Empathy: at a distance

Historically I'm most likely to have long-distance empathy with either my family (especially my mother) or my partners.

I've called my mother at the same time she calls me - a lot. I've picked up the unringing phone to call her and found her on the other end of the line, because she'd just called me. It's a bit of a running joke between us at this point.

I've had... empathic threads?... with two partners. One was over 600 miles, but I could tell if he spiked up or down. My current partner is about four towns away at this moment, and I can feel that he's upset about something at work. Distance empathy tends to feel less visceral to me than in-person resonance, but it's still noticeable.

As for the how - I've got no idea. I'm inclined to say 'some sort of energetic connection', but that's really a catch-phrase to say 'a connection I can't explain'.

For the most part I don't consciously experience this. I did have one rather powerful experience of it though. I was taking part in a healing energy class where distance healing was the topic. I had been given permission to send healing energy to a friend's child, who was sick with leukemia. I had been taught to connect through a sort of energy cord to the person receiving the healing. When I did that, I experienced her full ailment. My whole body felt on the verge of death and, on top of that, there were a couple of places where pain stood out stronger. It was such an overwhelming experience for me that I have decided never to do it again. Even the teacher of the class was a little surprised by how strong the connection was.

I suppose the only theory I have about how it worked was the energy cord used to connect me to the sick child. These types of energy connections must exist. People who do astral projection talk about them so I imagine it is something similar.

Thinking about this energy-cord / energy connection thing this morning has dredged up a memory of something I read once about a man who discovered that plants respond on a polygraph machine when exposed to human emotion. I just did some poking around, and the fellow is Cleve Backster. He later found that all sorts of cells respond to emotions, even over distance. "We found that a person could be ten blocks away, or even twenty miles away, and we still got reactions."

Unsurprisingly, the mainstream scientific community initially pointed and jeered at Backster because his theories challenge deeply held views about How Things Work. Then, when fringe scientists embraced the Backster Effect, mainstream science was able to point again and say "see, these wackos believe it, it's got to be craziness." Still, it's an interesting notion. And 'the earth is round' and 'the earth orbits the sun' were both once considered preposterous, so what we "know" is obviously malleable over time.

Fascinating interview with him here.

My first experiences were with a guy I only knew online (he became my mentor and taught me my sensitivities). He would climb into my dreams, tell me when I had a sore neck and wasn't sleeping, gave me headaches for fun, got me horny at will.

Being that he was the one to 'get the dust off' my connections, we got intrinsically connected in some way. I'll sometimes feel pains I can't explain to find out they are his. Sometimes I can drink ridiculous amounts and not get drunk, and sometimes I won't drink anything but he'll have been drinking so I get drunk. I feel blips like twitches inside my head when he's thinking about me.

I know it's easier to conceptualize in proximity, I think that's human, but connections seem to have nothing to do with distance. He described following a person's words to 'climb in'. Once you pick the focus you're essentially there - and you can use other people to get into someone else. He recently helped me explore someone a friend of mine knew - 3 degrees from him, but it wasn't important that neither he nor I knew her.

I don't know how it works. Quantum physics poses that distance doesn't matter..particles on different planets can affect each other. Maybe it's like that.

Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing it!

Have the two of you discussed the ethics of 'climbing in' to people intentionally? I'm curious what your take on it is.

Sorry for the long delay, life is busy..

Yes, we have to some degree. I kind of like thinking the ability to do so is only granted to those who are responsible enough to use it wisely.

He tries to block out things like me having sex with other people, or things about my clients (I'm a therapist). Most of the time I pick things up, I have no idea where it's coming from, and I ask him to interpret things..sometimes he will. For the most part it's just reading information that's there, rather than 'fiddling'. No different I suppose than picking up nuances of a person's body language.

Not to say he hasn't meddled from time to time, which actually gets quite confusing for me. Most of the time he plays around in my head, because he knows I don't mind at all. There's been a few other times with other people..though I can only think of two cases it's been not for their benefit. Sometimes it's information for self-defense. One other...may have been somewhat vindictively motivated, but when I feel that way it's always about 'learning' so bad things don't happen again, so theoretically still helpful - and fully with the intention of helping me heal from the emotional wounds the said person inflicted on me. And honestly, I have no idea what happened then, though it seemed conversation actually normalized, rather than the accusation and blaming he was spewing before.

A few other cases...keeping a person from going over the edge mentally, and helping someone sleep better...things that, if they knew it could be done and weren't afraid of it, they would've asked for help with.

Thank you!

Mostly it is literally "knowing" who is on the end of a phone line before I pick up.
I did dream vividly of my grandmother being in a graveyard and the following day received the news that she had died.
As for how:

Well if you hypothesise that the brain microtubules mentioned in the second article are capable of the same feat as the nanowires in the first. Then the odd connection an empath feels is perfectly natural and is all down to quantum physics, not some "supernatural" power.
We feel a connection because the nerve transmissions from one individual are capable of quantum tunnelling to another.

http://machineslikeus.com/news/evidence-macroscopic-quantum-tunneling-detected-nanowires

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/13-is-quantum-mechanics-controlling-your-thoughts/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

Nifty - and thank you for the links!

For me this has only really happened in two ways--one the person I'm very close to is going through something that produces strong negative emotions and somehow I suddenly know they'r in pain, or I have a dream about something with them and contact them because the dream worried me and find my dream was fairly accurate--ie "I did break up with him" or "wow, yes, I've had food poisoning for two days now." I really have no explanation of it though and certainly people I care about have been hurt and I didn't know, so it's hard to say.

I've been able to connect long distance with people both consciously and not-so-consciously. Everything from family members to people I'm talking to on IM. I think it does have a lot to do with a person's vibrations or energy, and when talking in those regards, it is important to remember that they have the capacity to behave in ways that aren't affected by physical distance and it is just a matter of tuning into a person's energy or vibrational 'address' of sorts.