A lot of empaths are addicts.

By addicts, I don’t necessarily mean alcohol, recreational drugs and prescription drugs, although these are of course common. It could be anything: running, yoga, exercise, porn, sex, shopping, food, the need to be busy, the need for drama.

As an empath, you feel everything, and there’s no way to stop this sensitivity: it’s just who you are. All the feelings and emotions of other people and all other Universes of energy, plants, objects, places and so forth, are always arriving to you. And so, one of the ways to temporarily stop this information from permeating your Self, is to distract yourself with an addiction.

Alcohol or drugs or food, for example, shift your vibration higher or lower, depending on the substance. This takes you out of empath mode, into a mode where you’re not as aware. With addictions that are exercise based, as another example, exertion releases endorphins that bring euphoria, which again takes us away from feeling all the world’s pain.

Now, exercise is a great tool for empaths, but when we start to use it too much, it becomes a distraction, just like anything else. For many empaths, meditation can also be a distraction: we go into bliss state, and we never want to come back out!

If you are an empath using habits as distraction, or as a way to lift you from the pain of everything, consider that there is another way. 

Instead of numbing, you can open. 
Instead of blocking, you can surrender.

In other words, you can use your empathic nature to open to everything. It is a different approach, and it is scary at first. 

But when you open to love, Oneness and yourself as soul, your experience changes. 

In old episodes of Star Trek, there was a character called the Empath, whose job on board the ship was to feel and sense and see everything about a given situation.

On the show, the Empath had to go into deep concentration, and put her hands to her temples and say things like “I’m getting something" or "I sense something."

Oh, if it were only so easy!

For most of us, being an empath isn’t something we can switch on, or off. It’s an openness in our being that allows us to take in the feelings and emotions of others. And by others, that doesn’t mean just human others; it means animals, plants, building, places, even time spans.

When you are an empath, you feel everything, and there aren’t too many ways to shut this constant stream of feeling information off.

Thus, if someone lies to you, but you feel the truth, you are left in confusion about what is real. If someone tells you shopping is “fun” but when you go shopping you feel every little thing: all the feelings of the people in the crowds, all the contained feeling of all the merchandise, who made it and where it came from....it can feel overwhelming. 

And so when you come home miserable and exhausted, you might think something is wrong with you. But there’s nothing wrong with you. You just haven’t been given the vocabulary, the identity, that helps you understand what you experience.

There are lots of empaths in this world. We're all feeling it all, all the time. 

All children have gifts; there is no child who is not uniquely blessed with some understanding, some consciousness, some deep creative self. 

If you find that you have a creatively gifted child, it is important to look at your own life, as an example to this child. For example, if your child is exquisitely sensitive and having trouble at school, you will want to look at your own experience of school, and how you dealt with that.

Modern school, for the most part, isn't very good for kids: it's fear and group thought at the very worst, with no room for expression and individuality. School has been this way for many decades.

However, what creative, gifted and sensitive children really need is time and space to inhabit their rich fantasy life, to connect with nature in a personal way, and to day dream. When you provide your child only with electronica, dry academics and teaching to tests, you are starving that children from what he or she truly needs.

The gifted child must have the downtime, the free time, to wander around in the woods, spread out in the home, create art, listen to music, have fantasy, be with animals, day dream.... all of these are the markers of an enriched creative and spiritual life.

If you believe your child is gifted, give your child more space, more free time, more downtime. Provide it for yourself, as well.

We dream and manifest these lives that are full of abundance and meaning, and this is a good thing.

But a funny thing happens when you begin to experience the life you were really hoping for. Most of the things that you thought you wanted, drop away.

Instead, you find that what you really wanted, even more than money and riches, or a certain place to live, or a certain style of living, or certain experiences, is really just a quality of spaciousness to your day.

It's the experience of being unhurried, unperturbed, un-hasselled; a quality of being able to experience time as Flow, in most of your day.

This is what the monks sought, when they went into seclusion: the quiet and the peace and the space where time would begin to Flow in a new way; an attention to prayer and stillness and quiet, so that spaciousness becaume the way they were living, experiencing each moment as Now.

As you consider how you really want to live, consider spaciousness as one of the qualities that you seek.

After all, when you are in Flow, you are in joy.

Our most advanced scientists are working on Oneness.

Quantum physics, unified field, the God particle. There are scientific terms, but when we look at these theories in terms of spirituality, of Oneness, of the idea that everything is One all the time, we understand that what we're working on is way more than just science.

Maybe we don’t have the science yet to prove Oneness; but we have glimpsed it. Maybe we don’t have the spirituality yet to prove Oneness; but we have glimpsed it. We know Oneness is there, because it’s so clear we are not separate; we feel this in every atom of our selves.

All of our experiences are part of unified field: the way we connect with each other in energy and emotion, without needing to be in the same place, or even the same time. There are too many coincidences, too much "random," that simply isn't. 

Above all, there is too much energy, emotion and unexplained phenomenon for us to not all be connected to each other, intimately, completely, without separation. Some things are beyond math and science, some things are beyond language.

We know we are One, because every cell in us knows, and because our own soul tells us, over and over and over again, whenever we let ourselves be awake. 

If you were raised on fairy tales, you were given a gift.

Depending on where you live in the world, there are fairy and folk tales that offer moral lessons, warnings against evil or darkness. There are also tales that invite us to think more creatively about our circumstances, and to not accept what the society or group thought would have us believe.

Many of these tales involve a young hero who must do a challenging task. Our hero usually meets a wise person, a beggar, a witch or an elemental, who gives them gifts with magic properties, or who advises them how to communicate with the Universe.

For example, if the hero is charged to find a precious ring that has been thrown into a field of flowers, the her or she simply speaks to the ants of the field, and they quickly find the ring. Or, if the hero is charged to clean a filthy hut, the birds of the air quickly come and do the task.

What we are taught then, is two stories: the first story, which that each hero is on a quest; each hero must walk a path. But under this is the second story: the recognition of nature as an ally, nature as magic, the world as a Universe that is something that we are not apart from. This second story teaches us that there are many beings that we can communicate with directly, both on this plane, and in the plane of multi-dimension, the etheric realms.

Of course, there's nothing fantastic tale about this! Living in multi-dimension is as real as death and taxes. It is all simply a matter of opening your mind, and awakening to this reality.