How To Overcome The Struggles Of Being An Empath With Ashok Gupta

Hello and a warm, warm welcome to our Facebook Live this afternoon or this morning, wherever you are in the world and watching. I'm so grateful that you're here with me today. And we've got a fascinating subject. The struggles of an empath and how to become an empowered empath. So that's the phrase we're going to be using today, how to become an empowered empathy. So those of you who don't know, my name is Ashok Gupta, and it's lovely to be with you today. We're going to say hello to all of you in the second part of our Facebook Live. So this first part, we're going to cover the struggles of an empath and how to overcome them. In our second half, we will say hello to all of you and answer some of your questions as well in a separate Facebook Live. So this is a topic that a lot of you have written in and you've wanted me to talk about. So it's been a long time in the making. So let's really dive in and understand what some of the struggles are of being an empath. So the first question is, what exactly is an empath? Well, an empath is somebody who finds it very easy to pick up on the emotions, whether they be positive or negative, of another person and not just pick up on them, then sense them, then actually experience them. The ability to empathize, to understand someone else's emotions and actually be with them to such an extent that you actually experience them yourself. So that's the definition of what it means to be an empath. And the way to look at it is if you imagine a couple of guitar strings. So when a guitar string vibrates, the guitar string next to it also vibrates. Okay? So there's a frequency that someone is vibrating at. And sometimes we talk about someone giving off a negative vibe or a negative vibration. And so we also vibrate with that negative vibration. And, you know, all of us to some extent, are empaths or have an empathic ability. It's just a question of whether we nurture that ability. So we've all had that situation where we've walked into a room without knowing it. We can feel there's a negative vibe. We've not even spoken to anyone or even seen anyone's face, but we can pick up on that negative vibration that we see or feel in that room. And empaths are people who are constantly picking up on the vibrational quality around them, whether that be from people or the world around them or even animals or nature. They have that degree of sensitivity and of course, being an empath is something to be celebrated. It's not a negative thing. However, if we are what I call a disempowered empath, there can be some negative consequences to being an empath. The main one being we can't help but take on the negative vibrations and negativity of other people around us. So that's what we're really going to talk about today, the downside of being a disempowered empath. And during our conversation, we'll be talking about how we can transform into an empowered empath to have all of the upside without some of the downsides of that skill or that quality. So there's a couple of friends that I want to introduce you to who've been dying to. To get on screen and be in one of our Facebook lives. So there are lovely actresses who will be joining us for the rest of today's session. So I'd like to introduce you to a couple of my friends. We have Anita, the empath, and we have Jess, the princess. Okay. So they'll be joining us today to demonstrate some of the transformations that we're going to be talking about. Very surreal moments on Facebook Live here, but hopefully you're still tuning in. So Anita is someone who is an empath, who has that empathic quality, the ability to pick up on other people's vibrations and emotions and to actually feel them herself. And Jess is somebody who's going to play the role of the negative person or the toxic person or the person who's always talking about themselves. So Anita and Jess are friends and they meet. And of course, when we're talking about being an empath and the negative consequences, these can be in friendships, these can be in work situations, these can be parent child interactions. So that empathic ability can demonstrate itself in so many of our relationships. So Anita and Jess are actually friends. And when they meet, Jess is somebody who has a lot of things going on in her life and wants to complain about them, blame other people, and he's in generally a very negative mood. Now, of course, we all have people who need our support in times of need, but there are people in our lives, and these can be our partners, our parents, our friends who seem to be completely negative a lot of the time or partially negative a lot of the time. And so Jess is one of those people who gets lost in her negativity. And so she's talking about all the difficulties that she's having, financial problems, her partner's left her, she's finding life a challenge. She just thinks things aren't going her way. And Anita comes along and listens, but Anita loses the light. And what I mean by that is normally she's in her light. She's a very intuitive person. She, she's quite spiritually advanced in some ways. But when she's with Jess, she loses it and becomes what we call enmeshed. Enmeshment means she now picks up and experiences those very emotions which Jess is experiencing. It's almost like she's offloading those emotions to Anita. And sometimes that can be because when Jess is talking about her problems, sometimes she triggers those same feelings and emotions in Anita which triggering her own emotions, her own issues. Sometimes it's simply because everyone we meet, we're exchanging energy with. So when these two people meet, Jess's vibrations get picked up and are transferred over to Anita. There's that exchange of energy. And in that moment, Anita normally is quite a compassionate, aware person, but she loses that awareness, she loses that stillness, she loses her light and she gets lost in Jess's problems. And that energy gets transferred from Jess to Anita. Anita then feels that stuck energy inside her. And what are some of the signs of that? She feels constricted, she feels those negative vibrations and she feels drained. She just feels like she wants to escape or run away from the situation. And because Anita is a disempowered empath, she thinks, right, I hate feeling like this and I hate her feeling like this. I want to fix this for Jess. How can I fix it for her? So she gets into that role of rescuing Jess from her problems and trying to fix it for her. Or she starts pitying Jess and saying, jess, that's terrible, that's awful. How could that person have done that to you? And in that way, all she ends up doing is enabling Jess's negativity. And Anita also experiences her energy levels going right down. And that subjective sense of energy we can call life force, or in Eastern thought it's called prana or qi energy. It's that life force that runs through our entire system that gives us that subjective feeling of feeling light and expanded and positive versus feeling drained and having low energy and low life force. And sometimes as an empath, we often are born with that ability. But if we've been through challenging childhoods, that can mean we learn to be hyper vigilant to other people's emotions. We start to worry about what other people are experiencing. And if we've had dysfunctional family relationships, we can begin to think that we're responsible to fix everybody around us, especially if we're the children of parents who had addictions or were abusive in some way. Then as an empath, we become highly disempowered, and we can become a helper. Some of you who follow the Gupta program, which is my treatment for chronic conditions, chronic illnesses, you will know that we use Anita as the helper role or the helper personality trait, or we become the approval seeker, and therefore, empathically, are constantly picking up on other people's vibrations. And some of the symptoms of this can be that longer term if we remain as an empath, a disempowered empath, taking on the negative vibrations of people around us, it can make us anxious and depressed. It can mean that we feel a victim of other people's negativities, and we feel that the world is a dangerous place or a bad place, and we start withdrawing from the world. So sometimes we start withdrawing from social situations or places where we can be in the light and demonstrate our power. We become disempowered. And worst of all, I've seen many people who have this empathic ability who then become cynics. They become negative themselves, and they start withdrawing from the world, seeing the world as a negative place, and they become cynical about the world, cynical about people. And this is essentially a hard shell that we put around ourselves to protect our empathic selves, to protect our soul in some ways. But that hard shell, that tortoise shell that we put around ourselves as empaths won't help us. Instead, we're repressing those emotions, and then we can develop health problems as well. So many empaths start developing certain health issues, and some of them can be things like me and chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, other kinds of sensitivities or other types of illnesses which we treat using the Gupta program. And so many of my patients suffer from these disempowered empath qualities, which is why we're doing this Facebook Live. Now, how can we move from being a disempowered empath with all those negative aspects or draining aspects to being an empowered empath? Well, let's have a look at the situation that we're in. So let's rewind. Jess has come forward and is speaking in a very negative way, in a toxic way, and literally sucking the energy out of Anita. We sometimes call them energy vampires. When Jess is expressing these, it isn't the real issue. Often we're not really expressing the real issue. The biggest problem that we have as humankind is our inability to resolve our emotions, our inability to express them, our inability to dissolve them. And that's why things like meditation and breathing and having a good, close network are very important to be able to resolve our emotions. And so often negative people underlying it, they have some toxic emotions stuck within them, such as grief or sadness or shame or guilt. And Jess, at a deeper level, wants to resolve those deeper emotions, but she doesn't know how to. So what's toxic or negative people do is they meet other people and play a role of being the complainer, the blamer. So they will complain about how terrible their life is to Anita, or they'll start blaming people around them or blaming Anita for how they're feeling, or they'll be a pity seeker, looking for pity and looking for confirmation or justification for how bad their lives are, and they look to you to justify it. Or. Or they keep talking and talking and talking about themselves and never show any interest in you because at some level they're looking for you to give them a sticking plaster. Jess thinks if Anita shows me some positivity and some sympathy and buys into my problems and gets enmeshed with me, then I temporarily feel better. But it's not authentic. It's not an authentic way of resolving that underlying emotion that Jess has. Jess wants to resolve that underlying emotion, but she uses being negative, being disempowered, complaining and blaming as a way of temporarily trying to justify how bad her life is or how. Or making excuses for themselves. So often blamers and complainers make excuses by feeling negative, okay? They can play the drama queen, literally. And Anita buys into it and thinks, well, let me feel sorry for this person. Let me take on their emotions, let me buy into their tragedy, and in that way, maybe I'll be able to help. And then the empath feels the pain and thinks, I want to get rid of this pain for Jess and I want to get rid of the pain for myself. I have to rescue them and I have to fix them. Unfortunately, that isn't going to work. And sometimes we indulge in being Pollyanna and saying, hey, Jess, everything's going to be okay. And we start indulging in positive statements, but unfortunately, Jess thinks, hang on, this person isn't taking my problem seriously. And often the negative person can resist your positive statements and can become even more negative to try and prove that you're wrong. Or we try to fix their issue, but it's too early to fix. Only Jess can fix her problems for herself. Or we try to tell them how terrible their problems are. Oh, gosh, Jess, that's terrible. Wow, you really are going through so much. I feel so bad for you. How could that person treat you? And sometimes, if we're not careful, we become an enabler. We start enabling their victimhood and that victim mentality by telling them and confirming to them how bad their lives are. And in doing this, we've stepped out of that strength, that witnessing awareness, and got lost and enmeshed in their problems. So how can we resolve this interaction? Well, firstly, recognize that Jess negativity, Jess is complaining and blaming and all the other things that negative, toxic people do is masking what's really going on for her. And when we recognize that, instead of getting lost in their problems, it's easier to feel compassion for what they're going through, because underlying it is an emotion, a strong, unresolved emotion. And those of you familiar with the Meaning of Life app, you'll know that unresolved emotions are one of the four conditionings that we talk about. So there's an unresolved emotion within Jessica. When we see beyond the complaining and we notice the grief or we notice the pain, then it's easier to feel compassion and stay in our light. So how do we transform from a disempowered empath to an empowered empath? It's as easy as A, B, C, D. Okay, so this is a process that we can go through. And we notice ourselves getting drained by negative people around us. A stands for awareness and acceptance. So, first of all, instead of getting lost in that negativity and lost in Jess's pain, instead we become aware of what's going on inside of us. So we say to ourselves, okay, how am I feeling right now? Am I getting drained by this person? Am I getting lost in the negativity? Let me step out of that and be aware that it's not mine to experience. It's not mine to do something with. It's not my pain. Let me hand it back to this person. Let me separate myself off from the pain that this person is going through. It's not mine to fix, and it's not mine to rescue her from her pain. Are we stuck in an old dynamic? Sometimes with our parents, with our partners, with our siblings, with our children, we get stuck in that negative dynamic of this person expressing their pain through complaining and blaming and feeling the victim, and we become the person that they suck the energy out of. Am I stuck in another dynamic like this? And that A for acceptance. What can help us step out of their pain into our own strength is to recognize that each soul must walk their path. We can't take responsibility for Jess's path and Jess's pain, that is hers to deal with. And we may judge that soul and judge their path and judge their pain, but then we disempower them because at a deeper level we can have a philosophical understanding or a philosophical perspective that each soul must walk their path and experience the ups and downs of life because that is what they've chosen. At a deeper level, we can't interfere with that. We can support their healing through that, but we cannot judge their path. And when we recognize that, then we stop trying to fix them or rescue them, or we stop resisting their pain and thinking how terrible what they're going through. We recognize that, that they are there to walk their path and we can support and help them in whatever way we can if they ask for it. Each soul is strengthened through the challenges that they go through. So let's not judge that. It shifts them and elevates them to the next stage in their conscious evolution or unconscious evolution, whatever way it may be. So that's the first thing. Awareness of what's going for us and stepping out of that acceptance for what they're going through and saying, this is not mine to heal, this is theirs. Return to sender. B stands for boundaries and self care. In this moment, am I able to step into my own light or do I need to have some space from this person? Empaths do need their own space. They can't be around people who are too negative for too long because inevitably they pick up on the vibrations. So it's having boundaries with that person, having space. And in general in life, empaths can be highly sensitive people or HSPs, so it is important for them to regularly recharge in nature. You know we charge up our phones, right? But if we aren't charging ourselves up in nature or regular meditation, then we're running our battery at 20%. And when we've got low prana, low life force, low qi energy, when we're around negative people, it'll be much easier for them to pull us down and drain our energy. So maintaining the light means that self care of regular morning and evening meditation. And as many of you know, we have a free not for profit app called the Meaning of Life Experiments with lots of great 10 and 20 minute meditations. And it'd be lovely if you haven't already. You can start a regular program of meditation and you will notice how that really supports your Ability to heal mentally, physically and emotionally, and also your ability to handle negative people around you. And what goes with that is obviously eating healthily, getting good sleep, making sure you engage in positive, uplifting pursuits instead of negative things, and spending your time around positive people. But we can't do that all the time. We will obviously encounter negative people or people who've got a lot of things going on in their lives right now, a lot of issues. It doesn't mean we hide from them, but can we stand in our power So B for boundaries and self care. Very, very important. Our ability to say no. Sometimes as empaths, we think we have to say yes to everybody and take on their situation and rescue them. But sometimes we need to say no to protect our boundaries. C stands for Conscious Compassion. Now that we've stepped out of their negativity into our light, how can we make sure that we're consciously compassionate rather than unconsciously compassionate? Unconsciously compassionate means we get lost in their story, their tragedy. We're buying into it, and we're unconsciously attempting to be compassionate. But instead we're lost. We've got sucked in. Consciously compassionate means staying in the light and observing what's going on for Jess. And that means we show care, we show compassion, and we show that sympathy and empathy through saying, I understand what you're going through. That must have been hard. But we don't get lost in the negativity. We remain separate and conscious, and we then have a holding place where we hold them in the light so they're able to actually express what's going on for them. And we become a conduit for that healing energy to be transferred to them without.