I am an empath. I was born an empath. For as long as I can remember, I've had the ability to feel other people.
Whenever there is some sort of humanitarian disaster, I feel it... REALLY feel it!
During the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square China, I watched every moment on television and cried for days. I still can't listen to "China" by Joan Baez without tearing up. I can feel my throat tightening just reading the lyrics (below). The images are vividly burned into my memory.
In the month of June, in the darkness of the moon
Went the descendants of a hundred flowers
And time may never tell how many of them fell
Like the petals of a rose in some satanic shower
Everyone was weeping in all of China
And Tiananmen Square
And even the moon on the fourth day of June
Hid her face and did not see
Black sun rising over Tiananmen SquareAnd Wang Wei Lin, you remember him
All alone he stood before the tanks
A shadow of forgotten ancestors in Tiananmen Square
And my blue-eyed son, you had no one
You could call a hero of your age
You have the rainbow warriors of Tiananmen Square, singing
China Shall Be Free
So many other disasters have emotionally overwhelmed me: the 1993 fire at the Mount Carmel compound in Waco, Texas; the genocide in Rwanda in 1994; the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001; the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004; Hurricane Katrina in 2005; the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, China; the genocide in Darfur, and now the earthquake in Haiti. Human rights abuses seem to have the most profound affect on me.
Not only do I feel the pain and horror in my head and my heart, I feel it in my body. Flares up my fibromyalgia.
"There's a great disturbance in the Force," my husband will say.
I'll be glued to the TV, watching every miserable detail, waiting for updated reports. This isn't because I have some sort of morbid fascination with disaster. It helps me make some sort of sense of what I'm feeling.
My astrologer confirmed this at our first session. She told me that seeing people suffering is very hard for me; that I feel their suffering in every part of my being. She was spot on!
It's a challenge to keep this in perspective. I can so easily sink into the suffering, so overwhelmed that I feel as though I'm drowning in it. I have to recognize that my job in this life is to feel the pain but not own it. While the news crews are recording the events, I am recording the pain and sorrow. I hold it like a chalice, offering it up to the Divine, releasing it to Heaven.
Are you an empath? Read 7 Signs You're an Empath by Isabella Snow.
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