Monday, August 25, 2008


Thoughts on Empathy: Part 2
Because we are becoming so ultrasensitive right now, you may be feeling a heightened degree of empathy for other people's pain, confusion, and various emotional states. I am noticing, though, that there is a kind of energetic ethics involved in using one's sensitivity when others are concerned — ways of being aware that make enlightened perception easier for others. My question is: How do we know, when someone else hurts, what it is exactly like inside them? Does feeling their pain help? Or is it, in a weird way, a sort of arrogance? I have felt how even the slightest level of second-guessing a person's thoughts — when I am not entirely in the moment with them in the direct experience of the emergence of their expression — is a kind of dominance on my part. I "think" I know what's coming and I cut them off, even if it's just a tiny tiny bit, and even if it's telepathic. I can feel how it's unfair to them and shortchanges their magnificence.

Similarly, if I hold the idea that someone else is feeling pain, and I don't want them to, and I'm hurting too because I'm HOLDING that imagined pain, and feeling bad because I'm feeling it, then I hold it in them as well as in me, and what good does that do anyone? Now they have to worry about me feeling a version of their pain that may not actually be what they're feeling. Now they have to get themselves out of it, and me too. How much better to notice what's going on, then drop the contracted feeling state, breathe, choose an expanded state where you see the soul for what it is, reaffirm the innate power and clarity of the person, and attune back to your own highest frequency, and hold THAT, so they can more easily shift out of their contraction into their own highest frequency, when they're ready. Because you have modeled it for them.

Empathy, the kind of sensitivity where you feel another's pain or contractedness, or their misperceptions about who they really are, is only good as far as I'm concerned, for teaching us about how to achieve conscious rapport. This assists us spiritually in beginning to know that we are One. Once we can feel communion, then we must raise the level up to the soul and vibrate at that tone, not the pain tone, otherwise we perpetuate suffering. In effect, we double the amount of pain in the world. It's fine to feel into people, but we need to recenter in our own core vibration after each foray into this sort of empathic information gathering.

See Aug 3 for Part 1. Art by Elvira Amrhein.