An Empath is a person who has the ability to feel and share other people’s feelings and pains. Empaths are very sensitive to their surroundings, what they eat, and who they are around.  Naturally, Empaths are kind, good-hearted, spiritually attuned, and excellent listeners.

Are you an Empath?

You know stuff without being told

Public places, like malls or busy grocery shops, can be overwhelming

You feel others emotions and pains by taking them on as your own

Seeing violence, cruelty, bullying is unbearable.

You know when someone is lying to you

You pick up physical symptoms off of other people such as colds, body aches, headaches, pains, etc.

You have digestive disorders or lower back pains.

You are always looking out for the underdog. Anyone whose suffering, in emotional pain or being bullied draws your attention.

Others will always want to unload problems on you, even strangers.

You are a good listener.

You are constantly tired and drained of energy.

You are drawn to healing, holistic therapies, and all things metaphysical. 

You have a creative streak and a vivid imagination.

You have a love for nature and animals. You find yourself constantly outside connecting with animals and seeking refuge in nature.

You need lots of alone time or you will go crazy.

You get bored or easily distracted if not stimulated.

You find it impossible participate in things you do not enjoy.

You strive for truth and honesty

You are always looking for answer and knowledge. You always are found with you nose in a book.

You like adventure, freedom, and traveling.

You have a messy room, desk, locker, etc.

You constantly and seem to be in your own little world.

You find rules, routine, and control imprisoning.

You find yourself prone to gaining weight without necessarily overeating

You are able to sense the energy of food and often do not eat meat from an animal that was mistreated.

You have been labeled as overly emotional or too sensitive.

Your feelings are hurt easily.

Animals and children take a natural liking to you.

You are fairly quiet especially in crowds.

If you answered yes to all or most of these you are definitely an empath.

Ways to cope with Empathy:

Allow yourself to have lots of quiet time without electronics. Curl up with a book and put on soothing music instead.

Take time out of your day to sit in nature

Pet a dog, cat, horse, rabbit, etc.

Meditate

If crowds are overwhelming, eat a high-protein meal beforehand (this grounds you) and sit in the far corner, not dead center.

Ground yourself

Cleanse your space, aura, and chakras of negative energy

Practise breathing exercises

Carry or wear protective crystals

Develop a energy shield for your body

Crystals for Empaths:

Rose quartz - Helps push away negativity, provides a bit of extra energy, excellent for grounding.

Black tourmaline - Protects from negative energy.

Amethyst -  Helps to heighten and sharpen an empath’s intuition.

Lepidolite - Eases any anxieties empaths have when around other people. This crystal is well known for its power, peace, and its ability to promote luck, love, and sleep.

Malachite - Removes emotional blockages and helps calm when you are in a stressful situation. Absorbs any negative feeling you might hold inside of you.

Amazonite - Helps balance emotions.

Citrine - Repels negative energy. Relieves depression and mood swings. Opens the mind to new thoughts, helps with dream recall, and increases self esteem.

Obsidian - Repels negative energy, grounds you, and balances emotions.

Aqua Aura Quartz - Deflects and traps harmful energies.

Essential Oils for Empaths:

Basil - Lifts fatigue, anxiety, and depression.

Frankincense - Has an uplifting effect, prevents people from draining energy, helps your concentration, and clears mind clutter.

Geranium - Uplifting, decreases anxiety and nervous tension.

Jasmine - Mood enhancer, balances emotions, boosts self-esteem and lifts anxiety and depression.

Lavender - Balances emotions, relaxes body and mind, and clears negative energy.

Marjoram - Calms emotional trauma

Rose - Mood enhancer.

Sage - Uplifting, grounding, relaxing, prevents people from draining energy, and good for anxiety.

Vetiver - Calms nerves.

Ylang-Ylang - Relaxes and good for anxiety.

Resources:  Christel Broederlow, drjudithorloff.com, davidwolfe.com, dayinthelifeofanempth.blogspot.ca, theknowing1.wordpress.com, eathanlazzerini.com

Comment if you are an empath and a way you cope as an empath. Let’s see how many empaths are out there!

May the moon light your path!

Lido, Italy 2018.

Ah, romantic love; beautiful and intoxicating, heart-breaking and soul-crushing… often all at the same time! Why do we choose to put ourselves though its emotional wringer? Does love make our lives meaningful, or is it an escape from our loneliness and suffering?  Is love a disguise for our sexual desire, or a trick of biology to make us procreate? Is it all we need? Do we need it at all?

If romantic love has a purpose, neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet – but over the course of history, some of our most respected philosophers have put forward some intriguing theories.

1. Love makes us whole, again / Plato (427—347 BCE)

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato explored the idea that we love in order to become complete. In his Symposium, he wrote about a dinner party at which Aristophanes, a comic playwright, regales the guests with the following story. Humans were once creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces.  One day they angered the gods, and Zeus sliced them all in two. Since then, every person has been missing half of him or herself.  Love is the longing to find a soul mate who will make us feel whole again… or at least that’s what Plato believed a drunken comedian would say at a party.

2. Love tricks us into having babies / Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Much, much later, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer maintained that love, based in sexual desire, was a “voluptuous illusion”.  He suggested that we love because our desires lead us to believe that another person will make us happy, but we are sorely mistaken.  Nature is tricking us into procreating and the loving fusion we seek is consummated in our children.  When our sexual desires are satisfied, we are thrown back into our tormented existences, and we succeed only in maintaining the species and perpetuating the cycle of human drudgery.  Sounds like somebody needs a hug.

3. Love is escape from our loneliness / Russell (1872-1970)

According to the Nobel Prize-winning British philosopher Bertrand Russell we love in order to quench our physical and psychological desires.  Humans are designed to procreate; but, without the ecstasy of passionate love, sex is unsatisfying.  Our fear of the cold, cruel world tempts us to build hard shells to protect and isolate ourselves.  Love’s delight, intimacy, and warmth helps us overcome our fear of the world, escape our lonely shells, and engage more abundantly in life.  Love enriches our whole being, making it the best thing in life.  

4. Love is a misleading affliction / Buddha (~6th- 4thC BCE)

Siddhartha Gautama. who became known as ‘the Buddha’, or ‘the enlightened one’, probably would have had some interesting arguments with Russell. Buddha proposed that we love because we are trying to satisfy our base desires.  Yet, our passionate cravings are defects, and attachments – even romantic love – are a great source of suffering.  Luckily, Buddha discovered the eight-fold path, a sort of program for extinguishing the fires of desire so that we can reach ‘nirvana’ – an enlightened state of peace, clarity, wisdom, and compassion.  

5. Love lets us reach beyond ourselves / Beauvoir (1908-86)

Let’s end on a slightly more positive note.  The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir proposed that love is the desire to integrate with another and that it infuses our lives with meaning.  However, she was less concerned with why we love and more interested in how we can love better.  She saw that the problem with traditional romantic love is it can be so captivating that we are tempted to make it our only reason for being.  Yet, dependence on another to justify our existence easily leads to boredom and power games.  

To avoid this trap, Beauvoir advised loving authentically, which is more like a great friendship: lovers support each other in discovering themselves, reaching beyond themselves, and enriching their lives and the world, together.

Though we might never know why we fall in love, we can be certain that it’ll be an emotional rollercoaster ride.  It’s scary and exhilarating.  It makes us suffer and makes us soar.  Maybe we lose ourselves.  Maybe we find ourselves.  It might be heartbreaking or it might just be the best thing in life.  Will you dare to find out? 

From the TED-Ed Lesson Why do we love? A philosophical inquiry - Skye C. Cleary

Like the 1960s generation had The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, the Big Three of the 1980s were Prince, Michael Jackson, and Madonna. Their new albums weren’t just song collections, they were messages uttered by the Oracle up on the mountain, echoing across the valley. They were events, statements, re-incarnations. Each new album presented a new persona for fans to imitate and for critics to evaluate, or, in the case of Prince, decipher. (Artists, back then, had to change with each new release or else be considered irrelevant. David Bowie entered the 1980s a smart yuppie, George Michael in the span of 7 years went from sparkling teen idol to sensitive, searching biker cowboy.)

Michael Jackson and Prince were regarded as rival gods, with the former more commercially successful but the latter preferred by most serious music critics (though in reality, fans, like me, liked both). Michael Jackson played games with tabloid journalists, who in turn responded with growing hostility; Prince played pranks on music critics, who wilfully allowed themselves to be deceived and wowed by this inscrutable prodigy.

Michael Jackson’s Avalon was Neverland, a fantasy dream that always invited ridicule (though not from me); Prince’s Mount Olympus was Paisley Park, a place deemed so mythical that fans constructed their own maps from the few photos and bits of footage that existed of it, and then endlessly speculated on what life was like inside of it: the parties, the concerts, sacred rituals, whisperings, the spontaneous nightly sessions. “Did you know,” they’d say, wide-eyed, “Prince has this huge vault of original masters and unreleased music right under Paisley Park? Only he knows the key code.” Whole albums (all masterpieces of course) had disappeared into that vault, never to be heard by ordinary mortals. And he never slept: nobody had ever caught him sleeping. He just went on and on, creating music. That was Prince, the enigmatic wonder, the living love symbol, and flamboyant question mark.

I still find it strange to realize so many of the artists I just mentioned, who so energetically populated my childhood and early teens, are dead. Michael Jackson, Prince, David Bowie, and George Michael all died within 7 years of each other; but there’s also Whitney Houston, Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, and so many more. (Compare 1960s giants Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, who are still touring and releasing records.)

When Prince died, a little more than three years ago today, I was on Texel, an island to the north of Holland, where I live. I checked my phone, checked the news, like you so stupidly do every now and then, and then saw the incredible headline. A sunny day, clouds seemed to appear that moment. Some people love celebrity deaths and follow juicy rumor sites about who punched who and who stepped out of the limo without their knickers on; me, I get depressed. It’s like having swallowed a stone. The sensationalist cries around every celeb death to me are like a beehive of bad vibes, a pest, and I have to stay away from it as far as possible if I want to protect my mental health, or what’s left of it. Prince’s death made me take things slow for a week or so. I have to mentally chew on such things, change my settings, ease into the new reality, let my heart adjust to its new weight. I’ve often had to deal with death in my life, sometimes it’s as if every high-profile death shocks me back into that familiar feeling of dread and despair.

Though Michael Jackson’s Neverland has turned into a derelict theme park that carries the curse of being unsellable, Prince’s Paisley Park has become a museum. Occasionally, browsing the internet, I see photos of it, and I’m always struck, kind of uneasily, about how soulless it seems. What does the lair of an extravagant hermit look like? What did I expect? Not something that looks like the atrium of a New Age company maybe. Looking at the interior, those sad police photos that were released last year, I can’t help but see the stupendous mundanity of it all. The building itself, somewhere in a suburb outside of Minneapolis, resembles a bunker, and though the pyramid skylights, that vaguely resemble guard towers, provide some natural light, the rest of the building is artificially lit, but dark. The recording studio is just that. Some of the walls have sayings like “Everything You Think Is True”. Stained glass with stars, clouds, and guitars. There’s a potted plant here, and an ugly tangle of phone cords in the corner there. Prince’s bedroom was sparse with empty green walls, and a plastic trash can you can buy at your local Walmart (but he never slept of course). The legendary vault reminds me of the storage room of my dad’s old electronics company, with its disorderly shelves and half-opened cardboard boxes. And everywhere, in every corridor and every space, there’s Prince iconography, but it’s rather bland, like the cover of a cheap unofficial biography.

For Prince, it must have been strange living in your own mausoleum.

The music that came from that place though. I believe PARADE (1986) was the first full album he recorded there, and then everything that came afterwards. My uncle was a real Prince fanatic, taking a slew of albums with him whenever he stayed with us, bootlegs too, so from an early age I became quite well-versed in all things Prince. Bits of his lyrics are as familiar to me as old family sayings. Personal favorites are the albums 1999 (1982), BATMAN (1989), and the LOVE SYMBOL ALBUM (1992). I like the street-smart humor of his early stuff, the raw passion, the in-your-face sex metaphors, with symbols as loud as cymbals, just the wild mercury sound of it; later on, his work became more spiritual, and harder for me to follow. His whole being though was music, every movement was a melody, every step a beat; he created music the way other people breathe. He had more songs in him than a duck has quacks. If you listen to the posthumous release, PIANO AND A MICROPHONE 1983, it’s as if the piano, microphone and artist aren’t three separate things, but one organism, bleeding and generating music; it features some wonderful, loose playing. It seems to me that towards the end of his life, in physical pain and unable to play a piano or guitar unless stuffed with elephant tranquilizers, he started to drift, and drift further, until he fell over the edge.

Like Bob Dylan, whose mystique and inaccessibility he shared, Prince had a habit of frustrating his fans, by deliberately excluding a great song from an otherwise so-so album and storing it in his vault, or by making his music hard to buy or even find (online, before he died, there was almost nothing). That’s one reason I kind of stopped following him; the other is the depressing decline of his songwriting since the 1990s. Looking at his later albums, which I first dutifully bought until I didn’t anymore, there’s hardly anything I really like. None of the best-of compilations collect anything from after the 90s. What happened? Age is part of it of course. A decline in quality is inevitable, most musical artists do their best work in their 20s and 30s. It’s also possible Prince’s brand of singing about his women like they are divine vaginas simply went out of style. Once cheeky and outrageous (his work was why Parental Advisory stickers were invented), his songs no longer shock us 21st centurians. We’ve seen so much already. Dirty sex wasn’t the only topic he sang about of course (far from it), but it’s the one he pushed forward the most as part of his image; his “royal badness” was part of his appeal. (The BATMAN soundtrack originally was going to feature Michael Jackson as Batman, the force of good, and Prince as the Joker, representing decadence, sin, evil.)

But his supposed “badness” was an act of course. The cocky poses, flashy gestures and mean diva looks were an obvious shield against the outside world, a theatrical defense mechanism. An attempt to dazzle people before they can get to you. When you’re shy—and he of course was the shyest—you feel like everyone is constantly watching you, and you become overly aware of how you look, how you walk, how you come across; you are constantly aware of your physical being taking up space. So what do you do when you’re an artist? You perform. Everything you do becomes a kind of performance, a conscious act. It gives you a feeling of control: you know why people are watching, because you’re making them watch you. But the essence of it is always shyness and nerves.

There’s something endearing about that 1983 footage of him being invited on stage for an impromptu jam by James Brown, who a few minutes earlier had invited Michael Jackson up. Ready to upstage his rival, who had just performed some killer moves, Prince takes the stage, struts, plays some random riffs, struts some more, suddenly takes off his jacket and does some tricks with the microphone stand, claps to whip up the audience—and then as he wants to make a fast and sudden exit, he clumsily goes down knocking over a prop, stage hands hastily arriving from all sides to help him up.

He died in an elevator near the lobby, but the spot itself has been covered up by a new wall (it’s near the watchful eyes in the third image). I keep wondering what happened. Was he making his way down to the ground floor from his production offices, or was he going up from the recording studio to his bedroom to maybe sleep? One associate, questioned by police, stated that Prince had told her he “was depressed, enjoyed sleeping more than usual and was incredibly bored”, and that at his last concert, he felt like he was going to fall asleep on stage. Those were rare remarks. An intensely private person, he mostly hid his problems, not just from others, but even from himself. The end, then, was inevitable. As with Michael Jackson six years before, the drugs relieved him of his pain, and then of his life.

He never slept, and when he did, it was 4ever.