All posts by Molly

From Entitlement to Gratitude

Dear readers, dear readers, I know you aren’t the audience that needs the following blog because you are the very souls that cherish the Earth as it deserves to be cherished, but I have to write this any ways.

I find myself quite charged up about Elemental issues and concerns right now. One reason for this is that my Elemental friends and partners are currently in such distress. So once again, I dive into the topic of the Elementals, their work, their world view, and their relationship with humanity.

When I talk with people about Angels, most have figured out how they feel about these beloved beings. The last twenty years has brought much information about the Angelic kingdom to humanity’s attention. As a consequence, there seem to be fewer questions in people’s minds about Angels and also growing gratitude from the human community for the Angelic community.

This is not the case with the Elementals. They remain misunderstood and under appreciated.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Elementals sometimes appear to people in the form of Fairies, Elves, Gnomes, and other creatures, but their function is not decorative.

The big picture is that the Elementals hold Earth reality in form for us. They are the engine that drives the manifest world. Their mental focus holds the vibration of each and every thing in creation in a form we can experience as physically tangible. If you can see something, thank an Elemental, because it would not be in material form without an Elemental holding its form.

Because of humanity’s arrogant attitude towards the Elementals and their work, the fate of much of the material world hangs in the balance. Humanity must move from an attitude of “It’s my planet and I’ll do what I want to.” to an attitude of conscious cooperation, understanding, acknowledgment, and gratitude to the Elementals for their essential work. This will be necessary to restore Earth.

In clarifying the work of the Elementals, it’s important to understand that they do not have to serve humanity the way Angels do.

Angels must support us no matter what we do. They are assigned to individual humans and hold us with love and compassion no matter how we behave. Whether our actions add to the light of the planet or not, we will still have a core group of Angels aiding us. They will steadily support us throughout our lives whether we ever give thanks for this help. If we work consciously with Angels or serve humanity in a way that could benefit from more Angelic assistance, we receive more Angelic support. To sum up, humanity is lucky enough to have Angelic help no matter what we do. This help comes in many forms including guidance, encouragement, energetic gifts of love, hope, compassion, and other positive emotions, and opportunities for spiritual growth.

Elementals do not share the same rules of engagement with the human community as the Angels. The Elementals have much more volition about serving us. They have the free will to stop supporting our misguided ideas and creations.

Until recently the Elementals behaved like the Angels. They cleaned up our energetic and material destructiveness on the planet and basically went along with whatever we decided to do. They were willing to clean up our mistakes as a parent might clean up the mistakes of a very young child.
But these days, the Elementals know we are no longer like young children that do not know any better. The truth is, we have a sophisticated model of cause and effect, but are unwilling to own that we know it.

Unlike Angels, Elementals have a choice about their ongoing work for humanity. The Elementals I talk to seem poised to void the old contract and re-negotiate on much different terms. In fact, this process is underway in many places in the world.

In places where the old contract between the Elementals and humanity is still operating, if you make an atomic bomb in your basement, the Elementals will hold the different materials in form for you while you assemble the bomb. As with the Angels, they have choice about the level of involvement and will probably not send in extra support for this dubious effort.

But unlike Angels, who must continue to participate in our learning lessons to one degree or another, Elementals can completely withdraw their energy from a project, place, or situation if they choose. The thing itself may still stay in manifestation for awhile after the Elementals pull their energies from the situation, but the situation or project will not have the animating life force energy of an Elemental. It will be dead matter. Eventually it will break down and move out of form.

In many places, Elementals have abandoned the old contract with humanity and have begun to pull out all their energies.

Dead matter is exactly what a lot of the Caribbean felt like this winter. There was virtually no life force in the land and very few stalwart Elementals holding the place in form. I don’t know what to make of this except we need to change our attitudes and behaviors if we are going to get the Elementals to re engage in holding this and other places in form.

Why would an Elemental pull their energies from one of our creations or from a place where we inhabit or from some project we are involved in?

Because humanity, both collectively and individually, willfully proceeds with bad ideas that we KNOW hurt our planet home. It is not like we are being destructive because we lack information. We have the information to do better and yet, we refuse to do better.

The Elementals know we know better. They know we know what we are doing to Earth. They know we choose to make other things more important than our stewardship of Earth.

We have hit the end of the road on the Elementals’ willingness to let us keep going with this approach. When I talk to the Elementals nowadays, their emotions are intense. They are deeply sad and deeply angry. They are close to calling it a day and completely withdrawing their energies from vast tracts of land. The Angels hold a steady note because their work is different. They will be here in the same way if half the world is underwater. And if the world is half under water, it will be because we refused to be our best selves.

I have written about this before, but the mood of the Elementals calls me to return to this topic. I have been consciously working with Elementals for about twenty years and over this time they have grown increasingly distraught. They explain logical consequences to me more vehemently. That is, when they are calm enough to talk.

Let me show this shift as it relates to one small incident that arose this week.

A company wanted to use Green Hope Farm Flower Essences in their product, but balked at our request that they list Green Hope Farm Flower Essences on the label for their product.

When they first floated out their project idea, I e-mailed to explain to them that the Elementals that hold the energy of the Flower Essence in form in our bottles want to be acknowledged on the product label for their ongoing work, even when the Essence is transferred into another product. One analogy would be labeling Oreo Cookies and Cream Ice Cream with the Oreo trademark if actual Oreo brand cookies were in the product.

The company representative’s response indicated to me that she didn’t believe in Elementals and thought it was just me demanding something to focus attention on Green Hope Farm. I sensed that because she was dangling a large contract under our noses, she assumed that I would simply cave in to their way of doing things. I didn’t and I won’t.

As far as I am concerned, one of the most important things that happens at Green Hope Farm is that we consciously work with the Elemental and Angelic kingdoms in everything we do. The cooperative work and the human staff’s conscious acknowledgment and gratitude to our Elemental and Angelic partners are the cornerstones of Green Hope Farm.

This is not an abstract partnership. This is not a story I told myself about Fairies and Angels dancing around the yard. Everything that happens here is held in a crucible of all partners. When us humans run into a challenge of any sort, we bring it to our partners to discuss. Sometimes we do this in the format of a group meditation during which we ask for the guidance of our Elemental and Angelic partners. Over the years we have been amazed and awed by the ideas and solutions we have received in this format. We also try and give thanks for everything that happens here because of our partners. There is so much to be thankful for.

So whether the company representative thinks I am telling her a fairy tale or not, it doesn’t change the reality of my partnership with the Elementals.

I honor this partnership by following the Elementals’ guidance. This is for practical as well as emotional reasons. After all, I know from experience that the Elementals hold a superior knowledge about Earth stewardship and Green Hope Farm stewardship than I do!

I also thank them frequently for their willingness to be partners with us humans here. I appreciate their free will decision to be as involved as they are here. Heck, I just love the Elementals! So even as the company spokesperson kept referring to the Elementals’ request as my request, the Elementals are real to me and I will honor and support this labeling request as the very least I can do to acknowledge my steadfast partners.

As I went back to the company representative for yet another round of conversation, I felt the many Elementals I work with charged up about this exchange. I learned some things from the Elementals that I had never actually been told before. It was as if the Elementals patience has worn thin with the politics of such silly negotiations and they wanted me to understand more fully the realities of even this small situation.

The Elementals told me, in no uncertain terms, that if someone uses Green Hope Farm Flower Essences in their product without acknowledging Green Hope Essences as an ingredient, the Elementals pull the energy of the Flower Essences from the product.

They explained that because Green Hope Farm is a place where we are working to create a new paradigm of cooperation and conscious acknowledgment between kingdoms, the Elementals involved here will not move back from this standard of acknowledgment and cooperation to the dark ages of ignoring their role in all creation. NOR WOULD I WANT THEM TO!!

But they reiterated that even the old dying model of humans and Elemental work together in unacknowledged partnership did not allow for such egregious use of their energies. Flower Essences cannot be WalMartized by some greedy corporation.

The Elementals must be asked to participate, acknowledged for their participation, and thanked for their participation to make a Flower Essence or there is no life force in the Essence. If there is no life force in the Essence, the product is worthless.

People are going to feel this deadness because people are making decisions about Essences from an energetic place. If there is no energy in the product, no one is going to buy it. Yes, people might buy it for awhile, because of a snazzy label or marketing campaign, but because a bottle without energy is not going to offer any energetic support, people won’t be fooled for long. No one can fake together a Flower Essence of any value without an Elemental. No one can make a Flower Essence without the help of the Elementals and the Elementals aren’t going to participate in a sham or someone’s greedy game plan.

As I went back to explain again to the company representative that the buck stopped with the Elementals, the Elementals suggested I explain things in terms of FLOW. Lack of integrity impedes flow. Integrity is about wholeness. It is about acknowledging all the parts that create a whole. When participants, including the Elementals, are not acknowledged, energy does not flow from all parts through all parts in the same way as when there is acknowledgment of all parts.

This, of course, has implications in terms of practically everything created on Earth, but for the moment, the Elementals were keeping me thinking about this one small situation.

The example they gave me to share with the company representative was a situation in which someone stole a cache of Pennyroyal Flower Essence from me at a talk I was giving. The Elementals noted the irony of this situation in which someone stole Essences and then expected these Essences to help them to remove negativity from their life. For the first time, they told me that they had pulled the life force from the stolen Essences, but they also said that this was hardly necessary as the act of stealing the Essence compromised the energetic flow almost completely.

We all know this yet, humanity, when it does not honor and thank the Elementals, does not live this flow model on a planetary scale. And this company did not think it needed to live this flow model in its own business practices. For now, under the dying rules of Elemental and human engagement, this may seem to be working for this company in terms of their bottom line, but it never has worked and never will work from an energetic model.

The Elementals mentioned another event that they said was an example of what could happen when all participants were acknowledged.

Recently, the Elementals asked me to recommend that someone using our Flower Essence mention the Elementals participation more clearly on their web site. They asked me to tell the owner of the web based business that she could bring many more things into her life if she acknowledged the Elementals more fully. They explained that such an acknowledgment would vastly increase the flow of good things into her life. This woman was happy to acknowledge the Elementals on her web site in greater detail, because she felt a great kinship with them. Her written thanks to the Elementals was heartfelt and full of gratitude for all the ways Elementals supported her work. Her words went much further than the Elementals request. Hers was a very moving tribute to the Elementals in her life.

A very short time later, like less than a week, she got back to me to tell me that she had been offered a TV show and that wildly improbable and wonderful gifts were flooding her life. This is such a classic example of the generosity of the Elementals, if we but show a modicum of gratitude for their service to us.

In both the small and grand scheme of things, it is about moving from an attitude of entitlement to one of gratitude and partnership.

May we all acknowledge we know the difference and get a move on to be our best selves in relationship to this gorgeous Earth and in relationship to the profoundly generous spiritual partners that we share this whirling green planet with.

The News on Sunday

Yessenia had her baby on Sunday, April 30th at 2:47 pm. The baby was 7 pounds, 8 oz. Her name is Klaudia Svia Russman. Mom and baby are doing beautifully. Vicki took some great photos but we didn’t have the right adaptor to put them on this computer so for now, no photos. One of the “only in this millenium” shots was one of Yessenia holding a cell phone up to baby Svia’s ear so sister Kyra could say hello from home. Later Kyra came in and checked out the baby in person.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, May May oversaw mulching in the back yard.

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Riley is a more mellow supervisor. He mostly lies down in the sun. That’s him at May May’s feet.

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I am an extremely fanatical fan of mulch. I know many people like the look of exposed soil in their gardens, but I don’t think the soil likes it at all. Sometimes it is all I can do to keep myself from stopping at a stranger’s garden and telling them to put some skin on their earth! I think every garden deserves and wants a skin. It upsets me to see naked earth. It damages the soil to leave the earth exposed to the elements. For one thing, it makes everything so much drier for the plants. And the soil erosion! It’s so unnecessary! Plus, it is so much more work not to use mulch. If you use enough mulch, there are so many fewer weeds! It is not necessary to spend your summer hoeing unless you prefer that to the other jobs you might have to do if you left your garden.

In the perennial gardens, I use native bark mulch. I don’t lay it on too thickly, because by the end of summer I want to have the seeds from plants like the columbines growing new babies in new places. So, I get some weeds by the end of the summer, but also some new baby plants from the self sowers. However I NEVER get the weed volume I would get without mulch. This time of year, after I have weeded each bed of those late summer weeds from last year, I then put on organic amendments and compost. When this is done, I mulch the beds with this bark mulch. The mulch keeps down the weeds, keeps in the moisture, and eventually adds more nutrition to the beds.

Experts People writing gardening books say wildly conflicting and confusing things about the use of bark mulch. They say it leaches lime out of our already acidic soil. My feeling is this, acid rain is a lot bigger problem than bark mulch. I mean, we have rain falling here that is more acidic than vinegar and we are worrying about bark mulch? I just add as much lime as the Elementals ask me to each spring and fall and then I mulch like crazy. My life would be one long vicious battle with crab grass weeding session without mulch.

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I have only just begun with this year’s mulching. Pretty much any run to town this month, I will ask whomever is going to get a scoop of bark mulch for one garden or another.

In the vegetable gardens, I use mulch hay. I need to call Taylor farm soon and ask them to bring up 100 bales. They hay our field and in return, deliver about 200 bales of hay to the farm for a modest fee, 100 in the spring and 100 in the fall when we lay all the gardens to bed.

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A dog’s work is never done and for May May, Sunday brought another project that needed her focus. Ben and I decided that we needed to drain the fishpond of the vast quantities of weirdly gray, dead algae water. Here you can see the strange colored water mid draining process. Ben also rebuilt the wall to hide the UV filter that will theoretically keep the algae under control from now on.

As the sun fell on Sunday, Yessenia was with her babe, the fish had a sparkling clean pond of fresh water, one perennial bed had the mulch it deserved. Emily had found a prom dress, Will had a sunburn from an all day track meet on Saturday, his first ever, and Jim? He was still urethaning the shelf units you see in the background of this shot. Viva his office laundry room!

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I would like to say that we were paid for product endorsement with this placement of flip flops in the middle of the action scene by the fishpond. But that would be a lie.

Cats will be Cats

A Green Hope friend from Atlanta wrote this week asking if there was anything she could do about her cat’s relentless hunting. She was weary of finding bloody animal corpses everywhere and wondered if there was some way to get her cats focused on some other activity. She asked if the Angels had any suggestions.

The Angels suggested she take Eyes of Mary. This wonderful Flower Essence helps us see life the way I imagine Angels see life: without judgment, with complete knowledge that all is well, with total acceptance about what is.

Both this Atlanta friend and I found this a funny and wise suggestion. Much as I would like to sit around knitting with my cats, sharing tips on intarsia style knitting or cutting a steek through a fair isle sweater, most of the cats I have known and loved have preferred to be cats. This means they loved to hunt. As the Atlanta friend quipped after she got the Angels suggestion, well then, I guess I just need to keep the carnage out of the house.

The three royal cats in our household are cats and live like cats. They spend most of the winter dreaming of big game.

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Okay, so Mishka is actually looking like she is dreaming of getting away from William.
Now, with spring upon us, we see the cats at breakfast and then again at dusk when we make a concerted effort to get them inside and out of reach of the bigger game hunters in the neighborhood like coyotes and fisher cats. Plus, William needs his cat time!

The rest of the time our cat trio is out doing whatever it is that cats do. I see them tearing across the yard periodically or digging in the rose garden aka the outdoor litter box. They leave strange small organs on the front porch. They resist cuddling. No discussions about knitting.

Yesterday, there was a funny cat moment at breakfast. Mishka resembles a gently toasted marshmallow. There is no camouflaging herself in the greening gardens. Consequently, despite hours underneath the bird feeders, she has not caught anything. I must confess to being relieved by this. I usually stop feeding the birds when the cats start going outside after their long winter’s nap, but it was such a hard winter for the birds, I have gone on feeding them a little bit longer. I have been glad this has been safe for the birds.

Mishka, however, reached her limit of patience yesterday and took things into her own paws.

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But if cats don’t like to knit, birds don’t like to be cat breakfasts either. Not even a chickadee visited the feeders while Mishka tried her new hunting strategy. Finally, completely miffed, she jumped down and Bella, the experienced huntress in the clan, came over to give her a pep talk.

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Me? Just for that moment, I could see the dance of it all and felt like I was having an Eyes of Mary moment of enjoying the cats being the cats and the birds being the birds, even if Mishka was not!

April Projects

April is mostly about one thing for me. Weeds. Here is my weed pile from Friday’s weeding. At lunch today I went out in the rain and looked at where I had weeded on Friday. Not a good idea. Every last weed I missed has multiplied tenfold. At least I know what I will be doing when it stops raining.

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One of our garden ponds has been more than a little green, as in day glow green. After much research into algae management and also a lost season with a barley ball that floated around the pond and did nothing to improve water clarity, Ben decided to install this rube goldberg UV filter to see if it will do the job of cleaning the water.
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Within a day, the green was gone, but so far we are not sure this gray is a whole lot better.

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Ben tore out the stone wall and plans to rebuild it with the UV filter inside the rock wall. Hopefully all this dead algae that has turned the water gray will now settle out and we will have that sparkling clear pond of our dreams. Good news is that the resident goldfish and koi in the pool seem unfazed in the face of changing water conditions.
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On Saturday, before a lovely rain began, Ben and Will, with May May supervising, potted up our new grape cuttings for our “vineyard”. Maybe someday we will make our own vinegar for our Flower Essences!

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William was in charge of writing the labels. As soon as the grapes were in their pots and the next job was transplanting the 6 zillion seedlings in the greenhouse into six packs, the place cleared out. Transplanting broccoli seedlings just doesn’t have the cachet of putting up grape cuttings for a vineyard.
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When it started to rain, I sat down and finished a pair of socks for my wonderful six year old niece Taylor. What have I been thinking knitting adult socks when I could be whipping out many more socks for little feet? Taylor picked the wool. I hoped she would like that each sock was a bit different than the other. Looks like she does!

On Being an Empath; Some Thoughts, Some Tools

Lately, the Angels and your e-mails have focused on the gifts and challenges of being an empath.

Here’s some of what I have learned about being an empath, validating my empathic skills, and taking better care of myself as an empathic person.

WHAT IS AN EMPATH
Being empathic is one way to describe a general ability to sense what people are feeling without conventional methods of information gathering. In other words, empaths often know what another person is feeling, even when the other person doesn’t tell or show them this.

Empaths often have very accurate information without any conventional explanation for how they know what they know. Sometimes this extends to knowing what is going on physiologically for people, as well as knowing how they are feeling emotionally. Empaths have learned to read people’s electrical patterns and translate this information into thoughts like, “This person is angry.” or “That person is sad.”

Empaths take an ability that lies latent in all of us, this ability to read each other’s energy field, and developed this into a skill set. Some people are born more empathic than others, but often times this skill set is improved through conscious as well as unconscious use.

There are many reasons someone might develop this skill set. First, let’s look at the situation for empathic children and why they might hone their empathic skills.

GROWING UP EMPATHIC
In general, growing up as an empath can be confusing. It is particularly confusing when an empathic child knows what people are feeling, but these emotions remain unacknowledged by the people feeling the feelings.

Another confusing aspect of being an empathic child is that adults often do not acknowledge it is possible that a person can empathically sense what other people are feeling. This can make an empathic child feel lonely and anxious that he or she is imagining things.

Even when no one acknowledges these skills, many empathic kids develop their empathic skills any ways. One motivation for developing these empathic skills is a self protective one. Take a common situation in which what is said in a family is out of alignment with what actually happens in the family. An example of this might be parents talking about what a harmonious and happy family they are, when the adults are actually unhappy and take this out on their children through abusive behaviors.

Empathic children find that in order to be prepared for what the adults in their life are actually going to do, versus what they say they are going to do, it helps them to hone their empathic skills and listen to the emotional subtext.

Empathic children zero in on this split between what people say and how they feel because it can help them be slightly more prepared for unpleasant events. However, this split between how adults talk about the world and how empathic children experience it can be very difficult for the child.

I told an empathic child I was writing this blog and asked her about her daily life. She said that it was very lonely. She mentioned the common occurrence of standing around with a group of peers. She said she can feel when someone who says nice things to her really doesn’t like her. She said the difficult thing isn’t this dislike, but that she has no other friend who feels the same emotional subtext. If she mentions to another peer that a person doesn’t like her, her peer will say, “What do you mean? She just said she liked your hair.” This child empath said she felt very alienated from her peers because of many experiences like this.

No matter who we are, it is so important to have some other person contain and validate our experiences. However, for an empathic child, the adults in his or her life may be unable to validate their child’s abilities or unwilling to contain the child’s empathic awareness. This leaves the child with the choice to either cut off from this empathic part of himself or cut off and hide this part of himself from the people in his world who deny his empathic gifts.

People may have benign motivations for questioning an empathic child’s experiences. They may not be aware that anyone can empathically know what another is feeling and therefore believe they are helping an empath by talking her out of her insights.

Sometimes however, people may be focused on controlling the flow of information in a situation by denying the emotional subtext. Parents of an empath may not be ready to look honestly at the situation that their child is seeing more clearly. Peers of an empath may not want to admit what a cut throat situation they find themselves in socially. There are many reasons parents, peers, or other people may be unable or unwilling to validate a child’s empathic experiences.

I love knowing there are empathic children who have parents containing their empathic experiences and acknowledging them as legitimate and real. What a wonderful way to develop one’s empathic skill set, because a parent or mentor is acknowledging it and holding it to be authentic and valuable.

I suspect most adult empaths have not had this kind of childhood and therefore have a complicated set of issues to resolve in adulthood.

BEING AN ADULT EMPATH AFTER A CHILDHOOD WITHOUT VALIDATION
Empaths who have not been contained by an adult during their childhoods often have a difficult time containing themselves as adults. While they may have developed excellent empathic skills, they won’t necessarily back up their sixth sense. Why? Because they have had no model for this process. Empaths have so often been at the receiving end of personalities who would rather have them not mention what they know. This means the self edit button and the self judgment button are often well developed and well used by empaths. It is a worthwhile but challenging process to begin to validate what our empathic self knows.

Another difficulty for empaths involves discerning what emotions belongs to whom. While empaths can probably read the emotional context of any given group of people extremely accurately, if they have not had a mentor explaining to them how to discern what emotions belong to whom, they have little or no frame of reference about what is going on and can easily get confused about whose feelings they are reading.

After all, empaths have accumulated a lot of shaming experiences in which other people have told them they are imagining other people’s negativity, so they often come to the conclusion that any negativity they sense must be their own.

Say an empathic adult without any positive mentoring goes to a party where everyone is acting very festive. The empath may feel at once that there is great tension and anxiety in the room and that nobody is having a good time. The empath has probably seen it a thousand times before and can read the situation with great skill. However, the empath may be predisposed to think she is imagining the bad mood of the gathering or spoiling the mood of the party with her own projection of negativity. That’s probably what she was told enough times when she was a child to make her conditioned to own the whole experience as her problem. In point of fact, the empath is probably accurately reading what is going on and the tense emotions do not belong to the empath.

The empathic skills from childhood to read a gathering and then brace for what may happen can continue to leave an empath feeling isolated, unless she also learns to back herself up. In this case, backing herself up might mean leaving the party where everyone is trying too hard to have fun and finding genuine fun elsewhere. It would mean trusting her read on the situation and not feeling like she has to defend her read before a court of law in order to know it is accurate. It would also mean not taking the emotions of the party on as her own creation therefore making it her job to fix the party by leaping on a table and trying to entertain the crowd or in some way trying to soak up every sad piece of energy in the room.

It is a big understatement to say that many empaths believe that everything they are feeling is their stuff. They usually have had no one offer them the understanding that a lot of the feelings they experience are from moving through other people’s energetic or electrical fields and DO NOT belong to them. In fact, as I mentioned before, they probably have had a lot of experiences in which people told them the feelings DID belong to them.

This confusion about who owns what can be a consequence of growing up in a household where empathic skills are not recognized. If, as a child, there is a lot of emotional business not being acknowledged in a household, the empathic child STILL feels these unacknowledged feelings. A few instances in which an empathic child mentions whatever is going on and gets told that she is imagining things can leave this child with a life long tendency to take everything on. Once this pattern gets set, it’s not a leap before the person believes if all the emotions are her emotions, then all the clean up is hers also.

I am sure that there are lots of other complicated factors here, but it does seem to be a pattern for most empaths to feel responsible for everything they feel. This can set up a lifelong pattern of confusion about whose business ANY problem is.

In the best of all possible worlds, a child might learn not only that her empathic gifts are real, but also that while it is sometimes appropriate to do something with her insight, oftentimes there is nothing that she needs to do with what she knows but LET IT GO.

HOW TO HEAL THIS CONFUSION
It is a terrible burden to feel responsible for cleaning up so many feelings, but it is also a logical conclusion to draw when the adults in an empath’s childhood deny all the emotions swirling about.

One fellow empath continually reminds me to be gentle with myself as I try to figure out what problems belong to whom. My own tendency has been to add insult to injury. When I realize I have taken on somebody else’s emotional problem as my own, I don’t just let go. I let go and then give myself a hard time about my confusion. It is important to realize that empaths live through intense situations without any guidance for how to handle these situations. As we learn management skills for our empathic skills, kindness to ourselves is so appropriate and helpful.

One difficulty that occurs when we think everything we feel is ours is that we often keep all these feelings in our own energy system versus watching them come and go without any sense of personal responsibility. This is very hard on our energy system and is something that negatively affects our health and well being.

There are many reasons why carrying other people’s emotions as our own does not help anyone. First, it prevents people from dealing with their own business. If an empath takes on another’s energetic business, the empath prevents this person from getting on with the work of solving his own problems. But please no shame here! If you have a tendency to take on other people’s emotions as your own, it is almost certainly because as a child you were encouraged to do so. As you get clear about why it is not helpful to do this, try to course correct without self judgment!

Another profoundly important reason why it is not a good idea to take on other people’s emotional business is that it wears on our electrical and physical systems to carry all this stuff that is not ours.

When I was growing up, there was a little old lady living next door named Hermina. Her life was one business transaction after another and she financially triumphed in every situation. She owned several houses in our neighborhood and her annual rent negotiations were epic battles. Her killer instinct extended into all realms of life.

When I was about ten, I noticed that yet again, the ripe berries in Hermina’s berry patch were going to the birds. I asked her if I could pick her berries. I have a thing about berries. Even then, it made me feel upset to see ripe berries going unpicked. Hermina’s deal with me was that I would pick all her red currants and raspberries and she would give me half of what I picked. I am certain she never gave the fairness of this arrangement with a ten year old a second thought. A more uneven trade with Hermina came when I was about fifteen. I painted her entire house in exchange for a heavy Nikon camera that she could no long use, because she could not hold it steady.

Okay, so I was not the sharpest tool in the shed when it came to negotiating with this woman, but honestly, I do not know of any story about Hermina in which she did not get the best end of the bargain. Nor can I remember any instance in which she did a thoughtful thing for another person, even an infrequently visiting grandchild. The point of this story is that she lived way into her nineties in the pink of health. She never had an empathic moment in her life and therefore never carried anyone else’s burden for even a moment. No doubt there were many other contributing factors to her good health, but her lack of empathy put less stress on her energy system.

I am not advocating living like Hermina. It is a tragic way to engage with the human community. However, it is an excellent practice to be helpful in any way we feel called to help AND THEN make sure we have cleared our own energetic fields and are no longer carrying anyone else’s emotions or energetics in our fields.

I have had a lot of difficulties learning to be more meticulous about clearing my energy field. I had the usual confusion about who owned what emotions and often didn’t realize what a spring cleaning I needed. It also took me years to realize I needed to ask if it was my job to take on other people’s emotional business. This would seem to be a straightforward enough question with a straightforward enough NO answer, but I often lapsed into the confused thinking of my childhood in which it worked for the adults around me to have me own their emotional garbage, work to cheer them up, or in some way try and “fix” them.

This is another part of the dynamic for an empath. We seem to sometimes attract people who are happy to have us carry their emotional stuff for them. It is a challenge to remember that their personalities and our personalities may not make the wisest decision about who should carry the emotional baggage in any situation. Our divine selves do a better job of knowing that we all need to carry our own stuff and no one else’s.

As a young adult, I had a dramatic learning lesson in a situation in which no one was asking me to carry anything for them. I thought because I could read the energy of a gathering of people, it was my job to “fix” their energetics. There were many problems with my process, including this idea that there was anything to fix, but first the story.

Way back in the early 1990’s, I was giving a talk to a couple hundred people at the annual American Dowsing Convention in Vermont. This was before I had much practice seeing my own patterns of over responsibility at work or had any tools to shift my patterns. But let me tell you, did this experience ever motivate me to learn some new tricks!

Dowsers are incredible networkers and information gatherers, but they don’t always take the time to ground what they are learning into their bodies. At their annual convention, many dowsers walk around with so much mental energy and new information collected above their heads that it’s amazing they can stand up. As I began my talk to the convention, I sensed the ungrounded nature of the crowd and decided, without being asked and without checking with my own guidance, to “help” them out by grounding all the mental energy for them through myself. I don’t exactly know what I did or exactly why I did it, but I sure experienced consequences for my decision.

I walked into my talk in good health and after my “helpful” gesture, I staggered out of the meeting hall with full blown pneumonia. Whoa! Talk about a wake up call!

A year later, when I returned to speak to this group again, I went with trepidation. I had thought a lot about the event during the intervening year, but I wasn’t completely convinced I had figured out what had happened or how I could correct it. I didn’t want to live frightened of such situations, so I knew I had to go back and try again. I had to see if I had learned anything during my year of searching for answers.

First of all, I realized there was nothing wrong with the crowd. They were just being their curious selves. I also realized their ungroundedness was their business, but that because of my empathic nature, it was difficult for me not to tune into it this ungroundedness and click into my pattern of “fixing” this because I did not like the feeling of such ungroundedness myself.

I decided to begin my talk with a guided meditation in which I gave everybody a chance to ground themselves. This gave them a free will opportunity to ground or not. I tried not to move any energies through my own body. I also offered a Sunflower Flower Essence to anyone who wanted to take it to help with this grounding process. I decided to try not to feel into the energy of the crowd in any way, shape, or form but just give my talk and then let go.

It was a moment of satisfaction, relief, and gratefulness as I walked out of the talk in good health. I cannot tell you that I never goofed up again during the years I was out talking to large crowds, because I did, but this was a moment of getting to see I had learned something!

An additional thing that I would do now in the same circumstance is stop after my talk to do a short meditation to clear my field. Here is this process which you will recognize as a variation of the land clearing process I described several weeks ago in the blog.

PROCESS TO CLEAR YOUR ENERGY FIELD
Ground yourself to the heart of the Earth and anchor yourself in the heart of God.

You can spend a few moments and feel this connection to the highest and purest of God as it comes into your energy system through your crown chakra, down through your third eye and throat, grounding in your heart. Expand this energy and move it through all your limbs, out through your arms and legs and down through your third, second and first chakra. You can see yourself moving this energy all the way to the heart of the Earth if you like.

Ask your Godself to clear from your energy field all energies that are not pure God that you have taken on subconsciously, unconsciously, or consciously. This includes clearing your field of all emotions, thought forms, entities, beliefs that are ancestral, karmic, psychic, psychological, or from the mass consciousness. Cleanse your physical, emotional, mental, and etheric bodies.

Send all the energies that you are releasing out through a christed grid. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! A christed grid is not a religious thing. Using a christed grid means that the energies will be purified as they leave you so that they will return to where they came from anonymously. The energies are received back from where they came in a way which doesn’t encourage a new cycle of back and forth emotions to be created.

For example if you picked up Jane Doe’s anger and then return it to her through a christed grid, she just gets her own energy back to deal with. If you don’t use the christed grid, Jane Doe might feel that you were personally sending her new anger not her old stuff and she might want to send you the anger right back.

The christed grid is useful for another aspect of this process. Sometimes we leave a part of our highest, purest God self with someone else or somewhere else for various reasons. Now is the time to call that energy back, again moving it through a christed gird on its return so that it is washed clean and doesn’t create a new cycle of exchange.

When the clearing and cleansing is done, ask God or your Godself to fill in the space with more of God’s purest and highest loving vibration. No sense leaving a vacuum that can be filled with any old stuff! I ask God to pour pure divine light and love through me and then visualize God literally pouring a pitcher of liquid divine light down through every part of my body.

SOME SUGGESTED ESSENCES FOR EMPATHS

Golden Armor- While we have often stressed Golden Armor’s support to buffer out machine made electrical dissonance, it also helps keep inharmonious emotional energies out of our field too.

Flee Free- This mix offers more support to keep your energetic field clear. The Angels often work very metaphorically with Essences, so think of using this one if you have someone who is being a pest in your life.

Watch Your Back- Another one to keep your field clear, but remember to think metaphorically here too ie this might be a good one if you are shouldering burdens that are not yours to carry, you need to get another’s person off your back, or you feel someone is back stabbing you, etc.

Violet Transmuting Flame Violet- This one is helpful with cleansing work because you can use the Violet Flame Flower Essence and process to help yourself AND the people whose stuff you have inadvertently picked up. This addresses the common empath desire to help others. Working with this Essence, you help yourself but also don’t shame the wounded part of yourself that thinks it’s not nice to clear your own field at another’s expense. It’s good to remember that you are just sending people back their own stuff, but this Violet Flame process helps erase all the negativity, so working with this tool you don’t send back as much stuff because a lot of it has been transmuted. It is a win- win situation.

The Alignment Garden- This powerhouse helps to keep us on purpose and in alignment with our divine self and authentic mission in life. This helps us not fall into old patterns of taking on stuff that is not ours. Perhaps this is why it makes people feel so lighthearted!

All Ego Contracts Null & Void- This is a tremendously helpful Essence when we want additional support to cut ourselves free from old ego agreements we have with others to carry their burdens or inappropriately take care of them.

Spiderwort- Offers help to discern what is our business and what is not.

Thistle- Any Thistle Flower or spiky Flower blossom helps empaths when they feel their energy system in being invaded or dumped on. Lots of spiky Flowers including two Thistles are in Golden Armor and Flee Free, however you may get called to a specific one of these Flowers for a specific situation.

Abutilon and Wild Abutilon- These two are for better protection from inappropriate sound vibrations. These two Flowers help empaths who have sensitive hearing. You know you are one of these folks if you cannot stand listening to a lot of music without feeling really rocked emotionally. The Abutilons helps with all kinds of hearing sensitivities.

To Thine Own Self Be True- This mix offers more clarification about our true calling and life purpose as opposed to ideas we might have picked up in childhood or from the mass media like “I am here to be someone’s doormat”. This mix helps us find momentum on the road to our own true life.

To Hear the Angels Sing- This mix offers guidance about staying on mission and support to feel at one with our divine self that knows the perfect balance between self and selflessness, service without servitude.

The Family River Trio of Black Currant, Borage, and Bloodroot- This trio is helpful if you are working on the issue of not taking care of family member’s emotional stuff because “they are family and you owe them”. See the blogs “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “More on the Family River or Farewell to Rusty Plumbing” for more info on this topic.

Abandonment & Abuse- When other people get demanding in a way similar to what happened in our family of origin, we can trigger back into thinking we are back in this circumstance and must respond as we were trained to respond by picking up whatever emotional garbage they want to dump. This Essence combination helps us to heal this wound so we no longer fall into this old pattern, but can experience this kind of triggering situation with a new confidence that we are in a new life where we can deal with any situation with appropriate love for all, including ourselves.

A CAVEAT
Sometimes it is not so simple to clear our energy field, even when assiduously doing this meditation or using some of these Flower Essences. In my own life, I sometimes I need to examine my patterns in conversation with myself or with another’s in order to see my confused thinking and get the click that helps me to let go of someone else’s stuff. One thing I have to watch for in myself is that I often pick up the energies of people that remind me of some of the adults from my childhood. Their archetypal behavior can trigger my old responses of over responsibility. Sometimes it is not enough to remind myself of the logic of a situation. Yes, I know it is better for someone to take care of his or her own emotional business, but my own patterns can get activated almost subconsciously. This is why I try to check my system after finishing this clearing to see where I am still holding on. Sometimes it takes awhile to let stuff in my field go, but persistence with Essences, the cleansing practice and the examination process helps. As I see the patterns in my daily life more clearly, I may suddenly know I have some more energetics that are not mine to clear from my field. This is an ongoing process.

For all the difficulties with being empathic, there are also the amazing gifts of being able to feel what it is like to walk in another’s shoes. This can open such floodgates of love and oneness. I am most grateful for these experiences. Empathic skills are infinitely precious,they are just skills we need to honor, acknowledge, and support!