One thing I run into a lot is the absorption of other people's emotions.
I don't just mean in myself, although that does happen, but in my work, it is often the case that a client's unexplained emotions or pains are actually the result of absorbing emotions from other people. Some people are just very prone to doing that.
So I want to talk about why and how this is, and how you can protect yourself. This post is an introduction to emotion absorption.
The mechanics of emotion absorption
We all have dual natures: we are both physical and spiritual beings. Part of our spiritual anatomy involves things called "chakras," the Sanskrit word for "wheels," or "vortexes." The Christian scriptures refer to them as "wheels" and Ezekiel 1 teaches that the spirit is in the wheels.
The vortex-like nature of these wheels make it so things can get kind of sucked into them. If you don't protect yourself, you can end up sucking up all sorts of energy into those wheels. Ideally, we would only absorb energies that would make us better and stronger, but often people don't live their lives in a very conscious state, and so they just allow whatever is there to enter their energy system.
Everything has energy. The music you listen to is made of sound waves--vibrations--and if that musical energy, if that song's energy, is good or bad, it will end up stuck to your energy and affecting you, unless you take steps to stop it. But this doesn't just go for music: it goes for food. Friendships. Hatreds. Technologies. Everything. Everything and everyone has energy and we all give it to and take it from each other.
You could argue that a good chunk of Christian teaching--and most spiritual teachings--is two-fold in message: to only give off the highest possible energy to those around you, and to avoid or prevent negative energy from others or events or actions to penetrate or lodge in you. We learn from the scriptures and the modern prophets to deny ourselves all ungodliness, and to love those that hate us. Since love cancels out negative vibrations, this is a very powerful energetic teaching for human spiritual and physical health.
A short explanation of emotion absorption, though, is that our spirits can siphon off negative (or positive) emotions from each other and store them in ourselves. I believe that mechanically this occurs via a thing called etheric cords--the energetic connections between people. If you have spiritual sight, the gift of discernment of spirits, these are the white-blue or black lines connecting people to each other. The blue ones are two-way and good; the black ones are one-way and bad. The blue ones mean the people give and take each other's energy roughly equally; the black ones mean one person is siphoning off the other person's energies and not replacing them. Not everyone "sees" energy in this way, but that is how I personally perceive it.
People can have more than one cord to another person. For example, a mother might have two, three, four, or more etheric cords extending from different parts of her energy to her child. Hopefully married people have cords to and from each other's root chakras, and separate cords to and from their heart chakras and chakras in their heads. It's possible to have healthy and unhealthy cords between the same two people.
Conclusion
There is a physical mechanism for the phenomenon of feeling like someone energizes you, or conversely, feeling like someone is sucking you energetically dry. People give and take each other's energy through "etheric cords." Some are energizing and some are the opposite. This is also how people give and absorb emotions to each other.