The Art of Empathy (25 page)

Creating a Sanctuary Where Empathy Can Flourish

EMPATHY IS A strongly receptive skill, and empathic people are nearly always sensitive in many different ways—emotionally, aesthetically, multisensorially, socially, and so forth. As you learn to engage perceptively and empathically with others, I want you to also become
comfortably
receptive to your environment and to the emotions, circumstances, needs, and wishes of others. Empathy requires receptivity, so it's important to surround yourself with nourishing and nurturing influences that will help you balance all of this necessary receptivity.

In the previous chapter, you learned about empathic mindfulness skills that you can access at any time and in any place. These resources will help you increase your intrapersonal skills, become more emotionally aware, and perform your empathic work in comfort and safety. They will also help you choose how much receptivity you'll engage in at any given moment. Your empathic mindfulness skills give you options in regard to your empathy.

In this chapter, we'll look at your home from an empathic perspective and discover if there are ways to make your home a more supportive and nurturing environment for an emotionally aware, grounded, focused, well-defined, and healthy empath. It's possible that you've already created an absolutely wonderful empathic sanctuary in your home (if so, congratulations!), but if your home is not currently a sanctuary for you, or if you're not sure what a sanctuary would feel like, it's worth taking a close look at your most intimate surroundings.

With your empathic Einfühlung capacity fully activated, I'd like you to observe your home as if you were an anthropologist, or perhaps as if you were
a nosy visitor (being fascinated by and nosy about the social world is a prerequisite for cultural anthropologists and other scientists). It will be helpful to take a notebook with you so that you can jot down your observations—but understand before you start that there are no right or wrong answers to the questions I'll ask you.

As you walk around your home, step outside of yourself and ask, “Who lives here?” What kind of person lives in your home, and what is important to this person? Is this person studious or active, solitary or a part of many social groups, organized or free form? Is this person artistic, scientific, romantic, reserved, or gregarious? Who lives here?

Starting from the most social areas and judging by the way you've set up your front room, what's important to you? Does all of your furniture face toward a central television, or have you created conversation areas where people can sit and talk? Do you have a lot of books, or is a computer or a sound system a central feature? Is your front room a kind of meditative space, or is it a very social space? If you live with a mate, are your styles and needs represented equally in this room, or does one person dominate? If you have children, is this room a kid space—and if so, is there any room for you here? If this is a home you're sharing with your parents, is there any space for you in this front room? If you're in a roommate situation, does this room welcome you? What do you (or the people who live in your home) value? And do those values truly represent the way you want to live?

Do your windows look out onto greenery or nature? If not, do you have plants in your home? Nature and greenery create a soothing atmosphere; simply placing a plant in a room can make it feel homier. Art and music can do that, too. Do you use art and music to bring a sense of beauty into your home? Using your Einfühlung capacity, can you identify any themes or leading emotions in the music you love and in the art you like to have around you? What is your color scheme, and what does it evoke for you? Do your musical and artistic themes—and your chosen emotions and colors—speak to you in a healing and welcoming way? If not, why not?

As you continue to investigate your home, do you find that you like order, or are you looser and more free form? What does the presence or lack of order say to you and about you? As you look at photos displayed in your home, are they of single figures or groups? Or are they all of landscapes or buildings? Does your photography identify you as a solitary person, a group member, or a lover of structure or of nature? If you could identify some leading emotions or themes in your photos, what would they be?

As you move into your kitchen, ask yourself about the social nature of the person who lives in your home. Is your kitchen orderly and spare, or is it overflowing with cooking gadgets and colors and places to relax? Is food preparation easy in this kitchen, or is it somewhat of a chore? Are the cupboards and the refrigerator filled with foods you love, or is there more of a mishmash of things you
should
eat but don't actually like? Does your kitchen nourish and support the real lives of the people who live here and gather here? If not, why not?

As you move through your home, continue to observe and explore. You've been leaving clues for yourself in your home; you've been displaying your true nature, your wants, your needs, and your dreams. With your anthropologist's eyes and your empathic capacities, you can begin to pull these clues together into a unified whole. Who lives in your home, and is he or she comfortable, welcomed, and supported here?

I'd like you to end your tour in your bedroom and, if you have one, in your private bathroom. We've gone from the most social areas of your home to the most private areas, and I'd like you to take a close look at the colors, photos, art, organization, and emotional tone of your private rooms. Look at the things you've chosen to place nearest to your private, unclothed, unguarded, and sleeping self. Is the emotional tone of your bedroom different from the tone in the rest of your home? If you have a private bathroom, what's the emotional and artistic tone here? Does it differ from the rest of your home? If so, what's different? What do these rooms say about you? What's important to you in the most private recesses of your home?
Who lives here?

CREATING A PERFECT EMPATHIC TERRARIUM

I like to focus on your living situation because if you don't have a warm, supportive, nurturing, and replenishing home environment, it can be pretty hard to develop a healthy and happy relationship with your empathic skills. This is true for everyone, but it's especially true for hyperempaths, who may burn out if their homes aren't sanctuaries for them. In the next chapter, we'll focus on the importance (the crucial, game-changing importance) of healthy love and family relationships for empaths because without that, they have no empathic downtime anywhere. But it's equally important for anyone who wants to develop and nurture their empathic abilities to have a home environment that's filled with comfort, real nourishment, beauty, and relaxation. This kind of environment is especially important for you if you're currently
working to develop stronger emotional awareness and a keener empathic capacity. If you want to be able to live happily as an empathic person in a fairly unempathic world, your home truly needs to be your sanctuary.

Your home can act as a kind of threshold between you and the outside world. It can act as a supportive backstage area where you can rest, recharge, replenish, and take a break from the emotional needs of others (and from emotional commotion in general). Your home can be an extension of your boundary-setting practice; it can help you learn how to set and maintain boundaries in the physical world as you learn to define yourself and set boundaries in your interactions and your relationships.

I don't want you to think that I'm promoting the creation of a silent monastery, because your home can certainly be a colorful, music-filled social space and a fun party home. Healthy interaction is good food for your empathic nature, and good friendships can help you develop and hone your empathic skills in a safe and friendly environment. A home that is healing and welcoming for you can be very healing and welcoming for others, as well. However, what we're focusing on in this chapter is how to make your home into a kind of terrarium that can nurture a sensitive, emotionally aware, and healthy empathic organism.

I asked earlier whether your home looks out onto any sort of nature or greenery, because greenery and natural environments seem to have a specific healing function for our bodies. At one point in my earlier career, during a five-year period when I wrote ten books and audio learning sets and toured constantly, I reached a point of such overwhelm that my health started to slip away. A counselor I spoke to prescribed hiking to a secluded spot near water and lying down on the ground under some trees. It seems strange, but that was a specifically healing activity. First of all, I was alone and away from the commotion of other people and their needs. Second, I was in a beautiful place where all the sounds were natural and unconnected to me (no phones, no alarms, no voices). Third, I could lie down and feel the grounding support of the earth underneath my entire body—I could let go of everything. And fourth, as I lay there, I realized that nature didn't need me—I wasn't central to the functioning of this place. Unlike my career or my home or my family life, in this place I was welcome but unneeded. The wind didn't require anything from me. The water flowed downstream whether or not I was there. The trees grew and the animals managed their lives—completely without input from me. In this place, I could be a part of nature without needing to do anything. I could just exist.

As you observe your habitat and your home, I'd like you to be aware of beauty and nature around you. Is greenery and growth visible to you? Do you have sources of fresh, clean air? Can you open your windows freely? Do you have plants in your home? Are there places where you can get away and simply be a part of nature—where you are unneeded but welcome, and nurtured but basically ignored? Are you connected to the natural sounds of the nonhuman world? If not, you can create many aspects of a healing natural environment for yourself.

When I have lived in noisy urban areas, my bathroom became an oasis where I created a sense of being enveloped in quiet, natural sounds and sensual delights. Hot baths or long showers with low lights and soft music (if you like music), wonderful scents (if you're not scent sensitive), and soft, clean towels can bring you a sense of release and relaxation. Think about how many of the gifts of sadness you can access during bathing. You can let go of lots of things that aren't working anyway, like dirt and grime, mental clutter, and muscle tension, and you can intentionally rejuvenate yourself, your skin, your mind, and your musculature. Water can be wonderfully healing and relaxing, and it's readily available. If you're surrounded by noise and bustle, even inside your home, your bathroom can become a mini-spa and sanctuary. Water, nature, and greenery are wonderfully healing, yet if you can't get to nature, you can still create a small healing oasis inside your home.

Relaxation is such an important part of a whole and healthy life, yet I find that it's not something many of us make time for, which is why I created such simple grounding and rejuvenation practices. I noted earlier that most meditation and relaxation practices use sadness without realizing that they're doing so; it's fascinating to me that instruction in how to access the gifts of sadness has become a kind of cottage industry. I mean, it's a good industry, but it's remarkable that people actually need direct instruction in how to access the gifts of their own emotions and that people need to be taught how to relax. As you observe your home, make a note of how many areas are relaxing or are set aside specifically for you to relax. If there are few or none (besides your bed, of course), ask yourself why.

For very empathic people—or for people who are learning to increase their emotional and empathic abilities—interaction and emotional availability are vital learning activities. You have to get out and interact, engage in relationships, use your empathic skills, and be willing to be intimate with others or with your interests out in the world. These are wonderful activities, but they're
activating (and sometimes fatiguing); you need to balance all that activation with relaxation, grounding, self-care, and rejuvenation. This is why we're focusing on your home, because it can be your empathic recharging station.

THE HEALING POWER OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION

As you observe your home and think about how it can support, nurture, protect, and replenish you, look at your artistic practice, if you have one. Have you created a space in your home for your artistic or musical expression? Artistic expression is wonderful and soul-expanding for anyone, but it has a particular healing quality for empaths—it helps you express and channel emotions intentionally. Whether you write, draw, paint, sing, compose, play an instrument, design, do metalwork or paper arts, work with fabric or jewelry, create with wood or ceramics, dance or do martial arts, do graphic arts or photography, do math or science, or work in your garden or your kitchen, artistic and creative expression will enable you to connect with yourself and to tangibly symbolize emotions, thoughts, and ideas.

Artistic expression is specifically healing for empaths because it helps us bring balance to our highly receptive bodies, and it helps us use our empathic Einfühlung skills in self-nurturing ways. We empaths spend a lot of time in receptivity, and if there isn't a healthy way for us to express and channel all of the emotions, sensations, and impressions we receive, we can become overwhelmed and exhausted. We can head toward burnout if we have no expressive practice to balance our natural tendency to be highly receptive to our environment and continually aware of the emotions, needs, difficulties, and wishes of others. Artistic expression can help us express things in a sensual, visual, vocal, intellectual, tactile, or kinetic way, and it can help us develop an internal dialogue and deeper intrapersonal awareness. Artistic expression can also help people with low empathy develop the intrapersonal skills and awareness that lead to stronger Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation skills. Artistic expression is a vital aspect of empathic self-care—and luckily, the art doesn't even have to be any good.