Developing Empathy through Mindfulness

According to psychologists, most of us do not really understand and perceive our own pain, so can we be sympathetic to the pain of others?

When we practice mindfulness, one of the skills that we develop is empathy. Once we have opened up our own experiences in ourselves, we will be aware of what we feel in each moment, and no longer deny our feelings.

Accepting our feelings and knowing our own pain is a step closer to being able to empathize and understand others. Through this, we can easily build a bridge to the pain of others, which causes us to step out of our comfort zone and offer to help others.

With the empathy that has risen inside of us and with what we have truly understood about pain - both in ourselves and in others - we are then forced to live and behave in a way that produces as little harm and harm as possible. When we realize that someone will suffer when we perform a harmful action or simply say hurtful words, we find that we are limited in doing so. It is considered a simple, very natural reaction in humans.

Open up with ourselves can be the source of our deep connection to others. Open up about pains does not mean we are weak and want to give up. But because the pains will teach us to see things in a different way, to have the courage not to hurt anyone, and to also realize that we are not alone and never alone.