The Holy Spirit guided me this week to Chapter 16 in the text of A Course in Miracles, to the section called True Empathy.
It opens with a line that stops the ordinary mind:
“To empathize does not mean to join in suffering, for that is what you must refuse to understand.”
Now look up empathy in the dictionary. What you’ll find is this: empathy is the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions.
To feel somebody’s feelings.
So Jesus is telling us that to empathize is not what the dictionary says it is. It’s the opposite.
I’ll explain.
As we’re endevoring to fully live A Course in Miracles, we refuse to feel another person’s pain as our own. Not because we’re cold. Not because we don’t care.
Because the pain is delusional, and joining it makes it more real.
Personally, when I teach this same teaching, I use the word compassion rather than empathy. When Jesus has a totally different definition for a word than the dictionary does, we run into conversational challenges and misinterpretations. We already have so much of that with the ego thought system. So, I do my best to simplify and clarify things.
Here’s how I’ve come to hold it:
- Sympathy judges first, then extends pity.
- Empathy, as the world defines it, joins the feeling.
- Compassion is loving understanding for what a person is experiencing, without identifying with them.
Compassion doesn’t require us to drown alongside anyone.
We can love someone completely and have compassion, loving understanding, without agreeing that their suffering is real.
The capacity to empathize is very useful to the Holy Spirit, provided we let the Holy Spirit use it in the Holy Spirit’s way. And that way is very different from ours.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t understand suffering, and would have us teach that it isn’t understandable.
That’s the whole shift.
If you’ve spent your life absorbing what everyone around you is feeling, and calling it love, I’d like to offer you something truly helpful. My Deep Dive Workshop, How to Stop Absorbing Other People’s Pain, is exactly this work, and I’d love to have you join me.
We can be truly helpful. That’s what we’re here for.
TOMORROW SATURDAY – How to Stop Absorbing Everyone’s Pain Workshop – Saturday, July 11th If your heart is tender and you’re weary of losing yourself in everyone else’s storms, this workshop is designed to support you in learning how to experience life without suffering from other people’s suffering. Click here to learn more.
IN-PERSON EVENT – Quantum Counseling Training Intensive in July – This is my most powerful healing event – and I only do it in person every other year. If you have an interest in training to be a spiritual counselor or simply doing some dealing work to open up your intuition and improve your relationships, I’ve been offering a professional training intensive for the last 15 years. This year we’re doing the training intensive – open to anyone whether or not you have any interest in becoming a counselor – the Quantum Counseling Training Intensive in Asheville NC Sunday, July 12th to Saturday, July 18th with Jennifer Hadley and Mark Anthony Lord, as well as Guest Teachers Alan Cohen, Jon Mundy and Lisa Natoli, Michael Mirdad joining us online – register soon so you can qualify for early-bird bonuses please click here now for more info.
Did you miss it? Q&A for the Quantum Counseling Training Intensive is available on replay now. Have you felt the nudge to go deeper in your healing journey—but you’re not sure where to begin? The replay is available now!
NEW PODCAST EPISODE: Mark Anthony Lord: The Work That Heals Us Mark Anthony Lord and I met as practitioners in training in 1999, and we’ve walked the same path ever since: prayer practitioner training, becoming ministers, starting our own ministries, learning to counsel and to train counselors. We each came up through a dark night first. What we keep marveling at is that the work itself is what healed us, and that A Course in Miracles met us at every turn. We go all the way back to the beginning here, and we don’t tidy it up.
