The Art of Empathy (23 page)

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 emoï¾­tion,
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.