March 30, 2008

• Followup on Psychic Shielding

  Below are some comments received on my recent post, The Difference Between Possible and Doable:

  What happens when a very empathic person is surrounded by people with
  a lot of anger and negativity?  This was me with my birth family, and
  even now with my own family! (been married 23 years with 3 children.) I
  would LOVE to learn how to shield!

  only_one_escape

  We do need ways to help people differentiate between others feelings
  and their own, and how to cope without being overwhelmed.  How to work
  closely with people and not feel like you’ve been run over by a truck
  when they’re in bad moods.  I am still befuddled when being confronted
  with words that don’t match feelings and I’m tired of feeling all of
  the rage in the world.
  quitchick

  What I was talking about in context of my daughter, is her being
  flooded with other peoples emotions and the sometimes iron control she
  has to exert not to be overwhelmed.
  Glassheart

  The part about distressed empaths seeking shielding is kind of sad. The
  best skill is to learn how to truly be open in a good way, and put
  everything into context. But that’s a lot of work, and of course it’s
  easier to shut out than understand.  Maybe someone should start a ninja school for empaths…
  HomerTheBrave

  I had to think about this for a while.  I appreciate you guys for making me think it through.

  I never seriously, consciously wanted to shield myself from psychic input.  There were a few times that I could have done without the projective telepathy.  Having people repeat my thoughts back to me right after I thought them was disconcerting until I got a handle on that, but I was willing to go to just about any lengths to maintain and develop my empathy and receptive telepathy after I realized I had them.  I was in my twenties before I understood that the condition of being “high strung,”  and tending to go really nuts in crowded situations such as rock concerts or county fairs, was related to empathy.

  By then, I’d blundered into a few coping mechanisms on my own.  I used alcohol and other drugs (which I don’t recommend to anyone under any circumstances) to deaden my perceptions.  I was also a risk-taker, an adrenaline junkie, and now that I have gotten out of that state, I will never go back.  Adrenaline enables and increases projective telepathy, and is an antagonist to acetylcholine, which enables and increases receptivity, empathy, and memory.  This, I suppose, has some connection to the fact that in my youth I was seldom able to get away with telling a lie, and that now, since I have been using various mental techniques and nutritional supplements to enhance my acetylcholine production, I can remember so many details for my memoirs.

  I agree emphatically with HomerTheBrave’s comment, except for the part about blocking or shielding’s being easy.  It is next to impossible without seriously mentally handicapping oneself.  The idea just appears to be a quick fix, and intuitively appeals to those who are driven to distraction by other people’s emotional emanations.  The approach that I use now is so counterintuitive that I was having a tough time trying to articulate it until I perceived the parallel between it and the PainSwitch technique I use to deal with the chronic pain of myalgic encephalomyelitis, AKA “fibromyalgia.”  I don’t try to block it out.  I don’t ignore it.  I focus on it with an open mind, and try to understand it.

  Wherever I happen to be, when I realize that I’m feeling something for which I have no personal motivation or explanation, I focus my mind on it.  Here at home, these things usually come singly and with a very strong signal.  Maybe my neighbors are having a marital disagreement, or one of them is answering the door to a State Trooper with a warrant.  Maybe there has been an accident on the highway or a bar fight at the lodge.  Physically, I feel it in my gut, a sick, sinking feeling.  In recent years, since I have become more aware of myself and my feelings, it hardly ever takes me more than a moment or two to realize that this is not coming from within. 

  It is a fairly simple matter to focus, and often the face of one of my neighbors comes to mind.  Sometimes I see nothing to explain the source of the feelings, but the feelings go away anyway.  Sometimes, I see the entire scenario, such as the night Ray dropped his snowmachine as he was dragging it from the bed of his truck, and broke his leg.  I saw that his wife and one of our mutual friends were there to help him (and were projecting their own distress), so I quit worrying about it… nothing I could do.  That time, with so many close friends involved, I was feeling the cold, smelling the gasoline and blood, too.

  If I can do something to help, I do it.  I enjoy hearing, “Wow!  You got here just in the nick of time,”  but unless I’m sure there’s something I can do to help, and that my help is needed, I just tune them out and butt out.  In crowded places, it is different.  When I am driving in traffic and need my concentration on what I’m doing, my autonomic systems take over and the adrenaline suppresses the telempathic perception.  I am grateful for my healthy adrenal glands, particularly after having lived without adequate adrenal function through most of the 1960s and ’70s.  That situation resulted from my sugar addiction and resulted in my earning a reputation as a psychic.  I would not want to completely lose my psychic ability, nor would I want to go back to having no control over when I use it.  So I watch my diet and I take my supplements and I do my best to keep my cool.

  Two specific memories come to mind, of different ways I deal with psychic input in crowded situations.  One, I think of as a form of play.  There was a day a few years ago, when I had gone to town for my volunteer gig, driving a van from a drug rehab center to an NA meeting.  Before the meeting, Greyfox needed to pick up his new glasses at Wal-Mart.  He had been doing all the driving, and I was relaxed and enjoying myself.  Sitting in the optical shop at Wal-Mart, with nothing to occupy my mind, I started “listening in” on what was going on around me.

  The checkstands were behind me, and there was a fairly consistent buzz of fatigue and annoyance from the clerks.  How people stand to keep such jobs, I’ll never understand.  There were several shoplifters working the store, too.  A couple of young teen girls had attracted the attention of a store employee, but he was just amused, more interested in watching them than busting them.  Going through one of the checkstands was someone carrying felony-weight merchandise, so scared that he was broadcasting his fear to the extent that I was amazed nobody picked up on it and stopped him.  After he got out of the store, I picked up on a couple who were having a disagreement over what they could afford to buy.  The woman solved it by letting him buy what he wanted, and stealing what she wanted.  I had a lengthy wait, and those are just some of the more interesting things I picked up.

  The other outstanding memory along these lines was at a Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival.  It also illustrates one of the factors, in addition to physical proximity and “strength of signal,” that affect my ability to receive thoughts:  obsessive, repetitive thinking.  This was a thought, not an emotion.  I was there at the festival to do readings, so I had done all I could to enhance my perception.  I had been listening, ever since I got to the booth in the morning, to a tape with beats at the frequency of the Theta brainwave state, about 3-7 hertz, and I was in Theta.

  At some point, between clients, I picked up a stray thought, “I got away with murder.”  I picked it up several times after that, and at one point the man who was thinking that paused at my booth to look at some of the jewelry I was selling.  “I got away with murder,” was running through his mind like a mantra.  I recognized him as someone I’d seen around the lodge.  I know I had heard his name before, but I didn’t remember it at the time, don’t recall it now and don’t want to.  I remember that he had come on to me at a Halloween party in the lodge, when he had been so drunk he could hardly stand.  He was drunk most of the times I remember seeing him.  That day at the festival, he was on some other drug, probably meth or cocaine, that enhanced his projections.

  It creeped me out.  I wondered if there was anything I could or should have done about it, but concluded that there wasn’t.  Later on, at the local store, I learned that the troopers were looking for him, but the troopers never tell us why they are looking for people, so I don’t know if there was any connection.  I do know that I have not seen that guy since that festival.

  Back on the subject of psychic shielding, I don’t recommend it.  Would you really want to go around blindfolded because there is ugliness in the world, or deafen yourself to avoid hearing dissonance?  One of the most useful and influential bits of advice I ever received was in Dick Sutphen’s Bushido Training:  “Cycle from positive to neutral.”  We know that the emotional troughs are there, but we don’t have to slide down into them.  We can enjoy the peaks without letting our own emotions wallow below the baseline.  When I post on the forums where the kids are looking for ways to block out their perceptions, I always recommend that they learn how to filter them instead.  This requires mental focus, discrimination and discipline, as in that, “ninja school for empaths,” that HomerTheBrave imagines.  In my far from humble opinion, that is preferable to cutting oneself off from any of one’s senses.
   

  • 5:22 pm
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