As published in Elephant Journal 

 
I know you are hurting.

I feel it. I feel the anxiety that burns. The weight on your heart. The pain in your shoulders. In your neck. I feel it all as if it is my own.

My stress. My ache. My desire. My confusion. My depression. My heartbreak.

Because I feel it I want it to stop.

Because I love you, I want to be the one to make it stop.

What I usually feel from you is an intense, unnameable energy that is your life force. Your very soul. A spark of the divine.

It is love itself.

It is glorious.

When I close my eyes, I can still see it. Colors that have no name as brilliant as the sun. A swirl of prismatic energy that sings in unison with the universe.

You still shine brighter than any soul I’ve ever known, but all I feel now is the suffering.

It overwhelms. Consumes. Destroys.

It dims that light in you—but cannot put it out.

This is not who you are.

You are laughter and joy and adventure and peace and commitment and life. I know this because I feel these things too. Not today. Not yesterday. Not for some time now. If I try hard enough, I can still touch them, but they are buried deep.

Hard to reach. Made all the harder to reach because you know me.

Knowing me has made it worse, because you know I am an empath. You avoid me and block me and keep these things to yourself because you do not want anyone, especially me, to see that what you want to feel now is the pain.

Pain does that. It blinds us to the truth that it, like all things, has purpose. Has a season. Will pass. Is temporary.

Pain doesn’t want you to know that.

It wants you to remain in the moment, convinced that it is lasting, so you either do whatever it takes to overcome it or be seduced into remaining there forever.

Suffering is possibly the most seductive of all emotions.

Misery truly does love company, but the company it desires most is your own.

You have stopped talking with me because you know I can see within you, and it makes you uncomfortable. It makes you want to run because you honestly believe that the person you are right now is who you will always be, and you don’t want me to see that person.

I see you. I see you though you choose to remain in the shadows. You cannot hide the truth from me; you are goddess. A manifestation of the divine. A sacred human.

Because you are unable to feel these truths, to access them, to realize them, you pull further and further from me and from the rest of the world, for fear of the off-chance that you will be revealed by another empath.

There is a better way. Join me.

My ability goes far beyond sensing. To be a true empath means to literally share feelings and emotions.

This sharing does not have to be a one-way street. The relationship can be symbiotic if you allow it to be. It takes practice and patience and trust but we, as One, can overcome those feelings through the simple, difficult, and always fulfilling acts of love.

Through shared breathing and the joining of heart and soul through Tantric practices, through faith and determination and commitment, and, most of all, through the sharing of love and gratitude, we can lift those feelings out of the dark places and raise them into the light—and we can forge new emotions in their place.

You will not hurt me in doing this. I have spent my whole life absorbing what other people feel. I have a capacity for pain and suffering that goes well beyond what others have because I have spent my whole life dealing with others’ pain as well as my own.

I have learned to separate those feelings, and to transmute them. I can take your pain and infuse it with intentions of love and gratitude, and together we can turn them into something meaningful.

I have also spent a lifetime absorbing other people’s love and joy and faith and trust and all those other wonderful things that we all want in our lives, and in absorbing them and making them my own, I have extended and expanded my own capacity for them.

Let me share that with you.

This is what it means to be loved by an empath.

Let me in.

~

~

Author: J.M. Greff
Image: Pixabay
Editor: Callie Rushton
Copy Editor: Travis May
Social Editor: Erin Lawson

Published by J M Greff

J M Greff is the rambling author, trucker philosopher, peace loving hippie, spiritual warrior, backpacking pantheist, wandering minstrel, and poet fool who created A Caravan of One for you. View all posts by J M Greff