With so many valid concerns stoking fear in today’s world, it’s no wonder that more and more of us are living in a state of chronic anxiety that seems irreversible. If you’re feeling at a loss about how to reclaim your peace of mind, body, and spirit, Sheryl Lisa Finn has a life-changing suggestion: Don’t underestimate the power of connection. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with the author of The Healing Anxiety Workbook to share actionable insights and approaches for dissolving anxiety on the spot and experiencing inner safety and serenity (without “bypassing” the realities of our times).
Enjoy this conversation on: anxiety in a nutshell—sensing a lack of safety; reverse engineering anxiety; working with trauma at the root; when anxiety seeps back in; finding a source of goodness bigger than yourself; grief; building a foundation of connectivity that we can source into in challenging times; creativity and working with our hands; receiving support from the “wise self” within; Jungian psychology, archetypes, and dreamwork; fighting the spiritual fight in the face of systemic problems; anxiety’s hidden agenda—to serve our evolution; a practice to release the anxiety-producing stories we tell ourselves; the power of ritual and the importance of getting out of our rational minds; the practice of asking your ancestors to take your worry from you; anxiety in relationships, and how connection becomes a remedy; panic attacks; anxiety as a friend in disguise; and more.
Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
Are you exhausted, anxious, or overwhelmed? Maybe your life is challenging. Or perhaps the state of the world and others’ suffering feels unbearable. If your life is going well, but you still feel miserable, maybe you have some guilt or shame. You are not alone. You may be suffering from empathic distress.
Most of us have been taught that empathy is wholly positive and should be fostered in children and revered in adults. This idea is partly correct. The absence of empathy is clearly problematic. When the ability to sense or care about others’ feelings or pain is missing, we edge into sociopathy. However, empathy is experiencing another person’s pain as our own. In small doses and for short periods, it allows us a deeper understanding of our fellow beings. But it can also make it harder to help, because the pain is spread around, not diminished. If your friend breaks their leg and you experience genuine empathy, it might feel like your leg is broken too. This makes it harder for you to function and definitely harder for you to help them.
Empathy can make us sick, overwhelmed, and burned out.
Many people feel helpless in the face of the magnitude of suffering in the world today. It can result in what appears to be apathy at first but is actually empathic distress, which means “hurting for others while feeling unable to help.” An op-ed in the New York Times titled “That Numbness You’re Feeling? There’s a Word for It” described this phenomenon and cited some of the research I used to create the Sounds True audio course Shining Bright Without Burning Out: Spiritual Tools for Creating Healthy Energetic Boundaries in an Overconnected World.
The Research
Neuroscientists Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer identified empathy as a contributing factor to burnout, primarily but not exclusively, among healthcare workers and therapists. The older term compassion fatigue is a “misnomer.” Compassion and empathy have distinctly different impacts on our bodies and psyches. Compassion is witnessing and being willing to help when possible and appropriate. Empathy is taking on others’ pain as our own. Empathy often creates “more distress.” It is a huge distinction.
Empathy is overrated and fatiguing. Compassion is what we need. Unfortunately, we often confuse the two. This dynamic is one reason why developing healthy energetic boundaries is essential.
Decreasing Empathic Distress
Being unable to adjust between compassion and empathy is a big reason many people feel drained and overwhelmed. Research about the critical difference between compassion and empathy aligns with many spiritual concepts of energetic boundaries. It also challenges some. One of the ways we inadvertently make things difficult for ourselves is when we believe that to be good, kind, “spiritual” people, we must always be wide open. We must be at one with the universe, be open to everyone, and say yes to everything. There is a paradox here. We are all one on some level, but we need to embrace the ability to differentiate ourselves from others at times to steward our own health.
We have reached a tipping point with empathic distress; it is a crisis within the crises.
Klimecki and Singer focus on how training in compassion meditation can help reduce empathic distress, shifting from an experience of absorbing others’ energy to a state of kindness toward others with clear self-differentiation. The distinction between empathy and compassion is one of the first things we cover in Shining Bright Without Burning Out: Spiritual Tools for Creating Healthy Energetic Boundaries in an Overconnected World. The course also includes a full set of tools for addressing empathic distress from the perspective of energetic boundaries.
Here are a few additional steps you can take today to begin reducing empathic distress:
Be clear about your direct responsibilities and what is not yours.
Pause before entering new situations: conversations, appointments with clients, meetings, etc. Take a moment to reset yourself with a breath and an intention for how you want to engage.
Pay attention to how you feel after interactions with people, places, and media. Note over time when your mood or body feels drained so that you can prepare more thoroughly in the future, consider how to minimize those interactions if they are optional, and take time to reset after engaging.
Mara Bishop
Mara Bishop is a shamanic practitioner, intuitive consultant, teacher, author, and artist. In private practice, she uses her Personal Evolution Counseling™ method to provide an integrated approach to spiritual healing, personal growth, and emotional well-being. Her books Shamanism for Every Day: 365 Journeys and Inner Divinity: Crafting Your Life with Sacred Intelligence are resource guides for spiritual practice. She resides in Durham, North Carolina. For more, visit wholespirit.com.
Dear friends, we wanted to let you know about a new program at Sounds True, called Share Good Karma, which was created so that you could receive free gifts from us – and share them with your friends.
The first two titles featured in the program are a collection of relaxing and healing music, entitled Meditation Music: An Invitation to Still the Mind and Open the Heart; and The Practice of Mindfulness: 6 Guided Practices. Once three of your friends “accept” these free gifts from you, you’ll receive an additional free gift of your choice.
Tami Simon speaks with Stephen Levine, a poet and meditation teacher who has worked counseling the dying and their loved ones for the past 40 years. He’s the author of the bestselling books Who Dies? and A Year to Live. With Sounds True, Stephen has turned his groundbreaking work from A Year to Live into an audio learning program, in addition to In the Heart Lies the Deathless, The Grief Process and, To Love and Be Loved. Stephen discusses the power of softening to our suffering, and living mindfully as a preparation for death. (52 minutes)
Tami Simon speaks with Mario Martinez, a clinical neuropsychologist whose breakthrough research examines how cultural beliefs affect our health and longevity. Mario is the founder of biocognitive science, a new paradigm that examines the dynamic relationship between thoughts, culture, and the body. With Sounds True, he has recorded an audio learning course called The Mind-Body Code: How the Mind Wounds and Heals the Body. In this episode, Tami speaks with Mario about the idea that culture creates biology; how we can access the antidote to shame, abandonment, and betrayal through healing fields in the body; and the concept of “the drift”—how we can navigate chaos with uncertainty as our guide. (68 minutes)
On this week’s Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon interviews author and poet Roger Housden, creator of the New York Times bestseller Ten Poems to Change Your Life. With Sounds True, Housden has recently published the book Keeping the Faith Without a Religion. Tami and Roger have a conversation regarding the extraordinary access contemporary peoples have to different faiths, as well as why increasing distrust of authority has driven many away from traditional religious practice. They also discuss how it’s possible to maintain one’s faith even in the midst of pain and suffering. Finally, Housden speaks on poetry and its inherent relationship to faith. (67 minutes)
