You're Not Crazy: Energy, Intuition, and Extreme Empathy

Photo by Soroush Karimi on Unsplash

My first energy healer, who was also a medium, was telling me about how she was planning to hold mediumship classes. “You’d be surprised how many people have ghost stories,” she said. “They won’t tell you about it until you tell them yours first.”

She was right. I have found a similar thing to be true about all kinds of phenomena that occur in the spiritual and unseen realms. I’m not just talking about seeing ghosts. Many of my clients come to me and try to explain their experiences related to energy, intuition, and sensitivity to the emotions and energies of others.

These clients struggle to find the right words to explain the feelings that they have in their bodies. After they do, they look at me like I might think they’re crazy. They often end with things like, “Does that make sense?” or “I don’t feel like I have anyone else I can talk to about this.”

I’m here to tell you: It makes sense. You can talk to me about it!

Before I discovered energy healing, I had all kinds of strange pains and feelings in and around my body. Yes, around. I distinctly recall the first time I was speaking to a fellow reiki practitioner who acknowledged that, yes, she also knew what it was like to feel as though a pain was occurring outside of your body. That was some wacky stuff going on with my energy!

Maybe not everyone feels these kinds of things. Some of us are having a different experience than others, and that’s okay.

This blog post is for the ones on the sensitive end of the spectrum. If you identify with any of the experiences described below, you’re not alone!

Blockages

Your body has an energy system that functions a lot like your circulatory system. Channels called meridians are moving chi energy around all the time, and your chakras are bringing that energy in.

Imagine what would happen if you tied a band tightly around your upper arm. You’d feel it, right? You’d feel the band, the place where blood was pooling, and the sense of there not being any blood flowing to your lower arm and hand.

We can develop blockages in our energy system in the same way! Often this comes from fear, trauma (physical or emotional), and suppressing our thoughts and needs. If you’re sensitive to energy, you may be able to feel that block. It will feel as though a band is wrapped around a certain part of your body, or as if an obstruction is in the part of the body that corresponds to a certain energy channel or chakra. But if you were to go to a doctor, they may not find anything physically detectable there. (If a block is long-standing or particularly acute, it could very well lead to physical symptoms like infection or injury, however, which of course may require medical treatment.)

Blockages can occur pretty much anywhere. In energetically sensitive people (which is most people who come in for reiki sessions), the throat/neck area is almost always blocked if they haven’t been tending to their energy systems. Most people find that, following their first session, their neck and shoulders are the first things to feel better as we begin to clear these blocks.

Remnants of past experiences

Sometimes, our past experiences leave energetic imprints on us. I once had a client who came to me complaining of stress. As I began to remove old energy from her, I got a vision of what looked like vines wrapped around her lower legs, ankles, and feet, making it difficult for her to walk forward. After the session when I described what I saw, she confirmed that that was very much how she had been feeling in her life overall. Did she literally have vines around her legs? Not exactly, but energetically, that experience of being held back by all of her obligations was very present in her aura.

You may also have sensations like that, which began when you went through a particular experience. It could have been in the recent past, or it could have been something that happened a long time ago that you never fully processed out. If that is the case, energy healing can assist you.

Entity attachments

When I was going through a particularly traumatic time in life, I had a lot of physical symptoms that developed from the stress - aches, digestive issues, etc. But I also began to have the strange sensation that something invisible - like beings that weren’t part of me - were leaching out my life force.

In my case, I never had the, “This sounds crazy, but . . . “ conversation with anyone. That was how crazy I thought I’d sound. It wasn’t until the first time a healer straight-up told me that she’d removed an entity from my energy system (and I felt the relief!) that I realized this was a totally normal and acknowledged thing in the energy healing world. Yep, there are invisible entities that can attach themselves to you and try to suck out your life force. They’re annoying, and people become especially vulnerable to them in times of stress, fear, or physical weakness. These entities are great at making a bad situation worse.

The good news? You can get rid of them. A good energy healer can find and remove these entities, releasing them to a realm where they heal appropriately or at least cease to harm anyone.

Extreme empathy

The word “empath” has gained a lot of popularity among the modern American spiritual community lately. I don’t think of being an empath as something you are or aren’t, so much as that every human is on a different place on the spectrum of empathy. For some, it’s strong enough that they can feel the emotions of others without even talking to those people. And/or they feel the feelings of others so strongly that they become confused about what’s theirs and what belongs to someone else.

If you’re very empathic, you’re probably also pretty susceptible to developing energy blocks, carrying around energetic remnants from other people, or even taking on entities when you don’t care for yourself well.

Feeling walled off

This is an experience that can, ironically, happen to people who are extremely empathic. They learn to wall themselves off energetically. The purpose of this is to protect themselves from feeling too much for or through others. It’s often due to past experiences of either feeling rejected, or having been persecuted for their kindness. Unfortunately, it can have the effect of keeping them isolated within themselves. It is as if they are walled off behind a piece of plate glass. Inside that glass is a person who is very sensitive and empathetic toward others, but they struggle to express it.

The ironic thing about these folks is that their walled-off state may make it difficult for them to even be aware of what’s going on. The “crazy” that they feel is the sensation that their outer experiences don’t match the inner. They may struggle to have meaningful or lasting relationships, often feeling abandoned or rejected by those they care deeply about. Inside, they have strong feelings of empathy and love, but they can’t understand why others leave them or keep themselves at arm’s length. What’s really going on may be that the people they care about are “bouncing” off of their plate glass, feeling unseen and uncared for due to that energetic walling off.

Healing this sort of energetic development must be done slowly and with great care. To tear down a person’s “wall” too quickly may be overwhelming for them. It is best to do it gently. We then work to replace the wall with a protective energy that is like a membrane which allows appropriate feelings and energies in and out, while filtering those energies that are not supportive.

So, my sensitive, intuitive friends! If you’ve identified with any of the above experiences, you’re not alone. Not everyone is aware of these phenomena. But I would venture that many more people experience them than are willing to talk about it.

Know where you can talk about it? In a healing session, of course! Just contact me to schedule distance reiki healing session. We’ll get you feeling better soon!