Crystals for Healing the Empath Wound: An Interview with Rachael Shaffer

Hello and welcome. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Rachael Shaffer. Rachael is a healing practitioner and the owner of Urban Empath.               At Urban Empath, Rachel specializes in supporting empaths, highly sensitive people, intuitives and artists to create successful relationships, find a true sense of purpose, and transform their lives. They do this through vibrational medicine, aromatherapy, coaching and more. Rachael, I am so excited to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us. Rachael Shaffer: Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here. Ashley: I'm really excited to talk to you today. We are going to be discussing something that I think is going to be so pertinent to everybody who's listening on the podcast and watching this video: the journey to healing the empath wounds. Could you start by telling us a little bit about your own journey and how you got started doing this work? Rachael: Absolutely. It's been a long journey. I started back when I was maybe, five? Of course, it started before birth. But at five years of age, I started playing classical piano. That's when I became sensitized to my energy system. When music becomes fluent, as a language, you start to soften your gaze and get into a meditative trance. I felt my crown chakra opening. I didn't have the words, but I had the sensations. It felt like it was happening to me and that it was in my physical body. It had felt like someone was touching my head basically. I would always run out of the room when that would happen. So, that was the start of me having the sensitivity to energy. In school years, classroom settings would get me disoriented. I was overstimulated constantly and I still didn't know why I lacked the sense of belonging. It wasn't until I moved to New York City from Pennsylvania to attend a musical theater conservatory, but ended up making a slight detour into working in a metaphysical bookstore for a time. That was boot camp for me. It was the first time I heard empath. It was right in the Union Square area of New York City in front of 5th Ave. It was probably the most famous bookstore called East-West Living. It's no longer there, but it was very famous. I had no idea how to protect myself. I was constantly dissociating from my body because it was so intense, and I began handling crystals daily when I hadn't worked with them previously. Ashley: This is super interesting to me because I actually had a really similar journey of my own story. I really started to open up when I started working in a metaphysical bookstore. So, that's really cool that that's a part of your journey. So, where did it go from there once you realized that there were these people out there called empaths? How did this evolve into you discovering this whole journey for yourself and where did it lead you in your work? Rachael: At first, I labeled myself. It was a label and I associated it with, "Well, it's the plight of the empath and this is what I've been dealt." And through inner work, working with mentors, working with crystals, essential oils, and vibrational sound, empaths have this affinity with energy and ability to tune, but that's also our weakness. It's our strength and our weakness in that we don't have a solid sense of self. We don't embody easily. Oftentimes, we get enmeshed with other people. Being an empath in and out of itself is not a wound. It's a psychic ability. But the core cause of it can be a wound. I'm still discovering more and more about it as I go along, but I'm learning that the most significant aspect is learning boundaries. Our energetic boundaries are very porous, and the wound can develop when we're still an egg in our mother, as she's a fetus.