How did I come to start working on developing empathy circles.
Started when I went to Occupy Wall Street and set up an empathy tent.
I had the intention to foster more empathy at the encampment that was set up in downtown Berkeley at the Martin Luther King park.
At the tent we offered empathic listening, conflict mediation, art work, etc.
The ideas was to promote empathy and see if we could build an empathy movement there.
We did a facilitated larger talking stick circle. There was a woman that was very outspoken and some of the guys didn't like her. She came to the empathy circle and was very traumatized. Some people there had slit her tent at night with a knife and she someone had exposed themselves to her as well.
She talked for about 40 minutes, and very much needed to talk. However, I noticed that there were other people who also needed to talk and be heard and they didn't get much of a chance. I just felt this process didn't work very well in this situation for maximizing empathy.
I started to think about a process that could work better. It need to be something that could maximize empathic practice and involvement.
Empathic Listening from Carl Rogers. The therapist,
I want to take empathy out of the professionalized therapy world and bring it to be something that everyone learn.
In some mediation training workshops I had also seen how
I had seen the World Cafe process. This is
4 people, everyone has a lot of time to talk, and to practice listening.
But more that just a one to one empathy buddy,
I thought that if people at the encampment could have created many small empathy circles and had long dialogues together that they may have
We need a peer to peer process. Something that anyone can easily get started with.
Problem, may have been the focus on building
Other person left the group, never really explained why
empathy circles platform needs development.