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are you an empath?

COMMON EMPATH SKILLS

  • You are unusually good at guessing how someone feels
  • You’re sensitive to other people’s moods
  • People find it easy to confide in you
  • You instinctively know what people want or need
  • You might feel someone’s emotions even if they’re not near you
  • You might feel other people’s physical sensations in your own body

COMMON EMPATH SIDE-EFFECTS

  • Feeling emotionally or physically overwhelmed in crowds
  • Feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders
  • Feeling emotionally drained when you have to touch a lot of people
  • Feeling like you need to help everyone by carrying their emotional pain
  • Random mood swings (angry, sad, scared, etc.) that have nothing to do with your life events
  • Hard time falling asleep or procrastinate going to bed

            In Your Life: A Softer Kind of Awareness

Certain eye exercises can teach people how to relax their vision
through “soft focus.” Because unhealthy energy is hard, rigid, and
stuck, it’s helpful to learn how to have “soft awareness.” I don’t mean a
woozy blissfulness, but a state of mind that is open, relaxed, and
receptive. In that state, you give yourself the best opportunity to flow
with life instead of putting up barriers and resistance.
  As
regards eyesight, hard focus is specific and particular. You take aim,
so to speak, and keep and object in your sights. Soft focus widens the
field of vision. Instead of isolating one tree, you see the whole
forest.  […]  A tightly focused mind becomes narrow and linear if it
can’t expand.
  […]
  Soft focus sees the mind as a whole. You
view thinking as if on a wide screen, accepting that any possible
thought can come along. Instead of being a problem, the endless flow of
thought becomes the fertile ground of change. The flood cannot be tamed.
Nor should we want it to be, because the glory of the mind is that it
draws from a thousand springs. Every mental event is temporary: it
exists in the moment and then vanishes. Yet, strangely enough, the
present moment is connected to eternity, because the present is the only
time that is constantly renewed.

DEEPAK CHOPRA
from ‘Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul: How to Create a New You’, (pg. 68-69); published in 2009.

Memento mori: (Latin: “remember (that you have) to die”)
The
medieval Latin theory and practice of reflection on mortality,
especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the
transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Mono no aware (物の哀れ): (Japanese: “the sensitivity to ephemera”)
The awareness of impermanence (無常 mujō),
or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or
wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness
about this state being the reality of life.

L’appel du vide: (French: “call of the void”)
The
psychological phenomenon in which people, with no desire to die, find
themselves faced with a steep cliff and experience a strong desire to
leap.

Amor fati: (Latin: “the love of one’s fate”)
An attitude in
which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including
suffering and loss, as good; or, at the very least, necessary.

She sleeps all day,
dreams of you in both worlds,
tills the blood in and out of uterus,
wakes up smelling of zinc.

Grief sedated by orgasm,
orgasm heightened by grief.

God was in the room
when the man said to the woman
I love you so
much wrap your legs around
me pull me in pull me in pull
me in pullme in pull mein
pullmein

Sometimes when he had her
nipple in his mouth she’d whisper
                Allah-
this too is a form of worship.

It smelt like flowers the last time she
buried the friend with the kind eyes.
The last time she buried her face
into his mattress, frangipani.

Her hips grind,
pestle and mortar,
cinnamon and cloves.
Whenever he pulls out:
                  loss.

Grief Has Its Blue Hands in Her Hair by Warsan Shire

This breadth of rain names are specific, descriptive and highly nuanced—a reminder of how keenly and thoughtfully ancient Hawaiians observed and were connected to their environment. With these words they distinguished Hawaii’s rains in a multitude of ways: by color, intensity, duration, at what times they would arrive, the angles or paths they’d fall in, how a certain rain is linked to a place or area throughout the Islands.

There’s the kili noe, a fine, light rain, but it’s not to be mistaken for the kili ʻohu, which was even finer and lighter. Depending where you lived on Oʻahu, when the rain fell in a shape that would circle your home, that was a pōʻaihale rain. The island of Niʻihau has a special rain, the kulu pākakahi, which appears in November.

What’s amazing is how nothing about these names are arbitrary.

There’s a rain named called Hukiheʻenehu, given to a Hilo rain for when the nehu fish was running. When this misty rain fell off the south-east coast of Hawaii Island, Hawaiians knew it meant to pull up their nets and catch them.

Rain names like hoʻopala ʻōhiʻa indicated when the native ʻōhiʻa would ripen, and the Hoʻopuluhīnano indicated where on Kauaʻi the hīnano grew.

The kuāua is a name given to a rain without wind extending over a small area. The ʻuala (Hawaiian sweet potato) farmer would count this rain to help determine when it was time to plant.

In addition to recognizing how integral rains are to survival, Hawaiians are also informed spiritually and emotionally by them. Apo pue kahi is a name given to a rain that’s felt after a loved one passes.

“Our kūpuna (ancestors) were so attuned to their environment that they assigned individual names to the multitude of winds and rains occurring throughout the archipelago,” says Collette Leimomi Akana, author of “Hānau Ka Ua – Hawaiian Rain Names,” the most comprehensive record of its kind that compiles this extensive part of Hawaiian’s vocabulary, sourcing its oral tradition, mele (song), oli (chants), moʻolelo (stories), ʻōlelo noʻeau (proverbs) and written literature. “I believe they named each wind and rain because they encountered them almost daily and felt a kinship with them.

Hawaiians have more than 200 words for rain

Favourite Czech idioms translated literally into English:

  • Gather your five plums and leave! (take all your stuff and get out!)
  • To have nerves in a bucket (to be mentally drained and stressed)
  • To receive lentil/soda (to get told off)
  • That is a back bucket to me (I don’t care)
  • Mushrooms with vinegar (nothing)
  • Like a tiny moon on dung (very happy)
  • Once a Hungarian year (in very long intervals)
  • Bear service (to cause damage with originally good intentions)
  • Two asses of sth (lots of sth)
  • To get drunk with a bread roll (to be satisfied easily)
  • Cucumber season (dull season without any news)

Hypervigilance makes sense as a survival strategy. After our brain has perceived a life-endangering situation and gone into fight or flight, then some people’s brains will be on the alert for more situations that could also be threatening. If the type of trauma you experienced was abuse or assault, then you were hurt by a person or people. That’s obviously different than being bitten by a snake or in a car accident. And when we know our abuser, there is a breach of trust and emotional harm inherent in the assault.

So now when we find we’re getting close to someone, we start getting anxious. We look for signs we’re about to be betrayed or hurt. We get paranoid about someone’s tone or interval in responding to our texts. We’re anticipating the worst and unconsciously looking for signs that we’re right.

from How to Trust People Again