As someone who offers empathic presence and listening to others, you may find that, at times, you lose yourself, take on the emotions and problems of others, or become depleted. Attending to your clients, friends and family without consistent self-connection leaves you less resourced and more reactive. To protect against this, you might find yourself avoiding the people you care about most. 

Maintaining self-connection while offering presence helps you enjoy the process while caring for your own energy and resources. Central to self-connection is the ability to focus from a relaxed and expansive state.  Martial arts and energy practices like qigong emphasize balancing your physical and energetic bodies in your center and maintaining a relaxed expansive focus. In these arts, you learn that movement requires less muscle contraction than you habitually engage. In the same way, offering presence in a sustainable way means maintaining a relaxed focus rather than tightening with urgency or ideas that you have to figure something out for the other person. Within this relaxed yet focused state, you can maintain self-connection by shuttling your attention back and forth between the following practices and the person you are with.

1. Visualize or feel yourself physically and energetically sitting back and into your core

2. Periodically focus on your breath expanding in the abdomen and releasing slowly

3. Align your posture over your center and relax your shoulders and back

4.  Bring awareness to receiving energy through your crown and root chakras and feeling the central channels of energy that run vertically between them

5. Pull your shoulders back and relax your face

6. Repeat a mantra to yourself that settles attention in your heart

7. Feel each part of  your feet that makes contact with your shoes or the floor

These practices will allow you to maintain enough self connection to notice when your energy is running low or when you would like to shift to attend to a need of your own. Self-connection will also help you interrupt habits that distract from offering presence (see a list of not empathy habits here). Naturally, self-connection implies that you are choosing to offer empathic presence from the autonomy of your generous heart.

Practice

Take a moment now to choose one of the self-connection strategies above to practice in the coming week.