When you experience love or joy in your life how does it make you feel?
Next time you experience a strong positive emotion notice the impact on your body - on your breathing, your heart rate. Feel your muscles - are they relaxed or are they tense? Really connect that feeling to your body, to your mind and to your soul. Be in the here and now and appreciate the amazing things happening to you.
OK - so now recall a more negative experience. An argument, doing something you didn't want to, some form of conflict, a road rage incident anything at all. Remember what happened to you physically, mentally and spiritually.
Whether you are an empath or not you will experience differences in your mental, physical and spiritual wellbeing for both positive and negative events in your life. Yet we often do not correlate those things happening to us, to the emotions we have been feeling.
During my life a number of things have happened on a reoccurring basis;
Losing my voice - the amount of times I've lost my voice when I feel people won't listen to me or I can't be heard. if not completely it goes croaky and weak. Now I know I need to make my voice heard in other ways, as an introvert I prefer the written word to talking things through, I often stutter or can't get the words out or articulate what I want to say when my emotions are strong.
My neck locks up - this has happened to me every year since I was about 18 - I've blamed it on 2 whiplash injuries I had in my late teens and although it's a factor that this is a weak point in my body, my emotions are often at play here. In the last 12 months, now I work for myself, I've had no problems with my neck. But in the past every time it happened it was when I was doing something or working with someone that I thought was "a pain in the neck".
Often there are environmental, physical and medical factors, but be aware of your sub conscious mind, it has a lot of control and will take your words and emotions literally.
For me I can absorb those emotions from others and they become physical symptoms in me, if I don't protect myself. And whether you're a full blown empath or have an empathetic nature we have to be so careful that someone else's "crisis" doesn't become ours. We need to ensure that when someone is having an intense emotion near us that we recognise what is our emotion and what is theirs.
For years "amorous advances" have been a problem for me - I'd assumed that every woman had experienced what I had, but now I realise my empathic nature meant I was giving the lustful signals men and women were giving out to me back to them. Not intentionally, I didn't even know I was doing it but it meant that most jobs I've had I've been sexually assaulted and or had inappropriate sexual advances. I'd hear rumours of people saying "so and so thinks you've got the hots for them" and I didn't even know who "so and so" was. I swear I'll write a fictional book on it one day as no one would believe the stories were real.
Then there are the "How are you" moments, where I ask a simple polite, typically British question and then have someone blurting out there woes to me for 10 minutes (whilst in my head I'm going I didn't really mean it I was just asking like everyone else). I can understand how women who were empath's in the past were burned as witches. I've seen the fear on a person's face as they stop talking and look at you like you've hexed them. On occasions I've been able to offer support to the person but on many they've turned on me, I think worried I'd tell the world their woe's. It's often worse when it's a senior manager who's trying to be an alpha male and they've just told me they hate their job and their life.
When I did my NLP training I didn't need to learn how to get into rapport but how to break it.
So I have to remember to protect myself, how to break rapport to get out of situations, I thought I'd be seen as being rude but if done in the right way it isn't.
I've tried lots of ideas for protecting myself - surrounding myself in white light, a bubble, carrying crystals with me for protection - hematite is very good for this, but be warned it is a metal so remove it from your pockets or in my case my bra, when going through airport security. I set off a scanner once and they did the handheld metal detector across my body and it made that big "whurrpping" noise right in the middle of my boobs! Fortunately when I went to the room to remove them and said lucky stones to the female Swiss security guard she just shrugged her shoulders and waved me on! Needless to say no crystals in my bra anymore!
So its taken years, but it was a doctor friend who said to me, why not use a Patronus charm. You'll only know the patronus charm if you're a Harry Potter Fan and mine is more a cross between a Patronus and a daemon from Northern Lights. Mine is a hare that changes colour and causes mayhem when I'm in seminars I find boring (I imagine that they are knocking over glasses and anything I see falling over).
When in company of energy vampires, I imagine them as dementors (again from Harry Potter), these people are usually sucking the life out of me, and I put up a bright white light (I even have a ring with a Hare on it with the inscription "Expecto Patronum".)
I can still get caught out, like I was this week, where I experienced a conflict that I wasn't expecting, but I find having some form of protection really helps me.
So connect with your emotions and look how they impact you on a daily basis. Look at what is the best form of protection for you. Is it a piece of jewellery that you hold in items of conflict, or a crystal that you can focus on, or surrounding yourself in white light or a bubble. Or figure out what your Patronus or Daemon is. Find what works for you.