Empathy: The Power of Connection

Empathy: The Power of Connection

Empathy: The Power of Connection

In recent years, the process of ‘restorative justice’ has been used more and more frequently as a way of dealing with crime. In this article ‘Empathy: The Power of Connection’ Steve Taylor Ph.D says that as a part of the process, offenders are brought face to face with the victims of their crimes, to hear how they have suffered as a result. The aim of this encounter is to bring healing, for both victim and offender. The victim transcends their rage with some understanding and forgiveness towards the offender, and the offender empathises with the victim, becoming aware of the real meaning of their crimes. This process changes lives. Victims feel free of the weight of hatred and are able to move on; offenders have a wider sense of perspective, and are less likely to re-offend. Sometimes offenders don’t meet their specific victims, but just the victims of similar crimes. But this still leads to a new awareness, and new patterns of behaviour.

This highlights the amazing power of Empathy: The Power of Connection. To a large extent, all crime and all cruelty are the result of a lack of empathy. It’s a lack of empathy which makes someone capable of attacking or oppressing other people. A lack of empathy for another tribe or country makes warfare and conflict possible. A lack of empathy towards other ethnic groups, social classes or castes makes oppression and inequality possible.

What is Empathy?

According to the book, Empathy: The Power of Connection, empathy is the ability to ‘feel with’ another person, to identity with them and sense what they’re experiencing. It’s sometimes seen as the ability to ‘read’ other people’s emotions, or the ability to imagine what they’re feeling, by ‘putting yourself in their shoes.’ In other words, empathy is seen as a cognitive ability, along the same lines as the ability to imagine future scenarios or to solve problems based on previous experience. But in my view, empathy is more than this. It’s the ability to make a psychic and emotional connection with another person, to actually enter into their mind-space. When we experience real empathy or compassion, our identity actually merges with another person’s. The separateness between you and the other person fades away. Your ‘self-boundary’ melts away, so that in a sense – or to an extent – you become them.

If you experience this state of connection with another person, then it’s impossible to treat them badly, except unintentionally. You recoil from their experience of suffering in the same way that you recoil from your own suffering. In fact, you feel a strong desire to relieve their suffering and aid their development.

Empathy has powerful psychological benefits for us too. Research shows that people who are more empathic feel more satisfied with their lives, and have better relationships. Some scientists used to belief that human beings are naturally selfish and individualistic, but more and more research is showing that empathy – not selfishness – is ‘hard-wired’ into us. Animals often show empathy towards one another, even to members of different species, and this manifests itself in random acts of kindness. As Lynne McTaggart – author of The Bond – puts it, ‘Animals often partner up with members of unrelated species…There are even instances of an animal from one species adopting those of another.’ And within their own species, animals often share food to make sure that weaker members of their group are fed, even when they have to sacrifice their own food.

Are Women more Empathic?

Studies have suggested that women are generally more empathic than men. For example, studies have shown that women are significantly better at ‘reading’ people’s emotions purely from looking at their eyes. Other research has shown that women’s friendships tend to based on mutual help and problem sharing, whereas men usually develop friendships based on shared interests, such as sports and hobbies. Men and women have also been shown to have different speaking styles. Women’s conversations usually last longer, because of their use of more ‘back channel support’, such as nodding, smiling and other gestures. If they disagree, they tend to express their opinion indirectly rather than making a statement, helping to avoid confrontation. On the other hand, men tend to more blunt and opinionated. They use more imperatives and tend to ‘talk over’ more. As the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen puts it, ‘men spend more time using language to demonstrate their knowledge, skill and status.’ This makes sense: after all, the vast majority of ‘man’s inhumanity’ throughout history really has been man’s. Almost all wars have been orchestrated and fought by men, and most social oppression has been inflicted by high status men, seeking to protect and increase their power and wealth.

This also makes sense in terms of women’s role as mothers. Surely their nurturing role encourages empathy, because of the need for a strong emotional connection to children. At the very least, you could say that this emotional connection would have made it more difficult for them to lose the ability to empathise.

Empathy with Nature

Empathy can spread beyond other humans, to other living beings and to nature itself. Many of the world’s tribal peoples respect nature because they sense that it’s alive, and because they feel connected to it. They sense that all natural things – not just animals but plants, stones and the whole Earth itself – are not just objects but beings, who are part of the same web of creation as them. They empathise with plants, animals and the Earth, and so are reluctant to damage or destroy them. As the great Native American philosopher Luther Standing Bear wrote, for the Lakota Indians, ‘Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them.’ As a result, wrote Luther Standing Bear, anticipating the modern animal rights movement, ‘The animals had rights – the right of a man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man’s indebtedness – and in recognition of these rights the Lakota never enslaved an animal, and spared all life that was not needed for food and clothing.’

This attitude brought a sense of responsibility. Many indigenous peoples saw – and still see – themselves as the caretakers of nature, with a responsibility to preserve harmony. As Chief Edward Moody of the Nuxalk Nation says, ‘We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can’t speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees.’

To a large extent, our environmental destruction is a manifestation of our lack of empathy for nature, and the Earth. Our strongly developed ego means that we experience a sense of ‘otherness’ to nature, that we can’t sense its aliveness, and so don’t feel any qualms about exploiting and abusing it.

Healing through Empathy

Actually, according to the book ‘Empathy: The Power of Connection, just as the lack of empathy makes cruelty and oppression possible, the presence of empathy heals conflict. The wider empathy stretches – from victims to offenders, from one ethnic group to another, from nation to nation and religion to religion – the less brutal and more harmonious a place the world will become.

And perhaps most importantly, as Restorative Justice shows, to some degree empathy can be nurtured. When people are brought together in a neutral context, with an open, trusting attitude, empathy naturally establishes itself. Distinctions of ethnicity, religion and other superficial ‘identity badges’ begin to fade away, as does the sense of grievance and rage derived from past events. The same could be said of nature too: when human beings spend time in natural surroundings, relaxing into its stillness and space, a bond naturally establishes itself.

And it’s this bond which is surely our true nature.  The book, Empathy: The Power of Connection, shows that the concept of separateness is an illusion. Empathy is simply the experience of our true, the exchange of feeling through the channel of shared consciousness which unites not just all human beings, but all living and non-living things.

Empathy: The Power of Connection

Think of someone you love, and be aware of the warm feeling that wells up inside you. Hold on to that warm feeling, and let it spread throughout your body, including to any parts of you body where you feel discomfort. Let it flow into your mind too, so that you feel empathy and compassion to your own thoughts, even the negative ones. Think of all the people around you, in the rooms or buildings close to you, and imagine that warm glow of compassion leaving your body and spreading to them. Think of all the people in your city, in the streets and buildings, and expand the warm feeling to them too. Thinking of all the people in this country, across the towns and countryside, and expand the feeling to them too. Then expand it further, to all the people on this planet, the millions of people in all the different countries. Feel the glow of compassion spreading from your being to the whole world, and into the space above you, rising up into the sky and the whole universe.

Cultivating Empathy

  • Use your imagination to picture how the world looks through other people’s eyes. Think about how other people’s predicaments make them feel, and how their experiences mould their perceptions.
  • When you speak to other people, give them your full attention. Don’t think about other things, look into the distance or look at your i-phone. Giving people your full attention shows that your respect them, and establishes a strong connection, which enables empathy to flow between you.
  • Before you condemn another person for behaving badly, think about the reasons for their behaviour. Is it because of bad experiences they’ve had in the past, or because of personality traits that they have no control over?
  • Be altruistic and kind to others. Make sure that your life contains an element of service, where you part the needs of others before your own e.g. caring for the sick or elderly, charity or voluntary work. Altruism and service help us to transcend separateness, and to connect with others, creating a follow of empathy.

Curated by Liz McCaughey

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The Game of Life

The Game of Life

You have come to this planet to learn. There is no right or wrong, simply frequency selection. That’s it. You have come to integrate experience and let go of judgement. This is the game of earth and you are all playing very well. Having fun? Writes Michael Forrester a motivational speaker who wrote the article ‘The Game of Earth Is Yours To Play’. But for a lot of people The Game of Life is not always fun.

Michael writes that earth is a game of decension and then reascension. You already know what it’s like to be a multidimensional being in the 5th, 6th, 7th and so on dimensional realities. You’ve been there, done that. You already know that you are connected to absolutely everyone and everything simultaneously, but what would it be like if you didn’t know that? What would it be like if you had a veil that hid all of your power from you and made you think you had no power? You see, you are so powerful that you must play the game of life with limited being, with limited perspectives, limited awareness and limited everything, otherwise where’s the fun in always being in the realm of the highest power.

When a teenager plays a video game and gets really good at it, they can play the game every day and win over and over against even the hardest obstacles or opponents. So then they are faced with a dichotomy. They want to continue playing their favorite game but they’ve already mastered it. So what will they do to not lose interest? They begin to select weaker players who they will then match against stronger opponents. Then they master those as well and continue selecting the weakest players of all until they can face the strongest obstacles or opponents. This is the game of life you are playing on earth. It is a grand experiment and you are blessed with genetic material from the entire universe to help you along the way.

How To Win the Game of Life

You have divine energy and infinite power so you have chosen to descend to see how difficult it would be to ascend while still in physical form. You think you can’t walk on water, or fly? That’s only because you believe you can’t, and at the moment it’s not in your best interest to do so. But you can.

Your goal was always to change your vibrational experience. Oh, and you added linear time to the mix while you were at it. Instead of seeing all concurrent realities at once (as you normally do on the other side), you have chosen to see only one perspective and one path in front of you.

Most human beings on the planet have difficulty comprehending that time does not exist. You bound this energetically to your DNA so that you could perceive time. But it doesn’t exist. Time is circular and not linear. You recreate yourself infinite numbers of times per minute so that you can feel what you call time. That’s why you are never the same person from day to day. You are never even the same person from second to second. You are constantly in a state of flux, refreshing a new version of yourself energetically and you have so much fun doing that without even realizing what you are doing.

Every single reality you believe in whether past, present and future happen simultaneously. That’s why your greatest gift is the present because that’s all you have to effectuate change to create a different vibrational reality for yourselves. Being in the present and in the “now” is all you have to do to change your vibration. You don’t have to meditate or sit in front of 30 candles in a low lit room with incense and soft music. You just have to be in the “now”. That’s it.

The mind was setup to be the operating system of limitation so that you could have this very unique experience as a dense being. There is nothing wrong with having a limited perspective. It is unique and beautiful in many ways. In 5th dimensional realities, which are what you are now heading towards, this limited perspective decreases considerably. You will see things from multiple perspectives and you will manifest immediately, as opposed to the lag time you experienced in your past. You will start using the 5th dimensional format more and more. Instead of wondering why you’re blocked energetically, you’ll just align with the new frequency. This means that close to 100 percent of all disease will disappear as well.

When you start using the heart as your filter, everything will become easier. Until now, most of you have been using your mind. The mind is the 3D filter. The heart is a multidimensional filter capable of electrical electromagnetic energy that the mind is not capable of. “Think with the heart, not the mind.”

In every year that now passes, you will understand more what time really is. You will only use time as a marker that you can refer back to if necessary. Think of a library and how you know exactly where the book you need is to retrieve the information you require. This is how you will eventually interpret time.

The answers will come. If you are open to them, they will come. If you find you’re not getting the answers, sit quietly and breathe. Deep breaths in and out. This helps connect you.

Carry a journal with you. Write down your thoughts. You will have so many aspiring thoughts in the months to come that you will forget them if you do not write them down. Some of your other lifetimes may come into your focus and you will start to question the nature of reality. Write it down. This moves it through physical vehicle and it then becomes more valid to you. As you write things down, the frequency is encoded in the words you write. When you read it again, you access that vibrational state and feel the inspiration.

The levels of the lower masculine energies dictate that a specific pattern of thought or experience must be followed chronologically in steps 1, 2 and 3. In divine flow, you will proceed very differently. You’ll start with step 1 and then go to step 15, then back to step 7 and then step 2, etc. Yet your experience will be complete as you pick up everything you need along the way. Why? Because you will be operating primarily through the heart center.

You may have found yourself already sharing much of your time with different projects and people as you enter into this phase. Lower masculine energy wants you to DO. The activation of the divine feminine energies want you to just be. The divine masculine energy says as you are you pulse out. As you spiral up, the divine feminine energy reads frequency and the divine masculine engages that frequency.

What is your version of the truth? Do you think it is THE truth? With the exception of love, there is no absolute truth and you will start understanding the different perspectives of truth on the planet and why they exist.

You are always putting yourself in a “now” moment that creates a vibrational signature. You have an agreed upon a set of circumstances that you define as your collective history and then you have another subset that is your personal history. As you change your vibration on an individual level, you decide whether you want to align with the collective version of the “truth”. Your individual frequency may suddenly align with a version that is so far from your current perspective that you could not even relate to it yesterday. That’s when you have jumped timelines, something you’ll also become very aware of.

It is not so much what you think that creates your reality. It is what you feel. If you feel really good, your reality changes. If you have trouble feeling what you want, your ego is in the way. So imagine what it would feel like to have what you want. That will help get the mind out of the way so that you can manifest your desires.

If you have read this far in this article, then you are likely doing all the work you need to do to release holding patterns and you are ready to move forward. You are guiding those receptive to galactic information. It will get easier for you to speak with others about consciousness and all those things we discuss here. You may also be processing persecution issues from other lifetimes which will also release as universal truths are revealed. It will become conscious and accepted for all.

Your awareness of what sound is will also shift. It is through sound and frequency that all is created and generated. All matter vibrates and creates sound. However there are different dimensional versions of sound which many of you may start to hear. For example, the universe, earth and collective consciousness all have their own sound. Each of your individual organs has its own sound. There is actually a symphony that is created for your body and you may start to hear these sounds as you look within yourself.

Do you feel like the earth’s consciousness is not moving fast enough so that all may awaken? Why are people taking so long? It’s not them, it’s you. Shift timelines and go to where you want to be. If you feel you are stuck somewhere that you don’t want to be, you have the free will to shift at anytime. Can’t shift? It means that your current reality is serving you somehow. You would not be on your current timeline if it was not serving you. You would be on another version where the collective would be doing something different. You can create anything you like, but it is the limitation in your beliefs that prevents you from shifting.

The frequency of the collective affects you and your frequency affects the collective. This simple understanding will enable you all to change the planet. If you don’t like your environment, city, state, country or the people in it, don’t fret on those things you dislike. Focus on the things you do like because any emphasis on what you don’t like keeps you on that frequency. Those who constantly relive history and emphasize horrific historical facts maintain that vibration. Those who focus on violence and the evil desires of others maintain that vibration. Those who think negatively, maintain a vibration that is perceived as negative.

Think positive and be positive. If you are drawn to media that promotes all the bad in the world, check within yourself as to why you are drawn to that information. This alone will change your reality and help change mass consciousness.

You are a divine being of light and infinite energy. You are so blessed to be experiencing your life right now. It is perfect. You are perfect and you are loved more than you could ever know. As the great Gandhi once said “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

by Michael Forrester

There is a book called Seat of the Soul and it was written 25 years ago and the message then is the same message that is needed now.  It is about the values of the soul and by living within the heart. As Michael Forrester states in the above article living within the heart will make life a lot easier. Especially for the time you are incarnate on earth living through The Game of Life.

You can purchase this book through the link below:

Curated by Liz McCaughey

Curation

At aMIndset we value good content for our readers. In that spirit, we will often curate or excerpt content from top quality sources on the web.The very internet itself was created on the foundation of linking, sharing, and recommending good content from other sources on the web.

Curation means finding good, well-written, and highly relevant material for our readers. By choosing content from your site, we are giving it our vote of approval. This not only means that we excerpt your content, but we also give it our highest recommendation, and we encourage our readers to view your content on your own website. Our curation is designed to send our readers to your site so you get new visitors exposed to your top quality content. We curated your content because it was outstanding in some way.

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The Malady of Active Laziness

The Malady of Active Laziness

The Malady of Active Laziness

There is a wonderful term that Sogyal Rinpoche uses in his book: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The term is ‘Active Laziness’ and the malady of active laziness is something which we all suffer. The story to illustrate this in the book is about a very poor man who manages to accumulate a sack of grain and he had had to work very hard to achieve this:

“He was proud of himself, and when he got home he strung the bag up with a rope from one of the rafters of his house to keep it safe from rats and thieves. He left it hanging there, and settled down underneath it for the night as an added precaution. Lying there his mind began to wander “If I can sell of this grain off in small quantities, that will make the biggest profit. ………..  I’ll become rich …….Plenty of girls will be after me…….we’ll have a child …what on earth are we going to call him?  Looking round the room, his gaze fell upon the little window, through which he could see the moon rising.

What a sign….I’ll call him ‘As Famous as the Moon.’ Now while he had been carried away in his speculation, a rat had found its way up the rope……”

Extract from:  The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

In the story the rat gnawed through the rope which resulted in the bag of grain falling on the man killing him. As his mind distracted him with all sorts of thoughts about this and that he was not paying attention to the present which resulted with him not noticing the rat nor the bag falling onto him. And as a result of this he died with none of his distracting thoughts coming to fruition.

The story illustrates a form of active laziness that we all suffer from.  We fill our minds with so many thoughts about improving our levels of comfort or wealth that we actually forget to be present and live in the moment.  We talk about all the important responsibilities we have without actually taking responsibly for one of them or taking action in the present to make them happen.  In the western world we cram our lives with constant activity to achieve wealth and comfort that we forget to look at the wealth and comfort of our soul. Our mind distracts us to the level that we lose sight of the real meaning of life.

We are constantly active amounting more material possessions not realising that when we die not one material item will follow us into the after-life.  We are lazy about improving our spiritual attributes as they don’t seem so important in this material world.  But when we die, all that will follow us to the after-life and the next reincarnation are the spiritual attributes. The activity we do in the material plane of existence with our thoughts and ambitions for more wealth and bodily comfort is a waste of time when we die.  The improvement of our inner-life that we are so lazy about is the most important part of each incarnation. It is our spiritual growth that will matter when we leave the earth and rest before the next life-time.

Our time on earth during this life-time is but a tiny dot on the landscape of the time that we will spend in the after-life and subsequent reincarnations.  Maybe it is time to stop the Active Laziness and instead focus on what is important.  The physical body or new home is not as important as the spiritual soul and the development of compassion towards others rather than just ‘Me, me, me’.

Replace the Active Laziness with Active Living and wake up to what is important in life.

Books written by Sogyal Rinpoche can be bought using the link below:

The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying            Living Well Dying Well

                                       

Curated by Liz McCaughey

Curation

At aMIndset we value good content for our readers. In that spirit, we will often curate or excerpt content from top quality sources on the web.The very internet itself was created on the foundation of linking, sharing, and recommending good content from other sources on the web.

Curation means finding good, well-written, and highly relevant material for our readers. By choosing content from your site, we are giving it our vote of approval. This not only means that we excerpt your content, but we also give it our highest recommendation, and we encourage our readers to view your content on your own website.
Our curation is designed to send our readers to your site so you get new visitors exposed to your top quality content. We curated your content because it was outstanding in some way.

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Senseless Acts of Violence

Senseless Acts of Violence

Senseless Acts of Violence

Have you ever looked at the events in the world and thought – Why is this happening?  The senseless acts of violence that seem to be a daily event.  The wars that are raging throughout the planet where it is mainly civilians that bear the brunt of the pain and agony.  Eckhart Tolle gives a very succinct description about these senseless and painful events which are a part of our environment.

Indeed he says that the individual mind is not capable of making sense of such tragedy. The mind cannot seem to be able to cope with so much sadness. And he believes that until we appreciate that nothing happens in isolation, until we understand that everything is connected – we will not be able to comprehend the world we live in and the pain that seems to be a part of every day experience.

This short video may not have all the answers to your questions about the senseless acts of violence that pervade the media.  But it goes a long way to helping us understand at least a small part of it.

An inspiriting and informative talk by Eckhart Tolle.

Why do senseless events happen?

Curated by Liz McCaughey

Curation

At aMIndset we value good content for our readers. In that spirit, we will often curate or excerpt content from top quality sources on the web.The very internet itself was created on the foundation of linking, sharing, and recommending good content from other sources on the web.

Curation means finding good, well-written, and highly relevant material for our readers. By choosing content from your site, we are giving it our vote of approval. This not only means that we excerpt your content, but we also give it our highest recommendation, and we encourage our readers to view your content on your own website.
Our curation is designed to send our readers to your site so you get new visitors exposed to your top quality content. We curated your content because it was outstanding in some way.

Full details of aMindset’s Curation Policy can be found HERE

Why asking for help is hard?

Why asking for help is hard?

Why Asking for Help is Hard

We do have to ask ourself why asking for help is hard to do.  Maybe we were brought up to be fiercely independent and not to show weakness.  However at some point in our life we all need help and yet we feel unable to ask for assistance. We prefer instead to soldier on alone, isolated and separated from our family and friends.

But if we really struggle with asking for help from our fellow human beings then it is a good time to remember that help is also available from the inner worlds.  There are enlightened beings who are available at all times to help us. If we can learn to ask, there is a great chance we will get the help we need.  Why asking for help is hard?

As Master Jesus said:

“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. Everyone that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth?”

Extract from:  The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

Learning to ask for help will change our lives, but there is no doubt that a lack of practise is a burden for all of us. Asking for help is something we just don’t know how to do. Or maybe we are lazy, feel unworthy or the opposite we feel too arrogant to want to ask for help. There are many reasons we are unable to ask.

Whatever the reason or excuse it is time to let go of that old habit and develop a new one.  

If we feel we need help then now is the time to learn to ask for that aid and see how we get on. It is not a difficult thing to learn to do. It just takes action and the more we practice the better we will become at asking for the help we need. If we don’t give it a try how will we ever know if asking for help works to improve our situation?  Be courageous and also humble so when you ask for help you are doing it from the bottom of your heart.

Ask for the meaning of your life so you can transcend the darkness and live in light. Ask for assistance in whatever form you need it.  Ask with truth and compassion. Ask with love in your heart and wait for the response. It’s not a hard thing to do and you might even enjoy the process.

Curated by Liz McCaughey

Curation

At aMIndset we value good content for our readers. In that spirit, we will often curate or excerpt content from top quality sources on the web.The very internet itself was created on the foundation of linking, sharing, and recommending good content from other sources on the web.

Curation means finding good, well-written, and highly relevant material for our readers. By choosing content from your site, we are giving it our vote of approval. This not only means that we excerpt your content, but we also give it our highest recommendation, and we encourage our readers to view your content on your own website.
Our curation is designed to send our readers to your site so you get new visitors exposed to your top quality content. We curated your content because it was outstanding in some way.

Full details of aMindset’s Curation Policy can be found HERE