762. Dave Markowitz

Buddha at the Gas Pump

Host Rick Archer interviews author and healer Dave Markowitz about the nature of being an empath and the challenges of empathic overwhelm. T

Key takeaways

• Dave Markontiz defines an empath as a 'sponge' or 'chameleon' who physically and emotionally embodies the energies of their surroundings.
• The process of shadow work involves integrating repressed emotions like anger and grief to achieve psychological wholeness.

Main topics

• Defining Empathy and Empathic Overwhelm
• Shadow Work and Emotional Integration

Notable quotes

We unconsciously liberate others when we do our work.

Conclusion

The episode offers a deep dive into the mechanics of sensitivity and p

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) We unconsciously liberate others when we do our work. And what a beautiful, beautiful sentiment and idea. And if that doesn't get you excited to do your work, I'm not sure it will, right? But it's not about changing others. It's not about doing it with the intention of making others wrong or bad. It's about being more light, being more loving, being more compassionate, and really modeling that way of being for others. Speaker 1 (0:29) Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We've been doing this since early 2010, so there are over 750 episodes. And if you'd like to check out the catalog of previous ones, you can obviously browse around on the YouTube channel, which I encourage you to subscribe to. They're well categorized and organized on our website, which is batgap.com, so I suggest you explore that. The whole thing is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. We're registered as a non-profit, and if you would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website. My guest today is Dave Markowitz. Dave is the author of Refuge for the Weary Empath, the Sacred Work of Healing Ourselves and Our World. You want to hold that book up, Dave? Sure. Speaker 1 (1:27) Refuge for the weary empath, the sacred work of healing ourselves and our world. So that's mainly what we're going to be talking about today. But before we do that, Dave, tell us a little bit about yourself, the trajectory of your life that led you to specialize in this area. And we'll be getting into defining what this area is in great detail as we go along. Speaker 3 (1:52) And of course, thank you so much for doing this. This has been on a bucket list for myself. So I'm super excited to be with you and Irene and everyone who's listening. So welcome. Speaker 1 (2:04) Thank you. And thank Speaker 3 (2:05) you. Wow, where do I even start? I was doing more traditional medical intuition and energy healing for quite a while in New York City. I realized even that in and of itself is kind of an oxymoron, traditional energy healing. But one day I was invited to a friend of a friend's birthday party. I said, sure, why not? And I hadn't drank alcohol in years. And I didn't realize until I got there, it was a bar crawl. So seven bars in seven hours. I'm new in town. I figured. meet some people, forgetting that after a few hours, most people are not really in a place to have high-minded conversations. But at the end of the evening, I went to hail a taxi and it came out something like, Speaker 1 (2:46) and Speaker 3 (2:47) in my head, I know I'm calling taxi, but what came out of my mouth was very different. When I finally got into a taxi, because that's a universal symbol, I heard, this is what we've been trying to tell you. You're an empath. And I said, oh, okay. Before that, people were saying, you're an empath, you're an empath. And I said, no, no, no, whatever. For some reason, I just didn't own the word. But of course, like many, until you have the experience, it's just random thoughts at some point. So I had this experience of getting really drunk and not having drank any alcohol. And in the old days, we used to call it a contact high, but this was pretty severe. And from that moment on, my practice changed. I started attracting people who were very empathic, very sensitive, super intuitive, felt overly responsible, had various aches and pains and weren't able to get any results. And I started intuiting in that moment very different information that I had as a more traditional medical intuition and medical intuitive and energy worker. which were things like, you're absorbing your mother's grief, or you're holding your father's anger. This was very different from, you're mad at your father. It's a whole different thing. And of course, a different thing requires different steps to heal. So fortunately, being reasonably intuitive at the time, I was able to intuit a bunch of new steps and became sort of known as the empath guy. I put out a book. I'll just hold that up real briefly. It was called Self-Care for the Self-Aware. Speaker 3 (4:21) and I've self-published it, and it was on Amazon's top 20 for 41 consecutive months, Speaker 2 (4:26) which Speaker 3 (4:27) I later heard was completely unheard of. Speaker 3 (4:31) And as a self-published author, the number of reviews were pretty profound. And it was kind of about my awakening that we're talking about here into the world of being an empath and what to do about it. So as time goes on, of course, we learn more and more. And then more and more books came out, which is now resulting in the most recent one, which we mentioned before, called Refuge for the Weary Empath. It just came out a few months ago. And it's kind of a culmination of a lot of things that I learned. But in addition, a lot of new information had come through about being an empath, what it means, and how do we deal with it in this very tense world on edge? You know, what's the best things to do and to not do? And so there's a lot of information that came through and you mentioned that you read it. Speaker 3 (5:21) We could talk about that for a bit, sure. But that's a real quick, hopefully quick recap of how I got here. Speaker 1 (5:27) Okay, good. So if a person has never really thought about what an empath is, what they will have learned just now from you is that an empath is kind of like a chameleon or a sponge who's going to take on the qualities of the environment they're in. Is that like the main way you define it or are there more dimensions that should also be brought out? Speaker 3 (5:51) It's probably other things, but that's the main one that I work with because I work with people with a lot of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, energetic blockages. They haven't been able to get any results. But once we can identify it as something that's actually been absorbed, we can work with it in a very different way and get results. So it's sort of a... I don't know, kind of an X factor is to understand that we're all connected and some can be in the presence of others and not really take anything on and they're just fine. And some walk out of, you know, any social environment, you know, completely drained, wondering what the heck just happened. So a lot of people also kind of try to delineate between highly sensitive person and empathic. People can put their own meanings on things and that's fine. I just share my own understanding. How he's sensitive is literal. I'm sensitive to thoughts, feelings, emotions, experiences of other people, environments, situations. An empath to me takes it one step further and actually embodies it to the point that it becomes a way of being, something we even identify with. Even if it's taking on grief of the collective unconscious, for example, we can at some point identify as that person that it's my responsibility to hold all these things for other people. And while theoretically okay, realistically, practically, it's quite draining. So if you're holding that much, obviously it can be draining. But if you're holding even something from a partner, from a parent, it's going to affect you at some point. So I help people delineate what's theirs and what's not theirs, and to give quality steps to not just prevent that absorption, but also how to heal it in a way that's aligned for them. Speaker 1 (7:31) Yeah. My mother spent quite a few years in mental hospitals when I was an adolescent. And towards the end of that period, I had learned to meditate. And I could go to visit her feeling just really clear and smooth and blissful. And after about 15 minutes in the hospital with her, I would just be discombobulated, just incoherent. It kind of disassembled the coherence that I was enjoying. Now I don't think that would happen, but I wouldn't want to work in a place like that eight hours a day. Speaker 3 (8:05) It's not for everyone. I just work with a lot of people who do work in those environments. I did a talk once at a hospital, and it was filled with doctors and nurses who have a lot more technical knowledge than I do, and they were all on the edge of their seat because they'd never heard of this kind of thing. Certainly, it's not discussed in medical school, right? Speaker 1 (8:22) Yeah. Speaker 3 (8:23) Although we might think it should be, but right now it isn't. So they were really interested in this transfer of energy and how it affects them and why. In 15 minutes, someone like yourself can be so disconnected from their essence. Speaker 1 (8:36) Yeah. So obviously the word empath is very closely related to the word empathy. And my understanding of the word empathy is almost synonymous with compassion and feeling love or support or nurturing quality towards someone who is suffering or having a hard time. Is that a correct definition of empathy? And are those also characteristics of empaths? Speaker 3 (9:01) Yes and yes. Speaker 1 (9:02) Okay. Speaker 3 (9:03) Technically, again, the empath to me is someone that really absorbs it to the level that it's not even healthy for them. Speaker 1 (9:10) Yeah. Absorbing it doesn't sound like a good thing. I mean, you want to be sensitive to others suffering, but absorbing it, it's kind of like, let's say a lifeguard. If he drowns every time he gets in the water to save somebody, that's not going to be very helpful. He has to be a good swimmer, you know? Speaker 3 (9:27) Extreme example, but yes, Speaker 1 (9:29) absolutely. Speaker 3 (9:31) Yeah, what I found is a lot of people I work with get some kind of sense of over-responsibility when they're really young. So I'll just give you a quick example that's very personal. When I was young, if I noticed my mother was sad, I would try to cheer her up. So whether that was singing Beatles songs, acting silly, distracting her from something. And when I saw that it worked, some part of me identified as that person, the person responsible for her emotional being. And taken to the next level, I was actually absorbing things and kind of saying, okay, I'll take your grief. And I was kind of digesting it. And that is very common, even if it's not that specific example, that whole idea is very common. A lot of people I work with, whether they're aware of it or not, it's something that happened typically when we were really young. And that becomes a way of being, like we said. And then we absorb things and absorb things and absorb things and wonder why we're not getting better or why we're exhausted, why we're depressed. Because a lot of people I work with on the surface appear to have it together, so to speak, or they feel they are at least. And underneath it, there's this struggle. And this is part of the struggle that we're talking about here. So it's kind of insidious that it's not really obvious, certainly not to our eyes. But once we become aware of it, we can't sort of unlearn it. We got to just go deeper into it and say, what's going on here? And that's one of the reasons I found people to become overly responsible. And that creates that sort of one-way sponge-like existence. Speaker 1 (11:02) How common are empaths? Like what percentage of the population would you say? Speaker 3 (11:06) I've heard around 20%. Okay, that's pretty high. That's Speaker 1 (11:09) like at least a billion people. Speaker 3 (11:13) Yeah, more. And a lot don't even know it, but they have the characteristics. So whether someone uses the word empath or not, I don't really attach to. I've had someone reach out recently and said, don't call me an empath. And yet they're coming to me for these kinds of things. That's fine. The words resonate, are different meanings. I actually feel we're all born empathic. We're all born highly sensitive and feeling that we're connected. And then the physical senses start to kick in and We get a lot of confirmation from physical beings that we are separate and we don't feel the connectedness that we used to, but we crave it. And I think this is another one of those things. We kind of crave that connection. So sometimes we're absorbing energy to feel less alone. Are Speaker 1 (11:58) there many people who think they are empaths, but actually aren't or who are empaths, but don't realize it? Speaker 3 (12:05) Probably. Speaker 1 (12:06) Most Speaker 3 (12:07) people I work with have an awareness of it. And don't mind the word, but there's all kinds of variations, right? Speaker 1 (12:16) Yeah. Okay. You know, some Eastern traditions, particularly Hinduism, say that we come into this life with the same level of consciousness at which we left the last life. So they would say that babies are not necessarily little saints. You know, they may seem innocent and pure, but may be predisposed to become cruel, brutish adults. Would you agree or would you say that babies and young children are tabula rossas and who are naturally empathetic and that the pressures and traumas of life numb or dull that quality? Speaker 3 (12:50) Open to any of the above. I think karma is real. It may or may not be exactly as we understand it, in our human understanding at least. I think some come in predisposed to something. And there's also an empty slate that would become products of those around us. So maybe our karma sets us up in a certain environment where those people can then fill that karma as well. Speaker 3 (13:19) So it's a lot of yes to that question. Speaker 1 (13:23) Okay. This is sort of an aside, but I don't take anything with absolute certainty. Everything to me is... hypothetical, which doesn't mean I'm skeptical about everything, but if you take a scientific approach, scientists give varying amounts of credence to different hypotheses, depending on what they've been able to actually ascertain empirically. So, you know, I like these kinds of philosophies. They make a lot of sense, but I'm not saying anybody should adopt them as rigid beliefs. Speaker 3 (13:53) Absolutely. That goes for anything that certainly I share today is, you know, try it on and see if it works. If it doesn't, that's okay. Speaker 3 (14:01) Yeah, I mean, anyone who claims to know every truth is probably someone you want to run from. Some Speaker 1 (14:06) kind Speaker 3 (14:06) of Speaker 1 (14:07) fundamentalist, yeah. But you can know Speaker 3 (14:08) enough to have a better life without having to know the secrets of the universe. Speaker 1 (14:14) Right. And you can claim to know the secrets of the universe and be a real SOB. Speaker 3 (14:22) Also, we've seen a number of those, yes. Right. Speaker 1 (14:27) So far you've implied or even said that empathy can be cultivated and that traumas can be healed. So do you think that many spiritual paths and some therapeutic practices can restore our empathy by healing traumas? And one reason I ask is that I know people who've been on a spiritual path for over 50 years whom I wouldn't consider to be very empathetic. Maybe they should have been supplementing their meditation with some kind of therapy or something. What do Speaker 3 (15:01) you Speaker 1 (15:01) think? Speaker 3 (15:03) Again, no absolute, but in general, the people I work with have done a fair amount of work on themselves. They've gotten to a point where they see things differently and tend to have more compassion and empathy for those in pain than maybe they had when they were kids. That's certainly the case for myself. I wasn't raised with that as being a focus. Speaker 3 (15:25) And, you know, over time, certainly doing the inner work, the shadow work, like when, for example, I don't feel I'm a good judge of anyone anymore because I've seen my own shadow and I really can't judge anyone. So people feel that and they feel safe enough to share some deep secrets with me quite often. And I don't take that lightly. I take that as quite an honor and a blessing. At the same time, an acknowledgement that Speaker 2 (15:52) Yeah, because Speaker 3 (15:52) I've seen my shadow, I can't judge others. And there's a safety that's connected to that idea. And I don't think that would have happened had I not, you know, had those experiences and done the work to. heal them so from first-hand experience i'll say yes absolutely okay Speaker 1 (16:13) as as you probably know jesus said judge not lest you be judged you know yeah and Speaker 3 (16:21) yet our human minds do it all the time right it's just kind of normal right Speaker 1 (16:24) or Speaker 3 (16:24) at least the default setting perhaps for many um but like many things really comes down to eventually is this serving me or is it not serving me Speaker 3 (16:34) And it wasn't serving me anymore to do that. And then, like I said, add those, you know, those dark times, shall we say. And that's another dark night of the soul. To me, it's a misnomer. It's dark night of dark years of the soul. Yeah. I haven't met anyone that had just one dark night and came out of it all fuzzy. Speaker 1 (16:55) True. Speaker 1 (16:57) I'm also reminded of the Native American saying of not judging someone until he walked a mile in his moccasins. Speaker 3 (17:03) Absolutely. Speaker 2 (17:04) But this thing about dark years of the soul is interesting because I Speaker 1 (17:09) look at the whole path of my life over the decades as being one of basically increasing happiness and fulfillment and good qualities. But I can sort of flash back to any point, a decade, five decades, whatever. And at that point, I might have felt pretty happy and thought that things were going well. But by contrast with now, I feel like, oh, my God, I was absolutely bonkers. I'm not sure how that relates to our discussion, but something you said made me think of it. Speaker 3 (17:42) We learn through duality and contrast. Yeah. I think that part's hard to argue, for me anyway. So we have to have these darker times to really appreciate the light. And so, you know, if you like the word bonkers and you want to call a part of your past bonkers, I'm all for it. Speaker 3 (18:02) As long as it's not a judgment kind of bonkers, right? Because we can't judge the past and really move forward clearly. That's another block I see a lot of people. They're kind of judging what is, judging what was, judging themselves, expecting to move forward. There's no space to move forward when you're judging who you've been. So I really, yeah. Speaker 1 (18:20) Yeah, no, I usually feel like, oh, I did the best I could. But by contrast with now, it's like, you know, okay, if I'm going to have a next life, I'd like to be in my current state of maturity. going through high school. Speaker 3 (18:32) I'm with you. I'm so with you. Speaker 1 (18:36) On that note, how can difficulties and traumas be conducive to our evolution in ways that an easier life might not be? Speaker 3 (18:47) That's that duality in contrast. Without that, we can't really know and appreciate the fullness of life. There's a phrase from the Kabbalah called bread of shame. It's referring to someone who receives a lot of money as an inheritance and hasn't worked for it. They're going to have a very different relationship to money than someone who has worked for it. Just one example of many, and maybe a superficial one, but you get the idea. We have to... in my understanding, we have to go through these challenging times to learn, to learn about ourselves, to learn about life, to learn about others. You know, Oprah Winfrey, on occasion, she would have some celebrity, you know, but a lot of times she would have someone that's been through hell and back. And those are the people that always inspired me and I think inspired her because she had her own version of that, of course. Speaker 3 (19:37) People who have seen the worst experience the worst and come out of it somehow still connected to the light and able to share that wisdom. That's a lot more inspiring than someone who is kind of born enlightened to me anyway. Not that someone, if they were born enlightened, is a wrong or bad thing, of course, but through that duality and contrast, Speaker 1 (20:00) it's Speaker 3 (20:01) an important thing to remember when we're going through hell. This is here for some reason. I might not know what that reason is right now, but I think if yourself or many people that are listening and watching were able to think of some of the worst experiences that they had, I would really... I bet, but I would certainly conclude or hypothesize that some good came out of it. Something powerful came out of it. Speaker 1 (20:27) I mean, you think of people like Elie Wiesel or Eddie Hillesum or people like that who actually went through the Holocaust and kind of came out with such wisdom and saintliness. I think in Eddie's case, she didn't come out. She didn't make it out, but she wrote some really profound stuff about what she was experiencing objectively in that situation. Speaker 3 (20:49) Victor Frankl, of course. Yeah, there you go. Nelson Mandela. I mean, these are popular names and should be for what they've gone through. But there are a lot of people that had that experience and aren't well-known. So let's not forget those either. Speaker 1 (21:08) Do you think that everyone possesses some degree of every quality, empathy, narcissism, all the different qualities, positive and negative, but they just exist in differing proportions in people, certain ones outweighing or overshadowing the others? Speaker 3 (21:25) Definitely. Speaker 2 (21:26) I Speaker 3 (21:27) think what we're doing here is getting in touch with our wholeness. Speaker 3 (21:33) I haven't met anyone who's really healed without accepting that they have a shadow self, that they have a lot of fear, anger, grief that's been repressed, which is part of how I define shadow. I look at it's the whole enchilada, as it were, as the phrase goes. We have capacity for anything. Speaker 3 (21:55) Even someone who is very evolved might show some narcissistic tendencies. They might not be considered a narcissist per se, but the tendency might be there. And the converse might be true as well. So I kind of look at it as a scale. I kind of look at a zero to a hundred. Zero as being total anger, ability to hurt others and not think twice. Hundred being completely enlightened, if you want to use that word. And all these little notches between. Speaker 3 (22:26) from one to 99, right? So not that it can be quantified, but just for an example, like every one of those is a way of being, it's an experience, it's a feeling, it's a thought. Granted, it's probably in the billions or uncountable numbers if you really break it down, but just for ease of visualization. And until we really get that we can be anywhere on that scale, given a certain situation, I think we're missing something. And what I've noticed is we kind of get squashed, right? So we might be born a certain way, and then we kind of get squashed. And then our sadness isn't welcome, so we squash that. Our happiness isn't welcome, we squash that. And we're kind of living in the middle, like 40 to 60 a lot. And we judge everything beyond those in either direction as wrong or bad or not safe. And I really feel like we need to get in touch with all parts of ourselves to really move forward. So that's what the work is about. Speaker 1 (23:28) I was walking in the woods this morning talking to a friend on the phone, and he was quoting Carl Jung as having said that the brighter the light, the more clear the shadows, or more distinct the shadows, which I could see as I was walking through the woods, because it was a sunny day and the tree trunks were casting shadows. So that's an interesting thing. It's like, as the light becomes brighter, metaphorically speaking, in our subjective development, does it illuminate our blind spots? Ideally. Ideally, because, yeah, I mean, I've met people who seem to be extremely bright, remarkably so, who seem to have some pretty serious blind spots still and be oblivious to them. Speaker 3 (24:11) We're seeing it on a big stage. Speaker 1 (24:14) People Speaker 3 (24:14) who were really revered for their spiritual awareness, their vision. Speaker 1 (24:19) Yeah, famous gurus and people like that you may be referring to. Speaker 3 (24:24) Yeah, we'll leave the names out, but yes. Yeah, sure. And so they're not fully integrated enough to own that part. And I really feel like what we don't own tends to own us. So if we don't own our anger and our fear and our grief. those own our experiences. So the more light we can put upon them, the, I think, healthier we're going to be, more vibrant we're going to be, more intuitive, just, I would think, more happier, at least more content. Speaker 1 (24:54) Yeah. Speaker 1 (24:57) You write about how personal transformation ripples beyond the individual, touching families and communities and all of humanity. And I've always been interested in the societal implications of spiritual development, how if enough people cultivated higher states of consciousness and healthy personalities, the world would be transformed. You mentioned that 20 % of the world's population might be empaths. But obviously that percentage is not high enough or maybe their empathic qualities are not strong enough because the world is still a mess. What percentage would we need for profound global transformation? Do you think that there might be a tipping point at which a dramatic phase transition could occur? Speaker 3 (25:41) I'll know it when I see it. Having not seen it, I can't say. Speaker 1 (25:46) But Speaker 3 (25:47) I think it's important that we all do our individual work. And that's one of the things, like you mentioned, that I think can inspire us a little bit more to do our individual work is knowing how, or at least that it can affect other people. And that ripple effect, in some ways, it's all we have because you can't really convince anyone to do something. Like how many times does someone give you a book or recommend a movie? You're like, okay, thanks. And you don't read the book or see the movie. It has to be something that you're called to. I mean, Marianne Williamson said it beautifully. She said, we unconsciously liberate others. when we do our work. And what a beautiful, beautiful sentiment and idea. And if that doesn't get you excited to do your work, I'm not sure what will, right? But it's not about changing others. It's not about doing it with the intention of making others wrong or bad. It's about being more light, being more loving, being more compassionate, and really modeling that way of being for others. And to me, that's where the juice is. Because like we said, you can't convince other people. to do or be anything. You can't say to someone, stop being an idiot and expect them to stop being what we're perceiving as an idiot. But we can model that. So