Find a calm setting, sit or lay down, and follow the guided soundscape from Howie B this week, exploring the next of our qualities of the mind necessary for inner warriorship: Empathy. We recommend headphones for the greatest experience.
Empathy allows us all, individually, to recognize that we are interdependent—and cannot exist independently of others’ efforts. Empathy can help to ground our aspirations in the service of others, and to not discriminate between objects of empathy: every single human is subject to disappointment, guilt, anger, frustrations, sickness, loss, and grief.
Various texts followed by adherents of mindful philosophies describe several practices for the cultivation of empathy.
Instead of replacing anxiety with calm as desensitization usually does, some practices of empathy replace unskillful states such as anger and hatred with empathy.
The cultivation of empathy is related to the active cultivation of other positive states of mind, namely kindness, compassion, and joy—which derive from the wellbeing of others. When these qualities are held in the mind, they are the perfect antidotes to the negativity that arises in our own mind.
