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Empathy is like Rubbing Your Tummy and Patting Your Head
I recently co-facilitated a virtual event for a group interested in meditation and ensuring that people from all walks of life have access to mindfulness practices. Thirty minutes or so into our online gathering, we broke into groups of three for a ten-minute exercise in listening.
The instructions were simple, but the impact so profound that it prompted me to share here.
In each group of three, one person offered to share a personal story that had “some emotional charge.” On a scale of 1 (“I woke up and brushed my teeth.”) to 10 (something deeply traumatizing), we asked the participants to aim for 4–6, recognizing our time was limited and we were among lay people, not mental health professionals.
The second person served as a “fact finder;” after the story was told, they reported the people, actions, and circumstances. The person in this role was to stick strictly to the facts, listening for and recounting details of how the event in the story unfolded.
The third person in the triad focused on feelings. After the storyteller shared the story and the fact finder recounted the facts, the third person conveyed what emotions they heard in the story and surmise how the storyteller might have felt.
