The Art of Empathy (20 page)

Perspective Taking—knowing where you begin and end helps you develop clearer self/other awareness

Perceptive Engagement—clear empathy is about the other, and knowing yourself more clearly allows you to meet the needs of others perceptively while also caring for yourself respectfully

In terms of the six dimensions of emotional style, the combination of this skill and your Getting Grounded practice is a full emotional-style healing that will help you develop a calm, focused, intuitive, sensitive, well-defined, and self-aware personal space in which you can address each dimension of your emotional style, from your Resilience and Outlook, to your Social Intuition and Self-awareness, to your Sensitivity to Context and your Attention.

HOW TO DEFINE YOUR BOUNDARIES

Please seat yourself comfortably and ground and focus yourself, if you can. (If not, it's okay.) Now stand up and reach your arms straight out to either side of you (if you cannot use your arms in this way, please use your imagination).
Imagine that your fingertips are touching the edges of a lighted oval-shaped bubble that encompasses your private, personal space. Reach your arms out in front of you and then raise them above your head. Feel how far the edges of your peripersonal boundary are from your body. Your boundary should be an arm's length away from you at all points—in front of you, behind you, on either side of you, above you, and even underneath you. When you can imagine this oval-shaped area all the way around you, drop your arms and let them relax.

Close your eyes if you need to as you imagine that the outer edges of this oval, which is around and above you and even underneath the floor, is now lit up in a bright neon color. Choose a very bright, lively color. (If you can't visualize, imagine a clear sound or a distinct movement at this distance from your body or draw a circle on the floor if you need to.) Make your boundary quite obvious in whatever way you can. This is all you need to do to define your peripersonal boundary; it's a very simple exercise. Just feel or imagine yourself standing inside this oval-shaped bubble, as if you're a yolk standing firmly inside the protective eggshell of your own boundary.

As you sense your boundary around yourself, return to your calm focus if you can, and ask yourself: “Do I claim this much room in the world?” As you connect with your brightly lit boundary, ask yourself whether it's normal to feel completely in control of this area around your body. For most of us, the answer is absolutely not! For most of us, our personal boundary is our skin itself; we don't live as distinct people who have enough room to live and breathe freely.

Remember this as you work with your boundary. You may feel frustrated at first, because you may not know, psychologically speaking, how to maintain proper boundaries or how to take your own place in the world. Don't feel alone in this—it's a situation we all face. Nevertheless, you
have
your peripersonal space, and you have a right to it. In fact, it's the area your brain already identifies as yours, even if you didn't realize that it existed before today. Now that you know it exists, get acquainted with your peripersonal boundaries. Get a feeling of having some space in the world, of knowing where you begin and end, and of having some privacy.

Now, thank the emotions that help you create your personal boundaries. Thank your free-flowing soft anger and your authentic, appropriate, and soft shame. Anger helps you claim your voice, standpoint, and territory and respond to any boundary violations coming from the exterior
world. Shame—anger's close friend and partner—helps you moderate your voice and standpoint so that you don't unnecessarily hurt yourself or others. Healthy, authentic shame helps you avoid any boundary violations that may come from
you.

Isn't it funny? The gifts of fear help you focus yourself, while sadness grounds you, and anger and shame help you set respectful boundaries. People generally avoid these emotions—yet look at what that would mean: if you kick fear out the door, you lose your focus and your intuition; if you avoid sadness, you won't be able to let go, ground yourself, or relax; and if you throw anger and shame onto the trash heap, you lose your ability to set and maintain effective boundaries! As we can all see, trouble with boundaries, intuition, grounding, and relaxation—and endless trouble with emotions—are normal, everyday problems for most people. But they don't have to be. You can set effective boundaries and reframe your approach to emotions. You can take a moment to sense your calm listening state and thank your fear. You can feel your grounding and thank your sadness. You can connect with the feeling of being safe and protected inside your own peripersonal space—you can light up the edges of your boundary again—and thank your healthy anger and shame. If you understand what they do and how they work, emotions can improve your life in amazing ways.

BREATHING WITH YOUR BOUNDARIES

Here's a simple exercise to help you become more aware of your peripersonal boundaries right now: Ground and focus yourself if you can. Sit comfortably and imagine your boundary at that arm's-length distance and imagine that its edges are brightly lit or very distinctive. Choose an intense color for the edges, such as lime green or electric blue; your boundary should be exceedingly noticeable to you. (If you can't visualize, try to imagine a noticeable sensation or movement at the edges of your boundary.) Take a deep breath and imagine your boundary expanding a few inches
in all directions (just as your torso does when you inhale). As you exhale, imagine your personal boundary resuming its healthy arm's-length distance from your body at all points. Feel your brightly lit boundary all around you, above you, and under the floor. Breathe in again and feel the edges of your boundary expand slightly in all directions. Breathe out and allow your boundary to resume its correct distance from your body. You're done! You can breathe with your boundary as often as you like—it's a simple, healing way to help your proprioceptive network connect viscerally with your new sense of your peripersonal boundaries.

Some quick pointers:
You can use your imaginal skills as a placeholder for your personal boundaries if you can't envision or feel them just yet. For instance, you can fill your entire peripersonal space with your favorite natural environment by imagining yourself surrounded at arm's length by a shoreline, mountain, or desert scene. (Again, you don't have to
see
this scene; you can hear it, feel it, or even smell it if you can't visualize.) You can use this nature scene to calm the area around your body, which will help you inhabit your peripersonal space psychologically. If you can imagine yourself enveloped in your favorite mountain or oceanside scene, then you can use your Einfühlung skills to surround yourself with a healing sense of peacefulness. Also, you can imagine lighting up your boundary and breathing with it every day; soon it will be able to help you define yourself in health-building ways.

BURNING CONTRACTS

Burning Contracts is one of my favorite empathic mindfulness skills, because it teaches you how to channel your emotions intentionally. It's a practice in which your emotions can help you understand more about yourself, your behaviors, your decisions, your interactions, and your expectations. Burning Contracts also makes use of your Einfühlung capacity to feel your way into the crux of an issue and then use your imaginal skills to bring full-bodied resolution to ideas, behaviors, and situations that confuse, trouble, or torment you. Your imaginal skills can help you access issues from your past and from the wordless depths of your inner life. They can also help you question fundamental aspects of your identity without losing yourself in the process.

When I work with overwhelmed hyperempaths, I rely on contract burning a great deal, because if hyperempaths don't have any skills, their ungrounded, unfocused, and boundary-impaired bodies often run on a troubling kind of autopilot. When I was living this particular form of empathic nightmare, I called myself a
runaway healer,
and I likened myself to a truck heading downhill with no brakes: “Let me fix you! I know I can fix you!!!” Even though I intellectually knew better, I found myself powerfully drawn to emotionally
unstable people and frankly unsafe situations, where I performed heavy empathic labor (unpaid and unacknowledged) and teetered continually on the edge of burnout. I wasn't happy, and I wasn't healthy. In many cases, I wasn't even valued—yet still, I magically found places where my empathic abilities had to kick into overdrive.

Conventional forms of therapy and meditation didn't touch this tendency in me, and they don't tend to touch other hyperempaths either, because empathic runaway healing behavior isn't something that can be talked away, thought away, breathed away, or chanted away. Empathic abilities are crucial for social functioning, they're powerfully preverbal, and they're evolutionarily very ancient—which means they can't just be talked to, argued with, or soothed away. Instead, you need to meet them where they are, work in their territory with their language, and engage with them in ways they can understand—which means you need to work emotively, empathically, and imaginally. Burning Contracts helps you do that.

The empathic practice of contract burning supports your equilibrium by allowing you to separate yourself from behaviors and attitudes that destabilize you and to treat them as contractual obligations that you entered into for some purpose but can now choose to end. This practice helps you envision your behaviors and attitudes as
tendencies
rather than concrete certainties. When you're grounded, focused, and well defined, you can approach your behaviors not as life sentences but as inclinations that you can now choose to support or release, depending on your intentions.

For instance, if you have trouble with certain emotions like anger or anxiety and if you lose your empathy when others are feeling those emotions, you can observe and then burn your behavioral contracts with those emotions and restore your emotional flexibility. If you're unhappy with distracted or addicted behaviors in yourself or if you lose all of your perspective-taking skills when someone else displays those behaviors, you can burn your contracts with those particular behaviors and begin to make separations from them. If you're unable to function skillfully in certain relationships, you can study, learn about, and burn your contracts with those relationships—not to end them, but to reorganize the behaviors that control your interactions with others. This empathic process of contract burning helps you meet each of your behaviors, attitudes, and stances from a grounded position of present-day choice and personal autonomy. It also gives you a way to channel emotions intentionally and to become more aware of the gifts and challenges that live inside each of your reactions, stances, behaviors, and emotions.