This is written for the empaths – those whose sensitive hardware can make this world feel so loud, confusing and overwhelming.

I wrote this guide because I’ve struggled to survive in this world as an empath. And I know I’m not the only one. I’ve grown tired of seeing my empathic nature as a liability that I must compensate for. This is a common experience for empaths.

And yet, as this story will reveal, the problem lies not in the intensity of the world we live in, nor in our own apparent design faults.

I believe the way to truly survive as an empath in this world, is to realise none of it has design faults, and that the same capacities that seem like such liabilities, are in fact super-powers that are waiting for you to unlock them.

The way to do so? A journey into yourself of course.

Who is the empath?

Empath – one who has a high capacity for feeling/sensing. The root of the word empathy means to be “in feeling”. This is a universal human capacity. An empath is one who has a particularly high capacity for the felt experience of reality.

You’re born this way. In fact, it’s something that you already are as a soul (most likely). To become an empath takes a great deal of work on the part of the soul. Lifetimes of lessons. So, in the grand scheme of things, you could think of yourself as “high level” in this particular ability (which is a good counterpoint to the common feeling of it being a disability).

Perhaps this fact helps relieve you of some sense of fault – the idea that you’ve messed up your own nervous system, or you’re just built wrong. It’s actually quite the opposite.

In our current world culture, empaths are often people carrying significant trauma. Indeed it can seem as though the two are fused, or caused by each other. That’s kind of true.

It’s more like we’ve set up this trial for ourselves as incarnated beings, where we’re lovingly forced to struggle in some particular way with these capacities – and through walking into pain time and again, we force ourselves to learn who we are and where our gifts truly lie. The one doing the forcing – who set this thing up? You.

We’ve got to go through these trials to be conscious of those gifts. To claim them and therefore wield them with consciousness, remembering who we are.

To be an empath in today’s world is no easy feat. Especially if you want to make a splash with your contributions – make a difference. Our culture neither trains us well to use these gifts, nor creates conditions where empaths thrive. Indeed, our rational culture usually sees empathic abilities as soft, weak, fragile, dramatic etc. The modern world occurs as loud and often overwhelming. It’s easy to become entwined in victim stories about all of this. And to feel misunderstood and defective.

Part of my own challenge has been to admit to myself how sensitive and empathic I truly am. It doesn’t really go with the outfit I’ve been trying to wear in the world. But as I’ve got over myself (and into myself), I’ve come to see, with increasing grace, the power and blessings of these capacities. And that it is in fact possible to reach a place of harmony in your relationship to the world, where you feel like you’re navigating the ocean of life, rather than being drowned by it.

The following four principles are I believe, universally applicable to empaths. The first two are more like skills or capacities, the second two more like strategies. They all require practice.

If you want to make a difference, use the gifts you possess and feel empowered in the journey rather than overwhelmed by its magnitude, these principles are keys that help you unlock yourself.

One — Learn how to self-regulate

I believe this is the core survival skill for an empath. Because as an empath in this world, you’re going to get knocked out of equilibrium (and your self-sense) a lot. In other words, you’re easily triggered!

Something happens, and suddenly you’re feeling all this stuff in yourself, and in the other people around you, and it’s hard to tell whose is whose and what is what. Your head spins, your body goes into fight, flight, freeze. It’s all so much!

This happens principally because you feel a lot — you experience a lot of impact from the things that happen – it really resonates inside of your body-mind. Add in all that trauma your family line has been carrying for generations, add in all the ways you were fucked up as a child, add in all the karmic lessons you wanted to come and face, and you get a powerful mixture just ready to trigger and overwhelm you, greasing the descent into “here we fucking go again”.

This is all happening in a post-covid world where things seem the same but are definitely not. It’s like the gods switched the energy field of the planet when we were all in lockdown, creating a pressure cooker of what’s not working, thinning the veil and spotlighting all our unconsciousness.

This all adds up to a potent dojo for self-regulation practice.

Self-regulation is the capacity to find equilibrium in your own nervous system, in the moment.

One of my teachers Michaela describes it like a sheet of thick handmade paper. Your nervous system is the paper, and through your upbringing, it got all screwed up and bent out of shape.

You can meditate in the forest for 3 days and smooth the whole thing out, and it all looks flat. But the moment you walk back into the world, and someone says that thing again, those same crease lines show up once more.

You can’t change the crease lines says Michaela. You can’t get rid of them. But you can learn how to smooth yourself out. This is the capacity for self-regulation.

When you know how to do this, you can smooth things out as or after they occur. This empowers you to work with the challenges and trials your life is throwing at you, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of all the fucking feelings.

This can only be done in the body.

It takes a lot of work, or at least it’s taken me a great deal of work to get to a place where I’m (at least) competent.

It can only happen in the body because that’s the location of the actual hardware, and therefore all the latent capacities and buried traumas. You can’t talk or think your way through this.

You have to go down and in, and come bottom up. There are a hundred different approaches. My own path has involved a lot of embodied yogic/tantric practice, lots of bodywork (a kind that teaches you how to self-regulate), different kinds of relational practice, psychotherapy, shamanic healing.

Whatever the method that works for you and your being, the key is to spend time exploring the felt sense of your own body, and particularly the places you habitually don’t feel. I think it helps to do this in a safe space, on the mat or with a professional.

The key to empowerment here is developing the capacity to self-regulate in the moment. This is the power move. You have enough self-awareness to be able to notice yourself getting activated (or that you’re already activated), and enough skill to change your emotional and energetic state — regulating your own nervous system.

This actually requires a kind of “going with it” (rather than against it), allowing the energy to flow without swamping you.

In other words, you notice when you’re getting swamped, and know how to get your head back above the surface.

I think the most basic form of this is to pause and take a breath (or three). It’s like a remembering – “oh, I can slow myself out of the tailspin”, which opens up the space around you, rather than fixating on the rabbit hole you’re feeling sucked down.

When I do this now, it kicks into gear a whole lot of instinctual things I do with my body, breath, energy and feeling. These are things that I’ve developed over time non-rationally, lying on the table with my bodyworker Markus, or exploring on the floor of my practice room.

However you develop this capacity to self-regulate, I believe it’s the first key to surviving this world as an empath. Without it, you’re liable to be a victim of overwhelm. With it, you’re empowered to explore the intensity of your experience, uncovering deep understanding about the nature of yourself, the world, and your place in it.

Two — Develop your boundaries and barriers

Boundaries and barriers (which are different) are the second survival capacity for an empath. They combat our deep tendency to get entwined and lost in the feeling state of everything happening around us, putting our attention on everyone else, losing touch with our own self.

A powerful empath walks into a room, and whether they’re conscious of it or not, feels the whole thing. Their nervous system is set up to tune into the emotional and energetic state of the place and people. They literally feel the room.

A skilled and conscious empath can distinguish between their own energetic state, and that of others. Through regulation of their own nervous system, they can become a beacon of higher consciousness, even changing the energetic state around them.

Without the capacity to create boundaries and barriers these situations often result in an experience of overwhelm and suffering. The tumult of emotions, unsaid feelings, unconscious behaviours and intertwining energy fields results in a confusion for the empath, who cannot tell whose is whose, and falls into the same old story that the world is too loud and too much.

The root solution to this challenge is boundaries and barriers.

Boundaries

Boundaries are about expressing to someone else, where the walls of your castle lie.

“No, I don’t want you to talk to me like this anymore.”

“No, I’m not going to do it.”

“No, I don’t want you to come closer.”

Your boundaries are in a sense, natural—they are what lie at the edge of your own kingdom. They have an “authentic” location. However for many of us (and especially empaths) they’re often hard to locate. It often takes someone trying to cross one, to show you where it actually is. And the moment they do, you feel it.

Boundaries are fuelled in part by the energy of anger. Not aggression. But the natural anger that protects your sovereign space. Your own ability to say ‘no’ is connected to the predator in you who is quite happy to kill a possibility or create a wounded reaction.

It’s an explicit naming of where the line around your territory is. And when someone then respects that line, you create an experience of safety and sovereignty for yourself.

Boundaries come from a lot of relational practice – finding and owning your “no” with the people in your life.

Declaring a boundary – saying no – always starts with feeling the truth of it inside yourself. It’s a body sense before it’s a decision. For example you can ask “does my body want to be in this room right now?” Yes or no? That’s a felt sense, not a rational decision.

The higher level practice is one of truth telling – being so sovereign that you only say yes to the things you genuinely and somatically feel a yes to, and saying no to all the things that you don’t actually want to do. That puts the cat among the pigeons.

Barriers

While a boundary requires a naming – an actual communication of where the line is —barriers are done without a word. It’s the thing you do on an airplane or a bus when you just close yourself to the people around you and sit in your own space.

It is always and already in your own sovereign power to actually own your own castle. Your energy field. This can be done in a moment.

The goal is to seal yourself up in your own energy field. The feeling is like becoming denser – your own self is more concentrated in your bodily location.

This is the opposite to the common state of an empath – having your feeling sensors out all over the room and world.

Instead, you just sit in your own bubble. I’m me. I’m here.

I do this by imagining myself contained in an energetic bubble, the feeling of just being me, sitting in the sphere of my own energy.

It helps me feel at peace, safe, contained. I have the ground and space to follow my curiosity. I am protected from the intensity of the world around me. I can regulate the input and output.

Barriers stop other people reading you, or unconsciously reacting to you. It’s not invisibility, though people in public places will probably pay much less attention to you. It’s more like you’re just there doing your thing, and then they can just do their thing.

Barriers are also what protect you from psychic phenomena. A shaman or spiritual healer must have strong barriers to shield and protect them from the negative effects of any work they may undertake.

In its most simple sense, strong barriers are the result of just being in your own energy field. When you inhabit all the different parts of you, and you know who you are, nothing comes in that you don’t know about, or consent to. The barrier becomes a perfect membrane that allows you to be you, and everyone else to be everyone else.

Three – Be conscious of your energetic diet

What you take in is what your body then has to digest. This is obvious in the case of our physical diet. The food we choose to eat is what our body then digests. This is equally true for our energetic diet – the relational input we’re receiving — the ideas, feelings and stories we take in.

As relational beings, empaths are disproportionally affected by the quality and nature of the relationships they have. All the people who you have regular contact with impact your nervous system more deeply than most. Meaning: positive nourishing relationships feed you deeply, and negative draining relationships cost you highly.

I think of this like relational energy input. Our system is designed to feel deeply, therefore each relational connection is attended to with a lot of consciousness (whether we’re aware of it or not!).

And there has never been a time in known history when humans had quite this much relational connection in our daily lives. Unfortunately, most of it is connection with people we don’t know. For example, all the people suffering in a far-off country. Or the political leaders in such a such place. And these connections are mediated through screens in our pockets or on the desk.

None of this plays to the strengths of an empath, who is designed to feel deeply, and influence the people who are around them.

So, a key to survival is therefore: consciously limiting your nervous system input. Restricting the amount of relational connections you’re actively engaged in reduces the empathic load on your system. You don’t have to be connected into quite so many dramas.

For example, I have realised reading the news is a net negative for me. As I tracked my experience after reading it, I realised that it resulted in my feeling worse 100% of the time. Never once did I flip onto the headlines, read about the carnage, and then feel better and more positive about myself and my day.

My current practice is a 20 second skim of the headlines once per day. This seems to keep me informed about the facts, without getting infected by the polarised, vitriolic drama-porn.

I can’t say where you should draw the line for yourself. I can say that I strongly encourage you to draw one.

The same principle applies to personal relationships. Which are the connections that are a net negative for you? When you add it all up at the end, does it cost you energy or give you energy? Do you feel more alive and grateful after talking with someone? Or more tired and pessimistic? Your energy-body doesn’t lie.

Empaths are built for relational connection. We’re so sensitive to the nuances of things, we feel natural compassion for those involved, and we think about it while we’re doing other things.

What’s your inventory of relational connections that feed into your nervous system?  Which ones feed you? Which ones drain you?

Four – Healing is not optional

Empaths are generally carrying a whole bunch of trauma. It doesn’t really matter where it comes from, or what it is – the result is a great deal of difficulty and discomfort with being in the body. To be in a full feeling state for an empath, means being in touch with all the things that are hanging out down in the depths.

So we learn to cope with the pain in our bodies. Our world – with it’s brilliantly powerful market system – has created an unprecedented variety of disembodiment options. From sugar packed foods, to drama filled TV, to addictive super computers running our social media input, the market has created a million ways for us to distract us from ourselves, and numb our feelings.

The way out is of course through – down into and through your own body. And to learn to re-associate yourself with yourself means facing what you’re carrying.

Whether it is coming to terms with what happened to you as a child, or unravelling what your family lines gave you, the healing of ourselves is a key part of the journey. The same gifts that make an empath feel challenged in life also hold the key to superpowers. The route to both the healing and the empowerment is through the body.

I think therapy, and more traditional healing modalities are important, and often necessary. I think some of the most direct healing methodologies are shamanic and energetic – ones that work with the energy and life force of things, returning them to their rightful place.

I confess, I used to think “healing” was woo-woo and dumb – something for folks who did unicorn mantras because they couldn’t hold down a career.

Then my guides started facilitating me through shamanic healing processes, and I experienced the undeniable and strange power of it all.

I don’t think you can survive in this world as an empath without committing to your own healing journey. The conditions make it impossible – you will suffer indescribably if you try.

This is partly to do with the level of trauma we’re tasked with clearing as a species, and partly with the way the mechanics work. The healing journey not only knits up the wounds you carry, and reintegrates your sense of self, it teaches you, indeed shows you, where your deeper gifts lie.

You came down here into this life with a particular purpose. And if you’re an empath then you also came here to help with the big collective purpose of healing up the millennia of trauma we’ve all built up. And specifically, you might well have volunteered to come and heal your own particular family lines, and childhood experiences.

If you feel like that’s bullshit, and no one would willingly choose the amount of suffering you’ve had to endure, maybe it says more about how evolved you actually are as a soul, that you would choose to come and transmute it all. You must have the chops for it—some really big chops.

Healing and integration create space for super-powers

The dysregulated empath lives a life that is constantly on the edge of overwhelm. Things in your life swamp you, or threaten to. And so we’ve all learned to cope, find strategies that make it more manageable. Most of these are compensation strategies. They seek to make up for the short fall on one end, with more extension on the other. We think we’re too fucking fragile, so we heavily invest in the tough exterior. We’re scared of people disconnecting from us, so we work extra hard to be nice and likeable.

The foundational fear is that it all becomes too much. Too much for little you to handle.

These four principles are a basis for surfing the waters of life, rather than constantly drowning in them.

As you develop the root ability to self regulate in the moment, the conscious you comes present. The one who can act in the face of the wave, rather than floundering. This gives a fundamental experience of empowerment.

Boundaries and barriers are what teach us to distinguish between self and other, and to root in one’s own self first. These are both things empaths usually struggle with. This rooting in self further empowers you in your own sovereignty.

As you’re able to regulate, keeping your feet in your own self, you get more choice about the waters you surf. So often we get so used to feeling overwhelmed, we don’t notice that we keep picking relational connections that actually overstimulate us. It becomes a weird kind of comfort zone. Choosing our energetic diet is like the hero choosing to walk their own path, knowing where to go and where to avoid.

This entire process is a healing journey. It takes you into the heart of yourself, and all the ways you struggle to interface with life. The sooner we accept that, and commit to our own healing, the deeper the wounds we are able to reknit. And they go deep. Generations back. Incarnations back. And of course back into the deep pains of your own childhood.

Healing is not optional. And it’s also not something you need to complete before you move forward. You don’t need to fix your brokenness first. It becomes fixed as you walk the path and engage with life.

The integration of your own body and mind using these principles leads to a potent possibility for the empath: the use of their super-powers for the greater good, and the flourishing of their own life.

The central shift is described beautifully by my body worker Markus. Once you learn how to self-regulate, you can begin to navigate. The capacity for regulation increases your opportunities to explore your sensations with curiosity and openness. To navigate the territory rather than be overwhelmed by it.

The world on the other side feels fundamentally different. One of possibility rather than liability. There is a switch in outlook.

Less: I’m a sensitive empath who is struggling with the overwhelm of this world that doesn’t understand me.

More: I’m a highly developed empath who chose to come here to learn and help by doing my thing.

Or in other words, less victim, more beautiful, awesome being.

As the victim stories in me continue to melt and evaporate, I have experienced first-hand, capacities and powers that come online. Here are three that I believe are common for empaths.

One – The super-power of intuition

Empaths, as deep and sensitive feelers, are built to work intuitively. This is a powerful ability when unleashed. Unlike the thinking mind (which our culture generally considers the true mind), the intuitive mind is plugged into the territory of experience, rather than the map of experience.

To think your way through a problem requires mapping the territory, making assessments based on past experience and knowledge, then running the different scenarios through your simulating imagination. This is the superpower beneath our culture, and therefore also it’s limitation.

The intuitive mind does not think through the problem, it plugs into the territory – the actual energetic experience of it – and gains direct knowledge about it. With skill (knowing how to be pointed in your intention) and discernment (knowing what is noise and what is signal), your intuition can lead you to answers that according to the rational thinking mind, we have no right to know.

This can be applied to the most practical of situations. When for example, considering an invitation to an event, the thinking mind can spend a long time computing the different rationales, considerations, possibilities. But when explored intuitively, you get direct data from the body.

If you imagine being there, in the room, your body will tell you how it feels about it. It will know things about that place that you have no consciousness of.

If you chase the gift of intuition further along the tracks you arrive at what we’d now call magical abilities, physic gifts. These are still treated with scepticism by our modern culture. They are, however perfectly native, and increasingly impatient about being let out once more.

Two — The super-power of non-physical communication

One of the root abilities of a shaman or psychic is their access to non-ordinary reality. While modern culture only believes in physical reality, there is a whole variety of worlds and dimensions accessible when you know how to look. As an empath, you have a particular sensitivity to the subtle dimensions, allowing you to sense what many would never notice.

You can sense the actual spirit of a thing. And if you can sense it, you can communicate with it.

A tree doesn’t have a mouth that physically talks, and they don’t have a neo-cortex that (we believe) enables them to think. However, through non-ordinary reality, you can absolutely talk to a tree, and discover it has a mind too.

The same goes for spirit guides, deities, ancestors, celestial bodies etc.

These abilities are sometimes called the “claires”: clairvoyance, clairaudience etc. These are the different channels through which we can communicate in this way. Some people “hear” in non-ordinary reality, a kind of telepathy with other beings (I am like this). Others “see” the non-ordinary realms in image, shape and colour. As an empath, you certainly “feel” the other dimensions.

Underneath the survival strategies of the empath lies the ability to sense deep into reality, to know things our culture doesn’t even believe in.

Three – The super-power of space change

An empath has the capacity to walk into a room, and feel the room — to feel the energetic and emotional currents that are flowing through all the people and beings in that space. While in an untrained empath, this leads to overwhelm and overload, the integrated empath does something else. They don’t seek to tolerate the soup of sensations; they consciously influence the space.

Without saying a word, you are able to consciously change the energy of a room or situation. This begins with changing your own energy, expanding your own field, earthing down into the core.

The funky gunky feeling can be cleansed and cleaned. The tension acknowledged and given air to breathe. The darkness and negativity dissolved into light and love.

Whatever you feel like your current level of skill may be, know that your hardware sets you up to command this level of influence. A fully empowered empath is a master of spatial energy, conducting the flow of the moment through their own body-mind.

The practice is one of feeling yourself in your wholeness, then expanding to include the wider room in the same way you feel yourself. For example, feel yourself as a being of luminous love, sit in that direct experience, then expand the field of love to include everyone around you.

This can radically change a conversation, or a room, or a situation.

Closing thoughts

Writing this has been a healing experience for me – to see how far I’ve come. I often don’t find this an easy world to be in, given the level of my sensitivity. And I know how deeply many of us struggle with these same challenges.

Many has been the day I’ve railed at myself and God over the difficulty level of the game.

“Holy fuck, why does it have to be this hard!?”

Sometimes now, my guides will reply. “You’re finding it hard Ewan? Then make yourself soft.” Which is good advice for an empath. For in that softness lies all exquisite sensing ability that gives us such power.

I feel it now as I imagine you reading these words. The softness. The compassion for us, and all the struggles we’re encountering.

So I send you love and blessings, wherever you are fellow empath. I hope this has helped you in some way, as you walk your journey. If you ever get lost, feeling drowned by the near infinite possibility? Go down and in.

Your body knows.