April 2008 Archives
In my experience there are three forms of unwanted empathy. You are not a victim, although you may sure feel like one if you regularly experience unwanted empathy. In truth you can take control of your amazing ability and free yourself from being at the whim of other people's emotions and states of consciousness.
Being Ungrounded:
The first form of unwanted empathy is when your awareness is so completely out of your body that you pick up anything and everything you happen to be around or focus on. The poet Eugenio Montale describes this effect well when he says in his poem Boats on the Marne:
Bliss of the cork abandoned to the current
that melts around
the upside-down bridges
Except with unwanted empathy it may not exactly be bliss that you experience; especially if you drive on the freeway. This kind of unwanted empathy is so intense that when you are around drunk people you yourself feel drunk and may even experience a hangover the next day. This is not so much unwanted empathy as it is being completely ungrounded. Ask yourself, "Do I want to be in my body? Is there a reason I wouldn't? Are there feelings in my body I would rather not be aware of?" Are you consistently doing things and going places that you don't want to? I know that personally the process for my consciousness to "float" or start to leave my body is when I feel like "I don't want to be here."
There are many grounding techniques out there to help with this kind of problem. Ideally you should be able to shift your consciousness, and change how you feel at any time, within a range of states available to you within your body.
When you "ground" or pull your awareness into your body (i.e., shift your awareness to states of consciousness that exist inside your body) then this type of unwanted empathy will cease. It may not cease completely though, which brings us to the next form of unwanted empathy.
Unconscious Projection:
The second form of unwanted empathy is when you are fully grounded inside your body as much as possible at your current level of awareness and still pick up remnant emotions from others. This indicates that you have feelings stuck inside yourself that you are not fully aware of. On an intellectual level you may "know" that they are there and causing you physical discomfort, but you have not really experienced them yet so they cannot be released. You will repeatedly pick up these feelings from other people going about your daily business, however you will not pick up other feelings at all. And you can, of course, assume that people ARE having other feelings than the ones you repeatedly pick up at this stage.
The word e-motion: energy in motion. Emotions move. When energy becomes trapped into body tension patterns it cannot move freely. Locate the feelings in the body and go into them with the intent to fully experience as much as you can for that session, however long. The intent to release or get rid of the feelings from the start is in my experience a form of resistance to experiencing them -- that may not be the case for you -- but it can become an obstacle if that is all you focus on. Osho mentions this as well in his heart meditation. A more detailed and in depth dissolving technique can be found in this post at the astral dynamics forum. Going layer by layer through all the stuff trapped in your system takes a long time it seems.
I am currently investigating techniques for working on this kind of problem.
Social disturbance (conscious projection):
The last form of unwanted empathy that I have experienced I would categorize under the title of social disturbance. This kind of empathy is when you tell someone something that they are not ready to hear or they are way too scared to deal with and they get very upset and "return" those feelings to you. If you persist then the feelings will be amplified. This category could be lumped in with the projection category since that is what it is; however, with this form you are consciously aware of the exchange in real time. This is the easiest form to eliminate; simply refrain from doing and saying things that you know are going to seriously disturb people. For example, not everyone can intellectually integrate the descriptions of your experiences into their inner framework.
Being Ungrounded:
The first form of unwanted empathy is when your awareness is so completely out of your body that you pick up anything and everything you happen to be around or focus on. The poet Eugenio Montale describes this effect well when he says in his poem Boats on the Marne:
Bliss of the cork abandoned to the current
that melts around
the upside-down bridges
Except with unwanted empathy it may not exactly be bliss that you experience; especially if you drive on the freeway. This kind of unwanted empathy is so intense that when you are around drunk people you yourself feel drunk and may even experience a hangover the next day. This is not so much unwanted empathy as it is being completely ungrounded. Ask yourself, "Do I want to be in my body? Is there a reason I wouldn't? Are there feelings in my body I would rather not be aware of?" Are you consistently doing things and going places that you don't want to? I know that personally the process for my consciousness to "float" or start to leave my body is when I feel like "I don't want to be here."
There are many grounding techniques out there to help with this kind of problem. Ideally you should be able to shift your consciousness, and change how you feel at any time, within a range of states available to you within your body.
When you "ground" or pull your awareness into your body (i.e., shift your awareness to states of consciousness that exist inside your body) then this type of unwanted empathy will cease. It may not cease completely though, which brings us to the next form of unwanted empathy.
Unconscious Projection:
The second form of unwanted empathy is when you are fully grounded inside your body as much as possible at your current level of awareness and still pick up remnant emotions from others. This indicates that you have feelings stuck inside yourself that you are not fully aware of. On an intellectual level you may "know" that they are there and causing you physical discomfort, but you have not really experienced them yet so they cannot be released. You will repeatedly pick up these feelings from other people going about your daily business, however you will not pick up other feelings at all. And you can, of course, assume that people ARE having other feelings than the ones you repeatedly pick up at this stage.
The word e-motion: energy in motion. Emotions move. When energy becomes trapped into body tension patterns it cannot move freely. Locate the feelings in the body and go into them with the intent to fully experience as much as you can for that session, however long. The intent to release or get rid of the feelings from the start is in my experience a form of resistance to experiencing them -- that may not be the case for you -- but it can become an obstacle if that is all you focus on. Osho mentions this as well in his heart meditation. A more detailed and in depth dissolving technique can be found in this post at the astral dynamics forum. Going layer by layer through all the stuff trapped in your system takes a long time it seems.
I am currently investigating techniques for working on this kind of problem.
Social disturbance (conscious projection):
The last form of unwanted empathy that I have experienced I would categorize under the title of social disturbance. This kind of empathy is when you tell someone something that they are not ready to hear or they are way too scared to deal with and they get very upset and "return" those feelings to you. If you persist then the feelings will be amplified. This category could be lumped in with the projection category since that is what it is; however, with this form you are consciously aware of the exchange in real time. This is the easiest form to eliminate; simply refrain from doing and saying things that you know are going to seriously disturb people. For example, not everyone can intellectually integrate the descriptions of your experiences into their inner framework.
I have created a simple empathy test based on the Gatha series exercises. You may want to meditate for a few minutes and clear your system before starting the test. In the future I will be creating additional types of tests as well as adding more of the kind featured here.
While watching one of these videos in the quiz it occurred to me what the girl's name was almost immediately -- simply from past experience with someone almost exactly like her. It also occurred to me that each name is like a kind of sculpture cut out of consciousness. Think about the programming terminology: namespace.
This test is not a survey style quiz; it is an exercise designed with the intent to help hone and increase your empathy. It can definitely help you narrow in and identify a more social kind of empathy. Recognizing a person's eye movements and what patterns they run may also help you.
If you are already an experienced empath then this test will probably not help you! Merging your consciousness with random people is most likely not going to help you and may even be dangerous. Alternatively, you can take the test without merging and just rely more on other sensory cues like body language and eye movements.
While watching one of these videos in the quiz it occurred to me what the girl's name was almost immediately -- simply from past experience with someone almost exactly like her. It also occurred to me that each name is like a kind of sculpture cut out of consciousness. Think about the programming terminology: namespace.
This test is not a survey style quiz; it is an exercise designed with the intent to help hone and increase your empathy. It can definitely help you narrow in and identify a more social kind of empathy. Recognizing a person's eye movements and what patterns they run may also help you.
If you are already an experienced empath then this test will probably not help you! Merging your consciousness with random people is most likely not going to help you and may even be dangerous. Alternatively, you can take the test without merging and just rely more on other sensory cues like body language and eye movements.
