A practice in seeing what you share with another person rather than what separates you from them.
Listen to the Meditation
About This Practice
Our default is to notice difference. We register how someone is unlike us before we register anything else, and once that comparison is running it becomes easy to be dismissive, or uninterested, or quietly certain that their situation has nothing to do with ours.
This practice reverses the order. You hold someone in mind and work through what is true of them and equally true of you. This person wants to be happy, just like me. This person has known disappointment, just like me. This person is doing their best with what they understand, just like me.
None of it is sentimental. It is accurate. And accuracy is the point, because the sense of separateness we usually operate from is the distortion, not the correction.
What follows is empathy, and empathy is not a feeling you can decide to have. It arrives on its own once you have genuinely seen the other person as a person. That is why this is worth practising rather than merely agreeing with.
Useful in the middle of conflict, and useful with the people you have stopped really looking at. Supports Compassion.
Micro Practice: Three Breaths
When you find yourself judging someone, take three breaths.
- Breathe and settle on the breath itself.
- Breathe and say silently: this person is just like me, they want to be happy.
- Breathe and wish them well.