For most of my life, I couldn't see all the things I was doing out of habit, but that I truly didn't want to do.

The belief that I had to was so ingrained in me.

It's very easy for highly sensitive people like us to betray ourselves.

We don't even know we are doing it. Especially if the circumstances of our upbringing brought us to overuse our empathy in service to others, it's become our default setting. And often to the detriment of our self-preservation and our joy.

The role of empathy in self-betrayal

Empathy is such an important (and needed more than ever right now) human quality. It allows us to understand and share the feelings of others, and to know what others need. It is essential in building a resilient and creative society. I think it should be part of the school curriculum because it is the building block for everything else if we want to lead a healthy and meaningful life.

Empathy is at its strongest when we are young kids. If it is modelled to us, it stays intact...

In this practice, we will be connecting ideas and thoughts with bodily sensations. I’ll walk you through all of it. Follow along and do what works for you.

What I would love for you to do is to sit with your feet on the floor. So, if you can have your feet on the ground, that will help with the intention of this meditation, which is to really connect with the earth. 

For this meditation, we're going to breathe in through the nose, and we're going to breathe out through the nose, which we normally don't do. But this is the intention is to increase the energy and to build this sense of inner world. When we breathe out through the mouth, the intention is to let go and surrender it all and allow liberation. But when we breathe out through the nose, we're saying, we're going to build here, so it's different.

I'm going to guide you, we're going to do each of the chakras, but we're going to talk about a quality in the chakras—there's one specific quality I want us to...

We were born very sensitive—At first, we didn't worry about the pain such openness would create. 

That is why being in the presence of a small child feels incredible. They don't hold back from showing their true sensitive self.

In that way, children are powerful. 

They can shift the energy in a room in a moment, simply with their presence. 

For adults with unexamined wounds, children are an easy prey. 

First, the adult feels uncomfortable in the presence of so much love and light that they shut down even more. The child feels the separation and the distance. There is no more connection and connection is love. 

The child experiences this as a disruption of emotional safety. 

Then, in order to feel better or regain power, the adult will say or do something to hurt the child, often under the pretense of safety or discipline, e.g. "It's not how we behave.”

Eventually, the child develops a protection mechanism in order to mitigate the pain of the...

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,...