In my last blog post, I shared one of the biggest myths floating around about being a sensitive being who absorbs the feelings of those around them. Because of this myth, sensitive beings around the world have been taught to hold back. We have been instructed to play small. We have been guided to abandon our true nature out of a fear that if we don’t play it safe, we’ll live a life of constant overwhelm from our surroundings. We have been taught that overwhelm is simply a part of our true nature and we have to suck it up and deal with it.
The true nature of the empath, however, is one that desires a full embodiment of the power we can feel inside, and a complete expression of it in the world.
We cannot be the true expression of our power when we are hiding from the world.
So what if instead of hiding from the world, we sensitive beings were to do the opposite, and actually run toward it?
I have been traveling full-time for the last 3.5 years, and travel has been the biggest key to healing and embracing my power that I have ever found.
When I first began my travels, I had already done a LOT of work on myself. In well over a decade of deep spiritual and self-development work, I had gone deeper than deep (or so I’d thought). But my travels taught me so much more than I could have learned by staying in one place… so much more than I could have ever realized I needed to learn or grow.
I have had incidents in airports that have rocked my world, but with each one I have come out feeling more powerful and fully expressed. I have experienced cultural frustrations that felt draining, but with each one I have come to the other side of feeling more connected to myself and every individual I meet throughout the world than I ever knew possible. I have felt the fear of uncertainty around my own safety, but each time, I have found more of what safety truly means within myself.
I have hit road blocks, challenges, exhaustion, overwhelm, and frustration. And I have come out the other side feeling free, full of exponential energy, and able to handle anything within this world and this cray-mazing life.
Traveling shined the light on the many fears that were hidden within the cracks and crevices of my psyche and the deep imprinting from lifetimes of having my power oppressed.
But most importantly, it showed me where I was still keeping that fear, shame, sadness, repression, and all other supposedly painful emotions buried deeply within me. And, in confronting the feelings that only a new land could bring, I discovered that pain was anything but. I found an ecstasy in the feeling itself that my travels helped to lovingly and courageously trigger.
When I would arrive in a new land, I would experience new things — including the history, the culture, and the pain of that land. As an empath, I was told by many that I just needed to learn to protect myself better. I was given advice on all sorts of methods to protect my energy field so that I wouldn’t absorb the pain of the land around me.
But I knew that wasn’t the answer. I knew that every ounce of pain I could feel externally could only enter me because it was already within me on some level.
And so I began to see my travels as an opportunity not only to explore, not only to experience new people and places, but to experience aspects of myself I wouldn’t have been able to find elsewhere — experiences that the land and its people were wanting to bring out in me, allowing hidden aspects of me to be seen.
I learned to receive every new situation and circumstance as my teacher.
From the frustratingly slow service in Brazil that always made me late for work, to the shame of Catholicism in Italy, to the uncertainty and fear of Morocco, and beyond. Each land brought me to my knees with a new experience of myself, a new experience of my humanity that was ready to be birthed, and a newfound lightness of being that I could never have experienced by staying home in the same place.
If we “play it safe” and keep to what we know in isolation, we as sensitive beings are depriving ourselves of the opportunity for our sensitivity to work the magic it is intended to have. It wants to grow us. It wants us to feel deeply, so that we can re-imprint the cells in our minds and bodies to restore the knowing of our true power.
Early on in my travels, I couldn’t get off an airplane without feeling overwhelmed by the energy I took on and I couldn’t get on an NYC subway without bursting into tears afterward.
Now, places like airplanes, subways, and busy cities like Manhattan feel like a simple playground of magic and comfort. Now, I can live in cities with high levels of danger and human conflict, and feel safe, grounded, and at home. And, most importantly, I have found a magic within the wholeness in my own being that doesn’t get rocked by the external world.
