It goes without saying that for most of us it may have been difficult to try to keep ourselves positive over the past two years. With so much going on globally and constant reminders by the media, it’s easy to get sucked in to the sadness and distress being felt on a global scale – particularly if you’re an empath.
We’re often reminded we must ‘keep our vibrations high’ and ‘stay positive’. There are even ‘daily affirmations’ you can find online, or asking your streaming devices for a daily positive affirmation. But is this really keeping you positive, or just a way of not really dealing with how you’re feeling and stuffing it down?
As a healer, I often hear other spiritual teachers say that ‘life happens for you, not to you’, or ‘everything happens for a reason’. I can’t stand these phrases personally and I don’t feel it’s helpful. No one when they come to see me for a treatment would want to hear that – my job is to help them heal from the wounds they are still carrying.
Don’t get me wrong – I do believe daily affirmations have their place, but I also believe you have to feel it to heal it, acknowledge how you’re feeling and let it come up to the surface to be released. However is it really keeping you positive if you’re just repeating a positive affirmation? I believe it’s all about the energy behind it and if you’re not really feeling positive it will still have a sad energy behind it.
Our emotions come up for a reason and are calling for us to deal with them. Telling someone to ‘smile – it might never happen (has that EVER put someone in a good mood…?), ‘you’ve got nothing to be stressed about’ or ‘there’s always someone worse off than you’ is dismissing the real feeling and not acknowledging how you’re really feeling. It makes us feel wrong to be angry, sad or anxious.
So please, stop making yourself feel wrong for feeling those feelings and giving yourself positive affirmations because you feel you should stay in a high vibration all the time. A high vibration isn’t about being smiley all the time – for me it’s not engaging in gossip or drama that pulls you down and doing things that actually make you feel good.
Give yourself permission to feel those ‘negative’ feelings and allow them to come up to release. Most of all, take care of yourself and acknowledge it when you’re feeling low, and don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it. Most importantly for those who identify ourselves as empaths – make sure that what you’re feeling doesn’t belong to someone else (you can usually tell this if your mood suddenly changes, or you feel drained after speaking to someone) and send it down to Mother Earth, or up to the Divine if that resonates for you