By Michael R. Smith
Increasing Energy Awareness and Perception
Each day, in every way, we affirm that we are moving toward becoming more empowered in our gifts and abilities. An empowered empath is defined as "a person, who having intentionally cultivated their gifts of energy perception, uses those skills with awareness and discernment to help and heal other people."
Intentionally cultivating gifts of energy perception is an important skill that requires the use of our most important tool: the human body.
The human body is a fully-equipped Divine instrument which will answer the empath's mantra "What reason do I have to feel this way?" The process of forming a relationship with the body's energetic sensors is the first and most important phase in the development of an empowered empath, and this phase we call becoming a spiritual detective. In order to be a good spiritual detective, we must have energetic awareness first. The only way we can achieve awareness is through a clean and clear physical body.
Becoming a Hollow Bone
In his excellent book, Fools Crow: Wisdom and Power, Thomas Mails, a white man, was allowed to capture the beliefs of one of the most sacred Native American Sioux holy men, Fools Crow. Through a series of interviews, Fools Crow explained how spiritual power works. Indigenous healers think of themselves as hollow tubes or "hollow bones" through which spiritual power flows, and they go through cleansing rituals to remove all doubt or fear that would impede healing. Then they are able to experience power as it comes surging into them and give the power away in the knowledge that as they are emptied out, Higher Powers will keep filling them with even greater power to be given away.
Fools Crow describes what many empaths experience. "Some people think we are chosen for this while we are still in our mother's womb," he said. "We have strange feelings, and we think about the Higher Powers more than other children do. We go apart and contemplate what is happening to us. It is like we have bodies that are covered with holes through which the Spirits enter and fill us, and out of which our prayers and desires go up to them."
Empaths are people who walk in two different worlds: the world of 'Spirit' and the world of Earth. That's one of the reasons why our journeys can be so difficult and laden with obstacles to being grounded to Earth. We feel completely at home in the world of Spirit; we miss it and we long for our Spirit friends. Compared to spiritual matters, Earthly matters are dense, darker, and full of lower vibratory energies. And because of that, many of us disassociate. We lose touch with our bodies.
For those of us who have become disassociated because our nervous systems have been on overdrive, big chunks of us are trapped or hanging out too much in the world of Spirit. When we are disassociated, we are barely present in our bodies. We don't notice little pains or even little pleasures that want to offer us messages. Getting present in your body is critical for proper functioning in this Earth world and for fulfilling your mission to help other people. (There is a shamanic process called Soul retrieval that some healers practice, which helps you to be more in your body and more grounded).
Quantum physics can teach us a great deal about ourselves. The law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it only changes states. All the energy that ever existed, in all of time, is currently present in this Universe. Energy never goes away. It is just moved around. It moves from place to place, from person to person, from sun to Earth, from Earth to moon, from moon to water, from water to fire, from fire to rocks, and so on.
And if you're an empath, energy will certainly be physically moving between other people and you. Empowered empaths have learned skills of energy maneuvering. This includes the knowledge of how to freely move with energy when called for, and also how to say 'no' to it if it's hurting you. You must learn how to allow energy to move out of you to a place where it won't hurt you or anyone else. The only way you can do that is by being grounded. That's the precursor to being a good spiritual detective.
Think of how lightning works; it only can move from the sky to the Earth if there is a 'ground' for it to discharge into. The same rule applies to your human body. If you aren't grounded, the energy will not be able to move in your body or discharge back into the Earth. If you're spending most of your days floating out in the spirit world and not enough as a grounded human being, you're setting yourself up energetically for a lot of hurt. You'll have a lot of accumulated energy and nowhere to discharge it.
I do believe that we can adapt and cope with our sensitivity, but we can't turn it off. Most of the misery of my clients comes from the frustration of banging their heads against the wall in the effort to be less sensitive.
So if we can't turn off our sensitivity or become less sensitive, what can we do to cope? In The Complete Empath Toolkit, we explore a multitude of practices that engage the body's divine energy discharge systems so that you will be happy, healthy, and perhaps for the first time in your entire life, you will know the liberating feeling of being in your body and experiencing it as your ally and friend. With applied daily practice, you can become an empowered empath, and share your sparkly, clean, Divine authentic self with the world, and healing others in the process!
