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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.

My question is about karma. I married a psychopath; at the very least, he is an extreme narcissist. I am trying to heal all the pain and trauma I've experienced from dealing with someone who has no conscience and doesn't feel remorse for using people at his convenience. These issues have me wondering about karma. What would be the karma for a psychologically disturbed person who doesn't have the capacity to understand that hurting people for his advantage is wrong, that can't truly see that lying, manipulating, stealing, killing, etc., for selfish reasons is wrong? What would be the fate for someone with no remorse? I have been to several counselors and he was referred to a psychiatrist, but without the capacity to see that you are wrong, without a conscience to feel bad for hurting others, what lessons can be learned in life for future karma? Sometimes I wish I could choose to come back in my next life in the position to make his life miserable, but right away compassion takes over and I just feel so sad for someone who, behind his grandiosity, is just a soul lost in ignorance. I wonder what his next life will be like. I can only imagine him as an animal, and it makes me very sad.

I.

Susyn:

Karma is a mysterious subject, for it's hard to see it clearly even after one's karmic time has been served, so to speak. I find it interesting that you choose to stay in this marriage; you may have karma of your own that you are working through!

Though there are some who believe that we can reincarnate as animals or even stones, one wonders what the purpose of such a life would be, for it would be difficult to learn much if we were in a form that does not include the challenges human life affords us.

A psychologically disturbed person does carry karma for their actions. Even though it may seem like your husband suffers no karmic consequences, he is missing the meaning behind his life experiences. My concern is that the same may be escaping you, for you seem to be protecting him and carrying on in a marriage that sounds like a prison.

It is usually the case that we don't get to see the karmic consequences of our choices until much later in life, if at all. Despite this, no one - not even sociopaths - can escape the lessons that are sure to come from misguided behavior. While a major upset can trigger new awareness, that is left up to divine timing and a higher plan. Sometimes this timing can be determined by astrological events, but since you didn't mention your birth date or your husband's, I have no way to tell when this might happen.

It may seem like your husband is immune to karmic consequences at this point in time, but if he continues to live life in this manner, he will surely have to return in a future incarnation with heavy limits and restrictions. Our understanding of karma is very limited, so speculating about how our current behavior may affect future incarnations is tricky.

For example, your statement that at times, you wish you could return in a future life and make him miserable is simply a natural result of the pain and suffering he has caused you personally. It is human nature to feel this way. That you choose to reach for compassion instead of vengeance should prevent you from suffering the karmic consequences of these thoughts and feelings.

In regard to your own karma, your best recourse is to stop focusing on your husband and hoping he will change. Changing what you are doing is one of the fastest ways to make him realize that there is a problem, so I hope you will consider shifting all the attention you give him back on to yourself. As you heal and get stronger, you may discover you have the power not only to remove yourself from this life-stealing situation but to start living a joyful, productive life whether he is along for the ride or not.

*****

Oceania:

As I've been pondering your questions, the following image keeps coming to mind: You notice that your house is on fire, and you dial 911 because you are curious about fire and you want to ask questions about it. You wonder what the fate of fire is, given how much damage it can do. The 911 operator does not answer your questions but tells you to grab a fire extinguisher and use it if the fire can be contained, and if not, to get out of the house and save yourself!

So...do I answer your questions or tell you to save yourself? You seem numb to the fact that you are in an unhealthy, abusive relationship. Rather than focusing on self-preservation, you distract yourself with philosophical questions. Your inquiries, common to those married to the mentally ill or addicted, are like complex mazes with no exit that will keep you mentally busy for a long time. Instead, you might ask: what is the karma for those who keep themselves small and deny their full potential in order to appease bullies?

You have capacities for compassion, change and insight that your husband does not possess. As you cannot change, enlighten or heal him, you must set some new boundaries and focus your energies elsewhere. Instead of worrying about him, protect your well-being and nurture your own development. Your husband's karma is his business and his concern. I suspect that he and others like him will be repeating the class until their lessons are learned.

We pass through certain stages of moral development in life. Like toddlers, sociopaths think their behavior is fine if it pleases them and they get away with it, and wrong only if they get caught and punished. For most of us, this view evolves. We come to see behavior as wrong when it breaks a rule or law. Later, our view becomes less concrete. We think about what is just and fair, and we consider the greater good. We may even come to champion values that transcend and challenge the status quo.

I can't imagine your husband as an animal in his next life because most animals have a greater capacity for love and empathy than he does. Your husband has the moral sophistication of a two-year old who seeks to meet his needs through tantrums and manipulation.

Continue with counseling so you can heal whatever led you to choose him in the first place as well as what keeps you there today. If you simply leave, you will quickly replace your husband with a similar man. You fit with him at this time, and it will require ongoing support, scrutiny and vigilance to address your own psychological and spiritual challenges in order to become a match to something better.

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.