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In today’s episode, I discuss:

I’m updating this community on my re-brand THE EMPOWERED EMPATH. We’re talking about what this process looked like for me, who the empowered empath is, the connection between empaths and autoimmune disease, and operating as a highly sensitive person.

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COURSE: Intuitive Soul School (Digital)

Ready to unlock your psychic abilities and awaken your higher self? Intuitive Soul School has been described as a, “BOOM of mind body expansion,” by past students. This self-guided course helps you to drop any wounds around your sensitive nature, and step into your empath powers.

Episode Transcript:

Hello friends. Have you noticed that you can get caught up in consuming content? Or maybe you notice you are hyper, hyper focused on the doing. Empaths, we often consume, and I know because that was me too. Soaking up information from all my favorite teachers and mentors, but it wasn’t until I started focusing more on the being and embodiment work that the door to massive clarity was finally unlocked and I no longer got confused about what was my energy versus everybody else’s. I was able to become a more clear channel for creation and as a result, transform my life, business and health. In fact, my meditation and embodiment practice is what helped me have a nearly $40,000 month this past January, see the highest downloaded month of the podcast, and finally release a lot of unnecessary stress. And my clients felt it and saw it in their lives too. It wasn’t reading more articles. It wasn’t doing more busy work.

So I’m inviting you to graduate from the spongy empath consumer into the self-activated sovereign healer. You can take your podcast listening experience from, Ooh, I feel seen, heard and inspired to holy shit, I actually feel different. My being has shifted. I am the embodiment of the woman I desire to be. The Third Eye Collective is a simple way to upgrade your experience and commit, not only to a meditation practice that compliments your healing, but also receive personalized coaching so you can be clear on what direct actions to implement into your highest goals. There are two simple ways to get involved at $11 or $22 a month with no commitment. So, if this is calling your name, join this amazing and growing community.

Welcome to the Healing Uncensored podcast. My name is Sarah Small, and I’m a health and mindset coach for women with autoimmune disease just like you. I absolutely love helping you tap into your self-healing power, uncover the energetic side of healing, and release limiting beliefs around your body and your life. Think of this podcast as everything you wouldn’t hear at your doctor’s office. It’s a place for empowered souls to move beyond food and heal themselves on a soul level. I hope you enjoy today’s episode. Now let’s begin.

Today’s episode is brought to you by the Healing Vault. The Healing Vault is a collection of trainings and resources to help you embody your most empowered self. I cannot tell you how often women ask me for healing tools, but say I don’t have time for the live calls or I need something now, like today. So here’s the thing. Sometimes you need a course on a specific topic and other times you just need to be in the vibration of someone living at their next level of healing, which is where this bundle of resources comes in. Think of the Healing Vault like your medicine cabinet for emotional symptoms. So are you ready to make your self-healing a non-negotiable? Are you ready for healing at your fingertips any time, any place, from any device that you own? This vault includes meditations, guided tapping, yoga for empaths, recorded lessons, and even an at home self-guided retreat. I’m offering the first 30 women access for just $88 by using the code UNCENSORED to enroll today. Again, first 30 women come join this healing vault for just $88 and I will see you inside.

Welcome to today’s episode. Today is a little different. I’m just going to update you all on some of the things that are happening over here in what was Autoimmune Tribe as you heard two episodes ago, and what has been happening with the empowered empath community, which is my rebrand. Not a week ago, I went live and I made this really big change in my business, and I’ve just been allowing myself to really feel into this process. So many of you have been here from the beginning, and I just want to say thank you all for being here and for giving me your time and for continuously supporting this community.

When I originally created Autoimmune Tribe, it was created as a community for women with autoimmune disease, and I was searching personally for somewhere where we could talk about the reality of living with chronic illness. And at the time my passion was more surrounding food as medicine and the autoimmune protocol, and starting to dive into a different meaning of self-care and honoring my body, and seeing my body’s symptoms, physical symptoms as messages. But that passion for food as medicine eventually evolved into this deep love for the emotional, energetic, and spiritual side of healing.

At this point, I have been working as a coach for about three years now, and Autoimmune Tribe is two and a half years old of me working on this full-time. In February and March, I’ve just been insane. Oh my God! So insane in the most beautiful way. So much fun, so much clarity after deep emotional chaos and the best months of my business yet. And this interesting thing has started to happen, which is whereas the majority of my clients and programs have been tailored for the woman looking to heal beyond food on a deep soul level, like in 21 Days of Healing and Intuitive Soul School and the newly launched Healing Vault and the Healing Activation Portal, and even my own autoimmune issues, symptoms, diseases really have led me to become fascinated with living a healthy lifestyle and more specifically, all of those emotional, spiritual, holistic healing modalities that my doctor really never told me about.

And if you’ve been here listening to the Healing Uncensored podcast for a while, you also know that the content of these episodes is mostly around looking deeper, healing in an unconventional way. Looking at your mouth like the last episode. Talking about functional medicine, talking about goddess, inner feminine energy, talking about the empath and the relationship and correlation between empaths and chronic illness. But this funny thing started to happen in my life and in my business, which is I began to get message after message from women who didn’t want to stop at healing their own bodies and they wanted to help other women heal, and create a business doing what they loved and what has helped them so immensely, enormously in their life. They want to be able to share that; they want to share their light. They want to take this chronic illness and see that there’s purpose behind it. Whether that’s sharing essential oils with their family, whether that is coaching other women on food and nutrition and food as medicine, or that is helping other women see their bodies as perfectly imperfect and owning this body, this vessel that we only get one of in this lifetime and just loving it purely.

So, they’re all coming to me with different passions, different niches, different sparks that really light them up. But I noticed more and more of this was happening and so I started creating programs for these women as well, like the newly launched Empath Entrepreneur mastermind, and my course Launch your Wellness Biz, and I’ve been sharing more and more about these tools in my own business as well. The insights that I’ve learned in my healing. Healing my own auto immune diseases, but also the insights and tools that I’ve started to glean through building a thriving, spiritual wellness business, and there’s so much that’s gone into that. So, so, so much and it’s been the greatest, deepest personal development journey that I think I could have ever been on. This combination of chronic illness/empath/entrepreneur, and, oh my gosh! So much has come up. Some of the biggest revelations of my entire life have happened through owning a business, and all of those pieces of my inner work and inner puzzle that I’ve started to put together and really shine a light on have of course helped my business and my money mindset and my belief in myself and what I have to share with the world but it’s also affected my health.

And through doing the personal development to grow a business, my health has improved and my health has improved by stepping into my purpose, and my health has improved by no longer disregarding and shutting out the whispers, those little whispers of your soul that say, Sarah, you can do more. Not even you can do more, you want to do more. You’re meant to do more in this world. Keep stepping forward, putting one foot in front of the other, stepping closer and closer and closer towards your purpose.

And so the beginning of this year, I’ve shared this on a couple of episodes where the beginning of this year was rough. Just so many emotions. My health took a little bit of a turn, and now that I’m out of that dip in the roller coaster ride of chronic illness, I’m feeling good. But emotionally, oh my gosh! So much came up and I think part of it was another layer of my own spiritual awakening and just awakening to my truth and awakening to my power. And oftentimes I’ve seen this pattern in myself and other female entrepreneurs where when you go through breakthrough, sometimes your health takes a dip because you are energetically shifting. You are raising your frequency of your cells inside your physical body, which then affects your subtle energy body. And as you go through that shift, that up level, that upgrade in your energy, your frequency, your health and your cells literally change as well. And so while there were certainly physical, understanding reasons for some of the health things I experienced mostly in February around glutening myself with Chapstick and some mineral imbalances that I’ve recently found, I also think part of the emotional turmoil that just kind of came out of really nowhere was also this awakening and this kind of breakdown to break through, and I don’t think it has to always be that way.

But in this case, I could feel my body just shifting, and then of course, through that shift and that kind of breakdown did come the breakthrough. And through that breakdown, there was clarity and through that breakdown, I had my best financial months in February and then even higher in March to date. So through that experience, I realized that Autoimmune Tribe no longer encompassed all that I do and all that I offer, but I was really stoked at the time because I was experiencing these physical symptoms and I was feeling deep sadness and just wanting to kind of hibernate like we do in the winter time sometimes. And so stumped on what does encompass all of who I am as Sarah Small? What encompasses all that I offer this world and all that I deliver through this podcast and my programs, through my social media presence? All of it. And that’s when I stopped forcing. I said you know what? No one else is feeling this but me. No-one’s on the other side of this going, oh my gosh, Autoimmune Tribe isn’t aligned. It doesn’t encompass all that Sarah does anymore. When is she going to change? When is she going to change? I just let myself keep that to myself, and I allowed myself to feel it into it.

When I finally realized that February and March were serving a purpose for my energetic state and not just some of the physical stuff I was experiencing, on the other side of that was a deep clarity and I felt into it and I released attachment to something that really means so much to me. This business, this community, because Autoimmune Tribe, while it’s just on the most simple level two words, to me it embodies three years of work, three years of love, three years of passion poured into every single post. Every single comment I’ve responded to. Every single episode of this podcast. Every single program and video and PDF within that program and every client that I’ve worked with. One-on-one. All of that.

So yeah, it’s two words, but within it, underneath it was so much, and that meant and means so, so much to me, and to surrender that, to surrender this thing that I’ve started to build my identity around felt challenging at first, but I realized that we evolve and we grow as human beings, and that we don’t have to stay with one label. These two words that were a label I decided on three years ago, at the time was really aligned. I didn’t have to maintain that for anybody. There was no rule, no law that that had to be me or the words that did encompass all of this forever. And when I really released the attachment to that and decided that you know what, whatever this….

So I think that – just a side note – I think that every program we create, the business as a whole has its own energetic vibration. It has its own soul, has its own energy. And when I look at the energy of all of this that I’ve created, but it’s not all about me and in fact integrates the energy of all of you, and then as a collective, it has its own separate energy. I asked it what do you want to be called? What does it want to be called? And I just trusted that a new name would arise and it didn’t happen right away. It didn’t happen fast at all in what my brain thought it should happen, the pace at which it thought it should happen. And I had several coaches, mentors that I was working with this past year, who before I even decided that I needed to, or wanted to change the name of this business, I was already feeling that tug in two directions, and they highly recommended to me that I either choose working with wellness coaches like with my Mastermind and Launch your Wellness Biz, or with people who were healing from chronic illness through things like Intuitive Soul School, 21 Days of Healing, et cetera, my one-on-one offers.

And when I thought about having to make that decision, it just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel right. Here I had two things I was immensely passionate about and trying to pick one just … and you know what? Someday maybe I will. Maybe I’ll just go back to the healing work, or maybe I will completely evolve into the holistic business coaching. I don’t know. But for today, for right now, what my soul is telling me, what the energy of this community is giving off to me is that it doesn’t want to choose one or the other and so I refused to believe that. I refused to believe that I had to choose, and instead I see these things as so intertwined and beautifully intertwined, because I also believe that the pathway to healing inevitably leads you to your soul purpose. Does that mean that after you heal chronic illness, you have to start a business? No. Does that mean that as you get healthier with your own autoimmune disease, that you have to teach everyone everything you’ve learned along the way? No, but I do believe that as you heal your physical body and dive deeper into the spiritual, emotional, energetic side of healing, that your life as a whole starts to change and that the physical symptoms start to alleviate and you do start to feel better and more energized and start to glow.

But you also have this experience of awakening, if you choose to have it. And through that experience, your truth is uprooted and maybe it was buried for a long time. We we’re living in a way – and I can relate to this -living in a way where we were fine all the time and we were always just fine. We were not good; we were not bad. We were fine. We were just coping. We were just going through the motions of the day. We were in this autonomic process over and over again of just habitual pattern, pattern, pattern, and our physical symptoms of chronic illness, or autoimmune were so big and so heavy, so all-consuming that maybe it felt hard to think of anything but that in that process, in that habit, in that pattern. But as you start to feel better and as you start to awaken it to your truths, things start to become more clear and then you have room to see what you really love, what you really desire, what you want more of in your life, what your passions are, who you are at a soul level. I’ve seen that in every single one of my clients, no matter what state they come to me in, what phase of their healing process, this unraveling, this cracking open up their soul that I’ve also experienced in my own healing process, allows them to see their truth with more clarity. And that truth might be that they want to coach other people and they want to start a business, or they want to sell essential oils, or they want to create workout programs, or they want to be a self-love coach or whatever that is in the entrepreneurial world. But it also might just be that they want to go back to school and they want to be a teacher, or they realize that they have been settling in their job and that they’re so worthy of more. They’re going to ask for a raise or promotion, or they’re going to create more boundaries around their work.

And so it’s not always saying I’m going to go start my own business, but it is, in my opinion, that pathway to healing inevitably leads you to your soul’s purpose. And when I really felt into that process, that process that I’ve seen over and over and over again in my own clients and in myself, my path, my journey, eventually a name did arise. And I realized that truly, truly, truly the common thread in all of what I do and all the people that I support is that they are all empathic beings. They are all the empaths, and they’re all the women who are sensitive, sensitive to the energy around her, the emotions that surround her.

And it doesn’t matter whether she’s the empath entrepreneur or the aspiring empath entrepreneur or the healing empath, or the empath with chronic illness. It doesn’t matter where she is in that journey. The common thread that weaves all of the people together that I work with is that they feel deeply. They feel deeply in their soul. Their emotions are lit up and they feel the energy of the person they’re in the room with. They feel the energy of the crowded spaces. They feel the energy of the puppies on TV, and they want to be of service to the world. They desire to be of service, of purpose to the world. And they want to see this experience they’ve been through of chronic illness as something more, as something greater, as understanding why this came into their life and putting some meaning to it that is more than just poor me! That is more than why me? That is more than I’m the victim of this illness, this disease that I have labeled myself with. And instead they want to see this as a learning experience. They want to see this as an awakening. They want to see this as something that is adding to their life, that is happening for them instead of to them.

And so when I realized that there was a very clear correlation between all the people I serve as being empaths, and that there’s also in my own research and my own experience, working with women, a clear correlation between the woman with autoimmune disease and the woman who considers herself the empath. I’ll talk a little bit about that here in a second. I realized that that was a common thread. I also have seen women trying to do business in a super textbook cookie cutter way, and it’s not working for them, and part of the reason is that they’re the empath and they have their own unique human design and their own unique energy. And when someone else is saying do it this way, do it my way, it doesn’t feel good for them. And what doesn’t feel good for them and they don’t want to do it or their energy’s not aligned behind it, and then they don’t sell. They might’ve been trying to be a coach for a year or two or three, and they’re not getting results. And they’re like, I don’t even know if I can even call myself a coach because I haven’t had more than one or two clients. That woman who is just lost and does not know what the F to do next, she’s also the empath. And so I help the wounded empath become the empowered empath, and a way to reframe this from the disempowered or wounded empath because that question that person asks themselves is why me? They ask why me versus the empowered empath or entrepreneur says what message is my body sending me? What message is my body sending me? What purpose does this have in my life? How is this happening for me? How can I reframe this, reprogram this, rewire this to support my soul and my growth and push me towards my purpose and my truth and my cracking open? That’s the empowered empath.

So now the empowered empath and this empowered empath community, it’s born, it’s created. And the core of my work – I want you guys to know this – the core of my work will not change, but the name that you’ll start seeing around here is the Empowered Empath. I look so forward to what is to come, and I feel so freaking aligned with this new name and the entire energy of this business so I hope you’ll come on this journey with me. I hope that I can inspire you and educate you on how to see your own sensitivities as strengths, and that we can all create this ripple effect of healing in the world.

I look forward for what’s to come, and if you have any sort of confusion on what an empath is because it’s not part of your vocabulary, not part of your language, I get it. That’s fine. I want to teach you. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes today to my empath quiz, that goes through many, many questions, about 30 questions so it takes about five minutes to get through the quiz, but all of these questions themselves will bring to light a little bit about what the empath is. An empath is the woman who cries when she sees puppies or hears the Sarah McLachlan SPCA infomercials on TV. She is the woman who loves to dream and create. She is the woman who feels deeply into other people’s emotions and is affected by the energy around her. There’s so much more. So, so, so much more so I invite you to go take that quiz.

I just want to spend a couple minutes here before we wrap up today also explaining the connection between empaths and chronic illness and how they can be related. So, if empaths don’t get enough alone time to recharge, then they will likely experience chronic fatigue and exhaustion. And if they have too much stimulus during the day, that can prevent an empath from falling asleep at night, which can lead to sleep issues. And we know that illness is correlated to stress. When we don’t get enough sleep, it stresses our body out. As well, the standard 9 to 5 job can be super exhausting for empaths since there’s this constant energy and oftentimes stress in their environment. So, if you’re somebody who during that 9 to 5 period of your life, when you’re at work feels so exhausted, then that’s going to affect your health as well. And you’re going to come home and you might not have energy for anything else. Same as when an empath feels another person’s energy, whether it’s in an office environment, a home environment, strangers on the street, at the grocery store. If you feel that person’s energy or multiple people’s energy, you can actually send the empath into fight or flight, a.k.a survival mode which releases cortisol, which stops digestion, which shortens your breath and constricts your blood flow. This is the stress response, which is not inherently bad, but if we are feeling like our body is not safe around people or unfamiliar energies in our life and our physical body and our physiology start to react to that way, that can lead to things like adrenal fatigue and HPA access dysfunction and Hashimoto’s thyroid disease.

And so to me, over the years of working, it’s been so interesting to pull out these pieces of like, of course the empath is going to be more prone to chronic illness. Does that guarantee chronic illness or autoimmune disease? Absolutely not. Does the empath who feels wounded and energetically sensitive or broken going to have a harder time healing? I think so, because until they have strong, energetic boundaries, all of these things that are affecting their physical health are going to feel exacerbated.

Empaths are also prone to emotional eating because when they’re unsure of how to manage all this immense energy that’s coming into their bubble and impacting them, and that they’re feeling all these feelings and they don’t have boundaries to be able to distinguish what is mine and what is not mine to carry, then they want to -what is the word – to be able to cover up, to numb out. That’s the word – to numb out all of those feelings, all of that emotional energy that’s swirling around them, and so oftentimes they go to food to be able to cope. Empaths also often get prescribed anti-anxiety drugs, medications, or even antidepressants, which because of some of the empath symptoms they’re having not necessarily imbalances in their body, but we know from our research that these drugs can destroy our gut flora or microbiome. And we also know that an imbalanced gut flora, leaky gut, the entire makeup of your gut has so much to do with your overall health and wellness.

So the empath and the woman with chronic illness in so many cases overlap. Think of those – what are those called? Not pie charts. I can’t think of the name of them right now, when the circles overlap. I’m going to find that out right after this. But when those things come together like that overlap, I feel like the circles overlap quite, quite a bit where there is just this overlap of the person who feels like, yeah, I’m really energetically sensitive, and then the person who has some sort of chronic migraine, gut issues, autoimmune disease. And so, my goal and my mission in this life is to be able to first bring awareness to all of this to people who are not already aware, and to be able to educate and inspire on people’s energy body, their subtle energy body, what is beyond our visible eye, and teach people how to create strong boundaries so that their energy doesn’t get used up and burnt out, so that the body doesn’t have to react on a physical level that leads to physical symptoms.

What I see is oftentimes people might start with some fatigue or pain, but after years of ignoring these symptoms, it can lead to bigger issues like IBS or lupus or Hashimoto’s or celiac disease and more. Disclaimer: this is not medical advice. I’m not a medical doctor or practitioner, but this is something that I am deeply passionate about. I think that we need to draw more attention to this connection and give all the empaths of the world the tools they need to manage their energy, be the empowered empath, and be able to inspire people in their life and take those tools and teach them to their children, their sons and their daughters, so that they can grow up asking empowering questions like what message is my body sending me, instead of disempowering questions like why me?

All along in my life, I realized much later on in life, I have been an empath and even though it wasn’t until many, many years later that I finally discovered there was a name for something I felt so deeply my entire life. When I was trying to operate with chronic illness and as a highly sensitive person and feeling burnt out time and time again, I wish that I knew that I didn’t have to feel weak for being sensitive, and that I didn’t have to close myself off from the world, and I didn’t have to try and conform to other people’s behaviors or habits or partying. Instead, I could just reframe my own dialogue around what it meant to be sensitive and it means to be sensitive and rise up into my power as an empath, as a woman with chronic illness and as a woman who was empowered by what my might be considered weak or weird or fragile or different by some people. So rather than conforming to what I was told over and again, which is that your emotions with sensitivity make you weak, I am choosing to shift that paradigm and I’m declaring myself the empowered empath and I would love, love, love for you all to see yourselves as the empowered empath as well.

That’s all for this time. I hope you guys have enjoyed this update and just a deeper understanding of what it means to be the empowered empath and the process it took to get here. I am so excited for what’s to come and again, I hope you’ll join me for this journey. Have a great rest of your day and I’ll see you next time.

All right. I had to Google what those circle graphs are called. That’s called a Venn diagram. So, in case that’s been stuck in your head for the last five or six minutes to the end of the episode, it’s called a Venn diagram. I think I’m going to make one so you guys can really see the overlap between chronic illness and empaths. That’s really all for today. I will see you next time and just a huge, huge thank you for being here, for supporting the Healing Uncensored podcast and being freaking amazing!