“Is this emotion I am feeling mine?”
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Hi I’m Trevor Lewis, author of “Thriving As An Empath: Empowering Your Highly Sensitive Self.” I’ve been an empath all my life and since 2013 I’ve been on a mission to help other empaths learn more easily the lessons I had to learn the hard way.
This talk addresses the most important lesson for any struggling empath to understand – that many of the emotions you are feeling are NOT YOURS – and the way to find out whether they are yours or not is simply to ask “Is this mine?”
Right now you may be thinking “What do you mean, is it mine? If I’m feeling it, it must be mine? Right?”
Well, yes, and no.
The mainstream world we live in believes that if we are feeling an emotion it must be ours and that, if we don’t like the way we feel, we must fix ourselves to feel better. As empaths, we know that we pick up energy from other people and yet, we buy into the mainstream view that the emotions we feel must be ours they do indeed become ours.
The way to stop taking on other people’s emotions as our own is to ask “Is this mine?”
My clearest example comes from early on in my healing practice when I sat down to do remote work for a client. As I sat down at my desk, I started thinking about a customer service issue I was having with my cable company and within a few seconds got to thinking “This client is going to have to wait. I need to write another email to the cable company.” As I had that thought I realized the anger wasn’t mine. I had tuned into my client and had started processing his anger. In doing so, my mind immediately went to justifying why I was feeling angry and hence the issue with the cable company. Was I angry at my cable company? Yes, but in that moment the anger I was actually processing was triggered by me tuning into my client. Recognizing that allowed me to release my attachment to the emotion, to focus on clearing my client and, later, to deal with the cable company at the proper time.
Notice how tricky the intellect can be. The job of the mind is to create labels, stories and meanings behind what we are experiencing in the world. When I started feeling the anger, the first thing my mind did was to come up with reasons why I was feeling the anger and latched onto the cable company as the reason. After spending all of life being socialized into the mainstream way of thinking, it takes practice to remember the way our emotional bodies process other people’s emotions.
Often, just asking the question “Is it mine?” can be enough to realize that the answer is “No” and for the emotion to dissolve.
Sometimes, more work is required. If you can work out who you are processing, it is useful to run the Light Project Exercise for them and that can be enough to shift the energy. The Light Project Exercise is the topic of another talk in this series.
Now some of you are asking “How do I get an answer to Is this mine?” “How do I determine who the emotion belongs to?”. “If I don’t get an immediate intuitive answer or if I don’t trust my intuition, then what?”.
The tools I use are either a pendulum or muscle testing. These are both great tools for getting yes/no answers to specific questions. Their value is in bypassing the intellect and so enabling you to tap into the wisdom of your own body. Our mind doesn’t always give us accurate information; our body always does. But using tools to help our intuition is a topic for another talk. There is much more to be said on that topic.
Before I finish here I am going to add a footnote. Some empaths I have met don’t bother asking “Is it mine?” at all. They take a different approach of just feeling the emotion, whether it’s their own or not, and just allowing the emotion to flow through their body. The principle of non-attachment allows the emotion to be just that… E-motion, energy in motion. By just allowing the emotion to flow through, they can release the feeling and move on with their lives.
Thank you for listening to this talk. Thank you for helping yourself learn to become a thriving empath.
For more videos see … Thriving Empath Videos