![]() ![]() “I wonder if you’re needing _?” (Care, safety, friendship, understanding – you may refer to this Needs Inventory).Īffirm the beauty and mattering of your needs. Let your compassionate self (or person from your life) begin to wonder about the needs that may be connected to these feelings. ![]() You might offer guesses such as, “Are you feeling _?” (Sad, scared, lonely – you may refer to this Feelings Inventory). See their loving eyes gazing toward you, not pressuring you to change an ounce.īegin to name the emotions associated with your reactive thoughts. Note: For many of us, self-empathy feels way too foreign, and it helps to start by invoking the presence of someone in our lives who has offered us warm, compassionate friendship and companionship. Notice the presence of your warm, compassionate self. ![]() There is so much energy and lifeforce in these jackals, not to be dismissed! What is it saying? Allow yourself to “get out the jackals” – judgments, evaluations, uncensored thoughts, etc. I like to offer folks this simple practice, inspired by Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and it's founder, Marshall Rosenberg. It's a doorway out of judgment/alienation/"I'm-alone-and-the-world-sucks"-thinking, and a doorway toward feeling supported, connected, and the possibility of loving companionship within and all around us. Identifying needs is a doorway out of our heads spinning in circles, and a doorway toward slowing in our bodies. In Nonviolent Communication's approach to empathy, we talk a lot about needs - and how powerful it can be to name and identify them, both in ourselves and in others. Simply put: it can feel a lot more scary to simply listen and to be with another (and ourselves) than to be in GI Joe action mode, ready to put out fires, solve riddles, and attempt to force order to the chaos that is so much the natural state of things.Īt the same time, empathy (or this simple "being with") is - again and again - the medicine we need, the nourishment we crave, the healing balm we didn't know we needed from the moment of our first owie in life to our first heartbreak.Įmpathy, simple loving presence and accompaniment, is what heals, what soothes, what guides us back to our innate knowing and gets us back "on track." Because fixing, analyzing, and Getting Somewhere has been praised in our society since time immemorial, and empathy and Just Being With has, for so many of us, felt terrifying - a kind of blind surrender in the face of the wild and woolly emotions that run through our brethren as well as our own bones. It sounds so, well, simple, but the truth is - our conditioning in fixing, analyzing, problem-solving, judging, and diagnosing are so much stronger than our natural empathy skills. The power of simply being with ourselves. The power of simply being with one another. ![]()
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