The Argument for Empathy

“Understanding is the other name of love. If you don’t understand, you can’t love” — Thich Nhat Hanh.

In the political climate that we live in, it’s very easy to give in to feelings of frustration, despair and anger while simultaneously wanting the world to be a more loving and kind place. These seemingly two contradictory experiences — where we feel such strong, negative emotions internally and long for love to be the norm — are not as diametrically opposite as one might suspect.

Let’s start by looking at painful emotions. One of my more recent books, Love Hurts, is about the ways that heartbreak manifests in our day-to-day life. For many of us, this simple term, “heartbreak,” encapsulates all types of experiences (for example: the death of a loved one, a painful break-up, even the suffering of feeling bombarded by the news of our society) as well as the emotions that these experiences spark (such as betrayal, rejection, sadness, or loneliness).

When we feel heartbreak, be it because of something happening in our personal life or in the world around us, we often want to distance ourselves from these visceral experiences and strong emotions. We want to run away from them, grabbing something sugary to eat, alcoholic to drink, or someone warm to sleep with. We tamp the emotions down and hope they will go away. Or we act out on them in ways that are not particularly skillful or helpful to ourself or others.

Instead, we can learn to be with the emotions as they are. Through meditation, we learn…