Empathy

Practice empathy by actively attempting to experience someone else’s feelings or thoughts.

if you start by non-judgmentally accepting your own thoughts and emotions—Mindful Presence—you may find that you have more capacity for understanding others’.

Understanding what someone is going through cannot be done just by intellect alone.

  • Empathy is one of those words that often get confused with others, specifically “sympathy” and “pity.”

  • Empathy is not an emotion, it is something you do, an action. Even more, it’s an act of creation. You have to actively try to experience what someone else is feeling and thinking. It’s not about understand intellectually what someone must be feeling or thinking, you must try to create that experience in yourself. You do that my tapping into your own experiences, looking for times when something similar happened to you and remembering what it felt like and what you were thinking. Of course, you may not have experienced exactly the same thing that someone else is experiencing, so you have to creatively combine different experiences and imagine something new.

Therefore:

Practice empathy by actively attempting to experience someone else’s feelings or thoughts.

Empathizing with someone requires a whole host of skills, including Humility, Listening, Discernment, and Suspended Judgement, so work to use them synergistically to have greater insights

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