The Everglow | Empath Survival

In this bizarre time, conspiracy theorists are popping out of the woodwork.  Those whose brains are not geared for conspiracies, are nonetheless being subject to the truly ridiculous stories put forth by such theorists.  It can be exhausting, and stressful dealing with those who can't accept simple events for what they are.  In my life I've learned it is best to stay away from such people, especially as an empath.  The conspiracy theorists will drain your energy because their brain has not yet developed far enough to process certain logic, or basic evidence.  Before you decide to engage in such a debate with a conspiracy theorist, make sure to bite your tongue, and walk away.  Or change the subject.

On today's show we'll discuss why it's useless to argue with people that don't want to accept reality.  Ultimately, unless you're getting paid to do so and you enjoy it, what's the point of trying to convince other people that a cloud is just a cloud and not a government "chem-trail" to influence the weather?  Why bother trying to explain to someone that September 11 was actually a bunch of terrorists and not the work of some inside government or "Deep state".  Ultimately you have nothing to gain as an empath, but everything to lose as you will exhaust yourself by playing a game of whack-a-mole whereby every time you succinctly disprove their points, they just jump to another or change the subject.

Take care out there!

What is Reiki and how can it help you? In the ever-growing sea of self-improvement options, from yoga to meditation, your options to live a better and happier life seem limitless in this day and age. In recent years, you've probably heard more and more about Reiki as a form of healing and overall wellness. In this episode we will talk to Manali Scott, an actual Reiki master, and learn about what is Reiki and how it can help you to heal as well as give you insight into what is holding you back in life.

This podcast is about practical advice you can actual use in the real world and for empaths especially, this is one you have to listen to! I was a skeptic until I met Manali and she helped me get out of a sticky situation.  Visit her website and sign up for  her mailing list and check out her services. You can find her website at Zen for You

Music by @Ikson

One of the best parts of traveling is the people you meet along the way. In just a few days, you can form friendships and bonds with other travelers that are deeper and stronger than with friends you have back home whom you've known for years. During my trip through Central Asia, I met Mark, who I decided to nickname "Dally", since he was from Dallas, Texas. When I travel, I often call people by the city or place they're from since it's easier to remember. Dally and I became good friends as we explored Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. As a fellow traveler who has visited 100 countries, today I have invited him on the show to discuss our love of travel, and some of the misadventures and exciting things that have happened along the way. From muggings in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, to almost drowning in a Turkish bathhouse, we cover it all.   Join us, won't you?

Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes for regular updates.  You can check out some of my travel videos on my YouTube channel by clicking HERE!

Music by @ikson

 

Have you ever wanted to run away from life?  In 2015 I was feeling so overwhelmed that I fled the country and ran away from being a lawyer! I told no one where I was going and fled to Thailand to be alone and save myself from having a breakdown. It was one of the best things I had ever done.  I went to Bali, Indonesia, then Chiang Mai, Thailand, and finally Calcutta, India for a month and told no one.  In this podcast I'll share what I did, I'll talk about the awesome travellers I met, and the life changing lessons I learned along the way.  Most people say you should always confront your problems and have the courage to keep getting up when you get knocked down.  They're wrong.  I learned that one of the best things you can do for your mental health is to run away from your problems and find happiness elsewhere.  I did and it worked out great! Check out my main website www.neilbhartia.com for photos and videos from my trip!

As an empath or sensitive person, do you find yourself always taking on other people's problems?  I don't mind just listening to their problems; I mean you actually mentally and emotionally bear the burden of other people's problems as if they were your own!  You find yourself stressed, anxious, and tired. Depending on the time of job you have, your personality and shouldering other people's problems all of the time can crush you. Today I discuss how to separate how you can be involved in helping solve a problem without bearing the weight of that person's problem.  Ultimately, it will help you live more peaceful when you realize that it is not your job to be responsible for other people's problems.

Resolutions you can use to change your life for the better as an empath. If you're always putting other people first, including strangers, it's time to stop and put yourself first! Learn how to be selfish, unavailable, and unreliable so that you can take care of your mental health, and pursue your dreams.

True story: the word NO is a complete sentence. As empath’s or highly sensitive people, we have a tendency or disposition to always be people-pleasers. Accordingly, whenever someone asks us for something and we don’t want to do it, we have a hard time saying the simple word NO. For an empath, saying NO is more of a negotiation, instead of an absolute or emphatic statement. Why? Because we are so concerned with offending the other person or pleasing them to make them happy, that we avoid using direct language to turn them down and try to negotiate declining the offer. Unfortunately, this ends up backfiring, as we usually get convinced to do what we ultimately never wanted to do in the first place.

So what do I mean about saying “no” becoming a negotiation? Let me give you an example. Let’s say someone asks you to go to a concert downtown. You have literally zero interest in going for a variety of reasons. First, you dislike the music of that particular band, second, the tickets are $200 each, and third, you’re working that day so you would have to get home from work early, get ready, and then spend another two hours trekking downtown in heavy traffic. Basically you’d be exhausted by the time you arrived to see a band you have zero interest in seeing.

But here’s the problem with the average empath: when our friend asks us to go downtown, we don’t say “NO”. Instead, we dance around the response. Example, instead of simply saying “no”, when asked whether we’d like to go to the concert, we answer “I’d love to go, but I have to work that day and I’d never make it on time.” Or we say something like “thanks so much for the invite, but the tickets are really expensive.”

Do you see the problem with answering like this? What you’ve told the other person is that you’re actually interested in going, except for a few things which can easily be overcome. Especially if the person you’re talking to is a friend, which obviously they would be if they were inviting you, you have now done is open the door to negotiating. The problem now is that with regards to your “I have to work” excuse, is that what are you going to do when your friend tells you - “hey don’t worry about getting there late, there’s an opening act and the actual band won’t actually get on stage until much later, so voila, you’ll have plenty of time to get home from work and get there in time to enjoy the show. I’ll even pick you up and drive us down!” or, what are you going to say if they respond by saying “don’t worry, fortunately the band is having a second performance the next day which is a Saturday when you don’t have to work. Great you’re coming now!” As you can see, you just fucked yourself. Because now, if you come up with an alternate excuse, it will make you look like a liar, or a flake.

In the second part of the example where you said you couldn’t go because the tickets are too expensive, what are you going to do when your friend starts trying to strong arm you into going by saying “it’s only $200, the band rarely comes to town. Stop being so cheap - you never go out and enjoy yourself anymore. It’s not much money.” Or what if he says “don’t worry about the tickets - I have an extra one and you can have it for free! What time shall we head down now that you can come?”

As you can see, you just fucked yourself. Because now, if you come up with an alternate excuse, it will make you look like a liar, a cheapo, or a flake. Or all of the above. The problem is for an empath, you don’t want to hurt your friend’s feelings by telling them that the band sucks and you have zero interest in going, so you struggle to find your voice and speak your mind. You’re almost obsessed with people’s feelings and not hurting them or causing conflict so you always speak using wishy-washy language to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes. The curse of an empath. Damned if you do,

OH NO!  You’ve been dumped.  Your girlfriend, or boyfriend, dumped you.  While at first you were a bit numb and it was playing out in your mind, with every passing day, and then every passing minute, the situation starts getting worse for you emotionally.  You started off thinking:  I don’t need her!  She’s replaceable and I’ll find someone new - to dwelling on her great qualities and then thinking she was the only one in the world for you.  Congratulations - you are officially in panic mode, falling into despair and depression.  Especially for an empath or highly sensitive person, the end of a relationship, when it doesn’t happen on your terms, can be particularly devastating.

Today’s podcast is about a few things, but mostly it’s about how to get over a breakup, otherwise known as the end of a relationship.  While there is no magic pill, employing some of these tips post-relationship can help speed up the recovery process.  And while it may seem like the pain is getting worse each day, just remember, that it will get better, and time really does heal this sort of wound.

While girls and boys, women and men, process the end of a relationship differently, I’ll try to speak generally about the feelings one goes through as well as what you can do to get back on your feet sooner rather than later.  Time is precious so why waste it worrying and pining about someone that doesn’t even want to be with you?  Most of the time you’re left bewildered, wondering what went wrong, but other times you saw the end looming.  Either way, unfortunately from my observations, probably 90% of the end of relationships involve a third party (ie. Your significant other met someone else), but don’t take it personally or beat yourself up over it.  Just like friendships can have a season, so can romantic relationships - people grow apart or start looking for other things.  There’s no reason to be mad at the other person, nor reason for you to be mad at yourself.

The strange part of a breakup, perhaps rooted in biology or natural history, is that usually the person that is on the receiving end of the breakup, is the one that suffers the most.  What I mean by this is that the person who gets dumped usually suffers the most turmoil.  Even if you were thinking of ending the relationship anyway, or perhaps you had ended it on previous occasions but had reconciled, the fact is that once you get dumped, you’re more likely to go down the path of feeling like crap.  I think there’s a famous Seinfeld episode about this where George Costansa is in a rush to breakup with a girl before she breaks up with him so that he doesn’t have to be the “dumpee”.

Anyway, the end of a relationship will send you through a series of emotions.  Let’s go through them briefly so we can discuss measures you can take to feel better.  I think the more aware you are over these steps, the more you can be assured that your just going through a grieving process like anyone else and that you’ll get through it.  How quickly or slowly you get through it though will depend on you and how hard you try.  

These days people get broken up with in a variety of ways.  Because we’re in the electronic age, don’t be surprised or take it badly if you’re broken up by text message, e-mail, or a voicemail.  If you’re really lucky you’ll get dumped in-person, but these days the new fad seems to be “ghosting” where your ex literally just blocks your number and disappears into thin air, never to be heard from again.

Let’s start at the top and go through some of the thought process you will go through after getting dumped:

* You’ll stay strong and think about what a jerk that guy was and how you can do better.  You’ll start by vilifying the way in which he dumped you, critical of the method, and your brain will likely go on attack mode, remembering all of the bad things and his flaws,

So it happened again didn’t it?  Despite all of the lessons you’ve learned, hundreds of hours of YouTube videos, Podcasts, and self-help books, you still let someone through your front door that sucked the life out of you and now that that person has found your magical teat to suckle off of, you can’t get rid of them.

You’re left drained, your eyes feel heavy, and you need to do a reset to get your energy back. If you don’t properly recharge or cleanse, you’ll end up becoming what you hate by being a jerk to your loved ones in an attempt to steal their energy to replenish your own.  It becomes this vicious cycle - someone has taken your energy and now you’re subconsciously trying to take someone else’s.  No wonder people like lawyers end up getting divorced so much - they probably do emotional drive by’s on their spouses on a daily basis.  if you wonder why you need so much alone time, then this is why - because you are trying to protect yourself from further emotional turbulence and you need this time to heal.

In any event I want to use this episode to talk about ways in which to recharge your batteries and reset your mood and essentially cleanse the toxic energies that you have absorbed.  What will be different though, is that as the modern-day hippy that I am, I don't really believe in all of these gem-Stones that you have to rub all over your balls.  I also don't believe in planets aligning in order to dictate your life such as I don’t think you have to wait for Mercury to be in line with your anus before you can help yourself.  I also don't think you need to risk burning your house down by burning incense and sage thereby setting off the fire alarms sprinklers and making things smell funky for your neighbors - something especially true if you live in an apartment complex.  The reason I do not believe in all those things is because those are all externalities and I truly do not believe that you need external material objects in order to heal yourself. Because once you start relying on these external things then what happens when you don't have access to them? For example I live in Los Angeles and I'm pretty sure if I go to Trader Joe's or Ralph's or Walmart I can't just find Sage so I can burn it.  Does this mean I have to run around town looking for sage or perhaps some sort of particular Quartz stone before I can begin the healing?  And what if there is a worldwide shortage of Sage - does this mean I can’t heal myself?   Nope, of course not.  The power to heal and cleanse oneself is within our self.

So here are some ways that I have found effective to help myself recharge my batteries.  Hopefully you find some use in them.  

1.  Make sure to give yourself some alone time everyday especially on a day when someone has taken your energy from you.

If you live with a roommate or you live with your parents or are married or whatever, then you may not have your own little cave to spend some time outside of the house where you can be alone. Especially in a big city like Los Angeles, it can sometimes be difficult because no matter where you go there are people around. But despite the crowds and big cities there are usually some places you can go to find some space.  A good place to do this might be a city park where you can sit on a bench and have at least a little bit of room with no one that knows you around.   Another place to get some alone time could be a public library.  While people may be there, at least they’re quietly doing their own thing which creates a very pleasant and healing environment.  I always love the smell of libraries.

While it is important for you to be alone, I think it's even more important that you're at least away from people that you know including friends and family.  At least when you're alone in a park or library then you're not around people that can try to use you as a conduit for them to use you to dump ...

After watching the NBA Finals in which the Golden State Warriors squared off against the Toronto Raptors in a best of seven series, I was prompted to do this impromptu episode when the Warrior's star player, Kevin Durant, severely injured his leg.

Kevin Durant was a unique player - not because of his almost 7 foot height, andand not not only because he was an amazing basketball player, but because of the fact that he was actually very sensitive to what other people would say about him even though he was a major celebrity.  Kevin injured himself about a month before the Finals and could not play.  Perhaps succumbing to the pressure to play again in order to save his team from elimination, he ended up playing.  From everything we knew it seemed like a bad idea in that he wasn't ready to play.

He ended up playing.  I cringed every time he had the ball.  Sure enough, not long into the game, he ended up tearing his Achilles heel, perhaps because he was injured and playing when he should not have been.   In this episode, I explore how giving in to what other people want can ultimately lead to your demise.

Good luck and best wishes to the kind soul known as Kevin Durant.