Empathy is the ability to understand someone’s experience from their perspective. Not you standing in someone else’s shoes, but as though you could be inside of them, standing in their shoes. It does not involve feeling someone’s feelings for them, but cultivating an awareness of how life’s experiences look from another person’s perspective.

Take a moment to bring a beloved person into your awareness. Now remember back to a time you shared an experience together. Separating from the experience for a moment, consider some things that are different between the two of you. For example, your upbringing, your height, the type of work that you do. From a sense of your differences, review the experience from their perspective. What do you notice?