For a long time, I thought empathy and clairsentience were the same thing, but once I gained more control over my own emotions, sensory experiences, and energetic field in general, here's how I now sense the difference between the two:
Empathy - an emotional attachment to the condition of another living being
Clairsentience - an intuitive felt understanding about another being's condition
When I see someone stub their toe, I might cringe and say ouch because I have a memory of what that pain feels like and where it's stored in my own body, which is empathy because I'm responding with emotional attachment to something that triggered a feeling. When I see a foot that has no obvious signs of issues or pain, but I begin feeling an odd pain in my own foot when I'm close to someone, that's clairsentience working between two energetic sensory fields full of information and awareness.
When I watch the news and begin feeling the weight of the world weighing down on me and depressing me, that's empathy triggering and engaging my emotional response. When I watch the news and suddenly start feeling a sense of tummy issues when a particular person is on the screen, even though I can't see their tummy, that's clairsentience working with my intuitive awareness of what may be happening in that person's body.
The challenging part of clairsentience is that you can't exactly tell what feeling is yours and what isn't yours until you know your body so well that you know what you're feeling can't possibly be yours because it makes no sense based on everything you know about yourself.
Meditation helped me learn how to treat all of the sensations and feelings in my body more like clouds of information that simply move through the body so that I can be less attached to how things make me feel emotionally and a much better observer of my own sensations. Once I was able to see sensations more objectively and less emotionally, it was easier to notice what sensations would come and go from my body and how it correlated with what I was doing or experiencing in a moment. This made it easier for me to understand clairsentience as an energetic awareness full of information rather than an annoying physical sensory experience.
By being such an intensive observer of myself and of everything else around me in my environment (thank you photography career), I began to notice that some feelings would enter my body when people would get close to me and then leave my body when people would walk away from me. Likewise, I would have some sensations that only happened in certain buildings or rooms, but not others. The quickest way to figure it out was to step in, and then step out, and then step in again to see if it was just me or my proximity to something. Those were the first clues I used to help me understand and make sense of my clarisentience and sensitivity to my environment.
I've had these sensations all my life but never understood them. They would just bother me and distract me and make me self-conscious or not feel well, but I didn't know how to sort them out from myself until I figured out how to manage my mind's observation tools separately from my emotions and sensory experiences. When emotions and sensory experiences are tied together, it's really challenging to sort out our own stuff from other people's stuff, because emotions make it all personal.
Once I became more aware of what sensations came and went, versus which ones traveled with me all the time, it became easier to sort out what was and wasn't mine. My aches, pains, or tummy things that travel with me no matter where I go, or only happen when I eat certain foods or move in certain ways, become so predictable that they are like learning how to ignore the sound of an air conditioner or refrigerator. Knowing the hum of our own body means that it's easier to be aware of what is unusual and how it seems to pair with environmental changes. This is also why it's important to observe your own body's reactions to different foods, different lighting conditions, different temperatures, different everything. If you can't sort out what predictably makes you feel a certain way, it's hard to sort out a lot of other things, so we always need to start from within first.
Once I was finally able to understand what was mine and what was outside of me, I also became aware of ways my sensitivity grew or diminished in relation to certain things. I noticed that clean living foods like fruits and vegetables made me more sensitive to the environment around me, and heavily processed or fried foods and alcohol dampened my sensitivities more. Once you know this, you can really use food and drink to shut down your intuition and awareness when you just don't want to feel things, and I'm sure that's why people make the worst decisions when they are drinking or have reached a point of feeling numb to the environment around them.
Until I learned the daily practice of reiki self-care, it was almost a fight between wanting to be healthy and sensitive, versus not wanting to feel everything around me. Reiki gave me more balance and control over my energy, my sensitivity, and the reach of my energetic field as well as more practice in containing it when needed. I eventually learned how to move through the world much more comfortably even while having my sensitivities engaged. I learned how to gain a little more control over my energy field, and how to push it outward, build an energetic wall, and pull it inward. This is mostly just a process of controlling our thoughts and awareness, because our energetic field actually has some level of conscious control.
I'm not unique in being able to control my energy field and awareness- we all can place our awareness in someone else's field. As an example that most people have experienced, or that you can try the next time you're in a crowded space... it's looking at someone across a crowded room and then having them suddenly look directly back at you even though you're far enough away not to be easily noticed. They become aware of you specifically because you placed your energy and awareness next to them on the other side of the room and they intuitively picked up on it, whether they knew it or not. Now, when you do this, because your awareness is across the room, you may not be completely aware of the person right behind you that may be eyeing your wallet or about to startle you, because your awareness has been placed on the other side of the room, so use with caution and don't be creepy about it. Likewise, the next time someone startles you or catches you off-guard, double check where your awareness was just before you were startled- you were likely mentally focusing on something away from your immediate surroundings.
Now that I have better control and use of my clairsentience and ability to feel into things, I don't have to go around feeling everyone's stuff when I don't want to. When people ask me to "see what I can feel about them" at random in public, it's easier for me not to immediately feel it, because I've actively learned how to turn the sensitivity down in public spaces. Having control also makes it easier for me to have a level of sensitivity and clarity when I do want to feel deeply and accurately for clients during reiki sessions and distance medical intuitive work, because I'm not carrying a bunch of other confusing stuff around with me or trying to sort out other information when I'm not doing a client session.
Do you recognize your own sensitivities? Have you learned how to work with them and better control them as they show up in your life? Share your thoughts or questions in the comments below!
Anne Ruthmann
www.abundantsphere.com
