Many people are sensitive to the energies around them, and find that they can suddenly experience emotions from someone nearby. This is called empathy. Empathy is when you really feel for someone. You not only sympathize with their pain, but you may also experience their pain.

Empathy can be quite a gift for healers and intuitives, but it can also take its toll. Being too open to the frequencies of those around you can cause confusion, headaches, lethargy and even physical illness. It can also allow all sorts of drama to intrude in to your life!

To reduce the effects of other people’s energy, try these simple grounding exercises, which can be done either sitting or standing.

Grounding with Light
Close your eyes and feel your feet connecting with the ground below you. Take a few deep breaths, then imagine at your heart center is a brilliant golden light. Imagine this light growing bigger and bigger until it completely surrounds you.

Then imagine a ray of this golden light shining down into the center of the earth, where it connects with the loving and nurturing energies of the planet. Your golden light mixes with the radiant emerald green light of the planet, and shines back up into your body with the golden light

Allow yourself to feel the radiant and nurturing energy from the Earth flowing throughout your body.

Now hold your hands out in front of you; palms facing outward. Imagine that this energy now flows out of your hands and forms a radiant bubble of light, or egg of light, that lovingly surrounds you.

Say to yourself:

Any negative energy that comes to me from another source is transformed by love and returned to them.

Any negative thoughts that I send out are transformed by love and returned to me.

With practice, the exercise can be done in just a minute or two, and can be done anywhere you find yourself feeling as if your energy is being zapped.

Tree Grounding Exercise
This is super simple, and can be done sitting or standing.

Close your eyes and feel your feet flat on the floor. Imagine that you are standing next to a stream, and that you are a tree with your roots going deep into the earth. You can hear the sound of the stream, as the water flows over the top of your root system. Take a nice deep breath, and feel your loving connection with the planet.

Grounding is a powerful tool for wellbeing, and these simple exercises can be done as many times throughout the day as needed.

It is a gift to be sensitive to the energies around you, but it’s important to be responsible about maintaining your own energetic boundaries. And the more you maintain your own energetic well-being, the more powerful your own gifts will become.