[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. This is Lisa Lewis, your host. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would like to remind all of you, my listeners that I offer a free eight-week email course titled Highly Sensitive People. My email course provides weekly tools that help you feel more whole in a world isn’t exactly made for us and I show you how your sensitivity can be seen as a unique gift and how many others are just like you. To find out more about my email course, please go to my website, amiokpodcast.com. Well, my podcast is all about exploring the world of highly sensitive people and empaths, and I’m so excited to have today’s guest on the show who also identifies as highly sensitive and as empath. My guest is Jennifer Moore. Jennifer, who also goes by Jen, is the author of the Amazon bestseller, Empathic Mastery. She is an intuitive healer, mentor, and a master trainer for emotional freedom technique international. Jen supports highly sensitive empathic women to release distress and overwhelm so they can access their inner wisdom and power. Jen brings over 30 years of her experience and work where she emerges practicality, intuition, and skill to offer insight, guidance, and emotional freedom to those she serves. Welcome to the show, Jen. [JENNIFER MOORE] Thank you so much, Lisa. I’m so glad to be here. [LISA] I’m so glad to have you on. I can’t wait to hear all about what you’re going to talk to us about. [JENNIFER] I can’t wait to see what we come up with. It’s always a pleasure to be working with and talking to and collaborating with another person who really gets what it means to be highly sensitive and empathic. [LISA] Sure, especially during this time of what’s happening in our world today. [JENNIFER] Yes, yes, absolutely. I think a lot of people are actually waking up to this in a way because things have just, the sort of the climate, the literal physical climate on our planet, but the political and social climates, everything is just heating up right now. I think a lot of people who had been able to keep things under wraps before are really now awakening to their sensitivity because things are just so much more intense. [LISA] Yes, I agree with that too. I just go back to the pandemic, the beginning of the pandemic and just everything that unfolded during that time period. [JENNIFER] It was wild, really intense. I started my pandemic a couple months ahead of time because I slipped and fell on some black ice and smashed my head on the back of our propane tank right after Christmas in December 27th, 2019. So I basically, it was what was, would be called a mild concussion but what I like to say is, I hate to think if that was mild. I’d hate to think of what spicy was, but I had sort of, so I was already sort of social distancing and working virtually and just really reduced, I had already done a lot of sort of quieting down, which was good in that I sort of was prepared. Like it wasn’t the rude shock that I think it was for a lot of people. [LISA] Well, I’m glad that it was only a mild concussion and that you’ve recovered from that. Wow. [JENNIFER] Although, I will say if anybody has struggled with concussions, and this is not my area of expertise, but I was, I’ve been amazed at the lingering effects that this concussion has had. Brain injuries are definitely serious, and I think that as a highly sensitive person, I, we often are more vulnerable. Like things affect us more deeply in a lot of ways than your average bear. [LISA] Yes, I agree. I broke my right arm in 2021, and so I think a lot of that had to do with just what was happening in my life emotionally, and I was carrying it right there in my shoulder for me to land on it and heal it really. Then I really had to heal not only my physical body, but mentally and emotional body too. [JENNIFER] Absolutely. Well, and I’ve had the experience before of some pain going on in my body, and as you know I’m an EFT practitioner as well as a trainer, and so when I’m experiencing something really uncomfortable like that, I will use tapping, also known as emotional freedom techniques. It’s amazing how many times memories will surface that seem to be directly connected to the pain, but things like stuff that happened when I was substantially younger, or even stuff that seems like it was either a memory from an ancestor or if you believe in reincarnation coming from a past life. So I think that so often what manifests as a physical issue in our body really does have a much more emotional, mental, circumstantial roots. [LISA] Yes, which leads me to my next question. I just want to back up and can you share some of your story about how you discovered or found out that you are highly sensitive and an empath? Also if you can share more about the EFT, the tapping for listeners that may not know about what that is. [JENNIFER] Okay. I actually, I’m going to go backwards and I’m going to start with the EFT because that’s a slightly shorter, sweeter answer than the, how did you get here, Jen? Basically, EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. This is a self-help tool that can also be used with somebody else working with a skilled trained practitioner but this is a tool where basically what we do is we focus our attention on something that’s causing us distress in our life, and then we apply mild pressure to specific accu-pressure or acupuncture points or end points of meridians in our body, on our head, our torso, our hands. Basically, by doing this, we allow sort of the mental emotional congestion to shift and release. Now, I just gave you like, the a hundred-dollar answer, like the long answer. The really short answer, which is what I should have started with, is that it’s like a mental, emotional form of acupuncture without the needles [LISA] I also, I’m level one trained, and so I use it with clients too, and now myself and it’s amazing, amazing what happens. [JENNIFER] It is absolutely amazing. Level one is just the tip of the iceberg. Level one is, at least with the EFT International level, one is the ability to know how to take the edge off. But once we start going into level two, and then, especially once we go into level three, then the really amazing magic starts to happen with it because we can gently address extremely traumatic experiences in our life, but with such a distance and with such a gentleness that we never even have to go back there, that we never even have to go back into the memory. And the physical recovery that I’ve seen with people, the mental recovery I’ve seen with people, the emotional recovery that I’ve seen with people has been so just, I am like, I’m just trying to think of the words that don’t, how I can say this, but it’s just been so awesome and just continuously, I am blown away by how powerfully and effectively EFT can help us define relief from things that we have been spinning our wheels about and struggling for our entire life. This leads me actually into the second part of your question, which is, so who are you and how did you figure out you were an empath? I was born as a very, very highly sensitive, anxious, like extremely anxious, fairly shy, but chatterbox little girl. I grew up in your standard, sort of New England household where, although actually not standard, because my family was not, did not practice a religion. I was raised in an agnostic household so that was a little bit, that made me a bit of an outlier in my extremely like white picket fence town but I grew up in your sort of like white picket fence, mom, dad, 2.5 kids, a whole life of white privilege. But I was in an environment where I always knew that I was different and where being in this lily-white suburb of Boston where everything is just sort of like we’re sheltered from all of the difficult stuff. I couldn’t really understand why I was pretty much constantly in a state of distress. The kids knew there was something different about me. I really identified, I think a lot of empaths identified with if you grew up in a certain age with Rudolph the Red Nose reindeer, and I definitely, like the kids did not, wouldn’t let me play any of the reindeer games, or if I tried, I was also horribly bad at supports. So I was singled out, I was excluded, I was bullied. One of the messages that I got coming from the outside was, you are different. But I also knew from the inside that I was different. My very first experience where I was like, there’s really something going on here was when I was nine years old, I had my first prophetic dream where I dreamed that my mom had died. But it was the morning, the night that I dreamed, it was the night that my very first best friend’s mother had died. I knew, like, even at the age of nine, I just knew, oh, this equals this, like there’s a correlation here. So that sort of started me on the journey of wanting to learn more about the paranormal, about wanting to learn more about extrasensory perception, about wanting to learn all kinds of things. At that point in time, we had maybe one and a half bookshelves or like in the library in the stacks, like one and a half set of stacks with books dedicated to the paranormal and the occult. At that point in time also, the stuff that was available was pretty limited, but it was the beginning, it was where I started. It wasn’t until, it was actually the first time I personally ever heard of the term empath was watching Star Trek. There is a classic, original Star Trek episode called The Empath. It ironically starred, or had the female character who was an empath named Gem, which happens to be my initials, which is for Jennifer Elizabeth Moore. Basically, she could heal people by absorbing and taking on their pain. That was my first exposure to somebody like me and it was also my first lesson in how to be a healer. Now, I’m not saying this is the way to be a healer, it was actually very problematic to learn how to basically siphon off people’s pain and then transmute it through my own body but that was my very first experience with it now. I had a fairly, and then I was like, maybe I was like 17 years old the first time I met another empath, and they were like, you’re an empath and I’m an empath. I went, yep. But it wasn’t until I was in my, like late twenties, early thirties, and I was working with a very gifted psychotherapist, and she was very intuitive and very psychic. She was the first person who started to help me recognize that most of the time that I was coming into her in a state of distress, it was after I had been in a situation or around people who were going through some very difficult thing. What she helped me to start recognizing and understanding was that most of my emotional distress, not all of my emotional distress, but a substantial portion of my emotional distress was as a direct result of absorbing and picking up on and resonating, like reverberating with another person’s stuff or other people’s stuff. That was where I personally began this long-convoluted journey to discovering and learning how to develop empathic mastery. [LISA] I love that. I’m wondering as you’re saying that, how did the therapist, the psychotherapist work with you to separate the two, like what is yours belongs to you and how to let go of the other people’s stuff? [JENNIFER] Well, I taught a masterclass the other day where I was actually talking about the five steps of empathic mastery. The first step in empathic mastery is cognize. You practically articulate exactly what it’s about because it’s recognizing what’s mine and what’s not mine. What I find is that the, and the second step of empathic mastery is release, and the thing about this is that what she taught me to do was to start to, I first identify that I was feeling feelings because what I find is that recognize has sort of three components to it. The first step is just recognizing that we are filling out of sorts. Because growing up in Lily White, New England in sort of a proper white picket fence town, I grew up in a place where everybody kept their feelings under wraps and basically, I grew up in a place where you were taught, if you were feeling extreme emotions, there was something wrong with you, that you needed mental help. So for me, just recognizing what I was feeling and identifying that I was having a hard time was like the very, very first step. What I find is with recognized as a highly sensitive, empathic person, it’s like we first have to just own our feelings and admit that we’re feeling something. Because many of us have been told, you’re too sensitive, you’re taking it too personally, you’re overreacting, you’re making a mountain of it out of a mole hill. Just let it go. Stop worrying about it. You’re being crazy, you’re being nuts, you’re like, just all of the ways, you’re being too sensitive. All of the ways that we’re told, no, you’re not allowed to have this feeling. So I really think the very, very first step was just owning my feelings and admit and just being present with and being mindful to the fact that I was having a hard time. Then once I was able to do that, then the question started to be, what’s, is this mine? I find there’s sort of personally, I’ve sort of distilled it down to two questions of, actually three questions, first question is, how am I feeling, the second question then being is this mine? In my personal experience, but 90% of the time the answer is yes, which means that a big part, some of it is coming from something about me and some percentage of it, whether it’s large or small, is coming from the outside world. Then once I’ve asked that question and I get that answer of yes and or yes, it’s totally yours, you got to do your work, or no, this has nothing to do with you, this is about the stuff that’s going on outside of you, then what I do is I ask the next question, which is, what’s mine, what’s not mine? So this amazing, amazing therapist, she was very psychic herself. She was able to really connect with me, not just with talking, but heart to heart and sort of like spirit to spirit and often connecting with me, not just with words but telepathically, which actually is one of the things that I love about being on podcasts with people like you, is because I find that it’s like, it’s not just words that you and I are sharing. There’s a frequency that we’re exchanging. That was, she was one of the very first people that I really experienced that with, where there was this magic and this synergy. What she helped me to learn was how to identify that I was feeling, then recognize that what I was carrying around that was coming from outside of myself. From that, to be able to give it back. I don’t know about you, but I personally find that 90% of the releasing it or letting it go is just about identifying the fact that it’s not even yours. Knowing who it, like, sort of basically knowing what the return address on it should be. [LISA] My own personal experience is 90%. [JENNIFER] 90 might be a bit of an, I might have pulled, that might have been mansplaining right there. [LISA] I feel the longer it’s been there, whatever that symptom or the belief, the core belief, the longer it’s been there, maybe that has to do with the age, too, of what your age, it hangs on, like for dear life. Like I’ve served you for this long and I’m not letting go, I don’t want to let go and there’s this maybe like a tug of war between the two. It’s like, okay, and then there’s that part that comes in about, I recognize you, I see you, I hear you, I feel and I want to release you. Maybe that’s the tender age of that release of really acknowledging to yourself that younger part of you that served you for a really a long time, served you really well for survival, it’s okay now. The adult is here, I’m here and it’s okay to release. [JENNIFER] It is okay. Well, and I find that one of the things that I’ve noticed for myself, and I’ve also noticed in working with a lot of other people is that in order for us to be able to truly let go of the stuff that we’ve been carrying, sometimes for lifetimes, we have to acknowledge how hard it was. There’s a place where it’s not just about like rainbows and unicorns and sunshine and roses and just being like, okay, now I’m just going to be happy. There is a place where we must allow the grief to come in, where we must allow the recognition to come in and I have found that a lot of times when we cannot let the charge go, when there’s an intensity remaining, it’s usually, or it’s very frequently because we’ve never, it’s never been validated. Especially in situations where we weren’t acknowledged, where we weren’t recognized for what we were going through, where somebody was like, oh, suck it up, it’s not that bad that it’s almost like we carry that distress for waiting for somebody to say, yes, it really was that bad. At least that’s something that I’ve noticed a lot of the time, is that in order to let something go, we need to acknowledge what it was. [LISA] I love that. Can you give us an example of something that maybe someone has been carrying for lifetimes or maybe just in this lifetime that may show up at your doorstep to work with you? [JENNIFER] Obviously, because this is a public forum, I’ll change the details to protect the innocent and not so innocent. Immediately what comes to my mind is a client that I was working with a number of years ago. When we started working together, their level of distress, they had been struggling with chronic health issues for a substantial period of time. They were just really, had just dug themselves out of that hole and were starting to get vitality and energy, and they were looking at building up a business, but they were having an incredibly hard time with issues of visibility, with issues around like asking for what they deserved, with over-giving, overdoing and just putting an incredible amount of pressure on themselves to sort of grow their business from scratch to six figures within like six or six months or so. They were really, really struggling and they were often struggling emotionally, feeling really, really anxious and distressed as well as struggling with just like, how do I do this, how do I make it, how do I find my way in this world? As we worked together, they would often, because within EFT, as you know, there’s this thing called the SUDS, which is called the subjective units of distress and a SUDS is like, on a scale of zero to 10, how intense does this feel with zero being not at all, and 10 being so over the top, you’ve never ever experienced anything more intense or worse than this. Generally, this person, whenever I would ask, on a scale of zero to 10, how intense would this be, their response was always, oh, it is a 50, or, oh, it is 110. So they were always pushing the number, inflating the number substantially higher than a scale that is supposed to contain all of it and it became really clear that even the way that they were relating to their distress was such a sign of growing up in a family system where everybody was considered equal regardless of what was going on with different family members. There were a lot of family crises, there were a lot of family secrets, there were a lot of things that were going on that were all being denied and ignored and pushed down. So this person was experiencing a great deal of, like their whole childhood, their emotional intensity had no, was regarded like, just was not taken seriously at all. So it wasn’t, we worked together for a good couple months, maybe even upwards of a year before they were even able to start using the SUD scale in the appropriate” way. And there’s no wrong way to use a SUB scale so I really was using air quotes for that because it’s very, if everything is a 300 for you, chances are there’s a lot of stuff that you’ve been through that really is worthy of or deserves acknowledgement and validation and may have been really dismissed, brushed under the rug or just basically told, I mean, how many of us grew up with their, there are starving children in name your country dujour, so eat your dinner. Like so often just those messages of your suffering is not as valid as the suffering of this other person. I hope that gives a good example of that. [LISA] Oh, no, that was an excellent example. Thank you for sharing that, Jen. I think as part of the point that you’re making, I hear in it that just that high number is this like a scream for help, can anyone hear me? Do you hear this? Can you hear this? I just, someone took acknowledge, like you said, this is so high, I can’t take it anymore. I just need someone just to say that. [JENNIFER] Well, and it’s sort of like the opposite of the name of your podcast. It’s like, I am not okay. I am not okay. I was actually, I was actually thinking about that. There was, when I was first learning to tap and when people would use the affirmation and I’m okay, that would send me over the deep end because so often for me the truth was, I was not okay and I was really accustomed to being in an environment where people expected you to pretend you were okay even when you weren’t. So I think there’s something so, so, so powerful in that ability to say we’re not okay. It’s almost like you have to be able to say, I’m not okay before you can say I am okay. [LISA] Yes. In that I’m like, I’m going to give you a warning and it doesn’t mean you have to take care of me or do anything, but I’m really not okay and I’m okay that you’re just listening. You don’t have to take care of me. So I feel that maybe there’s a setup you have to let the other person know so they don’t panic or go into a crisis themselves because you’re not okay when really, it’s like, no, I just need really to say it out loud because if I say it out loud, it just feels so much better. [JENNIFER] Well, and there’s a really big difference between waking up feeling a little, feeling out of sorts because you’re picking up on the upheaval going on in some part of the planet or all of the planet these days, or a large portion of the planet. I won’t say all of the planet because there’s a lot of joy going on at the same time. But I think there’s a really big difference between waking up and feeling out of sorts and realizing that you’re going through a major health crisis or that like you just lost your job or somebody, a loved one just died or something where there is just an extreme level of, or you are processing memories from the past that are coming up and things are really intense for you. I do think that there’s definitely degrees of I’m not okay and sometimes maybe what we need to say is I just need to really check in with you but sometimes maybe we do actually need somebody to do something. Like, I need you to drive me to the emergency room. I need you to just sit with me. I need you to support me. I need you to, if you can, I’d really love a hug right now. [LISA] I love that. I know as we were talking before, we even started the podcast, the people that you work with is mostly people that identify as women or female. Can you share about, and I read it in your bio too, helping women to release distress and overwhelm so they can access their inner wisdom and power. Like where does that start when they start to work with you and like, where does that end up? [JENNIFER] Well, it’s so often, I mean, it’s so varied depending on how that empathic overwhelm is manifesting. Some people start coming, people come to me or women come to me because something’s not working in their life because they often, I mean, most times that’ve been told they’re too sensitive, that they’re overreacting, that they’re taking things too personally, that they really need to get a handle on their emotions. People come to me, so people come to me because they feel like something’s not quite working but that could mean that they are struggling with an eating, with a food craving or with their relationship with food. I hesitate to say an eating disorder but some people might say that. Some people come to me because they are just physically wrecked that they are struggling with chronic health issues where they’ve been in a lot of pain I have one, one of my favorite miracle stories is a client who came to me in a state of extreme exhaustion, extreme depletion, flaring chronic Lyme and fibromyalgia, really just so like, bedridden, just take it one day, one action, and then be in bed for a week after that just to try to recoup and really like lots and lots of heritage legacies of trauma running in their family line as well as in their own personal childhood experiences and young adult experiences, all kinds of stuff. It was just absolutely miraculous to witness what it was like to just start taking the burden of stress off of this help this person, take the burden of stress off of their body and shift how they were living in the world. If you were to meet this person today as opposed to the person they were five, six years ago now, they are a complete, they are a vibrant, joyful, healthy, happy, probably somewhere between, I don’t know, 20 and 50 pounds lighter than they were. I don’t really pay attention to numbers but like not experiencing excruciating pain, not bedridden, not spending hours and hours and hours just trying to manage their health situation and having to eat an incredibly limited diet. I mean, they still eat very well and very carefully, but just, it was like they were let out of a of prison. So people, but what I will say is that to answer the beginning of your question, where do you start, where I start is where the, I start with the thing that’s most obvious. If the thing is that you can’t stop eating sugar, then that’s where we start working. If the thing is that you are terrified to set boundaries or set limits with your boss, then we start there. If the thing is that you’ve been dealing with a chronic exhaustion or physical pain, we start there. The thing is that as human beings, we are really varied and diverse and so empathic overwhelm will show up in many, many different ways depending on what is going depending on how we are made, depending on how we’re built. [LISA] Wow. As you’re saying that I’m picturing, it starts, the overwhelm starts like on energetic level, and then it manifests, if the issue is not taken care of, then it manifests somewhere in our body. That’s usually like the weakest point in our body, wherever that is or it’s also known as the Achilles Heel. Like, oh, that’s my lower back or that pet name, that neck pain or the shoulder pain or the knee pain or ankle pain. [JENNIFER] I would actually say, I think it starts, I think there’s a middleman between the physical manifestation and the overwhelm, because I think it often starts as that frequency or that picking up the energy that’s going on in the world around us and feeling that emotional overwhelm. But then I do think that often there are behaviors that we engage in, that there are boundaries we don’t set, that there are warning signs we don’t heed, and things that we sort of either shove under the rug or self-medicate with or engage in a behavior that does not support our highest good or our greatest health. I think often if you think back to where there was an empathic overwhelm situation and then there was a chronic health issue, there was probably a period between those two where we had choices that we could have made differently. I could certainly speak to my experience, particularly with Lyme disease and how that there was definitely that middle man, that middle thing going on between them. [LISA] Yes. Thank you for making that point. I do agree with your point about the middle point in that the behaviors or the actions that maybe as a result of that feeling of overwhelm or whatever the emotion is attached. If we think about just going back to the survival skills that we know at a younger age, which are very little, that’s usually the behaviors or the actions we pick up, but they can also be into our adulthood, to our adulthood too. Then if we ignore those or don’t do something different, that really helps us and then they can manifest into something else that’s more physical. [JENNIFER] Absolutely. Or sometimes if it doesn’t manifest as something physical, I find it can also manifest as a circumstantial crisis, that it can be you get into a car accident or you get fired from your job or a relationship blows up on you. I’m just, I mean just, but there can be external the agents of the universe because what I actually really believe is that we set boundaries or we can set boundaries in healthy ways or less healthy or unconscious ways, but we are going to set boundaries. When we refuse to set boundaries, sometimes the universe will set them for us [LISA] I’m laughing at that because sometimes they come to us like, what is going on here? I didn’t ask for this, how come this is happening in my life? [JENNIFER] Yes, absolutely. I mean, the thing is that I just want to say that especially when looking up the world and just the, the stuff that happens to us, and that can be difficult in my experience, it is not as easy as A plus B equals C and you know that, oh, well you caused this. I think that sometimes within the new age and the law of attraction, there can be a little bit of victim shaming and or blaming people for their hard situation. Or one of the things that really annoys me is, well, you chose this birth, you decided to be born this way. The way I personally look at that whole concept is there’s a really big difference between looking at the course catalog and saying, that looks like a really cool course to take and actually taking the class. So I think all of us could have, could just really work to have compassion for each other when we’re going through a difficult time but the thing I wanted to say is that I think so often the circumstances that lead to, like all of the pieces, it’s like a tapestry of experiences and a tapestry of feelings and components and aspects and interrelationships that all contribute to when suddenly the universe delivers this thing to us. So yes, if we look at it, we can probably say, oh yes, I can see how this, this, this, this, this, and this has led to this point to tell ourselves that we “asked for it,” I think can start to go into like, it just can get, it’s like it’s sort of adding insult to injury, especially if we’re really getting whacked upside the head by the universe like I did with a propane tank it’s sort of like, yes, kick them kick yourself while you’re already down. [LISA] Yes. I also hear is that when these circumstances come up, whether they’re very big crisis or not a crisis that I see it as an opportunity for healing. [JENNIFER] Yes, absolutely. Well, and I see it as an opportunity for self-love. One of the things that I’ve really, and I think in some ways that this is really the core of the work on this planet right now is for us to all learn to love ourselves and to love ourselves enough to say no, to love ourselves enough to believe we deserve to have a life of joy, but also to love ourselves enough to have compassion for what we are enduring without adding this layer of self-loathing or hatred to the process. Because so often when we are, when the universe has just dealt us a hand or a swift kick in the butt, it seems to me that that one of the lessons we get to learn is to have mercy and compassion for ourselves instead of being like, now look what you went and did. I can think of an example of this is I have a very, I have a friend who has been really struggling with a lot of chronic health things, which has been causing a great deal of physical pain and inflammation in their body. It has also been manifesting as weight on their body, which I believe very strongly is a sign, because of the chronic viral load in their body and the other stuff they’re dealing with, it’s like their body cannot release the weight. They’re normally a person who has a fairly normal weight and has a fairly, and eats a healthy diet. So the weight has just come on as they’ve been dealing with this health issue. What I can see is the outsider, is that the body, the negative body talk, the sort of the additional self-loathing that is coming from having this extra weight on their body is sadly adding to their distress when what they are needing more than anything is an incredible amount of merciful love and compassion and kindness and gentleness for themselves because they are already just absolutely inundated with, like, their plate is completely full. So I really do think that so much of our work is about learning to love and accept ourselves, love and accept the planet love and accept other people where they are, maybe not condone bad behavior. There’s a big difference between loving and accepting and allowing, but just really coming back to what does it mean to really love ourselves through this. [LISA] What would that sound like if someone were to, I mean, talk to themselves, to provide or offer that self-love or self-compassion to themselves? [JENNIFER] Well, I think that that would sound, I mean, what I would say is it would sound like what they need to hear. I think that one of the things I have learned as an EFT practitioner is that one of the most important things we can always do is use our own words and use our own language. So I can speak to what my, like, say my inner child, my five-year-old was having a hard time or was freaking out, what I could say to her is, you are good and you’re okay. I can see that you are doing the very best you can. I love you, and we’re going to get through this. Sometimes, depending on what part of me is going through what I’m going through, I might say I really hear that you’re having an incredibly hard time right now, and that’s okay, you’re okay, we’re going to get to the like, let’s just keep breathing, let’s keep breathing. You got this, I got this, I’m here for you. I’m with you. Sometimes that means going to my spouse or going to a friend and saying, “Hey there, can you listen for a little while? I’m just really having a, I’m feeling really emotional today. I’m feeling really out of sorts. I’m feeling really blue. Will you just tell me it’s going to be okay? Or will you just tell me that you love me? Tell me that I’m good.” Because sometimes I do find that I can say those words, but having another person to repeat them, to affirm them can also be really, really helpful. But I will say that the people I go to for this are people that I trust implicitly and that I know are not going to gaslight me or try to run some weird agenda or try to rush to find a solution or fix me that they can hear me and then say, I love you. I hear that you’re going through this hard time. I hear that this is what’s going on right now, and I’m here. It’s going to be okay. [LISA] Oh wow. Thank you for that example. [JENNIFER] Oh, you’re so welcome. [LISA] Jen, what would you like listeners to take away from our conversation today? [JENNIFER] You are perfect just the way you are. Even if you are feeling like there is something wrong with you, if you’re feeling like maybe you’re broken, maybe you are feeling the world too much and that you shouldn’t be feeling so intense, I just want to say there is a really good reason you’re feeling the way you are feeling. There is a really good reason that you are experiencing what you are experiencing and you’re okay. [LISA] Well, that’s a wonderful validation. Ooh, that felt really good to hear that. [JENNIFER] I’m so Glad. [LISA] Where can listeners get in touch with you? [JENNIFER] Listeners can find me on my website, empathicmastery.com. To grab a copy of my book, you can jump over to empathicmasterybook.com and to learn more about EFT, and if you decide, oh my God, I need to become an EFT practitioner, I do an EFT, I do a long level one and two professionally EFT training once a year right now that starts in March. You can learn more about that march every year, so whenever you’re listening to this and you can learn more about EFT by visiting eftinstruction.com and that will tell you about the training and also has more resources for EFT. [LISA] Great. Thank you so much. [JENNIFER] Oh, thank you Lisa. [LISA] I want to ask you, do you provide CEUs, for the practitioners that are listening? [JENNIFER] I currently do not provide CEUs. That is something that I’ve sort of, I started to look into. Here in Maine, I just sort of hit a wall. So if you are looking for CEUs, what I would highly recommend that you do is you go and you check out eftinternational.org, where you’ll be able to find somebody who can provide CEUs. For example, my colleague Robin works for Pessie and does amazing, amazing EFT trainings. I love Robin, Robin is, and Robin really knows how to deliver EFT in a way that makes it extremely accessible. So if you are, for example, a psychotherapist or a social worker or a nurse practitioner or any other healthcare professional who is looking for CEUs, I would highly recommend checking out Pessie and checking out Robin Biller’s work because it is off, she’s so good. I just, I love Robin and I really, I have mad respect for how she teaches and sort of ironically, Robin’s all about the sort of like short sweet sound bites. I, on the other hand have a training that is longer, like substantially longer than most other EFT level one and two EFT trainings out there. My training really specializes on how to use these tools specifically as an empath, how to work with this and how to do that healing work when you do have a lot more gifts than the average bear. [LISA] Wow, that sounds really powerful and really inviting to check that out. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Jen, and just providing all of the information and your gifts as an empath and highly sensitive person and your stories. [JENNIFER] Oh, Lisa, thank you so much for having me here. It has been such a pleasure to have this conversation today. I just, I can tell, I love the gentleness of your voice and I just love all the love that you bring to this podcast and to your questions. It has been truly a pleasure being here. [LISA] Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for that. Thanks for listening. Please let me know what you thought of the episode. Send me an email to lisa@amiokpodcast.com. Remember to subscribe, rate and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about Highly Sensitive Persons, please visit my website at amiokpodcast.com. While you’re there, subscribe to my free-eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. 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