The Art of Empathy
Gathering Your Tools
EMPATHY IS DEVELOPED (and flourishes) in healthy interactions. What I notice in people who are somewhat overwhelmed or overstimulated by their empathy is that they haven’t found a balance between interpersonal interactions and intrapersonal self-care. Many empaths spend so much time on the needs of others that their personal needs get pushed aside or disregarded. This is not necessarily a sign of poorly developed empathic skills, because in many of the six aspects of empathy, it’s not about you. It can honestly be tricky to balance your life in response to a skill that asks you to put the needs and perspectives of others before your own.
In people who experience empathic burnout (or caregiver burnout, which is a similar situation), I notice the presence of a type of either/or dichotomy: “Either I can take care of everyone else and get drained, or I can take care of myself and be selfish, but I can’t do both.” But I challenge that rigid idea and in this book, I provide options that restore flexibility. Empathic self-care can and does coexist with strong empathic skills. As we all know, it doesn’t have to, but in our quest to be happy and healthy empaths, self-care is a must.
As we learn these empathic mindfulness practices, I’ll explain each not only in terms of its purpose, but also in relation to our six aspects of empathy. I’ll also relate my practices to Richard Davidson’s six dimensions of emotional style. I want you to understand the intention behind each of these practices so that you can pick and choose among them, depending on your individual strengths and challenges.
THE FIVE EMPATHIC MINDFULNESS SKILLS
Each of my empathic mindfulness skills is an emotion-aware and emotion-honoring practice, and each relies upon the gifts and abilities that your emotions contribute to you. This is a distinct departure from many meditative practices, where observing and then completely releasing emotions (often called extinction ) is a central activity. As I look at emotion-releasing practices, I see that most of the four problems that lead to emotional confusion are active. Certainly, there’s the belief that most emotions are negative—otherwise, why else would you try to release or extinguish them? Releasing an emotion is not toxic in and of itself, because when an emotion is in a feedback loop, then certainly, you want to be able to calm yourself and calm that emotional activation. But merely observing and extinguishing an emotion is a repressive technique that undermines the action-requiring neurological program that’s trying to occur. Repression can be a wonderful emergency skill if you’re feeling an emotion that isn’t socially safe to express (or that’s stuck in a feedback loop), but in most other instances, repression will impede your emotional intelligence. It won’t help you understand the emotion that has arisen; it won’t help you recognize emotional nuance; and it won’t help you identify why your emotions arise, how they interrelate, or which actions they require.
In my work, I’ve taken apart meditative practices in order to understand their underlying purpose, and I’ve added to them an awareness of the purpose of emotions. In my version of a mindfulness meditation that welcomes your emotions (rather than treating them as problems in and of themselves), you’ll calm yourself and work with your breathing, you’ll focus yourself and become aware of your responses, you’ll observe your emotions without valencing them, and then you’ll turn toward your emotions and ask them what they’re doing. You’ll work as a partner and a friend to your emotions, and you’ll use your Einfühlung capacity to enter into a deep empathic relationship with your own emotions.
But you’ll be doing all of this calmly, with skills, and with support. This isn’t going to be a bad acting class; I’m not asking you to become your strong emotions or to go on an emotional bender. That’s not empathic, nor is it mindful. That kind of either/or thinking is a function of one of the central problems that create emotional confusion—that is, you can either repress and extinguish an emotion or express it and go on a rampage. But these are not your only choices. Remember the process of channeling. There is a middle path, and these empathic mindfulness skills will help you learn how to enter that path and become emotionally adept—and therefore empathically skilled.
As I explain these skills, I’ll intersperse pieces that I wrote about them in The Language of Emotions.40 However, I’m continually tinkering with these skills to make them simpler and more focused; therefore, these descriptions will relate specifically to developing your empathic skills.
GETTING GROUNDED
Grounding is a simple breathing and focusing practice that helps you connect to your body and focus yourself in an intentional and calming way. Intentional body awareness supports your intrapersonal skills and helps you become more aware of yourself and your unique responses. Self-awareness is a primary empathic skill, because you have to know how you feel so that you can regulate your own emotions and identify differences between yourself and others (this really helps with Perspective Taking). However, as Richard Davidson points out, there is such a thing as being too self-aware. Some people are so aware of tiny shifts in their emotions, sensations, and sensory inputs that they become overly self-focused or even overwhelmed. For these people, empathy can be hindered, because they have too much going on internally to be able to effectively take the perspective of others. My grounding practice helps in both instances.
Grounding, which helps you feel calm, centered, focused, relaxed, and awake, helps you turn your focus inward in a simple and calming way. In Getting Grounded, you don’t have to be isolated, immobile, or merely observational; you can be out in the world and interacting freely. Grounding is a highly portable skill that helps you focus internally as you center and calm yourself. You can ground yourself in a few seconds and restore your focus, even during tense interactions, or you can turn grounding into a luxurious and solitary meditative practice whenever you have the time.
Let’s look at the specific emotional skills involved in grounding and focusing yourself.
THE GROUNDING PROCESS: Welcoming the Gifts of Sadness
Take a deep breath and fill up your chest and your belly so that you feel a little bit of tension—not too much, just a little. Hold your breath for a count of three. As you breathe out, let your body slump a little bit and relax yourself intentionally. Let your muscles go slack, drop your head if that feels good, and just loll. Breathe normally for a few breaths as you maintain this state of simple relaxation.
Now, breathe in again, expand your chest and your belly until you feel a little bit of tension, hold for a count of three—and then breathe out with a sigh as you let go. You’re a ragdoll. Let it go.
Now, breathe normally and check in with yourself. If you feel a bit softer and calmer, and maybe even a little bit tired, thank the emotion that helped you release some of your tension and restore some of your flow: thank your sadness. That’s what the soft form of healthy, flowing sadness feels like, and that’s what it does—it helps you let go of something that isn’t working anyway, and it helps you bring ease and flow back to your system. In this short exercise, I created something that didn’t work—I created a bit of tension by having you breathe in an uncomfortable way, and then I had you evoke the gifts of sadness to let go of that tension. You didn’t need that tension; it wasn’t working anyway. Sadness to the rescue!
Each of your emotions has this soft, free-flowing state that brings you specific gifts and skills. Knowing this will help you access your emotions intentionally when you need the gifts they provide. It’s important to realize that you don’t have to cry or move into a sad mood in order to access the softening, relaxing, rejuvenating gifts of sadness; you can just relax and let go. Sadness is about releasing things and relaxing into yourself—and you can do that intentionally by working with your sadness as a skill.
Take a moment to notice how aware you are of your body. Sadness brings you back to yourself and makes you more aware of your interior state. Sadness brings flow back to you, it calms you, and it helps you release uncomfortable things you’ve been grasping onto—like tension, fatigue, or disappointments. It’s necessary to let go regularly, before everything piles up into identifiable emotional distress, pain, or misery, and sadness is the emotion that helps you let go. Other emotions do other things, and they’re necessary in other situations. But when you need to let go, refresh yourself, and regain your flexibility, you need the relaxing gifts of sadness.
Whenever you need to, you can consciously welcome your sadness and restore a sense of flow to yourself by breathing in and gathering any tension, and then breathing out gently as you yawn or sigh. It’s that simple. To channel your sadness, just relax and let go of things that aren’t working anyway.
THE FOCUSING PROCESS: Welcoming the Gifts of Fear
Now let’s work at a very subtle level with an emotion that helps you focus yourself. Return to that sadness-resourced sense of relaxation and inner focus, and find a quiet place where you can perform a simple listening exercise.
When you’ve found your quiet place, lean your body forward a little bit and try to hear the quietest sound in your area. Keep your shoulders down and away from your ears (good posture helps your hearing). You can also open your mouth a little (relaxing your jaw creates more space in your ears) and gently move your head around as you pinpoint the quietest sound and filter out the more obvious ones. Keep your eyes open, but rely upon your ears for this exercise.
When you’ve located this quiet sound, hold still for a moment. Stand where you are and try to locate the sound with your eyes; then move toward it, recalibrating as you near the sound. Time may seem to slow down somewhat, your skin may feel more sensitive (almost as if it’s sensing the air around you), and your mind may clear itself of anything that isn’t related to your quiet sound. When you pinpoint that sound, thank the emotion that helped you find it. Thank your fear.
Healthy, free-flowing fear helps you access your sensory skills, your instincts, and your intuition. When you need it to, your fear focuses all of your senses, scans your environment, and increases your ability to respond effectively to novel or changing situations. When your fear arises at this soft, subtle level, you’ll feel focused, centered, capable, and agile; you won’t feel agitated or obviously fearful. This soft focusing ability is one of the gifts of fear.
If you can access this subtle, curious form of fear when you’re confused or upset, you can access the information you need to calmly figure out what’s going on. You don’t need to feel afraid in order to access the gifts that your fear brings you, just as you don’t need to cry to access the gifts of sadness. This soft level of fear helps you focus on your instinctual knowledge as it connects you to your surroundings. This focus helps you stand upright, lean forward a bit, and bring your instincts and your intuition to the present moment.
Whereas the gifts of sadness focus you inward on what you need to release in order to relax, the gifts of fear bring you a forward, listening, sensing capacity that will help you interact with your environment and other people. If you can rely on fear’s calm, listening, sensing stance, you will be able to read people and situations empathically. It’s a wonderful emotion—but, then, all of them are! They’re like an amazing toolkit, full of magic, which is why it’s so bizarre that we’ve been taught to distrust our emotions.
What Grounding Will Do For You. Getting Grounded is an intrapersonal skill that supports the following aspects of empathy:
Emotion Contagion—grounding can help you calm yourself when you’re in the presence of intense emotions
Empathic Accuracy—grounding can help you focus yourself so that you can identify emotions and your empathic perceptions more accurately
Emotion Regulation—grounding and focusing can give you the internal stability you need to organize and work with your emotions intentionally
All of these aspects will give you an excellent foundation for clearer Perspective Taking, Concern for Others, and Perceptive Engagement
In regard to your emotional style, grounding supports your Resilience by giving you the internal resources you need to recover quickly when you need to and to slow down and take your time when it’s important to stay present with difficult issues. Grounding also supports your Outlook by helping you down-regulate from any kind of intense emotional activation, so that you can focus more calmly on your situation. It will also help you increase your Self-awareness, as you learn to manage your arousal and relaxation and become more able to tune in to yourself; develop fluid Sensitivity to Context, so you can tune in to others by focusing outward or tune out by intentionally turning your focus inward; and increase the precision of your Attention.
HOW TO GROUND YOURSELF
To ground yourself, you intentionally relax yourself and imagine breathing any tension downward, as if you’re gathering tension and exhaling it down through your abdomen and into your pelvis, thighs, calves, and feet—and then into the ground. Next, when you’re settled and calmer, you return to the subtle attention and focus you used when you listened for that quiet sound and welcomed the gifts of fear. That’s it; that’s the practice. When you’re able to release tension intentionally, connect to the ground, and refocus yourself, you’re done. The subtle gifts of sadness and fear belong to you, they work nicely together, and they’re easy to access. That’s it!
If you’ve learned any martial arts, you’ll recognize grounding as a process of connecting your chi—or your life force—with the earth so that you can be more stable and resourced. Before martial artists are allowed to jump and kick, they must first learn to stabilize and ground themselves so they can become aware of their posture, their balance, and their center of gravity. Getting Grounded provides this same stability to sensitive and empathic people, who can become physically destabilized when there are too many emotions flying around, when they’re in the presence of conflict, or when they’re feeling tense.
If you empathically think back to disquieting situations in your own life, you’ll probably recall that your body became rigid, that you may have lost your focus and your ability to relax yourself, and that you may have disconnected from the experience and become preoccupied, inattentive, or spaced out. Sometimes, those responses are fine, but if they’re your only responses during trouble, you won’t be able to develop strong empathic or interactive skills. If the troubles and difficulties of human interaction regularly unground, unfocus, and destabilize you, this simple grounding and focusing process will help you begin to develop Emotional Regulation skills. The simple acts of breathing intentionally and imagining yourself connecting to the earth as you let go of tension—and then reengaging with your soft focusing abilities—will help you reconnect to your emotional and physical center of gravity and to the intelligence inherent in your emotions. It seems very simple, I know, but that’s the point. Empaths need skills that are easily accessible, emotion honoring, simple, and totally portable.
If you prefer longer meditations, you can extend this grounding practice. You can breathe into each area of your body separately as you gather and release tension from every part of yourself. Or you can enhance this grounding practice with mindfulness practices from other traditions. But if you have only a few minutes each day to check in, this practice will help you connect with yourself, release tensions, and refocus yourself intentionally and swiftly.
You can also engage in activities that are grounding in and of themselves, such as exercise, swimming, hot baths, massage, good sex, playing with animals, being with loved ones, playing with children, eating delicious food, doing art, playing music, viewing art, being in nature, reading, doing math or science, organizing your physical space, or any of a hundred healing and grounding activities. If something brings you a sense of delicious relaxation and healing focus, it’s a grounding practice. Simple.
As you observe your life empathically, ask yourself how many relaxing, delightful, and grounding activities exist in your normal day or week. If you can think of very few naturally grounding activities, you might want to make this simple grounding practice a regular part of your life for a while. Then see whether you can find time for intentional relaxation (we’ll talk more about finding that time in the next chapter). If you want to be a healthy and happy empath, relaxation and grounding are vital skills.
DEFINING YOUR BOUNDARIES
People talk a great deal about setting boundaries, but the concept is sort of hazy. Often, when people talk about setting boundaries, they mean that you should tell people “no” and take more time for yourself. However, if you have very permeable interpersonal boundaries, this kind of verbal boundary setting can be pretty ineffectual. I work with a lot of empathic people who’ve tried every form of assertive communication skill, but when someone really needs them—boom!—their hyperempathic tendencies kick in automatically, and they lose their resolve.
Learning to define your boundaries certainly involves communication skills, but I’ve found that you can’t start there. In fact, I’d say that boundary definition is more of a behavioral and developmental process, in which you actually have to retrain yourself and learn to identify yourself as a distinct individual with distinct emotions, ideas, preferences, and requirements. This, in turn, makes you more able to understand others as distinct individuals. In fact, new research is connecting the capacity for self-identification with the development of empathic skills. Doris Bischof-Köhler, who created the teddy bear and spoon experiment I wrote about in Chapter 2, added a second phase to her experiment, which tested whether the children who could empathize also had the ability to identify themselves in a mirror. Mirror self-recognition tests indicate the point at which infants develop the ability to identify themselves in a mirror. Before this stage, infants may think that the baby in the mirror is someone else or that there’s a baby behind the mirror somewhere. Mirror self-recognition abilities suggest that infants have developed the concept of a self.
In her experiments, Bischof-Köhler found that although some of the nonself-recognizing infants could empathize skillfully, all of the self-recognizers could. This would suggest that self-awareness is connected to the capacity to comprehend the selfhood of others (and their distinction from you)—and, therefore, to a capacity for skillful Perspective Taking and Perceptive Engagement. This is why I call Defining Boundaries a developmental process. You have to know who you are and where you begin and end before you can empathize skillfully; you first have to be able to identify and define your own boundaries.
Luckily, your boundaries already exist. You can sense them when people stare at you from behind, and you can feel their exact dimensions when you’re in a crowded elevator. In the metaphysical community, this tangible sense of your personal space and your boundaries is called the aura, while in the neurological field, this personal space is now understood to be a part of your proprioceptive system. This system of neural and muscular networks in your brain and body actually maps your position in relation to everything around you. Your proprioceptive system works in every second to help you stand, balance, move, and understand your body’s relationship to its environment. (For more information on your proprioceptive system, see the excellent book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, by science writers Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee.)
Your proprioceptors map your body and your environment so that you can interact competently in the physical world. Your proprioceptors map your home, your car, your tools, your workplace, and all aspects of your physical habitat. If your proprioceptive system doesn’t work well, you’ll be pretty clumsy—you’ll drop things, trip over your own feet, or walk into walls. Thus, this system is an important part of your basic physical awareness.
Your proprioceptors also map a specific area around your body that is called your peripersonal space. This space extends all around you and out to the reach of your arms and legs—about eighteen to thirty inches in front of and behind you, on both sides of you, above you, and below you. It is the exact dimension that most aura readers consider to be the size of a healthy aura. In the rest of this book, I’ll focus on this area as your peripersonal boundary; however, if you require this area to be an aura, go ahead and trade the word aura for boundary; I now see them as one and the same thing. This peripersonal space is the area that you control and define, and you can use it to actually teach yourself how to set effective interpersonal boundaries.
If you can’t yet wrap your mind around the idea of peripersonal space, no problem. Your proprioceptors are already brilliant at mapping territory, including imaginal territory, such as your avatar in a video game or the imaginal walls you create when you’re pretending to be a mime. If you can’t yet sense this boundary, you can use your imaginal skills as a kind of placeholder. (I use the word imaginal intentionally, and I contrast it with the word imaginary, which means pretend or unreal.) Your imaginal skills are both unreal and real in very important ways—they’re creative skills that recruit your empathic, emotive, and artistic abilities to help you engage with ideas, concepts, and structures that may not be visible or tangible (such as your avatar or your mimed walls), yet they have their own kind of reality. Your real-but-unseen proprioceptive system is ready and able to help you create an imaginal boundary that will actually become tangible to you.
Learning to develop a tangible sense of your personal boundaries is very important if you’re currently dealing with low empathic awareness, because this practice will help you develop better Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation skills. You have to know where you begin and end so that you can scan through your body and your environment to properly identify emotional stimuli. On the other hand, this skill is also important if you’re a hyperempath who experiences a great deal of Emotion Contagion. Defining your boundaries will help you develop a clear self/other distinction so that you can begin to identify the differences between your own emotions and the emotions of others. Defining your boundaries will help you develop better emotional hygiene.
This self/other distinction is a source of confusion for many people who want to develop their empathy. I see people who intentionally try to de-self and become one with others emotionally so that they can empathize, and these people would strongly question my suggestion that people with low empathy should learn to define their interpersonal boundaries. I understand their confusion. When people have low empathic skills, such that they aren’t aware of emotions or can’t understand why people would feel this or that emotion (“I don’t feel it, so why should you?”), teaching them to set boundaries seems counterintuitive. Aren’t their boundaries too rigid already? I say “no,” and I see the situation of empathic insensitivity as a kind of analog to hyperempathy.
In a hyperempath, the self is not distinct, whereas in a low-empathy person, the other is not distinct. In both cases, there is boundary impairment combined with an inability to skillfully balance the needs of the self with the needs of the other. In both cases, learning to identify and work with the already-existing peripersonal space helps people identify self and other tangibly: “My clearly defined boundaries tell me where I begin and end, and now I understand where you begin and end.” Clearly defined boundaries lead to clearer empathic awareness, no matter how empathically receptive you currently are.
In our distracted and emotionally confused culture, most of us don’t see ourselves as distinct individuals with clear boundaries, and this truly impedes our ability to empathize skillfully. Luckily, this second empathic skill directly and imaginally addresses this problem. Empaths need safe space and privacy, and this skill helps you create both of them quickly, easily, and intentionally.
What Defining Your Boundaries Will Do for You. Boundary Definition is an intrapersonal skill that addresses these aspects of empathy:
Emotion Contagion—defining your boundaries helps you understand where you begin and end so that you can identify where emotions originate, and this, of course, increases your Empathic Accuracy
Emotion Regulation—defining your boundaries gives you a portable private space where you can work with your emotions in each moment
Perspective Taking—knowing where you begin and end helps you develop clearer self/other awareness
Perceptive Engagement—clear empathy is about the other, and knowing yourself more clearly allows you to meet the needs of others perceptively while also caring for yourself respectfully
In terms of the six dimensions of emotional style, the combination of this skill and your Getting Grounded practice is a full emotional-style healing that will help you develop a calm, focused, intuitive, sensitive, well-defined, and self-aware personal space in which you can address each dimension of your emotional style, from your Resilience and Outlook, to your Social Intuition and Self-awareness, to your Sensitivity to Context and your Attention.
HOW TO DEFINE YOUR BOUNDARIES
Please seat yourself comfortably and ground and focus yourself, if you can. (If not, it’s okay.) Now stand up and reach your arms straight out to either side of you (if you cannot use your arms in this way, please use your imagination). Imagine that your fingertips are touching the edges of a lighted oval-shaped bubble that encompasses your private, personal space. Reach your arms out in front of you and then raise them above your head. Feel how far the edges of your peripersonal boundary are from your body. Your boundary should be an arm’s length away from you at all points—in front of you, behind you, on either side of you, above you, and even underneath you. When you can imagine this oval-shaped area all the way around you, drop your arms and let them relax.
Close your eyes if you need to as you imagine that the outer edges of this oval, which is around and above you and even underneath the floor, is now lit up in a bright neon color. Choose a very bright, lively color. (If you can’t visualize, imagine a clear sound or a distinct movement at this distance from your body or draw a circle on the floor if you need to.) Make your boundary quite obvious in whatever way you can. This is all you need to do to define your peripersonal boundary; it’s a very simple exercise. Just feel or imagine yourself standing inside this oval-shaped bubble, as if you’re a yolk standing firmly inside the protective eggshell of your own boundary.
As you sense your boundary around yourself, return to your calm focus if you can, and ask yourself: “Do I claim this much room in the world?” As you connect with your brightly lit boundary, ask yourself whether it’s normal to feel completely in control of this area around your body. For most of us, the answer is absolutely not! For most of us, our personal boundary is our skin itself; we don’t live as distinct people who have enough room to live and breathe freely.
Remember this as you work with your boundary. You may feel frustrated at first, because you may not know, psychologically speaking, how to maintain proper boundaries or how to take your own place in the world. Don’t feel alone in this—it’s a situation we all face. Nevertheless, you have your peripersonal space, and you have a right to it. In fact, it’s the area your brain already identifies as yours, even if you didn’t realize that it existed before today. Now that you know it exists, get acquainted with your peripersonal boundaries. Get a feeling of having some space in the world, of knowing where you begin and end, and of having some privacy.
Now, thank the emotions that help you create your personal boundaries. Thank your free-flowing soft anger and your authentic, appropriate, and soft shame. Anger helps you claim your voice, standpoint, and territory and respond to any boundary violations coming from the exterior world. Shame—anger’s close friend and partner—helps you moderate your voice and standpoint so that you don’t unnecessarily hurt yourself or others. Healthy, authentic shame helps you avoid any boundary violations that may come from you.
Isn’t it funny? The gifts of fear help you focus yourself, while sadness grounds you, and anger and shame help you set respectful boundaries. People generally avoid these emotions—yet look at what that would mean: if you kick fear out the door, you lose your focus and your intuition; if you avoid sadness, you won’t be able to let go, ground yourself, or relax; and if you throw anger and shame onto the trash heap, you lose your ability to set and maintain effective boundaries! As we can all see, trouble with boundaries, intuition, grounding, and relaxation—and endless trouble with emotions—are normal, everyday problems for most people. But they don’t have to be. You can set effective boundaries and reframe your approach to emotions. You can take a moment to sense your calm listening state and thank your fear. You can feel your grounding and thank your sadness. You can connect with the feeling of being safe and protected inside your own peripersonal space—you can light up the edges of your boundary again—and thank your healthy anger and shame. If you understand what they do and how they work, emotions can improve your life in amazing ways.
BREATHING WITH YOUR BOUNDARIES
Here’s a simple exercise to help you become more aware of your peripersonal boundaries right now: Ground and focus yourself if you can. Sit comfortably and imagine your boundary at that arm’s-length distance and imagine that its edges are brightly lit or very distinctive. Choose an intense color for the edges, such as lime green or electric blue; your boundary should be exceedingly noticeable to you. (If you can’t visualize, try to imagine a noticeable sensation or movement at the edges of your boundary.) Take a deep breath and imagine your boundary expanding a few inches in all directions (just as your torso does when you inhale). As you exhale, imagine your personal boundary resuming its healthy arm’s-length distance from your body at all points. Feel your brightly lit boundary all around you, above you, and under the floor. Breathe in again and feel the edges of your boundary expand slightly in all directions. Breathe out and allow your boundary to resume its correct distance from your body. You’re done! You can breathe with your boundary as often as you like—it’s a simple, healing way to help your proprioceptive network connect viscerally with your new sense of your peripersonal boundaries.
Some quick pointers: You can use your imaginal skills as a placeholder for your personal boundaries if you can’t envision or feel them just yet. For instance, you can fill your entire peripersonal space with your favorite natural environment by imagining yourself surrounded at arm’s length by a shoreline, mountain, or desert scene. (Again, you don’t have to see this scene; you can hear it, feel it, or even smell it if you can’t visualize.) You can use this nature scene to calm the area around your body, which will help you inhabit your peripersonal space psychologically. If you can imagine yourself enveloped in your favorite mountain or oceanside scene, then you can use your Einfühlung skills to surround yourself with a healing sense of peacefulness. Also, you can imagine lighting up your boundary and breathing with it every day; soon it will be able to help you define yourself in health-building ways.
BURNING CONTRACTS
Burning Contracts is one of my favorite empathic mindfulness skills, because it teaches you how to channel your emotions intentionally. It’s a practice in which your emotions can help you understand more about yourself, your behaviors, your decisions, your interactions, and your expectations. Burning Contracts also makes use of your Einfühlung capacity to feel your way into the crux of an issue and then use your imaginal skills to bring full-bodied resolution to ideas, behaviors, and situations that confuse, trouble, or torment you. Your imaginal skills can help you access issues from your past and from the wordless depths of your inner life. They can also help you question fundamental aspects of your identity without losing yourself in the process.
When I work with overwhelmed hyperempaths, I rely on contract burning a great deal, because if hyperempaths don’t have any skills, their ungrounded, unfocused, and boundary-impaired bodies often run on a troubling kind of autopilot. When I was living this particular form of empathic nightmare, I called myself a runaway healer, and I likened myself to a truck heading downhill with no brakes: “Let me fix you! I know I can fix you!!!” Even though I intellectually knew better, I found myself powerfully drawn to emotionally unstable people and frankly unsafe situations, where I performed heavy empathic labor (unpaid and unacknowledged) and teetered continually on the edge of burnout. I wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t healthy. In many cases, I wasn’t even valued—yet still, I magically found places where my empathic abilities had to kick into overdrive.
Conventional forms of therapy and meditation didn’t touch this tendency in me, and they don’t tend to touch other hyperempaths either, because empathic runaway healing behavior isn’t something that can be talked away, thought away, breathed away, or chanted away. Empathic abilities are crucial for social functioning, they’re powerfully preverbal, and they’re evolutionarily very ancient—which means they can’t just be talked to, argued with, or soothed away. Instead, you need to meet them where they are, work in their territory with their language, and engage with them in ways they can understand—which means you need to work emotively, empathically, and imaginally. Burning Contracts helps you do that.
The empathic practice of contract burning supports your equilibrium by allowing you to separate yourself from behaviors and attitudes that destabilize you and to treat them as contractual obligations that you entered into for some purpose but can now choose to end. This practice helps you envision your behaviors and attitudes as tendencies rather than concrete certainties. When you’re grounded, focused, and well defined, you can approach your behaviors not as life sentences but as inclinations that you can now choose to support or release, depending on your intentions.
For instance, if you have trouble with certain emotions like anger or anxiety and if you lose your empathy when others are feeling those emotions, you can observe and then burn your behavioral contracts with those emotions and restore your emotional flexibility. If you’re unhappy with distracted or addicted behaviors in yourself or if you lose all of your perspective-taking skills when someone else displays those behaviors, you can burn your contracts with those particular behaviors and begin to make separations from them. If you’re unable to function skillfully in certain relationships, you can study, learn about, and burn your contracts with those relationships—not to end them, but to reorganize the behaviors that control your interactions with others. This empathic process of contract burning helps you meet each of your behaviors, attitudes, and stances from a grounded position of present-day choice and personal autonomy. It also gives you a way to channel emotions intentionally and to become more aware of the gifts and challenges that live inside each of your reactions, stances, behaviors, and emotions.
What Burning Contracts Will Do for You. This intrapersonal skill addresses all six aspects of empathy:
Emotion Contagion—you can bring forward, observe, and burn your contracts with any emotion that troubles or confuses you, which will increase your Empathic Accuracy and your Emotion Regulation skills
Perspective Taking—you can disentangle yourself from concrete expectations of how things are supposed to be, so that you can see the world from other perspectives and restore your Concern for Others
Perceptive Engagement—you can free yourself from unworkable behaviors so you can then learn how to be perceptive and flexible enough to meet the needs of others skillfully
In terms of the six dimensions of your emotional style, Burning Contracts addresses and supports all of these as well, because you can burn your contracts with any area of these dimensions that don’t work for you. Whether it’s Resilience (from slow to recover to fast to recover), Outlook (from negative to positive), Social Intuition (from socially intuitive to puzzled), Self-awareness (from self-aware to self-opaque), Sensitivity to Context (from tuned in to tuned out), or Attention (from unfocused to focused), Burning Contracts will help you observe, become aware of, understand the purpose for, and reorganize any aspect of your emotional style that troubles you.
HOW TO BURN CONTRACTS
To burn a contract with an idea, behavior, stance, or relationship, begin by focusing and grounding yourself. Illuminate your boundary with a very bright color (if you can) and breathe normally. Imagine unrolling a large piece of blank parchment paper right in front of you. (If you can’t visualize, use your hands to actually unroll this imaginary parchment.) Some people like to imagine that this parchment is rolled out flat on a table, but I like to imagine mine in front of my body, as if it were a whiteboard or a movie screen. This parchment should have a calming feeling to it. It shouldn’t be bright or jazzy; it should be a gentle color that can absorb whatever you place onto it. Keep this roll of parchment inside your personal boundary for now, as this will help you develop more awareness of your peripersonal space.
With your parchment in front of you, you can use your Einfühlung skills to empathically project, envision, write, speak, or just think your distress onto it. You can project your emotional expectations—how you’re supposed to feel and express yourself—onto the parchment. You can project your intellectual stances—how you’re supposed to think, what you’re supposed to think, how you’re supposed to be intelligent. You can project physical rules—how your body is supposed to look and perform for others. You can project spiritual expectations—how you’re supposed to meditate, pray, or behave in relation to spirituality or religion. Or, you can project entire relationships—images of yourself, your partner, and the ways you relate to one another—right onto the parchment. When you can get these behaviors, relationships, and ideas out in front of you, you can begin to observe and individuate from them. In this protected space, you can see yourself not as a victim of your behaviors or the situations in your life, but as an upright individual who decides to act, relate, react, or behave in certain ways and who can now decide to behave differently.
If this imaginal visualization process doesn’t connect for you, please feel free to use an actual piece of paper and write or draw out these same rules, expectations, stances, and behaviors in words, sketches, or even big scribbles. What we’re doing is creating a way for you to express yourself emotionally and imaginally in a safe, ceremonial way. We’re also helping you become aware of situations that may only exist right now in behaviors and beliefs—they may not be fully conscious yet. This process brings your emotional and empathic awareness to situations, ideas, and behaviors you’re already experiencing and struggling with in real life. This is an imaginal Einfühlung process, but it’s also absolutely real.
As these behaviors, beliefs, and postures move out in front of you, you may feel emotions rising up inside you. This is absolutely fantastic. It means that your emotions are awake to the process and will contribute the exact gifts and skills you need to address these issues. Remain focused, intensify your grounding if you need to, and brighten your boundary so you’ll have a greater sense of definition around yourself. Welcome your emotions—whatever they are—and use them to move these ideas and behaviors out of the shadows of habit and into your conscious control. If you feel angry, it’s safe to express it here. You can throw these ideas onto your parchment (or draw intensely on your real paper), or you can imagine a color, movement, sound, or quality that you associate with anger and place it alongside your images. If you feel fearful, you can speed up your movements and fling these ideas out of you. If you feel sad, you can lay these ideas onto your parchment slowly and mournfully. If you feel depressed, you can darken the images or your parchment (or slow your movements to a crawl), as you welcome your depression to this process.
Don’t repress your emotions or pretend you’re feeling something else. Don’t draw rainbows and dancing kittens if you’re enraged. Be emotionally honest. You’re safe here. Remember that you’re focused, grounded, and safely protected inside your own peripersonal boundary, and you can breathe in and exhale downward to intentionally relax yourself whenever you need to. You don’t have to repress, avoid, or demonize your emotions here. You can just get to know them. You can feel the way you feel, name your emotions, and learn how to work with them. You can complete the actions your emotions require and learn how to respond in many different ways as you learn how these responses feel in your body. This is what channeling your emotions feels like—it’s dramatic, imaginal, emotive play that helps you increase your Empathic Accuracy and your Emotion Regulation skills at the same time.
If your first parchment (or your real paper) becomes full, move it aside and create a fresh one. Keep working through the situation until you feel some sense of completion. When you feel done for now, and your parchment (or parchments) is full of words, images, feelings, or sounds, please roll it up. This parchment personifies the contract you’ve forged with this behavior, belief, attitude, or relationship. Roll this contract (or your real paper) tightly so that you can’t see what’s inside it—in this way, it immediately becomes less powerful. Tie your contract or your paper with a cord, if that feels right. Grasp your rolled-up contract and imagine tossing it outside your boundary and away from you. When it lands, imagine burning it up with whatever emotional energy feels right. You can blast it with anger, strike it with fear, engulf it with sadness, or use your depressive energy to create a funeral pyre. Your emotions will provide the exact intensity you need to destroy that contract and set yourself free. If you used a real piece of paper, you may want to tie it up strongly with many pieces of twine, throw it away, burn it, bury it, or rip it into tiny pieces. Whatever feels right is the perfect thing to do.
When your contract is gone, refocus yourself, check your grounding by breathing in and releasing any tension you might feel, and brighten your peripersonal boundary once again. You’ll probably notice changes in your skills—you may feel a difference in your grounding, you may sense a stronger focus or a relaxation of your focus, or you may sense changes in the condition of your boundary. If so, congratulate yourself—your imaginal and proprioceptive systems are communicating with you empathically! Note each of these changes and gently bring yourself back to center; breathe in and reground and refocus yourself gently, and set your vibrant boundary at a healthy arm’s length away from you at all points. That’s it!
Burning Contracts is emotional channeling. It helps you raft through the eddies and rapids of your emotions. Instead of haphazardly expressing your emotions at the outer world (or haphazardly repressing them back into your inner world), this process helps you become empathically aware of each of your emotions. Your grounding skills allow you to stay focused and integrated, even when strong emotions flow through you; your defined personal boundaries create a protected and sacred space where you can do your empathic work in safety and privacy; and your ability to imagine your behaviors and stances as contracts (rather than unchangeable destinies written in stone) allows you to amend and destroy them at will. This skill can work wonders in situations where you repeat behaviors (like my runaway healing) for what seems to be no good reason. If you can use your imaginal skills and your Einfühlung capacity to feel your way into the behavior, you’ll discover absolutely amazing emotional truths that you simply can’t get to with mere words (or with practices in which the focus is to extinguish your emotions).
You can burn contracts at any time and in any place. No one needs to know you’re doing it. Once you’re focused and grounded, you can imagine your peripersonal boundary as a kind of brightly colored, portable sacred space. Within your sacred space, you can do whatever work you need to in complete privacy. You can pull out a parchment at work, while you’re driving, or even when you’re in the middle of an argument (though it’s very hard to remember your skills when you’re fighting). This process is fully portable. It’s a fully embodied, emotionally welcoming, empathic process that was created for people with busy lives; it can be used whenever and wherever you like.
Conscious Complaining is an emotional-channeling technique that’s goofy and surprisingly healing. Although focus, grounding, and clear boundary definition are things to aspire to, no one can maintain them at all times. In fact, constant focus isn’t actually healthy (you have to be able to let go and drift every now and then), and life is a drag if all you do is work. Resting, daydreaming, fooling around, laughing, napping, procrastinating, and playing are extremely important parts of a whole and happy life. It’s important to keep things light. However, if you can’t ground, focus, or define yourself when you want to, that’s a horse of a different color.
It’s easy to get into troubling moods or stagnant places and lose all of your skills and forget all of your emotional wisdom; it’s easy to fall into emotional repression and incompetent expression. When this happens (and it will), your ignored and mismanaged emotions will intensify and repeat themselves. If you continue to ignore your emotions (and you will), they’ll become more intense. What started out as mobile, supportive, action-requiring emotions can become monotonous, tormenting, and chronic responses to the world. If this is your current situation, worry not! You can use each of your new skills to address this situation. For instance, you can ground and refocus yourself through relaxation and deep breathing or simply by taking a walk in nature or taking a hot bath. Then, you can define your boundaries to create sacred space, and burn your contracts with your cycling thoughts and emotions. However, there’s a much easier and goofier way to restore your grounding and your flow: Conscious Complaining to the rescue!
I first learned of the importance of complaining in Barbara Sher’s wonderful book Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, which puts forth the idea that wishes and dreams are not silly diversions; rather, they are actually crystal clear pointers that can lead you to your most important work. Sher writes that if you dream constantly of writing, training horses, traveling, going back to school, or becoming a doctor, that dream is actually a specific treasure map that will lead you to the central vocation of your life. Hers is not an ordinary self-help book, because Sher has truly lived the material inside it and knows that moving toward your dreams is often the most terrifying, ridiculous, infuriating, and impossible task imaginable—which is why so few people attempt it and why so many attempts fail. Sher’s position is that if you don’t look at the problems, the terrors, and the impossibilities in a conscious way, you simply won’t survive the often-harrowing process of bringing your dreams into this world. She suggests taking regular timeouts to complain—both to de-steam and to get a clearer understanding of whatever it is that’s holding you back.
Although Sher suggests finding a complaining partner (we’ll do that in Chapter 8), I modified the practice because there are very few people in this world who can deal with the amount of complaining I can produce. Most people are so uncomfortable in their own skins that they can’t let me be uncomfortable in mine; they want to stop me, fix me, or help me see the world in a peppier light (which is just a form of repression if I’m in a foul mood). So I created a solitary practice for complaining, which has been a real lifesaver. Now, every time I lose all faith or come up against impossible obstacles, I can whine, moan, kvetch, and reinvigorate myself with the grim truth of what I’m experiencing. When I’m done, I’m not depressed—instead, I’m often able to get right back to work, because I know exactly what the problems are and just how hard life can be. This practice doesn’t bring me down; it lifts me up, because it clears all the complaints out of my system, helps me be emotionally honest, and restores my grounding, my focus, and my sense of humor.
What Conscious Complaining Will Do for You. This intrapersonal skill addresses the first three aspects of empathy so that you can clear the decks and become more able to empathize skillfully:
Emotion Contagion—you can verbally identify and work your way through any situation of emotional overwhelm, which increases your Empathic Accuracy and helps you create some distance from situations or emotions that destabilize you
Emotion Regulation—complaining consciously and intentionally is an excellent way to regulate your emotions while you listen to, honor, and explore them
In regard to the six dimensions of your emotional style, this safe and private expressive practice addresses your Resilience in both directions by helping you slow down and focus on troubling situations so that you can recover more quickly. This practice also helps improve your Outlook in both directions, because you really need a safe way to focus on your allegedly negative emotions so that you can develop full-scale emotional intelligence. Conscious Complaining also helps increase your Self-awareness by helping you become more honest about how you truly feel, and it helps with your Attention levels in both directions as you learn to focus intently on your internal state, resolve the issue, and then move into a soft focus that allows you to be gently aware of multiple environmental inputs.
HOW TO COMPLAIN CONSCIOUSLY
Ready? You can be grounded or not, inside your strong boundary or not—it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you’re in a foul mood and you have some privacy. Start your complaining with some sort of phrase, like “I’m complaining now!” If you’re inside, you can complain to the walls or furniture, to a mirror, or to whatever strikes your fancy. If you’re outside, you can complain to plants and trees, animals, nature, the sky, the ground, or your God. If you’re a strong complainer, like I am, you might want to create a complaining shrine for yourself (maybe on top of a dresser or an out-of-theway table), with supportive pictures of grumpy cats, bratty kids, barking dogs, political cartoons, and whatever else calls to your complaining nature.
When you’ve found your perfect complaining site, let yourself go and give a voice to your dejected, hopeless, sarcastic, nasty, bratty self. Bring dark humor out of the shadows and really whine and swear about the frustrations, stupidities, impossibilities, and absurdities of your situation. Complain for as long as you like (you’ll be surprised at how quickly this works). When you run out of things to say, thank whatever you’ve been whining or yelling at. Thank the furniture, the walls, the ground, the trees, your complaining shrine, or your God for listening, and then end your complaining session by bowing, shaking off, and doing something really fun. That’s it!
People who try this practice are astonished to find that complaining doesn’t pull them further down into the doldrums. In fact, most people find that they start laughing during these complaining sessions, because they can finally break through stagnation and repression and tell it like it is—without repercussions. It’s an amazingly freeing practice in which you restore your flow again, you tell the truth again, you clear the decks, and you get an important time-out. And because this is a solitary practice, there’s no danger of losing face or hurting someone else’s feelings—instead, it’s like a quick lube for your soul. Afterward, you’ll find that you can revisit your struggles with renewed vigor and vision. Conscious Complaining is especially helpful in a life of striving, empathic good works, and personal growth, where complaining is often considered less than saintly (which is a shame, because all by itself, a prohibition on complaining can trigger unresolving, repetitive mood states like worry, situational depression, and apathy).
When you don’t pay attention to the difficulties of trying to live a conscious, empathic life in a sea of distractions and emotional illiteracy, the conscious life becomes less and less appealing, and the distractions start calling to you and shimmering seductively. If you only make time for work, and you never make time for play and rest or for kvetching, grumbling, whining, and complaining, your emotional flow will evaporate, you’ll deteriorate into perfectionism, and you’ll have no fun at all. Conscious Complaining gives a voice to your struggles, and in so doing, it restores your flow, your energy, your emotional honesty, your sense of humor, and your hope. It may sound contradictory, but you just can’t be happy unless you complain.
COMPLAINING VERSUS POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS
Positive thinking and affirmations are the opposite of Conscious Complaining. They’re also a function of valencing, since many (most?) positive-thinking programs valence the hell out of emotions. The idea behind positive thinking is that you hold on to thoughts and emotions that may get in the way of your health and well-being. Thoughts like “I’m unlovable” or “No one can be truly successful” or “Life is too hard” can really slow down your forward progress. Positive-thinking techniques teach you to unearth and then replace those thoughts with more helpful affirmations, such as “I have love around me all the time” or “Success belongs to me” or “Life is absolutely wonderful.” Seems like a good idea, right?
Well, although it can be quite healing to ferret out interior statements that crush your well-being, positive thinking tends to be too much of a quick fix (and it tends to be emotionally repressive). If you look at the practice empathically, you’ll understand the problem. Positive affirmations look at issues—for instance, a lack of love or an eating disorder—and apply a kind of reverse psychology. Instead of helping you sit with the issues and honor the emotions that are trying to arise, positive affirmations teach you to override the real situation with enforced statements that erase the true-but-uncomfortable emotions. Affirmations such as “I am surrounded by kind and loving people” or “Food is healing and slenderizing for me” do provide a more pleasant inner dialogue, but they don’t tell the truth or honor the truth that’s trying to come forward with the help of your emotions. These affirmations don’t speak to the myriad issues behind your eating problem, nor do they heal or address your broken and weary heart—and your emotions know it. Most positive affirmations elevate verbal–intellectual statements above emotional realities. In essence, you’re telling yourself how to feel instead of feeling the way you feel.
Empathically speaking, I haven’t seen or experienced deep or lasting change with positive affirmations. I’ve seen people deal with the surface of their issues, and I’ve seen them get some of the things they wish for, but I haven’t seen them deepen or mature empathically. Look at it this way: If you place a conflicting or overriding verbal command in the midst of strong emotions, you’ll set up warring factions within yourself. Each of your affirmations will deny or repress the truth of the situation, which means that your emotions will have to intensify in order to get you to wake up and take effective, emotionally coherent action. Positive affirmations attempt to deal with deep emotional issues in incomplete and repressive ways.
Conscious Complaining is healing because it speaks to your real issues from within your actual emotive sense of things—it addresses your actual concerns, and it welcomes your real emotions and gives them a voice. When you can complain consciously, you don’t sugarcoat or attempt to transform anything; you simply tell it like it is. When you allow yourself to be yourself, and when you allow your emotions to tell the truth without valencing them, no one gets hurt. When you can stand up and complain in a conscious way (rather than just griping to people without any purpose), your vision and your focus return, your emotions flow, you release your stored-up tensions, and you get to have the fun of translating everything you feel into choice words and phrases. And then it’s done—and you move on.
If we have to valence thoughts and ideas, then let’s look at them intelligently and empathically: “positive” thinking is helpful when it’s true, just as “negative” thinking is helpful when it’s true. If the phrase “I’m wonderful and marvelous!” comes barreling out of you, it’s a sign of contentment moving through you in its own way and its own time. Embrace it! It’s true! You are wonderful and marvelous! Similarly, if the phrase “I can’t go on this way!” comes out of you, it’s a sign of sadness, fatigue, or situational depression moving through you in its own way and its own time. Embrace it! It’s true! You can’t go on this way—so don’t try! Use your skills, bring your emotions forward, and deal with the truth of whatever you’re feeling—whatever that truth may be. Dance with your marvelousness in its time, and complain, cry, whine, and burn contracts with your situational depression in its time. Then, move on to your next emotion, your next idea, or your next task. Your Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation skills aren’t supposed to create an unmoving and unchangeable sense of slaphappiness in you; their purpose is to help you clearly identify your emotions and respond uniquely to each of them in turn.
Conscious Complaining will help you develop your emotional vocabulary and your emotional awareness in safety and privacy and it will help you restore flow to repressed emotions or emotions that are stuck in a feedback loop. It will also help you refocus yourself and release ideas and behaviors that aren’t working anyway, which is naturally grounding. Conscious Complaining is a silly practice, but it has a serious purpose—to connect you to your real emotions in a safe, lighthearted way.
REJUVENATING YOURSELF
Our fifth empathic mindfulness skill is a rejuvenation practice that you can use whenever you need to, wherever you are. This empathic rejuvenation practice is very simple and takes almost no time at all; however, you can turn it into a long and luxurious practice when you have the time.
What Rejuvenating Yourself Will Do for You. This self-rejuvenation skill addresses the following aspects of empathy:
Emotion Contagion—you can fill your body and your personal space with the precise emotional and sensual feelings that make you feel wonderful
Emotion Regulation—this soothing practice helps you restore yourself to equilibrium and can even be used in the middle of a conflict or when you lose your focus, your grounding, and your emotional skills
Concern for Others—this rejuvenation practice creates a compassionate and loving internal environment that helps you feel compassion for others, which increases your capacity for Perceptive Engagement
In regard to your emotional styles, this simple rejuvenation practice increases your Resilience; it refreshes your Outlook; it makes Self-awareness delicious; it increases your Sensitivity to Context in a safe way by helping you learn how to tune in to relaxation and delight; and it helps you learn to soften your Attention intentionally as you rejuvenate yourself.
HOW TO REJUVENATE YOURSELF
If you’re ready, please sit down, breathe in, and ground yourself as you exhale. Just let go. Now, lean forward with good posture and focus yourself; imagine that your peripersonal boundaries are very bright and distinct at the correct arm’s-length distance from your body—in front of you, behind you, on either side of you, above you, and below the floor. Imagine your boundary as whole, distinctive, and vibrant.
In the space between your body and the edge of your boundary, imagine your favorite place in the world at your favorite time of day. For instance, use your full-bodied Einfühlung skills to feel yourself surrounded by a mountainside on a late spring evening, or beside a creek in a redwood grove at dawn, or in a cave on a tropical island where you can see and hear the ocean. Choose your favorite place and imagine it surrounding you. Remember that you can also feel or smell or sense this scene if visualizing isn’t your skill. Just surround yourself with a feeling of beauty and relaxation and delicious, sensual pleasure.
You may feel your focus soften here, and that’s perfectly fine. This is an interior exercise; you don’t need to be completely aware of the outside world. Let your focus drift naturally.
As you sense your gorgeous nature scene around you, breathe some of it into your body. Take a deep breath, and imagine breathing the felt sense of this peaceful, beautiful place into your body. Imagine embodying the way you feel when you’re in your favorite place. Breathe this feeling into your head and neck, and breathe it down into your chest and your arms and your hands. Breathe it in through your chest and abdomen and into your lower belly, and breathe it down into your legs and feet. Breathe this peaceful and delightful feeling into every part of your body. Fill yourself with this feeling of peace and beauty.
When you feel full, just let your body, your emotions, and your focus soften and relax. You can stay here for as long as you like. To complete this rejuvenation practice, bend over and touch the floor with both of your hands and let your head hang down. Just relax. You’re done. Thank the emotion that helped you rejuvenate yourself: these are the gifts of healthy, flowing joy. Joy arises to help you feel a blissful sense of expansiveness and connection to beauty, peace, and wonder.
You can keep this joyful nature scene around you at all times, or you can bring it forward specifically when you want to rejuvenate yourself. For me, it’s fun to imagine my nature scene around me at all times, because I can be where I am—in a traffic jam, on a plane, or in a meeting—and also be swimming in the warm water at Ke’e beach on Kauai or sitting next to a stream in a verdant redwood grove. Empathic and imaginal skills are excellent!
You can perform this rejuvenation practice every morning or evening, once each week, or whenever you like. Sometimes, you may feel like Rejuvenating Yourself hourly—go ahead; this is your practice now, and you can use it however you like.
BRINGING THESE PRACTICES TOGETHER
These empathic mindfulness skills belong to you now, and you can use them in whatever ways work for you. You can wake up in the morning, ground and focus yourself, imagine your boundary, and go on your way—or you can take your time with each skill if you need to. You can use very quick versions of Conscious Complaining throughout the day (my favorite is “Okay, I’m complaining. This sucks! Thank you, I’m done.”), or you can create a complaining shrine if you’re dealing with a lot of repressed or repetitive emotions. You can burn contracts quickly, or you can work extended contract-burning sessions into your day or week as needed.
You can rejuvenate and replenish yourself before bed with a few soothing breaths, or you can take specific rejuvenation breaks throughout your day. It’s up to you; these are your skills now. This is your empathic practice. I created these five simple empathic mindfulness skills because I understand the demands of real life and the way we actually live, and I don’t want to saddle you with a complex set of healthy activities that you don’t have time for. I want to make your empathic life more workable, more understandable, and more manageable.
In terms of your ability to empathize adeptly, these skills will help with an aspect of empathy that many hyperempathic people find challenging, and that’s Emotion Contagion.
HOW TO TELL IF AN EMOTION IS YOURS OR SOMEONE ELSE’S
A question I’m asked constantly is how to determine whether an emotion belongs to you or to someone else. The answer involves me asking you some additional questions, the first of which is: How well are you defining your own boundaries? When you can define your peripersonal space, you’ll have a physical and imaginal way to identify where you begin and end. For hyperempaths, this can be a game changer.
As I mentioned earlier, before I learned how to define my own boundaries, I felt every emotion around me, and I compared myself to a malfunctioning radio that picked up only static. Learning to ground and focus myself and set boundaries has helped me learn how to identify my own emotions and reactions so that I can tune into the difference between myself and others. Learning about my peripersonal boundaries has really helped me articulate my own sense of identity and contrast it with the very different identities of others. It has also helped my empathy mature from that place of runaway healing (where I compulsively fixed the problems of others because their problems hurt me) and into a more patient, eagle-eyed understanding of the natural life span of difficult situations. When I learned how to identify myself as a distinct individual, I was able to observe the pain, emotions, and anguish of others as something I could understand without having to ingest bodily, share viscerally, or fix immediately. Grounding myself and setting boundaries helped me moderate my overactive Emotion Contagion abilities, which, in turn, helped me develop better Empathic Accuracy and Emotional Regulation skills (because I wasn’t filled with the confusing static of everyone else’s emotions all day long).
Learning to set boundaries also works for people whose empathic awareness is low, because it helps them realize that their emotional realities end at a certain point and that other people live inside their own worlds with their own distinct emotional realities. So whether you’re emotionally hypersensitive or relatively insensitive, I want you to focus on your boundary-setting skills. That’s the first step in learning how to identify whether an emotion is yours or someone else’s.
The next step is to understand that sharing emotions with others is completely normal and absolutely crucial to the quality of your relationships. If your dear friends are laughing, laugh with them. If your mate is crying and you feel the sadness alongside him or her, then cry. If your dog suddenly sits up with alert wariness, track with your dog and use your own fear-based ability to find out what’s going on. Emotions are essential, action-requiring aspects of everything you think, learn, notice, and do. It’s absolutely normal to share emotions. And when you have your own emotional skills, shared emotions are just as easy to work with as internally generated emotions are. You just feel and identify the emotion, ask the questions and track back to the stimulus, and then perform the action for that emotion (or decide not to act if that stimulus is invalid). Then you move on to the next thing. Sharing emotions is normal—it’s the Emotion Contagion aspect of empathy.
In fact, if you think about it, Emotion Contagion is central to your Einfühlung capacity to appreciate art, music, comedy, drama, and literature. A novel that doesn’t move you emotionally is a failed novel; music that doesn’t touch you emotionally is boring; comedy that doesn’t send you into fits of laughter isn’t working right; and actors who can’t evoke emotions in you (or who clumsily do so) are considered bad actors. We actually pay good actors a great deal of money to emote on screen or on stage so that we can feel alongside them—and we put on lavish spectacles every year to reward actors with Emmys, Tonys, and Oscars specifically for their advanced Emotion Contagion skills. If you think about it, Emotion Contagion is not just normal—it’s actually something we value very, very highly.
So with the understanding that healthy boundaries help you identify your own emotions as distinct from the emotions of others; that emotional contagion is normal, healthy, and valued; and that you can work with any emotion (no matter what evoked it) if you can identify it and track back to its stimulus, I’ll now reapproach this question: Does it matter if an emotion is yours or someone else’s? When you have empathic skills, does it matter?
No matter where an emotion comes from, the process from stimulus to action is the same, as we learned in Chapter 4: you feel and identify the emoﾭtion, ask the question for the emotion, and track it back to its emotion-evoking stimulus. Is the emotion true for you, or is it true for another right now? That’s the way you tell whether the emotion belongs to you. If the emotion does belong to you, you complete its action; if it doesn’t belong to you, you use your grounding skills to down-regulate the emotion, refocus, and soothe yourself. Then you use your imaginal and proprioceptive skills to set your boundaries more distinctly and develop more precise emotional hygiene skills. With the help of your empathic mindfulness skills, you can gently teach yourself how to identify self and other.
This identification process may take a while, especially if you’re on either side of the pole of hyperempathy or low empathy. But with practice, you’ll be able to retrain yourself and develop better boundaries. This will, in turn, help you develop stronger Emotion Regulation skills and clearer Empathic Accuracy. Your empathic skills flow from your capacity for self-recognition and self-definition (as Doris Bischof-Köhler discovered with babies who could recognize themselves in a mirror). As you develop stronger self-awareness, you’ll become more able to identify where emotions come from and what their stimuli are.
But I have a gentle warning, because your brain is somewhat of a trickster (okay, it’s a big trickster). Your brain loves to make up reasons for everything. Since all humans have all human emotions, any emotion you pick up can have validity and truth for you at any given moment. This is fine. If you can find a reason that an emotion might be true, then you can simply complete the action for that emotion and go on your way. But there’s a trickier situation to be aware of, and it tends to occur in the presence of emotions that people have mistakenly valenced into the so-called negative category. When an emotion is characterized as negative, we tend to ignore, suppress, or repress it, and subsequently, we don’t develop practical skills with that emotion. What I’ve noticed in my own emotional evolution is that when I have trouble with an emotion, I’ll be strangely drawn to people who overexpress or repress that emotion. It’s almost as if my organism is drawn (like a moth to a flame) to people who are living out their trouble with that emotion. And even though that emotion is currently problematic for me, I’ll drop into a kind of unconscious contagion and feel the emotion vicariously alongside the troubled people (usually while I criticize them for being so out of control—hello, my shadow!). When I catch myself doing that, I complete the action for that emotion within myself, and I burn contracts with that emotion and those people (and my old approach to that emotion). Then I move forward.
Understand that burning your contracts with people doesn’t mean letting go of the relationship itself. Instead, this practice is about letting go of old, unworkable ways of relating; in most cases, burning these contracts will help you reinvigorate the relationship. But sometimes it takes a while, because you might get riled up by how troubling or wrong or deluded those other people are and forget that you have skills and options. I just want you to know that there are reasons behind Emotion Contagion that might surprise you.
So as you observe the emotions that you pick up from others, just ask yourself whether those emotions are ones you can deal with well on your own. If they are, you now have options: you can take the opportunity to work with those emotions consciously; you can ground yourself and down-regulate those emotions and then set clearer boundaries; or you can just enjoy those emotions in the way you enjoy emotions that are evoked by engaging music, art, books, or films. However, if the emotions are problematic for you, and you lose your skills every time they’re evoked, you may be picking them up precisely because you need practice with them. So instead of blaming people because their emotions are so intrusive (though this is sometimes the case), just ask whether your own preexisting problem with those emotions might be the crux of the matter. And if certain people are difficult for you to be around because their emotional approach or emotional functioning doesn’t sync with yours, just check in with yourself and ask whether you have a good relationship with the emotion(s) in question.
The full answer to the question of how to tell whether an emotion is yours or someone else’s is a long one, but it comes down to this: if you know how to work with emotions, then it doesn’t matter where they came from. Certainly, you don’t want to spend your life around emotionally repressive or emotionally explosive people (that’s exhausting for anyone, but it’s especially problematic for people who want to become healthy, happy empaths), but Emotion Contagion is a normal and healthy part of being human.
Saying that, however, I now want to focus on an emotion that can be problematic to share—not because the emotion is inherently troublesome, but because of the unusual and future-focused actions this particular emotion requires.
THE EMPATHIC DILEMMA OF ANXIETY
Being an author is pretty awesome, but one of the less awesome things about writing a book is that it sort of freezes you in time. It stands as a testament to what you knew the year you wrote it, even though you keep learning and growing long after it’s published. Luckily, I’ve been able to use my website to update my work in The Language of Emotions (which I wrote in 2009) and share the new things I’ve learned about emotions and empathy. The following information on anxiety first appeared on my website.41
I continually study emotions and empathy in social science, neurology, and related fields to stay updated. In January 2011, on the San Francisco–based radio show Forum with Michael Krasny, I heard an interview with Dr. Mary Lamia, who is a psychoanalyst and psychologist. She wrote a book called Understanding Myself: A Kid’s Guide to Intense Emotions and Strong Feelings. It’s a great book for kids, and Lamia has some very surprising things to say.
In the latter part of the interview, Lamia spoke about anxiety in a way I hadn’t heard before, and I mulled it over a great deal. She sees anxiety as the emotion that helps us take action and get things done. I knew that about fear (the question for fear is, What action must be taken? ), and in my work, I focus on the action-based and intuitive aspects of fear. However, in my previous book, I sort of pushed anxiety off to the side because, honestly, it bothered me when people ran around being anxious. I just wanted them to calm down and focus themselves already. Sheesh! When I wrote my book, I didn’t see anxiety as a purposeful emotion (I valenced it!); therefore, I completely overlooked its function. What I began to understand after hearing Lamia is that I wasn’t able to maintain my grounding or my boundaries around anxiety and that the normal process of Emotion Contagion suddenly became troublesome when anxiety was in the room. This is a problem I share with many, many people, so let’s look at it.
PUTTING IT OFF VERSUS DOING IT AHEAD OF TIME
Lamia contrasts procrastinators, who put things off until their anxiety kicks in and makes them do their work, with do-it-aheaders, who do their work ahead of time. I’m a do-it-aheader. We actually have a joke in our family about thanking Karla from the past—we’ll find some job I finished weeks ago or unearth finished pieces to a project that’s crucial, or we’ll find important papers in my filing system, and we’ll say, “Thanks, Karla from the past, for making things easy!” Clearly, this thankfulness is a great motivator, because in each day, I think of all kinds of cool projects and jobs to do for the future happiness of my friends, my family, and myself. It’s a total win-win. It’s time travel that works!
Before I heard Lamia, I would have said that I didn’t have anxiety, but I realized with a thud that, “Ooohhhh, I have plenty of anxiety, but I somehow learned to respond to it at very early points in its appearance, so that it almost never gets to the level of a mood.” I realized that I’ve always paid close attention to soft and subtle levels of anxiety and responded at very early points in its life cycle, which meant that I rarely experienced an identifiable mood-state form of anxiety. Consequently, I developed a valenced and unnuanced empathic blind spot about anxiety.
Because I almost never moved into the mood state of anxiety, and because I usually responded to it in its soft, free-flowing state, I mistakenly identified my subtle level of do-it-ahead anxiety as foresight, conscientiousness, or perhaps just being organized. I didn’t realize that I was working with an emotion that was trying to prepare me for the future. Whoops! We live and learn. So I finally learned to identify the nuances of anxiety, and I’ve since welcomed anxiety fully into my emotional toolkit. It is now easy to maintain my grounding, my focus, and my boundaries when I’m near an anxious person.
When I lifted my veil of ignorance about anxiety, I realized that my behavior only appeared to be anxiety-free, because I wasn’t in an anxious mood. However, I was using my anxiety about not having completed things as a way to help myself out of future troubles. Does that make sense?
We’ve all experienced what it’s like to look for a specific shirt that turns out to need washing (disappointment, frustration), or how it feels to lose important papers (anxiety, fear, disappointment), or how it feels to be late (embarrassment, shame, anxiety). As a do-it-aheader, I work to avoid those unpleasant outcomes by confronting them before they have a chance to happen. I’m time traveling in a way that’s different from a procrastinator (who’s trying to avoid an unpleasant future by not confronting it), but we’re both attempting to achieve the same goals—we’re both trying to avoid an unpleasant future.
During the Forum interview, a self-avowed procrastinator called in and explained that he could easily finish things that were pleasant, but that he really had to force himself to do things that felt like work or to finish chores that he didn’t feel he was good at. He needed his anxiety to get to a fever pitch before he could power his way through his procrastination and into unpleasant tasks. Even as a do-it-aheader, I totally get that. When I have a miserable task to accomplish, my entertainment-and-online-game habit takes over, and I hide from the misery and discomfort and doubt. However, I’ve learned to pay myself with procrastination; for example, I’ll tell myself, “Okay, you can play three games of (insert current favorite game here) or watch a show, but then you need to write that difficult letter or clean out the crisper drawer in the fridge.” That may sound silly, but I think it helps me remain emotionally honest.
Honestly, I don’t want to write that letter or clean out the wretched crisper drawer. It’s miserable work. Besides, what if I say the wrong thing in the rotten letter and make things worse? We can all stand outside the situation and know that I’ll feel better once these miserable tasks are completed, but it’s a long slog through foul terrain before that can happen. So if I have to do those odious things, then I need a reward. And though I didn’t know which emotion I was working with, I somehow learned to play with and work with my procrastination and my anxiety, rather than being worked over or overwhelmed by them. Score one for the unintentional empath!
REFRAMING YOUR APPROACH TO ANXIETY
Contagion in the area of anxiety can be troublesome, not simply because anxiety is usually negatively valenced but also because anxiety requires actions that are based on the future. If you pick up anxiety from others, you may become overwhelmed with a dozen future plans that you can’t act upon in the present moment, or your adrenaline might kick in and make you feel jangled and unfocused. Both of these fairly normal responses to anxiety can cause you to shut down your empathy. It’s important, therefore, to understand procrastination, anxiety, and anxiety-prone people more empathically so that this emotion isn’t quite so destabilizing.
What I see in career procrastinators and anxiety-prone people (that is, in mood-state anxiety) is that their uncomfortable relationship to procrastination and anxiety becomes a kind of lifestyle and very much a part of their self-image. Procrastinators and anxiety-ridden people may feel some shame about their behavior, but because they’re in a feedback loop with the powerful state of anxiety (which affects hormones, stress reactions, eating behaviors, sleep patterns, and more), they may feel as if they have no control over it. As a result, their mood-state anxiety may become an unwanted but persistent houseguest, which they eventually just learn to live with. Some people even begin to champion their anxiety/procrastination cycles (think of those signs that flaunt a messy desk as a mark of genius).
My suggestion for interrupting this feedback loop (in yourself, certainly, but you can also share this practice with the anxiety-prone people in your life) is to turn toward the anxiety and procrastination and ask the question for anxiety: “What really needs to get done?” I think the word really is key, because if you simply ask your procrastination what needs to get done, it might answer: “Eat chocolate, go blog hopping, play Angry Birds, watch movies,” and then it’s four hours later and where are you? Did those things really need to get done? But if you ask your mood-state or intense anxiety what needs to get done, it might answer: “Make sure you turned off the stove, now polish the doorknobs, now wash your hands. But where are the nail clippers? What about reorganizing the closet or changing the oil in the car? Oh, did you check the stove?” And again, it’s four hours later, and you’ve been sent on any number of fool’s errands. If you can slow yourself down and ask yourself what really needs to get done, you can bring your full awareness to the situation.
When any of your emotions (or the emotions of others) are caught in a feedback loop, it’s very tempting to turn away (or run away) and ignore them, but you can make significant improvements in your Empathic Accuracy if you can clearly identify emotions and engage with them empathically. When you can understand the reasons that emotions arise, you can help them do their proper work so that they can recede naturally and you can ground and focus yourself again. This process of identifying, listening to, and responding to emotions so that they can move onward is how you develop Emotion Regulation skills. This next skill is a specific healing practice for anxiety, which can be a very problematic emotion if you don’t understand how it works or how to regulate it.
CONSCIOUS QUESTIONING FOR YOUR ANXIETY
Anxiety has an important purpose and function—it’s your task-completion emotion, and it’s your procrastination alert system. Anxiety can be an intensely action-focused emotion, and expressing it when it’s intense or when it’s in a feedback loop can be pretty problematic. It can run you in five different directions at once. However, repressing anxiety isn’t a good choice, because anxiety will keep bubbling up—it has tasks to complete! But here’s the rub with intense anxiety: even channeling it can be problematic if you’re highly activated—it might overwhelm or confuse you, especially if it’s in a feedback loop. So we have an empathic mindfulness practice for anxiety that’s similar to Conscious Complaining.
In Conscious Questioning, you turn toward your anxiety and identify each issue that your anxiety is responding to so you can organize all of your activation. This practice will help you ground and focus yourself again. You can do this verbally, by asking yourself (out loud) about each thing that really needs to get done. But I find that it’s helpful to write things down as well. Writing is a way to physically express your anxieties, become aware of them, and organize them intentionally. And here’s the interesting part: speaking or writing out your anxieties is an action. It counts as an emotion-specific action that helps your anxiety calm down a bit so that you can ground and focus yourself. Many of us try to repress or run away from anxiety, but that doesn’t work; turning toward anxiety empathically does work. Simply voicing or writing down your anxieties will help your anxieties recede. With this quick, focused practice, you can access the gifts of anxiety, identify any upcoming tasks, organize everything you need to do to complete those tasks, and gently confront your procrastination tendencies. When you use Conscious Questioning, it doesn’t matter whether or not the anxiety you feel belongs to you, because no matter where it came from, you can turn toward it, question it consciously, complete its specific actions, and move onward.
Empathic mindfulness skills help you make real changes in your behavior, in your approach to emotions, in your outlook, in your tension levels, and in your empathic skills. No matter where an emotion came from, which emotion it is, or how activated the emotion has become, you can use your empathic skills to engage with each emotion and figure out what it’s trying to do. Remember, though, that if you do what you can to empathically address an emotion and it’s still too much, please reach out for help from a trusted friend, counselor, or health-care provider. Sometimes, especially with a very intense emotion like anxiety, we can all use a little support to bring an emotion back into balance.
FROM YOUR INNER WORLD TO YOUR OUTER WORLD
Your empathic mindfulness skills are a set of intrapersonal skills that you can use no matter where you are or what’s going on around you. In our emotionally confused and empathically noisy world, these skills will help you stay focused, grounded, self-aware, emotionally flexible, empathically aware, intuitively attentive, and rejuvenated. In Part Two of this book, we’ll explore ways to safely and comfortably bring your empathy into the world. In the next chapter, we’ll create a home environment that can support you and your loved ones in these ways and more.