Building Empathy with Mindfulness
This mindfulness worksheet outlines a simple practice that can help us to feel greater empathy for anyone we meet. It invites us to put ourselves in another person’s shoes – to experience the world as they do. Over time, it can deepen our compassion, understanding, and patience with the people we meet.
But what does empathy mean, really? Often there is some confusion between empathy and sympathy, so let’s break it down before getting into how we can enhance it with mindfulness.
What Does Empathy Mean?
Empathy is different from sympathy in that empathy is our ability to understand the feelings and experience of another. This virtue lets us feel with someone, as if we were experiencing what they are experiencing ourselves. Sympathy, on the other hand, is feeling concern or sorrow for another person’s pain from the outside.
The difference? Putting ourselves in someone’s shoes, or diving into the feeling for ourselves.
Building empathy is therefore not about rationally understanding why someone might be feeling pain, sorrow, or any other challenging feeling. It is about having a felt understanding of another’s experience. In other words, it is an embodied understanding. To enhance this virtue within ourselves, mindfulness practices and our list of empathy quotes can play a supporting role.
Mindfulness Practices for Increasing Empathy
Mindfulness and meditation are not practices that stop at awareness of our own world; they expand far beyond our individual being by enhancing our awareness of our interconnectedness with all things. As such, there are a variety of compassion-based mindfulness practices that can help us cultivate empathy. Building empathy can support our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of the people around us.
Some exercises (in addition to this worksheet) that you might consider exploring include:
