Listen here:

In this episode, I will cover:

• 7 guidelines to live by as an empath
• How living by these guidelines opens you up to more calm, more magic, and more fun
• How I’ve been implementing these ideas into my own life

Additional Resources:

COURSE: Earn Like an Empath

Sales and marketing as an empath is a strength. Let me help you understand why inside this course that helps you to release fear around sales, protect your energy, and build confidence so that money comes easily to you. Include my step-by-step sales process for hitting $20K months.

BOOK: 21 Days of Healing

21 Days of Healing was created out of my own desire to go beyond food and heal on a deeper emotional and spiritual level. I curated the most-loved content based on hundreds of live students’ experience in the course and created this self-guided workbook to help you navigate chronic illness, release emotional inflammation, and find the medicine woman within.

PRODUCT: Pique Tea

Pique is a concentrated invigorating elixir that dissolves in cold or hot water and provides your body with phytonutrients to unleash your inner potential! My favorite is Reishi Calm for grounding!

Episode transcript:

Welcome to the Healing Uncensored podcast. My name is Sarah Small and I’m a holistic business coach and intuitive healer who supports empaths in creating a thriving body, business, and life. Healing my own chronic illness as an empath led me to become fascinated with energy, and more specifically all the emotional, spiritual and holistic healing modalities that my doctor never told me about. I began to share my insights and journey online, and over time built a powerful community and business supporting women who are also on their path to healing. Think of this podcast as your uncensored and no-BS guide to navigating life, health, and entrepreneurship as a highly sensitive person. You’ll get no-nonsense and totally holistic tips from me in real-time as I navigate this healing journey right beside you. Now let’s get started.

Hello everyone. I just want to jump on today and riff a little bit on these seven ideas that if we live by, allow us to feel a deeper experience of life, maybe a more grounded or centered experience and maybe more joy or happiness or laughter or health, the things that we most crave and most desire. These are seven ideas that I’ve been playing with, with my yoga teacher training. So I’ve been teaching yoga for about 10 years now and I have had the honor of guiding other people to become yoga teachers as well. And throughout the process as a yoga teacher, like money, mind, body practices, we go beyond the physical movement, the asana that you see or experience in a yoga class, and we start to discuss on a deeper level really using yoga as this guideline to live by because it is so much more than just physical postures.

And in that discussion, we talk about these seven different guidelines to live by, and so I want to share them with you today and I just want to see what that sparks within you. If there’s anything that you feel like you could be inviting more of into your life of these seven ideas, or if there are ones where you feel like you spent all of your time, or if there are ones that you have maybe some reconciling to do with those ideas. So let’s dive in and just see what comes up, see what surfaces for you today.

Guideline #1:

The first is you are exactly where you’re supposed to be, and I feel like probably we’ve heard this. All of us have heard this at some point already in our life, but I want us to reconsider this today and consider that if we were to live by this guideline that we are exactly where we’re supposed to be, then no experience that surfaced or popped up in our life would be unworthy of some attention or some reflection, or trying to see where does this fit into my life as the whole picture.

And when I think about this, sometimes I zoom back into the timeline of my life and I zoom into moments where I didn’t feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be and there was a lot of rebellion within this concept. But what I realized in retrospect – hindsight’s 20/20 – that that was exactly what I needed to be able to grow. So I also feel like this idea or guideline to live by of you are exactly where you’re supposed to be, is the openness that there is growth and to receive that growth at this moment, and that none of these experiences of our life are unworthy of our attention. And instead of good or bad experiences or spots that you are along your timeline in your path, they get to be opportunities for us to reflect and to go deeper and to try to understand this big, crazy life. So that’s the first concept or the first idea.

Guideline #2:

The second is that all things are connected, and this relates back to the 12 universal laws or 12 laws of the universe, and the law of divine oneness that what you do matters. And I think that’s my favorite part within this concept as a whole is that if all things are connected, then what I do or do not do has a ripple effect within the collective consciousness and has an effect on the world. And so if I were to live by this guideline that all things are connected, I would look at my actions or I do look at my actions, my thoughts, my beliefs, the way I react and respond to my environment, the way that I treat the earth and I treat my body. All of that matters because all things are connected.

I was talking to a client yesterday and we were talking about how she has this deep desire to spread kindness in the world, and I reminded her that kindness starts with her but being kind by being kind to herself, it has this ripple effect that is then spread outward, and I think of it as our energy is this… if you look up the concept of quantum entanglement, our energy being quantumly entangled with all else. And so if our energy body were floating up above us, it would be just entangled with all the other energies of not only human beings but animals and objects and nature and plants and everything is connected. That’s why as empaths, we start to feel if there’s some sort of crisis or war or horrible tragedy in the world, sometimes we feel that on a deeper level because all things are connected, and we can feel that coming in because of our high sensitivity within our heart and our feeling and our senses. So all things are connected and I’d love to see what you guys are, what’s coming up for you as I say that, and have you ever considered that in your life of how what you do has a ripple effect outward into the world?

Guideline #3:

Number three: the idea or guideline three is that exercise and rest are vibrant for human health. So it seems obvious, right? But we have to sleep and if we don’t sleep, we literally go crazy. We cannot live without sleep at some point. We can definitely stretch our body to the limits, but rest is essential for vibrant human health. And I was talking to another client earlier this week and we were talking about how both of us didn’t sleep well. I’ve just not been able to fall asleep at night lately. I don’t know exactly why, but my brain has been really busy and there’s just a lot going on just within my thoughts and ideas and I’m like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah all over the place. So I haven’t been sleeping well and I notice even with one night of poor sleep that the next day I feel it, that I do not feel as well the next day after just one night of poor sleep.

And so there’s the rest side, where okay, the sun goes down, that’s kind of our cue within our circadian rhythm to go to bed every night. But what about this other piece of exercise? And I think that I know and I’ve discussed this on the podcast, especially with chronic illness, having exercise intolerance and exercise not always being something that felt supportive and healthy for me. And what I came to learn later was, first of all, it’s okay to take a break from exercise when you are completely cashed out, and I did that for a little while, even within my yoga practice. And then I came to realize as I healed my physical body and really started taking care of this vessel, that movement – maybe I want to change the word – so it’s not always just exercise, you need to sweat, work out but the movement is absolutely a key part of vibrant human health. And movement to me is a little different than an exercise in that it could literally mean shaking off energy in my body and throwing it to be recycled into something new. It could be more of an essential practice of moving my hips and getting into my chakra system, especially my lower chakras like root and sacral. It could be dance. It could be going to the gym and lifting weights because I enjoyed that to an extent. I’m not someone who wants to be lifting weights every single morning before I start my day. But movement is key and it allows the energy that you’re holding in your body to be integrated and to be processed.

So think about digested food but digesting energy. So when energy comes into your body, your bubble, your subtle energy body, well just like food, we can either just kind of keep it there and hold it in that space and it can eventually start to affect our physical body or we can feel it as heaviness or stickiness, or we can take that energy similar to the way we process food and digest it and integrate it into our being. And by moving our body, we allow our blood to flow, our energy to literally move and we are allowing that to be processed more easily and effectively than pushing things into little corners and being like, I’ll come back for you later. So movement is absolutely key to vibrant human health. So to recap number three, exercise and rest are essential for vibrant human health. Makes sense. But maybe we haven’t thought about it in those words or in that way before.

Guideline #4:

Number four: laughter and play our nature’s fountains of youth, and I love this. I’ve shared with you guys podcast episodes and in some of my writing lately that in my brother Joe’s journal and if you’re new to this community, I just lost another brother. His name was Joe and in one of his journals when he was in an outdoor camping trip called National Outdoor Leadership School, he had written in his journal kind of like as a sign off at the end of a letter and it said, keep silliness alive, and I got that tattooed on my arm right underneath my other brother Jordan’s handwriting from his journal and it says, I trust the process, and these feel very sacred to me. They feel like they also fit into these seven ideas or guidelines to live by.

And when I read those three simple but powerful and impactful words in Joe’s journal, there was kind of just this moment of goose bumps, and I thought to myself in my mind, Sarah, this is important. You need to remember these words. There was something kind of coming through me at that moment like I was meant to stumble upon these words. I was meant to read these words, but not just to read them and forget about them, but instead to integrate them into my life. Because as a kid it was easy to be silly and it was easy to have played and it was easy to have laughter, but as we grow older and we have more responsibilities and we run our own businesses, life gets crazy and I’m not isolated in that experience. I know you all have very similar life gets crazy experience. And so we forget. We forget the play, we forget silliness. We forget laughter. And I’m always really inspired by the people that I see in my life and I know in my life who are still really good at tapping into their inner child and our adult children, not in an irresponsible way but in like a silly, playful way and I’m always attracted to those people. I want to be friends with them because it’s a really beautiful reminder to me of keeping silliness alive.

But we can also cultivate that within ourselves. We don’t just need to see it or be inspired by it around us. We can tap into laughter and play more than we realize and more than maybe we give ourselves permission to do. So this is your reminder today to keep silliness alive, but also that laughter and play are fountains of youth. And I think it’s really, really interesting. There’s a …not really a statistic, it’s just a fact, a fact that all animal species engage in some sort of play. Isn’t that fascinating? Every animal that exists has some sort of play. They may not laugh the way that humans do, but I think that there’s a similar nervous system response and purpose and need, a deep core need for play in life. If all animals have this and you see it. I have a lot of feelings about zoos, but when I’ve been to the zoo in the past and you watch the monkeys or something, or even you watch fricking rhinos and you look at that animal and you’re like, how does a rhino play? They play. And that’s adorable. But all these animals to partake in play and as humans, I think we forget the importance of that. And so infuse more play and infuse more laughter into your life, and the business coaching side of me wants to also tell you that when you do allow yourself to be silly and to play and to laugh, that’s when you open your channel to abundance and you are magnetic as fuck, and people want to be around you and invest in your offers.

Guideline #5:

Let’s go on to five. Five is that touch and intimacy are deep human needs. So maybe if you’ve heard of the five love languages. I had to think about that for a second, and some of us have – I’m one of those people – our strongest love language is physical touch or human connection. Even if that’s not your strongest love language, the touch and intimacy in our life are still a deep human need, and touch and intimacy to me are related but they’re not the same. So touch is receiving a hug and I started this whole conversation talking about yoga teacher training and how I’ve been guiding it for the last three months now. And we talk about in training that even just with permission, giving someone like a hug after class or just like a hand on their back in a yoga posture to let them know that they’re supported. You literally have their back just like this soft but not creepy, firm touch on someone’s back can be life-changing, and I know that maybe that sounds drastic. What do you mean Sarah? Touching someone’s back can be life-changing? Well, they may not receive that anywhere else in their life. And that human touch, that human connection is a deep need.

We see this in research and studies as well with the research they’ve done with monkeys. Have you guys seen that ever? YouTube videos or on Facebook feeds and how psychologically damaging it can be if these monkeys or even human children, especially human children can be if they do not receive human touch and human connection. I mean that’s how we punish people in prisons, right? We put them into solitary confinement and that is something that affects us on a neurological level deeply. But then let’s talk about touch versus intimacy. Touch is literally human touch. It doesn’t have to be skin to skin. It can just be a big bear hug, but it is touch. Whereas intimacy I feel like can involve touch but doesn’t need to involve touch. I feel like human intimacy is a way for us to feel a heart connection to another soul.

So to me, intimacy can be … one of the most intimate things can be looking somebody in the eyes and holding eye contact and being a mirror for their soul and also saying without actually saying, just through eye contact, telepathically saying, I see you. You are seen. I’m holding this space for you. And that intimate moment of eye contact without actually touching somebody, that to me feels very intimate. It also always comes back to the heart for me when I think of intimacy. So our hearts, research shows, has 60 times more power than any of the other energy centers or areas of our body, and so we give off the strongest charge through our heart. And to me, intimacy is when you feel that unique frequency of somebody else’s heart, like shining outward. And it goes out far. I think it’s 30 feet. I believe that’s what it is, 30 to 60 feet out.

So it’s no wonder when you’re in crowded spaces, you can feel overwhelmed if you’re highly sensitive because you’re consuming and processing all of these charges of the unique frequency of all these humans’ heart chakras or heart centers. And so intimacy to me is feeling someone else’s heart, not physically, but energetically or emotionally or spiritually. And then that leads to a conversation on love and the heart connection to your partner in life. But it doesn’t have to be romantic or sexual. It can simply be love in a holistic, like the universal way that allows us to experience intimacy.

And then I think also intimacy is with yourself and orgasmic manifestation, connection to your sacral chakra, intimacy within your being of loving yourself on a soul-deep level. So that was five. Touch and intimacy are human needs and something to consider before I move on to six is also where do I want to receive more of this in my life? If you’re kind of having a light bulb moment of wow, I haven’t prioritized that or even thought about that in a really, really long time, but also how can you give more of that intimacy or that eye contact or holding the heart space for somebody else, or just a hand on the shoulder or a hand on the back or a hug to people in your life, and be this fluid channel of give and receive for touch and intimacy.

Guideline #6:

Number six. Six is fear and pain, our life’s greatest teachers. This one feels intimate for me. I feel like I have an intimate relationship with this sixth guideline or sixth idea to live by, which is that life gives and life takes, and we see that in cyclical processes in nature all the time. In death and rebirth and seasons of spring growing, fall, winter dying. We see it in hibernation and then the renewal. And so life gives and takes and we see it in nature and we see it in cycles of life. Even the sun, I don’t stay up forever. It’s still always there, but it’s there and then it’s gone and the moon’s there and then it’s gone. Life gives and it takes.

And so when we think about that on a more human 3D realm level, well to love is to realize that life gives and takes. To open your heart up vulnerably and experience love is also to acknowledge that life gives and takes and that love is ultimately going to end up in heartbreak in some way, someday because of impermanence in life, which we’re going to get to impermanence. But when we can realize and release attachment to the idea that this clinging onto what’s good in fear that … so it’s like when we’re experiencing comfort, joy, any positive emotion, we think, Oh my gosh, this is never going to last. I have to grip onto this. And then when we experience discomfort or pain or negative emotions, we think this is never going to go away. It’s never going to be released. I’m going to be this way forever.

What if instead of attachment to, or trying to always be in a positive place or push away our negative things, we opened up to the idea that fear and pain were life’s greatest teachers and that they were actually the key to growth and liberation, and that the most courageous thing we can do is really learn how to love and to care and to give, without the expectation of receiving back in return. But instead of just letting the law of cause and effect, another universal law, we’re still going to receive back in return, but it’s liberating to be able to show up and not have an attachment to that. So fear and pain as life’s greatest teachers allow us to see the darkest spots and shadow parts within our lives and in ourselves through a new lens, and realize that learning to be whole, we can learn to be whole no matter what life has given or taken from us.

And in fact, the things that have been taken away from us, the deepest losses, pains, and fears you have experienced or traumas in your life actually get to be life’s greatest teachers, get to liberate you, get to teach you your greatest lessons in this human existence and human experience. There’s a chapter about this in my book, 21 Days of Healing that is all about discovering wisdom and actually an exercise that takes you through how do we look at a shitty experience, an insurmountable loss, a deep pain, physical challenges that have taken us to our brink, to our edge, and how do we reform that and recycle that into something that allows us to grow?

Because that’s not necessarily something we’ve been taught or that comes naturally to us. But instead, I believe that we truly can shine a light on those darkest spots, those shadow parts, and integrate them back into our lightness to have a whole human experience, and use fear and pain as opportunities to elevate ourselves and evolve our existence as a human being.

I’d love to hear from you as well. What are some of the fears, pains, traumas, negative things in your life that have turned out to be your greatest teachers? This is probably the strongest charge of these ideas that I have learned to live by. Again, it didn’t come naturally. This is definitely a learned experience for me, but I go back to this over and over and over again, and these things that I have had to overcome and hurdle in my life have turned out to be the biggest shapers of my identity. Who I am on a core level has been curated and affected by pain and fear and trauma, but not in a negative way where it’s like, Oh, she’s just a broken wounded soul, and instead in a way that it has allowed me to step into my power, into my greatest, most abundant, joyful self. So if you can switch the dialogue and even the internal talk around what fear and pain are here for, not just, Oh my gosh, this is never going to go away. Fear, it’s going to be here forever. If you’re experiencing discomfort right now and instead go, wow, this is temporary. I know I’m going to get past this. So while it’s here, what can I learn from it?

Guideline #7:

Okay, let’s go on to number seven. Number seven is all things are impermanent. And so I hinted to this a little bit in the sixth one, which is fear and pain are life’s greatest teachers. But to add to that as a whole, separate one is seven, which is all things are impermanent, and this idea that nothing that we hold onto the outside of ourselves, literally in your hands or inside of ourselves is ultimately permanent or never-ending. So that can induce fear in some people because they think, Oh, that thing I’m holding, whether it’s a memento that you love, or your dog or someone you love, it’s impermanent. And so in that sense, it scares the shit out of us, because we go, if this is impermanent, then I better grasp and try to control it and make it permanent because I don’t want to experience sadness. I don’t want to experience loss. I don’t want to experience pain.

But then I would direct you back to number six, that is fear and pain are part of being human and they get to be our greatest teachers, and to experience loss is to have experienced love on the deepest fucking level. So the more loss you have experienced, consider that is how much you have opened your heart to the world and you have allowed yourself to love in this human experience. So if there are these things outside of us that are impermanent, so are the things inside of us. And so that again may induce fear in some sense that we think, Oh well if my joy is impermanent, then I’m just kind of waiting for it to run out. It’s never going to last, or in a more positive sense or comforting sense, the impermanence of you know, I smacked my elbow. This hurts a lot right now, but it’s impermanent, or my heart is broken but it’s not going to be that way forever, and in that sense, it sometimes gives us comfort.

Same thing with the external. I gave you the example of losing someone you love or something that’s really important to you like a memento and that can induce fear. But the idea of impermanence is also that the things that you don’t necessarily want to hang onto in a physical form also get to go away and are impermanent and that you can release and that you can let go and you can cut the cords with or from so that you are liberated. So we’re misguided in life to think that there is a permanence to everything when what we know is that the only constant or known is change, is shift, is recycling, is energy, is evolution. So we want the pleasure to last forever and then we want the discomfort to go away immediately. But what if we really leaned into the idea of impermanence and then allowed up ourselves to, without judgment or attachment, experience the light and the dark, the good and the bad. The high and the low of life as a whole in a way that allows us to flow, and that we’re not clinging on or trying to force anything in our life, and instead like in meditation, letting thoughts come, observing them, and then letting them go in one door out the other. Here it is, but it’s impermanent so why am I getting so fucking attached to it in the first place? Right. And I see some of the people I work with who struggle with this for good reasons, but it’s like they think that that state is going to last forever. But what we know is it’s not and it’s going to change even though we don’t always remember that in the moment.

So this is your reminder today that the pleasant is going to pass and the unpleasant is going to pass, so why not show up for all of it and use it all for your growth and cherish those pleasant, amazing, joyful moments in your life completely. Be fully there for it, and those discomforting or more unpleasant moments in your life, know that they will pass and they can be teachers if you allow them to. If you open yourself up to the liberation of them from them and allow yourself to actually grow, allow yourself to receive change in your life.

So when we take all of these seven ideas or guidelines to live by, it allows us to look at life through a different lens, through seven different lenses really, but I think of it as the kaleidoscope that you put together, all of these different colors and lights and the darks, and that is a more, I think, holistic lens to look at life through, that allows you to release attachment, to experience joy and play and silliness. To look at some of the things that have not made sense and reassured and grounded yourself in this is exactly where I’m supposed to be, and fear and pain are my greatest opportunities for growth, and movement and rest are key to the vibrancy to human health.

So when we put all these together, I know for me, and I’d love to hear from you, but for me it allows me to make sense of the things that once didn’t make sense, and to find a grounding or a footing where I felt like there was no foundation, and to find a deep peace, a calm within the chaos, and I hope that these encourage those things within you today as well.

If you have any questions, please let me know and it’s been a pleasure chatting with you. I’ll see you guys soon.

I am so, so excited to announce that my book 21 Days of Healing is now published and available for purchasing online. It is based on my bestselling course. Over a hundred women have been through this course called 21 Days of Healing, and the book that you’ll receive is a self-guided workbook to help you navigate chronic illness, release emotional inflammation, and find the medicine woman within. This is for any and all of you who are ready to stop fighting your body and wondering “why me?” when it comes to both physical and emotional pain, and it presents many, many, many integrative approaches and easy to understand energy healing techniques and emotional healing therapies to help you remove blockages in your life and in your body to decode the deeper messages in your physical symptoms and really transform your relationship with challenges in your life and health, similar to what we discussed today in the guideline of fear and pain are life’s greatest teachers.

That’s a huge theme of this book that you will hear stories around my own life, but also have easy to implement activities and exercises to integrate into your own life. So this is all about letting our emotional breakdown or our physical breakdown become our breakthrough, our greatest, greatest breakthrough. I would so appreciate your support. This book was a labor of love. It’s been about a year and a half, almost two years in the making and lots of design efforts, lots of editing, lots of tweaking going back and forth to the drawing board, and I’m just so, so proud of how it turned out. It’s gorgeous. It’s a completely color interior, something that you can write all over or you can do the exercises in a notebook. It’s up to you.

But if you have already purchased your book, I’d also really appreciate it if you could just share this with somebody in your life who you feel it could also benefit from all the different modalities and techniques that are taught in the workbook. And that’s the beauty of it is that you can go through one round of 21 days and you can go back again and again and again, and you’re going to find different pieces of wisdom and learnings every time you go through it. 

One more thing, which is completely free, is the 21 Days of Healing book club. So if you are not already in a specific, separate Facebook group called 21 Days of Healing official book club, I invite you to come and join us. January 1st we’re going to start going through these 21 days to gather. So I’m going to be jumping in and doing some live videos, doing some giveaways and just allowing everyone to interact and remain accountable and support each other throughout this process.

So there are a couple of ways to get the book. You can go to my website, theuncensoredempath.com and just click the book tab and you’ll scroll down to the bottom for two different purchasing options, or you can simply go over to amazon.com, use your Prime membership, search 21 Days of Healing and get the book in two days. Either way, I hope that this arrives at your doorstep really soon, and I would love to see you inside the free book club starting January 1st.

I love you guys and thank you so much for tuning in today.

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