Empathy Hurts

I was thinking about empathy. I do that a lot. I was wondering why people avoided really empathizing with another person. Even people who know all about empathy, such as people trained in Nonviolent Communication do not empathize as much as one would think. So I watched myself to see what happens when I empathize.

As I took myself through the feelings step by step, I noticed that at a certain point I had to take my attention off myself. Some part of me did not like losing my attention. So that is certainly one reason people find empathy difficult. Then at another point I saw that I during empathy I feel the same emotion as the other person. If she felt sad, I felt sad. If she was angry, I felt angry. Since, like most people, I do not enjoy feeling sad or angry, I wanted out of the emotion. I wanted to feel better, so I immediately sought to make the other person feel better. I either wanted to console them or advise them.

Two experiences make empathy difficult, having to focus exclusively on someone else for a few moments and feel what they are feeling. We become like a tuning fork resonating to the pitch of A.  The other person is vibrating at sad frequency and we attune to it. However that's not the final piece. For I must also know in my heart that pain is OK. It's like taking your child to the doctor for a vaccination. You feel the child's fear, resonate to it, while at the same time knowing that her fear is OK.

You match the child's frequency. The child feels that you understand. The child feels heard, and so doesn't feel the need to fight against his own feelings. He doesn't have to stuff the feelings down, ignore them, or belittle them. If you are calm with his fear, then so is he!
The fear is free to work itself out on its own. And it does. What a gift your presence has given this child.

But what I notice is, that to do this, one must have faith in the experience of natural pain. (meaning pain that comes naturally from life experiences) All our lives we are told that pain is bad. That pain may even be a sign of moral weakness. Drug companies and chocolate makers bank on our fear of painful emotions. But we are more than physical bodies. Our souls journey toward wisdom and meaning. All emotions bring valuable information to us. To suppress them or advise them away is to lose their messages.

Just for fun imagine that you lived in a society that frowned on laughter. (I think the Puritans might have been such a society) If every time you laughed someone tried to help you suppress it, what would you lose? Wouldn't that be weird? Fortunately we live in a culture that trusts laughter's effect on us.

How to make self-judging fun

In response to an email about judging oneself harshly for judging oneself; The part of you that judges is the part of the brain devoted to making sure you can fit into this culture.  If you think about it, every judgment you have comes from somebody else. I notice that I have no  judgments about purple spotted kitterwogs, for example, because I have never heard anyone talk about  them. If one could imagine our culture as a field of thoughts and beliefs, then judgments could be seen  as floating around that field. As we grow up we tune into the field and are programmed by repetition.  Nothing about judgments are personal. When I meditate I watch the judgment thoughts as they float  through, I can really feel how they are not personal to me. I see myself as merely the receptacle for  the culture’s field. I can’t help my judgments anymore than I can help what the current fashions are or  the kind of city I live in It has all been decided for me. As I watch me make judgments, I notice that there are two me’s watching. One ‘me’ is a continuance of  the cultured mind. That me is judgmental of my judgments because in this culture we are fond of making  people feel guilty for the very things they have been taught. The other ‘me’ is strictly an observer. She has no judgment. She seems to look on with what I would call compassionate interest. She is actually  more of a Me than me. When I look through her eyes, I see “my” thoughts as not “my” thoughts.  I see the judging self as just a wonderful example of this culture, but I also experience myself as  more than this judging self. I experience myself as this loving watcher as well. Now I notice that judgments still pass through me. I still judge the driver in front of me, the authority  figure blocking me, my ability to stay on a diet, and so on. And then I notice that I judge my judging.  And then I notice that everything I just thought was taught to me by somebody and is not personal to me. I suspect that you know all of this already, but your description of judgment inspired me to remember  about the impersonal nature of our thoughts. We think our thoughts are ours, but they are not.  I think that is very cool. From this perspective, it’s even possible to have fun with thoughts  and beliefs like judgments. There’s something about seeing this culture stamped inside of me  that is funny. I have this whole thing about aging right now. It’s so interesting to watch these  taught beliefs about my attractiveness and vitality seeping away. If I were in another culture,  I might look forward to aging as a time of great status. Now I fear it for loss of status.  My mind is just playing out this culture’s meme about aging and  here’s the kicker - there’s nothing my mind can do about it.

Feeling Heard

Notice for a moment how you feel reading the above cartoon compared to how you feel reading the cartoon in the previous post. Imagine if you were the little poodle. Which mom would you want? This mom is really putting her whole heart into the discussion and even though we are outside observers -  we can tell which one feels good to our heart. We can feel the connection.

I just love that feeling. There is such a giant difference between communicating with the heart and the head. Communicating with the heart means you resonate with the other person's experience. You don't try to fix it. You don't try to change it. You don't judge it. The heart joins. There is one place we do this easily. Laughing. When a friend is laughing, we join in or if we don't get the joke, we smile in resonance with their obvious good time. It wouldn't occur to us to try to change their laughter or advise them out of it.

We think that we have to help a sad or angry person out of their unhappy state. But trying to change their experience is just as invasive as trying to change a laughing person's experience. It's the experience that counts! Isn't that interesting? Our experiences bring us wisdom. We need to have them fully. We want others to witness our experience and then speak from the heart that they witnessed us. Just like the mother poodle in the cartoon.

Age of Heart

"The Map directed me from the Age of Reason to the Age of Heart. It was now time for the Indians to show the non-Indians how to think through the heart and not through the mind." 

    Joseph Rael, House of Shattering Light, Council Oak Books cc. 2003, pp. 115

Nonviolent Communication founder Marshall Rosenberg calls his way of speaking a language of the heart. My favorite aspect of NVC is empathy. Not only does empathy help you to understand where someone is coming from - it heals the heart. But it's not easy to do, for one thing, empathy requires full attention.

Mom thinks she is empathizing with her child. True: her mind is engaged, but not her heart.
The other day, I saw a very distracted dad repeating back what his little boy said to him. Clearly he had learned the parenting lessons on reflecting back what is said. The child kept repeating with increasing intensity that his fingers felt like they were burning. The father repeated back dutifully, "Your fingers are burning." All the while the dad's eyes were on the ingredients list he was reading. It's not easy to shop with a four year old! The child kept repeating that his fingers were burning and the dad kept mirroring back that his fingers were burning. It was an excellent example of the limits of intellectual involvement only. The child simply did not feel heard by his dad's heart.

When the Universe sends a Message

I attended another class with Arny Mindell, founder of the Process work Institute. His work is really bending my brain. I'm so accustomed to learning everything through my intellect. Arny works with body feelings. He has us moving around the room feeling our body's response to certain questions. The body answers these questions with an emotion and movement. What fascinates me is how intelligent the answers are; every bit as intelligent as the intellect and maybe more intelligent in some cases.

I admit that I follow his instructions with a level of distrust. My mind scoffs at his instructions asking for me to draw the energy of a feeling or act it out. It sounds really silly. And I think I must look silly bending and waving my body. Fortunately everyone else is gyrating around too. (Funny what we will do if others are doing it, too, no?) But then a real insight actually comes into my mind! It's like magic.
Who knew the body was so wise?

Raphael Cushnir says that emotions have a message and that when we avoid our emotions with addictions, we don't get the message. The message then uses dreams, life events, and illness to try to get our attention. Only be allowing the feeling to live within us, and only by being compassionate with that emotion, can the message it carries live within us. I think that Arny's work is very similar. Arny says that the Universe as a consciousness sends us messages and that if we resist the message by avoiding it with addiction or putting it down as silly, the message will try to get through as illness, dreams, and unconscious behavior. Both Raphael and Arny use acceptance as a key part of their healing work. But Arny uses the wisdom inherent in the body, too. It turns out the body is smarter than I thought.

Connecting Frequencies

I joined Christina Pratt's Shamanic Journeying class last night. What a beautiful space her husband designed. He is an acupuncturist, so he made sure to have all kinds of elements represented - wood, metal, stone, water, and fire. Whatever magic he used worked to make the whole place seem to breathe.
Christina was warm and funny. She made the me feel welcome and comfortable.

A musician played crystal bowls. I hadn't heard those bowls before in person. The vibrations go right through the body. They sound ethereal and feel soothing. It's easy to meditate in such an atmosphere.
I also noticed that the sounds helped to create a sense of harmony and lightness in the room of people. Which makes me wonder - what would happen if all meetings started with good harmonics? What if before a meeting started - everyone chanted together, or played drums together, or anything that helped create a sense of connected frequencies?

And isn't empathy a kind of resonance? When I empathize with someone, I am resonating with their experience. I am tuning in to their frequency. I feel as they do, like a tuning fork picking up a tone. Everyone craves empathy. Try it. Next time someone tells you something, do not give any advice or console them, instead empathize with their experience:

"My boss probably thinks I don't know my job."

(It's tempting to console like this - "That's not true!", but instead empathize like this)

"You sound discouraged. Did something happen today to make you feel incompetent?"

(Now the person will turn up their emotional frequency a little louder, because they can feel the attention and care)

"Yes! I totally goofed up a report. And it was my fault, too. I put in the wrong figures."

"Oh that can be so embarrassing when that happens! It sounds like you're worried that she will look down on you after this." (still resonating with the friend's experience)

"I KNOW she will. I feel so stupid."

"Have you lost hope?"

"Maybe, a little, mostly I feel stupid."

"Are you mostly mad at yourself?"

"Yeah, I am. Maybe she isn't that upset, but I'm pissed with myself."

"I am so much harder on myself than anyone else is. That's what it sounds like you have going on.
Self punishment is us!" (See how this person continues to hold her friend's frequency? But now it has shifted by itself. Watch.)

"Oh yeah, That is so true. I am so hard on myself, it's ridiculous. I had me losing this job and you know what, I'm really good at it and my boss knows that, and anyone can make a mistake. Geez. I always think I should be perfect."

"I know how it is. Do you feel better now?"

"Yeah, weirdly enough, I do. Thanks for listening."

The above conversation is based on real situations I've been in. Empathy is resonating with the other person like a harmony. It's very healing.

Process Work Institute again

I'm thinking some more about what really excited me at the forum I attended last week at the Process Work Institute in Portland. Usually in a discussion, the only points of view represented are the views of the participants. So if my church (this is a true story) has a discussion about getting more races represented in the church and the only people having the discussion are Euro-americans, then the only point of view we hear is the Euro-american one. That's how we usually discuss things. Arnold Mindell, founder of PWI, separates out the points of view as having their own value. If I understand him correctly, many points of view exist in any conversation, whether there are people to speak them or not. If no one is there to speak them, he calls them the ghost point of view. To really understand a topic thoroughly, ALL points of view must be heard.

In the forum last week, one woman stood up and spoke for the billionaires, since we had no billionaires attending the forum. In a discussion about economics, she thought that the billionaires would have a view. Especially since some of us were trashing them from our point of view! She was not attacked. Everyone understood the valuable function she played. Others joined her who could identify in some way with her point of view.

The result? Much more compassion and a recognition that solutions are not simple. The forum was practice for a group of students, so we only met for a couple hours. I believe that if we could meet over several days with this sort of listening and empathizing with a variety of view points, we would reach real depth in our conversation and a glimmer of what a real solution might actually look like.

Do I Join?

So do I join this group? Let’s call them the Board of Directors or BD group. I don’t think it will be an easy group to enact changes in. Here’s why: two male members have been on the board for three years and are very close friends. They have seniority, belong to the more politically powerful gender, are older than everyone else, and there are two of them. Arnold Mindell, Process Work Institute, talks about rank as the hidden denominator in groups and I think he is right on the money. These two men have lots of rank and are the de facto power in the group. The only woman member had the courage to point out some issues that the other men perceived as criticism. I watched the men pepper her with questions and she looked like she had run into a boulder. Her posture was rigid and her face looked like it had been flattened into a stiff sheet.  She needed some empathy that’s for sure, but none was forthcoming. The men felt attacked and they pushed back.

Later, she said she felt heard, so obviously she is so used to boulders she doesn’t register them as blocks anymore. Earlier, when she was asking for a facilitator to help make the conversation safer, I got all excited, because that is what I do. I make it safe for everyone to talk in a group. But the men didn’t think that would be necessary, they were doing it already, they said. I about wet my pants with frustration, but since I was a visitor I kept mum.

Party On!

I watched as the chores were being divvied out at a meeting recently. One member actually grimaced as he agreed to one thing after another. Earlier he had confided that his life was really full, so I had no idea when the group expected him to accomplish his tasks. I noticed that the other members were not excited about their jobs either. One person refused to do a task because she lacked energy for it.

The group talked about ways to get new members for more energy. And that was the reason I was there; I was investigating to see if it might be something I wanted to do. But early on I found out what the problem was – it was the kind of problem that should stop a group in its tracks and usually does. The group had been formed around a purpose that no longer existed.

It seems to me that when life loses purpose, Nature lowers the energy volume. It’s time to sit still, meditate, and dream. But our culture vilifies the image of laziness. One friend of mine quipped that he would never brag about having a lazy day to friends he wanted to keep. “Busy, busy, busy” as Bokonon says in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cats Cradle. It’s hard enough to get myself to agree to do nothing, let alone a group. And yet, when a group lacks energy, I think that is the message. “Stop doing stuff!” It’s time to hang out, dream, and dare I say it? Party!

At the turn of the 20^th Century, some of the great thinkers and artists of that time gathered at salons. Gertrude Stein hosted famous parties out of which whole intellectual movements were born. A party is a great way for a group to play around with ideas. Relax in a lounge chair, listen to great music, and dream up stuff together. Since it’s a party, no one expects great ideas or even ideas that make sense – making it all the more likely that an unexpected, good idea will show up. 

Process Work Institute

Well there's nothing like seeing a theory become a real living thing. Last night, I attended an 'Open Forum on Economics' put on by some students of the Process Work Institute. PWI was founded by Arnold Mindell and teaches his ideas in Psychology and Conflict Resolution. I've read a couple of his books and he really talks my language, except of course when he really gets far out there even for me. And he could be right in his "out-thereness" who knows? At any rate, some of the things I resonate to are his concepts around intuition, and the bleed through, so to speak, of a larger consciousness that he sometimes calls the big U. He also believes strongly in something he calls Deep Democracy. Deep Democracy insists upon hearing all points of view to find the big U of a group.

So last night, I got to see all these beliefs in action and wow! how inspiring. There were four main presenters. Then there were about 10 helpers and the teacher. The presenters presented the topic and then fielded questions and comments. The helpers sought out triggered people and helped them on the spot. One woman kept saying inappropriate things, by her body language I guessed something was not quite right, so several helpers immediately came to her side to listen to her quietly and answer her questions in a way that did not disturb the larger group. Another person started crying and tissues appeared. Later two factions began to argue and the students worked to be sure both sides received fair time to say what they wanted. The facilitators also translated shaming language into empathetic language. Every so often one of the facilitators would sum up what was being said, or go over the major themes we had discussed to give us a bird's eye view of what was happening.

I saw a group of fifty people supported, and it really did feel like support, to communicate at the most vulnerable and deep levels. It was like watching a dance; like a dance of emotions. I was so delighted watching the students work. I just knew group process could look this connected. I can't wait to see more.