Paper on 3rd Global Conference for Empathy
14-17 July 2016
Mansfield College, OXFORD UNIVERSITY
THE BIRTH OF EMPATHY THROUGH THE BODY
Dear colleagues,
In the presentation I have prepared for this year’s conference, which concerns empathy, I will briefly try to make you experience the magic of the birth of empathy through the realisation of our body. Having worked several years with people by using somatic therapy, both therapeutically and educationally, I have studied how empathy can be reached by the birth and the development of the relationship with the body itself at an existential level.
Empathy is a person’s psychological ability to have room for other people in his or her inner world. To feel the other person’s truth and feelings as another reality, which differs from his or her own reality, but at the same time to approach the other person’s truth with ease, without fear and without any particular purpose in mind. To be able to trust the other person’s feelings, even if the circumstances and the events that the other person experiences or describes are distant or unknown to him or her. To be able to be as close as the other person needs or asks for, without judging or evaluating what this person shows, based on his or her own code of values. Empathy is, in a way, the practical demonstration that a person fully accepts the value according to which all people are equal and each person is a link in the chain of the universe.
I will continue my presentation based on this view of empathy.
Let’s see how a person can acquire this ability through the discovery of their body’s existential dimension.
The approach I use in order to work with the body and its abilities is the Non-Directive Somatic Psychotherapy (Non-Directive Somato-Emotional Release – N.D.S.E.R.), based on the touch of the craniosacral therapy (C.S.T.).
Now it’s not the time to discuss this method extensively. I will only talk about the characteristic touch which is used in this method and then I will go on with the presentation.
This touch, which is known as the gentle touch of 5 grams, evokes the memory of the body and enables the traveller, which is the person who participates in a session, to communicate with their body, to feel their body via the information they receive from all their senses, which are awakened throughout the session, and to fully realise the existential dimension of the body and its power. Our body is not only what we see when we look ourselves in the mirror and, of course, it doesn’t consist of the beliefs we have developed about it throughout our life.
Next, there is a dialogue, which has been part of a session, between a traveller and his fellow traveller (the therapist). The traveller is lying on a massage table, having his eyes closed, and he is being touched by the touch of 5 grams.
It is a man who came to attend a session because he was feeling his heart beat hard and this made him worried and scared him a lot. He came to me after having visited a cardiologist who reassured him that he had no pathological disease. Besides the fear he felt regarding anything that happened to his body, he also judged other people quite harshly, he had high expectations of them and, eventually, he ended up being isolated and feeling that no one fully understood him.
Fellow Traveller (therapist): Where are you now?
Traveller: I am part of a picture… from my childhood… He starts breathing quickly.
FT: Can you describe it?
T: I am at about fifteen years old. I am at my father’s vineyard. It’s the time that we harvest the grapes. My father is far. I am alone there… it’s afternoon and I’m tired… we have been working since the morning. The basket is full of grapes and I have to carry it up to the road in order to put it in the car. I’m carrying it with my hands. I’m taking an uphill path and my heart is beating hard. It’s difficult… I want to leave the basket on the ground but I keep walking. I want to shout that I’m young and that I can’t do this. As I keep walking, my heart beats faster and faster… It’s about to break but I don’t stop…
FT: How do you feel your heart now?
T: Now? It’s beating hard now, too… He bursts into tears. My heart always shows me something. Since that day at the vineyard, it beats hard when it wants to show me that I’m tired and that I need to rest. That I want to ask for help. But, since then, I have decided not to listen to it. I wanted to prove how much of a man I am. And I did it. All these years, I never paid attention to it. Not in any way. I behaved as if it didn’t exist… He is in floods of tears. And then he addresses his heart: “I forgot you, I put you aside. I want to tell you that I’m sorry… for having left you alone all these years, in that vineyard.”
Silence
FT: How do you feel your body now that you’re telling all these things to your heart?
T: My body exists. It has tension but it exists. And, for the first time, I listen to my heart beating hard and I’m not afraid of it. He is in tears… Thank you.
“The fact that my heart showed me that I abandoned it when I was fifteen, is very painful and at the same time very revealing… and it’s true that, since then, I haven’t done anything of what I really wanted.”
Let’s take a closer look at what happened to this person after he communicated with his heart.
So, after this session, he stopped being afraid of his heartbeats because now he knew for sure that his heart also had another dimension and that it wasn’t only a mechanical pump. He had encountered the existential level of his body. This encounter makes people feel like Alice in Wonderland, when she passed through the tiny door and found herself in front of an amazing world of unlimited possibilities!
After this encounter, the man started trusting the messages of his body and perceiving them as something that didn’t want to destroy him – probably the opposite. He approached even the pathological problems that appeared to his body without panic and with the will to understand what was going on. What had happened?
His body unfolded, in front of his eyes, its other dimension. The one that contains the memories, the traumas, the way in which each person experiences their feelings. People have the same feelings but their internalisation and expression is personal. This personal imprint is recorded in the memory of the body and not in the memory which is subject to our logic. This experience leads people to understand that, apart from logic, there are other inner pieces which they can know and remember. And these pieces establish a straightforward, personal truth because they aren’t affected by any kind of external learning or social education. In other words, I would say that they are the part of the brain which takes orders only from our inner world. This fact itself makes people withdraw from the dogmatism and the inflexible attitude they may have so far. These are features of people who have learnt to act only rationally. Whose whole life is based on the verb “I know”. They accept to hush and to start to listen. At this very moment a tiny gap is opening up, in order for empathy to develop.
Regarding the man I mentioned above, the one who attended the session, the first spark of empathy for his own body had just been created inside him. The experience of communicating with his body made him realise that his brain doesn’t know everything. He listened to the truth that lied inside him all these years. This truth also gave him the answer to what he feared so much, his heart beating hard. He was afraid of this, he didn’t know anything about it, but he was sure that there was something wrong with his heart. An illness that not even doctors could diagnose! Later, his body itself offered him the solution and his heart stopped beating so hard. Until the moment he attended the session, he had been treating his heart harshly and had been distancing himself from it, based on what he thought he knew. Of course, he had the same attitude towards his whole body, towards all his feelings. He took it for granted that his body should be there to serve him. If something was not working properly, he was afraid, angry and he judged his body without suspecting, not even for a moment, that there was a different, more functional way of life. After attending the above-mentioned session, as well as other similar sessions, he stopped regarding his body as an organism with operating rules and thinking in fear that something wrong is going on when these rules are violated. He stopped pointing his finger at his body like a strict teacher who knows everything. He opened up the way in order to stand next to his body and to listen to it, fully accepting that it can tell him, better than anyone else, what’s going on and what he needs. This way opened up through the man’s experience of communicating with his heart. This communication isn’t a simple emotional expression. Don’t think of it in this way. In this experience, the traveller’s brain generates theta brainwaves. When people are in a state of theta brainwaves, their brain cooperates with the centres of emotions, desires and repressed memory, while the centres of logical processes become less active. Therefore, whatever happens at that time is recorded in brain centres which cannot be influenced by our rational thinking or by any form of social education. It is information that is recorded permanently in our brain. The relationship which is developed with our body and with ourselves in such sessions is characterised by listening, trust, acceptance, love and peaceful coexistence, all of which form the essence of empathy. Most importantly, all these things now emerge from the centre of ourselves, without having to make any effort. And this constitutes the substantial difference from any kind of learning or education we may have received until now, about how to show empathy. External learning can teach us techniques to show empathy. The somatic experience I just presented to you can make us feel empathy. When we are able to feel empathy, nothing can make us forget it. This is contrary to the cognitive acquisition of empathy, which can be forgotten or fade away, as it happens with every piece of theoretical information that our brain receives.
When the relationship with our body takes this form, it’s a matter of time to also adopt this attitude when we develop relationships with the people around us. When we discover that we can have this peaceful and honest relationship with ourselves, we also want to establish the same relationship with the others. We want to do so because, in our life, we coexist with the others. And if we are in seventh heaven with our body, why not be in seventh heaven when it comes to our relationships with the other people?
The phrase “to be in seventh heaven with my body” isn’t mine. It’s been said by many people who have received this therapy. And afterwards, each and one of them have been able to easily listen to, feel and understand the others.
The discovery of the body in this way is a big or small adventure for each person. However, all travellers can arrive at the same island where peaceful coexistence prevails. This coexistence depends on empathy. And if you think that the relationship with one’s body is like a very small pebble which falls into the lake of social reality, I will agree with you. But I will also prompt you to remember the physical law according to which even an apparently small action of energy can cause a chain of changes.
Subsequently, an experiential activity will be done, in which the audience will take part.
Thank you very much.
