A happy high heart chakra

 As an empath, I have become acutely aware of the High Heart Chakra , also known as the Thymic Chakra or Thymus Chakra.    I didn’t even know I had one until recently until it was activated by really and truly getting to be myself in a bond with someone else. 

You’d think I might have found it sooner than mid-life, but I can’t complain…it wasn’t consciously activated and only the right situation could allow it to bloom on its own. I am very grateful to have discovered it at all.

I’ve been aware of the fairly well-known set of 7 chakras, or energy centers in the body for at least the last 15 or so years, and the more “traditional” 7 chakras do NOT include a “high heart” chakra or thymic or thymus chakra.  

(To read more on The Seven Chakra Energy Centers, see the article at http://www.thespiritualeclectic.com/2010/01/27/the-seven-chakra-energy-centers/.) 

It’s not that this additional chakra is anything new either.  Some energy practitioners believe there are 10 or even 12 chakras in and above/below the body. Perhaps even more.  And that no two people are alike and may have lesser chakras where others do not.

The first time I heard of the High Heart Chakra was from shaman Kelley Harrell of Soul Intent Arts  (http://www.soulintentarts.com ).  During a chakra clearing she did for me, the “usual” chakras didn’t turn up anything too murky but she mentioned a disturbance in my High Heart Chakra.  She was dead on, but I didn’t really understand it at the time.

You see, as an empath, I “connect” with people I am bonded with, whether they are family or friends, romantic or platonic, male or female.  (For more on energetic connections or empathic connections, see the article at http://www.thespiritualeclectic.com/2008/11/06/%e2%80%9cenergetic-connections%e2%80%9d-the-seventh-sense/.)  The strength of the connection depends usually on the depth of the bond and the location of the other person–the more intense the physical separation, the more intensely I feel the connection).  The physical location–where I FEEL the connection–depends on the individual and the relationship.

There are particular people in my history and in my present whom I will sense in different chakras.  Sometimes, I will feel them in different quadrants of a chakra.  I will know something is seriously amiss by where I feel a sudden pang of anxiety or grief that is not mine.  Yes, I’ll be feeling quite happy and content when an abrupt gnawing dread or “disturbance in the force” becomes suddenly overwhelming to me.  Sometimes, even though many of these connections are felt in my Third Chakra (solar plexus), I will know exactly which loved one is in trouble or hurting.  I’ll call and get instant confirmation.  Other times, they’ll lie to me to ease my mind or because my gift freaks them out, but I’ll find out later that they really were upset at the time.

I dated a man several years ago who was in serious trouble but I didn’t know it.   Felt it, yes, but didn’t have any physical proof.  Even after he left the geographical area, I could feel when he was in trouble…which was later easy to confirm.  I used to get this feeling with my maternal grandfather when he was very ill and needed help, and still get it with my children, mom, and brothers.  Most of my close relationships, I’ve felt in my solar plexus, a few in my heart chakra, one in my throat, and another in my brow (sixth) chakra.  Now, I feel someone in my High Heart Chakra.

I’m generally not aware of my chakras when all is well with me AND all is well with the people with whom I’ve bonded.  I simply feel good and that’s that.  If things are abolutely wonderful, then I feel blissful but still I’m not acutely aware of my chakras.  But if something is wrong,  I feel a terrible ache in one particular location in my body, one particular chakra or quadrant of a chakra or combination of chakras aligned with that relationship.  In the same place I might feel deep overwhelming love, I will feel the emptiness, the anxiety, the grief.  The flip side of the coin, so to speak. 

That’s how I discovered my High Heart Chakra–I’d been blissfully happy when one of my loved ones was deeply emotionally wounded.   I might as well have been shot there with an arrow.  The feeling couldn’t have been less different because I felt it as deep physical pain.

In some of my research, I’ve read that the High Heart Chakra is a lesser or minor chakra–or an in-between chakra–and that it’s located in the upper body as a pair.  They are supposedly on either side of the body, high up in the chest and directly below each collarbone.  I don’t feel them that way.  I feel only one, directly between my heart and throat, and I can pinpoint exactly where it is.  As far as I can tell, I have only one. 

The High Heart Chakra is supposedly an in-between energy center, between the Heart Chakra and the Throat Chakra.  One interpretation of it is that when it’s activated and open, we can speak our emotional truths.  To me, that means being able to be myself completely, to be open emotionally to and with someone, not to have to censor my feelings.  Of all my loved ones, I feel only one there and that is the very nature of the relationship–emotional openness, emotional truth.  I count myself as fortunate to have experienced a bond that facilitated this activation of emotion and empathy within me.

Real empaths feel too much.  Real narcissists don’t seem to feel anything, or at least not in regard to others’ feelings.  Showing your vulnerable side to a narcissist in an attempt to explain how his or her behavior might be hurtful will just invite more abuse, whether they’re in a relationship with you or you just happen to be the latest fixation of the narcissist who’s trying to make his or her own deep personal pain go away.  Narcissists–at least the ones I’ve had experiences with–have a deep self-loathing.  That might seem incongrous with their arrogant me-me-me-me-me-me-me attitude on display, but they have a tremendous sense of unworthiness that causes them to lash out at others in an attempt to increase their self-esteem.  The ones I’ve known personally have an unfathomably deep sense of shame about something in their lives, usually in early childhood.  I don’t know if it’s true of all narcissists, but the ones in my observation have abandonment issues with at least one parent, all stemming from something that happened when they were pre-schoolers, and have ensured they never get close enough to anyone again to feel abandoned.

Whereas the narcissist doesn’t connect well or much with others, the empath connects too much.  The empath literally feels what someone else feels, whether it’s strong emotion or physical pain. I know because I am one, and I’ve made friends with other empaths over the years because it’s helped me deal with my difficulties.  I have frequently felt a heavy pain in my chest when someone was near– and by now I can tell the difference (most of the time) between someone else’s physical pain and my own–only to find out that the person was having heart trouble.  I’ve felt the inner anxiety of a person, the hidden stresses behind the smile, the anger no one else could see right before someone lashed out or became violent.  I can explain it in several ways but if you don’t believe that one person’s feelings can be perceived by another, then no amount of scientific, psychological, or spiritual explanation will convince you.  All I can tell you is what I’ve experienced myself, and it’s both a blessing and a curse.

Being an empath is at its most incredible when you’re in a loving, bonded relationship and giddy with the newness of discovering each other.  It’s at its worst when you let your own feelings be overshadowed by someone  else’s, particularly when those feelings are loaded with anxiety or grief.  It’s for these reasons that I save myself the agony of hanging out around airports and medical facilities–too much intense negative emotion by others leaves me feeling…rubbed raw.   But even worse for an empath is being in a relationship with a narcissist.

Non-narcissists on a negative or depressed binge are bad enough but the diagnosed narcissist bonded with a feeling, sensitive empath?  Hell for the empath.  The empath, for example, may be looking forward to celebrating their first anniversary.  She wants to go out for a picnic dinner at sunset.  She’s exhausted after being cooped up with a sick baby for the past week but the grandparents are babysitting, the picnic basket is packed,  she’s put on her prettiest dress, and she’s so happy and excited as she waits for her husband to come through the door after work.  He’s been promising her this outing for the past month, and she can’t wait.  Then hubby walks in and plops down in front of the TV to watch the news.  He’s sullen, unhappy.  He tells her he doesn’t want to go out for the picnic.  He’ll just eat the sandwiches while he watches TV.  He tells her he’s tired.  She knows.  She can feel how tired he is because she’s an empath who feels physical feelings of others.  He tells her his work day was long and disappointing.  She knows it was disappointing–she can feel his inner despair–because she’s an empath who can feel emotional feelings of others.  After eating his share of their anniversary meal in front of the TV, he announces that he’ll cheer himself up by going to his best friend’s house for the next couple of hours.  She’s hurt by his behavior, yes.  Perhaps she’s angry–but that will probably come later.  Right now, in his presence, she feels what he does and it all makes perfect sense that he go to his friend’s to feel better.  It makes perfect sense that he doesn’t want to celebrate with her because he’s tired or in a bad mood.  She can see the event so vividly from his point of view that it overpowers her own wishes for herself. 

I’ve noted that many empath-narcissist relationships echo codependent-abuser relationships. (That’s not to say that all empaths are abused or that all codependents are abused, etc,etc.)   I cannot think of a single empath I know personally who isn’t or didn’t used to be codependent–in other words, a people-pleaser/self-sacrificer/martyr.  I’m a  recovering codependent and I must stay very conscious of doing things for myself and taking care of myself or else I’ll give up everything I want to make someone else happy.  I’m more me-focused now that I’ve ever been and happier than I’ve ever been because I’m no longer putting everyone else ahead of me to the point of self-annihilation, but it’s hard for me to do.  It’s not that I want to control people as many codependents do, but I want to control outcomes.  I want everyone to be happy and fulfilled, even if that means I have to give up what I want again and again. 

One of the most gifted (0r most cursed) empaths I know is in a relationship with a female narcissist.  When he is away from her, such as at his job or on a business trip, his true personality comes out.  He’s a gentle, happy person who spends his time making others feel good, too, or talking them through difficult times.  When he goes home to her, he becomes a mirror to what she wants.  I’ve seen him become irrational whenever she’s been in one of her irrational snits, to the point of sounding as if he’s channelling her.  It becomes her words, her emotions pouring out of his mouth.  If she feels insecure or angry or no matter how abusive she is toward him, he immediately understands and sees himself in the way she does.  I’ve asked him how he can flip-flop between being so calm and collected with us and then seem “possessed” by her when she’s around, and he explains it that when she thinks he’s a horrible person and really feels that he is, then he does, too, because he can feel her feelings that he’s a horrible person.  Her feelings may not make sense but when she’s in them–or when he’s in them–they make perfect sense to the two of them.  Like many empaths, he meshes with the personalities of the people he’s with and becomes like them, losing himself in someone else’s emotions.  When he’s with her, he sees her, the world, himself, everything from her point of view…and as an abuser, she makes sure she’s with him as much as possible so he doesn’t get any time away from her to sort through his own feelings.  I’ve seen this stay-within-my-presence-so-I-can-remind-you-how-great-I-am behavior from most narcissists in relationships, though it’s not necessarily a sign of narcissism but more one of insecurity.  If the empath can be controlled by  being in a narcissist’s presence and the narcissist can feed off the empath’s understanding and devotion, then the relationship becomes very sick very quickly.

Both empaths and narcissists have a big problem with boundaries.  The narcissist has never met a boundary he/she  didn’t cross and the empath has no idea what a boundary is. Narcissists tend to be exciting, dynamic, charismatic people and it’s wonderful to be around them–initially.  But the relationships they form are shallow connections and they’ll move on to the next person who’ll make them feel good without much more than a second thought such as one narcissist I know who goes from marriage to marriage to marriage and leaves just before the thrill dulls.  They’ll do things to others that are criminal (the one guy who arranged to have his wife  gangbanged)  if there’s a thrill in it.  They’ll run away (literally or figuratively)  if the connection verges on becoming too emotional or too risky of showing their deepest vulnerability.  They’ll breach polite etiquette (the dinner guest who went through my things and donned my sexiest underwear in front of other guests, family, and me). 

For narcissists, if you set a boundary, they will try to cross it.  I’ve been stalked by narcissists and they need to have attention on them, constantly, and will cross the boundaries from creeping to harassing just to remind you they’re still there.  I’ve told narcissistic men not to pursue me because I wanted absolutely nothing to do with them ever again because of their past mistreatment–and wow, what a challenge it’s become to get and keep my attention then! 

For empaths, setting boundaries is the only way to live with the curse of feeling what others feel and getting lost in others’ points of view.  The only way to stay grounded and true to your own personality, your own needs and wants, your own dreams is to learn to set boundaries and not let others cross them. 

Here are a few things that have helped me as an empath:

1.  I hang out with positive people and people whose attitudes are more similiar to mine when I’m alone.  I stay far away from negative people and drama queens, if I can.

2.  I don’t make instant decisions after a persuasive argument from someone else.  Too easy for me to say yes immediately because I can so understand their point of view and excited feelings toward a subject without being sure that those are my feelings, too.  If I decide based on someone else’s excitement, I tend to regret it.

3.  If I’m inclined to make a quick decision, I stop to ask myself if this is in-line with my wants, needs, dreams, personality.   If I get a hell-yes from inside with no tiny niggling doubt, then it’s usually a good quick decision.  If I’m overwhelmed by the feeling to say yes but something inside is contradictory in any way, then I’m likely being swayed by someone else’s enthusiasm and not my own. This is such a matter of boundaries!

4. If I find myself becoming lost in someone else’s feelings, I spend a day or two away from that person.  If that person has a problem with my being out  of their influence for a day or two, then it’s even more important for me to take a little break and re-assess my own feelings.

5.  If I’m dating someone who has had many, many, superficial relationships and is over 40, I take an emotional step away. 

6. Once I realize someone fits the pattern of Narcissistic Personality Disorder–or outright tells me he’s been diagnosed!–I stay the hell away.

7.  If I start to feel depression or despair when things are going well for me, I stop and ask myself where it’s coming from.  The day I realized I was an empath was after a horrible experience where I took on the feelings of a suicidal woman I was helping–and suddenly realized that my deep despair and even the way I phrased my despair was out of character.  I know that my true self is serene and calm, so when I become emotionally turbulent, I always (now) look at what’s going on in my life.  If I’ve just been through a breakup or a medical scare, then yes, those turbulent feelings are probably my own.  If life is great for me but I’ve just had a chat with a colleague who is distraught over her son and now I’m depressed, then that turbulence is usually something I’ve brought home with me from having a close connection with my colleague.  Once I can distinquish my own feelings from the feelings of others, I can break the connection…if I want.  Sometimes, if the feelings are very strong, I don’t realize at first that they’re not mine.  That may sound strange to the non-empath, but being able to tell the difference and know that boundary is crucial to an empath’s happiness.

8.  I never apologize for my own emotions.  They are my best guide to living the life I want, but I must be aware of the difference between my emotions and someone else’s I’m bonded with.  If I am feeling good, feeling at ease, feeling happy, then my life is on-track.

Photo credit by eyesore9; creative commons license

First dates are perhaps the best example ever of energy bubbles and making those first important energetic connections with someone else.  That’s because there are few other situations where we are thrust into an environment with a new person and expected to stay and hold our own for at least 20 to 30 minutes before deciding if we want more.  Wouldn’t it be fun is we could see the energy bubble around us in living color?

I write a lot about energy, a rather nebulous term for people who’ve never been around healing circles or bonfire drumming.  As an empath, my awareness of energy has grown to the point where, even though energy is invisible, its effects are not.  I feel it much as I feel the wind.  I can’t see it but I can see it bend the trees, and I can hear it howl or sing sometimes, and I can feel it.   I think we can all feel it if we’re aware of it and use it to diagnose how well a first date or first meeting is going.

A typical first date–even if you’ve been talking to the other person online, via email, via text, and on the phone or even webcam for months–is fertile ground for studying how energetic connections form, or don’t.  Like most people, I tend to have an upsurge of energy and excitement just before my date shows up.  It’s anticipation, wonder, curiosity.  I’ve had some people walk through my front door and felt as if I’d known them all my life, and the energy between us has been gentle, passionate, flowing, caring, happy.  I’ve had low-key DVD/wine/cheese/sitting on the floor dates in my family room that were just one big colorful energetic bubble and floating blissfully skyward as he exited my home and then allowed me to sigh my way off to bed and sweet dreams.  These are the ones I’m dancing around the house over and can’t wait to talk to him the next day.  That’s the kind of date I want, every time.  Who doesn’t?

The horrible first dates aren’t as easy to feel the bubble, possibly because it bursts at first glance or so soon after that you’re not even aware of it.  It’s just a huge disappointment that hits you so early that you don’t hang around to watch that energy bubble float between you.   But who cares about those dates?

The best use of the bubble to diagnose a first date is when you’re not sure how the date is going.  Those…mediocre dates…that sort of fizzle at some point.  A great date is the kind where you lose track of time because you’re so caught up in each other’s energy and that bubble just gets bigger and brighter and before you know it, you’ve been locked in deep conversation for three hours  and spend the next five making out because you can’t bear to tear yourselves apart.  You are both in that bubble and floating away, spinning, with it.  A mediocre date is the kind where the…pacing, if we were watching a movie…begins to lag.  If the pace picks back up, the energy bubble is stable.  If not, it either fizzles or pops.

For myself, about the longest I can sustain the energy of a mediocre date is 30 minutes, though most of the time, it pops at about 20.  (Yes, I date a lot, and most of my dates are great these days…though every so often, one will surprise me.)

That’s the point where suddenly the energy falters.  It doesn’t matter how good-looking the guy is, how nice he is, how entertaining he is.  I know at that instant that the date is over, usually for both of us.  It’s rarely something we don’t both seem to know at the same instant, with the exception (for me) of the rich guy who reverted to his good ol’ boy loud-obnoxious-racist roots in a ritzy restaurant after he’d had a few drinks with dinner.  He was too inebriated to be aware of the change in energy between us.  Most of the time, however, you both can feel the drop in energy.

This happened recently on a really lovely date with a really lovely gentleman.  Sweet guy, and on the surface, we had a lot in common.  About 30 minutes into our date, though, we’d hit most of the most obvious subjects that we had in common and we started getting into more of the subject matter akin to whom we are under the surface.  That’s when little things about our differing value systems popped up and I felt the quivers in the bubble as it began to deflate.  This bubble didn’t pop, it just fizzled, rather suddenly.  It wasn’t one particular question but a short series–how was it I could be happy now when I’d been through a divorce and why wasn’t I still devastated,  what was my most bizarre date since being single and how could I ever have considered dating a potential cross-dresser?  Nothing wrong with his belief system–just much more rigid than my open-to-almost-anything way of thinking.  I saw in his eyes that he could not fathom what I consider “openness,” and I knew that I could enjoy dinner with this man, but that I’d never be able to be myself around him…and him hang around.  It was a little sad to feel that bubble pop, right on time, but rather than drag things out and try to revive the bubble (that never works, ever), I called it a night much like an ER physician calls a death.

Most of the time, the bubble doesn’t fizzle and deflate to nothingness.  It pops after one particular question, whether you acknowledge it or not.  That question varies from man to man, but at some point, a hot button comes up in conversation.  Ylike ou never know until the question is out there and maybe not until after it’s answered if that was the magic question that ended the date.  It’s anything from “What do you think of Sarah Palin?” to “Do you think Nietzsche was insane?”  to “What’s wrong with these wontons?”  The most WTF moment I’ve ever had in a date was 20 minutes into appetizers–after weeks of talking on the phone–when he asked a simple question about what I’d done the night before, I told him, and he lost it with a diatribe on how educated people like me think we’re more important than people like him.  Huh?  I’d never mentioned my literary aspirations before then…just never came up…but in explaining that I had been researching Medieval history for a new novel I was working on, something touched off his hot button and he exploded.   I never had a clue as to what exactly happened back then but I understand better now.  Even though we tried to pull the date back together–we’d met half way and had driven way too far to walk out after 20 minutes–the energy bubble had burst and it was definitely over.

Watching the energy level and letting it act as a gauge in first dates has become something of a game now, not as much fun as great dates but fascinating enough to make mediocre dates more enjoyable.  By the way, first dates never start out as mediocre.  It’s just one of the directions they can take when it fizzles or pops. If that bubble expands, you never want it to end.

Intuition is a funny thing.  Most people never trust theirs.  Sure, later–after they’ve been mugged–they talk about the icky feeling they ignored because they didn’t want anyone to think they were silly or illogical. I’ve heard the same sooooooo many times from women who were certain their spouses were cheating, but they convinced themselves they were being crazy or paranoid or insecure–only to discover after they were alone with no money and a couple of kids that their intuition was a lot more trustworthy than a ton of charming reassurances from the hubby.   I rarely see anyone under 40 follow his or her intuition without fail–even famous spiritual teachers I consider to be extremely wise–and not exactly crowds of people over 40 who do either, though the numbers are still significantly more. Maybe that’s because most people need decades of data to know to follow their own internal guidance.

If there’s but one good thing I hope to pass on to my children, it’s to trust their intuition, regardless.  If you have a bad feeling about a date, don’t go.  If you have a bad feeling about your mate, know something’s amiss.  If you have a bad feeling about walking through a dark parking garage, make other arrangements.  As I was told once, your intuition isn’t a crazy little voice in your head talking to you–it’s God talking to you.  Every time I have ignored my intuition, I’ve been burned, whether in my professional or personal life.

I went through years of not trusting my intuition.  After my divorce, I didn’t feel I could trust it because I felt I’d been fooled so badly.  But as my teenage daughter pointed out to me then, it wasn’t that my intuition was bad; I just refused to listen to it and follow it.

I’ve had several recent opportunities to see the matter of trusting intuition from the other side of the story, and I’m seeing my own past a little differently.  I have walked away from a couple of situations where there is nothing I can say.  Nothing.  I’ve been asked repeatedly for the truth, and I’ve given it repeatedly, but not what they want to hear and certainly not what they want to believe.  Deep down, I know that deep down they know the truth. Otherwise, they wouldn’t keep asking.  They keep hoping my answer will be different, but it doesn’t change facts.  So I’ve stopped answering the questions.  At some point, they’ll come to terms with the truth, and when that happens, I’ll probably be the last person to know it.

I’ve been there myself, most notably with a woman who kept telling me the truth as she perceived it.  Deep down, I knew she was right but I didn’t want to admit it.  I argued with her about it all the time.  My own intuition told me she was right but it was easier to dislike her than to admit that not only was she right but so was the intuition I was ignoring.  I was furious at her because she just wouldn’t shut up about it, and it made me feel that I had to defend my decision to believe something I really didn’t believe.  My whole focus on proving that she was wrong took me away from dealing with the hurt over a situation that had nothing to do with her, and it took me much longer to work through it and ditch a bad situation that was causing me grief.   I wasn’t able to see that and work through it until she and I stopped associating with each other.  Our break was largely because of her comments on her own intuition on  my situation, which provided me with a good excuse to get her far away from me.  In hindsight, there were many other valid reasons not to have this person around me, but years and years later, I can see clearly that our semi-friendship came to a head over my unwillingness to trust my own intuition and she just happened to be the mouthpiece for it every time I squelched what my gut said.

It’s my core belief that the truth always comes out.  Even and especially the ugly truth, and regardless of how long you delude yourself.

The eyes are the windows of the soul, indeed!  Yes, her eyes really are that color and those are lichens on the ground in this beautiful natural setting.

Photo copyright by Aislinn Bailey, AisPortraits.com, Niceville, Florida

Some cultures believe (or did initially) that a photographer could steal your soul if he took pictures of you.  I’m not sure about “stealing,” but I now believe that it is entirely possible to capture a soul in a photograph—or if not the soul, then certainly the “energy” of the person.  After observing a few experiments with energy work, courtesy of an interview subject I’ll call “Ruby,” I will never look at Facebook or MySpace profile pics in quite the same way.Though I’ve always loved photography and dabbled in it myself when I was younger, I’ve been blessed to have five professional photographers come into my life within the past year, plus my daughter joined their ranks over the summer.  I love looking at their portrait work, and I sometimes feel like a stalker because I can’t stop looking at their beautiful photographs.  They have a special way of capturing the personality of each subject.  Yet, with professional photos, it’s usually more of the personality than the soul that is captured, in much the same way that a statue or oil painting captures the famed of the past.

My latest experiment seemed to reinforce that professional photos are manipulated too much really to show the soul (vs personality) of that person at the moment.  Instead, they seem to show the energy of the photographer because these portraits become partnerships between photographer and subject.  The subject often assumes a posture suggested by the photographer, a tilt of this head this way or that, just the right lighting, and—if all else fails—a few deft minutes on the Adobe PhotoShop CS3 or CS4 to add sparkle to the eye or depth of color to the cheeks.  Not that a professional photographer can’t capture a soul, but whereas personality can be captured by a professional, the soul is usually best seen through candid shots, particularly those god-awful camera phone or webcam pics.  A professional photographer will make every attempt to make a person look good, regardless of the state of the subject’s soul at a given moment, whether joyous or troubled.

These photo experiments began when Ruby, who often works with radionics and psionics, asked if I had a photograph of someone we were participating in a healing circle for.  We didn’t know what was wrong with the guy but he’d been feeling lethargic with no obvious clue as to why.   I grew up seeing pictures in Baptist church bulletins or on the walls of Sunday School rooms where we noted who was sick or in need each week and prayed for them.  The photographs aided the prayers for healing because they allowed the prayer committee to focus better on the person and visualize them as they were when they were in good health.  None of this is scientific, at least not in the classical sense, though it may one day be better explained via zero-field theory.  However, for spiritual people who work regularly with energy—whether Christian, Wiccan, or some other religion—the nuances of the unseen connections between people are enjoyed without prejudice.

What Ruby, who is a “highly sensitive person” to the extreme, did was to pull out a pendulum and let it swing casually over the photograph.  It was a recent photo,  and a full-body view.  The pendulum swung wide and then in small intense circles as she moved her hand over the photograph.  She asked me to write down the results of her own interaction with the energy she felt from the photo.  So as I interviewed her, she interviewed the photo—and I merely watched the pendulum twirl clockwise or straight or counterclockwise in answer to her questions.

The dowsing went on for almost 1.5 hours.  Ruby asked a long assortment of questions that covered everything from the psychological to the sexual to the gastro-intestinal to things I’d never heard of.  I never saw her hand waver once, though if it had been me, I think my fingers would have been cramping within five minutes.  I was fascinated by her process and took copious notes.  She would ask how in-balance certain chakras were and work from there to see how close on a scale of 1-100 the person was to total vitality.  On ones that were out of balance, she’d use a different scale to find the magnitude of particular problems, looking especially at barriers to vitality.

Ruby uncovered a host of minor problems that were a drain to our friend’s health—and by the way, he’d given permission to do any kind of prayer or energy work for him so he’d feel better.  These minor problems were all rather normal except for two that were extremely high:  parasites and heavy metals.  She asked me to pass along the information to our friend, which I did.  He reported later that he’d gone through a detox program for parasites and later heavy metals and that after the heavy metal detox, he’d felt particularly good again.  He’d regained his energy.

That was my first experience with this sort of thing.

The next time, Ruby noticed a photo in my home of another old friend of mine.  It was an old photo, taken at a time when he was still married to his first wife, and he appeared quite happy and all-smiles in this great candid shot at the beach.   There was always something about the photo that bothered me, but I could never put my finger on it.  She commented on some things going on in his life at the time the photo was taken, things she couldn’t have known, but the photo felt that way in spite of the smiles.

According to Ruby, the energy of the person (not to be confused with personality) is something that she can feel in a picture.  Couldn’t I feel it, too, to some degree? she wanted to know.

The short answer was yes.   I could look at the picture with all the smiles and fun and there was just something…off…about it.  There was a sadness there, a sense of loss.  Always had been.  There were problems in his marriage at the time.  But I’d never really thought about it.  When I relaxed and let my mind wander, I could almost sense his energy in the photograph.  There was a certain sadness in the eyes, in spite of the smile.  I think anyone who looked closely enough would have spotted it.

“Do you have other photos of him?”  Ruby asked.  When I told her I didn’t have any recent ones, she suggested we search for his image on Google.

We found  it.  I tested  her belief that I, too, could feel his soul in this picture.  He was smirking in this one but there was a heaviness around it.  He was smiling but his eyes weren’t.  I didn’t know what had happened to him, but one look and I could tell he was in trouble—even if it hadn’t been a mug shot.

We found another photo of him online. Not a professional photographer’s work, but a decent photo. He looked nice, dressed up, professional.  But there was a deep feeling of darkness and oppression in this photograph.  He still looked much the same as when he’d been a close friend, but looking at his picture, I didn’t even recognize him.  I felt no connection at all.  It was as if I were looking at a stranger.

Ruby suggested I check out other photos to see if I could discern the state of the soul of someone I hadn’t seen in a long time and didn’t have a current history on.  In a way, it was fun because I got the hang of it quickly, yet it was too often very sad and I stopped after two or three tries.

I looked up several friends from the past and, regardless of the smiles, either their traumas or their hardness showed through the eyes.  Even if they were the picture of health, the feeling of oppression was still there.  These were clearest in quickly snapped camera phone photos and especially in webcams pics.  Some of these people had changed so much that I felt no connection of friendship to them at all anymore.  They looked much as I remembered but they felt like strangers.  I decided not to reach out to re-acquaint myself.  As an empath, I just felt too sad whenever I looked at their images.

There was one, though, that struck me differently.  I had not seen the woman in years, but she looked 10 years younger than the last time.  Back then, she’d been married to an alcoholic who abused her regularly.  In her new Facebook picture, she was laughing in the rain, drenched by a nearby car’s pounding through a puddle, but literally dancing.  Even if the photo had been of only her face, her smile was magnificent.  It went all the way up into her eyes and lit up the screen.  Absolute joy radiated from the photo.  When I reached out to her, I found out she’d left her husband, gone through counseling, started a new life, and was enjoying every minute of what  the world has to offer.

Some photos capture the appearance.  Others, the personality.  The ones that capture the soul, though, can tell a sensitive person exactly how you’re doing and how life’s treating you.

Can you feel psychic connections across time and space?

As in, can I connect with someone from 2 years ago or from 2 years from now? I don’t know.

I haven’t been able to, at least not much. Or have I just never really thought about what’s also known as energetic connections, empathic connections, and quantum entanglement?

I’ve connected with people in the future–their feelings, at least, and some in the past, particularly with past life work. I’ve seen intuitives do this at least 5 years in advance. So it should be a yes to this question since time isn’t really linear.

As for space, with people I’ve had deep personal psychic connections with, I’ve felt them readily (and unintentionally) as far away as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York from here in the Florida panhandle. Somewhat in DC and the Los Angeles areas. Strongly on the other coast of Florida and in Georgia. I can often feel a friend in New York when times are rough for her, despite her happy outlook. I can frequently feel another dear one in Virginia. I’ve also felt the empathic connections as far away as Afghanistan and Iraq but didn’t have a strong connection to them at close range, so I was surprised to pick up even that, especially at that distance. It’s how I knew my friend Maverick was safe even when we lost communication for several months. I was able to reach out to him and know he was okay, though very scared. That’s definitely a huge benefit when it comes to psychic connections.

I can discern a difference in geographical coordinates, as in, if a person here is 2 miles from me and I can feel him strongly, I know when he’s away on a business or pleasure trip. I learned this when a friend moved away and I could discern terrible anxieties in him 6 hours away, though not as strongly as when he’d been upset while living here. It’s most closely explained in thinking of talking on the phone to someone down the street and getting a loud and clear voice but if he calls from London, he sounds farther away and I might get some static. If he’s crying on the phone, I can still hear him, but I can tell he’s not down the street anymore and that he’s upset.

So yes, psychic connections can be felt—though not always clearly—across time and space.

Empathy, empathic abilities, and what I call “energetic connections” (or emotional connections) between people are all about feeling what someone else is feeling. Some of us empaths, or “highly sensitive people,” have these abilities more than others, to the extent where it seems like a curse. If you’ve formed an emotional, empathy-type connection to someone who is terminally sick, mentally ill, or overstressed, the emotions can be debilitating. On the other hand, merging with a lover takes biological to chemical to alchemical thrills.

Examples of such connections:

- A mother’s intuition where she feels her baby’s pinched finger as if it were her own flesh.

- Suddenly feeling something is horribly wrong and getting a call 10 minutes later that a loved one has died.

- A High Priestess who forms a strong bond with the Initiates of her coven and can sense when one of them is in trouble—or doing quite well.

For more information on empathy and “highly sensitive people,” and for the most extensive article archive online concerning “energetic connections,” we recommend the empathy, energy, and psychic categories of this website.

I am totally in love with this artist’s work.  Please check it out.  Photo Copyright:  alicepopkorn; creative commons license.

Psychic Spying can backfire in the worst sort of way—you can not only alert the person you’re snooping on, but divulge your own deepest, darkest secrets.

Several years ago, I was at a metaphysical festival in Florida where I met various healers, intuitives, and vendors of all sorts of New Age items and services. While waiting for my daughter to return from a booth hawking fairy designs, one of the less busy psychics handed me a flyer with her resume, testimonials, rates, and—imprinted in bold letters across the top of the page—a message that said

N O    P S Y C H I C    S P Y I N G

Beneath that, she detailed how she wouldn’t check up on your romantic interest’s other, er, interests or anything that wasn’t directly related to you. She also wouldn’t snoop on your children to see if they were having underage sex or hanging out with a forbidden playmate, or if your husband was thinking of having an affair.

I laughed when I read it because I knew exactly what she meant. A shaman I talked with more recently, with my daughter present for the appointment set-up, warned me that he wouldn’t tell me the results of my daughter’s reading because she was over 18 and was entitled to her privacy. I grinned at him and explained that it had never crossed my mind: we’re already close and she tells me most everything I want to know and beyond that, I have a rather stellar intuition of my own.  A few hours later, my daughter and I shared a lengthy car ride and compared notes gleefully.

But the point on psychic spying is well-taken, and for reasons that most people don’t realize.

I don’t consider myself a psychic, though I am very intuitive and often have the knowing. No matter. I have clairvoyant friends of such high caliber that I don’t compare. However, I am an empath, and I understand how these energetic connections and psychic connections work.

The reason a psychic, shaman, empath, etc, may refuse to participate in psychic spying goes a level deeper than ethics. Some will certainly do it for the money or curiosity. Others will do it if there is a personal threat to you or it is directly related to you, such as checking to see if a potential business partner is financially responsible and will continue to be so with your money… or if the guy who just proposed has a hidden history of abuse or would begin one with you…or if a mentally unstable rival is likely to go after you with a knife. These are the same things you might find out with a good private investigator but one who has some insight into future probabilities.

But there’s another reason why many intuitives will not indulge your need for psychic spying.

When people try to connect with me through clairvoyant means, I as an empath usually not only know it but I can follow it back to them and see things about them that they’d rather keep hidden. Dark, bad things. I’ve had this happen with boyfriends’ ex-girlfriend drama queens, only to realize that the exes were far crazier than the guys had suggested. In that moment of connection, I could see how disturbed and disturbing some of these clingy young women were, including things that they’d never shared with the mutual men in our lives.

By far, the most disturbing encounter was an over-protective friend of a woman I was in business with. Our business partnership had disintegrated because we had different visions for a project, and no matter how I tried to keep it professional and calm, the woman became unstable, controlling, and abusive. It was personal to both of us, but she was far more emotionally involved and needed to blame someone for the project’s failure—that someone being me.  She was sure I’d gotten rich at her expense and couldn’t understand that our joint venture had been very costly to me financially.  That’s when her shaman friend stepped in to “help” her by paying me a little visit energetically and doing a little bit of psychic spying. The purpose was to see if I was the liar I’d been made out to be.

It felt as if the shaman friend had walked into a dark room where I stood, and that she was standing in the shadows behind me, watching to see if I would celebrate her friend’s troubles or make some motion that would betray my intentions. I was aware of her but she didn’t realize I knew she was there. I had nothing to hide, so my guard was down and I let her see—fully—that I had nothing to hide and that I’d been truthful. At that moment, it was as if all the light around me focused on her and I turned to see her, to look into her eyes. In the same instant, I saw something in her that she’d never let anyone see. I saw her deep craving for self-amputation, and I reeled unexpectedly, showing her that I’d seen, that I’d seen it all because she carried her secrets with her to try to learn mine. She fled the room.

You see, here’s how psychic spying works when the person spied upon is an empath or intuitive—and you really never know: it’s as if you look into a hand mirror to try to see me in a different part of the room without me knowing you’re looking at me. Got it? You can’t see your own face or eyes in the mirror–just me because I’m what you’re focusing on. However, all I have to do is be alerted that you’re looking at me and I can look at the mirror in your hand and I won’t see myself in it–I’ll see your face and eyes.

It’s the same with energetic connections and psychic spying. The thing about these connections is that it’s never a one-way street, not if the other person is just as talented as you are.

Super sensitive. That’s what I am. I’m still trying to assimilate the weirdness (thus far) from yesterday’s eclipse, August 5, 2009. I had some strange physical effects, and it felt like the veil between the worlds was thinner than ever yesterday. In fact, I know it was, based on what happened late in the evening.

Physically, my senses were…MORE

Photo by Netream; creative commons license

For many of us–especially those of us raised in an environment of real or imagined scarcity–getting into a mindset of abundance and prosperity is a real milestone on our spiritual journey.  Reaching that peak is a true celebration, yet we can fall off that peak and back onto a pit of impoverished feelings rather quickly…if we’re not careful. 

In keeping an attitude of prosperity, we must either surround ourselves with others who have mindsets of abundance or we must make sure we don’t lose our focus on and thankfulness for the prosperity we enjoy.

To demonstrate, here’s how my relationships have affected my own ability to attract prosperity.

My parents and family:

I’m one of those people who was raised in a mindset of poverty.  If we did have anything of material prosperity, then there was pressure to give it away.  This came from our religious beliefs that poor men got into heaven and charity equaled love and spirituality. My family had plenty of stories of “good women” who “would give away their last dime to help someone else.” This attitude didn’t apply just to material resources but also time and desires.  It came with a ready-made sense of self-sacrifice, that you could never have what you really wanted, and that you’d always have to make some great sacrifice to have even part of what you really wanted.

My marriage:

My two-decade marriage, while materially prosperous, was emotionally impoverished and I never felt I had enough of anything—time, money, love, happiness. My salary as a professional grew quite nicely and yet, I had no idea of my worth.  I never felt I made enough money and I felt that any of the things that made me happy were burdens on my family, especially financially.  Even when we were paying more in taxes than my annual gross salary, I still felt poor.

When I divorced, I was terrified.  I was so buried in my mindset of scarcity that I had no idea if I could make it on my own.  I figured I’d never be able to afford a haircut or a modest dinner out again.  But after my divorce, that began to change and I started feeling prosperous for the first time.  Part of this was that I’d always let other people tell me how to spend my money and, if it was for something I wanted to do that they didn’t value, the answer was usually no.  Now I no longer “had to ask permission” to enjoy any of my earnings.  I began to feel prosperous, though I was still careful with my money.

Prosperous men:

When I began dating again, it was mostly professional men.  I dated several physicians and defense attorneys, as well as businessmen with their own jets. In general, they were all very financially prosperous. With one of them, my prosperity mindset was a brief issue.  He was a sweet man, a physician making about $30,000 a month. He was religious and might have been spiritual as well—there was a strong hint that he might have explored that theme more deeply if we’d been together longer. We dated for a short while, with him wining and dining me at the classiest restaurants around, driving me around in his luxury cars, begging me to spend weekends at his little beach cottage at a resort a few hours way.  I had a little bit of an issue with the way he spent money on me—I had my pride and I felt I couldn’t return these expensive favors.  I quickly came to terms with how we were at different places in our careers and lives and, in terms of percentages, he wasn’t spending much at all on our relationship and there was a balance between us.  I figured out how to let go and keep my attitude of prosperity, thankful for what I had and what he had and that we could share some fun times.

Not so prosperous men—and where I lost my sense of abundance:

Another man who was very special to me—still is—came into my life at a time when I was a little queasy about the money I’d spent on house repairs, especially when my house value and retirement accounts had just taken a considerable hit, thanks to the souring economy.  I’d started to worry about money and felt I needed to cut back.  I felt scarcity creeping in.  That’s when I met someone who earned considerably less in a year than the doctor I’d dated made in a month.  It’s a shame that our country pays such terrible wages to the men we expect to protect us, but that’s another story, and wages have absolutely nothing to do with his value.   Not that his income mattered to me.  Not at all.  But it did to him.

He was very much like me in that he had his pride and wasn’t looking for a free ride from anyone else.  He tended to give away everything, to take care of everyone, to spend almost nothing on himself.  He was extremely spiritual, devout, and had that sense of “spirituality equals poor” because material wealth was not his goal.  He was more focused on service to his country, family, and spirituality—all beautiful, high-minded ideals that really impressed me and rang true to my own values. The other side of that coin was that he had the same mindset of scarcity I grew up with and had lived with for so many years—a lovely theme of entwined nobility and self-sacrifice.  He was in such a state of loss and impossible choices between competing desires and felt he had no way of winning, even if he managed to get just one part of what he wanted. All he could do was try not to lose everything while being more concerned for the health and future of others than for himself.  Many of our conversations were centered around loss and fear of loss and the struggle to save everyone else, everyone but himself.  He was willing to be a martyr if it was required of him. Yes, I knew these themes well.

It was through him that my own prosperity was emphasized, but in a negative way.  My previous relationships with men who brought home high-six-figures were not an appropriate baseline for me to see my own abundance.  With a man who earned much less than I did and who struggled to budget money for food while sending his income to others, I began to see my prosperity in a different light, even to the point of being embarrassed by it.  I actually stopped feeling grateful for everything that I had.  The poor guy could barely afford gas between my house and his work, and I risked wounding his pride when I filled his gas tank once or twice. I was at a place in my life that I felt I’d worked hard to get to, but instead of celebrating it with him, I felt bad about my prosperity, mainly because I thought it would make him feel inadequate.  I understood this because I’d felt the same way, initially, with the $30,000-a-month suitor.

This is not to denigrate this man—all his other qualities made up for any negativity over money issues, and he is one of the most exquisite beings I’ve ever met.  I share this only because of the tremendous insight he gave me into my own attitudes. The deeply spiritual tie to his poverty and self-sacrifice seeped into all aspects of his life, to the point where it sometimes seemed he was giving up all of himself to placate everyone else.  His focus became “what I can’t have” and “what I must sacrifice” rather than how very much the Gods were offering him.

For me, I not only stopped feeling grateful for my prosperity, but I also started to live in those moments of scarcity from my past.  It was too easy for me to remember being in his situation, back when I was in my early twenties and my furniture was Early Salvation Army, my fanciest meals consisted of noodles and tomato sauce, and a friend cut my hair whenever I butchered it too badly.  I wanted him to understand that I knew his financial situation even if I personally no longer had those constraints and in doing so—empath that I am—I put myself back into those days of constant worry about money and loss. 

The first inclination that my mindset had changed came over Labor Day weekend when my garage and car were burglarized. For the past year, whenever I had loose change, I dropped it into a compartment between the front seats.  It was full and heavy, and I’d saved about $300 in coins.  A few weeks before—when I’d had more of an attitude of abundance—I’d asked my younger daughter to take out the money and we’d use it for a special trip but she’d gotten caught up in school activities and hadn’t managed it. Sometime during the night, someone broke into my garage and got into my car, trashing the inside of my car and taking all but a few dollars.  Nothing else in the car was taken, including clothes and electronics.  Nothing in the garage was taken, including lawn equipment, power tools, and sports equipment.  Nothing but small change.  And that’s exactly what I’d begun to focus on—my small change and losing it.  I remember thinking the day before that I was focusing on small change instead of my prosperity.

I didn’t listen to that, though.  I had too much else going on in my life to pay attention.  I was more aware than ever of the abundance and prosperity I had on every level, especially how happy I was, and at the same time, acutely aware of the potential for loss, the probability of loss, the nearness of it.  For all the happiness of that season, there were some very important losses that expressed around me.  Underlying those losses was a theme of scarcity—if not at that moment, then coming soon.  I began to feel I could not afford anything anymore.  At all.  That all my dreams were on hold.  All I could feel was lack.  It seeped into everything.  I felt I had more than I’d ever had in my life, but the fear of loss obliterated the joy.

That’s not to say that my downgrade in abundance is his fault.  I tend to merge with people I care about, and in understanding what he was going through, I lost my grip on my own prosperity.  I had hoped to bring him to my prosperity mindset but instead, I was the one who shifted to his sense of lack and sacrifice. We’re enough alike that I could tune into those feelings easily…too easily.

Finding my way back

When I started focusing again on my home and what I have and what I love, I started to feel that sense of abundance coming back to me. It took a little time, and I gained new insights through new relationships.  It was odd, but I began dating two new men who had a surprising amount in common with the last one.  Same jobs, identical pay, almost the same birthday.  Yet these new men drove fancy cars and bought themselves $90 hoodies without blinking an eye.  It was a shock at first to see that other people earning the same income could take it so far…though they were taking it that far on themselves.   These men are not very spiritual and we don’t resonate on many levels, and they do not live in the mode of scarcity or fear of loss.  I date them for non-spiritual reasons and without any intentions beyond friendship and fun before they deploy. But I’ve learned something from contrasting how they view their material wealth.

My own income has not changed over the past month, and yet, I am back to feeling more prosperous this month, and my bank account is rising unexpectedly and my book sales are suddenly up.  A couple of months ago, I was afraid of missing a payment—something I never do—but today…I am fine.  The difference isn’t in my salary or expenses…it’s in my outlook, and that brings in more prosperity of the physical type to match the mental and emotional prosperity I feel.

Photo by  Northeast Photography; creative commons license

There’s an edginess that’s been in the air for the past couple of hours.  It’s the kind of feeling you get after a fight with a lover or when a dream just got deferred. I can’t pin it down but it’s been intense.  Weighty.  It’s nothing new…but I wasn’t expecting to have it interrupt my pleasant evening.  Someone else’s feelings, that is.

This makes me wonder how many people suffer from depression because they’re so highly sensitive to the emotions of others.  This isn’t like that horrid feeling when Shannon, Brian, and I walked past the meat market, er, I mean bar, in the restaurant a week ago and Brian and I both went, “Ewwwww, what’s that feeling?” at the same time.  It’s always gratifying to be in the company of other empaths who pick up emotions at the same instant I do.  It’s a blessing to have others like that around, really.  They totally get it when you say, “Hey, who just had an emo moment?”

Tonight’s wash of emotions happened fairly suddenly, and I don’t feel thye’re  ”mine.”  I’m going through my usual checklist, and hey, good health habits make it easier to isolate!  It’s even better when the feeling goes away, often rather suddenly and inexplicably.  Except for not knowing WTF just happened.

Here’s my empath’s checklist, applied to this particular instance:

1.  Why am I feeling this way?  Did this wave of emotion come on out of the blue, almost like turning on a lightswitch?
I have no clue why I’m feeling such sadness and upset.  It came on suddenly in the middle of a pleasant evening.  I didn’t just have a fight with anyone or receive bad news, yet I certainly feel the effects as if I had.

2. Did something happen to trigger this wave of upsetting emotion?
No.  I’ve been on an even keel all day at work, even with people having meltdowns all around me.  I’d had plans to do some decorating projects tonight, and I was looking forward to that after watching a movie.   I’ve also had time to watch a movie I’d been dying to see and liked a lot.  There were no incidents that happened right before  the emotional wave.

3.  Am I well-rested?
Yes.  Sometimes lack of sleep will have an emotional impact, but I slept well last night and spent half an hour in meditation tonight.  The latter might be a clue, though, because  during my meditation, I felt very connected to a friend of mine who’s having family problems.

4.  Is my blood sugar out of whack?
No.  Sometimes, fluctuations in my blood sugar will make me either antsy or down but I can usually associate that with particular eating habits and know what to expect.  So far this year, my diet has been very healthy and I’m giving my body what it needs.  Also, the timing isn’t right for any type of “sugar crash,” even if I’d been less mindful of my diet.

5.  Are my hormones out of whack?
Hmmm, well, I am feeling the need for some male company, but no, no raging hormones.  I’m on a new prescription after an abominable time with the last two consecutive prescriptions but I’ve been on it enough days that I’m rather sure I’m not suffering a sudden new side effect. (Being a human antennae for emotions isn’t on the packaging!)

6.  Is there something in my environment that I’m hearing, smelling, seeing that has triggered these feelings?
No.  That includes any annoying noises or flickering lights.

7.  Is there something going on in my immediate environment that’s emotional turmoil for someone else?
No.  In fact, this started before my daughter came home from work cheerful and continued afterward.   I was home alone in a pleasant atmosphere.  There was no tension in the house and no upset with my daughter.

8.  What was my day like overall–before the wave of emotions?
Overall, good.  Pleasant interactions with everyone around me.  Good news on many fronts.  Some financial relief in one area.  A great workout.  Some interesting new things I learned.  A very solid, though busy, day.

9.  Are my stars out of whack?
Whether you believe in astrology or not, I sometimes find that personal astrology chart is facing some harsher transits.  In this case,  I’m actually supposed to be under some very, very pleasant influences this week with lots of good and positive emotions.

10.  Is this the usual pattern for my mood changes?
No. I can get into a mood and stay there for two or three days, whether it’s blissful, sad, anxious, or whatever. My moods don’t swing every 15 minutes–if they do, I know for certain that I’m being influenced by someone else’s emotions, usually someone who’s ADHD, bless ‘em.  In this case, the emotional wave lasted about two hours and crested, then faded as if someone had fallen asleep or escaped into some mindless pastime.

11.  Do I have loved ones who are having obvious–or not obvious–difficulties that might be related to this wave of emotions?
Yes.  I do.  At this point, I’m usually either calling them or checking in on them when I can.  Some aren’t always available.  And some will lie to me that everything’s just hunky-dory so they don’t worry me, but I’ll find out later how upset they were.

12.  Are there certain words or phrases that come to mind with these feelings but seem unusual for me?
When I first realized I was empathic, I had been talking for hours to a suicidal acquaintance.  When my emotions crashed that night and over the next couple of days, I found myself thinking thoughts that were phrased in a particular way that wasn’t anything like me, at all.  When I figured out where I’d heard those phrases before, I figured out that I’d taken my work home with me, in the worst way possible.  IN this case tonight, I am getting certain words, glimpses almost, that give me clues to the identity of my troubled loved one.

13.  Am I overreacting?
This is where it helps to have a good friend who understands I’m an empath.  She knows that if I don’t seem like myself that she should call my attention to it.   I’ve been through a lot of loss in my life, including relationships I didn’t want to see go, but back in October, she saw me fall to my knees sobbing at a professional conference of 200 of my esteemed colleagues and got me out of there.  To me, I couldn’t separate my sense of loss from breathing and lost all perspective.  She got me out of there and started quizzing me, then it became obvious to me that I was going through not only my own mourning for a loss but feeling the raw emotions of the other people involved in the situation.    Though I’d been through much worse in my life, the double and triple wallop of emotions was more than I could take.

After running quickly through my checklist, I can usually figure out that these emotions aren’t mine but ones I’ve picked up from someone I care deeply about. Often, I’ll be on the phone, running through my list of loved ones and calling them just to see if they’re all right.  Almost always, if I can reach everyone I think it might be, I find the culprit.  Once I realize not only that the empathic wave isn’t mine and especially if I know whose emotions I’m picking up, then I can usually release it and get back to my pleasant life already in progress.

Photo by ShotsAtRAdom; creative commons license

When I was a little girl in a Southern Baptist church, the preachers often talked about how we’d all recognize each other when we got to heaven.  Even as a child, I had a few problems with the way this scenario was presented to me.  Sometimes we were told that everyone would magically turn 33 again (the age of Jesus on the cross) and that’s the age we’d appear to be in heaven.  I had issues with this nice little fantasy!

First of all, I didn’t quite understand how we’d get to take our bodies with us.  Our physical bodies were sinful, after all.   Or look exactly the way we wanted to.  And if we looked exactly the way we wanted to, then how would anyone recognize us?  By the time I was a teenager, I already disliked any photograph that actually looked like me, so how would someone recognize me? I had a long way to go before I was 33 and who knew what I’d look like then?  How would I recognize my grandparents if they were walking around those streets of gold, carrying harps and being 33 when I’d never known them at 33? 

Of course, the preachers, Sunday School teachers, and parents all seemed mortified at my questions.  Questions really weren’t allowed in the church I grew up in.  Questions meant doubts and doubts equaled “going to hell.”    So most people kept their mouths shut and tormented themselves in private.

But now I understand exactly how we might “recognize” each other in the afterlife, or next life, or heaven, or whatever you choose to call it.  It works just as well in this life, too, right now, here on Earth.

After my grandfather died, he visited me in my dreams many times.  On one occasion, he appeared to me as a young man, in his 20’s, in a suit from the 1930’s.  It frightened me because I didn’t recognize him.  It was his energy, his essence, but not the way I’d known him.  In my dream, my anxiety saddened him and he became an old man again, and I was comfortable with that.

Since then, I’ve come to understand my empathic nature much more clearly. 

Unless my own emotions are very turbulent, I now will feel sadness, euphoria, or anxiety and know that something important is happening to a loved one.  I can often tell WHICH loved one. 

More recently, I’ve had experiences where I felt someone’s scathing hatred—and I’ve been able to tell who was suddenly focused on me and verify it with physical evidence.  That’s a longer story and a more private story than I can explain here, but having that “recognition” of another person’s essence or energy physically and scientifically validated was a shock for me.  I didn’t have to hear her angry voice, see her enraged face, or even receive an email or IM from her.  I simply recognized the feel of this person’s energy when she focused on me and when she reacted to her thoughts of me, which were expressed hundreds of miles away to someone else at the same instant in time…to the exact minute.  I found it both disturbing (her mental state) as well as somewhat euphoric (my amazement at recognizing the signature of her energy and thoughts).  I’d had this happen with people I’d connected with emotionally in a love relationship but never with someone I wasn’t a fan of and usually not validated in such a physical way as this was.

But I still didn’t think of it in terms of “recognizing” someone without recognizing their physical presence.  Two things happened that made it clear for me—1.  I learned a lot about grave dirt in spells/rituals and 2.   a “stranger” friended me on Facebook.

A practitioner of what some people would ignorantly refer to as “Black Magick” explained how grave dirt is used in her rituals (these were rituals for protection, not harm, by the way, so stop being panicky).  From her explanation of dirt from a grave being “charged” with the energy of that person, I began to understand better that our bodies house our essence or energy and become “charged” so that other people associate who we really are with the bodies that carry us.  When those bodies die, they are still charged with that energy and when buried, the ground around them becomes charged with that energy.  Hence, a person who was a stronger protector in life might leave behind grave dirt that is highly charged with that protector-influence.  It’s like picking up a shirt left behind by an old lover and still finding his scent on it and smiling at the memories its charged with.    For most people, the concept of grave dirt carrying the energy of the person buried there is way too morbid or bizarre to think about, let alone to consider the recognition of that energy as anything other than “bad.”  Me, I find it to be an interesting correlation.  We might sense a loved one at a cemetery but we might also sense them in their homes.

I finally put it all together when I received an email from a name I didn’t recognize.  In the past, I’ve  opened emails and felt that person’s energy attached to their words, sometimes knowing the emotional content before I read a single word of it.  Some people use their emails magickally, and once you open the email, it’s considered “accepted” so that you get the brunt of whatever emotions  or persuasive ideas those words were charged with. Sensing the sender’s own energy or essence when opening an email is an odd feeling, but quite real and very specific to the person.  It’s like walking into a room and smelling gardenia perfume and knowing your grandmother is nearby.  Even if other people in your life wear gardenia perfume, it always mixed with your grandmother’s skin in such a way that it’s a unique scent.  In this case, the email wasn’t directly from the person with the strange name but through a social network, so it wasn’t as strong.  Still, there was something about the essence around that name that caught my attention.   I researched the name, which didn’t even vaguely resemble any birth name or married name of anyone I’d ever known, and found a piece of artwork online.  When I looked at the art, I felt the energy of a girl I’d known 28 years ago who has since disappeared and changed her name to start a life elsewhere.   Had I seen a picture of her, I would not have recognized her.  But her energy?  Yes.

So no, we don’t need our bodies in heaven to recognize each other.  In fact, we don’t need them here to recognize each other either.

Photo from http://flickr.com/photos/alicepopkorn/2949731451/; creative commons license

When I talk about feeling energies or “energetic connections,” non-empaths usually think I’m crazy.  They don’t understand if they’ve never  experienced their world through that particular sense, much as a man blind from birth might not understand when I talk about the subtle hues of different colors.  Experiencing energy is really another sense—not a sixth sense but really more of a SEVENTH sense that goes above and beyond the intuition that is commonly accepted as sixth sense. 

Empaths and other “highly sensitive people”  experience energy in the same way as non-empaths understand sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste—and even sometimes intuition.  It’s a new level of interaction with the world around us.  Some people are born with it and for others, it must be cultivated, as with a sense of taste.  I have learned to like the taste of fine wine, dark chocolate, and to a much lesser extent even broccoli.   I have never liked the taste of beer, coffee, or cigarettes and have no intention of cultivating what others find pleasurable with that particular sense of taste.

My younger daughter is also an empath, but she doesn’t like it and shields against almost everything.   Her first significant experience with it was when she was a little girl and could pick up on my unhappy emotions, even when I was smiling, and would go to bed shaking because she knew things weren’t good between Mommy and Daddy, even though Mommy and Daddy were good at hiding it at that time.  In spite of so much shielding, she’s still the first one to know when a relative is dying, and perhaps that’s why she dislikes it so much.

She says that I relish being an empath, and truthfully, I do.  There is nothing quite as amazing as merging energetically with a romantic partner and feeling each other’s emotions, sensations, and passions.  It takes sexual chemistry to a point of alchemy.  There’s also a security to reaching out a tentacle to check on my mom or kids and knowing that they’re okay or to feeling something’s wrong and calling at just the right moment to talk them through it. 

It’s the wonderful connections that help me to deal better with the overwhelming emotions I feel from others, the times when the energetic connections become a curse instead of a blessing.  With the sense of sight, it would be like looking into bright sunlight and being momentarily blinded.  With the sense of sound, it would be like standing in front of 15-foot speakers at a AC/DC concert in the 80’s until your ears hurt and later everything you hear seems muffled.  With the sense of touch, it would be like gentle rubbing turning to chafing turning to a bad case of monkey-butt.  The same with sensing energy—sometimes it’s so discordant that it hurts.

Usually when I speak of energetic connections, it’s in reference to feeling them.  This is when my “antennae” pick up the feelings of people in my environment as well as to people I’m emotionally connected to, even if they’re hundreds or thousands of miles away.  In fact, I’m more likely to feel the discordant emotions strongly when I’m not physically with a person but have that emotional connection.

Whereas I can “receive” these waves of energy like communication signals, I can also broadcast them.  I’m often not aware of it, unless I’m speaking with a fellow empath.    My daughter has stood with me when I’ve been drawing down a Full Moon and urged me to “Stop that!” because my energy was heating up the sphere around me.  I have many consecrated objects in my home, but I don’t feel their energy all the time.  Maybe that’s good because otherwise, I’d be buzzing in my skin.  I can easily feel someone else’s energy on an object or the sizzle of energy of a consecrated sacred object, but my own can be identical and I cannot feel it.  Others will walk into a room—even people who don’t consider themselves to be empaths—and either feel the energy coming off my consecrated items or be instantly drawn to them. 

I liken my not being aware of my own transmission of energy or the energy of my sacred tools to the sense of smell.  Initially, it may be strong, but then I get used to it and it fades into the background of daily life.

Photo by Andrea Pes; creative commons license

When I first began meeting “intuitives,”  I heard several of them say that they could not read their own futures.  I thought it was odd at the time, given that some of them had told me amazing things about my own life–right down to  names, ages, locations, specific projects I was working on that I’d not told anyone about.  They said that they could read Tarot, runes, and other methods of divination to give them insight into their present or even their past, but not for the future.  In addition, most could no longer read futures for their closest loved ones, even if they’d been able to when they and their loved ones were mere strangers.

I can’t read for myself either, when it comes to the future.  I can throw out a card to meditate on or divine to determine the current state of things, but I can’t get a fix on what’s ahead.  I can have a subtle “knowing”—particularly about something I don’t want to see—and completely ignore it until after the fact. THEN I recognize it and that I knew all along.  I’m in that state now, where I remember an odd feeling of something coming up but I couldn’t fathom it so I pushed the intuition aside.  Now I stand back and try to figure out if I have the same feeling about something coming up in the future, but I cannot quite catch the right feel of it and follow it to ground.  It’s like being caught in a lightning storm and feeling the crackle all around me but not knowing where the next bolt is coming from, just that it’s there somewhere.   Intuitive friends can tell me with great clarity what to be careful of, and be much on-target.  Sometimes I have a strong knowing about the good stuff, but the bad stuff, I just can’t always find the armor in time for.

But I can often see the bad stuff coming for other people.

Back in late summer, someone asked me to give a reading from my favorite Tarot deck, the Arthurian Legend cards.  I didn’t really want to but felt obliged to give it a try.  I don’t consider myself a reader and I never know when I throw down the cards whether I’m in the zone or not.  The last thing I want to do, as a High Priestess, is lay out cards and then shrug.  High Priestesses are supposed to be consistently excellent at Tarot, according to some handbook I must not have read. 

It was a valuable lesson to me.  Honestly, it was one of the worst readings, as far as circumstances and outcome, that I have ever done or witnessed in my life.  It almost hurt to have the cards between us.  I could offer absolutely no hope based on the layout and on my intuition.  They were full of oppression.  I’d add anger or hate, but those emotions didn’t really fit.  This was simply oppression, maybe with some despair thrown in.  I felt horrible because I really could not say anything positive about the situation in question.  I tried to temper my language for the querent, though, because I know what it’s like to have a reader say something really callous, like “Why the hell would you want to be with this person?  Is your self-esteem that fucking low?”  Been there.

Despite my gentleness, the querent began to make excuses before I could move on to the next card, telling me, “Oh, that’s probably just XYZ” or  “Maybe what you’re seeing is XYZ.”  It wasn’t XYZ.  The querent wasn’t listening and didn’t want to listen but because of hopes and fears, could turn even the worst card’s meaning into something fluffy.  I couldn’t lie though.  All I could do was to explain that as of that moment, the entire situation was oppressive and would bring great pain if continued.   I didn’t express some of the more upsetting impressions I was getting because they were bad enough that one of us would have run screaming from the room.

Another lesson was in watching a not-too-experienced psychic  read for himself.  I hadn’t watched anything like this in about 10 years, and I was very new to metaphysical practices then.  The past and present cards seemed accurate, from what I knew of the questions and situations.  The near future/outcome cards were lushly read, with great positivity, his hopes and dreams coming out with every syllable.  The energy of the cards did not match what he wanted for himself.   He saw what he wanted to see.

And that is why we cannot read for ourselves (most of us, anyway).  The source of our ability to read for others is in the same location as our own hopes and fears, and our own hopes and fears overshadow the intuition.  It’s far easier to read for a stranger for whom we have no hopes or fears–because the thing that is speaking loudest is our intuition. We need that lone voice to guide us in our readings, not a howling cacophony of our own worries and wants.

Photo by Ulrike; creative commons license

(Yes, S.B., this is for you…because we’re tired of your cell phone going off 30 times every morning!)

Oh, the subjects that come up over lunch with a friend!  Her live-in boyfriend has accused her of cheating and, honestly, she’s fed up.  This time, it’s all because she didn’t respond  immediately to his fifth control-freaking phone call of the day, which came during a  lunch meeting where we all had to have our phones off and pretend to pay attention to the guest speaker.  By the time she called back, he was livid.  She’s not cheating on him; there is no one new—but his past as a cheater and his trust issues and insecurities are driving her away, and I suspect that it won’t be long until she’s actively looking for someone who won’t put her on the defensive at least once a day.

How do I know she’s not cheating?  Because I know all the signs.  I’ve lived long enough and seen enough to know the patterns, the ordinary hints that—taken altogether—signal trouble.  I also recognize the one sign that is a sure-fire giveaway, though it may be that only empaths will know it when it happens.

The sad truth underneath:

If you’re reading this because you suspect your guy or girl is cheating on you, then you have trust issues.  They may or may not be warranted, but bottom line, you have trust issues and the damage is already there.  You can either heal or deal, but there is already something dreadfully wrong in your relationship, even if you don’t recognize it yet.  Frankly, it’s not likely to get any better because once you start looking for proof of cheating, you’ll eventually find it…even if it takes you years to drive them into someone else’s arms with the constant nagging and doubts.  If your lover is cheating, whatever your definition of cheating is, then deep down you already know and just need the physical proof—or if they’re not, then it’s such a reality to you that you will most certainly manifest either the cheating or the same outcome as the cheating.

The other side of it is that, I believe, if people are cheating and want to get caught, they will be.  If they don’t, they won’t.  That might not make sense at first glance, but I’ve seen a lot of people cheat who didn’t want to disrupt their cozy homes and they took extreme care to keep up their secret lives.  I’ve known because I witnessed their activities on a business trip.  The ones who got caught?  In every case, they really wanted to get caught, even if they didn’t realize it.  They were unhappy in their relationships and looking for a way out, and it was easier to give their mates a reason to end the relationship than to come out and say, “Hey, this isn’t working anymore!” and take the adult role and leave.  So they play games with their mates and with themselves.  They leave subtle and then not-so-subtle clues, often subconsciously sabotaging their relationships to break them up.  My former circle-mate, “Betsy,” is a prime example of that, so I’ll use her lack of inventiveness in my illustrations.

How to tell?  It’s all about patterns—mundane ones and energetic ones.    But that will be Part II of this series.

I’ve been through many, many hurricanes, and Hurricane Gustav has made me feel anxious since it was a blip in the Atlantic that no one but the online meteorologists were talking about.  It’s as if something energetic, something in the Ether, gets all worked up, as if the energy of an area is preparing for the distruption.  Animals and insects feel it.  I’m an empath and so do I.

Though Hurricane Dennis hit close to me as a Cat 4, I evacuated at the last minute about 20 miles inland to a friend’s house, mainly because I didn’t want to be alone.  I was never afraid of that storm at all, and it did extremely little damage in my residential area.  With Tropical Storm Fay, I had the feeling of “drizzle” –more like water coming down than rising up.  With Hurricane Ivan, which did mega-damage here, I got the distinct impression of “RUN.”  I had some damage but my home is well-built and other than a huge tree on the roof, it wasn’t too bad…but I also did a tremendous amount of working with my Angels right before I left and a lot of putting my own energy and magick into my property.  With Hurricane Katrina, I had the same antsy feeling as now–but with a sense that my own home would be safe and that New Orleans and coastal Mississippi were the main target areas of devastation.  We barely felt it here, except those of us who are empaths.   But Gustav has had that same Katrina-feel to me, with a feeling of New Orleans being deeply affected.

I listen to my instincts moreso than The Weather Channel.  And I watch the animal and insect activity, especially about two days before a storm is forecast to hit anywhere close to my area.  When the animals evacuate, so do I.

I’ve spent the late afternoon today, about two days out from the storm, perusing my property.  It’s been a warm afternoon and a little quiet, with the usual lizards and redbirds.  No crows–I see lots of those before a hurricane.  No dragonflies, which tend to hatch in time to feed off of the mosquitoes from post-storm waters.  No unusual ant activity, such as building mounds close to the house, ants in the house, or crawling everywhere in the grass, signs that portend a lot of water activity in a storm.  I did find a few mounds in the edge of the neighbor’s yard, at a high point on the property but also where there are no sprinkler systems and no general rain run-off.  Ants in my yard were quite sparse, with a few near a high spot where we’ve recently cleared brush.  I understand that turtles are nesting 120 miles west of here in the Mobile/western Florida area, maybe closer, so that’s a good sign of no devastating storms.

I’ll continue to update any animal signs here over the next few days.  If you’re seeing unusual animal and insect activity where you are, please feel free to post in the comments, but please include your location.

Update, pre-storm:  I walked outside after midnight (Sunday AM) with the Army Ranger and there was a swarm of dragonflies around the porch light, a baby snake on the doorstep, and a plague of tiny frogs on the patio.  Grasshoppers were in the bushes and other nightlife was quite loud in the stillness of the night.  All very unusual.

Update, post-storm:  Back home, Monday late afternoon, and there’s been plenty of rain and wind but no real damage here (Destin/Niceville, Florida).  Very, very windy, and I can see sand and/or mist in the air from the Gulf.  I need to get a tree surgeon out this week to trim up a few trees, though.  There were tornadoes here but none on my property.  Back in GA, where we evacuated to and where there was so much water dumped from Tropical Storm Fay a week ago,  the mosquitoes are HUGE and AGGRESSSIVE, with swarms of dragonflies and ants loose in the grass or with high mounds built to avoid the water-logged fields.  The drive back was slightly windy, with lots of wind in the last 20 miles, but uneventual.  Relatives in middle-GA were getting tons of rain from the outflow of Gustav.

Photo by macxbebe; creative commons license.

Is this message for you?  As my long-time readers know, I occasionally feel the need to give someone a “message.”  Often I don’t understand the urge to write these words and have no idea what I’ll say until it’s on the screen in front of me or who it is that needs to read it.  Sometimes I know who it’s for.  Just as often, it turns out to be for many of my readers, and that just validates (to me) the universality of the human experience.  I no longer question the illogical nature of some of the messages I deliver but write it anyway.  If it’s not meant for you, don’t worry about it.  If it is, you’ll know it.

I know that these are dark times for you.  Dark times and dangerous days.  While others are taking the opportunity to stretch to find ways of “rising above” their situations today, August 16, 2008 with the lunar eclipse as a reminder of how things may seem dark but the light returns, you can see only the darkness.  You see only loss, sacrifice, injustice, impotence. 

You no longer see the light in yourself or those around you, and at the moment, every spark of feeling loved is gone.   You are not able to rise above, surf, sail through the air, be happy.  You are not even on the deep and powerful river I often see in my dreams, the one in my meditations that I write of.  You’re in a far different place.  I see it as a moat from Medieval times, a repository for sewage.  You are walking on the bottom of the moat, unable to see above, let alone lift your head out for a breath of fresh air.  You are so far down in the muck today, and if you will reach out for help, it will be there for you, and from places you’d never expect.  There are those who will pull you up, but not until you decide you no longer like the taste of shit and you’re ready to climb out of this life you’ve built for yourself; this is not the life you intended, but it is the life you expected.  It’s time to realize your worth and fight for what you really want.

You are in this situation now because of choices you made.  Even things that aren’t your own doing are things you brought to youself because of past patterns you have not yet broken, and now they are breaking you instead.  This time….these next few months…and especially these next few days…will be critical to the rest of your life.  Now is the time for you to decide your worth because if you cannot decide now, your dreams are lost.  If you allow other people to determine your worth, then you will never know how much you can be.

You’ve lived with sorrow, confusion, and uncertainty for too long.  You’ve lost yourself and you are now losing all the trappings of who you once were.  You have been deceived, by yourself as much as by anyone else.  Maybe it’s easier for you to take the blame yourself or easier to blame someone else.  Neither case will move you forward out of the muck.  This is a time of fear and restriction for you, when you see everything you’ve worked for wither before your eyes, especially your own reputation.  There is no point in trying to explain yourself or defend yourself or prove yourself to most people.  However right you may or may not be or however hard you try.  They will not hear it.  They have already chosen, whether they know you or not.  Spending your energy to prove yourself to people who will never be open minded, let alone open hearted, is wasteful.  The best you can do is to break your old patterns and show by your actions as you move forward, out of the muck, that you are still a person of integrity.  It will take time for your integrity to be seen again, but you will know it, feel it, first.  Later, the others–even the ones who doubt you so much now–will see it, just like light coming back after an eclipse and then they won’t be able to imagine the darkness of moments ago.

What started as a noble plan to protect others, save others, help others has ended in failure.  You know this.  You don’t have to admit it to anyone but yourself.  For now, you have to take a stand–for yourself.  You have to fight for yourself and not let your deep wounds cause you to lose faith or to give in to the will of others. You must take care of yourself first, heal yourself first.  It’s like the airline attendant says, “In case of emergency, put the oxygen mask on yourself first, then on others.”  

But while it’s time to stand up for yourself and what you really want out of life, you must be careful these next few days.  Standing up for yourself will bring tremendous ego conflicts, ones that can be physically dangerous, both to you and for you.  This is true Scorpionic energy at its worst, and it can have life or death consequences.  You must find that balance between standing up for yourself and taking care to protect yourself against those who do not have your best interests at heart.  Be careful of violence.

You have the opportunity to turn this hell around, though the results will not look like the heaven you thought you were getting yourself into way back when.  You can pick up the pieces and recreate yourself and your life the way you always wanted. It’s time to save yourself.  Just because you’re a tragic figure right now doesn’t mean you have to remain that way. 

Indigo #2, the Magical Child

Ghosts in the lights?  Sensitive to WiFi waves?   Hearing voices?  ADHD?  Depression?  Autism?  Or just plain old prophetic living in the End Times? 

Over the past four years, I’ve noticed how many of my daughters’ generation–kids born in the late 80’s/early 90’s–have been much more sensitive than my generation, in general.  They’re part of what’s known as the Scorpio Generation and are definitely what’s known as Indigo Children.  They walk into my house and feel the buzz of energy, they pick up my crystals and talk about the vibrations they feel, and sometimes they see and hear things they cannot explain.  They’re intuitive, clairvoyant, empathic, and…having a hard time dealing with the world at times.

I’m one of the older Indigos.  Some who don’t know me and think Indigos must come from one particular time period might dispute that, but there are indeed a few of us born to earlier generations.  For example, I’m part of a group born in a narrow span of time with a stellium in Aquarius–though I’m a Pisces, I have a tremendous amount of Aquarius in my natal chart, and the Piscean qualities of empathy  and sensitivity just add to the mix, giving me virtually all of the recognized Indigo traits.  Others born within a few weeks of me include two friends I admire–Maggie Shayne and M. R. Sellars (Murv), except Maggie has even more Aquarius than I do.   I don’t know about my friends, but being an Indigo when I was a child and teen was extremely difficult and I had no one to talk with about the more unusual elements in my life, so I understand my daughters’ generation better than most adults.  I think many of their parents–my peers–have a hard time understanding their sensitivities, and I cringe to see so many of them trying to function daily on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs and others resorting to alcohol to dull the overwhelming sensations.  This baby-on-board generation is the most watched-after generation in our country’s history, with anything from baby monitors to hear their coos from the next room to GPS bracelets and phones to keep track of their every movement at children and teens. 

I’ve read recently of younger children with incredible sensitivities that too many adults dismiss as the result of brattiness or parental failure to “apply the rod.”  Certain sounds drive the kids wild and certain fabrics irritate their skin to the point of hysteria.  It’s a stimulus that seems like a brush of ordinary life to most adults but to an oversensitive child, it’s a brush that rubs a raw nerve.  My daughter suggests some might be from caffeine and other stimulants we’ve added to our food supply over the past few decades.  I’ve heard some say that the growing occurence of autism in children is from too many vaccinations/toxins introduced into a child’s body in a short period of time, and others claim that it’s a curse on our human race such that the technological and environmental sins of the fathers are visited now on their children.  Others say that the strange connection with the paranormal and being able to feel such normally hidden vibrations is to balance the damage done to our race as it mutates.

With so many Indigos in my home this summer–residents, house guests, and visitors–I’ve been noticing their sensitivities that most adults dismiss and applying those observations to others who are empathic, intuitive, and even clairvoyant.  There does seem to be a connection between empathy, at least, and these sensitivities.  They’re not only sensitive to annoying stimuli but to energy patterns–which fascinates me.

A few days ago, I blogged about how I’m able to see the flickers in fluorescent lights that most people can’t and how my optometrist explained the physiology behind what I see. Some of my houseguests, as it turns out, are sensitive to light flickers as well and can discern the flickers in lights as well as computer screens.  I also semi-joked how this physiology might also explain how some people see ghosts, auras, and other energy patterns (which I know alot of Indigos who do see). 

But what about people who hear things?  And what of those naysayers who are rolling their eyes about now, assuming they’re still reading?  Another example hit home with me last night when I read about school kids using high-frequency sound waves for ringtones because their teachers can’t hear it.  I downloaded the mp3 files from http://www.freemosquitoringtone.org/ .  I listened to (or for!) some of the ringtones, heard the lower ranges, and then nothing.  I wondered if it was working or just a joke. 

Hmmm.  You know how your parents yell at you to turn the music down because you’ll harm your hearing?  You know how you can stand in front of a 6-foot speaker in a night club and not hear yourself yell and the music’s so loud that the beat just crawls through your veins but who cares because you’re 21 and having a great time?  Yeah, well, our parents were right, dang it.  My ex began to lose his hearing a decade ago and used to yell at me for mumbling when he was frustrated.  My voice is soft and in that particular register than isn’t easily heard by those with even slightly diminished hearing. I’ve always had really great hearing, and if there’s a burglar alarm, a piece of whining electronic equipment,  or a TV with a cable box on anywhere nearby, I’ll find it.  Or did until recently.  I’ve noticed this year that I need for my elder daughter to speak up more, because her soft voice is way too similar to mine, and the TV isn’t quite loud enough sometimes when I watch a movie with the girls.  Normally, I just remind myself that gyrating to “You Shook Me All Night Long” in front of giant speakers at a frat party in college was a good memory to make.

But last night, just as I was about to give up on whether the mosquito ringtones worked or not, one of my houseguests peeked into the home office and asked if I heard that funny noise.  I didn’t.  I turned the volume to max and played it again–and brought the poor boy to his knees.  Same with one of my young visitors.  It was rather amusing to hit replay again and again and watch them cover their ears and beg while I heard nothing.  I was, however, “aware” of the sound.  Not at an audible level, but a tension on my nerves.  I tend to “feel” things–always have.

So.  Same question as with seeing flickers. What might the ability to hear certain sounds and not others mean for the paranormal life? 

For people who can’t see the energy cycling through a light bulb and don’t hear in the higher registers, what people with these sensitivities experience is not credible.  Many skeptics who can’t see the cycles or hear the high pitches firmly believe that there is no scienfic evidence  that these exist.  It’s not in their experience, and therefore not valid. 

Meanwhile, my houseguests who can hear the whine of a computer in the next room when the house is quiet know not to stay up too late and be noisy enough to keep me from sleeping on a night before I have to go to work.  Otherwise, I might just play a long soundtrack of sounds I can’t hear even at maximum volume while I’m dressing for work at 5 AM!

Control Your Submissive Boy:
150 Ways for the New Domme to Master Her Man

This book is written within the context of a loving female-led marriage or long-term relationship between a man and a woman because we do not believe there is enough credible instruction and idea-generators available for the new domme or for the wife who has been introduced to Dominance by her submissive husband. It can also be used in the context of short-term and uncommitted relationships.

The purpose of this book is to serve as a launching point for new ideas to spice up your sex life and/or love life, and hopefully to take you in interesting new directions that make your life more…fulfilled.

Available in print later this summer

Available as a pdf ebook at http://www.spilledcandybookstore.com/Control_Your_Submissive_Boy.html

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Part of the idea of “connection” is that I am able to be myself, completely. No facades, no barriers, no walls. If you think of connection in terms of energetic “flow,” then this makes perfect sense.  You cannot exchange energy with someone else if there are walls up.  You may get a little bit of exchange at a surface level or feel the pulse of electricity close by, but it’s shallow, superficial, untouched.  This is why deep connections have always been important to me and I’ve never found shallow ones to be really satisfying–and I will seek out deep connections at all costs.

I’ve noticed that I’ve trusted such connections to stay intact much moreso with women than with men.  I’ve had female friends over the years who have come and gone from my life, and yet, every time we’re together, it’s as if no time has passed.  We may not have spoken or communicated in years, but when we are in physical proximity, the flow of love and friendship is as strong as ever. That’s true ONLY if there is the deep connection I speak of and it never works for friendships where this connection never existed to begin with.  But I have had little to no trouble trusting this connection with women, perhaps because I’ve enjoyed a close relationship with my mother from the time I was small.  I just simply KNOW that the connection is always there, no matter how far away or how long.

If I go to my earliest male connection, then that would be Daddy.  I never had the connection with him that I wanted.  There were barriers.  There were walls.  But I could never really be myself.  Up until not long before he died, I consistently sought his approval and consistently (at least by all outward indications) failed.  Our connection was real only by feeling the electrical static of our proximity and not by the openness between us that flowed no matter where I went or what I did.

In my marriage, I never really had that deep connection I craved.  Yes, we were together a total of 23 years and I know how sad that sounds (and was), but there were always walls and barriers and I never in 23 years really felt that I could be myself with him.  The same is likely true for him because he kept so much of himself isolated from me. Even with children together, that connection was never there.  Our connection was by proximity, not by the deep emotional intimacy of two people completely at home with each other and able to share both their dreams and inadequacies without fear of losing that connection.

And so other men have come into my life in recent years.  With changes in old patterns, I’ve sought/attracted men with whom I can be myself and they as well can be true to their inner being, with few walls between us, those connections have been some of the deepest, most soul-touching of my life.  That’s a wonderful new pattern but it’s been strangled at times by an old pattern that says the connection is only in the proximity and if I’m not receiving confirmation of the connection through communication when out of proximity, then it must not be real, must not be true.

So here under the influence of a very powerful Scorpio Blue Moon, I see all those Scorpionic aspects together–secrecy, sexuality, intensity, trust, and truth–all in regard to my emotional connections with different men in my life…and I understand that if I ever felt that deep connection with any of them where we truly showed each other not just our wounds but also our souls, then those connections have not faded, regardless of blackouts in communication or in the distance of either time or space.

Photo by whateyesee13

Well, of course.  That’s me, hitting the heel of my palm against my forehead in a gesture reminiscent of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” video from the early 80’s.  How could I have missed it?

The emotional Tower Card of the past few days has been about trust.  Scorpio Full Moons are good for that.  Secrecy, sexuality, intensity, truth…and trust.  

Yes, my friend Maverick is on the other side of the world and communication between us is spotty  to non-existent.  I can give up on that and walk away or I can let my heart get wrung out.  The same is true of other men I’ve cared for where the communication between is now–or has been–spotty to non-existent.  That’s the repeat in this lesson I haven’t quite understood before. 

If I wanted to ditch our friendship, then the opportunity is certainly there.  No communication?  Forget him.  Forget the reasons why, too.  

But if I am to trust that the connection and the caring for any and all of these men who have been special to me was really there, is there now, and will be there in the future, then I cannot assume the connection is gone just because because the physical proximity is.  That doesn’t mean I won’t, perhaps, find another man who’s better suited to my needs, since my relationship with Maverick is not defined in that way.  This isn’t so much about Maverick as the lesson my friendship with him is teaching me.  

Trust the connection.  The form has changed, for the moment, but not the substance.  The connection is there with or without physical proximity–that has now been established.  Once it’s made, it never really goes away, (and in relationships where the connection was never made, they just drift, even through marriage and children) .  The opportunity is always there to strengthen that connection when physical proximity is once again close.  That goes for Maverick, but at the same time, it’s true of other men in my life.

Regardless of the man, it’s the truth.

It still bugs me how a guy can sit next to me, my fingers wrapped in his,  and earnestly ask ME to decorate HIS house to MY tastes and then be out of my life a week later with no explanation.  Or how a guy can plan a week of dates for us and then disappear  with no forwarding address because his job turns sour.  I’ve dated guys with second thoughts and guys with no thoughts (at least once), and those I handle very well.  The ones I have trouble getting  a grip on are the guys  with whom I establish a connection, something on the emotional realm that may or may not be romantic and is not necessarily physical, and the connection is suddenly severed without explanation.  

It’s really an emotional Tower Card for me.  I can’t pinpoint the origin of it to deal with the first time and rewrite it into something much better so that I reprogram my response, but I can definitely pinpoint several men over the past few years who’ve pulled that little trick, each for a good reason of his own, none of them having anything to do with hurting me, but still.  It always shakes me up, and as a result, I’m wary of trusting the grovelling guy at my feet quite so quickly.    I don’t want to become jaded, and I guess since I can still give enough of my heart to let such a drop in communications shake me up,  then I’m really not yet jaded.

What’s prickly for me tonight is Maverick’s disappearance–again.  Yes, yes, I know he’s out getting shot at by terrorists but is that really an excuse?  Hmmm, okay, maybe.  I knew this was coming.  I’d been warned that there would be intense conversation and then a sudden blank time when I would hear nothing from him.  Our conversations have been an amazing gift to me, and he’s helped me understand some things in myself that I might not have discovered so easily had he not forced the question.  It’s not like I think he and I are a perfect fit and I don’t think there is enough commonality for anything long-term. He’s suggested becoming my house-husband and I waffled.  It’s a nice fantasy, but I don’t think I’m the woman he’s looking for  and I’m pretty sure he’s not the guy I’ll settle in with in the future.

BUT the intensity and texture of our friendship gives great value to keeping that connection with him, with hearing that he is all right.  The bottom line is, regardless of what we are or aren’t to each other in the past, the present, or the future, at this point in time, I do care about him.  I can’t say how I care exactly and whether it’s to a greater or lesser degree than I care about any other man in my life over the past few years.    

But the bottom line is 1.  I care and feel a connection to him and 2.  there’s a grueling lack of communication.  This uneasy feeling isn’t so much about Maverick or my friendship with him as it is about what the blank time between us stirs in me. There are still old pains that I have not been able to release.  This month, this month I will do that.

Sometimes, you find things in your garden that you’d forgotten.  

Mother’s Day was a little strange to me this year. The girls gave me some terrific presents, and afterward I took the girls to the farm to visit my mom, which was fun.  I enjoyed running through the fields of grass–its subtle hues of green, gold, pinks–waving in the Spring breezes as the dog jumped over the grass that was taller than he is like a dolphin rising and falling through the water.  It was funny  and fun and pleasant, but there were some surreal moments, too.

On the way home from dinner with my mom and girls, the sun was still high in the sky and we made a detour through the cemetery.  That’s not unusual.  I often drive by my grandparents’ graves to “pay my respects”  when I’m in town.  It was strange that I’d forgotten until I’d already turned in at the cemetery that Daddy’s there, too.  It was…disconcerting…to remember so suddenly.

We watched “3:10 to Yuma” with my mom, figuring she might like it–as Shannon and I certainly enjoyed the pretty men–but afterwards, I was suddenly hit by one of those energy waves that I don’t get as often now.  I never could discern its origin, just that it was one of my “boys” somewhere, anxious. The feeling stayed through the night, and through the day as well.  It is less so tonight, but  still there and still anxious.  No, it’s not Daddy.  This is the energy of a young man, yearning yet somehow blocked from contacting me, most likely by himself.  And though you might think it would be easy for me to pinpoint, there’s more than one man in that situation.

Mother’s Day is always a bit difficult for me because the memories of the last Mother’s Day of my marriage are still vivid and tears at old wounds. They are memories that might slip unnoticed into the night except that they are too merged with Mother’s Day for me to separate the two.  Unfortunately, my plans for a Mother’s Day dinner outing with the girls didn’t go as I’d hoped.  I didn’t find out until too late.  They’d earlier thought that they would be with me for dinner but instead they had to go to their paternal grandmother’s for dinner, so I was alone with my thoughts for a long while.

I spent some time walking around my garden before sunset, trying to ground and shake off the disconcerting energies of the weekend.  I haven’t been in my garden much, between our camping trip and a busy week at work, so it seemed that some things had grown quite a bit.  A few surprised me, not because they’d grown so much in the past week or so, but because they’d grown so much in the past week when they’ve been invisible for years.

There’s a line of oaks the squirrels planted for me that are suddenly tall and shading the back patio.  A redbud that I planted fifteen years ago did not grow AT ALL for several years, so I dug it up and planted it in an area where it seemed much more likely to flourish.  It didn’t .  It’s lanquished for ten years.  But in the past two weeks, it’s shot up two feet and entwined itself with a young oak that’s come up long since it was planted.  

If I look around my gardens, I see other flowers and trees that are suddenly flourishing, with no explanation (not counting “Fairies at Work”) . Yes, I’ve pruned some areas of the yard, so I notice some of the flora more but many of these just SUDDENLY seemed to spring forth after long years of being runts in my garden.

I suppose it’s like that with traits and abilities.  Some stay in the background and then, one day, they suddenly burst forward, growing by leaps and bounds, taking centerstage and outpacing everything around.  In any case, it was a lovely Mother’s Day gift from my garden.

 Photo by Deeble

For quite some time now, I’ve started my meditations in my Enchanted Forest.  I’ve met lovers there and friends, had men drink from my hands and lips and hug me for dear life from on their knees.  I’ve pulled them out of dark prisons, drifted on quiet lakes, let them sleep in my arms, climbed rocky mountains, stretched out in green grass in sunshine.  Most of those times have been quiet and serious, almost desperate in tone, clutching at each other to hold on.  

You cannot tell me that energetic connections aren’t real–I’ve proven that out at least twice in the past year with two new romances, and two old ones.  If you tell me things in my meditations and show me things, and then you call me the next day–even if we haven’t spoken in months or years–and repeat the same words and show me the same things as in my dreamwalking, there IS a connection.

I’ve not gone there often recently to my forest–I’ve gone to other venues for my meditations–but I’ve tried twice in the past few nights.  There are various men in the Enchanted Forest but one has come forward in these meditations and seems to be demanding my attention when I’m there.

What’s different is that he’s all about PLAY.  He’s hardly there a moment and we’re splashing water at each other from the fountain or throwing leaves at each other.  He has me laughing in this meditation, to the point where I giggle my way back into the waking world.  I have  not been able to stay there with him because his playing is so damnably disruptive and fun! 

Photo of Beale AFB antennas by casch52 

As with most Mercury Retrogrades, people from my past are coming out of the woodwork, but the most amazing thing was not the phone call I received late today but in what happened before. I’m left with an odd feeling of intense interest, annoyance, and a little bit of self-superiority as if I’ve been competitively tweaked. But what intrigues me most is something that he missed entirely in our conversation…but I didn’t.

So the strange part first and then the stranger part:

The strange part is that I’ve not talked to this man in quite a few years. He has been on his own spiritual journal for the past year, dealing with the rise of his kundalini and the inherent difficulty in handling that without and later with help. This tremendous awakening–one that has some qualities of what some of us call “ascension” and most definitely the qualities of what I’ve felt in connecting with Deity–has had a profound effect on him. This is all fascinating to me because I do love to hear individual experiences to compare notes. He’s tried to analyze this experience scientifically and has come up with what he sees as the secret of the Universe (my words) so that all experiences of this type can be explained scientifically. He and I have that in common, that we like to show the science of magick, though he still has his scientist’s sense of superiority that says his way of explaining the unknown is the only way.

I’ve been told it’s a true gift that I can see the connectedness in things that don’t seem connected and understand that it’s all the same thing but just different terminology and different way of experiencing the same energies. That gift of seeing this, though, can also give me a backlash of annoyance when someone else insists their way of experiencing such a profound experience is the only way. I don’t believe that any one person’s personal gnosis is superior to my own experiences, but many new converts to any kind of spiritual awakening do. He’s learned to manifest and is still in awe, but also at that dangerous point of feeling like he’s a god and can wield his new power however he wants without realizing the consequences yet. Given all my work in this area over the past couple of years, I found it chafing and amusing at the same time that he would present this information in such a way, but he may simply have meant it as being thrilled with this new skill and I may have been putting old attachments on his presentation, ones where conversations tended to be all about him and what benefitted him and my increasing weariness with his self-absorption. He also bumbled into a few personal areas that still sting–oblivious to them–and that colored my reception of the conversation as well.

So our conversation was quite fascinating in that Life, Death, and the Universe way I like so much, yet he didn’t understand that since we’d last talked, I’ve experienced everything he had to tell me and more. He hasn’t read enough of my blog or my books to know this, though, and some of his enthusiasm sounded arrogant mixed with heartfelt. No matter how many times I told him I’ve had these experiences and I handle them differently so that I can actually function on a daily basis, he was still the new expert on the Truth, even to the point of telling me how to instruct my daughters. I kept thinking how much Shannon–and especially Brian–could teach him. There seemed to be a competitive edge to our conversation, with him often talking over me so that I could not be heard, but then, he’s from my past, from those circles in my past where I was so often not heard and let myself be dominated. I didn’t care for it so much this time or the way it reminded me of those days when I was unheard and there’s still a big part of me that this man hasn’t heard, regardless of how many times I’ve said it. I don’t lose sleep over it.

But the even stranger thing was that I knew he was going to call VERY SOON. Not necessarily that he was going to call me today, but it was not a surprise at all when I picked up the phone. I was more wary than surprised. All these years, and I knew he was going to call me within the next six weeks. I’ve known that it was manifesting and I wasn’t really looking forward to it, figuring that if he was calling, it would be something to benefit him…not me. I have been feeling him thinking of me off and on over the past three years, but moreso in the past year since his kundalini rise. This has been growing stronger in the past few months. I know there’s been a residual energy connection with him that has never been broken but he’s broadcasting on a much higher frequency now and I’ve been receiving that, like it or not. He didn’t catch that in our conversation even when I pointed it out. I wish he had. If he could actually hear the people around him, there could be so much more.

This kind of knowledge he gave me today is important to me in my own understanding of energetic connections. He himself admitted I’d been on his mind during the time I’d felt him thinking of me. I felt him yesterday, very strongly. This morning, I dreamed of him, for the first time in many years. When I woke, I thought it was odd that we’d had such a long talk in my dream and I’d been okay with him contacting me. I’d expected more to tell him to go to hell, but in my dream, I realized that there would be something to be gained from this reconnection. He called within 12 hours of my waking.

I asked, after he told how I’d been on his mind, if he’d dreamed of me last night and he’d said no. He’d found my number after Googling me and he considered running a Google search to be the connection I referred to instead of the connection in the Ether I’d experienced as a dream. He didn’t get it. He just didn’t get it.

I guess I’m disappointed when I completely understand someone else’s theory but they either disregard or just don’t quite make the connection with mine, pardon the pun. But I’m thankful for so very much that this conversation showed me today, and on more levels than I can publicly describe.

c Lorna Tedder