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Welcome to Witches in Yoga Pants, your cozy corner of the cosmos, where modern magic meets everyday life. We're here to explore magic, mindfulness, and personal growth with a grounded, no-fluff vibe. Whether you're into moon rituals, tarot spreads, or just trying to survive Mercury retrograde, you are in the right place. So get ready to disrupt some old patterns, explore what it means to reclaim your power and remember who you really are. So pull up your yoga mat, light a candle, and let's get into it. Hello and welcome back. I'm so glad you're here. Today I want to talk about something I hear people say all the time, and it's something that comes up frequently in the work I do with clients, and that is the idea of picking up on someone else's energy. Maybe you've had this happen. You walk into a room feeling perfectly fine, and within a few minutes you feel irritated or anxious or heavy or exhausted. Nothing has actually happened to you. Nobody's said anything upsetting. There isn't an obvious reason for the change, but suddenly you just don't feel like yourself. Or maybe it happens when you're with a particular person. You can be having a perfectly good day and then spend an hour with them and afterward you feel completely depleted. Sometimes you don't even notice it while you're with them. You get in your car to leave or you get home and suddenly you realize how different you feel. There are also people who seem to feel everything happening around them. They walk into a room and immediately know that something's off. They can tell when two people have been arguing, even though everyone is pretending everything's fine. They feel someone else's sadness before that person says a word. They notice tension in a space where other people seem completely oblivious to it. If you are one of those people, you may have spent a lot of your life being told that you're too sensitive. But what if sensitivity isn't necessarily the problem? What if you're simply receiving a lot of information? And the bigger question here becomes: what do you do with all that information once you receive it? There's also an important distinction between sensing someone else's emotional state and assuming that every emotion that you experience belongs to somebody else. And that is where I want to go with this today. Because when we talk about absorbing energy, there are different things that may be happening at the same time. There can be energetic sensitivity, there can be empathy, there can be nervous system responses, there can be old experiences in us that are being activated by someone else. And within the energetic framework that I use in my work, there can also be emotions that we experience as absorbed from other people. Sometimes it isn't as simple as saying, this feeling isn't mine. Sometimes the more useful question is, is this mine? Is this theirs? Or is something happening in their energy that is activating something in me? That distinction matters because if everything uncomfortable becomes somebody else's energy, we can accidentally avoid looking at ourselves. But if we assume that everything that we feel originated inside of us, we may also miss the ways we are responding to and interacting with the people and environments around us. So let's talk about what might actually be happening. Humans are constantly communicating with each other in a way that has nothing to do with words. We notice facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, movement, pauses, changes in breathing, tension in someone's body, and hundreds of other tiny signals, often without consciously realizing noticing any of them. Your nervous system is paying attention. You may consciously think everything's fine, while another part of you is registering that the person sitting across from you is tense. And that's the reason you can walk into a room and know something happened before anyone tells you. You aren't imagining it. Your body is simply noticing information faster than your conscious mind can explain it. We are also affected by the emotional states of the people around us. Spend time with someone who is laughing uncontrollably and you might find yourself laughing even if you don't know what's funny. Sit beside someone who is visibly nervous and you might notice your own body becoming more alert. Walk into a room where everyone is relaxed and comfortable, and you'll find yourself settling in too. Our nervous systems don't exist in isolation. We influence each other. And that means some of what we call picking up energy may have a very physical component to it. But for many people, the experience seems to go beyond simply noticing someone else's mood. This is something I see regularly in my work with clients. When I'm working with someone and we're trying to identify emotions that might be contributing to a pattern, discomfort, belief, or an energetic imbalance, sometimes what comes up isn't an emotion that appears to have originated within them. Within the framework I use, I refer to these as absorbed emotions. An absorbed emotion is essentially an emotion that we experience as having originated with someone else and then being taken on or held within our own energetic system. And I release a lot of them. Sometimes a surprising number of them. It can happen in relationships, families, workplaces, friendships, caregiving situations, or emotionally intense environments, and it doesn't necessarily require some dramatic event. Imagine being a child living with a parent who is constantly anxious. That child may not understand anxiety. They might not even have language for what they're experiencing, but they are living inside an emotional environment where anxiety is present again and again. Or imagine being in a relationship with someone who's angry but doesn't express their anger. Nothing is technically happening. They're not yelling, they're not saying they're angry, but you feel the tension anyway. And maybe you start becoming anxious. Maybe you start trying to make everything okay. Maybe you become hyper-aware of their mood. Maybe you begin changing your behavior in response to something nobody has actually acknowledged. Over time, it can become very difficult to tell where one emotional experience ends and the other person's begins. This happens with caregivers too. When you love someone who's struggling, you naturally want to help them. You sit with them, you listen, you worry, you try to make things better. And sometimes, especially if you're a highly sensitive or empathic person, you might find yourself carrying the emotional weight of what they're experiencing long after the conversation has ended. The same thing can happen in helping professions, therapists, healers, medical professionals, body workers, coaches, teachers, caregivers, intuitive practitioners, and anyone who spends significant time holding space for other people can become very familiar with that feeling of finishing a day and thinking, hmm, why do I suddenly feel so heavy? That doesn't mean helping other people is inherently draining, and it doesn't mean we need to become afraid of other people's energy. I actually think fear around energy can create its own problems. If we start believing that everyone around us is energetically dangerous, then we can become hyper-vigilant. We start protecting ourselves from everything and we imagine shields and barriers everywhere we go. We become suspicious of crowded rooms, we start labeling people as energy vampires and might even begin attributing every headache, bad mood, or tired afternoon to someone else's energy. That is not discernment. That's fear. Energetic awareness should help us understand ourselves better. For me, the goal isn't to never be affected by another human being. We're supposed to affect each other. We're relational beings. We love each other, we comfort each other, we laugh together, we grieve together, we walk into a room where someone we love is hurting, and something in us responds. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The question is whether we know how to come back to ourselves afterwards. This is where human design gives us another really interesting lens. If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you've heard me talk about defined and undefined centers in human design. You don't need to know your chart to understand this part, although if you have your chart, you might recognize yourself immediately. In human design, the defined centers are considered areas where we have more consistent access to our own energy. Undefined or open centers are considered more receptive. They are the places where we can experience and potentially amplify energy from the people around us. And I want to be careful with the word amplify because it doesn't necessarily mean you copy what another person is experiencing. Sometimes you experience it more intensely. The emotional solar plexus is probably the easiest example. If you have an undefined emotional solar plexus, human design teaches us that you can be especially sensitive to the emotional energy around you. Someone else may have been irritated at level three and you experience it at like level seven. And because you're feeling it so strongly, you may assume it's yours. You might think, why am I so upset? Meanwhile, the emotion may not have originated with you at all. This can also create patterns where someone with an undefined emotional solar plexus becomes uncomfortable with emotional conflict. If you're amplifying the emotional intensity around you, keeping everybody else happy can start feeling like a way of keeping yourself comfortable. So you become the peacemaker, you smooth things over, you don't say that thing that might upset someone, you monitor everyone else's mood, you learn how to read the room incredibly well, and eventually you become so accustomed to paying attention to everyone else's emotional state that you stop asking yourself how you feel. That is where sensitivity can turn into conditioning. But emotions aren't the only energy that we can experience this way. An undefined root chakra can be sensitive to pressure. You can spend time around someone who's rushing, stressed, pushing, trying to get everything done, and suddenly you feel like you need to hurry up too. Nothing changed on your schedule. There isn't a sudden emergency, but your body feels the pressure. An undefined sacral chakra can experience and amplify the life force and work energy of people with defined sacrals. You might be around someone who can keep going and going. And while you're with them, you feel like you can keep going too. Then you get home and you crash. An undefined ego or will center can become caught in proving. Someone else's ambition, competitiveness, or need to accomplish something can activate something in you that suddenly feels like I need to show that I can do this too. There are different ways we interact with energy throughout the entire chart. Again, you don't need to memorize any of this. The bigger idea here is simply some people are more receptive in certain areas than others. And that can explain why two people can walk into exactly the same environment and have completely different experiences. One person walks through a crowded shopping center and doesn't think twice about it. Another person walks through the same space and comes home completely exhausted. One person can sit beside someone who is extremely anxious and remain relatively unaffected. Another person's heart begins racing. Neither person is better, neither person is more spiritually evolved. They simply have different levels and types of sensitivity. But here's the part I think we need to talk about more in spiritual spaces. Just because somebody else's energy is present doesn't mean what you're feeling isn't yours. Sometimes another person isn't giving you their emotion. They're activating yours. Let's say you're around someone who's angry. You immediately become anxious. It would be easy to say, I absorb their anger. Maybe. But maybe their anger reminds your nervous system of what anger meant when you were a child. Maybe anger wasn't safe. Maybe someone being angry meant yelling was coming. Maybe it meant withdrawal. Maybe it meant punishment. Maybe you learned very early that when someone around you became angry, your job was to become small, quiet, helpful, or invisible. Now that you're an adult, someone near you is irritated. They're allowed to be irritated. They aren't threatening you. They aren't even angry with you. But your body recognizes anger and says, we know this. We know it's dangerous. And the anxiety you're experiencing may actually be yours. Their emotion simply activated it. This is why I don't love automatically saying, that's not yours, send it back. Sometimes it isn't yours. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's a combination. And sometimes figuring out whose emotion started where isn't even necessary. You can simply notice what's happening. I felt fine before I came into this room. I notice every time I'm around this person, I become tense. I notice that I feel responsible for making this person feel better. I notice that when everyone around me is stressed, I start rushing even when I don't need to. I notice that after certain conversations, I feel emotionally heavy for hours. Those observations give you information. Then you can become curious rather than immediately creating a story about what they mean. One of the simplest questions you can ask yourself when your emotional state changes suddenly is what changed? Where was I? Who was I with? What were we talking about? What happened in my body? Did this feeling exist before this interaction? Does this emotion make sense in the context of what is happening in my own life? You don't need to interrogate yourself every time you're in a bad mood. Sometimes you're irritated because you're irritated. Sometimes you're tired because you didn't sleep. Sometimes you have a headache because you need to drink water. Sometimes you're overwhelmed because you have too much to do. Everything isn't energetic. And I think remembering that actually makes energetic awareness more useful. Because discernment requires us to leave room for the ordinary explanations too. But when you notice a pattern, pay attention to it. If you consistently feel different after being around a particular person or environment, that is information. It doesn't automatically mean that person is toxic. It doesn't mean they're stealing your energy. It doesn't mean you need to cut them out of your life. It might simply mean that your system is working harder when you're around them. Maybe you're monitoring them. Maybe you're masking. Maybe you're trying to keep them happy. Maybe you're absorbing or amplifying their emotions. Maybe they activate an old pattern inside of you. Maybe you don't feel safe being full of yourself with them. Maybe they talk at you for two hours and never even ask how you're doing. That last one, that's just exhausting. And this is where the energetic boundaries and practical boundaries start meeting each other. We sometimes talk about energetic boundaries as though they require an elaborate ritual. And rituals can absolutely be helpful. But one of the strongest energetic boundaries available to you is simply knowing when you're done. Leave the conversation. Not answering the phone every time someone calls. Taking 10 minutes alone after spending time with a lot of people. Not automatically volunteering to fix someone else's emotional state. Allowing another adult to be disappointed without making their disappointment your responsibility. Recognizing that compassion does not require you to carry what someone else is carrying. Those are energetic practices too. You can care deeply about someone without joining them inside every emotion they experience. You can sit beside grief without making the grief yours. You can love someone who's anxious without becoming responsible for eliminating their anxiety. You can be present with someone who's angry without needing to absorb, fix, or fear their anger. And if you're someone who's naturally sensitive, learning this can change everything because sensitivity without boundaries can be exhausting. Sensitivity with discernment can become an incredible gift. It can make you intuitive, it can make you compassionate. It can help you to notice what isn't being said. It can help you understand people, and it can make you deeply perceptive. It can also be incredibly useful in healing work. But you need to know how to come home to yourself. There are many ways to do that. And I don't think there's one magical energetic clearing technique that everyone needs to use. Sometimes water's enough. Take a shower and intentionally imagine the day washing away. If you've been in a particularly intense environment, changing your clothes when you get home can create a surprisingly powerful psychological and energetic transition. Go outside, put your feet on the ground, move your body, shake out your hands, stretch, turn on music, open the windows, use smoke if that's part of your practice. Use sound. Take a bath. Sit quietly for a few minutes and notice what your body feels like when nobody else is asking anything from you. You can also simply use intention. You don't always need an elaborate ritual. You can say to yourself, anything I'm carrying that isn't mine, I release. And then you release it. You don't necessarily need to know who it belonged to. This is something I think people can get stuck on when we identify absorbed emotions in energetic work. They immediately want to know whose it was. Was it my mom? Was it my partner? Was it my coworker? Was it the person I talked to yesterday? How long have I been carrying it? Why did I absorb it? Sometimes those answers are useful and sometimes they're not necessary, and sometimes they are. If you're carrying something that you no longer need, you can let it go without solving the entire mystery of how it got there. The same is true for emotions that are actually yours. You're allowed to release those too. You don't have to earn your way out of an emotion by understanding every reason you ever felt it. Sometimes awareness is enough. Sometimes the body is ready before the mind has finished writing the story. And if you're someone who's absorbed a lot from other people, I would encourage you to start noticing your baseline. What do you feel like when you're alone? Not isolated, not lonely, just alone in your own energy. What does your body feel like? What does your mind feel like? How fast do your thoughts move? What is your natural emotional state when nobody else is in the room? The more familiar you become with yourself, the easier it becomes to recognize when something changes. This is especially useful before and after situations where you know you'll be around a lot of people. Before you walk into a gathering or a meeting or the store, the hospital, the airport, a family dinner, or wherever you're going, check with yourself. How do I feel right now? And then check again later. Not because you need to protect yourself from anyone, but because you're learning yourself. And I think that distinction matters. Energetic awareness isn't supposed to make us afraid of connection. It's supposed to help us stay connected to ourselves while we are connecting with other people. There will always be people whose presence affects us. There will be rooms that feel different when we enter them. There will be conversations that leave us lighter and conversations that leave us tired. There will be people we feel immediately comfortable with, and others our body seems to react to before we understand why. We can pay attention to those experiences without needing to turn every one of them into a supernatural explanation. We also don't have to dismiss an experience just because we can't explain it scientifically. There is room for curiosity, there's room for intuition, there's room for understanding the nervous system, there's room for human design, and there's room for energetic practices. And most importantly, there's room for asking questions. There's room for saying, I don't completely know what happened, but I know I felt different. That's enough information to become curious. And if you're noticing that you seem to carry emotions, patterns, or energetic heaviness that you have a difficulty releasing on your own, this is also something I work with in my sessions. A lot of the work I do with clients involves identifying what their system may be holding on to, including emotions that appear to be their own, as well as emotions we identify as absorbed, and then working to release what they no longer need to carry. We can also look at your human design chart and the places where you may naturally be receptive to people and environments around you. The goal isn't to make you less sensitive, it's to help you understand your sensitivity so you aren't carrying everything you encounter as though it belongs to you. Because maybe the question isn't whether other people's energy can affect us. Of course, other people's energy can affect us. We affect each other every day. Maybe the more important question is whether we know how to recognize ourselves inside of all that noise. Can you feel someone else's sadness without losing yourself in it? Can you notice tension without automatically taking responsibility for fixing it? Can you enter a room full of emotion and still know what belongs to you? Can you allow yourself to be sensitive without assuming that sensitivity means you have to carry everything you feel? That is where discernment becomes powerful. You don't have to shut yourself off. You don't have to build walls around yourself. You don't have to become less empathetic, less intuitive, or less connected. You can simply become more familiar with your own energy. And when something doesn't belong with you anymore, whether it began with you or came from somewhere else, or was activated somewhere in the space between, you can give yourself permission to put it down. Until next time, notice what you feel, know what's yours, and release what you no longer need to carry. Take what you've heard today even further by joining my newsletter community. 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