From Outward Listening to Inward Focus #251

Have you ever found yourself feeling drained, anxious, or unsure what’s even yours anymore?  When there is a lot of energy around things can get a little muddy.
This happens a lot when you are tuned to “listening outward” — when your intuitive radar is constantly scanning everyone else’s energy instead of staying anchored in your own. For empaths and highly sensitive people, it can feel second nature to absorb moods, stress, or even physical sensations from others… until suddenly you’ve lost your center.  And you may not have any idea this is happening until you feel grumpy and like you have lost yourself a bit.

In this episode, we’re unpacking how empathy turns into enmeshment — and how to return to your grounded, radiant energy through listening inward. You’ll learn how to recognize the signs that you’ve been listening outward (like emotional exhaustion, scattered focus, or fuzzy intuitive hits) and simple ways to tune back in. Christina shares grounding practices, affirmations, and gentle questions to help you reconnect with your inner guidance and hold compassionate space for others without losing yourself in the process.

Christina Wooten helps you access the wisdom and support of the Spirit World to elevate your life.
She is a Certified Psychic Medium and Reiki Master Teacher.  Christina is the owner of Sedona Medium and co-host of Modern Life and Spirit podcast.

She offers Psychic Medium Readings, Soul Readings, and teaches how you can start communicating and receiving messages from your Spirit Guides - through her program.
Learn more about her offerings here


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Transcript

Narrator: 0:48

Christina, welcome to the Modern Life and Spirit Podcast where we explore spiritual topics relevant to today's world. Your hosts, certified psychic medium Christina Wooten and Reiki master teacher Robert Wooten, break down how to work with spirit to create more positive growth in your life. Consider this podcast your go to spiritual resource for navigating the modern world. Hey there,

Christina Wooten: 1:15

kindred spirits. Welcome to Modern Life and Spirit Podcast. I'm Christina Wooten, certified psychic medium at SedonaMedium.com Welcome to our episode today. We have a lot to talk about, and I'm also going to answer a question that I got as well about our natural law series, so I will address that before we get into the main meat of our topic today. But I wanted to share just a moment of good news because I'm really excited about it, and I feel like we need to make a more concerted effort to share good news with each other. So I'm going to share some good news that happened. So since our last recording, we have been consistently feeding a cat outdoors, a male Russian blue cat. I really just think he has the sweetest temperament, the sweetest energy. Is a big snuggle bunny, definitely a lover and not a fighter. And we have been luring him in and getting him comfortable over long, long periods of time. This has been several months of consistent effort of building trust and really working with him, and, you know, feeding him in the entry part of the door, helping him start to relax in this area and start to get used to the smells, the smells of our dog and the smell of Luna, and just for him to get a little bit more comfortable, and I'm so excited to say that this past, well, little over a week now, he is now an indoor cat, so we have brought him in officially, and we just kind of shut the door and we're like, All right, we're ready for two nights and no sleep, which is usually what happens. I think Luna was a little bit Wilder at first, but it's been wonderful to have sky be a part of our family. He is getting along perfectly with Luna. They have touched noses. They're getting close. They haven't spooned yet. So my cats that are now in spirit, Malcolm and Tigris, they used to spoon, and I really loved that. So I'm hoping that eventually sky and Luna will become closer and closer and closer to one another. Right now, about the closest they are is, you know, a couple of feet away from each other while they nap, which is huge, and you can tell that sky is getting lots of trust in tolerating Lily, who can be a little bit much at times as well. I mean, at least he's accepted. Okay, I don't think this dog is going to eat me. Seems to be a lot more comfortable and is not hiding under the bed anymore. So, so happy, so pleased for that. And I'm just very grateful that we have these beautiful spirits that are in our life, that are in this world. This is one of the great blessings of the earth. Plane is to have the blessings of animals in our lives. So I hope that you are also just taking a moment to just feel some gratitude for your animals, whether they are loved ones that you have in spirit now, or whether they are those that are companions for you right now on the earth plane, I'm just so thankful that we have them in our lives. Thank you to spirit, to the Divine for allowing us that gift if we're going to have heavy life charts and really intense challenges dealing with fear and the density of this earth. Thank goodness we have the blessing of animals. I did want to address that. I got a question from Joanna from one of our last episodes about soul journey. The soul journey Part One and Part Two, about the natural law episodes that I mentioned, particularly in the second part of that series, we have five natural law episodes that we have already released, and honestly, the easiest way for you to locate those is to go to Sedona medium.com and in the search bar on my website, just type in natural law and hit enter, and those episodes will come up for you. But I did want to share with you the episodes that we do have out. So we have natural law, the law of love, which is episode number 94 if you're not familiar with natural law, please start with episode 94 because everything is based on the law of love. So it will really help you to understand the basis of natural law, what I mean, what we're talking about here, and the foundation of all of it in Episode 94 then we talk about the law of mind. In episode 95 we talk about the law of cause and effect. In episode. 116 the law of thought and intention in Episode 139 and the law of vibration in Episode 192, so again, Joanna, the easiest way for you to find those natural law episodes, rather than just scrolling through is to go to Sedona medium.com and use the search bar on the website, type in natural law, and all of that will come up. So I hope that that has been helpful for you. In today's episode, we are talking about the challenge of listening outward instead of inwardly, and how that can impact our intuitive perspective. A lot of people grow and develop your initial energetic sensitivity and your psychic sensitivity through empathic skills. And all of that is based on listening outward, where you're very tuned in to the environment, to the energy of your environment, from physical spaces to also the people that are entering your environment as well tuning into their true energy, and you can also sense their emotional state so that you can respond to that, an emotional state in a way that helps you to stay safe. So this in particular, is a big survival skill that a lot of people grow and heighten and develop, this learning of how to listen outward, and that is a big part listening outward of psychic abilities, but it's something that we have to when we're talking about intuitive work and when we're talking about more mediumship development, this is where we are. Instead of leaning on our psychic abilities, where you're listening to the energies around you, listening to the auric field of the people around you, and so forth, you are getting that information from the higher realms that requires a different kind of listening, where we're not listening to be tuned outward. We're tuning upward, if you will, and we're tuning inward to make sure that you are listening to the right energy. Now think about when you've had a friend who's been really upset, and before they even have the chance, really to open up their mouth to tell you exactly what's going on, you just feel this wave of energy in your body. Maybe you're feeling their emotions, the stress, the heaviness in your solar plexus. Maybe you're feeling the anxiety in your chest or the stress that's building up in your body, maybe you're even filling it in your tissues. So, for example, tightness in your shoulders, right? All of that comes from this listening outward, from that intuitive radar sweep, which is happening all the time, where you're constantly scanning the environment around you, and it happens so naturally, for most people, that it's really unconscious. Nobody's saying, all right, let me scan this area right quick, right? It just happens because that's what you're naturally used to doing. It becomes this unconscious behavior, and where that becomes a real problem in our lives is it can cause you to lose the thread of your own frequency, to feel a sense of not being grounded within yourself or occupying your own perspective because you are so connected with the changing, fluctuating energy that's around you, or being tuned to the influences that are around you very regularly, like family members or people that you would have very direct, regular interaction with, Like co workers, for example. So today we're talking about what happens when you are listening outward instead of inward, especially for empaths who get confused with compassion, and how to show up in a compassionate way without necessarily losing yourself in the process. Also with our intuitive abilities, when you are really tuned to other people, what can happen is you start second guessing your own intuitive hits because someone else's opinion feels stronger, or you are, you know, used to their energy trumping yours. So you are like, Oh, well, they must have it, right? Not me. So you end up getting pulled off your own axis and pulled away from your own center. And it can cause real confusion in the intuitive realm because you're not listening to the right info. Information for you, your own energy. So let's talk about what I mean when I say listening outward. I've kind of described this a little bit as the intuitive radar suite, because that's how I see it. That's what's happening. Is this energy of what's happening around me, what's going on. So it's habitually where you're extending your intuitive awareness into others emotional and energetic space. So you're focusing your antenna, for lack of a better word, outward, and that can be very tuned to other people's needs, to their moods, to their expectations, and sometimes even to collective energy fields. So we're, you know, thinking a little bit broader, not just the people that you're regularly being exposed to and the environment you're regularly being exposed to, but maybe on a grander scale for you, you're really sensing the earth shifts, or you, maybe you're sensing more the group consciousness that is happening on a bigger scale around us. A lot of people right now who are impasse are being really deeply influenced by that energy, because it is so strong in the environment and in our cultures. Right now, lots and lots of strong collective energy, which is just overwhelming. And I think that if we can look at the gift of that as it really makes it clear that we can't be anchored in this outward energy all the time, that we have to be collected, and we have to be more present in our own inward energy, our own intuitive soul, direction, rather than all of this other stuff. And I think that all of this intensity right now is drawing people to that awareness and helping us to become even clearer about when we have slipped into that unconscious state of listening outward and when we are truly grounded and present in our own inner self. And I want to clarify that this way of listening and tuning in and being present and developing of these psychic abilities aren't bad. You know, it's not bad, and it's not wrong. In fact, it it helps a lot of us to really develop and it helps us to understand one another. There's a real unity consciousness that can be found in this level of empathic awareness, where it becomes a challenge is when it's very unbalanced, so when your awareness is really vacating your own body and your own energetic field when you're not holding that awareness as well, that's when it becomes a challenge that we want to address in a different way. So some things that you might notice, if you're really used to doing this unconsciously, is that you naturally feel very responsible for everyone else's comfort. So you notice when somebody feels uncomfortable. So maybe you're at a group event or a party, and you can sense somebody feels a little off, so your first reaction is to go over and to talk to them and to help them feel a little bit more comfortable, or you want to ease their stress in some way, or you might be matching your mood to other people's mood without realizing it. So the more that you're in somebody's environment, the more that you start to mimic, unconsciously, their mood, their energy and sometimes even their approach to things. One thing that I've noticed about impasse is that impasse can also even start to mimic people's accents. So I used to have a friend from Chicago, and this was many, many years ago, before the idea of empathic management had ever even crossed my mind. But I would get on the phone and talk with her for a little while, and by the end of that 20 minute conversation, I had a full on Chicago accent, and it took me a little bit to shed it afterwards, which, of course, is very strange because I'm originally a North Carolina girl. So it was really weird, and I was so embarrassed by it, but I recognized this in being a very strong empath is the ability to mirror other people. Can be very, very strong and very, very subconscious, so it's not an active choice that you're making. It can also be very exhausting, because you're just feeling like you're reading the room. 24/7 imagine that radar sweep is going that's your energy that's just sweeping around 24/7, all the time, that is exhausting. It's tiring. It's why a lot of empaths can have health issues, and it's why a lot of empaths need a lot of rest and need a lot of break from other people, or if they're in environments where there's a lot of public connection or. There's really a lot of intensity around them. It can be very, very overwhelming, and can lead to a lot of mental health challenges too. So listening inward is really important. Being able to be grounded in how your body is reacting to something, because our body is incredibly intuitive. Our spirit is always trying to communicate to us. Our guides are trying to communicate to us as well. The only way that we can hear those things is if we are really present in our own frequency, in our own energy, and intentionally listening to that, making sure that we are holding space for that, one thing I see with people who can be really empathic is that that empathy can turn into an enmeshment we often think about we're being compassionate when we're taking on someone else's energy, where you can really Fully perceive their perspective, you understand exactly how they feel. But that isn't really compassion that becomes enmeshment, which can be really toxic when you become really entangled in someone else's energy. You're no longer present with them. You aren't there anymore. You have left your grounded center, true compassion. It holds space for other people. It doesn't collapse into them. You're holding the space for them. And when you are staying rooted in your body, in your spirit, in your your vibration, your grounded energy, becomes that safe harbor that they can use to help regulate too. So when we are in the environment with someone who has a very peaceful aura, a peaceful energy, a lighter way of looking at life, that helps us to shift into that vibration. So think about his impasse. When you go to a yoga studio or a meditation or, you know, some sort of relaxation experience, and you go into this environment, and all the energy there is geared towards helping you to relax. You are going to match that energy, right? Because that's just naturally what empaths do. It's just matching that energy. So you're going to move into a more peaceful, relaxed or spiritual state from that environment and exposure to that environment. We want to be that for everyone, when we are grounded and rooted in our spiritual energy and our highest vibration. What that allows us to do is to be that energy that other people find and connect with, and can be like, oh, I want more of that energy. And they can feel when I'm around this person, I feel safe, grounded, connected, at peace, quiet on the inside, aware of myself, feeling that sense of love pouring outside of me. You can be that for other people, when you are grounded in your energy, rather than flipping back and forth among all the different frequencies that you are being exposed to, that's where you're really holding space so that they can elevate their energy to help where you're they're matching your energy. And I think that that can be exceptionally healing. That's where we're, in many ways, fulfilling this beautiful calling to help others from a spiritual perspective, we can't do it for them, but you can hold that energy, and in just holding that energy, you can help people find that within themselves. But when we get into that enmeshment mode, or kind of abandon ourselves, abandon our own energy to really understand that other person and really get into their energy the next thing you know, you know, you're angry too, you're frustrated, you're like, I can't believe they said that. And it's like that you are jumping into the ocean to save somebody who's drowning, but you have forgotten your own life raft. We're not always going to notice in the moment that you are listening outward, because that is happening for many people, subconsciously, it's just part of how you've operated for so long. You naturally are doing it. You're naturally scanning all of the time without necessarily realizing so it's not a conscious choice that you're making. It's just happening. So what I want you to do is pay more attention to the evidence, the signs, the symptoms that you are listening outward, and start to pay more attention to that. And when you notice that you are feeling this way, then redirect and. To Bring your energy, returning it back into presence. So let's talk about some of these symptoms, or things to watch out for. First, emotionally exhaustion, irritability, confusion about what's yours. Maybe you were feeling fine earlier, and suddenly you're just kind of off, and you're not sure where it's coming from. You're not sure why. You're just sort of agitated, or you're up and down throughout the day, and you know that there's, you know, nothing mental health wise, going on. It just seems to be like in different environments, you're just up and down, up and down. Energetically, you might feel your solar plexus. So your solar plexus chakra is about three finger widths above the top of your belly button. So that's where a really powerful energy center that we have called the solar plexus chakra, is right there near the stomach. When that area starts to feel tight, or maybe it feels very heavy and your focus seems to be really scattered. That's one of the things that I notice, is that my focus gets really, really scattered too. Those can be indications that we've gone outward and we need to come back to center. Intuitively, maybe you're having difficulty discerning true guidance, what you should be acting upon, versus just a lot of noise, just stuff flipping, flipping around, you're becoming aware of lots of different things, but doesn't seem to have a whole lot of meaning to you, or consistency, or feel like it's a directive. It just feels like, almost as if somebody's flipping pages and you're just reading a couple of words off of each page over and over and over again in long periods of time, you might notice psychic burnout, where you just feel just exhausted. You want to disconnect from everyone and everything. So you start to get all this hermit energy like, No, I'm not going out. No, I don't want to go to the grocery store. Your reaction to other people when they're inviting you to things that you know you would enjoy is just like no thank you. Maybe you're feeling just this big sense of withdrawal, or you can go a different direction and feel a lot of blurry boundaries. So it starts to get very confusing for you. What you should be reinforcing whether you should stand up for yourself, whether you should not. You start to get really in your head about it. Get really confused and not know what really is yours. You may struggle too with knowing what really resonates with you, because you're just in other people's energy and you're not really there, present with spirit and present with your own frequency. Messages could feel that you get, especially if you are a healer or someone working in the spiritual profession, they may feel very fuzzy, or just kind of feel inconsistent, or just feeling off your own frequency, like you're just off your path. You don't feel yourself, you almost don't recognize yourself. Something just feels really, really off, and you may not be able to verbalize exactly what it is you just like I don't feel like me, I don't feel like myself. So those can all be some indications, especially when several of them are present, that you might need a little bit of recovery time to really focus make sure you're tuning back in to yourself. So let's talk about how to tune back in. So once you notice that you have gone to this place, or maybe you've recognized all of what I'm saying, you know, you've been in that space for a long time, tuning back in doesn't take a whole lot of time. It really doesn't, which we can all be very thankful for. But it does require our awareness, our awareness, to begin to catch it more readily and more quickly before we have gone down this path for too long, to really practice checking in with yourself on a daily basis. Am I here? Am I with me? Am I feeling the presence of my own spirit and my own direction? Just that question will tell you right now. So feel in your body. Are you present? Are you here with your own spirit? What's the response that you get? Is it a yes? Is it a no? Because if it's a no, we want to bring that back in, and we want to practice several times throughout the day checking in. Am I here? Am I connected with myself? So the first thing to do is really get into your center. You can take some deep breaths. I think breathing is very, very helpful to just bring your attention in where we start to feel the rise and fall of our chest, feel your stomach inflate and expand. Just get back into your body to begin with. We want to feel the body, but ask yourself first, where am I? Now? Where am I now? And sometimes you might feel the sense of, oh, my mind has gone way down this rabbit hole, and I'm thinking about something that's supposed to happen tomorrow, and I'm probably making a huge deal out of it, and I'm imagining many different scenarios, and I'm so in that that I'm not here, or you might be thinking about something that's happened in the past and replaying, you know, all the things that you could have said or wanted to say, and you just didn't get a chance to say, and replaying that over and over again. But ask yourself, Where am I now? And it ought to give you some clear direction about is my attention here? Is my energy here, or is it elsewhere? Is my mind and my awareness and my presence in something else? When you are using that breath so that in breath really getting reconnected with your body, do some affirmation with yourself, I like to put my hand on my chest, because adds more feedback to I'm here. I'm present and saying something like, I'm here in my body. I'm here in this moment. Sometimes I like to use I choose to be present. I choose to be present here that something about the word choice really helps me feel more empowered. And so sometimes I'll add that in depending on what feels right in the moment. So I'm here in my body. I'm here in this moment, or I choose to be present whatever feels good for you, but reinforcing that with your breathing. And imagine your energy starting to return to your center. And if you need a focal point, think about that point at the solar plexus, right there at the stomach area, calling your energy back into that space. You can use a visualization. You can just maybe feel some people are feelers, where you feel your energy returning from that muck of whatever you've been thinking about or focusing on, or whoever else's energy you've been in at the time. And one thing that can be helpful too is to call on your guides to ask them to help to realign your energy. So you might say something like, guides, I really need your help. I've been in every body else's energy. Today. I've been everywhere, but right here, please help me to just recalibrate, to get present, to get very sensitive to my own energy. And if you give yourself a few minutes where you're just sitting in quiet, you're reflecting, you're being open. This might be a good time that your guides will send some healing energy to you. So you might feel some sensations at the top of your head, around the crown, maybe around the third eye, or elsewhere. Or you might just feel your energy lift up a little bit, or in somehow change. But there's usually some sort of a sensation feedback that lets you know your guides are working on something, that they're supporting you, that they're helping you, that they are helping to adjust your energy in the ways that are beneficial to you. Make sure that you ask for that help. It's just another way that you can learn to become more sensitive. Your guides want you to occupy your space, because that is that balance. Space is how you will be able to do your work. It's how you'll know what's right for you. We spend a lot of time kind of blundering around based on other people's expectations or other people's energy, because we're not sensing our own and our guides know how important it is that we have got to be able to have our one foot into the spirit world and one foot here in the earth plane, so that we can actively engage with the whole purpose of why we came here. We came here to live this life, to have these experiences and to gain wisdom, and we're not gaining as much wisdom when we're not present, when we're not here. That eventually means we usually have to repeat things. Sometimes we repeat experiences in other lifetimes, and it just can become a very frustrating habit that we feel for ourselves, our spirit guides aren't really frustrated with us. They're like, well, you have infinite time. You can choose what you want to do, but let me tell you, this would be easier. That would be their approach, right? But we can feel sometimes disappointed in our own vacancy, our inability to be present in what we've chosen to do, but when we get on the other side, be like, Ah, I didn't use that to the fullest, because I was kind of not there. I wasn't in that energy fully. So we really want to be present for the entire reason that we came here on this planet, to have this type of experience. If you are feeling this part of you, this calling to try and help someone, maybe you know someone who is really hurting, going through a very difficult time, and you find that you fall into the enmeshment category, so you end up really taking on more of their energy and connecting with that versus holding that space that they can rise up to energetically. Remind yourself how important it is to hold love for them without holding whatever pain or illusion they are in in that moment. We don't want to reinforce especially spiritual people reinforce the illusions that we carry and that others have. We want to be clear. Be clear that love is happening. Be clear that they are love. Be clear that they are filled with love within. We want to reflect that back to them, to remind them of their true, higher self and to not get lost in their illusion and delusion, which can be very easy to do when we are listening outward and not within. Now, if you are really, really struggling with consistently getting to listen inward, if you find that you struggle to answer questions like, How are you feeling right now, or what's going on with you? What's happening? And you just sort of like, draw a blank. You're like, I don't know. I haven't thought about it, like, I have no idea what's going on. I don't know how I'm feeling about something. That might be a good time to really implement more journaling so that you are grounding more into your perspective. You're understanding your frequency and your energy and what's happening within your own life, and how you're processing it, how you're understanding it, so you are emitting an energy and radiating it outwards, rather than being a sponge that is just absorbing those are completely different energies. And think about that from a manifestation perspective. When you are a sponge, just absorb, absorb, absorb. I mean, you're reflecting all kinds of stuff back. It's super inconsistent. There's a whole different energy when you are radiating something outward into the world that's really powerful. That's where you have the opportunity to make a greater impact on the environment around you, to help others, to support that is where you're really offering a greater level of healing. So as we come into closing, one affirmation that I think can be really helpful is saying I stay rooted in my spirit, open hearted yet centered. I am a grounded light in the world. I stay rooted in my spirit, open hearted yet centered, a grounded light in the world, and that can just remind you of what you are tuning into, what you're doing, what you're connecting. Remember that not to judge yourself when you notice that you're listening outward. That's not going to help the situation at all. We want to love ourselves through this growth process, through this invitation to be really aware and really present and really guided. And so don't take on judgment for yourself. Just when you notice that it's happened, re shift. It be in your energy. Listen to the feedback that your body and your energy is bringing forward. And if you've been feeling off or really scattered lately. Just let this be a reminder to come home, come home to yourself, come home to your power, your frequency, that space within yourself that is nurturing, supportive, that is animating you, that is helping you be your highest and best version. All right, everyone, I'm so glad that you're here. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to share this with you, and I know that your spirit guides are glad that you had the opportunity to understand this. This is so important in our world right now that we become very deeply rooted within the true practice of living our spirit, bringing it forward into the world, really anchoring into the energy of love and compassion, and not just swinging back and forth by all of the division and so forth that's happening around us at all times. I know our guides are excited about us integrating this message and information and bringing that more forward into the world, in a world that really needs it. If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. Please take a moment to leave a. To review, we'd love to hear from you. And of course, if you have other questions, you can always reach out to me at Instagram, at Sedona medium. All right, everyone, many blessings.

Robert Wooten: 35:57

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