One of the biggest challenges a healer can have in their work is maintaining boundaries. Most healers are natural empaths or clairsentients. This makes the boundary edges of the aura tend to be more wispy and fluid. An empath merges with their environment to understand it, as opposed to maintaining strong boundaries and staying separate from it.
This skill is part of what makes an empath a good healer; we can easier merge with the client and feel what the client feels, whether this be physical sensation, emotion or attitude. Having an insight into the client enables us to develop rapport. More this than, the client feels understood, which is probably one of the most under-rated aspects of healing.
Clairsentience enables a healer to feel their way around the aura, or psyche of a person, and map it out. For example, while I was working recently, I was able to use my feeling senses to identify a hard black shield in the client’s pelvic region, a troubled area in the belly, and a numb feeling in the heart. The client was withdrawing sexually from her partner because she felt emotionally exhausted by her partners bad behaviour. She was seriously considering ending the relationship, but feeling very confused.
Digging deeper under this first layer of feeling, I found storage sites of resentment and fear. One of my most natural, instinctive abilities as an empath is to ‘boldly go where no wise people fear to tread’… or in other words, I have a strange, almost reckless lack of fear about diving into someone else’s pain and torment and then using my own body to drain it off. This is an incredibly effective technique and brings the client very palpable relief from the sheer intensity of their emotions.
Up to a certain point, I can do this kind of work without any harm to myself. My body seems to treat the process as though it were reading a very good fictional story; it enjoys the drama and the rush but it stays detached. It knows the story is not it’s own and it doesn’t go out in sympathy. There is actually something almost exhilarating about a smooth, efficient release of stored emotion, whether it be my own or someone else’s. My personal equivalent of roller coaster riding or bungy jumping!
When I’m getting the balance right, I get to the end of the day and can’t even remember who I saw that day, let alone what their story was. I’m happy, relaxed and in love with life. Other peoples stuff is water off my duck’s back.
If I do too much of this work, or I inadvertently dip into the wrong ‘stuff’, it’s a different story. What is the ‘wrong stuff’? The wrong stuff is traumatic material in a client’s body that my own body shies away from because it’s too close to my own unresolved experiences. I’ve learned to listen carefully to the difference in my body’s response to trauma in another’s field, because if I don’t listen, I can do damage to myself.
I know I’m overdoing it when:
*I feel emotionally affected by a client’s story.
*The emotions I’m clearing start to leak into my personal life.
*I feel tired.
*I stop loving my job (classic burn-out symptom!)
The best way to protect myself, besides putting boundaries on how many people I see per day and refusing to dip into material my body gets jittery about, is to switch psychic gears. It’s so easy to lean too heavily on my clairsentience because it comes so naturally. in fact, when I’m tired, I can get caught in a vicious cycle of going on automatic and slipping into my clairsentience and thus becoming more drained.
Maintaining my self-care in the first place ensures that I don’t over-use my clairsentience and I’m learning to spot the warning signs that remind me to switch gears as well as disciplining myself to spread myself across all of the abilities.
Clairvoyance and clairaudience are the two abilities that afford me the most protection during healing. They enable me to work in a spirit-assisted manner without drawing too heavily on my clairsentience. Switching on my seeing and putting it in the front row seat (ie using it as my primary scanning or information gathering tool) enables my clairsentient self to take a rest. It can still support from the sidelines but it isn’t taking the sheer brunt of a client’s emotional material.
In spite of all the romantic notions people have about clairvoyance, clairvoyance used alone without support from our other abilities can be… what’s the word? A little blind? Haha!
If I only switch my clairvoyance on, I get plenty of imagery but can be baffled as to what any of it actually means. I need extra help putting it into context. Naturally, I tend to rely on my feelings, but if I need to rest this part of myself, employing my clairaudience is the next best thing. Even then, my clairsentience is still sitting in the background, on a banana lounge, drink in hand, keeping an eye on things and putting her two cents worth in from time to time.
With my clairvoyance and clairaudience working hand in hand, the process can look something like this:
I scan the aura visually and notice the shapes, colours and visual metaphors. I get ‘the lay of the land’, so to speak. Then I ask where to begin. This is the very best way to engage clairaudience (psychic hearing): ask a question inside your mind. Wait for the reply. Intend for this to be a mental dialogue inside your mind. During healing, clairaudience is a voice in my mind that says things like “Reach your hand a little deeper in. Now grab hold of the energy line you can see and twist it to the right. Support the belly with your other hand.”
This combination of visual and auditory impressions enables me to maintain strong boundaries during healing, because both abilities allow for some distance between myself and the client.