Just inside the entrance to Pasqua Hospital, colourful panels adorn the walls; gold, silver and bronze casts of hands reach out towards the room.
On Tuesday evening, those hands were stretched towards those who were there to celebrate the unveiling of the huge, 20-footlong mural.
Titled the Oneness Compassion Mosaic, it was created by 300 Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region patients, family members, volunteers, health care staff, students and members of the community over the space of almost two years.
"Their trust was incredible," said Bonnie Chapman, the artist in residence who conceptualized, facilitated and curated the project.
I’m happy to have Jean Fain, L.I.C.S.W., M.S.W., a Harvard Medical School-affiliated psychotherapist specializing in eating issues, and author of The Self-Compassion Diet: A Step-by-Step Program to Lose Weight with Loving-Kindness back as my guest. Today she shares how to give yourself more compassion, which a lovely gift of self-love.
Here’s what she has to say:
The practice of self-compassion – treating yourself like a good friend or loved one – may be centuries-old news, but suddenly it’s new again. For the last year, not only has self-compassion been making headline news, including the #1 most emailed NY Times article last winter, it’s the topic of an increasing number of popular books.
I would like to commence this introduction to Jacob Arlow’s paper on “Empathy” by picking-up on his description of the nature of empathy. Empathy is a mode of operation that attempts to capture the patients inner life and requires the analyst to draw out of themselves a state of experience that somewhat approximates that of the patients.
Listening commands the analyst to be free from urges to do or say something, an idea that often runs contrary to much of our clinical training and to our prevailing culture.
The ability to empathize correctly creates deep bonds and friendships like few other conversation skills can.
How to Empathize Correctly
Empathizing is about reading between the lines of the conversation. It’s realizing they’re describing their feelings for a reason. In other words, recognizing it’s important to them.
Your job is to put yourself in their shoes, in their situation, and figure out why it’s important and what exactly they’re feeling.
You may also need to help them work out what they’re trying to say, since sometimes they’re clouded by emotion.
Here are some helpful Dos and Don’ts to Empathizing:
Some very interesting people speak to the power that cultivating compassion has in transforming human relationships at every level, from one's relationship with one's own self, one's relationship with family members, on up through the relationships...
The great moral argument of the left is that the government policies they advocate create a fairer and more compassionate world. Everything they advocate flows from the overt assumption that if you want a fair and compassionate society, their policies of forced fairness and compassion are for you; and, conversely, if you don't support their policies, then you by that fact itself cannot want a fair and compassionate society.
That is the logic they present us with, and many on the left go to great lengths to prevent anybody from looking into whether or not those policies actually deliver on their stated goals.
We who value our founding principles of individual liberty often focus on the policies themselves and the people who support them, attacking the communists, the socialists, the fascists, the leftists, the progressives, or the liberals because their policies serve to undermine our freedom.
by Joel F. Wade, Ph.D. author of Mastering Happiness.Mastering Happiness Compassion Helping People Versus
CCARE’s Compassion Training Teacher Certification program is a part-time, 12-month training for professionals who want to deepen their ability to share the science, philosophy, and pedagogy of compassion. Graduates, who fulfill all program requirements, including a period of supervised teaching, will be certified to teach CCARE’s Compassion Training Course. The Compassion Training Course is 9-week program developed by a team of psychologists, scientists, and contemplative scholars at Stanford University.
What is empathy and what do we need it for? Södertörn University, Stockholm Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge August 16-18, 2012
The last ten years we have witnessed an exploding interest in the phenomenon of empathy. The wave of empathy studies is psychology, philosophy, psychiatry and other disciplines is linked to a parallel theoretical interest in the phenomena of feeling, selfhood, inter-subjectivity and morality, but also to practical attempts to understand and improve meetings between workers and clients in different professions, such as health care professions, teaching professions, psychotherapy or social work.
To be empathic is increasingly viewed as a must for any person working in cooperation with and/or helping other people, although, as is also pointed out, the empathy must be professional in character to not produce destructive intimacy or burn out. The question of what “professional empathy” might be and how it is possible, or, indeed, fruitful to attain such ability is an interesting one in itself.
Education experts from Learning Care Group and Sprout have teamed to find ways to engage children in opportunities to develop an understanding of empathy -- through teachable moments, by acknowledging children's good deeds and in other ways. Each school has pledged to contribute a certain number of kind acts -- collectively, as well as individually. These can include something as simple as giving a hug, getting a towel to help clean up a spill or sharing a box of crayons with a friend. Kind acts are being tracked and highlighted with Kindness Meters at each school, where children can see how each individual action adds up to a kinder school overall.
Sprout launched its Kindness Counts campaign in August 2011 and hopes to ultimately record one million acts of kindness from families across the country.
International House, UC Berkeley Campus This day-long seminar will offer strategies for cultivating self-compassion and reducing stress in yourself and others. It will be led by Dr. Kristin Neff, a pioneer in the study of self-compassion.
Self-compassion is a skill that can be learned by anyone. It involves generating feelings of kindness and care toward ourselves as imperfect human beings, and learning to be present with greater ease during life’s inevitable struggles...'
What is empathy? It is usually defined as the ability to ‘identify with’ another person. It seems to involve having a good sense of what the other person is feeling, and not merely with an air of scientific detachment, but knowing in the sense of sharing. But is empathy in fact possible? After all, people are so very complicated and we have no direct access to the minds of others. How do we know what they think, or what they feel? How do we know if they think anything at all? Maybe they are all just zombies, or robots, to give two examples that often crop up in philosophy of mind? Nonetheless, we do sometimes think that we empathize with one another. If I see you accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer, I wince.
What do mirror neurons teach about us about our empathy? This week, leading neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni visited with Six Seconds’ Master Class in Pajaro Dunes, California, for an oceanside chat on mirror neurons and their relationship to empathy and learning. A few of us collected some of the takeaways:
What are Mirror Neurons?
Mirror neurons are “smart cells” in our brains that allow us to understand others’ actions, intentions, and feelings. The mirror neurons are in many areas of our brains, and they fire when we perform an action such as grasping an apple, and similarly we see others doing it. As it turns out, our mirror neurons fire when we experience an emotion and similarly when we see others experiencing an emotion, such as happiness, fear, anger, or sadness.
The ADFES is a rich stimulus set of 648 filmed emotional expressions. It is distinct from previous sets for several reasons:
It consists of dynamic expressions rather than static pictures. It features displays of nine emotions: the six ‘basic’ emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise), as well as contempt, pride and embarrassment. Expressions are displayed by 22 models (10 female, 12 male). It included North-European and Mediterranean models. It utilizes active head-turning to clarify the directedness of the expressions.
In these one minute videos, Rick Hanson speaks personally about each of the 52 practices that appear in this book - Just One Thing.
This one minute video is on how to have compassion for yourself.
The practices -- simple actions inside your mind -- light up neural networks of deep well-being and resilience. And because "neurons that fire together, wire together," each time you do a practice, it strengthens key neural circuits like building a muscle in the gym.
Want to know what it's like to shuffle around the grocery store like achy old folks do? Just in case that sounds like fun, researchers at MIT's Agelab have created a jumpsuit that brings the experience to life for the young, able-bodied masses.
The Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES, get it?) was created to provide insight into the physical effects of aging.
That's important because all those baby boomers who've dictated politics and the economy for what seems like forever are now getting old. To continue making money by selling them stuff, products need to be designed that make life groovy for people with poor eyesight, stiff joints and a hunched back.
Hillside Elementary School adopts "Walk in My Shoes" program to teach students to support and empathize with their peers who have learning challenges.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that elementary schools can teach kids to sound out words, recite multiplication tables and draw turkeys for Thanksgiving by tracing their hands and adding feathers...but can schools teach kids to empathize?
"Yes," says Hastings' Hillside Elementary School Principal Laura Sullivan.
Bullying at schools has become a huge issue. In looking for innovative solutions, Canadian educators turned to a unique classroom program called Roots of Empathy. At the heart of the program, now being implemented in 1,400 schools, lies this insight: When you put an infant and its parent in the center of the classroom, children start to sensitize themselves to the baby’s intentions and emotions. The results that ripple out are unambiguous: a measurable reduction in levels of aggression among schoolchildren.
Think of the last time you encountered someone who was suffering.
Maybe they were coping with physical pain, financial struggles or the emotional weight of a divorce or the death of a loved one.
Would you define your response to them as compassionate?
Now think of the last time someone inconvenienced you.
Maybe an aggressive driver forced you to swerve off the road during rush hour or one of your children accidentally broke an expensive lamp. Maybe it was as simple as the pizza delivery guy being an hour late.
Empathy is seen by some researchers as a cognitive attribute (i.e. ‘understanding’ another person's concerns) and by others as an affective attribute (i.e. ‘feeling’ another person's suffering) or both. We propose that clinical empathy should be viewed as a continuum of three obligatory sequential stages: ‘comprehension’ of the patient's predicament (a cognitive process based on listening); followed by ‘compassion’ (an emotional or affective process) and then, ‘commitment’ to do the best for this patient (a practical stage of obtaining and applying the best patient-suited evidence and providing ongoing support). Thus, for empathy to be effective, the physician's compassion needs to be not only felt by the patient but also followed by action. img http://bit.ly/rYTr9k
Many people would argue that in that regard, the baby starts off with nothing.
The idea is that children start off immoral, monsters or if not monsters, at least they know not from good and evil. This is not the view which I think is supported by the data. I think there is now more and more data in support of a different view of compassion. Now we know this is true for children. In fact, we know this is true for babies. One way to make a baby cry is to expose it to cries of other babies. There’s sort of contagiousness to the crying. It’s not just crying. We also know that if a baby sees another human in silent pain, it will distress the baby. It seems part of our very nature is to suffer at the suffering of others.
They all fall into the category of those who help and support others — but often, do not get the help and support that they need, according to Cherie Castellano, the driving force behind the creation of three Central Jersey-based peer-to-peer support programs.
The programs, offered by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, are proving that empathy, which arises from walking in the shoes of another, creates a powerful connection and support for those in crisis.
I am an evolutionist who studies all aspects of humanity in addition to the biological world. I manage a number of programs designed to expand the influence of evolutionary theory in higher education (EvoS), public policy (The Evolution Institute), community-based research (The Binghamton Neighborhood Project), and religion (Evolutionary Religious Studies)
“Empathy is at the core of academic programs. This is so incredibly important. We are not preparing our children well if we are not explicitly teaching it. We think about it as part of our responsibility.”
– Katherine Dinh, Head of School, Prospect Sierra
At Prospect Sierra, an independent K-8 school in the San Francisco Bay Area, learning has to do with engaging the heart just as much as it does with engaging the mind. It is a place where compassion is not a program or unit, but a cornerstone of the entire school community. Teachers, students, administrators, and parents are all deeply interconnected and dedicated to making school both challenging and joyous....
We recently spoke with the folks at Prospect Sierra to see what tips they had to offer about activating empathy in schools. Here are few:...
Babies are to be employed as ‘tiny teachers’ in classrooms throughout the Highlands to make schools a safer place.
The move is part of a pioneering Action for Children programme to reduce levels of bullying and aggression in the classroom.
Roots of Empathy – ‘empathy’ being the ability to identify and understand another’s feelings – is being rolled out in eight schools in the Highlands. The programme aims to reduce problem behaviour - including fighting and bullying – by encouraging children to interact in a nurturing manner.
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