A post shared by Elephant Journal (@elephantjournal) on Mar 20, 2017 at 12:25pm PDT

We are the ones who feel everything deeply.

We are also the ones who regularly fall in love.

However, this does not mean love in the normal sense of the word. Falling in love for an empath can be quite different than most people’s experience of the L-word. Love for an empath can encompass much more—and, in fact, it must.

I’ve done a fair bit of investigation into love, both the experience of it in a relationship and the experience of it out of one. I also understand personally what it means to be an empath, because I am one.

Empaths are people who use all our senses regularly; in fact, we have a hard time not dong so. We are the ones who observe, smell, taste, hear, feel, touch, speak, and emote all at once—and often with the inability to turn off our hyper-vigilant constitutions.

We are the ones who understand you, without you having telling us. We are the ones who also know, just through a feeling in the air, what might be coming next.

Yes, empaths are highly sensitive people—ones who can learn to use this ability to our advantage in love, because we tune in to things others cannot. However, our hypersensitivity in relationships must be worked with, so that it does not become a hardship. If we solely focus on the other person’s feelings, as empaths, we will get incredibly overwhelmed.

Rather, the gift of an empath is that we can love in many different ways. We operate with all of our senses, which means we can love like this—with all of them—also.

This way of loving takes the pressure off of ourselves and our partners, so that we are not overburdened  with their feelings, nor are we leaning into our own neuroses about what they may or may not be.

When empaths put too much weight onto one feeling, we tend to get neurotic and anxious. We also absorb things that are not meant to be our own, or perhaps even known to us in the first place. For us to avoid doing this in love, we must realize all the ways that we can experience loving in the moment.

The following can help empaths get more joy out of falling in love, rather than stress:

Touch. Empaths tend to be overthinkers, especially in love. A great way to curb this is to love, instead, with our bodies. Try paying less attention to the mind; instead, focus on how the body feels when touching another. Is it warm, soft, hard?

Loving through touch means we get tender and slow. It means we let go of the rules of the mind, and we love with our skin instead. This can be done with another person by choosing to let go of speech for a bit and just feel. It can also be done with ourselves, or a beach, or a meal, or even simply through breathing and feeling the air on our face.

Sound. Empaths are very affected by noise. This means we can become overstimulated by trying to follow too much conversation or with aggressive music or background. It also means that we can be positively stimulated with sounds that are pleasant. Instead of focusing on words, can we learn to fall in love with just the sound of our partner’s voice? I do (and have) often. Listen to the tone instead—to the richness of it, and to how it ebbs and flows.

As empaths, when we begin to focus too much on feeling another’s emotions or words, music is a way to quickly experience greater love too. Play a song we can feel in our bodies, one that makes our joy swell up inside.

Space. Because we feel so much, it is important to remember that to be our best in love we must take our own space. This means that as empaths we have to spend time on our own. When we do not, we get overwhelmed, pick fights, and become overly emotional. Taking sacred space for ourselves will create better love. This is our chance to just be with our own beautiful selves. It is the opportunity our sensitive nervous systems need to relax. A little deprivation from others can go a long way in helping us feel peaceful and balanced. It’s okay to love from a distance sometimes. As empaths, we must.

It is a great experience to love as an empath. Lucky for us, we have the capability to do it on many levels. Harnessing this ability means we become acutely aware of the benefits and also the possible downfalls of getting too hung up on one strong feeling. Let’s disperse our love out on all our levels, so we feel it more grandly.

Let’s love with touch, sound, and space.

 

~

Author: Sarah Norrad
Image: Unsplash
Editor: Yoli Ramazzina