What is this about?

Hi, I’m Danny and I’m in love with empathy 🙂

Giving it, receiving it, watching it, teaching it.

I believe empathy is one of the missing ingredients that can make life wonderful. It can open doors to profound and life-affirming human connection with strangers without any shared history, not to mention enabling rich intimacy, deep mutual understanding, satisfying resolution to conflict (aka conflict intimacy) in our close relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. Empathy is an antidote to physical, emotional, and relational violence, distance, withdrawal, and despair, can increase fun and togetherness, and bolster confidence about how to support others without needing to know the answers, as well as a pathway for everyday, relational spirituality. Certainly for me (and many friends I know), becoming skillful in empathic listening and developing empathic friendships has been one of the most transformative changes in my life and is one of the ways I see people most radically and readily improve, enrich, and nourish their own relationships (including with self). It amazes me how just a few minutes or sometimes even a few seconds of attuned empathy can totally transform one’s mood.

Basic NVC teaches an empathic orientation to listening for feelings and needs. This is the key to the first gate of the garden of relational delights, and can open a whole new world of understanding, especially when we’re used to listening to surface level content, to fixing, helping, advising and all these well-intentioned but non-empathic ways of responding.

And yet, simple reflections of “are you feeling_____ because you have a need for ______?” can sound clunky, be off-putting, and are quite limited in their scope of application. Even if a person says ‘yes’, then what?

• What if a person is really attached to their strategy?
• How do you go deep with empathy, touching the beautiful heart of life?
• How can we support people staying whole and present when their needs are not met?

How do we meet people with empathy in a way that helps us ‘fall in love’ (be moved by their humanity), gives them a deep sense of being seen, heard, and understood that brings them in touch with inner intelligence, and helps both of us find our way to willing flexibility and creative, collaborative, caring relationality? (And not ‘NVC-annoy’ people)

In this deepening course, we’ll explore some of the next level skills and applications of empathy. We’ll practice and refine it as an art and enjoy playing in the group field of empathy. I imagine that this learning exploration can help you consolidate empathy as a core orientation and skillset, provide meaningful community, and help you gain confidence about stepping into this beautiful way of meeting life.

Most sessions will be taught by Danny, with 1-2 taught by a guest/assistant teacher.