Empaths often have a history of childhood trauma. Explore how empathy is both a gift and a challenge, and learn how to navigate your past experiences for a brighter future.

Empaths are people who tend to be very sensitive to other people’s moods, emotions, and energy. They can tell when what you’re saying doesn’t match what you’re feeling. They’ll feel other people’s emotions—both good and bad—as if they were their own. You won’t tend to find an empath in a crowd—it’s so overwhelming to have everyone’s energy coming in at once that many empaths would rather stay home with a few people they feel safe with (or only in exactly the right crowd).

The Five of Cups instructs us to explore our relationship to trauma and how we process. Learn more about the spiritual meaning of this tarot card.

The Five of Cups tarot card usually shows a cloaked figure looking down at three cups that have been spilled. Two cups remain upright just behind this person where they can’t be seen. In the distance is a bridge across water, some faraway land that must be crossed.

Even when our circumstances are safe, we may not feel safe within our own bodies. Explore the importance of cultivating a feeling of safety from within, and how it can help us heal deeply.

Safety seems like a pretty basic idea: Am I at risk for harm or not? But for many of us, it’s more complex than that. Am I physically safe as well as emotionally safe? Does my internal feeling of safety match my environment? Am I safe internally as well as externally?

We don’t often think of this as an internal dynamic, but it is. When we can learn to listen to our bodies and our own internal “yes” and “no” signals, we cultivate a habit of respecting our own needs, limits, boundaries, and desires.

Self love is, essentially, the opposite of shame. When we behave in alignment with the idea that we are worth loving as we are, we in alignment with the idea that there’s nothing wrong with us, that we deserve, for example, healthy food, enough sleep, and pleasurable experiences. For some of us, that causes a kind of rebound effect where we end up falling back into self-punishment and in our familiar old hole of shame.

After healing from sexual assault, sex has to change. Whatever our experience of sex before the assault and however it has affected our lives, sex can never be the same again. Here’s the good news: it can be way better.

Trauma doesn’t respond to conventional ways of healing, so we need our unconventional grimoires. We cannot plan out and micromanage our healing, but we can cast a spell.