You’re driving home at the end of a long day. Exhaustion stretches over you like a long, lazy cat across your chest. It is hard to breathe and the fatigue feels unmovable. Your eyes are heavy, you can’t imagine how you are going to make the forty minute commute much less land at home with your responsibilities – your family, your laundry, your meowing cat.

Is it normal to be so exhausted? You had a few meetings but you were relatively productive and ate protein and veggies for lunch and slept a full eight hours the night before. You were able to go for a walk and do yoga and not feel rushed driving to work – your self-care is not perfect but pretty good.

As we get more in touch with our inspired and empowered nature, we begin to understand there are lots of invisible forces at work. We have energetic exchanges with people, the environment, and the cosmic forces all the time. Exchanges can happen between people we are close to, our friends and family. Or casual acquaintances, a coworker or possibly some random person that stands in front of you at a food truck.

These energetic exchanges with other people contain peoples’ mental and emotional bodies that are swirling around and their projections of their wants and needs and wounds. For some, other peoples’ processes don’t really affect them, or so they think. But for lots of empaths, encountering and taking on other peoples energy is as common as eating lunch.

So here you are at the end of the day, exhausted and overwhelmed. It is possibly that you are being affected by some interaction that you are not aware of? If you take a minute and trace your energy, you might find you have been worried about a family member or can’t quite keep a person who told you a story out of your mind. Or you walked past a hospital and it was in that moment that you noticed the heaviness showed up.

So when you feel this state of depletion, take a minute to call back all your energy. Use your breath to inhale all your energy back by calling back the invisible tendrils that you send out into the world. And on your out breath, release the worry you are carrying about a loved one’s situation or the person you had a heated exchange with. It’s okay if you don’t know exactly where your energy leaked or what you took on: it’s often impossible to locate the origin of your dip in energy. Just set the intention to call back your energy from the places you sent it out and release all the energy that you took on. After working with your breath and setting an intention, you may feel a shift in your energy or some tingling in your hands or other sensations that suggest a return to well-being.

Sending love and light as you claim yourself fully and claim the day.