Do You Experience: Sympathy Empathy or Compassion?

What is the difference and why should it matter?

   Have you ever felt immersed in another person’s problems. Are the troubles of other people a source of anxiety for you? If your reply is yes, you may have confused sympathy or empathy with love or compassion. A sympathetic relationship pulls another person’s energies into our own space and body. We commonly associate this with loving and caring. A husband’s sympathetic labor pains is a good example of a sympathetic connection.

Sympathetic connections hold unspoken messages such as :

• I feel your problem. I want to solve it for you.
• I feel uncertain about getting ahead until you are doing better.
• My preoccupation with your issues is an expression of my love; “It’s what any family member out to do.”
• What happens to you happens to me.

   Sympathy is defined in the dictionary as a relationship of such affinity that what happens to one person happens to the other, an act of entering and sharing the feelings of another person. A father feeling the sympathetic labor pains of the mother is an example.

   With a sympathetic connection, another person’s emotional energies are pulled into our energy body. This affects how we feel about ourselves, the world, and other people. The other person’s energy may even get stuck in our physical body as well, affecting our health.

   This is almost always an unconscious process. We do it without conscious intention. Sympathy acts like a program running in the background of our awareness that constantly sends out cords to others and pulls in their issues.

   Empathy for another means being open to another person’s feelings and respecting them. An empathic connection makes it possible for us to feel and identify the feelings of another person. Unlike sympathy, however, empathy allows us to feel another’s energies without taking those energies in.

   With healthy empathy we retain personal identity, knowing the difference between our personal feelings and the feelings of the other. Some people have been empathic since birth. Usually, these empaths have felt burdened by the volume of energies they have continually feel.

Empathic people need:

• Functional energetic filters to keep out the unwanted energies while allowing healthy ones to enter. This can be like your personal energetic spam filter.
• Discernment. Empaths need to distinguish external energies from those that are authentically their own.

   For empathic people, this is frequently an unconscious process. Ask any empath-would she like to turn down the volume of external material? Yes! All that is often needed is the awareness of how the empathic process operates in their awareness for the empathic person to contain it.

   Compassion can be experienced an expansive and dynamic flow from your heart. Compassion enables us to give without pulling in energies from other people. Compassion tends to temper our giving with wisdom instead of giving with just emotion.

As you approach another person’s energy, intend to align yourself with greater Light or with Divine Will. You become a vessel for that greater Light instead of giving of your own personal energy. The result is the recipient gets the flow of energy from a source that is greater than your personality. And you may get a glimpse of the larger picture for the other person, bringing you deeper understanding.

Compassion is a conscious process.