Why This Book Is for You or Someone You Love
● Were you described as an over-sensitive child?
● Do you feel worse when you are around crowds?
● Do you sense when someone is not telling the truth?
● Do you have fast mood swings for reasons that you often don’t understand and can’t control?
● Do you have other experiences that modern science can’t explain (such as telepathy, knowing future events, or knowing current events happening far away)?
● Do you pick up energy from other people?

If you or someone you love can answer yes to most of those questions, then this book is for you! It will help you understand these traits and most importantly, be able to work with them. Instead of thinking of them as liabilities or even curses, they will become a useful part of your everyday life.

What Is in This Book?
This book describes both what the term empath means and what it does not mean. It covers a host of different tools, techniques, and coping mechanisms, to move you forward from being a confused empath to being a thriving empath. Different people will resonate with different exercises, and we do not intend for you to use all of them, only for you to know what processes are available.
As empaths, most of us put other people first. Then, only once we’ve taken care of everybody else, do we take care of ourselves. Unfortunately, this only works as a very short-term strategy. There is a reason that on an airplane, we are told to put on our own oxygen mask before taking care of the person next to us. We need to be healthy, centered, and have a good understanding of what it means to be an empath if we are to best help those around us. Because of this, the second half of the book puts an emphasis on self-care and discusses things like physical exercise, diet, meditation, and breath work.

You will see three individual chapters on shielding, grounding, and releasing. The chapters on self-care tools, crystals, and herbs also include aspects of all three. It is not about favoring any single one of them. Sometimes the emphasis may need to be on shielding, other times on grounding or releasing, but all three have a role to play in being a balanced, thriving empath.
Of course, any one of these topics could be volumes on their own. We are not trying to cover these topics in depth but only to touch on them from the empath’s perspective. This book is intended primarily to be a guide for beginner empaths, although many established empaths may well find many new ideas here. Instead of presenting extensive detail, we want to pique the reader’s interest by including references for further reading. Especially in such mainstream areas as diet and exercise, we have aimed these reference points somewhat off the beaten track. See what catches your interest; try the processes, see what works, and then reach out to other books and Internet searches based on the ideas we have shared here.