Some weights don’t belong to me. Yet, for most of my life, I have carried them like they were sacred. I carried them like they were mine. I carried them like they defined me. I know there are so many others who have done this exact thing.
The Empaths.
The Karmic Empaths, I feel is more fitting, at least for myself… and if you’ve found your way here than maybe it’s true for you too.
A karmic empath is a soul whose sensitivity is inter-dimensional and multi-dimensional. We are attuned not just to emotion, but to unspoken contracts, hidden griefs, ancestral debts, and collective wounds. From my own experience, even the collective unconscious.
We pick up what others don’t know they’re still carrying. We absorb what’s never been named. Also, we wear it in our nervous systems, in our dreams, in our bones.
Karmic Empath’s Frequency
At its distorted frequency, this gift often feels like a curse. It leads to identity confusion. We don’t know who we are because we are carrying everyone else. We burnout and attract codependent dynamics, one after another.
The karmic empath becomes a vessel of everyone else’s transformation… except their own.
Healed Frequency of The Karmic Empath
At its healed frequency, a karmic empath becomes an initiator. We no longer carry karma… we illuminate it. We witness without absorbing. We name without rescuing. We hold sacred space for others to transmute their own pain…. without sacrificing ourselves to do it.
A karmic empath is not here to be the wound’s container. We are here to be its mirror, midwife, and liberator. Sometimes that is the hardest thing to for the karmic empath. To truly see oneself as that source of power, rather than the one always standing next to it.
The True Alchemist
To realize we were never just the witness…
we were the alchemist.
When you’ve spent your whole life kneeling at the altar of other people’s pain, rising into your own power can feel like betrayal.
It can also feel like abandonment and even selfishness.
Why though?
Has the karmic empath been conditioned to believe that to matter, we must martyr. That to be divine, we must disappear.
I don’t feel that is liberation or the reasoning of the very fabric of who we are and why we are here. I feel that is simply- learned sacrifice.
The Wound in Disguise
Empaths are taught to be proud of their pain. We are congratulated for our selflessness. I used to think this was love, God, and purpose….my purpose. I felt the unspoken sorrow of those around me. I bled for them in silence, and thought it was purpose.
It made me strong, sure. It also made me tired.
Soul-fully exhausted.
It made me someone who disappeared inside everyone else. Worst of all it made me… disappear from myself.
Healers and Old Souls
We are called “healers” and “old souls,” but beneath the praise is a silent invitation:
Give more. Take more. Carry more.
We become the place where everyone’s shadows go to rest.
We inherit the karma of lovers, friends, family, ancestors…
sometimes even strangers. Often times we confuse it with intimacy. This very limiting and painful belief gets embedded within us that says absorbing suffering makes us whole.
This is not empathy. That is erasure.
When Boundaries Are a Betrayal (and That’s the Lie)
Somewhere, I learned that boundaries were cruelty. That saying “this is not mine” meant abandonment. Maybe I felt that if I didn’t take it on, no one else would.
Maybe that was true in my childhood, in my lineage, in this world full of broken systems and fragmented souls.
I am not a child anymore, nor am I a storage unit for other’s emotions.
I am not a trash bin for unprocessed guilt. I am not an emotional landfill, nor a sacred incinerator for karma that is not mine.
I am a sacred instrument, and I know this- the divine has no interest in distortion.
The Turning Point
There comes a moment when the body says “no more.” A quiet rupture or a sacred breaking. When the soul spits out what it never agreed to digest. When the tears no longer taste like your own. The fatigue deepens. The joy dims. The presence fades, and one day, you realize: you’ve been carrying centuries in your spine, ghosts in your belly, and someone else’s grief behind your eyes.
I reached that moment.
I felt the echo of other people’s choices lodged in between my joints. I heard voices in my head that were never mine. I dreamed their fears, wore their shame like perfume, and called it compassion.
The truth is:
If I carry what is not mine, I rob them of the chance to transform it.
I intercept their healing, and I delay my own.
I am here…
This is where I am. A space of in between. Coming from where I was, and in position to transform, and meet myself on the other side.
I am ready to walk forward in my power as a karmic empath to rise inside myself, and show others they can too. I am standing here —
not as a wound’s container, but as my own liberator.
From this place, I choose.
I choose to stop bleeding for others in silence.
I choose to stop mistaking martyrdom for love.
I choose to stop calling my exhaustion “purpose.”
The Sacred Shift: From Sponge to Mirror
I am not here to absorb. I am here to reflect.
A sponge soaks in and gets heavy. A mirror shows truth and stays clear.
When I become a mirror, I don’t love less. I just stop leaking. I just stop bleeding. I stop transmuting pain that was never mine to begin with.
Now I feel deeply with people, not for them. Now I hold space, but I don’t hold their burdens. Now I trust that their souls know how to alchemize, and I stop playing “God” with my body.
For the Ones Who Feel Everything
To my fellow karmic empaths:
You were never meant to be a burial ground for pain. You were born a sacred flame.
Discernment is not cruelty. Boundaries are not walls… they are altars.
Empathy is not absorption. It is resonance… with your soul still intact.
If you feel this, if your ribs ache with the weight of ghosts you cannot name, if your silence has been too holy, too long…
then let this be your permission:
Return to yourself.
Return what is not yours.
Keep what is sacred.
And walk on, lighter.

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