#Compassionate Communication #GJWMotivation — Kelly Bryson & Edwin Rutsch talking #empathy and #honesty

I had this terrible day one time and everything went wrong. I'd gotten a ticket from a policeman and had broken my favorite dish and done this and that and I was telling my friend, he's a carpenter, he has no language, he's a layman, and he was just listening and I was telling him on and on about my pain and what was going on with me and this terrible thing and that terrible thing and he just was quiet and silent and finally I had finished saying all of my pain and all of my stress and all the things of the day and it all come out and then his response was, ----. I felt so understood. He had totally gotten it. It was some of the highest octane, highest quality empathy I've ever gotten just from that one word. He got me. He groped me fully and I felt totally gotten just by the one word but it was really by his presence. He's totally letting himself get lost in a sense in my story. Letting himself be taken on that boat ride with me. Just that one word said it all. Just ---- and that was it. That's it. He captured your experience. Right, but I don't teach that as a technique. That wasn't technology that I teach. It won't work. It's got to come from something real. It was his real heart coming out to me and I felt it. I felt his loving in that one word. I was trying to start the discussion here with a few metaphors of empathy because I really find that metaphors can really capture the felt experience and you had mentioned Marshall Rosenberg and he has a metaphor of empathy as well. I don't know if you remember his about surfing. I could start. He says that empathy for him is like surfing. The person you're empathizing with is like the wave. You're connecting to the wave as the surfer and you're not thinking about anything else. You're just being present with the wave and following the motion and the energy of the wave. Allowing comes to mind. The idea of allowing the energy to carry you and to take you away and to surrender. When I'm really empathizing the way I love to, I'm surrendering to the energy. I'm letting the energy carry me and there is a checking out and balancing what I'm doing. Am I connected? Am I understanding? Are we in connection? When I'm really feeling it, those questions don't even come up. I know I'm connected. I know that I'm riding the wave. I know that we're in empathy with each other and I also am aware of this other energy that's present when I'm really doing that. I call it the energy of compassion, the healing power of compassion. I feel the healing power and I really get very intoxicated on it. Even though I'm dealing with someone who's been raped or been brutalized in some way, my inner experience is ecstasy. Even though I'm translating their pain and helping them let go of their pain around it all, I know there's a healing happening that brings me into this ecstatic state and I believe it serves my own healing. So it's beyond, or I'm hearing it, it's like beyond just following somebody with that and being with them that there's actually a sense of healing that you feel and maybe it's that sense of warmth and being with someone that has and you're kind of very aware of that healing that happens. There's an exchange of some kind. Carl Jung talked about it, there has to be an allowance, an opening kind of at the gut level where I'm allowing myself to be affected by what's being said and there's like an alchemical exchange process that's going on between the two of us. Martin Luther talked about it when he said he wants to create an I and Thou conversation, not doctor, therapist, patient and doctor kind of experiences. So both people are affected and transformed by the alchemical exchanges happening of this energy of empathy. But I have to let go of any ideas of helping or fixing or making things better and just allow myself to be swept into this interaction that's going on that transforms both of us. I have to be as open to being transformed as I am wanting the transformation to happen myself. So the walls go down so that catalyst, that chemistry can happen. Well, kind of keeping on the theme of metaphor, I thought maybe I would just share a couple of metaphors that I have personally. So one of them when I talk about empathy, I say that empathy is like a cornucopia and I happen to have the cornucopia picture here that there's for me, I hear that you're saying that there's a healing quality and it's maybe that warmth and that sense of connection that heals both the ear and the listener, both part of the exchange. For me, that empathy is like a cornucopia in that there's a richness of experience that if I'm not empathizing, my life is more monotone of monotone experience. And if I empathizing with others, that it opens me to a whole variety of experiences. So it kind of opens and has a richness to it. Wonderful. Yeah. I would say it certainly is one of the things that has enriched my life more than almost anything I can think of. And also enriches us because it creates an intimacy. It's ecstatic in itself and nurturing and energizing and uplifting. And also, I think this empathy, where it's coming from, the place where this energy is coming from, is a vast place. It's very hard to talk about, but it's a place that knows it all as well. An infinite space of all as well is where I have to kind of come from in order to give the empathy that I want to give.