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In this episode, I discuss:

• How to build emotional intelligence
• Using your emotions as a strength
• Growing, connecting, and co-creating with your online community
• How to recognize and strengthen your intuition

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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 clearer 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 a 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 busywork. 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, click the link in the show notes to join this amazing and growing community.

Welcome to the Uncensored Empath, a place for us to discuss highly sensitives energy illness, healing, and transformation. My name is Sarah Small, and I’m a life and success coach for empaths who want to create a thriving body, business, and life. Think of this podcast as your no-B.S. guide to navigating life, health and entrepreneurship. You’ll get straight to the point, totally holistic tips from me in real time as I navigate this healing and growth journey right beside you. This is a Soul Fire production.

Hello, empath community. Today’s episode is a little bit different. First. I want to start with a little bit of a catch-up. I am now officially 36 weeks pregnant as I’m recording this. By the time you listen, it might be a little bit later and we are in the phase now of all the things to get ready for baby girl. It has been just an intense, crazy past nine months, and I’m at the point where I’m starting to do all these things for cervical ripening. And every time I drink my raspberry leaf tea and I eat my dates with a little goat cheese on a gluten-free cracker, getting ready to go into labor, it’s just surreal. I’m like, oh my gosh, is this going to be the moment? Is it going to be now? When is she coming? There’s this anxious, impatient anticipation mixed with my entrepreneur hat that says not yet, not yet. We’ve got more things to do before you arrive earthside, little girl so just wait a little bit longer.

I had a little bit of a scare this week where I had this really intense pain that actually brought me down to my knees. I shouted to my husband and he came upstairs and of course he was freaking out like, holy shit! What’s happening? I was just having really intense pain that was radiating through my right side, and my intuition told me this is going to pass. Just deep breaths. It’s going to be fine. And it did. It totally passed, but then I wasn’t feeling baby move after that sensation, so we called the midwives, talked to my doula, and decided to go in and have a non-stress test. That’s basically just where they hook you up to the monitors to track the baby’s movements, consistency of contractions. You hear her heartbeat and she was totally fine. But having that moment of, oh my gosh, is she coming now definitely made things even more real and was definitely the inspiration I needed to continue or finish packing my go-bag for our birth center and making sure all the things are at least as in place as they can be, because it’s not going to be perfect.

This journey, I’ve been talking to so many other mama friends, and then my care team is just incredible. I have so many people supporting me – my midwife, my doula, my massage therapist, my prenatal chiropractor, my acupuncturist. There are literally so many people who I have on my team who are supporting me. And in talking to all of them, I’ve realized that a birth plan is not necessarily as helpful as birth preferences, and so I have been putting together and have finalized my birth preferences, knowing that this is like the ultimate. I am not in control. She’s going to come when she wants to come. And we can of course bring all my pain management stuff and we can make the decisions that are in the highest alignment for the birth that I desire to have, but there’s still so much that is out of my control. I’ve also been listening to hypnobirthing tracks, and just trying to release fear around labor and delivery and the pain that may be present, and then also train my subconscious mind to go into a deep hypnotic state so that we can reduce pain without medication as well.

So, without going on and on, I did want to provide you guys a little update on what’s been happening behind the scenes because holy crap, it’s been a lot. It’s been a really intense journey and I was telling my husband it feels like I’ve been pregnant for a year, and I almost have. Because as you guys know, I’ve been really open on this show and talked about my story of miscarriage and loss.

I got pregnant last May 2020. I’m recording this April, 2021 and I’m still pregnant. But as you listened, we were only pregnant for about two months in May, June of 2020. Then I did a very intensive detox for the chemotherapy drug called methotrexate that was required because I had a tubal pregnancy that lasted for two months and it was supposed to last for three months, but I got pregnant – again. So, by the end of August, I was pregnant with this baby girl. And then we’ve just been buckling up for the ride. There’s been so many scary moments and so many beautiful moments, and I’ve been trying to document it and your mind goes to so many different places.

So, if you can all let me know, I would love to hear from you in the DMs. I am planning to share our birth story and a little bit more about this pregnancy journey after the fact once I’m on the other side, but I’d love to know if that’s something that is interesting to you, that you are curious about to know more details and not just a summary that I’m sharing today. On Instagram, I recently posted in my story about how the journey with pregnancy and sensory processing disorder has been such a coexistence of discomfort, sometimes excruciating pain and this miraculous joy, gratitude and beauty all wrapped up into one. And so many of you reached out and if you have children saying, this is exactly how I felt as well, where there were moments when I was crawling out of my skin and it was sensory overload, but from the inside versus our external environment. And then those of you who haven’t yet had children, or maybe don’t plan to have children had also expressed like, this is my fear and, this is kind of what I thought it would be like and now I’m hearing you put it into words.

I was telling a client that that’s not meant to deter or scare anyone, but to talk about my very real experience. And it’s not that I can’t do it. It’s not that I haven’t done it, but there’s been moments that have been uncomfortable and my giant toolbox of things empath and all things subconscious reprogramming has been life-saving during this time to be able to lean on, to be able to go to so that I didn’t have to feel like there was nothing I could do because I have this giant toolbox and it’s been so helpful.

All right. Well, the countdown is on and there are less than 30 days till her due date. We haven’t picked a name. We have some top names that we’re probably just going to see when I hold her for the first time and start to really get to know her. I think she’s just going to tell us. I think that there’s going to just be a telepathic communication where she’s just going to show me. And I think it’s going to be one of the top names that we picked out, but who knows? Maybe it’ll be something completely different, but we are not that couple who has the name going in to the process and instead, we’re just going to hope that it comes to us once we’re there and once she’s here. All right, that’s enough personal updates.

If you have been listening to the last several episodes, you know that I recently launched the Third Eye Collective. This is like your upgraded podcast experience, and today’s episode is a clip from the Ask Me Anything audio for April, where our members got to ask anything in everything. And we had four questions this month that I was able to break down and go into detail inside this episode. So you guys are going to get a peek of a couple of those. And just a reminder that if this is something that you want access to, the doors are open. We have two different levels. The first is The Awakening. That’s at $11 a month. There’s no commitment, and you get two healing meditations with myself, as well as access to our empath vibes playlist that I was literally just adding more songs to this morning. I usually around the 15th of every month add at least five to 10 new songs to that ongoing empath-vibey playlist on Spotify.

And then we have The Expansion, and what you’re going to hear today is part of The Expansion. $22 a month. Again, no commitment. You get this additional solo episode, as well as the opportunity to ask me anything inside of our coaching thread and it’s intimate. It’s coaching customized to you at the lowest price point you will ever see it within my many containers. You also get those two meditations and the Empath Vibes playlist as well, discounts on my coaching services, and right now, you also receive a free signed copy of my book, 21 Days of Healing when you sign up. So that pays for itself within the first month. I can’t wait to share this with you.

How to build emotional intelligence

We’re talking a lot about … if I had to summarize this month’s ask me anything, it would be on emotional intelligence and reconnecting to your body. Not just your physical body though, your emotional body. So, with all of that being said, here is your sneak peek.

The next question is how to not let my emotions hold me back? And what I want to say to you, love is that your emotions are a form of intelligence and wisdom that live within you, regardless of whether it is the deepest joy and bliss and pleasure high-frequency emotions, or it is the guilt, shame, sadness, and grief that live in the lower frequency on the spectrum of emotions. It doesn’t matter. All of the emotions within that spectrum that all hold different frequencies are messengers, are divine intelligence that lives within you. And so, if I had you here with me, I would ask you, how are you currently seeing or picturing these emotions as holding you back? Because when I think about our emotional body as a layer of our energy body that does hold this full spectrum of emotion, there’s so much information in there that we can choose to allow to guide us so that when shame creeps up, because we’ve all experienced that lowest frequency emotion before, we can start to get curious. Curious about it and in conversation with it and we can allow that to teach us.

We can also allow it to bring us to our knees in the moments where we need to cry, we need to express. And then when bliss and joy enter into our space, same thing. We can allow that to guide us, to inform our decision, to show us what we want to move closer to, versus what we want to move away from.

So, ask yourself this question, how do I feel like my emotions are holding me back? There’s probably a lot of internal dialogue around what you should be feeling and what’s acceptable or appropriate versus not acceptable and appropriate. And within that is likely a lot of story from the past – past experiences, your inner child and childhood experiences, the environment in which you were raised and which you may have been told emotions held this either positive or negative connotation. And my invitation for you to step into today is to release any positive or negative, and instead, yes, emotions do hold high and low frequency. But what if there were no positive or negative emotions and instead every emotion held divine wisdom and intelligence that was meant to be there and it was an expression of your authentic self and it allowed you to make more informed decisions for yourself in your life?

Using your emotions as a strength

Ultimately, the only way I feel that your emotions can hold you back is if you repress them, if you don’t allow them to the surface, and if you bury them and we start to store away, store away, store away our emotions for years and years, and it becomes a habit now that has this stronghold over us, it feels locked up. And in that sense, we can feel very constricted. We can feel very stuck so it’s when we actually feel our emotions that we get set free. So, I invite you actually into a deeper, emotional experience in your life as a way to release anything that’s been stored up, and also to become more intimately connected to all the flavors of emotion that do exist within your life. It is when we reconnect to our emotional intelligence and our emotional body that we become more embodied leaders, path pavers, way-showers, healers on this planet and so we need you. We need you to let your emotions guide you, versus the old story of anything that is limiting about the emotional experience of being a human being. You are allowed to be 100% human and at the same time, you are 100% the spiritual being and divine.

Growing, connecting, and co-creating with your online community

The next question is how to engage with my followers. So, the first thing I want to pause and witness here is the language that is used – followers – and what if instead of seeing the people who yes, do technically follow you on whatever social media platform as followers, who are just along for the ride. Instead, see them as your community, see them as real human beings, and then how do you engage with real human beings? Well, yes, it’s different contexts being online than it is in person. But what if you started to treat that relationship to your online community, similar to how you would engage with people in real life? Why should it be any different, right? You are still you. We still want to feel. We want to feel your energy, and we want to feel your authentic energy when you’re showing up online. So how do you engage with your community is to treat every human being that likes your posts, that comments on your posts, that participates in your live streams, that sends you a DM as a human with a beating heart. A human who has a life story, a human who we don’t know what kind of day they had today. A human with their own beliefs, values, purpose, mission, goals, dreams, visions on this planet and to get curious about that human.

Now, this is hard to do when we’re always speaking to large crowds, whereas if we’re speaking to this mass of people. So, in order to feel more connected to the people who are in your space, go talk to them individually. Treat them as an individual. When they pop into your DMs, get curious and ask them questions. My challenge to you is to go to a recent post or piece of content that you’ve put out and notice who are the five people that have engaged with you, that find your content interesting or activating, or they’re clearly curious and go create a relationship with those let’s just start with five people. Follow up with them, respond to them, send them a message. Even if they just commented on a public post, you can now send them a private message and engage with them like you would a person at a party as a real human and with a sense of curiosity in your mind of, I don’t know anything about you yet so I want to get to know you so I’m going to ask the questions that I would if we were just sitting at a coffee shop, waiting in a long line together and starting to get to know each other, because we’re both here and we’re both interested in the same thing, let’s say.

So how to engage with your community. First of all, let’s change and get rid of the language of “followers”. Change it to community. Start to treat every single beating heart in that community as just that – a real ass human being with a beating heart and express interest and express curiosity. Now, depending on your human design, you can also take this a layer deeper and start to get more strategic. For example, the generators and manifesting generators of the world can create even more engagement with their community by creating these opportunities where they can respond. Where they can respond to their community’s questions, where they can respond to a need, where they can provide a solution where there is a problem or a challenge. Whereas myself as a projector, my strategy is to wait for the invitation. And so, I can create more opportunities for engagement by presenting myself in such a way that I hold wisdom, that I hold information and knowledge that people are going to be curious about. They’re going to want to ask me the question that’s going to open the door up to the invitation. Now the invitation has been made and I can be on my throne as the teacher and the guide, and I can answer those questions. But it’s my natural presence and magnetism and positioning myself as the expert that is going to allow people in to start to ask and get curious and ask me questions that then open up conversation, which leads to more engagement, which leads to more connection.

So you can think about this in terms of your human design, but I also want you to just think about it as taking the time. I think we got lazy. I think we got really fucking lazy about social media and you think, oh, if I just post this picture of me doing whatever, put a couple inspirational things down, that that’s going to allow me to grow my following. Well, what’s the fricking purpose of that? Why do you want to grow a following? And instead, I challenge you to think about the relationships you’re actually curating, the connection that you’re having, the heart-to-heart experience, and to see this as a community as if you were all in ceremony together, and to treat social media as such, as that. I’m not just going to post for likes, and instead, I’m going to create opportunities for people to connect, and that can’t happen unless I’m actively engaging with them as well and I’m creating these connections. I’m holding space for these connections to exist.

I’m going to pause there, but this is a big topic that I think we can all be a part of changing, so that not only our relationship to social media shifts, but also the people who enter into our space, our container, our little corner of social media feel safe, feel seen, feel heard, feel understood, and they’re going to want to come back and that’s going to increase your engagement even more. Because when they come to your corner of the internet, they actually feel the connection compared to so many other places on the internet.

How to recognize and strengthen your intuition

Okay. Our last question for today is a listener who wants to strengthen her intuition. Okay. There are so many ways to start to reconnect to your intuition, and I like to use the clear senses or clear senses of feeling, hearing, touching, smelling, seeing. I like to use those as a framework to build the language of your intuition and to understand it on a deeper level. I would pause and I would start by asking you how do you experience your intuition currently? What is that like? What is that experience like? Maybe you know. Maybe you’re still a little fuzzy; you’re not sure. But when you have, if you have felt your intuition the past – my guess is that you’ve all felt it at least once – how did you feel it? Was it a little rumble in your belly? Was it a clear knowing in your mind? Was it a flash of a vision? Was it a voice in your ear telling you? What are the clues? What are the signs that show you your intuition is speaking to you? And so how we strengthen our intuition is overlapping with developing our emotional intelligence like we were talking about in a previous question and starting to become a skilled translator, a skilled translator of what intuition is telling me. What is the message here? Not only what method or mode does it arrive in, whether that’s feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing, et cetera, and then also what is the literal message? If a little bird were to come and deliver it to you on a piece of paper, what would be written on that piece of paper? And that’s again where we’re invited to become more self-aware. More attuned to the subtle energy of our body.

In the empath leaders’ membership yesterday, I was guiding a client through understanding the difference in sensation in her body of when she puts up a wall that’s protective versus she upholds a healthy boundary, and both of those were in her chest. But when we peel back the layers and we got more intimately connected to each of those – wall versus boundary – she could notice that the actual sensation in her chest was different when she was protecting versus when she was upholding a healthy boundary, standing her firm ground. Intuition is similar in that when the message comes through, we want to start to notice how is it coming through? What mode of transportation, and then what is it telling me? This invites us to get very connected to our body in a way that is intimate, that is potentially unfamiliar to many people. They may be slightly aware of some of the physical sensations, but have you ever gone so deep into that sensation to notice its texture, its quality, its shape, its size? Is it moving, not moving? Is it hot? Is it cold? Does it have a color? Does it take on a sign, a symbol, an image, a shape? And it’s when we start to connect to the sensations our body is sending us, especially as empaths, that’s when we start to be able to decipher what’s written on that little note and we start to build this muscle of our intuition, when we start to realize, oh, well, when I feel an openness in my chest that is expansive, that is full of water, that is when I feel powerful in my boundaries. And when I feel a heavy, close sharpness in my chest, that is what I know I’m going into self-protection.

Your body will show you. It’s not just your third eye. I know we associate intuition to the third eye chakra and this community is the Third Eye Collective, and it’s a beautiful representation of how intuition can come through and often does come through, but it’s not the only way your body will show you. So, in order to strengthen our intuition, we have to practice going inward and getting curious about what our body is telling us.

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode. If you’re new here, reminder to rate, review, and subscribe to the Uncensored Empath podcast. And if you want to join us inside the Third Eye Collective, the link is in the show notes. I hope to see you inside and to be able to support you at an even more intimate, integrated experience. I’ll see you next time.

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