“That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.”
– Rose Tico in The Last Jedi
I don’t normally listen to the radio or hear news reports unless I am driving my car. I choose not to listen to or watch the news because it stimulates low vibration feelings of fear, sadness and frustration in me. I dropped my daughter off to her dad’s house to feed their pets early this morning and on the way home heard the news. Four main stories: political misconduct by a member of the New Zealand government, a spike of COVID-19 cases in Melbourne resulting in it going into lockdown, a busload of young people going off a bridge in China resulting in numerous deaths, and a father who got so upset about losing an arm wrestling match with his son that he fired shots with his gun and ended up in an 8 hour stand-off with police. By the end of the news report I felt myself moving into fear and anxiety about the world going crazy and being a very scary place right now. I wished I hadn’t heard it.
And if I had lived even just 150 years ago, I wouldn’t have. Had I been living then I would have heard largely only smaller amounts of local and national news. There has always been death, and war, and outbreaks of illness, and disasters, and murder. The main difference now, is that the full global amount of it is presented to us all in graphic, sensationalised detail 24/7. We are urged to stay informed and there can be a judgement that if we are not, then we are out of touch or ignorant somehow. Yet what is the outcome of being informed of this constant flow of negative information? What is the outcome of knowing about all the accumulated suffering in the world – most of which we personally cannot do anything about? Does it help us? Or does it just stimulate feelings of fear, anxiety, overwhelm, distress – and guilt. Guilt about feeling good and happy when others do not.
Which prompts the question: what is the best way to respond when others are suffering?
I want to talk about this on an interpersonal level and then apply that to a universal scale.
Many people feel uncomfortable experiencing their own uncomfortable feelings, and therefore also feel uncomfortable when other people are experiencing uncomfortable feelings. As a result people seek to avoid people who are feeling sad, or try to distract them, or think their feelings away by making comparisons or looking for ‘the bright side’, just as they do to themselves. There’s a beautiful little video clip where Brené Brown talks about this.
Most of the time when people seek to ‘make someone feel better’ what they are really expressing is:
I feel uncomfortable when you feel sad therefore being sad is not acceptable.
I feel guilty feeling happy when you feel sad therefore I need you to feel better so that I don’t feel guilty.
It is an aspect of human nature to look to others for validation of our own feelings.
I believe that true emotional intelligence is coming to a place of accepting that all your feelings are valid for you, free from comparison to anyone else. When you choose to become comfortable with all of your own feelings as simply an expression of who you are, then you are also able to be comfortable with all of the feelings that others experience as an expression of who they are.
There is a difference between feeling bad for someone, and experiencing empathy. Feeling bad is pity. It is feeling discomfort, distress, and sadness when witnessing someone else suffering. Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions of someone else without feeling the emotions. When you feel pity, you feel low frequency emotions, and it usually comes from a base of personal fear and insecurity. When you feel empathy, it comes from a more empowered base of love.
Emotionally intelligent empathy is being able to sit with someone who is feeling low frequency emotions such as pain, hurt, sadness, anxiety, grief or frustration and think:
I can acknowledge how you feel
I can allow you to feel whatever you feel
I can love you for whatever you feel
And
I don’t need to feel what you feel to love you
I can choose how I want to feel
I can lovingly hold space for you to rise into a better feeling when you are ready, but I do not need you to feel good in order for me to feel good myself.
How I choose to feel is not conditional on how you chose to feel.
When you do this, you can create an upward energy vortex that draws others up and creates a pathway for others to rise.
I believe this principle also works on a universal level.
Fear only begets more fear. I do not disengage from knowing about the suffering of others in the world because I do not care, but because I care deeply, and believe that the best way to create positive change is to keep my own energy vibration high so that I can uplift others.
We cannot support others by coming down into a low energy vibration with them. It is like saying to a person who is physically unwell, because you are unwell, I will help you feel better by choosing to be unwell also. Of course this makes no sense. To help others we must have resources to share with them.
In addition, energy flows where focus goes.
What are you giving your attention to? Are you looking at all the things that you think are wrong in the world? Even if you are looking at them with eyes of compassion and a heart that desires to help, when you keep your focus on the problem, and highlighting the problem, and raising awareness of the problem, you just keep reinforcing the problem, and reinforcing that there are problems, and training your brain to look for problems.
I am not saying to stick your head in the sand and not be aware of what is around you. I am saying notice what you don’t like, what you don’t want, the problem, but just notice it, and then shift your focus and energy to creating what you do want and to what feels good.
When you feel frustration, sadness and anxiety about the suffering of others, then you are trying to help someone who is unwell by becoming unwell yourself, and as Abraham Hicks says: you can’t get there from here.
You have to move yourself into a higher vibration.
You have to do more of what you love.
You have to dance.
You have to enjoy pleasure.
Not in a fear based way where you are desperately trying to avoid suffering, or with a scarcity mentality of trying to avoid suffering by grabbing onto anything that makes you feel good, but with a loving understanding that as you feel good you create a stronger positive vibration in the world that uplifts others.
For many people though, in order to do this they must first give themselves permission to feel good, and release the belief that they are not allowed to be happy.
If you want to learn more about how to become comfortable feeling all your feelings and/or giving yourself permission to be happy, I provide more information and practical tips on this in my book 10 Steps to Happiness.
I also created a video related to this topic a couple of years ago about my response to a mass shooting in a high school in the United States of America.
Blog cover photo by Peter Lawrence on Unsplash
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