Meditation for Empaths: How to Stop Absorbing and Start Protecting Your Field

Much more than just sitting in silence, meditation is one of the most powerful tools a person may use to feel well in the fast paced, sometimes chaotic modern world. Especially when you are an empath or person who is sensitive to energy.

If you go about your days:

• absorbing other peoples energy
• feeling other peoples’ feelings
• feeling dysregulated
• riding the ups and downs of fight or flight
• feeling drained and overwhelmed
• like you lack proper energetic boundaries
• wishing that you could find a way to stay more regulated and protected while at work, home or school

That is a sign that you could benefit from energy management meditations. More than just ‘breathing in and out’, these help you:

• return to focus after a difficult or draining interaction
• boost resilience
• build up and strengthen your field so you can protect yourself
• come back to your baseline after a day living life

In Part 1 of the Empowered Empath: Sovereign Energy series, I addressed the drain, dysregulation, and exhaustion so many people feel after a day in their life. Today, in Part 2 of the Empowered Empath: Sovereign Energy series, Today I introduce you to my secret weapon: energy management meditations.

Spiritual vs. Energy Management Meditations

Not all meditations are created equal and they do not all do the same things. There truly is a meditation for everything from meeting an animal guide to getting focused for a task and visualizing your success. In general, I categorize them into two separate categories: spiritual meditations and energy management meditations.

• A spiritual meditation is one where you communicate with your soul, your higher self, and work through your unique soul journey.

• An energy management meditation is one where you take steps to align the energy of your body – like releasing what you have picked through an interaction or during your day, regulating your body and emotions, and strengthening your field so you do not always pick up and feel so much in the first place.

Both are incredibly useful. For this article, we are going to focus on the energy management type.

Why Empath and Energy Sensitives Need Energy Management

All interactions, thoughts, and experiences that we have in the run of a day have energy. What makes empaths and energy sensitive people unique is that they can detect these on a more subtle level than the general population.

Because your system will naturally register everything around you, you need practical, real-world tools to help you handle – and offload- what you pick up in the world around you.

In video 1, I talked about how the modern world, communication scape, and workplaces are exposing you to higher volumes of people and information every single day while at the same time, keeping you away from the quiet and safe spaces of regulation and self-connection that empaths and energy sensitives need to come back to their baseline and feel like themselves.

Meditation becomes one of those spaces of self-connection, decompression, and strength when you allow it to.

Three Most Useful Parts of Energy Management Meditation 

One of the most important parts of learning to meditate is that it teaches you to disconnect from your surroundings and refocus on yourself. It becomes like a soft room you can enter at any time – no matter where you are. These are the top three most useful parts of energy management style meditations for anyone – but most especially, empaths and energy sensitives.

1. Stopping Fight or Flight and Coming Back to Center

Have you ever had the experience where you were going about your day and then suddenly – you felt like you had to get up and run out of where you were, right away? Perhaps this happened as you were sitting in a meeting or about to get on a call. (Perhaps it happened when you are walking through the mall.)

That urge to run away is called the fight or flight response. It is common for energy sensitive people to enter fight or flight mode when exposed to high volumes of people, technology and information in the run of a day. Even when nothing is outwardly wrong. When fight or flight hits and there is nothing ‘wrong’, that is your body telling you, “This is too many stimuli, and I need to get away from it.”

For many – getting up and running away is not possible. This is happening when you are at work or with your children.

This is where meditative breath kicks in. The foundation of meditation is learning to slow your breath. When you slow down your breath, you mechanically stimulate the vagus nerve, which tells your brain you are safe. This shuts off the fight-or-flight reflex, stops the cortisol spike, and brings you back to center. Invisibly. (If this happens, you may also like to follow up with these next two steps.)

2. Actively Protecting Your Energy Field

You are at work on a call and suddenly, you are overwhelmed by heavy feeling energy – like a bad mood came over you but you know it is not yours. Perhaps you are out in a crowd and you become highly uncomfortable because you can feel the thoughts and feelings of the people around you.

If you find yourself picking up the feelings of people around you or through digital communications – that is a sign that you have a strong energy field. A person who has a strong energy field must take steps to learn how to protect it. An impactful way to do this is to strengthen its boundaries and learn how to care for it.

Stated simply – your energy field exists both within and outside of you. Your auric field, also known as your bio-field, is a key part of this. Left on its own – it can act as a sponge that picks up ‘too much’. When it is routinely cared for – it can act as a protection mechanism that helps you keep noise out and your own energy in.

• (See this article for more information on the auric field-energy body-daily life connection.)

One of the best things a person who feels too much can do is strengthen this boundary and to build it up like they would build a muscle. An impactful way to do this is to work with meditations focused on repairing and strengthening the energy field on a regular basis. Working with your energy centers (chakras, meridians) as well as your ability to heal and adjust them with your own focused intent helps you build your ability to command them.

Just like at the gym when you want to build a muscle – the more you work building up this part of your field – the stronger it gets. This translates into picking up less from those around you and your physical environment. It also means that what you do pick up, you are routinely cycling out which keeps your system away from feeling overloaded, thus keeping you feeling well.

3. Rebuilding & Recharging Your System

It’s the end of the day and you are feeling exhausted, dysregulated, and as through your defenses are worn down. You must look after the family and do errands but feel like you are running on empty.

Humans have a baseline charge whose maintenance is key to their wellbeing. As discussed in part 1 in this series – modern life requires people to be more available, more online, and multitask perhaps more than any humans have before. Being indoors + on computers depletes that charge which makes us ungrounded and tires out our physical bodies. This is known to wear us down.

When an energy sensitive person is not charged properly – you tend to feel tired, overwhelmed and have a hard time regulating your emotions. This is because this charge is also key to helping you maintain energetic boundaries as well as to repair yourself.

Meditation – particularly one done outside whilst in direct contact with the Earth- is a powerful way to recharge and rebuild your system. Particularly if you mindfully place them at times of the day to serve the task, like in the morning to build up your charge and ground yourself before work, or to do an evening practice to repair it and release what you picked up after a long day. Connecting with Earth specifically brings you into contact with a fresh flow of electrons that will help to biologically repair your system.

• (Click here More on the Earth charge + human body + wellness converation.)

How Meditation Saved My Life

As a highly sensitive person who also lived and worked in a high-pressure academic environment, I once struggled deeply with chronic burnout, sensory overload, and an inability to separate my own emotions from the stress of those around me. I used to spend a lot of time on the internet going from one meditation to alignment practice to shielding practice — never really getting the job fully done. 

Being a systems analyst and practicing research anthropologist (*at the time), I stopped looking for generic solutions. I decided to study the exact mechanics of soul growth and energy management instead. This journey began in 2014 and led to my original method of conscious self-connection. It didn’t just help me cope with a capitalist, tech-driven world — it saved my life. 

What I learned is that once you are able to get your energy field strong and grounded, regulation issues and exhaustion tend to begin drifting away. I condensed this deep energetic work into three simple, actionable pillars that you can use to take care of your field to strengthen it and repair it when things get tough.

 Breath, Ground, Align:

• Breath: Regulates your nervous system and instantly restores your internal focus.
  
• Ground: Activates your ability to harmonize your physical body directly with the Earth.
  
• Align: Releases the heavy or foreign energy you have picked up throughout the day, actively bringing your energy body and physical body back into a unified state

Instead of spending hours trying to figure out which meditation to use, practicing this specific sequence allows you to reclaim your sovereignty in just a few minutes. I went from being a mess to a highly functional empath – and have since helped hundreds of others find that path.

Step Into Your Sovereignty: Join My Next Cohort

If you are ready to stop managing chronic exhaustion and start commanding your energy, I am thrilled to share that I will soon be taking in a new group of students.

I will be teaching my step-by-step energy management meditation method inside my upcoming signature program Breath, Ground, Align so you can thrive at work, home, and school without burning out.

• quick study (no long hours spent at the computer)
• access at your own pace (get to it as your schedule allows)
• mp3s that you can download to your phone and use any-time, any-place

Pre-registration is officially open today. By pre-registering, you secure priority access before the general public and lock in exclusive early-bird pricing.

• [Click Here to Pre-Register for the Energy Management Program] and get early bird pricing.

Did you skim this during the workday? Come back for the video – here’s why

As an uber driver recently put it: “There is music in the human voice. Doing everything in text – we don’t get to hear it.”

The human voice and image is incredibly regulating and helps you feel understood, validated, and connected. Hearing real people who have had these experiences and come up solutions deliver the message with their own voice and mannerisms is almost always better than reading just the text. Slow down, be human with humans, and take seven minutes to focus on this important part of yourself.

Coming Up Next in Part 3…

As I close out Part 2 of the Empowered Empath: Sovereign Energy series, remember that you do not have to live life feeling dysregulated, exhausted, and like you are carrying the weight of the world. Learning how to care for yourself as the unique being you are helps you stay strong, grounded, and in your own power.

• Click here for part 1 of the series in case you missed it (3 modern sources of empath drain) https://crow-medicine.com/why-it-feels-so-heavy/
  
• Click here for “From Breakdown to Life Balance: Why Energy is the Missing Piece of the Puzzle” https://crow-medicine.com/energy-sensitive-burnout/

In Part 3 of the Empowered Empath: Sovereign Energy series, I am taking off the instructor hat to give you a raw look into my own journey. I am going to share exactly what a complete mess I used to be — from total sensory burnout to absorbing everyone else’s chaos — and the exact steps I followed to get my life in order.

In loving empowerment,

Katie Harris (IndiCrow) MA *PhdABD*

I blend social anthropology, ancestral tradition, and original methods to help you navigate—and feel well in—this world.

Do you know anyone who needs to hear this?

Please send this article + video to them & spread the word. Let’s empower each other and other energy sensitives to feel well in this world.