Does Empath = Psychic?

What does being an empath have to do with Psychic Ability?

Information from the psychic level is what people call a sixth sense. It involves specifics, like flashing on the location of your lost suitcase or predicting that tomorrow it will rain.

By contrast, having one more gifts as an empath comes under the category of spiritual experience, something that contributes to the evolution of consciousness.

As discussed in both my how-to books for training Skilled Empaths, Become the Most Important Person in the Room and Empowered by Empathy, whenever you work or play as an empath, your consciousness shifts.

Your aura merges with the other person’s, even if this happens so quickly that experience of conscious http://spidercreative.co.uk/wp-content/db-cache.php ness isn’t Austin conscious.

Consequently your way of experiencing life is forever altered (even if the changes are so subtle they are routinely overlooked by the conscious mind). Thus, every gift of a born Empath moves you forward spiritually.

Practical Points about Being an Empath

Actually, a simple way of distinguishing psychic experience from the experiences of a born empath is KNOWLEDGE TYPE. Psychic experience adds to your collection of information whereas discovery as an empath irrevocably changes the knower.

Another difference is TIMING. Psychic experience pops like a photo flash. By contrast, empathy dawns. Gradually. Even when you’re skilled, sometimes you’ll slowly wake up to a feeling of “There it goes again.”

Only then will you recognize that you have been traveling. Either you wake up to someone else’s experience in terms of your body-mind-spirit package or else you awaken inside another person’s package entirely. Well, that’s interesting….

The relatively slow-motion timing for doing a Skilled Empath Merge comes with one delightful advantage over a quick psychic flash. Skilled Empaths have the choice to linger.

Darn, No Stock Picks for Empaths

Another difference between psychic and empath abilities involves practical usefulness. I may as well break it to you now— if there’s a competition about usefulness, psychics win hands down. Laura Day, for instance, makes a point of how useful psychic information can be for making business decisions.

Well, becoming a Skilled Empath doesn’t necessarily help you pick winning stocks. Accuracy (truth that you can test) is a non-issue. Genuineness (truth that resonates within you) matters far more. Empath Empowerment reveals the deepest truth that you can hold and, like virtue, must be its own reward.

SERVICE is yet another point of difference. For a psychic, service is optional—desirable, prudent, definitely wise, yet optional.

I think of “Betty,” a friend who used her considerable psychic gifts in a way that may surprise you. She was a madam.

Yes, Betty would use psychic abilities to tip her off when calls for her “girls” came from detectives. For years Betty’s accuracy prevailed, helping her to foil the police. Eventually she sold her business to a non-psychic and, within two weeks, police raided the joint.

Ethically mixed situations like these are perfectly compatible with psychic development, even if not ideal. Skills of Empath Empowerment, however, demands that you be scrupulously ethical. The style of knowing is so personal that consequences of questionable choices will come back to you fast and hard.

Is Detachment Good or Bad?

Perhaps the most fascinating difference between psychics and empaths involves DETACHMENT. When it comes to giving service, psychics help others best by staying neutral. The crystal-clear quality of their information is what counts.

In Anatomy of the Spirit, Caroline Myss explains, “For me, a clear impression has no emotional energy connected to it whatsoever. If I feel an emotional connection to an impression, then I consider that impression to be contaminated.”

Her success as a medical intuitive and teacher demonstrates how a psychic can work with the utmost effectiveness without descending into the mushy, gushy, and vulnerable realms of service as a Skilled Empath.

For some of us, however, that mode of work is inescapable, even preferable.

Fortunately there’s enough work for us all, those who are talented as psychics and those who happen to be empaths.

Were you to train yourself to fit Myss’s mold, after great struggle, you could probably rid yourself of the “contaminated” perception that comes from sharing energy with the people you help. In doing this, you’d also lose about 80% of your effectiveness… and even more of your joy.

This prediction isn’t just theoretical. I’ve seen this kind of numbing happen to several empaths who’ve wound up as my students. Before finding me, they made heroic efforts to force their soul-level gifts to match up with those of their famous psychic teachers; to their detriment, they were trying to turn apples into oranges.

Surely the orchard of God’s helpers has room for us all. Some of us are psychics, others empaths.

What about Being Both Psychic and an Empath?

Couldn’t someone be both? Yes, some are gifted at both, even if they don’t make a clear distinction between them.

For instance, psychotherapist Belleruth Naparstek has written a brilliant how-to about intuition, Your Sixth Sense. In discussing terminology, she implies that those who call themselves “empaths” are using a euphemism for the more controversial term, “psychic.”

Later in her book, however, Naparstek gives personal examples of both the “pop” of psychic experience and the slower dawning of empathy—as though they were one and the same process—misnaming what I call Physical Oneness so that it can conveniently fit into the category of psychic perception.

In one anecdote, for example, Naparstek describes that she felt a lump in her throat while talking with a client. “How did her lump get into my throat?” she wondered. Later the client’s lump left, mid-session, and so did her therapist’s.

How did this happen? How, indeed! That was what I would call an Unskilled Empath Merge, using the empath gift of Physical Oneness.

When you give service as a psychic, transmitting information to others, you may bring important knowledge. Joining empathically doesn’t seem as flashy; you may have relatively little knowledge to report; yet by the very act of connecting, you bring healing. And that’s just part of the beauty of serving others as an empath.

Adapted from Empowered by Empathy by Rose Rosetree