This has been a year that can use all the Joy we can feel. But when Xmas and Joy to the World pass on December 26, we should remember that "what the world needs now is love sweet love."
Love at its best overflows with tenderness. Tenderness is what comforts and heals pain and suffering from the inside out. Pain is pain, suffering is being alone in pain. When you take away people's aloneness, suffering they can't tolerate becomes pain that they can. The problem and challenge is that tenderness can't be rushed and in our go-go, get more, sooner world it is actually in danger of becoming extinct.
Please don't let that happen.
Watch Naomi Feil take away Gladys Wilson's aloneness and suffering through Tender Loving Care*. Then go be tender with someone who needs your love to ease their suffering.
Together we can heal the world, one conversation at a time.
Imagine the possibilities.
* Tender Loving Care - If you found yourself tearing up as you watched Naomi comfort Gladys and would like to understand why, here is an explanation that comes from my life's work studying, understanding and teaching listening.
I believe empathy exists on a continuum from sociopathy to antipathy to sympathy to cognitive empathy to emotional empathy. And as with beauty, will all of them, how such a response from others is in the response reaction of the beholder.
- Sociopathy - you feel people are not just tuned into you, but in doing so, they have your number and then use it to take advantage of you.
- Antipathy - you feel people are frustrated, angry, turned off or at its worst, repulsed by you and primed to attack you.
- Sympathy - you feel that people feel sorry for you, which is ncertainly better than the prior two, but at its worst, you can feel pitied by them.
- Cognitive Empathy - you feel understood by people. And that instead of their taking advantage of you, being angry at you or pitying you, you feel that they are saying to you that what you are feeling makes sense for you to feel.
- Emotional Empathy - you feel felt by people. When that occurs you feel safe, less alone and embraced by people. When that happens you may begin to cry, not from sadness, but from feeling relief. As we explained at the beginning, when that happens, suffering you may not think you can tolerate or even live with, becomes comfort that totally connects with you in your suffering and becomes something you can live with. And when that happens, you feel hope.
If you teared up when watching Naomi Feil emotionally empathize with Gladys Wilson, it's because you know what it's like to feel suffering and alone and in need of an emotional connection.