Massage & Bodywork

JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2015

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technique ENERGY WORK The Empathic Healer Using Your Caring Spiritual Power By Cyndi Dale Do you frequently sense clients' pain in your body? Sense their needs before they speak? Maybe you know if clients are telling the truth or feel their emotions as if they are your own. Perhaps you pick up extrasensory messages about them. Congratulations. You are an empath. Empathy is a power with diamond-like facets, each surface potentially able to reflect feelings, knowledge, physical sensations, sensitivities, and "things spiritual." This ability bonds and unites, informs and instructs, but it also complicates. While it's beneficial to intuit a client's aching shoulder, it's another thing to have it linger in your own body or mind after the client has left. By understanding the subtle or energetic dynamics of empathy, you'll be better able to enjoy and apply its upsides and decrease the downsides. AFFECTIVE AND COGNITIVE EMPATHY Empathy is classically defined as the ability to sense what's happening to another, but it can also include being aware of your own internal state. 1 As such, it relies on an amazingly complex set of linkages. Most scientists highlight interchanges between the brain, other parts of the neurological system, and psychological programming. In regard to our relationship with others, experts often distinguish between affective empathy, the ability to relate to another's 102 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k j a n u a r y / f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5

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