What Energetic Connections Feel Like to an Empath

Energetic connections


A solid 95% of the people I interact with in my daily life have no idea that I’m an empath or even that I have an esoteric blog.  Of those who are open to the fact that I have strong gifts of intuition and empathy, they still do not understand exactly what a high level empath is and often ask me exactly how I experience energetic connections.

Energy Signatures

Every person has what I call an “energy signature.”  If you feel comfortable only with the  first five senses, then it would make perfect sense for me to say to you that every person has a particular smell, or odor, that is unique to them.   You smell it when you visit their homes or when you give them a hug.  After you’re in their presence for a little while, you no longer smell it.  You’ve gotten used to it.  Just as you can’t sense your own smell because it’s with you all the time…unless you’ve been working extra hard.

It’s that way with energy.  Everyone has an energetic signature.  It is their life force. It envelops the body they occupy, and after death, it can be felt around the grave where that body lies, on their possessions that they loved, and sometimes around the entire area where they died, particularly if there was great fear or anger in their last moments because energy and passion are closely connected.

I’ve felt vomit-inducing energetic signatures at the Alamo and especially at the Gettysburg battlefield, which is supposedly one of the worst places an empath can visit.  I walked through the museum, looking at those old eyeglasses, watches, photos that were so beloved and on the body at the time of a fearful death and the vibrations seemed to jump out at me.  I left doubled over and sick to my stomach.  A few years later, I took my daughter there with the intent of staying all day for the benefit of her education, but she had the same sick to her stomach reaction.

To a lesser extent, I pick up on the energies of hospitals, airports, and malls at Christmastime.  Occasionally after a storm or natural disaster, the emotions of others becomes unbearable.   The more ungrounded I am, the more sensitive I am to energies and energetic connections.

Energetic Connections

An energetic connection is simply a bond or link between two people, even people who have never met in the flesh.  Once that link is established, it is not easily broken.   Some links, I have broken through ritual and others with the help of a gifted healer.

The most easily understood energetic connection is the empathic link or bond between mother and child.  I distinctly remember my newborn infant having blood drawn from her tiny heel for a Bilirubin test.  I felt her pain in my teeth and in every bone in my body before she could even scrunch her tiny face and wail.   I’ve known plenty of low-level empaths who’ve known without a doubt that their child was hurt or that there was “something wrong.”   And I have known high-level empaths like myself who have felt the pain of a loved one being attacked in the same areas of the body where their loved one had been beaten, blow for blow, even though it was days later before they found out about the attack in a distant city.  

These are, by and large, passive energetic connections.  For those I had been linked with, I feel their energetic connections in different ways.  I may have that raw feeling that something is horribly wrong.  With that raw feeling, I may sense the energetic signature of a specific person and call that person, only to be told that “Oh, no, everything’s fine!”  Then later–days, weeks, even months later–I find out what really happened that day.  My closest family and friends understand when I put out a call that says, “Okay, report in!  I’ve got a bad feeling!”  Those are times when I can’t tell exactly who’s in trouble or hurt.  Although I can also feel intense joy in others, I usually note anger, fear, dread, depression, jealousy over the lighter emotions just as I might be more attuned to someone screaming for help or cursing loudly then the gentle peal of laughter or a whisper.

I’m usually linked to other people through one of two ways when it is an energetic link that is to be maintained effortlessly.  Most of the time, the link is established through strong emotion–that emotion usually being great love–but I have had a strong connection lasting around a year or two with a fellow empath I had bonded with–and the jealous young occultist he was engaged to but had lied about to me. Jealousy can indeed be as strong an empathic bond as love, but thankfully this one did not last and I was able to break it easily when I finally broke my connection with him for good.

The other way links are formed is through a ritual passing of or sharing of power, such as through a Third Degree Elevation, Reiki attunement, or some other intentional mixing of energies. This link allows two people to know if the other is okay, if the other is hurt and needs help, if the other is truthful or hiding something.   That doesn’t mean that one always knows what’s going on in the other’s life.   For example, in one such bond I had, I knew the other person was hiding something and that it was a doozy. I just didn’t know what it was.  Since I knew about other doozies in his past, I let him convince me that the waves of shame I felt off of him were related to information I already knew.   At some level, I knew he wasn’t being truthful, but refused to see it.  Heaven help me when I’m dating someone I have an empathic bond with, because I will easily know when he’s upset or something’s wrong, long before I get a phone call or a text.  The problem is, I won’t know why he’s upset until he tells me.  He may be made at me and never want to see me again…or he could be angry over a flat tire on the way to work.   It’s stuff like that that drives us empaths crazy!

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With specific people, usually the ones most important to me or who become more important, I can sense the link in certain chakras, or energy centers, in my body.   I recall one close friend who was a substance abuser in hiding and was frequently in trouble or near to being found out.  Every time he went through one of those episodes, I felt it first in my third chakra.  The worse it got, the higher it rose, into my fourth chakra and fifth chakra. This was actually easy to confirm…all I had to do was look at my personal journal and his arrest record to see the correlation.
With a best friend of over a decade, I felt her darker emotions in a particular sector of my heart chakra. The last significant man in my life, I could feel in my high heart chakra.

Sharing an empathic bond in a romantic relationship can be extremely beautiful, loving, and nurturing, but in this case my seeing him at soul-level led him to proclaim that “you see too much” and “you know too much”   without even trying.

For those with whom I’ve bonded through ritual, the energetic connections feel different.   It’s almost as if they already reside within all my chakras, but when they reach out to me or are thinking focused thoughts about me,  I tend to feel it in my arms and/or face.  Each one has a different energy signature and a different place, as though one might be cupping my face in his hands or one might be hugging me.   I feel those particular sensations as what a shaman friend of mine calls “a cellular burn.”  It’s a sensation of heat but without really burning my skin.  It’s like a burn at cell level from the inside out, radiating not onto my skin but from underneath my skin, burning upward.   It doesn’t hurt and it’s not particularly uncomfortable, but it is enough to get my attention, almost as if someone reached out, put a hand on my shoulder, and shook me.  I’ve experienced this bond with a previous Wiccan High Priestess who–though many of us use it to keep loving tabs on our spiritual brothers and sisters–used the bond in such a way that she appeared in dreams as a particular unusual animal.


Non-Bonded Connections

With people I’m not bonded with, I can sense their focused thought on me sometimes but without the energetic connection, they reveal themselves to me in a different way.  For these people–and I’ve always been able to verify it later–it is as if they are a translucent shadow standing in front of me, usually about 3 feet in front of me.  Sometimes a little to one side.  The first time this happened was in 2007 after I’d casually dated a man for a few months. Although he was initially fascinated with my spirituality, he was unhappy that I was not a good Catholic girl. We had no spiritual connection even though we tried to make it work. We weren’t bonded and weren’t bonding, even I had an enjoyable time with him and loved the poetry he wrote me.  He, however, disappeared for three days and, while the fate of our future hung in the balance and he gave thought to whether we should see each other again, everywhere I looked for those three days, I saw him in front of me in shadow.  Solemn, focused on me, almost as if I had put on a pair of glasses with a smudge on one lens.

I’ve had several romantic rivals show up this way.  For some reason, it’s love connections that tend to spur these odd visits from strangers and near strangers.

On a very few occasions, when a psychic stranger or shaman has tried to probe me for information on behalf of a friend, they have appeared this way in front  of me, translucent and a sudden bloom of heat in my face, so that they can see me and understand me at a deeper level, but it is always reciprocated, usually to their shock, and whatever secrets they are probing from me…their own secrets are exposed to me.

With those I’ve bonded with ritually, intentionally, I can tell from the sensation of the energetic connection when they are particularly focused on me, and I often find comfort in it, to know that my well-being floats through the minds of other people with whom I’ve shared myself and my secrets.

Most of the time, though, I feel the connection and within a few minutes or even seconds, my phone will ring  or my instant messenger will chime, and I’ll know instantly who it is.  It’s probably been pretty stupid of me to tell certain people that I know when they’re thinking about me.  If they can feel me thinking about them in the same way, then I suppose I’d be a bit unnerved as well.  Imagine that kind of world where your thoughts and emotions are not policed, but are free range and the subject of them is easily aware of how you really experience them.  That might make for a much more honest world, don’t you think?




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