The Art of Empathy (19 page)

HOW TO GROUND YOURSELF

To ground yourself, you intentionally relax yourself and imagine breathing any tension downward, as if you're gathering tension and exhaling it down through your abdomen and into your pelvis, thighs, calves, and feet—and then into the ground. Next, when you're settled and calmer, you return to the subtle attention and focus you used when you listened for that quiet sound and welcomed the gifts of fear. That's it; that's the practice. When you're able
to release tension intentionally, connect to the ground, and refocus yourself, you're done. The subtle gifts of sadness and fear belong to you, they work nicely together, and they're easy to access. That's it!

If you've learned any martial arts, you'll recognize grounding as a process of connecting your
chi
—or your life force—with the earth so that you can be more stable and resourced. Before martial artists are allowed to jump and kick, they must first learn to stabilize and ground themselves so they can become aware of their posture, their balance, and their center of gravity. Getting Grounded provides this same stability to sensitive and empathic people, who can become physically destabilized when there are too many emotions flying around, when they're in the presence of conflict, or when they're feeling tense.

If you empathically think back to disquieting situations in your own life, you'll probably recall that your body became rigid, that you may have lost your focus and your ability to relax yourself, and that you may have disconnected from the experience and become preoccupied, inattentive, or spaced out. Sometimes, those responses are fine, but if they're your
only
responses during trouble, you won't be able to develop strong empathic or interactive skills. If the troubles and difficulties of human interaction regularly unground, unfocus, and destabilize you, this simple grounding and focusing process will help you begin to develop Emotional Regulation skills. The simple acts of breathing intentionally and imagining yourself connecting to the earth as you let go of tension—and then reengaging with your soft focusing abilities—will help you reconnect to your emotional and physical center of gravity and to the intelligence inherent in your emotions. It seems very simple, I know, but that's the point. Empaths need skills that are easily accessible, emotion honoring, simple, and totally portable.

If you prefer longer meditations, you can extend this grounding practice. You can breathe into each area of your body separately as you gather and release tension from every part of yourself. Or you can enhance this grounding practice with mindfulness practices from other traditions. But if you have only a few minutes each day to check in, this practice will help you connect with yourself, release tensions, and refocus yourself intentionally and swiftly.

You can also engage in activities that are grounding in and of themselves, such as exercise, swimming, hot baths, massage, good sex, playing with
animals, being with loved ones, playing with children, eating delicious food, doing art, playing music, viewing art, being in nature, reading, doing math or science, organizing your physical space, or any of a hundred healing and grounding activities. If something brings you a sense of delicious relaxation and healing focus, it's a grounding practice. Simple.

As you observe your life empathically, ask yourself how many relaxing, delightful, and grounding activities exist in your normal day or week. If you can think of very few naturally grounding activities, you might want to make this simple grounding practice a regular part of your life for a while. Then see whether you can find time for intentional relaxation (we'll talk more about finding that time in the next chapter). If you want to be a healthy and happy empath, relaxation and grounding are vital skills.

DEFINING YOUR BOUNDARIES

People talk a great deal about setting boundaries, but the concept is sort of hazy. Often, when people talk about setting boundaries, they mean that you should tell people “no” and take more time for yourself. However, if you have very permeable interpersonal boundaries, this kind of verbal boundary setting can be pretty ineffectual. I work with a lot of empathic people who've tried every form of assertive communication skill, but when someone really needs them—
boom!
—their hyperempathic tendencies kick in automatically, and they lose their resolve.

Learning to define your boundaries certainly involves communication skills, but I've found that you can't start there. In fact, I'd say that boundary definition is more of a behavioral and developmental process, in which you actually have to retrain yourself and learn to identify yourself as a distinct individual with distinct emotions, ideas, preferences, and requirements. This, in turn, makes you more able to understand others as distinct individuals. In fact, new research is connecting the capacity for self-identification with the development of empathic skills. Doris Bischof-Köhler, who created the teddy bear and spoon experiment I wrote about in
Chapter 2
, added a second phase to her experiment, which tested whether the children who could empathize also had the ability to identify themselves in a mirror. Mirror self-recognition tests indicate the point at which infants develop the ability to identify themselves in a mirror. Before this stage, infants may think that the baby in the mirror is someone else or that there's a baby behind the mirror somewhere. Mirror self-recognition abilities suggest that infants have developed the concept of a self.

In her experiments, Bischof-Köhler found that although some of the nonself-recognizing infants could empathize skillfully,
all
of the self-recognizers could. This would suggest that self-awareness is connected to the capacity to comprehend the selfhood of others (and their distinction from you)—and, therefore, to a capacity for skillful Perspective Taking and Perceptive Engagement. This is why I call Defining Boundaries a developmental process. You have to know who
you
are and where you begin and end before you can empathize skillfully; you first have to be able to identify and define your own boundaries.

Luckily, your boundaries already exist. You can sense them when people stare at you from behind, and you can feel their exact dimensions when you're in a crowded elevator. In the metaphysical community, this tangible sense of your personal space and your boundaries is called the
aura,
while in the neurological field, this personal space is now understood to be a part of your
proprioceptive
system. This system of neural and muscular networks in your brain and body actually maps your position in relation to everything around you. Your proprioceptive system works in every second to help you stand, balance, move, and understand your body's relationship to its environment. (For more information on your proprioceptive system, see the excellent book
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own,
by science writers Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee.)

Your proprioceptors map your body and your environment so that you can interact competently in the physical world. Your proprioceptors map your home, your car, your tools, your workplace, and all aspects of your physical habitat. If your proprioceptive system doesn't work well, you'll be pretty clumsy—you'll drop things, trip over your own feet, or walk into walls. Thus, this system is an important part of your basic physical awareness.

Your proprioceptors also map a specific area around your body that is called your
peripersonal
space. This space extends all around you and out to the reach of your arms and legs—about eighteen to thirty inches in front of and behind you, on both sides of you, above you, and below you. It is the exact dimension that most aura readers consider to be the size of a healthy aura. In the rest of this book, I'll focus on this area as your peripersonal boundary; however, if you require this area to be an aura, go ahead and trade the word
aura
for
boundary;
I now see them as one and the same thing. This peripersonal space is the area that you control and define, and you can use it to actually teach yourself how to set effective interpersonal boundaries.

If you can't yet wrap your mind around the idea of peripersonal space, no problem. Your proprioceptors are already brilliant at mapping territory,
including imaginal territory, such as your avatar in a video game or the imaginal walls you create when you're pretending to be a mime. If you can't yet sense this boundary, you can use your imaginal skills as a kind of placeholder. (I use the word
imaginal
intentionally, and I contrast it with the word
imaginary,
which means pretend or unreal.) Your imaginal skills are both unreal and real in very important ways—they're creative skills that recruit your empathic, emotive, and artistic abilities to help you engage with ideas, concepts, and structures that may not be visible or tangible (such as your avatar or your mimed walls), yet they have their own kind of reality. Your real-but-unseen proprioceptive system is ready and able to help you create an imaginal boundary that will actually become tangible to you.

Learning to develop a tangible sense of your personal boundaries is very important if you're currently dealing with low empathic awareness, because this practice will help you develop better Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation skills. You have to know where you begin and end so that you can scan through your body and your environment to properly identify emotional stimuli. On the other hand, this skill is also important if you're a hyperempath who experiences a great deal of Emotion Contagion. Defining your boundaries will help you develop a clear self/other distinction so that you can begin to identify the differences between your own emotions and the emotions of others. Defining your boundaries will help you develop better emotional hygiene.

This self/other distinction is a source of confusion for many people who want to develop their empathy. I see people who intentionally try to de-self and become one with others emotionally so that they can empathize, and these people would strongly question my suggestion that people with low empathy should learn to define their interpersonal boundaries. I understand their confusion. When people have low empathic skills, such that they aren't aware of emotions or can't understand
why
people would feel this or that emotion (“
I
don't feel it, so why should you?”), teaching them to set boundaries seems counterintuitive. Aren't their boundaries too rigid already? I say “no,” and I see the situation of empathic insensitivity as a kind of analog to hyperempathy.

In a hyperempath, the
self
is not distinct, whereas in a low-empathy person, the
other
is not distinct. In both cases, there is boundary impairment combined with an inability to skillfully balance the needs of the self with the needs of the other. In both cases, learning to identify and work with the already-existing peripersonal space helps people identify self and other tangibly: “My clearly
defined boundaries tell me where
I
begin and end, and now I understand where
you
begin and end.” Clearly defined boundaries lead to clearer empathic awareness, no matter how empathically receptive you currently are.

In our distracted and emotionally confused culture, most of us don't see ourselves as distinct individuals with clear boundaries, and this truly impedes our ability to empathize skillfully. Luckily, this second empathic skill directly and imaginally addresses this problem. Empaths need safe space and privacy, and this skill helps you create both of them quickly, easily, and intentionally.

What Defining Your Boundaries Will Do for You.
Boundary Definition is an intrapersonal skill that addresses these aspects of empathy:

Emotion Contagion—defining your boundaries helps you understand where you begin and end so that you can identify where emotions originate, and this, of course, increases your Empathic Accuracy

Emotion Regulation—defining your boundaries gives you a portable private space where you can work with your emotions in each moment