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“Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.”
~ Chogyam Trungpa
Empathy is…good!
Narcissism is…bad!
Problem is, there’s a trend—perhaps emboldened by social media or profit-seeking self-help gurus—wherein many of us, nowadays, confuse the two.
Empathy is how we save ourselves.
It’s how we serve others.
It’s how we protect our planet: we give a care.
Narcissism is how we invest in self-defeating self preservation. We prioritize ourselves over truth, over love, and in so doing we narrow our heart’s ability to feel, to care, to live.
Narcissism narrows our capacity to take responsibility, to take blame, to own anything—and in so doing we find ourselves angry, heavy, empty, alone, parched.
We all have trauma, or stress, or challenges. Do we close our hearts, or remain bravely vulnerably powerful in our basic goodness?
Real empathy ain’t reading Maya Angelou or Brené Brown or Pema Chodron or watching David Attenborough or Mister Rogers or Jane Goodall…then going and eating your factory-farmed bacon carved from feeling pigs, snacking on slave labor-harvested chocolate, or mistreating our Mother Earth in this climate change “future” our children are inheriting.
Real empathy is being willing to look at anyone, including those you don’t care about (or even dislike!), and being willing to put yourself in their place.
Real empathy is opening up when everything in you cries to shut down, to be willing to stay with your broken heart when everything screams: get comfortable! Get away! Good Vibes Only!
Real empathy sucks. It’s the best.
Q: Why do you think that people are so protective of their egos? Why is it so hard to let go of one’s ego?
A: People are afraid of the emptiness of space, or the absence of company, the absence of a shadow. It could be a terrifying experience to have no one to relate to, nothing to relate with. The idea of it can be extremely frightening, though not the real experience. It is generally a fear of space, a fear that we will not be able to anchor ourselves to any solid ground, that we will lose our identity as a fixed and solid and definite thing. This could be very threatening.”
~ Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
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