Arrival: Question to Write On for this week…
Given that this is the last week of our six week sprint,
What have you gained from this experience?
What has been a highlight / what are you taking with you?
Edwin
Celebration - hearing how people are successfully using EC is fulfilling (Eliza and Rita)
Connections: making so many wonderful connections with and empathic group of people.
Shared connection on a common empathy project. Enjoy having that common initiative to work on and explore. One felt common brain (towards empathy), field of empathy, empathy consciousness, connecting and enjoying
Creativity and innovation. Lot’s of new insights and feelings around the nature of empathy.
Tools and Resources. A growing set of resources for facilitating empathy circles
Energized. Energy for continuing and building on this work.
Many Insights and Learning: on facilitating a design group.
The shared cornucopia of felt and common humanity.
Extended sensitivity skills - feeling.
Creativity and everyone's contributions
Sharing the sensitivity and care to the empathic field, learning, growing and observation
Body of work that keeps growing, sense of satisfaction
Rosa
The people have been amazing! Such a pleasure to meet each of you…
The insight on using a “positive psychology” approach when first starting empathy circles (inviting people to share things they love, things that are meaningful to them, etc.)
I’ve been moved to see how much others enjoy being a part of an empathy circle. I’m thinking especially about a time when people were talking about how it’s so counter-cultural… we are not “doing” anything, we are just ‘being’... and how easy it is for it to feel amazing, just ‘being’ together.
Salvador
I have more and new ideas about how to organize and promote Empathy Circles
I have written two “documents” in Spanish, to be used in EC
I feel glad sharing experiences and ideas with the people in this group. It is important to share with people with similar interests
I think that empathy is a rather complex way of being and understanding. So it might be useful to identify some steps to develop that complexity.
It is more clear to me that the context and people’s situation are important to identify a good way to invite people to EC. And even to find different ways to do EC.
It has been useful to reflect in my own practice and to review some texts that I have written.
I feel invited to write more about my experiences and learning working with people in general, and with psychotherapy graduate students in particular.
Valerie
Alara
Martin
I know that this is a research event for Edwin and Rosa and I think it has fulfilled its purpose of providing some material for moving ahead. Certainly reading these notes of the experiences of the others is very powerful. Seeing what struck each person as most important. I especially like the sense of empathy circles as a way to bond a group.For me it has been an opportunity to immerse myself in an empathic environment as a catalyst for my own path. The highlight has definitely been meeting you all. I am sad it is over. I will leave you with my program blurb for the World Mediation Summit in Madrid.
Journey to Empathy
As mediators know empathy is a central skill. To be able to really listen and to understand what the reality of a situation is like for the parties and to help those parties to that level of understanding of each other is paramount in our world.
Martin Golder started a practice in conflict management as an adjunct to his architectural practice in 1996. He quickly discovered that empathy was not one of his native gifts or perhaps it had been surgically removed in British boarding school. Using a contrived surface veneer of empathy, mechanical empathy if you like, works well as conflicting parties are too wrapped up in their own conflict to notice the artifice. However Martin decided that ‘real’ empathy might work better and so embarked on a quest to find it. This participatory presentation is the result of that quest.
Magic and meditation are involved.
Eliza
The beauty of simplicity
How quickly we can connect with people deeply
That there is a wonderful community of people all over the world who are dedicated to greater connection
The amazing technology of zoom to connect people
The potency of embracing a process of both and rather than either or
Gratitude
Violeta
I feel like it ended way too soon!
I learned how quickly you can form a community, using a simple, but effective tool. Now, I try to remember most of the people on this sprint were already passionate about empathy and it might not be the case in other circumstances.
I will definitely incorporate empathy circles in my trainings or research efforts. I hope to be able to share some of my findings or challenges with the people on this team. I translated the one-pager in Bulgarian and plan to do the same with all the other documents. The hardest thing right now is the translation of “empathy circles” and “speaker” :).
One of my insights is that we can achieve synchrony and connection in very short snippets of time (2-5 min). I used to think you need hours to do that!
Lastly, I am taking a lot of inspiration and motivation from these six weeks. Thank you so much for this opportunity, Edwin and Rosa!
RitaI enjoyed bathing in the energy of empathy in general and being part of an empathic community in particular.With ease, I found the experience serene and comforting. I believe that in hearing each other the way we wanted to be heard, we were able to become connected very fast. I wonder if the ease happened because we had a common goal: to explore a model we were attracted to even before the first meeting. I take home with me the beauty of getting together with a vision that will grow and materialise way beyond the short 6 weeks bracket.
Mrinal