Ora North - I Don’t Want to Be an Empath Anymore: How to Reclaim Your Power Over Emotional Overload, Maintain Boundaries, and Live Your Best Life

Ora North brings a raw and powerful look at the reality of being an empath. Its not always glitter and unicorns; we must take a long, hard look at the wounds and shadows we hold; we must get real to heal. Ora skillfully guides us through this process so we can take off the spiritual mask and claim our true power as empaths.

Lisa Campion , Reiki master teacher, and author of The Art of Psychic Reiki

What a relief this book is! At turns fresh, familiar, frank, and funny, author Ora North manages to distill recovery models, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and shamanism into a coherent and accessible program for empathy management, self-healing, and relationship building. Dont take the title seriously, though. After working the exercises in I Dont Want to Be an Empath Anymore , you will not only be more comfortable being so deep in the world of emotion, you will have become adept at it and found yourself embracing what an asset your sensitivities are to yourself and others. Highly recommended.

Kathryn L. Robyn , healer, artist, author of Spiritual Housecleaning , and coauthor of The Emotional House

Ora North is the wise, witchy aunt I never had, who has arrived on the scene just when this heartbroken world needs her most. How I wish I couldve read this bracing tonic of a book when I was sixteen, and so overwhelmed by confusing, painful emotions that all I could do was bury them. Ora reassures us in her straight-talking way that its never too late to witness and integrate our dark, scary feelingsand regain our equilibrium. Goddess bless her for doing this groundbreaking work, and for writing this compelling, enlightening book to empower sensitive souls like me!

Simone Butler , astrological consultant at www.astroalchemy.com, and author of Moon Power and Astro Feng Shui

Ora North has penned an instant classic. I Dont Want to Be an Empath Anymore is the kind of book you immediately feel understood by; the kind of book that feels so perfect and obvious, youre a little surprised it didnt exist before it did. I devoured it and then gave it to my favorite people, because I wanted them to feel understood too.

Arden Leigh , creator of The Re-Patterning Project, and frontwoman of Arden and the Wolves

Ora tells the truth about what it means to be a deep-feeling person in this world. She blazes a way through the precarious world of self-inquiry, and she offers real-world tools that are restorative to the raw nerves of an empath. This book is a healing.

Erin Schroeder , The Psychic Witch, psychic teacher

As a cry of the millennial witch, this guidebook has much to offer those who need to effectively harness the powers of empathetic sensitivities rather than be consumed by them. The author speaks volumes to the various aspects of being an empath in our culture, such as the dangers of the positive vibe only complacency, past trauma, and the neglect of certain emotions. She offers innovative exercises such as listing your victims and villains of your shadow self, a formula to write your own pain alchemy affirmation, throwing yourself a pity party, and creating voluntary energetic blindness. Bravo, Ms. North!!

Nancy Antenucci , owner of Between Worlds LLC, author of the beloved Psychic Tarot , and teacher and presenter throughout the US and internationally as faculty for the Arcana Company in Chengdu, China

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2019 by Ora North

Reveal Press

An imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Sara Christian

Acquired by Jennye Garibaldi

Edited by Jean Blomquist

Text design by Michele Waters-Kermes and Tracy Carlson

All Rights Reserved

In consideration of evolving American English usage standards, and reflecting a commitment to equity for all genders, they/them may be used in this book to denote singular persons.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

For Katie, who felt too much.

Contents

Foreword

There is a rebel storyteller in all of us, I think, a submerged seer-poet who sits atop our ribs, skipping stones in our blood and waiting to be called up, hoping for the chance to climb our bones, stand on our tongue as if it were an orators mound, and spill out wild truths that give pause to all who listen. The tales told by this deviant visionary are not those of skills mastered and quests fulfilled; they are those paradigm-shifting sorts of stories, riddled with shadow, uncertainty, and longing. That moment when we grant this outlaw the opportunity to speak is a wondrous initiation, one of those pivotal plot twists in our epic stories of becoming when we suddenly claim not only our socially valuable successes but also our as yet unmet desires to heal the many wounds of our foremothers.

A true elder-teacher, this storyteller is a sage healer who somehowagainst all odds within this hard-edged society of ours where all things must be named and boxedshares her experiences of unlearning and unease, stepping with grace into that rare role of a wise mentor who weaves hard-won knowledge with admitted, beauteous, and blessed uncertainty. Our aching world does not need another spiritual teacher who has solved every mystery, who floats far above the ground and is never in danger of falling. It is not the overbleached and all-knowing healer-prophet we seek; it is the wounded mystic who walks heavy on this ancient land, who has become the wild heart she needed when she was younger, and who tells stories not to offer soft-breasted comfort, not to rehash the old and outmoded, but, rather, to radically oppose the existing thought structures, change-resistant cultures, and socioeconomic systems that threaten to bind us all to joylessness.

True healing is never about a quick fix, and that mischievous maker of myths knows this well, as does Ora North. Healing happens only through awareness and integration, only by coming to terms with the gifts we have been given and the wounds that still pulse with the same ache our grandmothers grandmothers nursed long ago on ancestral soil. What Ora offers in this book are not overly simplified tools or a diluted plan for winning at the Game of Empath. This book is an interactive wilderness guide of sorts, an eloquently written and sorely needed ownership manual for the empathic human soul.

As a Witch who believes our magick must be first and foremost a planet-savior during this desperate time of human history, I honor and bow to the work being done by empath-storytellers like Ora, who call out the distortions of new age thinking and frame empathy as not only a gift but one of the most valuable resources our ailing society can cultivate during the Anthropocene. She writes without making any one-size-fits-all claims about the potent medicine she offers, whilst being concurrently generous with tools, stories, and ample opportunities provided for the readers to draw their own conclusions about what it means to be an empath in a hard-hearted, trauma-riddled world.