Thriving as an Empath 5: Releasing The Messiah Complex

When we are sensitive and connected to those around us, we can easily pick up "The Messiah Complex". This is the belief that we are here to save others. It is a challenging concept because there are some truths within it and also real pitfalls to be able to thrive as an empath.

Transcript

So today we are continuing our thriving as an empath series and our topic today is releasing the messiah complex and this is a really big deal because humans are naturally empathic.

Some people are more empathic than others like it's like just like some people are better runners and some people are better at memorizing things.

Some people are much more in tune with their emotional connection with others.

I actually believe that some of us it's actually part of our soul's journey to empathically connect with others and other people it's still naturally there but it's not meant to be a focus and one of the challenges is when especially if you feel that real wiring that this is really part of your journey I'm meant to I'm meant to connect with others in this way.

If we have this messiah complex and what the messiah complex is is it means that you believe that on some level you're here to save others.

You're here to save the world.

You're here to save the people around you,

Your partner,

Your children,

Your parents,

Your clients,

The community,

Whatever that is that's the messiah complex and if we have this then we will end up using this natural empathic gift and we will become so hyper focused on others it will become imbalanced.

We'll actually lose ourself.

We'll lose our own center and our lives will be completely poured in to the journeys of other people.

We'll completely lose our way.

We won't be able to hear our own truth and the other problem with the messiah complex is it's a complex it's a thought process it's a program in our brain or maybe in our interface maybe it's a way of interacting with an insane world that I'm just going to focus on fixing it.

That's what I'm going to spend my entire life just fixing this crazy world and it's just part of my interface it's how I survive but because it's part of the interface or it's part of our brain we now start confusing this natural empathic flow of emotional connection with mental stories and as soon as we start mixing mental stories with emotions the emotions become something they're not.

It's one thing to be sad.

We can feel sadness and this is fine.

It's good to be sad.

It's good to feel.

That's what we're here for.

Humans are meant to feel emotions so it's good to be sad and when we're fine with it until the brain kicks in and says you'll never find another one like them.

Life is like as soon as the brain starts kicking in and twisting the emotions it starts a loop and all of a sudden sadness becomes a way of life.

Sadness then suddenly becomes part of our philosophy or anger.

It's good to be angry but if our brain gets in there and says yeah they always do this you know what men always do this you know what this is just what women are like you know what that's what relationships are you know what that's what just the way life is and you know what the world's just crazy and I just you know you have this now anger has this structure that it's now looping on and it all comes out of the brain.

It's not meant to loop.

We're meant to experience it take action and go on to the next one.

That's what we're meant to do so anything that involves the brain and our emotions we have to be very careful because it'll warp and twist our emotional responses into something they're not.

It'll make them bigger than they are.

It'll make them smaller than they are but it'll twist them and the messiah complex and I mean a complex it is something that our emotions will get twisted on and we are the ones that are the ones that are the ones that get destroyed not the people we're trying to save.

They may become annoyed with us and stop wanting to hang out with us and stop wanting to listen to our constant advice and constant belief that we can save them.

They just are too much of a loser or something and I know that sounds really harsh but that's what it feels like.

If someone comes up to you and they say here you know I'll do this and then we don't say I'm going to save you but here I've got this thing here,

Here,

Here,

Here.

Personally I avoid people like that like crazy because I'm like I don't know who you think you are like there's something inside of me that just sort of goes yeah I'm kind of on my own path here kind of certain stuff out.

If I want help trust me I'll ask but someone who just assumes that they know something more than I because they observed something simple on the surface and then made some big thing to make themselves feel good about themselves.

And so realize I have this sort of like ah push back because I've had the Messiah complex for most of my life and I don't know whether it's because I was born to preachers and teachers like everybody down my line were ministers school teachers whatever like I am born into this I am here to educate you I am here to save your souls like it's like I don't know maybe it's part of my ancestral I don't know something so I know this very intimately and so I am quite opinionated about it because it was really hard to get out of it and I still have to be very careful that I still don't do it.

It's easy to do in a relationship it's easy to do in the community even me running for council am I doing it to save the town?

Am I doing it to save the people?

Really Katrina?

One I'm not here to save anybody.

Two who do I think I am?

There's all these thousands of people in the town all living their own very interesting lives with their own soul's journeys and their own karma and their own samskaras that they're playing out.

So I have to really I have to conscious constantly check myself say what are you why are you doing this?

In my astrology grid I have all these planets in the house of service so I have a tendency to always want to do things to help and it's not that you never help anymore this is the sort of challenge of this whole messiah complex idea it isn't that we don't help it isn't that we don't teach yoga or we don't work in the healing field or we don't share ideas we don't write books we don't help our neighbors we do do all that.

The question is why are we doing it?

And if we're doing it because we believe that we're here to save others that's a twist it's a twist in the natural desire to do things for the collective.

So if you imagine that we are on some level in one in some dimensions we are all one we truly are so if I can alleviate any struggle for you then we lift the hole but I'm not saving you I just see that you've got 10 bags of groceries you're carrying and I have one here let me carry some of your groceries for you okay I'm not saving you it's just it was an opportunity to help or an opportunity to be a part of or an opportunity to spread the load like this is very very different than wow oh but you're gonna have a good day now because you just met a good samaritan and did you see that thing I did?

For you that guy he's gonna be thinking about that all day.

And again it's not that it's so obvious that we think about it like that but there's a whisper of it inside there's a whisper of it that says I'm doing this for your benefit and it's a real danger.

So back in the day in 1999 when I was sick and I had breast lumps I always repeat that because I know you guys have heard all this story a million times but some people haven't.

I worked with a man named Jim he was an amazing person and even he wouldn't have called himself a healer even though that was the role he played for me in that time he would never call himself that he just simply saw things that other people didn't see and if we were open to hearing them he would share them.

It's interesting so today 23 years later he doesn't work with people anymore he says because everyone literally wants me to act as this healer to save them to fix them and it's like they don't want to do anything themselves and he's like what am I doing then philosophically for him he's like I'm taking away your journey you know why are we even here why as souls are each one of us even here on earth if we each have a journey to take let's say we do have karmic patterns that our soul wants to work out it wants to get through this it wants to understand it wants to get down to the root take it out and heal it and actually walk forward in new patterns why would we take that away from someone you know what I mean like why would you why would you interrupt someone's life path if someone is here to learn something explore something the best thing we can ever do is actually do the work if I want to learn how to climb mountains it's really important that I train and it's really important maybe that I practice doing rock wall climbing in my local community and maybe it's important that I work out and it's important that I build those muscles it's like that story of the person who wanted to save the butterfly because he saw the the larva kind of struggling to get out of the chrysalis or something and he thought oh well the butterfly is really struggling so he very carefully like opened it up and like allowed the butterfly to come out and of course the butterfly died because the wrestling to get out of the chrysalis is what builds the muscles or builds the infrastructure inside the butterfly so it can fly so it's a very curious philosophy to say I'm gonna let you skip some steps and then for us to believe that then you can now do what you were made to do like it makes us start to question do we believe that there's design in our lives do we believe that our souls actually have a mission or do we believe we're just sort of you know meat suits walking around suffering and hopefully I can relieve your suffering or do we believe that each one of us is actually this divine being having an experience and maybe from the outside your your story looks horrible and I wouldn't want to have it maybe but that's just my judgment it's just a story it has no bearing on whether or not it's the right path or anything like that like when I even think back to all the years on the farm that I really struggled they were really difficult years you know I was last night I was teaching yoga and we were talking about my world is really really it's very rich like I love it I I'm writing and I'm teaching and I'm I just do a million things and I love it it just excites me I kind of sometimes feel like that mad scientist in the lab you know it's it's why right now I couldn't live with anybody like I just couldn't have a romantic partner living with me because I would be too antisocial to be able to still do all the things I love to do and it was in we were talking about this at yoga last night and and I realized because it was a woman there that had young children like I mean like a three-year-old and an eight-month-old and all of a sudden this realization hit me because I had a lot of depression when my kids were little I just felt like a horrible mom because I was really resenting them and it wasn't until last night that I realized that that was one of the reasons was because I actually love having this multi-faceted creative flow in my life and suddenly having babies on a farm and my son colic'd and it was really really labor intensive I deeply grieved the woman that I love to be in order to be a mom and I had great real depression like real struggles but that was important that was an important part of my life nobody could have ever healed me or fixed that you know it was very important to my journey and important it made me who I am today it's a very funny philosophy so for Jim he's really a very important person for Jim he's really of the philosophy that if you really want help and you really want a different way of seeing the world he can share how he sees the world and if that resonates with you and his presence seems to be authentic then you'll walk away imagining something different about the world he didn't heal you he didn't fix you you just observed him in his life in his presence in his philosophy in his way of being but he didn't fix you or anything because I think we do that all the time we look at people and we see them as I want to be like you you know maybe I want to emulate Gandhi or I want to emulate this person I want to emulate Martin Luther King Jr.

I mean these are kind of lofty goals but there's something about these characters that resonate in our heart and says and says oh I like that and it wakes us up to something they're not saving us they're just passionately pursuing whatever it is that they believe in it's a very different thing so one time after I was uh sick so that I had this miraculous healing the lumps came right out the side of my breast it's all it's in my book what if you could skip the cancer if you've never read it and I called him one day and I said Jim I want to do what you do I want you to teach me or would you teach me how you heal people and with a pile of explicatives he says why the frick would you ever want to do that Katrina that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard he just gave me help and I was like what again daughter of preachers teachers like isn't this the most altruistic thing what are you talking about why would that be a bad thing to want to heal people to be a healer to help alleviate people's suffering how in the world can this be the wrong thing and he just said Katrina I want you to go away and think about why you'd ever want to do something like this and I really had to go I he had me stumped I had no idea why I wouldn't want to do that like it just didn't make any sense to me it was like the ideal thing and then in prayer and meditation and I don't know sobriety or something I kind of thought about it and I realized I was uncomfortable with other people's unhappiness I was uncomfortable with other people's discomfort and other people's pain and I wanted to fix it then it kind of comes back to that philosophy thing right it's like but is there purpose in people's struggle and again don't get me wrong if someone says hey can you give me a hand sure that's a whole different thing I'm helping because you asked that's not me going I can see where you could use some help and even then there are times that we can do that sometimes people are kind of drowning I've had friends I mean especially in those early years when my kids were young I was just I really was drowning I was really in a horrible depressed place and I would have friends that would come over and they would just sort of look at me and say wow you're you're really hurting and they would say you know what let me give you a hand and I would like literally sit there while they like clean my kitchen because I was really really struggling and they're just being kind they weren't saving me they were just genuinely their hearts were just like kind of wow I really want to help here and they did and I fully and I fully appreciated it and I extend I started to cry and I'd start to talk about whatever was going on while they kind of washed the dishes and played with the kids or changed the diapers or whatever you know this isn't a this isn't a black and white thing we just have to look inside ourselves to see where we might be a muck philosophically there's another question that if we believe that purpose of my life is to save others we have to ask ourselves so do what is my actual soul's journey myself like what am I expanding into what is my growth edge not fixing others what is my personal soul's edge because that's one thing I realized in myself is that I thought I had made it I thought I was at the top of my game I thought I was as good as I was good as I was going to get that there was nothing else for me to learn it sounds so conceited to say it out loud so I thought well obviously I'm just meant to share this now with others it was like there was this glass ceiling over my head that said no no this is the height of your personal growth and so the idea that I wasn't supposed to be fixing other people meant so then I'm supposed to keep growing myself and this was a real challenge because I don't know why I just had this idea that I'd hit my top game but I hadn't so I had to actually deeply go within and say no what do you want to learn about Katrina what do you love to do what's your growth edge what do you want to expand into what are the things that maybe you long ago gave up but you don't believe you could ever do but maybe you could or maybe there's parts of me that I struggle with so I've avoided those things you know maybe I love being in my head but I'm not really much into the fitness of my body or vice versa are there things that I'm not doing because it's too hard and so because those are too hard I've sort of hit a ceiling so I'm just going to go fix everybody else and this is what happens when we have this wounded healer archetype archetype that I'm actually quite struggling in some difficult areas of my life and I don't know what to do with them and I feel very stuck but I have this really cool modality so I'm going to go out and I'm going to fix everybody else and the funny thing about that is I'm not saying you shouldn't do it I'm not saying that going out and sharing whatever you've learned with others is a bad thing the key again is the mentality are you doing this to fix those other people or do we recognize that the people that come to me for help are actually here to guide me on my journey if you pay attention their problems will be similar to yours and you'll actually realize that they're actually giving us clues to help us unpack the things that we've struggled with or we're currently struggling with it's this idea that we really all are in this together there is no hierarchy that I'm more enlightened than you are or I'm more connected to God or I'm a great healer and you're suffering there isn't this weird grade I'm not a grade a human and you're a grade d human and so therefore I can fix you because I know better there's no such thing and this is a huge ego thing in the spiritual community in the healing community and it's not just in here it's in medicine it's an it's like I mean it's easy to kind of point fingers at doctors oh they're playing God and blah blah blah but it's it's something weird inside of us it's like we all want to play God whether we're a doctor or a naturopath or a reiki master or a or a spiritual teacher we all want to kind of play God all the time like it's a massive ego trip and for me anyway I know that the medicine for me is to go inside and figure out what do I want to learn what do I want to grow through I'll tell you it's so easy to think it's like one time I went to uh Sedona Sedona and Sedona Arizona is beautiful in the states it's quite a quite a vortex of energy it's quite a place and there I met a lot of really nice people there but there was a funny energy and I couldn't quite put my finger on it and it really it really bothered me it really curled my spine and you know obviously maybe it's a mirror maybe it's my own stuff and I was doing a lot of talks with people right because I was people had asked me to do talks about tantra and different things and there was a couple talks of groups of people that I don't know it was almost like I was just sort of talking into a void it was very strange and afterwards I sat with one of the women of this one group in particular and I said you know that was really strange I said I said I love talking and sharing and chit-chatting and I love that like it's just and normally I can really feel the room and it becomes a very in Dutch you would say it's a very warm fuzzy sharing of experiences it's not like I am the teacher and it's a it's a gathering but just be the same as if all of us were actually in a room it would be a really interesting juicy sharing of ideas and that's normally what it was but it wasn't with this group I felt like I was just talking into this void the woman looked at me and she said yes well you have to understand that Sedona attracts a lot of spiritual graduates we don't really have much left to learn and it was so enlightening for me to hear her say that one I realized how much I disagreed with her but it also really clarified that for me that if we live in a limited world let's say a limited world like learning to drive a car learning to drive a car is quite limited you can sort of learn the basics make it second nature and maybe you can learn to drive really fast maybe you can learn to drive in snow and ice but for all intents and purposes it's a limited skill set but in the spiritual world which is our life which is the human existence we live in an infinite space how do you ever graduate in an infinite space why would we ever believe that we were limited in our growth it's not possible the only reason that I would be limited in my growth is because I lack the imagination to imagine what else is possible or maybe I don't want to maybe I'm still attached to being the healer being the fixer being the messiah maybe I my my I have karma around that maybe I need to work out this complex that I need to be better than other people or I need to have the answers that other people don't have or maybe I just it helps feed my self-worth or something I don't know and so I need to actually do this this is important it's an important thing and it's not time to move on to the next thing because this is this is still a wound that needs to be looked at I don't know so it's just always interesting because I love the analogy of humans that we are climbing our own mountain that I am climbing my mountain what is it that Katrina would love to expand what would I love to explore in this world in this consciousness well you're on your mountain and you're climbing your mountain and it's different than mine it's not my mountain I actually don't know how you should climb your mountain you have a very unique path to take you might look over at me and you might say Katrina um I got this thing over here that I have to do and it looks like you did it once how did you do that and I might say well I kind of did it like this I don't know if it'll work for you but this is sort of what worked for me oh that's cool and then maybe there's another time that they're doing something I'm like hey what are you doing over there because that looks it looks like I need that it's always a helpful thing because we don't really know each other's terrain and so I'm always intrigued like that's how I felt myself I felt that I it's like I was standing on this edge of my own mountain looking around at the other mountain people in the mountain it was like I I had my back to my own mountain and I was looking out at the other people on their mountains saying you should do this you should do this hey you should turn left hey you should instead of looking at my own mountain it's just really interesting and you know and we all can do that right when we're struggling we can turn around we can say hey can I get some help and I mean we can ask for help and then people who say are great naturopaths or chiropractors or reiki masters or doctors or homeopaths or counselors you know and they actually genuinely love doing this they love the human body they love how it works they love the sherlock homes of sorting out houses how they can possibly help we can say hey I twisted my ankle or I fell off a horse like can you kind of get my spine back in alignment sure I'd love to do that you pay them and everything is exchanged no one saved anybody it's the same thing as you know me going to a blacksmith and having my horse's shoes made we didn't save the horse you just made shoes for the horse it's a really subtle shift into what do I love to do doing it and perhaps it's of great service to others if they need it then I'm doing this to save the world like you can feel the difference it's also a really interesting realization when it when you look at how people really heal so let's say you know we're here let's just say I'm giving a talk and you guys are here well I'm just talking about something I'm interested in and I'd like to explore more and I'd like to go deeper into it the healing happens in between everything I say it's like your soul has a question and it's asking a question and you're asking a question and it's asking a question and it's listening but sometimes it's not even what's said it might be something that I said that then triggered someone else's thought and then someone else had this idea and then there's and all of a sudden this starts to triangulate inside of you and all of a sudden you're like aha that makes sense who knows who said what who knows who initiated it who knows who who even knows why I'm doing these talks maybe this talk came out of someone's question from three months ago and then a conversation happened there and I was like aha this is an interesting thing let's dive into it who knows like there's no one saving anybody and what's crazy I mean this is why we write we we read books why we listen to podcasts why we hang out with people who are interesting to us and insightful and it isn't what they say it's like this interesting container to explore thoughts and allow the pieces to fit inside of us before we go got it but we do it you do it we do it it helps us on our journey up the mountain and it's really important that we are all empowered in that way that it's us that take the steps nobody else does it for us like one time I uh I was teaching a yoga teacher training 10 years ago and it was all in person obviously you know when you would have 10 full weekends in a row that would be the 200 hours it was like the Saturday so it would normally be like Friday night Saturday Sunday so at the end of Saturday one of the women came up to me and she said Katrina um I can't make it tomorrow because I've got these tickets to Iron Maiden concert she just went to this whole story about this Iron Maiden concert and this and that and she just sort of kept telling me all the reasons why she wouldn't be able to come to the training on the Sunday and I just sort of sat there listening and I didn't remember this it was my sister who was taking the training who told me this story later and I was just sitting there listening and I said okay cool I'll see you next month that was it that was all I said so we came back the next month and you know of course we're doing our check-in everyone's checking in you know and we got to her and she says Katrina what you said to me just blew my mind like I just I thought about it all month and I was like sitting there thinking what in the world did I say I mean it wasn't until later that my sister came up to me and she said you didn't say anything I was there I was like oh good because I forget a lot of things I say but I swear this is what happens more often than not it's like I was doing nothing but listening I wasn't even holding space I wasn't being some teacher I was just sitting there I literally was no different than anybody in the world just sitting and listening to someone and this is where like even the act of listening is so valuable people go away going wow that was so profound but it was their own thoughts that they were hearing it was their own realizations that they were achieving and I was like wow that was so powerful and I was like wow that was their own realizations that they were hearing out loud that was so powerful another thing that's really interesting about this idea of raising our own vibration or healing the world a while ago we did a whole series on the levels of consciousness in David Hawkins book Power versus Force and if you didn't hear any of them they're really it's the stages the levels of consciousness that we often live in that we often get stuck in it's one thing to be angry because something happened it's another thing to live in a state of anger it's another thing to grieve because we've lost something or someone it's another thing to live in a state of grief and so each one of these state these levels have a certain vibration and if we get stuck there we sort of perceive the world through this level this vibration this frequency you know at the bottom it's like shame guilt anger fear grief I don't remember what they are now anymore but it comes all the way up to courage and courage is at this level of 200 of 10 to the 200 and at that point our frequency becomes starts to become very positive and proactive and now we can actually make choices in our life and we're not just sort of circling the drain and just sort of struggling right we're actually okay now I can do stuff and then beyond that it's neutrality willingness you know love enlightenment what have you and one of the interesting things that he said was that when we raise our own frequency like when we do our work our personal journey when we climb our mountain and really clear up our karmic patterns and our samskaras and all these things that we actually these are just samskaras are samskaras are just like patterns from past lives and stuff however you understand that when we do that we slowly raise our own frequency even if it's just a few points we just keep raising our frequency and his theory was that as we raise our frequency the whole ocean rises it isn't just that we're rising like a silo because we are connected to everyone but we don't raise the frequencies of others by telling them things or by grabbing them or injecting them with our energy or something like that it's just by osmosis as we rise everyone around us rises too and even then I'm still feeling this is a little bit messiah like what I'm saying but the point is that there's real value in climbing our own mountain and there's a greater value to the whole when we continue that we get rid of that glass ceiling and we continue to grow ourselves that was a huge deal for me because sometimes and again I don't know whether it was just weird programming as a child or the ancestors that it was almost selfish I believed it was selfish to do my own thing that I was supposed to be out there helping others you're supposed to be selfless your whole life is supposed to be devoted to saving the world this is a huge teaching it's a huge teaching in religions and organized religion to spend your whole life focusing on yourself in your own journey and your own passion so this is selfish so this idea this teaching from David Hawkins really alleviated that for me that no it's it's a good thing it's a good thing for you explore your joy and your passion and what your edge is the other thing that's really interesting in my experience is that like I love writing books and I love talking and I love giving courses and gathering and chatting with people about deep and interesting things I really love that but the minute I think I think that I'm doing it for anyone else it becomes flat I've written books I could I could pick a chapter out of any book I've written and we could just talk about it but that's not my current growth edge I wouldn't be doing that for me that doesn't expand me at all I'm just repeating something I've taught so often I finally wrote it down that's not interesting and even I'm writing this book the union of the masculine feminine if I write it with the mentality that I already know everything that's going to go into this book it becomes a very boring book and there's no life in it is that really what I was born here to do just write down stuff is that really it am I not growing right now am I not expanding right now but when I sit down and I actually write and I'm actually exploring it and I'm diving into the conscious the ideas and the philosophies and I'm playing with it and as I'm writing it it's actually forming itself as I'm writing it like it's so funny like there there were a few little holes in it in the intimacy parts that I was struggling with the masculine and feminine so of course you know my partner and I on the weekend we end up having these deep conversations about intimacy and and the masculine holding and the feminine chaos and all that we like it was really deep and it was coming directly out of the experiences we were having and he was asking me like is this how you're feeling and so we end up diving deep into this if I go into this with this idea that I already know it all we're not going to go anywhere because I didn't know it all and we kept going deeper and deeper and I had this great realization that then I was like I have to go right you know and and it's really exciting that even this book is at my personal growth edge it's personally something I'm exploring right now as well and it's so exciting suddenly the whole book becomes alive to me it doesn't just become this thing that I'm just documenting for the sake of others because others need to know this you know what I mean like it's so egotistical but it's actually something that I'm personally so passionate about is so so passionate about and it's it's fun to live like that and I don't know it kind of sucks the joy out of it as soon as we think we're doing it for other people at least anything I do I find that teaching even doing one-on-one counseling or grid readings or or anything it has to be a back and forth it has to be a a connection of souls I'm not I don't know anything better than anyone else so thank you so much for being here and I hope you have a wonderful day

Reviews

Excellent... perfect timing for an issue that really irks me. I get really triggered when I see people displaying this "messiah complex".

Another wonderful talk! So true what you say that we heal in the spaces inbetween words.

Really enjoyed that. Attending & hosting womens circles really helped me begin to shift out of this saving mode. It fascinated me how I would mainly just listen & then people would tell me it was such an amazing session. I was a business consultant before, so a fixer & I never had those sorts of responses from trying to solve their issues.

Really enjoyed how much this talk sparked my own imagination and inner truth. Thank you!

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Thank you once again for sharing your strengths and experiences, Katrina. I see you as my guide on my mountain whenever I need to just sit near and listen.