Release emotional baggage and reclaim your joy

Amy Scher —

March 1, 2021

If you or someone you know suffers from any form of depression—from feeling exhausted or blue to not being able to get out of bed—I am excited to share something with you that can offer a new approach to this huge challenge facing so many people today. Depression happens on a “spectrum” and can have a huge impact on our daily lives. I see depression as the literal depression of self—a side effect of being buried under the sometimes-overwhelming thing called “life.”

In my latest book, How To Heal Yourself From Depression When No One Else Can, I’m bringing my tried-and-true methods to one of the greatest challenges of our time.

My work has helped thousands of people overcome emotional and physical challenges when nothing else has worked. Today I want to share with you one technique that we use in several different ways together in the new book: The Sweep Technique.

The Sweep Technique is a script that you repeat in order to clear subconscious blocks and beliefs. It can be done by simply reading the script out loud or in your head a few times in a row.

The Sweep Script

Even though I have this _______ (describe what you want to release such as “feeling depressed and fatigued”), I acknowledge it’s no longer working for me.

I give my subconscious full permission to help me clear it, from all of my cells in all of my body, permanently and completely.

I am now free to thank it for serving me in the past.

I am now free to release all resistances to letting it go.

I am now free to release all ideas that I need this in order to stay safe.

I am now free to release all ideas that I need it for any reason.

I am now free to release all feelings that I don’t deserve to release it.

I am now free to release all conscious and subconscious causes for this energy.

I am now free to release all conscious and subconscious reasons for holding on to it.

I am now free to release all harmful patterns, emotions, and memories connected to it.

I am now free to release all generational or past-life energies keeping it stuck.

All of my being is healing and clearing this energy now, including any stress response stored in my cells.

Healing, healing, healing. Clearing, clearing, clearing.

It is now time to install _______ (insert a new, healthy energy such as “the energy of moving forward,” “the feeling of being content,” or “the belief that I can feel better now”).

Installing, installing, installing. Installing, installing, installing. And so it is done.

If you’d like to join me for more healing in the new book, I will walk you through using more of this technique, along with others—to release emotional baggage, reconnect with yourself, and reclaim your joy.

Love,

Amy B. Scher

This originally appeared as an author letter by Amy B. Scher, author of How to Heal Yourself From Depression When No One Else Can: A Self-Guided Program to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t.

Amy B. Scher is an energy therapist, expert in mind-body healing, and the bestselling author of How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can and How to Heal Yourself from Anxiety When No One Else Can. She has been featured in the Times of India, CNN, HuffPost, CBS, the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Curve magazine, and San Francisco Book Review. Scher was also named one of the Advocate’s “40 Under 40.” She lives in New York City. For more, visit amybscher.com.

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Posted March 1, 2021

Amy Scher

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I have the right to set limits with how long I listen to people’s problems.
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I have the right to quiet peacefulness in my home and in my heart.

Practice: Take a Sound Break to Repair Yourself

Plan periods of quiet to recover from our noisy, fast-paced world. This helps calm your nervous system and your mind, an act of self-empathy.

It’s rejuvenating to schedule at least five minutes of quiet or, even better, complete silence for an hour or more where no one can intrude. As I do, hang a Do Not Disturb sign on your office or bedroom door. During this reset period, you’ve officially escaped from the world. You’re free of demands and noxious sounds. You may also get noise canceling earbuds to block out noise.

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Embracing your empathy does require courage. It can feel scary. If you’re ready to discover its healing power, I would be honored to be your guide to helping you in overcoming your fears and obstacles, and enhancing this essential skill for long-term change.

Though many of us have never met, I feel connected to you. Connection is what fuels life. While empathy is what allows you to find peace. With both, we can make sense of this world together.

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Are You Suffering from Empathic Distress? How to Recla...

Mara Bishop — March 7, 2024

Are you exhausted, anxious, or overwhelmed? Maybe your life is challenging. Or perhaps the state of the world and others’ suffering feels unbearable. If your life is going well, but you still feel miserable, maybe you have some guilt or shame. You are not alone. You may be suffering from empathic distress.

Most of us have been taught that empathy is wholly positive and should be fostered in children and revered in adults. This idea is partly correct. The absence of empathy is clearly problematic. When the ability to sense or care about others’ feelings or pain is missing, we edge into sociopathy. However, empathy is experiencing another person’s pain as our own. In small doses and for short periods, it allows us a deeper understanding of our fellow beings. But it can also make it harder to help, because the pain is spread around, not diminished. If your friend breaks their leg and you experience genuine empathy, it might feel like your leg is broken too. This makes it harder for you to function and definitely harder for you to help them.

Empathy can make us sick, overwhelmed, and burned out.

Many people feel helpless in the face of the magnitude of suffering in the world today. It can result in what appears to be apathy at first but is actually empathic distress, which means “hurting for others while feeling unable to help.” An op-ed in the New York Times titled “That Numbness You’re Feeling? There’s a Word for It” described this phenomenon and cited some of the research I used to create the Sounds True audio course Shining Bright Without Burning Out: Spiritual Tools for Creating Healthy Energetic Boundaries in an Overconnected World.

The Research

Neuroscientists Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer identified empathy as a contributing factor to burnout, primarily but not exclusively, among healthcare workers and therapists. The older term compassion fatigue is a “misnomer.” Compassion and empathy have distinctly different impacts on our bodies and psyches. Compassion is witnessing and being willing to help when possible and appropriate. Empathy is taking on others’ pain as our own. Empathy often creates “more distress.” It is a huge distinction.

Empathy is overrated and fatiguing. Compassion is what we need. Unfortunately, we often confuse the two. This dynamic is one reason why developing healthy energetic boundaries is essential.

Decreasing Empathic Distress

Being unable to adjust between compassion and empathy is a big reason many people feel drained and overwhelmed. Research about the critical difference between compassion and empathy aligns with many spiritual concepts of energetic boundaries. It also challenges some. One of the ways we inadvertently make things difficult for ourselves is when we believe that to be good, kind, “spiritual” people, we must always be wide open. We must be at one with the universe, be open to everyone, and say yes to everything. There is a paradox here. We are all one on some level, but we need to embrace the ability to differentiate ourselves from others at times to steward our own health.

We have reached a tipping point with empathic distress; it is a crisis within the crises.

Klimecki and Singer focus on how training in compassion meditation can help reduce empathic distress, shifting from an experience of absorbing others’ energy to a state of kindness toward others with clear self-differentiation. The distinction between empathy and compassion is one of the first things we cover in Shining Bright Without Burning Out: Spiritual Tools for Creating Healthy Energetic Boundaries in an Overconnected World. The course also includes a full set of tools for addressing empathic distress from the perspective of energetic boundaries.

Here are a few additional steps you can take today to begin reducing empathic distress:

Be clear about your direct responsibilities and what is not yours.
Pause before entering new situations: conversations, appointments with clients, meetings, etc. Take a moment to reset yourself with a breath and an intention for how you want to engage.
Pay attention to how you feel after interactions with people, places, and media. Note over time when your mood or body feels drained so that you can prepare more thoroughly in the future, consider how to minimize those interactions if they are optional, and take time to reset after engaging.

Mara Bishop

Mara Bishop is a shamanic practitioner, intuitive consultant, teacher, author, and artist. In private practice, she uses her Personal Evolution Counseling™ method to provide an integrated approach to spiritual healing, personal growth, and emotional well-being. Her books Shamanism for Every Day: 365 Journeys and Inner Divinity: Crafting Your Life with Sacred Intelligence are resource guides for spiritual practice. She resides in Durham, North Carolina. For more, visit wholespirit.com.