Empaths, Emotional Weight Gain, and Love Handles
Empaths feel their way through their surroundings with an unparalleled intensity. In equal fashion, they feel deep unfathomable love, but at what cost? When empaths carry the emotional burdens of others, love handles develop.
Empaths and Love Handles
Empaths are the greatest advisors, priestly ones, and sages of our time. We are lucky to call them friends as they detect lies without effort. Their delicate senses are so highly attuned they put the galvanic skin response to shame. It is an empath’s gift, extraordinary sensory abilities, which make them insightful counselors, wise teachers, and intuitive lovers. Empaths feel their surroundings mega-intensely and this door swings both ways – they love equally with an incomprehensible depth. Their love is an emotional force that brings their whole heart, mind, body, and spirit to bear. This kind of love often overwhelms others. When their love goes unrequited or un-metabolized, an empath’s love handles are born. These are a symptom of the mind-body-spirit’s heavy burden of carrying emotional weight.
Living as an empath is not an easy thing to do. The empath’s jittery nervous system makes it difficult to manage their complex sensory experience. They feel everything. This will be experienced in a multitude of ways, from the disgust of an ill-tempered boss or coworker to the disappointment of their partner when they’ve had a miserable day. Not only does an empath feel deeply, they feel they must respond. Empaths are extremely sensitive and responsible individuals who carry the feelings and emotional baggage of others. Depending on the circumstances, life situation, and moods of their loved ones, these feelings might be joy, passion, anger, sadness, grief, loss, and even anxiety.
This kind of unmanaged sensitivity creates a dangerous and painful emotional cycle affecting them physically. Since our sensory processes (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) are different for every individual, no two empaths will experience their environment in the same way, with one exception. All empaths have a common thread that weaves through the empathic experience. When an empath feels unloved, an automatic self-protection mechanism kicks in. This coping mechanism developed in childhood in order to feel the thoughts, emotions, and intentions of others so the child would know how to gauge his/her behavior in response.
First, when an empath’s love is not reciprocated they experience a great emotional loss and this heavy grief takes an emotional toll. Secondly, even more challenging, when an empath loves someone who can’t or won’t love himself or herself, the empath will attempt to hold, fix, or change an emotional pattern in order to relieve the dissonance they feel so penetratingly in their own mind and body. The empath’s love handles are a physical sign that grows out of this invisible, but very palpable emotional-energetic exchange.
An Empath is Born
Early in life, the sensitive child witnessed the pain of a parent and subconsciously decided to take this suffering on. While in early childhood development, the young empath didn’t consciously understand their innate tendency to hold and metabolize their parent’s pain process. As an empath matures into adulthood he/she doesn’t realize that he/she is literally ‘loving’ others too much. An expansive capacity for compassion, love, and emotional holding comes from the empath’s second chakra that connects the energetic and physical body near the navel. When this energy pattern runs unchecked there will be a slow subtle weight gain, which first appears around the waistline. Left untreated it will run down toward the hips. This is a gradual warning sign that the body-mind-spirit are out of balance and rest, kindness, and gentle loving care of the Self are needed. Once the empathy weight hits critical mass it runs throughout the entire body and is not easily lost by conventional diet plans like the calories-in-calories-out method.
Learning Relational Health
When empathy weight becomes stuck or held in the empath’s body it simply means they have not been able to metabolize or transform foreign energy. The challenge for an empath is to learn how to love safely and healthfully without the weight gain. This means developing self-love and confidence at a core internal level. Love handles are only a sign of a long-held coping mechanism of caring entirely too much. While this may sound simple it can be extremely damaging to an empath’s self-esteem. It is incredibly important for a young empath to become aware of this pattern early because when treated at the ‘love handle’ level their system will recover quickly and weight loss comes naturally. This occurs when an empath becomes aware they can incorporate methods of daily self-care that immediately treat the imbalance. Once they bring their intention to this imbalance and use their energy for self, not giving it away to others, the weight often melts away.
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