Empathy: Empathy Projects

I can’t say I always enjoy cardiovascular exercise. Nevertheless, I do cardio pretty regularly. I do it because I know my heart was designed to handle such challenges, because once I get started, I feel that it’s doing me good, and because if I stop for very long, my health begins to atrophy.

There’s another form of cardio that works much the same way, though it affects the emotional heart rather than the one made of auricles and ventricles. This workout consists of deliberately cultivating empathy. To empathize literally means “to suffer with,” to share the pain of other beings so entirely that their agony becomes our own.

Emotional Cardio

Empathy is the glue through which connection is forged. When you share others’ suffering, you also share their experience. I know one wise old man who has been working at empathy every day since becoming a meditation master early in his life. He matter-of-factly describes a state of complete empathic fitness as a “continuous emotional orgasm.” Who’s with me now?

Caveat Empathor

Many people, fall into an emotional trap Buddhists call “idiot compassion.” At first glance, this looks like empathy, but it’s actually projection. It encourages us to condone harmful behavior by assuming that the perpetrator is acting out of pain and helplessness.

“I know he’s just a hurting little boy inside,” says Jeanie, whose boyfriend, Hank, has just beaten the living tar out of her for the umpteenth time. “He’s so sensitive. His mama abandoned him. He even cries when he talks about it.”

(Because Jeanie herself would become violent only in the grip of intolerable torment, she thinks she understands Hank’s motivations—and so she excuses his behavior.) Real empathy is not based on this kind of projection but on close observation.

EXERCISE 1: LEARNING TO LISTEN

If you want to see into the hearts of other beings, your first task is to hear their stories. Many people are gifted storytellers. Only the empathic are true storyhearers.

To become one of these people, start with conversation where you simply listen, acknowledge what is told to you, and ask for more details. You’ll be amazed by the stories you’ll hear when you use this simple strategy with your children, your next-door neighbor, your aunt Flossie, your ethnography subjects. You’ll learn things you never knew you never knew.

Even if you’re not in the company of people, you can work to increase your storyhearing techniques. Books, movies, songs—stories told in any artistic medium can give you an empathy workout. To grow stronger, find stories that are unfamiliar. If you read, watch, or hear only things you know well, you’re looking for validation, not an expansion of empathy. To achieve high levels of fitness, focus once a week on the story of someone who seems utterly different from you.

EXERCISE 2: REVERSE ENGINEERING

You can use a similar technique to develop empathy, by working backward from the observable effects of emotion to the emotion itself.

Think of someone you’d like to understand—your enigmatic boss, your distant mother, the romantic interest who may or may not return your affections, someone from another cultute. Remember a recent interaction you had with this person—especially one that left you baffled as to how they were feeling. Now imitate, as closely as you can, the physical posture, facial expression, exact words, and vocal inflection they used during that encounter. Notice what emotions arise within you. This will work as a system for empathy as long as you note that emotions and emotional expression are not always salient across groups, but are generally transferrable between stigmatized groups within a culture. What you feel will probably be very close to whatever the other person was going through.

For example, when I “reverse engineer” the behavior of people I experience as critical or aloof, I usually find myself flooded with feelings of shyness, shame, or fear. It’s a lesson that has saved me no end of worry and defensiveness.

Reverse engineering can be accomplished in real time, by subtly matching another's body language, vocal tone, even breathing rate.The body shapes itself in response to emotion, and shaping one’s own body to match someone else’s is a quick ticket to empathy.

EMOTIONS CROSS-CULTURALLY

EXERCISE 3: SHAPE-SHIFTING

In folklore, shape-shifters are beings with the ability to become anyone or anything. What would it feel like to be them? How would I cope? What would I do next?

See that strange man in the orange polyester suit putting 37 packets of sweetener into his extra-grande mochaccino with soy milk? What if—zap!—you suddenly switched bodies with him? What would it be like to wear that suit, that face, that physique? What impulse would lead to sugaring a cup of coffee like that, let alone drinking it?

You can feel this shape-shifting developing empathy.

EXERCISE 4: METTA-TATION

Classic metta practice starts with your own sweet self. For five minutes, with each breath, offer yourself kind thoughts (May I be happy, may I feel joy, etc.). Taking these few minutes every day can put you on the road to complete, uncritical acceptance—the foundation on which all empathy is based. (Reaching that point, admittedly, takes years for most of us incomplete and self-critical people.)

Then switch the focus of your kind thoughts onto a friend or family member. When you feel a sense of emotional union with that person, target someone you barely know. As a final, black-belt exercise, project metta thoughts onto one of your worst enemies until you can begin to feel for them. Don’t rush this process, or (God forbid) fake it. You’ll only become a saccharine pseudo-empathizer, wearing the plastic smile.

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Stigma Spring 2022