadow side of this for me has been....how much of this stems from a sense of responsibility, or perhaps guilt? Somehow that urge you "should" help others from their pain? Are you, like me, discomforted or put at dis-ease when seeing dealing with is often the direct result of their own choices?
Helping others is not saving them from their pain, from their consequences; it is perhaps best served in helping them discover the tools to seek their own discoveries, set their own healing. All of the wisdom in the world is useless when it falls on deaf ears.
Today I seek to hold space for others so they may heal and help themselves.
Today I choose to be present with my own suffering or discomfort and not salve it with music, noise, food, distraction.
I also seek to understand where and how I have resisted healing - to recognize it so I may grow and release the past and destructive patterns I am continuing and bringing forward.
Art by Dantegráfico on Pixabay.com.
