#ifeelyou

Empaths are Empathic and experiencing other people's emotional energies within them, as if they were their own emotional energies, whether they conflict with their own at the time or not. Empath = Experiencing: I feel you. When humans are being kind to one another, they are able to graciously offer compassion and sympathy to others, and offer support by empathizing with them. These are emotional actions that we actively engage in and DO in response to something we have seen or heard, or been a part of someone. Sympathy, compassion, and empathy require an external stimulus – you see or hear of a situation, event, or circumstance, and you emotionally respond to the person involved in or impacted by it. Some of these compassionate responses are socialized morals and ethics (ie don’t laugh when someone hurts themselves), while other sympathetic responses are framed by cultural customs (ie funerals that mourn loss versus celebration of life). When you are an Empath – there is no conscious doing; you are not actively offering an emotion to another person. You are not sharing an emotion with another person in response to an external stimulus. You are (initially) unaware of any external stimulus, only the presence of the person with you (and we will discuss how you can experience the emotions of people you are close or connected to in some way, even if they are not in the same room or location. For the sake of simplicity of the explanation and argument here, only the presence of the person with you). When you are an Empath, you are BEING the emotion of the other person unknowingly. We experience the emotion AS the other person – in feelings and in sensations in and within the physical body. This experience can then shape our thoughts in the mind, as the flow goes: emotion -> feeling -> body effects -> thoughts in mind -> spirit effects. Herein lies the challenge: to know when an emotion is yours or not yours, and that you are capable of experiencing this.