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An Excerpt from Becoming an Empowered Empath by Wendy DeRosa

While empathy is a wonderful trait to have, it’s also possible to have too much of a good thing.  Unless they have strong boundaries, extremely empathic individuals, or empaths, often end up feeling overwhelmed, disconnected from self, and overly emotional as a result of taking on the negative energy of others.

In Becoming an Empowered Empath: How to Clear Energy, Set Boundaries & Embody Your Intuition  (New World Library, March 30, 2021), Wendy DeRosa, a preeminent and pioneering expert on this subject, helps readers understand their empathetic nature and offers the practical tools they need to restore their energetic boundaries, honor their intuitive gifts, and fully express their personal power. We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.

As a Soul, you are light. You go in and out of lifetimes, and in each lifetime you create and absolve karma. You overcome something. You grow and evolve. From a state of expanded consciousness, you were born into the human experience to do this.

The root, or first, chakra is located in the tailbone area of your body. It is the power center that holds the consciousness of our safety, survival, and attachment to our material existence. The root chakra is the doorway to your ability to ground your energy into the earth and represents the earth element in your body. It governs your physical health; physical structures, such as your bones; your central nervous system; and your home life, which includes both your physical home and a sense of belonging or attachment to this world. It also governs innate love, often experienced as fullness and abundance, and attachment to your family of origin or chosen family.

This is the power center that houses deeply subconscious programming and information about your patterns, belief systems, and how you are going to operate in this world. Much of the energy held in the root chakra is part of your hard wiring, formed from the time you’re in utero until the age of seven.

For empaths, it is crucial to understand the consciousness that’s held at the root chakra. It is the foundation for your entire energy system, the patterns you repeat, and what you are holding on a subconscious level. That consciousness affects your ability to be connected to yourself deeply and to have strong, clear boundaries.

We are going to take a journey into the root chakra consciousness to unpack what is held in this region of the body.

Before birth, we incarnate in the womb. Because we are sentient beings who feel energy and operate through feeling, our empathic intuition is the first sense that forms. In the womb, our bodily systems and senses begin developing after the empathic sense is already established. We are not able to see, but we can hear somewhat as the ears form. While we’re in the womb, the instinctual and sentient aspect of life is the primary state of being. With that comes a sensing of emotions as vibrations from our mother, father, family, and their history of beliefs and feelings.

Love and feeling wanted at deep levels are a primary form of bonding for an empathic or sensitive child, even while still in utero. Despite whatever emotions the mother experiences during pregnancy, the deeper bond of love for her child creates an attachment. After being born the empathic intuitive can feel what they have absorbed in the womb. If being unwanted is the deeper feeling here, this energy also forms part of a child’s attachment in the world.

When we are born, we meet our family of origin or our adoptive family. We’re awake in the world. In that experience, the empathic intuitive or sensitive child feels what is going on around them in a newfound, expanded space: being held, loved, fed, cleaned, and so on. Survival programming forms from how well we are attached to our family and feel the bonding. This attachment includes how we receive love, how safe we feel, whether there is peace, et cetera.

As we grow from infant to toddler to adolescent, we orient ourselves in our environment. We become attuned to our familial and cultural beliefs, whether they are spoken or enacted. If I am a sensitive child, I take that information in and bond to my family accordingly. As I internalize these beliefs, they become the beliefs I hold about myself. This is the foundation from which I will begin developing my belief systems.

In this environment, very sensitive beings can feel so much. The consciousness during a particular era influences familial and cultural beliefs. For example, fifty years ago, virtually no one was talking about how to nurture an intuitive child. Instead, parents were typically operating from beliefs and attitudes rooted in survival, social norms, and order, such as:

Children are to be seen, not heard.
We keep quiet in this house.
Don’t make noise.
It’s not okay to have feelings.
Don’t trust anyone.

These beliefs become part of the energy we marinate in as sensitive beings outside the womb. People in the household having beliefs and feelings is not unusual. What affects the sensitive child, though, is when an adult does not provide repair from trauma or upset, permission to be, or the sense of safety that comes from the child understanding that their feelings are warranted and true.

The child begins to lose a sense of belonging with the world — not always in the family, but in themselves. The energetic imprint is that the child, to survive, closes down to themselves in order to feel everyone else’s energy around them. The loss of connection to self and to a sense of belonging is deeply subconscious in the root chakra. It innately forms the beginning of the overly empathic experience that we will be unpacking in this book.

To be an empowered empath, you must reclaim the power that exists in your root chakra. No longer are you a victim to the universe and to energy around you. The protection mechanisms you developed in childhood kept you safe and were appropriate for the time in life when you were vulnerable. Thank those protection mechanisms! Thank the disassociation, thank the fight-or-flight response, thank the pattern of overeating or whatever other repetitive pattern you adopted. These coping mechanisms were helping you during a time when you lacked power and love in your root chakra. As a spiritually progressing Soul in a human body who is on this earth to continuously grow and evolve, you are safe now, and it’s absolutely okay for you to take back your power on behalf of your inner child.

Wendy De Rosa is the author of Becoming an Empowered Empath. The founder of The School of Intuitive Studies, she has been helping people develop intuition and experience personal transformation for over two decades. Visit her online at SchoolOfIntuitiveStudies.com.

Excerpted from the book from Becoming an Empowered Empath. Copyright ©2021 by Wendy De Rosa. Printed with permission from New World Library.

Every night, my dreams involve a friend from when I was younger. We always hung around together, but as time went on, we grew apart. Now he is always in my dreams. He isn't doing anything special or unusual, he just always seems to be in every dream situation. I have no idea why this would be, for I haven't spoken to him in more than five years. If we see each other, we say hello and move on. It's just so strange because he is not someone I even think about during the day, and now he is in my dreams every night for the past three weeks. There is nothing sexual about this; he is just always there like we are close friends even though we're not. Help me, please.

Anonymous

Susyn:

As we travel from one lifetime to another, we tend to move in groups. Our parents, siblings and friends show up over and over in these incarnations, for we have important lessons to learn from all of them.

Often we cross paths with people during our formative years who played an important role in a past life. Even though you and your friend have not remained close over the years, your spirits remain in touch. There is a good chance that you have known this friend before, and that this is what cemented the fast friendship you formed in adolescence. Given this deep soul connection, you are sure to be close to him again in the future.

Dreams carry powerful messages that we need to pay close attention to. There may be an important reason why you are dreaming of him so often, so you may want to consider getting in touch with him to see how he is doing. Even if he is perfectly fine, talking to him could reveal why you are having these frequent dreams about him. You may even discover that he has been thinking and dreaming about you as well.

Astrologically, Mars recently turned retrograde. This only happens once every two years. Depending on where it lands in your natal chart, this could be contributing to this phenomenon. For example, if it is traveling through your third or eleventh house of friendships, Mars could be moving you to go back in time to reconnect with this friend.

As a Libra, friendships and partnerships are very important to you. They are crucial to your well-being and peace of mind. Whether or not this friend returns to your life, the dreams may be pointing out an area of your life where you need to put more focus.

We never know when someone will enter or reenter our lives, but the messages in your dreams are clear: A part of you is longing to reconnect and re-establish this friendship that was so important to you in your early years. With the dawning of Facebook, more and more of us are running across people we haven't thought of or heard from in years. More often than not, there is a subconscious or spiritual reason they are drawn to reach out to us, or us to them.

Even if your friend isn't interested in resuming this friendship, there is still a higher purpose behind your dreams. To discover their messsage, write them down in detail. Perhaps they are urging you to revisit a time in your life when things were simple and lighthearted. If you meditate on the thoughts and ideals you carry about that time, you could discover that these dreams are urging you to reclaim the joyful innocence of your youth.

*****

Oceania:

It's not so much your friend you're dreaming about, but rather whatever it is he represents!

Since a recurring dream character can reflect an aspect of ourselves, you might make a list of qualities that come to mind when you think of this friend and whether they might be qualities within yourself that you would like to embrace, explore or expand at this time. If I think of my best childhood friend, Nancy, I think of someone bold and fearless who would never back down from doing the right thing. If I found myself dreaming of her, I would ponder whether those are the qualities I need to develop in order to best cope with current challenges.

Another possibility is that your mind is drawing your attention to the time in your life when you were close to your friend. Jot down your impressions of that period in your life. What stands out? What were your hardships, triumphs, discoveries and transformations? If I think back on the years Nancy and I were close, I remember it as a time when I was first allowed to attend Girl Scout summer camp and ride the bus to downtown Minneapolis without an adult. Since those experiences represented separation from my family and a growing sense of freedom, if I were dreaming of Nancy, it might mean I needed to amp up my sense of autonomy and act with greater independence in my present life.

A third possibility is that you need to examine the quality of the relationship you shared with your friend. Write down impressions of the friendship itself when it was in full bloom. What did you like best about it? What needs did it fulfill? This KIND of relationship may be something you yearn for in the present.

My friendship with Nancy was characterized by true companionship. We would sleep in a tent in the backyard on the weekend, play tetherball, sit in my treehouse and add to our gum wrapper chain, follow the local creek on bikes until it joined the Mississippi River. If I were dreaming of Nancy, it could mean that I was yearning to share activities and adventures with someone.

You don't say whether or not you're in a romantic relationship. If you ARE, perhaps something is missing, and these dreams are a wake-up call to try to cultivate more of the qualities that flourished in this old friendship. If you're single, your dream may be pushing you to seek companionship, friendship or romantic partnership.

Explore whether any of these explanations fit for you, and then get busy. The recurring dreams of your friend will subside as soon as you pinpoint and address the issue he represents.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.