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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ora North
Read between
September 13 - October 29, 2020
After a while, it’s hard for you to tell which emotions belong to you and which emotions belong to them. The more those lines are blurred, the more you lose your confidence and the sense of your mission here on Earth.
But being able to see everyone else for their emotions leaves you feeling oddly lonely in your own feelings.
Sacrificing your own personal journey for the sake of others, waiting for someone to do the same for you, isn’t the holy badge of honor that it’s made out to be.
If you feel irritated and claustrophobic regularly, that’s a sign your shadow is expanding to a point your body can no longer contain it.
Lightwashing will not work for you. Positive thinking to cover up your bad feelings will not work for you. You need to feel. You need to feel it all.
“Don’t give any attention to the negative news, because then you’ll be feeding the negativity and making it worse. Focus on love and light instead. Good vibes only!” This is a really convenient way to ignore reality and enable oppression.
When you willingly look into your own shadow, your own victim gets to step up into empowerment, and you get to see that. Your own villain gets to expand into kindness, and you get to see that. Your own innocent self gets to descend into some interesting debauchery, and you get to see that too.
Dividing our emotions into “good” and “bad” makes the empath experience even more painful, since we’re forced to distance ourselves from the “bad” in a way that doesn’t empower our emotional process.
You may be surprised by how good it feels to simply allow yourself to feel terrible without trying to change it.
If you’re getting strong no sensations in your body when you’re with a certain person, especially if it’s a romantic partner, your intuition is telling you that it’s time to walk away.
Give yourself permission to lose the relationships that aren’t good for you.
You must be able to verbalize your boundaries.
Even with our closest loved ones, we cannot assume that they will naturally pick up on our boundaries. We have to tell them.
On a basic level, when you change, your loved ones fear losing you. It’s a legitimate fear, because when you emotionally transform, the old you indeed dies.
The people who can’t or won’t adjust to and respect your boundaries are not meant to be close to you anymore, and that’s a tough pill to swallow, especially when you love those people.
It’s not your job to meet everyone’s emotional needs. It’s impossible, and that kind of accommodating nature is as disempowering for the other person as it is for you.
Unconditional love, by definition, is love that’s not subject to any conditions. The problem with this is that boundaries are conditions. Boundaries are conditions to a healthy relationship, set by each person in the relationship.
Since we feel so intensely, it’s easy to base our lives on external validation—that is, on the feelings and reactions of our loved ones—rather than on internal validation.
Knowing yourself inside and out, and being able to meet your own needs yourself, is the key to having high self-esteem that comes from within.
A healthy dose of space is the precursor to all true emotional awareness and realization.
We often lose our sense of mystery when we can read energy as much as we do, so finding someone cloaked in mystery is pretty damn appealing.
No is a sacred word. Use it.
Part of doing the intense self-work of the empath is letting go of relationships that cause you to struggle with your boundaries, safety, and vulnerability.
We tend to label these “failed relationships,” but I don’t believe any relationship that was created out of love can ever be a failure. When a relationship ends, it’s because one or both people grew so much that the relationship was no longer a suitable container for them. In that way, the ending of a relationship is a positive thing, a herald of exciting things to come.
The Japanese believe that items which have been broken are more interesting, and that their brokenness offers a beautiful history of the item.
Acknowledging and crying over this person that you cannot be will help you move forward with who you actually are. These old versions of yourself as well as the desired versions of yourself that never came to pass need to die so that you can live in the present.
If you’re constantly bombarded by the energy of everyone else, you won’t get the opportunity to explore your own identity because you’ll be too busy managing their feelings and energies.
