Life Skills: Empathy Education

Life with all its complexities and contrasts creates a necessity to chalk out ways to make young impressionable minds better equipped to handle its exigencies. Holistic education is so much about grounding in connectedness as much as it is about intuitive understanding that, harmony in the mind body connection is a way of life and living.

An education in empathic behavior becomes paramount in a materialistic world. A lot of misconception about empathy needs clarification.

Empathy is seeing with another, listening to another acknowledging them as they are, in a nonjudgmental space and being with another sensing the feelings and caring to reach out with support through words action and deeds …

Empathy can be sensed in a touch a nod or a smile or in the simplicity of silence, doing nothing but just being there ….

Empathy is a sharing, a feeling, a bonding, a being, a seeing, a sensing, a trusting and believing in hope, in faith, in life and grace.

Empathy is about caring, as a way of being. Empathy is not always about bearing the suffering and sensing another’s pain or being in a state of sorrow or pain. There can arise great empathy when dancing together or in a classroom environment where the teacher feels one with the student’s frame of mind and speaks to address that … or hearing or performing a song or play together with unbridled sense of bonding and enthusiasm. This empathy can be reflected time and time again in striving to consciously stay aware of the mutually creative fulfillment it brings to our lives. Positive benefits of empathy can become a mirror to gradually inducing greater empathic behavior in our lives towards ourselves and others.

Our movements have the power to change our moods, as much as our thoughts can bring a change in our way of being. It doesn’t matter who believes in your empathic way of life, what matters is you believe in it yourself. And that is the first step in making a positive difference. When there is an empathy in action, it is mirrored in our minds to create, generate loving and caring thoughts as a response to the action.

Every empathic thought finds its way into expression thoughts words or deeds creatively. With increasing empathic thought and action there is unknowingly a connectedness, valuing the interdependence in this web of life and living as a way of being.

Savvy

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