New Empathy Circles and Open Café
Do you want to work on developing your empathy skills?
Would you like to speak and feel fully heard? Would you like to connect to yourself and others more deeply?
An empathy circle is a simple but powerful way for people to connect through structured dialogue, speaking, and active listening in small groups. It takes about 15 minutes to understand. You don’t need any special skills or training to be involved.
It is primarily designed to offer an environment for active listening and creates a space where you can talk and feel heard to your satisfaction about a set topic or whatever is alive for you in the moment.
You will each have a role in the circle and take turns switching roles throughout the circle. One role is the speaker who will speak to an active listener.
Everyone else takes the role of a silent listener during each turn and there is also a facilitator role who will also participate, keep time and help keep everyone in the process.
Schedule: https://empathymatters.org/now/events-list/
Meditation facilitates creating more space in life to focus on the things that are really important.
Meditation facilitates a calm mind which heightens compassionate and empathetic responses to people. A study in Human Neuroscience explained how meditation could affect emotional processing which can create positive responses to negative stimuli. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485650/
A few hours of training over the course of several days increased positive affective experiences and elicited activity in brain regions previously associated with positive affect and social affiliation (Klimecki. https://empathymatters.org/now/meditation/
RE: Guidelines:
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The two main criteria in practicing Marshall Rosenberg’s NVC are:
1. Are you speaking and acting from your own experience?
aka: Empathy is not about “fixing” someone else.
2. Is your practice contributing to well-being?
aka: Emathty is not about harming self or others (“Ahimsa”) ….
If harm occurs accidentally, empathy circles can be used for repair work and healing.
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QUESTION: “When should NVC not be applied for a reason of impaired physical or mental health?
ANSWER: ” I cannot think of a situation in which self-compassion, self-empathy, and self-connection is not appropriate. ~Marshall Rosenberg
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Carl Rogers 3 core conditions:
1) Empathic understanding: the counselor trying to understand the client’s point of view.
2) Congruence: the counselor being a genuine person.
3) Unconditional positive regard: the counselor being non-judgemental.
[Listening] … means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it… It involves being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meanings that flow in this other person…. To be with another in this way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another’s world without prejudice… In some sense it means that you lay aside yourself …. ~Carl RogersEmpathy is saying to someone:
“I’m trying to be a companion to you in your search and your exploration. I want to know, am I with you? Is this the way it seems to you? Is this the thing you’re trying to express? Is this the meaning it has for you?”
So in a sense I’m saying, “I’m walking with you step by step, and I want to make sure I am with you. Am I with you? So that’s a little bit of my understanding about empathy.”
~ Carl Rogers
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“HOW TO” Empathy Circle Video by Edwin Rutsch:
https://www.empathycircle.com/how-to-empathy-circle
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