From Empathic to Clairvoyant

I found this question on Reddit and think it gets to the heart of one of the major side effects of operating through clairsentience. For this reason, I teach Clairvoyance as an alternative to Clairsentience. I hope the response I shared below is helpful to you if you’re one of the many who label themselves as empathic, energetically sensitive and intuitive.

Stronger my clairsentience gets, the more I dislike being around the majority of people. from Psychic

My Response:

I’m so sorry you’re struggling with the realities of clairsentience. It’s really difficult to be tuned in to other people’s energy, emotions and agendas on an ongoing basis.

Here’s the thing:

Clairsentience is accessed through the second chakra, two fingers below the navel, in your Astral/Emotional body. The second chakra is the seat of the emotions. It’s also the energy you use for creative expression, and it’s deeply connected to your sexuality. Chakras have openings that regulate energy flow. A chakra that is excessively open or too tightly closed causes energy disregulation, and can even cause physical imbalances. People who are organically clairsentient, or those who work to cultivate clairsentience, are creating an excessively open second chakra.

Chakras work like a vacuum. They take energy into the energy field, ideally from the aura that surrounds the individual, and ideally only the energy that belongs to that individual. When a chakra is excessively open, it’s going to vacuum in energy from its immediate surroundings, and not just the unique, autonomous energy of the individual who ‘owns’ that chakra. The more open the 2nd chakra, the more you’re vacuuming in other people’s energy.

The only way clairsentience works is through taking on and holding the energy of someone else (or multiple someone’s if you’re in a group setting), through the act of displacing your own energy to take on the energy from others. You become a little less you, and the individual who you’ve taken energy from becomes a little less him or her. This is part of the reason that healing professionals who are clairsentient or empathic burn out. They’ve taken on so many other people’s energy and dissipated so much of their own energy that they burn out.

Unfortunately, once someone else’s energy is in your field, your body thinks it’s yours. It can’t distinguish between your energy and someone else’s. So let’s say you are at a funeral, and there are a lot of sad, grieving people at the funeral. If your second chakra is excessively open, you’ll pick up and resonate with everyone’s grief and sadness, and your body will think it’s your sadness. Picking up and holding other people’s energy is not necessary for connection and authentic interaction, and there are actually ways in which doing so can be detrimental to your physical health. For example, returning to the grief scenario, the thyroid is effected by grief. It’s not unusual for a person who loses a loved one to experience a decrease in thyroid function. It’s a condition known as hypothyroidism. As the grief passes, the thyroid will often return to balance. If you’re carrying multiple people’s grief, your body could have an extreme case of hypothyroidism, and you could end up on thyroid medication for the rest of your life because the grief never actually passed out of your field. You don’t feel the grief anymore, but the energy remains in your field and impacts your overall vitality.

Additionally, the second chakra is not our most sophisticated energy receptor. It becomes a viable energy center around the age of 7, which is the age of reason, where little children begin to be able to discern the difference between how someone else feels and how he or she feels. [Mommy’s mad right now, but I’m happy today because we got to see a play at school today.]

Everything that is experienced in the second chakra is gated against our filters for how we see the world. So while you’re probably reasonably accurate about the agendas you seeing playing out with your friends and associates, they are at least partially skewed by your biases and ways of framing experience.

Bottom line: clairsentience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and when the second chakra is regulated so that you are present to your own emotions and not picking up on other people’s energy, you’ll most likely be able to navigate your experiences with less disappointment and more autonomy.

The last thing I’ll add about clairsentience is that reading other people’s energy without their express consent is inappropriate and kind of a TMI experience. I get paid to read energy, it’s part of what I do as a practitioner and teacher of energy healing. When I get paid for it, I use my clairvoyance system to view my students’ and clients’ energy in relation to whatever issue they’d like to address in their lives. It’s not a free for all, I can only see the energy they want me to see, and the information is contextual to the issue itself. Clairvoyance is a skill that can be cultivated in the same way that you’re currently operating through clairsentience.

It’s a little harder to engage than clairsentience, yet it offers a more refined view of what people are creating and manifesting in their experience. When viewing information clairvoyantly, the information perceived bypasses our filters of how we frame reality and establish context and meaning for our experiences. I would never view someone’s energy without their consent, it’s akin to watching people’s lives through their windows.

I’m not saying any of this to be accusatory. There is a lack of understanding in general about energy, its properties and potential implications to the body systems. I’ve been teaching about energy since 1992, and this is what I do for a living. I hope these ideas are helpful and useful to you, and I’m open to fielding other questions on the topic as they arise.

A Reply Back:

Thank you so much for such an informative response, I actually completely agree and practice the ethics of not reading into someone’s energy unless someone has given their permission or expressed it as such.

However with friends I have known for quite a few years, due to the dynamic we have, I pick it up, as clearly as sunshine hitting your face. I don’t always like what I see. The pretense has faded and that has made me sad. I notice especially when I am tired the sensing gets stronger, and I am actually hoping to shut it off a bit more. Or perhaps being able to use it in a more constructive way. It is so interesting to hear about your professional path… Would you say clairvoyance is better, or at least less harmful in that sense than clairsentience?

My Response:

Don’t worry. You can learn to “shut it off.” You can develop the ability to turn your senses on and off, which I think you’ll find as a relief.

And to answer about clairvoyance vs. clairsentience…

With appropriate energy boundaries established, clairvoyance will always deliver a cleaner, clearer set of insights into the energy being read and perceived. Clairvoyance can be harmful, too, if individuals who see energy organically have no understanding of how to turn it on and off, how to navigate the information that is perceived, and how to ground their energy so that they are not at the whim of their clairsenses. Given the choice to feel someone’s pain, grief, sadness, depression, anxiety… versus observing and witnessing it, (and as a practitioner, supporting the person to evolve it and move through it), I’d choose observation and witnessing every time!

I really wish you all the best with this. You are powerful and you are asking all the right questions. You will be able to develop your senses in a way that serves both you and the world, without wearing you out or leaving you feeling disenchanted about people in general. Keep in touch 🙂 -Jill