Have you ever wished you knew what someone else was thinking or feeling? Understanding what another person is experiencing is a wonderful thing, right?

Well…maybe not. While I make no serious claims to being a brilliant telepath (or even a kind of dull telepath, for that matter), I do find myself overly gifted with what I call “telempathy.” By that I mean to know, not what other people are thinking, but rather what they are feeling. Here are some characteristics of that telempathy thing (and it holds for empathy too):

I don’t pick up on happy times, generally only sad emotions. Image from: freedigitalphotos.net

• Telempathy and empathy often means you get sad, not happy. I consistently have a need to contact friends when they’re upset, or sad, or unhappy. You’ll notice that I’m not getting lots of happy-stuff here. Nope, I rarely pick up on that. Instead, I pick up on my friends’ feelings when they’re having trouble in their lives. Since the friends I’m talking about typically live from 50 to 2500 miles away from me, this is not something easily explained by other sources of information.
• Telempathy and empathy for other people’s feelings can intrude on your life. Sometimes, when there’s a serious crisis going on, the empathetic signals are so strong they can wake me out of a sound sleep. In one case, which I discuss in IMPOSSIBLE REALITIES, a friend suffering with his dying father, would wake me up at night because I would “hear” him screaming in agony. He had no clue he was broadcasting his pain loudly enough for me to pick it up 30 or 40 miles away.
• Sometimes telempathy and empathy are more physical. Sometimes I even pick up on physical injuries. Another friend went on vacation overseas and starting on the 2nd day of their trip, I realized my right foot was just killing me. When I collected them at the airport, I realized they’d had an accident on their 2nd day of their trip to their right foot, and had spent the rest of the trip taping it up with duct tape.

So…you still want to be empathetic? Why?

To be honest, I haven’t discovered a great number of advantages of telempathy, other than that I consistently call my friends when they’re down and need encouragement. (A good thing, I admit.) To put it bluntly, it’s damned uncomfortable most of the time.

The thing, is, however, that I nearly always know certain things about such telempathy feelings:

• I know the feelings aren’t mine. I’m never unclear that what I’m feeling belongs to someone else. It’s not a matter of my mood or feelings changing as it is recognizing that someone else is in trouble.
• I generally know whose feelings I’m picking up on. I’m never unclear about that, but I have no idea just how I know who I’m detecting.
• I don’t have to work at it. The telempathy simply happens. I don’t have to meditate or go into an altered state or anything else. I simply get a “knowing” that a particular person is in trouble or unhappy.
• I pick up on feelings of people I know well. I am deeply grateful that I appear to have to have some kind of personal relationship with the other person to pick up on their feelings. (Can you imagine the personal chaos that would result from picking up on all the misery in the world?) The weaker that emotional bond, the more severe the empathetic cry has to be for me to detect it. Thus, I might pick up on a fairly minor upset from a very close friend, but it takes a massive emotional crisis for me to pick it up on someone who’s just a casual friend.
• Once I pick up on feelings, even if from an acquaintance, the impact on me is about the same as it would be from a dear friend. No, I can’t explain that either, other than to suggest that once the connection is open, the feelings pour through at the same rate; closeness of friendship merely seems to make opening the connection easier.
• Turning the feelings off, and closing the connection completely, is extremely difficult. The milder the feelings, the easier it is to shut it off. In the case of extremely strong feelings, it’s like trying to shut a door against a tsunami-like flow: it’s just not going to happen. My greatest struggle with telempathy has been in limiting its impact on my life.

If you want to know how to be telempathic, I honestly cannot tell you. I had spent about a year working on meditations of heart energy when this particular skill developed, so my theory is that opening up heart energy opened up the telempathy. But that’s speculation simply because I have no other real explanation. But, if you really want to be telempathic, the trick will be to do some serious heart meditations. Next time I’ll give you some hints about how to do that.

Featured image from: freedigitalphotos.net