There is a subtle tension that lives beneath our desire to help. Most of us have felt it. Someone we care about is hurting, struggling, or overwhelmed, and something inside us immediately moves toward fixing, soothing, or carrying what they are experiencing. But what if that impulse is not always about compassion? What if, sometimes, it begins with our own discomfort? In this special Circles | Edges episode, Aaron shares a conversation from his appearance on the Create Magic At Work Podcast with Amy Lynn Durham, exploring empathic distress, leaky identity, and the hidden ways our sense of self can become intertwined with the suffering of others. Together, they examine the difference between empathy and compassion, the social conditioning that shapes caretaking behaviors, and why presence often asks more of us than intervention. This is a thoughtful exploration of emotional responsibility, identity, and the possibility of showing up for others without losing ourselves in the process. As the conversation unfolds, you are invited to notice where helping becomes fixing, where compassion becomes exhaustion, and where a deeper, more sustainable form of connection might be waiting.

Invitations to Consider:

• Why the urge to help can sometimes be driven by our own need for relief rather than another person's needs.
• Aaron's concept of "leaky identity" and how identity can become dependent on helping others.
• The hidden ways empathic distress can create exhaustion, overwhelm, and unhealthy relationship patterns.
• The difference between empathy, empathic response, and compassionate action.
• How presence and witnessing may be more healing than fixing.

About the Guest Host:

Amy Lynn Durham, known by her clients as the Corporate Mystic, is the founder of the Executive Coaching Firm, Create Magic At Work®, where they help leaders build workplaces rooted in creativity, collaboration, and fulfillment. A former corporate executive turned Executive Coach, Amy blends practical leadership strategies with spiritual intelligence to unlock human potential at work.

She’s a certified Executive Coach through UC Berkeley & the International Coaching Federation (ICF) In addition, Amy holds coaching certifications in Spiritual Intelligence (SQ21), the Edgewalker Profile, and the Archetypes of Change . In addition to being the host of the Create Magic At Work® podcast, Amy is the author of Create Magic At Work®, Creating Career Magic: A Daily Prompt Journal and the founder of Magic Thread Media™. Through her work, she inspires intentional leadership for thriving workplaces and lives where “magic” becomes reality.

Connect with Amy:

https://createmagicatwork.net/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/create-magic-at-work

https://www.facebook.com/112951637095427

https://www.instagram.com/createmagicatwork

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnEm4h3fUgaq8qgvZpz6dGg

About Aaron:

Aaron Tabacco, PhD, has spent more than thirty years guiding people through growth and change, often in complex and high-stakes environments. He currently serves as the Director of Staff Experience at a major academic health sciences university. With a background spanning nursing, neuroscience, education, coaching, and mediation, his work centers on helping individuals and organizations navigate identity, connection, and transformation with greater clarity and care.

Known for his grounded presence and compassionate communication, Aaron works with students, clinicians, faculty, executives, and senior leaders across healthcare and other industries. His approach integrates relational depth, reflective practice, and a commitment to creating more humane, integrated ways of working and living. He works in San Francisco, California, and lives in Vancouver, Washington, where he continues a lifelong engagement with writing, music, and the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest alongside his husband and three adult sons.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-tabacco-phd-83359b9/

https://lucusgroup.com/home

https://substack.com/@aarontabacco?r=b5ap9&utm_medium=ios

https://www.youtube.com/@CirclesEdges

Email: [email protected]

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Mentioned in this episode:

This show was brought to you in part by the Magic Thread Media Network. To learn more visit: https://magicthreadmedia.com/

Good afternoon, and good wishes, my friends and listeners who have joined me for the last several months on Circles Edges Radio. Today I'm going to introduce something a little different from our regular evenings together. I'm calling this mini series of episodes, circles, edges, the waking hours. These are daytime conversations shared from another podcast, Create Magic at Work with Amy Lynn Durham, where I recently had the chance to speak a bit more openly about the show, my own life, some of my philosophies, experiences, as well as questions that are raised for me by you in our dialog together across the last several months, so you can think of these episodes as companion pieces, not quite the candlelit room of our usual time together, but another doorway into the same circle. I'm so glad to be able to share these conversations with you, and I am grateful, as always, that you're here

when we have these sort of leaky identities, identities that you know are permeable to the world around us, that they're not necessarily all owned internally, but there's something about our identity that is dependent outside of us, that's kind of where that there's this perfect storm, so if, if my identity is somebody who is a fixer and shows up in the world and takes care of everything and makes everything better, and the world responds positively to that, because why, why wouldn't they? People want to be helped and they want to be seen and noticed, you know, if our identity isn't entirely autonomous within us, we run the risk then of unknowingly needing that relationship with other people to feel that we are who we are.

Amy Lynn Durham: Hey, it's Amy. Welcome to Create Magic at Work, where we cast visions for a future of work where business decisions ripple outward to our teams, our communities, the planet, and humanity as a whole. If you're ready to edge walk instead of sleepwalk through your leadership, you're in the right place. So, let's start making magic at work. Hi, everyone, Amy here. I want to invite you into a space today that is a little bit deeper than our usual conversations. If you've ever felt completely drained by the emotions of the people around you, or if you feel a constant heavy need to fix things for others just so you can feel okay again, you're not alone. One of our most popular guests on the podcast, Dr. Aaron Tabaco, is back with us, and we discuss the shadow side of empathy, the inspiration behind his new podcast, Circle's Edges, and his concept surrounding time, quantum presence. We realized this conversation was so deep that we're bringing it to you in a two-part series. So, in this first half, we're exploring why one of your greatest gifts, your empathy, might actually be causing you distress, and actually Aaron calls it empathic distress. We're going to look at Aaron's new podcast, Circles Edges, and also how to identify if you're operating with leaky boundaries that are exhausting your spirit, sit with us in this conversation and exercise the Edge Walker skill of focus, staying truly centered and giving your full attention to a concept that has significance and importance. Because this one's deep and is an invitation to look at how we all show up in the world. Let's step into part one. Hey everyone, welcome back to Create Magic at Work. Today is a super special day for me, and hopefully for all of you, because we have one of our most popular guests returning to have another conversation that hopefully resonates and inspires with everyone, and it is Dr. Aaron Tabaco. I have asked Aaron back to the show, because it's been a

while. It's been a minute since we've had you on this show. Gosh, I should have looked up how long it's been, but a couple of years ago, you shared how to be present at a whole other level, sort of, in my opinion, blew the lid off of what our current sort of ideas were around presence, which I so appreciated. And we'll put all the links to these past episodes in the show notes, but that took off. That was one of the most popular episodes in Create Magic at Work history, along with your conversation around feedback, which you came back and talked about feedback, which, in my opinion, is a feedback model that you shared that is on a whole other level than the ones that are taught in the corporate space and in trainings, incredible, eye-opening work. So, thank you for sharing that. And I have asked Aaron back to create Magic at Work, because he has some newer ideas and concepts that you and I have talked about for quite some time, but we haven't really recorded and shared it with the Create Magic at work listeners or community. So, thanks for coming back to dive into, I think, three. I'm going to try to cover this episode, three really cool, eye-opening, enlightening topics. So, thanks for being here, Erin.

As always, thank you for having me. Yeah, I think maybe it was three, maybe even three years ago when we had that conversation on presence at a very high level, and our relationship has grown quite a bit over those years. We knew each other before that, but not a whole lot of time, maybe four years, I don't know, four or five years, I don't remember, doesn't matter. But yeah, I'm grateful to be back. I appreciate the invitation, and I'm glad that you know some of the things that I'm sharing out in the world are resonating with with you and others, and if we can talk about that and it's useful to people, then I feel like that's a really good day.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, and I should, I should share with everyone listening since the start of Magic Thread Media, the podcast network that I started. Aaron has started his own podcast, which will be a topic of conversation today as well, called Circles Edges, and it is designed to. it's a late-night radio show style podcast designed to be listened to before we go to bed at night, really. The show releases in the evening, and it's been such an honor to be a part of bringing that to life, because the response from Circle's Edges has been incredible.

Yeah, incredibly has. has, and you know, to, to make sure it's clear to everyone listening, circles edges wouldn't be here without you, Amy, and you're, you know, reaching out to say I'm launching Magic Thread Media, giving me goosebumps, I'm like, perfect name for you and a media company, and I want you to do a show, and whatever you want to do, Aaron, and I was like, okay, something inside me says yes, I need to do this, and so I appreciate you opening that doorway. I think it's come to me at a very important time in my life, and is really, it has really become a focus of my spiritual work in the world right now. So, thank you for the opportunity.

Amy Lynn Durham: So, while we're on the topic, tell us more about Circles Edges, because you know you, your voice and your message resonates with people so deeply, and they feel so connected to you when you speak, and and you have a way about speaking and listening to others where they really feel seen, and so being a guest on podcasts was great, but I definitely saw that you needed your own container for this energy, and I'm honored to have, you know, to have that container for circles edges, just tell us a little bit more about about circles edges and what people can expect to hear if they head on over to listen to the show.

Well, I mean, for me this was born out of a need, a really deep need to one find a a an energetic current of connection and comfort in the world right now. I just, over the last year, I've, I have become increasingly, you know, chaotic in my energy responding to all of the things happening in the. World, and feeling sort of agitated and restless and anxious and concerned about that, concerned about myself, concerned about my family, our society, the world at large. And when you reached out about a show, I knew a few things right away. I didn't want to interview people. I didn't want there to be any dialog that was not between me and a listener. I wanted to create a space where people could come for really substantive, deep connecting and real talk with somebody that felt safe, and for me, you know, I reflected on my own childhood, and was taken back to, you know, growing up in the 80s, in particular, this late night FM radio voice phenomenon kind of became a modality of media in those years, and I would be awake at night, like many of us are restless and unable to sleep, and often I would just literally turn the dial on my FM AM radio to find somebody out there that you know, I felt I could connect to, and that this, this model, I mean, maybe they would DJ some music, or what have you, here or there, but, but very often it was just long monologs, sometimes they would take a caller, sometimes they wouldn't, they would muse about all kinds of things going on in the world and everyday life, and they were just keeping people company, and there was something really deeply comforting about that, about both the intimacy and the distance with the stranger, and I felt when considering a show I thought that's really the energy that I feel I need in the world right now, and maybe it's time for me to show up and be that energy, and not just look for it as a recipient, but generate him, and so yeah, that's what it is, right? It is some very deep,

reflective, philosophical, spiritually intelligent conversations that are thematically tied to the repeating patterns and experiences of our lives, so the circles that come in many, many forms, you know, they're external circles of society and relationships, they're internal circles. There are very large arcs, like, you know, whole civilizations and societies and philosophies and things that come and go, like, like tides, but every once in a while we, as people, we notice these circles, these patterns, and very often that noticing is a signal that there's some edge it's exposing for us that we need to pay attention to, and that edge is usually an invitation to move into a higher self in some way to improve how we're showing up in the world to experience a different relationship with the world around us or ourselves, and those edges, you know, we could choose to draw back and ignore them, or we can kind of lean into them, and my own experience has been that when I discover these patterns, especially if they're patterns that are unpleasant patterns in some way that cause distress or grief or loss or anxiety. I have learned the practice of waking up to it quickly, diving in to understand it, and then rather than running from it, you know, like turning full head on into it to discover the edge and the invitation, and to grow, because I don't want to be living out that pattern over and over and over again, especially if it's, you know, very unpleasant or keeping me back in some way, so I mean, that's kind of, you know, like the 30,000 foot view of what Circles Edges is, it's deep personal connection across space and time with people talking about things that matter, and that, you know, might help people navigate some of the edges they're seeing in themselves.

Amy Lynn Durham: Would you say that part of circles edges is this pattern, and maybe bringing the pattern to our attention? And then when we face that edge, is that what you're saying? Is that a moment that we break the circle? Is that a moment we break the pattern if it's something that is causing grief or is harming us?

I mean, it certainly could be. I think the position I take with the show and listeners who've tuned in will understand that it's not an advice show. I don't know what is right for anybody listening, I don't. We haven't had any conversations or dialog directly. These are really just opportunities to maybe reflect as an individual, examine what's there, and if there's something inside that really one of these sort of circles that really touches you or grabs your attention. The invitation then is to go on a path of discovery to figure out what that means for you, and to know that you can just keep tuning into the show, and I'll be there, and you're not having to do it alone, necessarily. Maybe distant, I might not ever know the story, but there's a certain comfort in knowing that you're not the only one out in the world who might be trying to move beyond something, break a cycle, grow from it, or not even necessarily sometimes the circles we experience, we can't, we can't extricate from our lives, but maybe we can live in relationship with them differently. So, there's lots and lots of options. I never pretend to know what is the right answer for anybody, but all I do is sort of try to call attention to the things I have noticed, and then invite people to do the same,

Amy Lynn Durham: yeah. One of the things that I felt really resonated with me was the episode on fixation, and talking about the circle. In that circle, I don't know if it was the circle or the edge, the need that we have to fix, the need that comes up within us to step in and help others when in fact it might be detrimental to ourselves and the other person, two words that you used really hit me were was empathic distress, and I have felt that I have felt empathic distress in situations where I can feel what's going on, and I want to step in and fix it, whatever it might be, and one of the realizations from your show and from fixation was really that was kind of about me and me being uncomfortable in the distress that I was feeling and working towards making that distress go away and the damage that it can cause was was a new revelation in listening to that episode of fixation and hearing about empathic distress, I hadn't heard that before, and I listened to a lot of different things. We also hosted an Edge Walker Cafe on the Shadows of Empathy, sort of connecting the two here, and lots of themes coming up with that. Why are we doing this, and how do we walk that edge of not abandoning someone that needs help if we are compassionate and have empathy versus stepping in to fix everything all the time to alleviate our own distress that we're sitting with,

yeah. Well, I think many people responded to that. I had quite a bit of feedback on that episode, in terms of sort of high empathy people reaching out and really talking about, you know, how these things really touched them and called them to attention as well, so you know, you certainly weren't alone in that. I think you know it's a little bit of a, it's a bit of a messy circle that we find ourselves in, many of us, and there's no reason to judge ourselves for it. Let me just start with that. This isn't something that we should moralize within ourselves and feel bad about, you know. Neurobiologically, humans have been a successful species. Evolutionary biologists talk about this, because we developed this internal biological neurological capacity. Capacity for empathy, like it's helped us be successful as a species, because we become stronger and care for one another better when we have this emotional response to other people and their needs, so it's a fundamentally human thing. Unfortunately, many of us grow up in situations, and this is a global phenomenon, where that that capacity for empathy and its expression and communication is not well stewarded by our families and the rest of the world, and a portion of us incorrectly tie our identities as showing, you know, through the behavior of showing up empathetically for somebody, we tie our identities to that and start to see ourselves as somebody who is responsible to respond to everybody and their needs and look for opportunities then to kind of live that story out over and over and over again and when we have these these sort of leaky identities identities that you know are permeable to the world around us, that they're not necessarily all owned internally, but there's something about our identity that is dependent outside of us, that's kind of where that there's this perfect storm, so if if my identity is somebody who is a fixer and shows up in the world and takes care of everything,

makes everything better, and the world responds positively to that, because why, why wouldn't they? People want to be helped, and they want to be seen and noticed, you know. If our identity isn't entirely autonomous within us, we run the risk, then of unknowingly needing that relationship with other people to feel that we are who we are. Like, to actually, it's like the mirror. Well, it's like looking in a mirror behaviorally. I show up to fix something, somebody responds to that, and then I see myself as that person, and it's this like self-affirming cycle or circle. The problem is that, as altruistic and as loving and as compassionate as showing up for people can be, we can at times be utilizing that energy of whatever they're going through to benefit our own identity affirmation, and it becomes about us, even though it should never be about us, and that's kind of what I mean about like this idea of like leaky identity or permeable identity, and you know, I mean, on one extreme, that you can see that manifested in people who experience codependency in relationships, where two folks who have kind of some focused dysfunctions ally themselves to actually experience that circle intentionally over and over and over and over again, which psychologically manifestations of that are usually pretty pathological and pretty damaging to people. That's a very different function than interdependence, where there's two autonomous identities choosing to work together cooperatively. This is a very different situation, so you know, and then in the episode I kind of talked about the many ways that that can unintentionally get in the way of progress for ourselves and for others, you know, so for example, if someone shows up and they're very, very distressed about something, and they start to tell the story and break down into tears. If we're one of those folks who's really struggling with the fixing and the leaky identity piece, and we jump right in right away, you know,

with, oh, it's okay, I've got you, everything's gonna be okay. I'm here. I'm going to take care of you. We'll get through this. You know, this immediately responding to a situation to affirm our identities, do our jobs, do the things that you know make us feel like we're whole. And notice I said make us feel like we're whole.

We shut down like the expression of someone's grief. We literally say stop, like don't express this, and that gets in the way of, you know, showing up for someone as a witness. It also gets in the way of them expressing. Needs thoughts. How many of us actually need to talk things out aloud to even understand what it is we're thinking, and when we jump in right away, because we're in a state of this empathic distress, we clip all of that opportunity off for expression, for thinking, for reflection, and we center our own need, as you said, Amy, you know, like you noticed that at times in these experiences that it's your own discomfort calling you for some sort of form of self soothing, and actually it's interesting, because it's self-soothing, but it's in the context of another person.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah,

and that's what you know, we don't want to show up for people in the world that way. I don't, I don't think we want to, and I think most of us don't realize if we're in that cycle that we're even doing that. But I, this is very much a pattern, and I can speak to it pretty, you know, from a pretty educated perspective, because I spent years, you know, as a nursing professor, teaching, you know, frontline nursing caregivers, professional nurses how to do that, how to show up and be present for other people. Now I do it in the world of executive coaching, and when people are struggling to feel like they're adding value or helping somebody find comfort or helping somebody you know achieve some sort of epiphany or great insight. If that feels like it's lacking in the exchange, then that individual experiences a lot of times distress, you know, I've literally had people crying, saying I, but all I want to do is be helpful, and I, in that session, I didn't do anything that was helpful, and I feel like I failed them, and there's this like debrief after a session, and it's very interesting, it's just an interesting phenomenon to sit with, and it's like, well, that might be that's that's all your interpretation and your experience of what happened. Yeah, and also that's not the focus, like this. You're literally, if you kind of work to watch yourself on a camera, you would be like, "Wow, I didn't even talk about the person and their needs or anything. I'm debriefing all about my lived experience. In that moment, it's like, oh yeah, see, these are the things that, that when that sort of circle emerges, and you know, sometimes people just get tired of that. There's a lot of people who kind of self-identify as empaths in a very science fictiony sort of way, as if that is kind of a real thing, and it is a very real thing that we have the biology to have our emotional centers activated by someone else's lived experience, that is the nature of

this mechanism. It's also not true that we are experiencing the other person's emotions, thought, spirit, etc. I mean, it's that is what's happening in their body, in their spirit, in their emotional state, in their world, and we begin telling ourselves a story that we understand, we know we relate to it, but really it's our body responding to this observation and filling in lots and lots of gaps, so until we realize that and start to take a walk down the edge of that empathy to understand what, when it's serving us and when it's serving others. It's, it's only after, like, taking that journey that we can, I think, kind of rise above all of that and accept that we have these emotional responses and bring them forward in authenticity, and yet not make it all about

Amy Lynn Durham: us. Yeah, I just.. my take on everything that you're saying. This rise of spirituality that I've seen in pop culture. there's been a lot of language around the empath that has that more people are exposed to and speaking about, and okay, I'm just gonna say everything that I really want to say, like I always do, so I started seeing it when this, these things sort of became more popular in pop culture. This pop culture spirituality is, I guess, what I call

it,

Amy Lynn Durham: and there was something of a shadow of this in it, where. People were made to feel special that they had some sort of special gift or specialness or special quality, like being an empath, and then I saw a lot of individuals that that started identifying as being an empath, using it, using that identity or using maybe a spiritual counselor or advisor or an astrologer or whoever told them, "Oh my gosh, you're such an empath. Oh yeah, you can take on the energy of the room and you can feel all the feelings. And so there was an element of specialness in that, and then there was also an element of I'm special, I can't be in this room anymore because I take on everybody's energy, or I have to shield myself from you energetically because I'm I'm an empath and the empath mantra that I've learned and I've shared with others is observe, don't absorb. When I started studying the SQ 21 the 21 scare skills of spiritual intelligence, there was a teaching that shared as coaches, as therapists, as a person that wants to be of service or help someone else, that there is a big difference between empathy and compassion, and in their teachings empathy is when you are taking on others' stuff as your own, and as you said, there's leakage there, like it's almost like you can't differentiate between what's yours and what's not yours, and so essentially you, you're taking on the suffering of someone else and trying to fix it yourself, but it's not your suffering, it's not yours to fix, and so in this, in the SQ teachings, they recommend leading from more of this, is their language and their definitions, but like from from a compassionate state, where I am sort of what you said, you know, I am, I'm autonomous, but I can see the suffering of others, and I can help alleviate that suffering without taking it on myself,

right?

Amy Lynn Durham: And I think there's something interesting about the evolution of what's going on with, with spirituality that I'm watching, there was something of a shadow there where people were made to feel special, and now that that things are shifting and evolving, I think there's a realization that I don't know, maybe, maybe the SQ teachings are really on to something that leading from compassion might be the way to to lead with all of this, because as you talked about, then there's this other part of empathy where it's a huge shadow where I'm not even focused on the person you just gave an example, I'm focused on how that went for me, and what did that look like for me, but then there's another edge to that, where I think there's a whole other teaching that women have to, or lesson, or energy that we have to kind of perk up and pay attention to, because there's a lot of system socialization in women to be the fixers, to be the healers, to be the nurturers, to maybe not have strong boundaries because of, because of all of that wrapped up into one, so I've said a lot. We're getting like so deep today, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that, because I definitely feel like there's an evolution of spirituality going on. There's a recognition, just to kind of recap everything, all of my riffing here, there's an evolution of I don't know if the spirituality teaching is resonating with me as a woman surrounding being autonomous, there's there's other layers there also, the recognition of the high self-orientation when I am in empathic distress at times, so those are sort of the thing, the themes that are coming to me as you share, and then I feel frustrated inside too, because I'm like, well, I'm a human, and if somebody is hurting, and if I want to help them, now what do I do with this? How do I do. Differentiate all of these things you and I just talked about, instead of just living my life and wanting to be a good

person and helping, so I'm sure a lot of people are sort of feeling these same things, so that's why I bring it up.

Right. Yeah. Well, you know, as I kind of said in the episode, I, what I don't want to message is that we, that every, you know, desire to be a compassionate responder in the world is coming from a sense of selfishness. I don't believe that it is by any means, but it is a complicated relationship we have when we are experiencing, you know, emotional empathy, you know, emotions are arising within us physically relating to another person's experience, and then the expression of compassion toward them, which I think is like the active outcome that that can stem from that empathic or empathetic response, and I think maybe that's the nuances, there's empathetic and there's empathic, and I think that the between the world of science fiction and pop culture spirituality, the concept of being empath has been kind of written into a certain script about what it is, and some, some things being factual, like the fact that we can experience empathy, that there's a part of our brains that is activated by someone else's emotions, and similar emotions in ourselves can can rise forward, sometimes different emotions, but you know, it's just this emotional conversation we're having, it can happen without words, even you know, looks, glances, tearful eyes, I mean, you don't necessarily need words to communicate, you know, through this concept of empathy, or this function of empathy, but to the points you're making about how society and society, meaning all I'm using it to mean all of the social influences in our lives, are our families of origin, the friends we choose and grow up with, the adults we associate with our intimate partners, the communities we align ourselves with, the faith groups or the vocational communities, the pursuits, all of that, all of that is that, that we, we end up in trouble, like I said earlier, when we have somehow attached our, our identity and our sense of who we are to the experience of this empathy and compassion in its

expression, that's where I think pop culture, maybe the those in the spiritual industry say that the spiritual industrial complex that is out there selling all kinds of things to people, you know, one of the things that's true about people, generally speaking, this is from, you know, the body of work in psychology, people who tend to be very, very high in the in measures of empathy very often come from traumatic backgrounds in some way, something about their development life experiences has taken that that early human developmental ability to experience emotion in ourselves by witnessing it in others, and has really turned that switch on, and the volume all the way up, and so unknowingly, you know, it's not like people said, "Oh, I just.. I'm going to become dysfunctionally empathetic in the world, that's nobody says that, but that's kind of what happens, is that that volume gets so turned up, and then people become hypersensitive to that experience, you know? If, if you're looking at a population of people who have had that experience, and then someone comes along selling a workshop that's going to tell you how to deal with the world as an empath, because you're special. I mean, gosh, if I've spent a lifetime experiencing tragedy and someone shows up and says you're so special because of this, you know, there's a certain vulnerability and a willingness to want to go down a path to say, oh right, maybe this is this is something that sets me apart, something that stabilizes my identity. Right, that's I think what I'm getting to, is that this is a stabilizing factor, and it's an affirming factor of that leaky identity problem we're having, linking our doing, the act of doing, which is fix. Thing to our being, you know, in our identity, so there's just a lot of, I think it's kind of a perfect storm of situations, whether it's social scripting about women and nurturing, for example, or you know, children who have had adverse childhood events that really follow

them for many years, and kind of set them up to be the responsible, caregiving, nurturing types to keep everything moving in the world, you know, which was adaptive, like they had to do that to survive. I come from that background, so I'm not pointing any fingers.

I can specifically say that this has been a part of my journey, you know, it can be very, very, very overwhelming to have to sort all of that out, and so when people show up with answers, it feels good, and if one of the answers is, you know, you're this unique human that very few people have this, you know, ability, and there's something special about you, and here's how you're going to have to navigate that. Well, there is something special about you. I mean, the ability to have a really highly tuned sense of, you know, emotion or hopefully emotional vocabulary to go with it, not just the feelings, but you know, some emotional intelligence around what all those feelings are, you know, that is special, and it's wonderful. It isn't you that's not your identity, it is something that occurs within you. And then the calling is to figure out how do you navigate the world in a way that actually is productive and generative and compassionate for self and others, and not be somebody who maybe is distracted from doing the hard work to plug those leaky identity boundaries.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, and I think the gifts, if I may, of an empath are available to everyone, because we're human, and so maybe that ability to be attuned to the emotions in your environment came from the different places that you mentioned they might come from. We all have that ability within us, and then whether we have to plug the leaks and figure out how to use it in a healthy way, or don't have that ability at all, or maybe we need to practice skill build in that ability a little bit more. Right, I think I'm looking at it is as a way of, we can all tap into this, and then figure out a way to use it for good, for the greater good of all.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I think, the whole purpose, and what we're getting to, I think, really naturally, is why the program is called Circles Edges. It's like, because we're in this pattern of showing up in the world in a very specific way. I mean, the reality is, if for anyone who is, who is listening today and thinking about this from the perspective of, gosh, I identify as an empath, you know, what does this mean for me? You know, is this bringing up something that feels threatening to you? Is it something that feels affirming to you? Is it something that's enlightening to you? I don't know what your experience of it is, but I guess what I would offer is, if you feel that much of your life experience is in the empath or empathic realm, what have you noticed about relationships with the world around you? Because if you look back and much of your experience brings sadness, loss, confrontation, confusion, difficulty, distance, drama that may be calling you to look at the edge within that circle to see if there is a different way that you can still honor the fact that you have an expanded volume all the way up ability to witness and respond to emotions in the world around you and separate your identity from that, so that you can learn to to be with others in the world in a way that feels healthier and more generative and more compassionate and less exhausting, you know, because what I hear from people who say, "Oh, I'm an empath, and it's just exhausting. It's usually the second phrase is something about exhaustion. I just get so exhausted by certain people, and I get so exhausted being in relationships, and I get so exhausted by all of these other pieces. Yes, that's that's an edge calling your attention, because there isn't actually a necessity for you to be exhausted by all of that. It is something that can be lived with as the beautiful gift it is, without it depleting you of your life force and your autonomy to

go forward in the world and your opportunity to be in relationship with others.

Amy Lynn Durham: Thank you for that insight.

You're welcome.

Amy Lynn Durham: And that's where we're going to pause for today. You have a week to sit with these ideas before we go where we're headed next. I'm genuinely curious to hear what came up for you as you sat with us in this first half. I know a lot of things came up for me, especially surrounding the empathic distress piece. Next week, in part two, we pick up where we left off and move into quantum presence. We're going to discuss Aaron's concept that time is not linear, how to operate from your higher self and the evolution of spirituality, and how to move toward a state of interdependent compassionate presence. Make sure you're subscribed, so you can step right back into the conversation with us. The second part two drops, and we'll see you then.

Thank you for joining me for some of these daylight crossings, and I look forward to returning to you again next week in the evening for another episode of our traditional Circles Edges Radio Hour. Until then, I'm sending you good wishes and a good day.