The Greatest Spiritual Quality-2

The Greatest Spiritual Quality-2

Nature has bestowed upon us an extraordinary emotion ­— empathy. Empathy is the seed of compassion. Simply put, empathy is a genuine effort to see the world from the perspective of the other person. It is to step into their shoes to see where exactly it’s hurting. We have a tendency to quickly judge the other person or to make them understand our viewpoint but empathy is about being a non-judgmental listener, a receptor.

Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. Instead of offering empathy, we often have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, however, calls upon us to empty our mind and listen to others with our whole being.

Marshall Rosenberg nicely sums up empathy in the quote above. In fact, in his book on non-violent communication, he cites a beautiful poem Words are Windows or They’re Walls by Ruth Bebermeyer:

I feel so sentenced by your words,
I feel so judged and sent away,
Before I go I’ve got to know
Is that what you mean to say?
Before I rise to my defense,
Before I speak in hurt or fear,
Before I build that wall of words,
Tell me, did I really hear?
Words are windows, or they’re walls,
They sentence us, or set us free.
When I speak and when I hear,
Let the love light shine through me.
There are things I need to say,
Things that mean so much to me,
If my words don’t make me clear,
Will you help me to be free?
If I seemed to put you down,
If you felt I didn’t care,
Try to listen through my words
To the feelings that we share.

When you wish to empathize with someone, just listen. When you do that and do so sincerely, a little while later they’ll start to make perfect sense to you. You’ll begin to understand their challenges and barriers, their aches and pains. Most of us have automatic response to most things in life. But, with mindfulness, you can pick and choose your emotions. When you dislike something, you can choose from anger, repulsion, empathy, compassion, indifference or any one of the twenty-seven other potential emotions experienced by us.

When you continue to practice a certain emotion as a conscious choice, soon it becomes your second nature. It is the reason why some people can be eternally angry or always selfish or mostly arrogant. Or why some people are often kind, compassionate or considerate. At some point in time, they had chosen these emotional responses over others and they’d done so repeatedly until it was instilled in their DNA.

Mulla Nasrudin went to a department store to buy a pullover for his wife. While he was at the checkout counter, a flash sale was announced offering 40% discount to customers who paid within the next 60 minutes. Soon, out of nowhere an army of female customers rushed to the counter and Mulla found himself getting pushed and pulled in various directions.
He tried to be patient and polite but even at the end of one hour, he was still at the end of the line because of the wild crowd. Upset and frustrated, he stuck out his elbows and started pushing his way through all the women around.

“Don’t you have any manners?” a lady yelled. “Can’t you act like a gentleman?”

“No, ma’am,” Mulla said loudly, “I’ve been acting like a gentleman for more than an hour. Now, I must act like a lady.”

This was just for the smiles and not to show the other side of empathy.

You don’t have to feel a certain way to act a certain way. The reverse is more practical and effective: start acting a certain way and you’ll start feeling that way. Empathy, therefore, is an act before it becomes an emotion. Practice it and you’ll experience it.

In the words of Buddha: Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.

Om Namah Shivay