The Art of Empathy (21 page)

What Burning Contracts Will Do for You.
This intrapersonal skill addresses all six aspects of empathy:

Emotion Contagion—you can bring forward, observe, and burn your contracts with any emotion that troubles or confuses you, which will increase your Empathic Accuracy and your Emotion Regulation skills

Perspective Taking—you can disentangle yourself from concrete expectations of how things are supposed to be, so that you can see the world from other perspectives and restore your Concern for Others

Perceptive Engagement—you can free yourself from unworkable behaviors so you can then learn how to be perceptive and flexible enough to meet the needs of others skillfully

In terms of the six dimensions of your emotional style, Burning Contracts addresses and supports all of these as well, because you can burn your contracts with any area of these dimensions that don't work for you. Whether it's Resilience (from slow to recover to fast to recover), Outlook (from negative to positive), Social Intuition (from socially intuitive to puzzled), Self-awareness (from self-aware to self-opaque), Sensitivity to Context (from tuned in to tuned out), or Attention (from unfocused to focused), Burning Contracts will help you observe, become aware of, understand the purpose for, and reorganize any aspect of your emotional style that troubles you.

HOW TO BURN CONTRACTS

To burn a contract with an idea, behavior, stance, or relationship, begin by focusing and grounding yourself. Illuminate your boundary with a very bright color (if you can) and breathe normally. Imagine unrolling a large piece of blank parchment paper right in front of you. (If you can't visualize, use your hands to actually unroll this imaginary parchment.) Some people like to imagine that this parchment is rolled out flat on a table, but I like to imagine mine in front of my body, as if it were a whiteboard or a movie screen. This parchment should have a calming feeling to it. It shouldn't be bright or jazzy; it should be a gentle color that can absorb whatever you place
onto it. Keep this roll of parchment
inside
your personal boundary for now, as this will help you develop more awareness of your peripersonal space.

With your parchment in front of you, you can use your Einfühlung skills to empathically project, envision, write, speak, or just think your distress onto it. You can project your emotional expectations—how you're supposed to feel and express yourself—onto the parchment. You can project your intellectual stances—how you're supposed to think, what you're supposed to think, how you're supposed to be intelligent. You can project physical rules—how your body is supposed to look and perform for others. You can project spiritual expectations—how you're supposed to meditate, pray, or behave in relation to spirituality or religion. Or, you can project entire relationships—images of yourself, your partner, and the ways you relate to one another—right onto the parchment. When you can get these behaviors, relationships, and ideas out in front of you, you can begin to observe and individuate from them. In this protected space, you can see yourself not as a victim of your behaviors or the situations in your life, but as an upright individual who
decides
to act, relate, react, or behave in certain ways and who can now decide to behave differently.

If this imaginal visualization process doesn't connect for you, please feel free to use an actual piece of paper and write or draw out these same rules, expectations, stances, and behaviors in words, sketches, or even big scribbles. What we're doing is creating a way for you to express yourself emotionally and imaginally in a safe, ceremonial way. We're also helping you become aware of situations that may only exist right now in behaviors and beliefs—they may not be fully conscious yet. This process brings your emotional and empathic awareness to situations, ideas, and behaviors you're already experiencing and struggling with in real life. This is an imaginal Einfühlung process, but it's also absolutely real.

As these behaviors, beliefs, and postures move out in front of you, you may feel emotions rising up inside you. This is absolutely fantastic. It means that your emotions are awake to the process and will contribute the exact gifts and skills you need to address these issues. Remain focused, intensify your grounding if you need to, and brighten your boundary so you'll have a greater sense of definition around yourself. Welcome your emotions—whatever they are—and use them to move these ideas and behaviors out of the shadows of habit and into your conscious control. If you feel angry, it's safe to express it here. You can throw these ideas onto your parchment (or draw
intensely on your real paper), or you can imagine a color, movement, sound, or quality that you associate with anger and place it alongside your images. If you feel fearful, you can speed up your movements and fling these ideas out of you. If you feel sad, you can lay these ideas onto your parchment slowly and mournfully. If you feel depressed, you can darken the images or your parchment (or slow your movements to a crawl), as you welcome your depression to this process.

Don't repress your emotions or pretend you're feeling something else. Don't draw rainbows and dancing kittens if you're enraged. Be emotionally honest. You're safe here. Remember that you're focused, grounded, and safely protected inside your own peripersonal boundary, and you can breathe in and exhale downward to intentionally relax yourself whenever you need to. You don't have to repress, avoid, or demonize your emotions here. You can just get to know them. You can feel the way you feel, name your emotions, and learn how to work with them. You can complete the actions your emotions require and learn how to respond in many different ways as you learn how these responses feel in your body. This is what channeling your emotions feels like—it's dramatic, imaginal, emotive play that helps you increase your Empathic Accuracy and your Emotion Regulation skills at the same time.

If your first parchment (or your real paper) becomes full, move it aside and create a fresh one. Keep working through the situation until you feel some sense of completion. When you feel done for now, and your parchment (or parchments) is full of words, images, feelings, or sounds, please roll it up. This parchment personifies the contract you've forged with this behavior, belief, attitude, or relationship. Roll this contract (or your real paper) tightly so that you can't see what's inside it—in this way, it immediately becomes less powerful. Tie your contract or your paper with a cord, if that feels right. Grasp your rolled-up contract and imagine tossing it outside your boundary and away from you. When it lands, imagine burning it up with whatever emotional energy feels right. You can blast it with anger, strike it with fear, engulf it with sadness, or use your depressive energy to create a funeral pyre. Your emotions will provide the exact intensity you need to destroy that contract and set yourself free. If you used a real piece of paper, you may want to tie it up strongly with many pieces of twine, throw it away, burn it, bury it, or rip it into tiny pieces. Whatever feels right is the perfect thing to do.

When your contract is gone, refocus yourself, check your grounding by breathing in and releasing any tension you might feel, and brighten your peripersonal boundary once again. You'll probably notice changes in your skills—you may feel a difference in your grounding, you may sense a stronger focus or a relaxation of your focus, or you may sense changes in the condition of your boundary. If so, congratulate yourself—your imaginal and proprioceptive systems are communicating with you empathically! Note each of these changes and gently bring yourself back to center; breathe in and reground and refocus yourself gently, and set your vibrant boundary at a healthy arm's length away from you at all points. That's it!

Burning Contracts
is
emotional channeling. It helps you raft through the eddies and rapids of your emotions. Instead of haphazardly expressing your emotions at the outer world (or haphazardly repressing them back into your inner world), this process helps you become empathically aware of each of your emotions. Your grounding skills allow you to stay focused and integrated, even when strong emotions flow through you; your defined personal boundaries create a protected and sacred space where you can do your empathic work in safety and privacy; and your ability to imagine your behaviors and stances as
contracts
(rather than unchangeable destinies written in stone) allows you to amend and destroy them at will. This skill can work wonders in situations where you repeat behaviors (like my runaway healing) for what seems to be no good reason. If you can use your imaginal skills and your Einfühlung capacity to feel your way into the behavior, you'll discover absolutely amazing emotional truths that you simply can't get to with mere words (or with practices in which the focus is to extinguish your emotions).

You can burn contracts at any time and in any place. No one needs to know you're doing it. Once you're focused and grounded, you can imagine your peripersonal boundary as a kind of brightly colored, portable sacred space. Within your sacred space, you can do whatever work you need to in complete privacy. You can pull out a parchment at work, while you're driving, or even when you're in the middle of an argument (though it's very hard to remember your skills when you're fighting). This process is fully portable. It's a fully embodied, emotionally welcoming, empathic process that was created for people with busy lives; it can be used whenever and wherever you like.

CONSCIOUS COMPLAINING

Conscious Complaining is an emotional-channeling technique that's goofy and surprisingly healing. Although focus, grounding, and clear boundary definition are things to aspire to, no one can maintain them at all times. In fact, constant focus isn't actually healthy (you have to be able to let go and drift every now and then), and life is a drag if all you do is work. Resting, daydreaming, fooling around, laughing, napping, procrastinating, and playing are extremely important parts of a whole and happy life. It's important to keep things light. However, if you
can't
ground, focus, or define yourself when you want to, that's a horse of a different color.

It's easy to get into troubling moods or stagnant places and lose all of your skills and forget all of your emotional wisdom; it's easy to fall into emotional repression and incompetent expression. When this happens (and it will), your ignored and mismanaged emotions will intensify and repeat themselves. If you continue to ignore your emotions (and you will), they'll become more intense. What started out as mobile, supportive, action-requiring emotions can become monotonous, tormenting, and chronic responses to the world. If this is your current situation, worry not! You can use each of your new skills to address this situation. For instance, you can ground and refocus yourself through relaxation and deep breathing or simply by taking a walk in nature or taking a hot bath. Then, you can define your boundaries to create sacred space, and burn your contracts with your cycling thoughts and emotions. However, there's a much easier and goofier way to restore your grounding and your flow: Conscious Complaining to the rescue!

I first learned of the importance of complaining in Barbara Sher's wonderful book
Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want,
which puts forth the idea that wishes and dreams are not silly diversions; rather, they are actually crystal clear pointers that can lead you to your most important work. Sher writes that if you dream constantly of writing, training horses, traveling, going back to school, or becoming a doctor, that dream is actually a specific treasure map that will lead you to the central vocation of your life. Hers is not an ordinary self-help book, because Sher has truly lived the material inside it and knows that moving toward your dreams is often the most terrifying, ridiculous, infuriating, and impossible task imaginable—which is why so few people attempt it and why so many attempts fail. Sher's position is that if you don't look at the problems, the terrors, and the impossibilities in a conscious way, you simply won't survive the often-harrowing process of bringing your dreams into this world.
She suggests taking regular timeouts to complain—both to de-steam and to get a clearer understanding of whatever it is that's holding you back.