Toxic Empathy
Psychologists make the distinction between “emotional empathy” and “cognitive empathy” or “social intelligence,” which is to appreciate what’s going on emotionally with another person without any contagion of feelings. Cognitive empathy allows us to understand that someone is suffering and still want to help, but without feeling what they are feeling. This distinction makes all the difference when it comes to serving and still conserving our energy.
Emotional empathy is a disembodied emotion, meaning that your attention is outside of yourself. You project yourself in the other person’s body, you feel what you perceive they feel.
Emotional empathy takes you out of yourself and places you in the other person’s shoes where you are disconnected from your inner world. You are out of your body and in an emotion that doesn’t belong to you. In the process, you contaminate your present moment awareness. In this state,...

Happy New Year, beautiful souls! 

May 2022 be the year you remember who you are and share your unique medicine with the world. We need you to be you, out loud, now more than ever!

With everything that has happened in the past couple of years, it's easy to let fear take over. Many of us have forgotten how to trust life. With our increased focus on the news and the global pandemic, our hearts have entrained with fear-based messaging and anxiety in the people around us. 

We know who we are, and we know what we want. But often, we close in on ourselves unconsciously, from a fear that is not even ours, that does belong to us. 

The incessant low-grade worrying that operates in the background without our conscious awareness sucks our energy. We become exhausted from always "fighting" and "protecting ourselves." Our bodies are intelligent, so to survive, we become apathetic. This is a protection mechanism. Our bodies are trying to keep us healthy and alive by shutting...

When I look back at 2021, I feel dizzy. The emotional rollercoaster was a lot to take for many of us. I often felt like my shoulders shrugged in, my heart tempted to close up. The disappointment felt was existential, like I couldn't be who I truly am, but not because I was in my own way. It felt the world was in my way. I saw how easy it was to give in to fear and go back to more safe, logical, and measured ways of moving through the world...

 Instead, I accepted the invitation and dug deeper. I found a wound in my heart that had been there for eons, a wound that said, "it is not safe to be that sensitive and that open, because in the end, it will hurt, you will be disappointed."

Familiar? This belief can take you back into old patterns very fast. It can easily be justified by how people around you live their life. It takes a lot of patience, trust in your core-essence, and more patience to move through. Your inner child holds this core wound, and it will work hard at...

Our chakra energy system can be separated into three parts. 

The first four chakras (root, sacral, solar plexus, and heart) represent the past and hold the memory of past experiences, from childhood and in utero, and the unprocessed traumas we have gone through even as adults. So in order to heal the past, we must sink into ourselves, make direct contact with our inner landscape, and explore what lives in us at the cellular & energetic levels. The first four chakras, when healthy, allow us to process and transform at a rapid pace. Experiences that relate to our sense of safety, belonging, ability to take action, and sense of identity move through us and resolve without interruption. As the expression of who we are to the world, these four chakras are supposed to change, transform, and expand over and over again. So healing is not a one-time thing. It is an ongoing journey that always brings us more into the integration of who we truly are. One should always start here on...

My body forgets quickly that life is on my side. Even after years of healing, my animal suit tries to protect me from disappointment by attempting to control outcomes. It wasn’t safe to be opened and soft as a child. And if I was, if my guards were down, then my environment would remind me quickly to shut it down. Often the reminder would come as a surprise, out of left field, catching me vulnerable, reinforcing the need for more protection, more layers.

Sometimes, everything outside of me proves true my conditioned belief that life is not on my side; I am the only one on my side. When my heart is closed, and my fire is kept neatly at bay below my diagram, with shallow breaths and business, of course, the reality I project is one of disappointment, of compromise, and of smallness.

And if I stay like this for a while, my inner world starts to crumble too. It’s harder to meditate, harder to breathe deeply, and my health suffers. Opportunities for a return to wellness seem...