Align to the Energy of Grace
When beneficial people, opportunities, resources, or experiences show up for you right when you need them, that’s grace in action. Grace is a mystical, supportive force that is always operating in your life. You can mindfully increase the number of moments of grace you experience and more fully activate this energy anytime you like. Whether you are facing a specific challenge or just want extra support, aligning to the energy of grace is an excellent way to take care of yourself.
Here are some methods for aligning to grace energy.
• Think of the world as a magical, loving place. Really difficult, painful things happen, but remind yourself that miracles happen too.
• Look on the bright side of situations, find the silver lining, and stay hopeful about the present and the future.
• Use a grace mantra, like “Unexpected blessings are always showing up for me.”
• Anticipate mercy and second chances.
• Be kind to others as often as you can.
• Stay open to new experiences, people, and opportunities, and remain flexible.
• Speak honestly yet try to stay positive with your words.
As you align even more to grace energy, here are a few things to watch out for.
• Don’t deny your own challenging emotions. You can be very sad or angry about something that’s happened and still stay hopeful about the future or focus on the silver linings in the present.
• Be optimistic but also be realistic. Remain grounded about the facts of a situation.
• Take responsibility and take action where you can.
• Learn from the past, yet keep looking forward and remember that the future can be different and better.
I experienced grace in action many years ago when I was looking for an apartment in Manhattan. The initial two weeks of my search were very disheartening. I felt scared and defeated. However, I’d just gotten turned on to the power of positive thinking, so I thought “Well, let me try to switch my attitude and my expectations.” I began thinking things like “I’m a good person and a good tenant, and anyone would be lucky to have me live in their building.” My energy had been stressed, hurried, and closed off the past two weeks, so I purposefully relaxed, opened up, and slowed down. Within days I met a sweet real estate agent, and the first place she took me to was my dream apartment—in a brand-new building, in a sought-after neighborhood, with a beautiful park only blocks away. The price was astoundingly affordable. My husband and I lived there for thirteen years, and every time we walked through the front door we were reminded that miracles are real.
To align more mindfully with grace in your own life, take one situation that’s been frustrating and change your attitude and your approach via the suggestions in this exercise. Notice if this changes your energy to one that’s calmer and more hopeful, and watch for changes in the outer world too.
Allow Yourself to Feel Good Even When Others Don’t
If a loved one, or the outside world, is going through a challenging time, it’s all right if life still feels pretty good in your neck of the emotional and energetic woods. Remember that:
• You don’t need anyone’s permission to feel your positive feelings. Part of your self-care practice should be celebrating and savoring whatever is going well in your life.
• Taking on the challenging emotions of others won’t help them. In fact, it will likely make things worse for both of you.
• Empaths are best at supporting others when they are taking great care of themselves. Taking on the energies and emotions of others is poor self-care.
When someone else is in a challenging place but you’re not, try the following:
1. Practice focused support. Give someone your full attention when you are supporting them, then take your attention elsewhere.
2. Put time limits on your support. It’s okay to notice the time when a friend is venting to you on the phone.
3. Find someone else to share your happiness with.
4. Compassionately and mindfully honor a loved one’s—or the world’s—pain. Step up your activism, make a donation, make someone dinner, or just tell someone you care.
Letting yourself feel wonderful experiences is how you stay balanced. Savoring and celebrating are good self-care!
Create an Intimacy Checklist
Empaths can bond with others very quickly because empaths can so easily sense how other people are feeling or what they need. Bonding easily with others is a useful and lovely ability, but it also has a challenging aspect—you can get too close too fast and end up hurt, realizing later that you did not yet know the person well enough or long enough to become so open and vulnerable.
Being intimate quickly isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a potential dear friend comes into your life out of the blue just when you need that sort of relationship most. This empath ability to get close quickly can also be quite valuable in certain work scenarios, like when you’re new to a job but can quickly discern what a boss’s temperament is like or how you can contribute to the existing team in a unique way. Yet empaths should be careful around this phenomenon.
Consult the following checklist when you’re becoming intimate quickly with a new friend, extended family member, coworker, lover, or anyone else. You could also create a personalized checklist using some of the following questions while also coming up with your own.
• How does this person treat themselves? Do they seem to have a good sense of self-love and a healthy self-inventory process?
• What’s the drama factor in our relationship? Have we already had intense fights or have I questioned the relationship already?
• How long have I known this person—days, weeks, or months?
• Does it feel like we have a soul connection or deeper bond?
• Do this person and I have any mutual friends or acquaintances?
• How much do I know about this person’s past?
• Has this person been given the opportunity yet to show up for me in a significant way or have my back? If so, how did they do?
• Does this person try to make me responsible for their emotions?
• Does this person make me feel frazzled or drained, or does their presence make me feel more grounded and calm?
• Does this person give me my own space?
• Does this person genuinely care about my health and happiness?
• How does this person speak to me? Is it with kindness and respect?
• Am I in a relationship with this person because I sense they need me, or because I get something nourishing out of having them in my life?
• Is it difficult for me to set emotional boundaries with this person?
• Have I secretly wondered if this person may not be the best fit for me as a friend or lover or colleague at this particular point in our lives? Or does it seem like we met at the perfect time?
• Is this person generally supportive of my dreams and hopes?
• Is this person’s natural energy a good fit for me, or does it feel a bit too intense or a bit too mild for me?
• Does this person seem flexible or open to change if something in our relationship isn’t working?
Remember that the questions on this list aren’t meant to judge you or the other person. The answers will simply help you get clear on the dynamics of your current relationship with them.
Practice Radical Self-Love
Empaths can be susceptible to internalizing the critical opinions of others about themselves. If someone is really angry at you or really disappointed in you, you may feel the other person’s emotions strongly and intimately. If you’re already in an emotionally heightened and vulnerable place, it can be more difficult to engage witnessing energy to get that eagle perspective of your higher self.
Radical self-love and self-acceptance are antidotes to being overly judgmental and harsh with yourself. Use the following self-love techniques for balance when you’re in a challe
nging place with yourself, or use them anytime as effective self-care.
• When you catch a glimpse of yourself in the bathroom mirror at home, smile, wink, or look in your eyes and say “I love you!”
• Find a cute, happy picture of yourself as a child, frame it, and place it somewhere you’ll see it often. Remind yourself that this lovable child is still part of you.
• If you’re upset with yourself about the past, close your eyes and imagine yourself at the time of the difficult event. Silently send that younger version of you unconditional love and offer a quick, wise pep talk.
• If you’ve disappointed yourself or you regret an action, get your journal and write down five ways you have changed or want to change for the better because of this experience or five things you learned from it. Five is a number associated with positive major life changes.
• Serenade yourself by putting on a tender love song and singing it to yourself. Singing will open your throat chakra, which helps you express and process emotions.
Recognize Intense, Neutral, or Mild Energy
Having a classification system for different types of energies can help empaths be more aware of how the energies of others might affect them. Energy can have many subtle layers to it, and energy can be individual or collective. For instance, a national tragedy could create an atmospheric energy of grief, yet also have undercurrents of healing and connection. We might classify this energy as intense. Certain people or places might idle at different energies too, like a quiet town that is described as sleepy (mild energy) or a therapist who is grounded (neutral energy). Here’s how each type of energy might affect you.
• Intense energy has the capacity to affect you in a big way. If a friend with a naturally intense energy is on top of the world, they can be a joy to be around as you open up to feel some of that sparkle! If the same friend is frustrated, you may want to engage witnessing energy to have good self-care boundaries.
• Neutral energy can be nourishing, like a blank canvas that allows empaths to tune in to themselves. You may find when there are no intense deadlines, and people are content in their positions, that your office has a comforting, neutral background energy.
• Mild energy can be a nice break—or it can become boring. Life is best with a balance of energies, and every empath will have different preferences and tolerances, at different times, for mild and intense energy.
Practice assessing energy as intense, neutral, or mild. People, places, and groups can have a baseline or natural energy and also experience drastic energy swings or subtle shifts. It’s normal for people, empaths included, to be a fascinating, fabulous mix of different energies.
Detox from Gossip
For this exercise, you will try to avoid engaging in (which also means listening to) celebrity “news” and family or workplace gossip for two weeks. Diplomatically bow out of or redirect conversations that involve gossip without judging the person gossiping or creating unnecessary drama.
Both during this two-week period and afterward, whenever you find yourself attracted to stories about others, ask yourself:
1. Does this information directly affect me? If a coworker is gossiping about how your boss is switching departments, the answer may be yes. If the gossip is about the personal details of a manager’s divorce settlement, the answer is probably no. That’s the type of gossip you should avoid for the next two weeks.
2. Does this information help me better connect to myself? A friend might be sharing a story about their sibling, and how this sibling is going through so many big changes at once that it’s causing them to feel ungrounded. If you are also struggling to stay centered while facing many big changes, this “gossip” could help you get more in touch with your own emotions, and listening to some of the details for a brief amount of time is fine for this exercise. If, however, you catch yourself reading about a celebrity’s rehab stay just because you’re bored at work, you should mindfully and lovingly find something else to occupy your mind over the next two weeks.
After this mindful gossip sabbatical, you will probably develop a different relationship with celebrity news, as well as family and workplace gossip, and be better able to discern when hearing or reading about others is healthy and when it is toxic, clogging up your sensitive system unnecessarily.
Release Someone with Love
When you care deeply about someone, it’s normal to hold them close to your energetic heart. But when a relationship significantly changes or ends, or it becomes painful to hold someone close, it’s healing to release them. This release happens on an energetic plane, and simply changes the level of intimacy between you and the other person. Because empaths are so sensitive to energy, lessening the energy connection between you and another can have amazing positive influences on you and even on the other person on the physical plane! Yet you don’t have to let the other person know about this exercise or communicate with them—so it’s a great option for a breakup or for creating mindful distance from someone who is still in your life.
The practice of releasing someone with love can help you do many healthy things, like:
• Process through painful emotions more easily or quickly.
• Forgive or accept the other person or find peace for yourself.
• Move on from a relationship and get closure.
• Bring new relationships into your life.
• Have a more neutral, and less triggering, experience when you interact with this person.
Try this ritual on any relationship. (If the other person makes you feel physically or emotionally unsafe, seek professional help.)
1. Create a healing atmosphere—play sacred music, light a candle, hold your favorite crystal, or burn some incense.
2. Imagine the energy around you becoming soft and loving. Picture the energy as pink, gold, or green, colors associated with the heart and healing. Take deep breaths as this energy washes over you.
3. Close your eyes and picture a healing sanctuary. It might look like a beautiful room with soft pillows to sit on and lovely sunlight streaming through the windows. Or it could be outside, like a field of wildflowers gently swaying in the breeze where you can lay a comfy blanket and sit. Your healing sanctuary might look very unique, like the tower chamber in a large castle lined with stunning tapestries. Take a moment and let your intuition and imagination fill in the details. You can visit this healing sanctuary anytime you like. If you have a spirit guide, loved one who has passed on, or angel you like to work with, call them in to be with you.
4. Picture yourself in your healing sanctuary. Next, think of the person you want to release. You might imagine writing their name on a piece of paper, or you might summon an image of their face. Send their soul the silent message that you wish them well and hope all the best for them. Tell them you are releasing them from their connection to you, and say anything else that feels right.
5. Notice (with your eyes still closed, resting in your healing sanctuary) what emotions come up in you. Let yourself feel them, and make a note to come back to them after you close the ritual.
6. Take in the details of your healing sanctuary one last time, and say goodbye to it for now. Slowly open your eyes. Take some deep breaths with your hand over your heart to close the ritual.
A lot of emotions or intuitive hits about next practical action steps might come up for you. Get support from loved ones or healthcare professionals, and know that releasing someone is a process that can’t usually be completed with one ritual. As emotions come up around this issue in the following days or weeks, let them. When your mind returns to this person, think “I’m releasing them with love,” and feel the gentle, peaceful energy of that intention in your heart.
Confront Others While Protecting Yourself
Empaths sometimes shy away from confrontations because they fear absorbing the challenging energies and emotions that confrontations can bring out in others. Yet sometimes confronting others, or openly disagreeing with them, is an impor
tant part of enacting change. Telling someone else how you really feel or what you really think helps you stay connected to yourself, honor your emotions, and practice self-care. It’s also a way to honestly show up for other people to their benefit.
Try the following empath-friendly confrontation technique the next time you need to confront someone.
1. Process your emotions ahead of time. Share the raw ones with a trusted person, like a good friend or counselor.
2. Think through what you want to say and what you hope to accomplish in the confrontation beforehand.
3. Use your empath ability to tune in to what the other person’s emotional experience might be. You could get the intuitive information that a romantic or business partner is scared about the future or overwhelmed with work and that’s why they’re being so rude to you lately. View any insights you get with healthy skepticism. After all, you may or may not be correct. This step is meant to help you see the other person more compassionately or holistically and remind you that other issues that have nothing to do with you might be at play.
4. Take a few minutes just before you confront this person to enter observer mode and engage witnessing energy. Get relaxed and grounded, perhaps by meditating, listening to nature sounds, telling yourself a supportive mantra, or picturing a ball of healing golden or blue light around your body.
5. Tell the other person how you feel and what you want as calmly and diplomatically as you can. Give them space to respond, and really listen.
6. After the conversation, pay attention to any new intuitive insights or emotions you experience about the situation.
While it may be naturally more challenging for empaths to confront others, it’s a skill worth honing and an aspect of life worth making peace with, both for your personal and professional lives. If confronting others is tough for you, keep trying, get more support or tools, and practice radical self-love through the process.
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