I'm not sure when or how I signed up to be a healer, but it was headed my way the whole time. People used to say things that verified that they saw a healer in me, but I denied it. However, something much deeper knew that it was a denial - a denial in the sense that deep down I knew I wasn't ready to face what I was destined for.
Those who are healers usually are disguised in a health field, a religious field, or volunteer in non-profit, but the list is exhaustible really. To be a healer means you care; you care about true healing.
My class, thus far, has taught me to differentiate between healing and curing. I don't have an interest in curing because that only fixes an issue surface deep. I was born a deep person for a reason. Seeking out the depths resonates greatly and profoundly with me and my ministry. I seek out emotional healing, spiritual healing, the kind of healing which isn't manifested physically.
Training to become a healer, as I intuitively expected, comes with its own healing assignments. Much like a doctor has trouble practicing medicine if they are sick, a healer is also not perfect, and will have struggles of performing healing. As healers, we are asked to remain aware of our own faults and weaknesses, as well as face the fears inside us.
I have never been a coward in facing my fears. With the exception that some fears are not worth facing or may not even make sense to (like facing a past abuser), it isn't any different with healing. Healing can certainly come through facing one's fears, but if fear isn't the hurdle for healing, then it might not be your destined route for healing. However, for me, I knew it was.
The root chakra faces many deep struggles, mainly of fear and anxiety. When an infant develops, they want to know, in the most general baby-minded way of perceiving things, that they are cared for and safe, that they will survive. This picture looks different across cultures, but is painted by the culture's perspective of survival. A healthy root chakra is stabilized over time when a secure and trustable environment for survival occurs. If this perspective is not maintained, then the root chakra remains vulnerable to unhealthy energies pertaining to this matter. Energetic signatures of openness or closedness (I'm making that a word now) remain imprinted upon the chakra. Whatever the cumulative perspective is will subconsciously feed the growing child until they are ready to heal. Other chakras develop accordingly influenced by the health condition of the previous chakra(s).
Being born an empath, I grew up feeling things that were unexplainable through the brain of a child, but I knew others were not aware of these feelings - at least to the level I felt them. I remember, when a child, guaranteeing others that I felt deeper emotions than the normal spectrum. As one who has a strong visual understanding, I believed there was a spectrum measurement of how an individual perceived emotional intensity (but try using those words when you are 8 years old); I knew I was on the heaviest and most intense side of the spectrum. I was different.
When I first learned of empathy and being an empath, I didn't realize they were separate ideas. Empathy, as Brene Brown teaches, is different from sympathy; it is where you experience feeling what others feel. Every emotional being on this planet has this capability - unless a psychological blockage occurs; however not everyone has the capability to control the intensity. An empath will feel the feelings more intensely, as if the emotions are their own. It is as if there is third-person empathy (normal empathy) and there is a first-person empath (really feeling emotions as your own).
Chakras and empathy were not something I could learn about in my protected world I grew up in. Christianity introduced me to the experience of spirituality and having me connect with that fun, mysterious world, but what I felt couldn't be explained in the religion I was most familiar with. The intensity of the feelings I felt led me to believe I felt depressed or "emo." Though a false identification, I adopted these pictures and labels to help express how I felt inside. This decision led me to study psychology, which popularly teaches about the brain and its following behaviors. While I enjoyed the intriguing thrill of studying psychology, and even counseling, it still only scratched the surface to what I was truly seeking. By 2013, I knew there was more I needed to find, but I didn't know what it was called.
As an empath, I have struggled to find my own identity. Mixed up with intense emotions that I couldn't explain to anyone else and not knowing if any given emotion was mine or not, I knew this was my work to figure out something deeper within me - who am I? Many find their fitting labels through their relationships or career choice, but that, again, I felt was just a surface answer. As with any other feeling, I experienced this deeply and was quietly emphatic (if that can make sense) about finding where I belonged. Remember, I felt different. Discovering the labels "empath" and "highly sensitive person" finally gave me some permission to allow how I felt.
Allowing a space to truly feel who you are inside is something profound; the feeling of "belonging" or "being home" provides a safe place to be and grow. This profound belonging, feeling who I was, was my foundation.
Reaching down deeper, now that I allow myself to be awake to that which feels within me, I realize there is a path for me to walk now. A few months ago, I felt very blind, yet apprehensive, about "what I want to be when I grow up." The funny thing is that I already know. I intuitively sense that there is quite a path for me in this lifetime but I am not aware at this time what career this path will lead to.
I consider being an intuitive and an empath a gift from heaven. Being able to sense things that don't seem natural in this world is pretty cool, but I also sense that I have these gifts for a reason. In fact, I feel it probably just as strongly as Jesus knew about his chosen path of ministry.
Jesus was not only a teacher, public speaker, and miracle-worker, but he was also a natural healer. It has always intrigued me how to heal: how did Jesus cure a woman from bleeding and what did he feel when the healing power left from his body into hers; how did Benny Hinn make people walk again; how do people get their cancer reversed instantaneously (and why don't doctors believe in it by now)?
Now I get it. The how is inside me, it is me. I have to truly feel, and even intimately know, that living energy inside me before I can do anything with that energy. That same place I reach into to find myself is the same depth I felt as a child that I called a place of emotional intensity.
Here is where it comes full circle. When my root chakra was learning about the world, the energies and empathic emotions that I experienced in the prime of my root chakra development told me that the world couldn't be trusted and was not stable. I protected myself by not allowing myself to identify with how I truly felt. Yet I felt deeply and with such intensity that wasn't explainable... until I learned what an empath was. Realizing the depth of feeling as a gift and tool for me to use in my personal identity opened the doorway for true, inner healing to begin. I wasn't ready to be called a healer until I took the special leap of faith, which included facing my fears - the baggage of energy that was held since young childhood in the root chakra, perceived through the heart of an empath.
Affirmations:
I release the burdens I felt when my family stressed and struggled financially (yes, as a one-year old empath, I felt that).
I release the socioeconomic expectations for living/house standards and realize anywhere can be called a happy home.
I allow myself to realize and own my capability and responsibility for living a stable and secure life.