Where to find empathy in the Human Design Chart
WHICH PARTS OF THE HUMAN DESIGN CHART MAKE YOU EMPATHIC?
First let’s establish what an empath is.
The Cambridge English Dictionary says an empath is (especially in science fiction stories) a person who has an unusually strong ability to feel other people’s emotional or mental states.
Comparatively, the Oxford Dictionary of English says an empath is (chiefly in science fiction) a person with the paranormal ability to perceive the mental or emotional state of another individual.
Paranormal abilities aside, many of us have some form of empathic qualities whether they are intuitive, emotional, physical, or mental. Regardless of how sensitive a true ‘empath’ needs to be on the spectrum of empathic qualities, we are ALL empaths to some extent – it’s part of being a human being!
That said, not all of us experience empathy in the same way, nor do we process energy in the same way. Let’s look at the different ways empathic qualities can show up in the chart.
An Emotional Empath
The Solar Plexus Centre is where emotional energy is felt. If you have an open Solar Plexus Centre, you are emotionally empathic. Your open Solar Plexus Centre picks up other people’s emotional energy when you're around them. You may even amplify their emotional energy. Often you will feel other people’s emotional energy even if they haven’t openly expressed it. This makes you deeply attuned and empathic about the emotional energy of others.
Note: if your Solar Plexus Centre is defined and you have a tribal emotional wave (channel 59-6, 49-19, or 37-40) you may feel like you pick up other people’s emotional energy. However, your own emotional wave is triggered by other people as opposed to picking up their energy. Other people send you into emotional highs and lows through your interactions with them.
A Mental Empath
The Ajna Centre is where thoughts and beliefs are held. When you have an open Ajna Centre, you naturally pick up the thoughts and beliefs of others and tune into what other people are thinking. This gives you a deep sense of knowing how a person mentally processes life and how they perceive things.
Identity and Heart-Felt Empath
The G Centre is where self-love, identity and life purpose are held. When you have an open G Centre, you naturally pick up on the sense of other people – who they are, their love of self, and their sense of purpose. This can feel like emotional empathy but it’s actually more about tuning deeply into the heart of a person. You can sense into who they are beneath anything they are showing on the outside.
Fear Empath
The Spleen Centre is where fear lives in the chart, among other things. When you have an open Spleen Centre, you naturally pick up on the fears of other people. You are deeply tuned into the fears of others and you can sense their fears even if they haven’t spoken about them.
Sensitive Empath
The more open centres you have in your chart, the more sensitive you are to tuning in to up other people’s stuff. This is why Reflectors are the most empathic of all types because they have all 9 centres open.
When you have Gate 19 defined in the chart, this can also make you ultra sensitive to the emotional needs of others. This gate is about connection and intuition and can make you highly sensitive to touch, feel, smell, and taste. Many also feel connected to animals through this gate. You can even sense the emotion of a room when the energy shifts.
Add this to an open Solar Plexus Centre and this is a combination for intense emotional empathy.
OTHER EMPATHIC MARKERS
While the above markers are the strongest for empathic qualities, there are other markers in the chart that can cause us to be empathic and pick up on other people’s stuff. Some of these are listed below.
Open Root Centre
When you have an open Root Centre you pick up pressure from other people whether the pressure is targeted at you or not. You can sense when someone is feeling internal pressured to get something done or to do something and this can easily feel personal even when it’s not.
Open Will Centre
When you have an open Will (Ego) Centre, you can pick up on other’s willpower and their drive to push through and get things done. This can feel like very strong energy and if you need help to get something done when the going is tough picking up on this energy from another can feel great and help you achieve things. This energy can also feel pushy. When you are picking up on this energy from others you can often sense their ‘pushiness’ which can at times feel overwhelming.
Open Head Centre
When you have an open Head Centre, you pick up on the ideas of other people. You can be tuned into their ideas and wonder how you both have the same idea at the same time. While this can feel extremely coincidental and at times amusing, it is easy to believe that these ideas belong to you instead of acknowledging that these ideas were never yours in the first place.
How to Thrive as an Empath
While having empathic qualities has its good points, it can make us extremely vulnerable to other people’s energetic ‘stuff’ as I like to call it. We can use our empathic-ness to help us tune in to others and connect with them, but we also need to protect ourselves from the impact that these sensitives can have on us.
Our goal is to thrive as an empath instead of succumbing to our sensitives. We want to use these empathic superpowers for the greater good while remaining in our natural, happy, and healthy state.
I work in three distinct stages to thrive as an empath. I call these stages: explore, release, and restore.
Stage 1 - Explore
The first stage in this process is simply to learn about yourself and your natural empathic qualities. To thrive, it helps to first understand your mechanics.
The easiest way to do this is to look at your human design chart and see which of the empathic markers you have listed above in your personal blueprint. Equipped with this knowledge, you’ll have a better understanding of how your empathy works and what type of ‘stuff’ you are naturally likely to pick up and take in from other people.
Stage 2 – Release
The second stage in this process is to let go of anything that is no longer serving you.
Once you have a clear understanding of what makes you empathic, you can begin the process of releasing whatever you’re holding onto that doesn’t belong to you. In human design terminology, we call this conditioning.
Conditioning refers to the ‘stuff’ we adopt from other people such as their thoughts, beliefs, fears, and so forth. We become conditioned to act or think in a way that isn’t natural for us. We can spend decades living according to our conditioning only to realize that the path we’ve been living isn’t authentically our own.
The release process is the most cathartic. Once you understand how you hold onto other people’s ‘stuff’, it’s time to let it go and clear it out. This includes everything you need to do to offload the trauma and negative impacts caused internally by being an empath. This is usually the longest stage because it requires you to truly clear out the energetic junk you’ve collected through your life.
There are many different techniques to draw on during the release stage. Some of these are listed below.
Grounding
One simple technique used is grounding. This shifts other people’s ‘stuff’ out of your system by planting your bare feet on the ground so you can connect with the earth and let the energy you’ve picked up from others dissipate through your body and into the ground.
Protect yourself
Before you engage with other people, if you need to, protect yourself from the impact of their stuff by imagining yourself surround in white light, or in a bubble or whatever mechanism works to help protect you from other people’s energy when you’re around them. This is extremely helpful if you know someone’s energy impacts you. You can take a moment to shield yourself from their energy before you enter their space.
Remove yourself
The simpliest way to let go of other people's energetic stuff if it doesn’t feel good is to get out of their aura by moving physically away from them. Even going into another room for 15 minutes can be enough to let go of the ‘stuff’ you were picking up from them so it can dissipate and no longer impact you.
Smudge it away
Ever burnt a sage stick? Sage is immensely cleansing. Burning some sage and letting the smoke waft over you or the room, house, object or area you don’t feel good, in will help clear the energy from other people. This is a simple and easy technique that you can use on yourself any time you want to release the stuff you’ve picked up from others.
Talk it out
Talking it out is another effective way to verbally release what isn’t yours to hold on to, especially if you have an open Throat Centre.
The impact of trauma can keep us stuck in negative patterns. Finding a way to let go of everything that isn’t serving us, is a vital part of the release process.
Emotional Freedom Technique
Otherwise known as tapping, this helps to release emotional, mental, and physical trauma from the body and let go of the emotional charge this has on our person.
More info here.
Sound and Vibrational Frequency
We are made up of vibrational frequencies. When we are unwell, feeling distressed or overwhelmed, our vibrational frequency is usually in dissonance. Sound and listening to particular vibrational frequencies help bring our own frequency back into resonance and good health, wellbeing and happiness. There are many different techniques we can use to do this. I offer two different types of sound therapy, if you’re interested in learning more, click on the links below.
Biofield Tuning Therapy
When things are really difficult to shift or unconsciously causing us to stay stuck in old patterns despite our best efforts to move them, I use Biofield Tuning therapy. This uses tuning forks and vibrational therapy to dislodge knots in our energetic biofield around the body. Our biofield can hold onto trauma energetically even when we’ve mentally processed it.
This is my favourite technique for clearing out the energetic junk we often collect as empaths throughout our lives. As a Reflector, with all my human design energy centres open, this is the most effective technique I use on myself to clear out everyone else’s ‘stuff’ from my own energy field. More info here.
Ultimately, any process that helps you free yourself from the conditioning and negative impacts absorbed from the world around you is beneficial.
Step 3 – Restore
The third and final stage of this process is to restore yourself to the way you’re naturally designed. Once you release everything that isn’t yours, you make space for something even greater: more room more you!
During this last stage, you can finally restore yourself to the person you were born to be, unconditioned, free of other people’s ‘stuff’, and available to tune in to the world around you as a healthy and happy individual.
Here are some general guidelines for restoring yourself.
1. Choose your friends wisely
Remove people in your life who don’t feel good to be around (unless you have no choice) and who fill you up with negative thoughts, feelings, and fears. Spend time with people who respect your needs, protect your heart, and understand your sensitivities.
2. Protect yourself
Learn to let go of the ‘stuff’ you pick up from others rather than soak it up like a sponge. Increase your resiliency so you are less vulnerable to others. Set boundaries and don’t let yourself or anybody else cross these boundaries. They are there to keep you safe from the damage your empathy can sometimes allow.
When you notice yourself getting pulled into someone else’s ‘stuff’, remove yourself from them. Distance is a quick and effective protection mechanism. It also helps to find a way to expel anything negative by shaking it off, using breathwork, visualization, taking a bath, or any other means that help you dispel this negativity from your person.
Be sure not to put yourself in situations that overwhelm your empathic senses. This prevents you from checking in properly with yourself and determining what is your ‘stuff’ versus someone else’s.
3. Choose a healthy environment
Choose what you consume; what you listen to, watch, read, and eat. Spend time in environments that feel good with people you enjoy spending time with. Toxic environments wreak havoc on empaths and can make it hard for you to protect yourself if you are always negatively overloaded.
4. Spend time alone
Use your alone time to disengage from others and tune in to your own needs. Spend this time connecting with yourself, away from the influence of others, so you can truly tune into what you desire, like, and need.
5. Engage in self-care
Start to put your own needs first. Remember this doesn’t make you selfish. You’re capable of giving more when your own needs are taken care of. Self-care should be a holistic approach encompassing your body, mind, and spirit.
Practice getting more in touch with your own body and out of your head. Mindfulness, grounding, self-touch, or even bodywork can help you focus on your personal boundaries and tune into your inner guidance. Personally, I love to get out into nature because it reinvigorates all my senses.
6. Practice self-awareness
Tune in to what’s yours and what’s not yours. When you understand how your empathy works, you can check-in when you’re sensing something unhealthy and determine if this has been picked up from someone around you. Armed with this awareness, you prevent yourself from succumbing to the source of this energy and becoming a victim of it.
7. Stop being a superhero
Stop rescuing others. Empathy can cause you to want to help and fix other people when you sense their needs. Often this is to the detriment of your own needs. When you’re not constantly trying to save others, you not only protect yourself, you also give other people the opportunity to rescue themselves.
8. Harness your superpowers
While it’s best not to be the superhero in other people’s lives, you can use your empathic powers for the greater good of all. Empathy allows us to remember that we are all connected. It prevents us from becoming self-absorbed and uncaring about the needs of others.
When you embrace the compassion that your empathy provides, you increase your capacity for connection and understanding. Just don’t lose yourself in the process. A world without empathy would be a very sad and lonely place indeed.
Know your value and your self-worth and love yourself for everything that makes you who you are, including your sensitivities. Don’t be the victim of your empathy but rather use these superpowers for the betterment of all and for yourself.
The world will be a better place when there’s an abundance of thriving empaths. When we harness our ability to be tuned in and connected, we demonstrate how to be both concerned for the wellbeing of others and be self-empowered at the same time.