The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines empathy as:

Empathy is one of the most essential skills. With it you will find success in most walks of life. It will allow you to experience many different perspectives which are necessary for personal growth and understanding. In my opinion, empathy is the one skill that will begin to transform this world and create the type of societies that we all envision.

To empathize means to be successful with the opposite sex. Through empathy you can become a dynamic powerful speaker. You can become a great business person, and in general achieve many of the things that you set out to do in life.

The reason for this is that empathy allows you to understand what the other person or being is thinking. It allows you to know the desires of others so that you can do your best to meet them. If you are a businessman, you will be able to know what the customer wants, and by satisfying these needs, you will achieve success. As a lover, you will know what your partner needs, sometimes even before they consciously know it themselves, which will make you the best lover that they have ever had.

Being able to empathize with your environment and the people around you will keep you safe. By understanding the intentions of others, you will be able to steer clear of those that would harm you. You can also learn to empathize with a geographical area so that you can actually read subconsciously all of the signs that can warn you of danger. Through empathy you can learn to avoid that dangerous alley or stay away from a certain building or vehicle that might be doomed.

Empathy will also make you a better, more creative human being. Remember that famous saying that implores you to, “walk a mile in another man moccasins”, before you judge him. This is sound advice that will allow you to get into the perspective of someone other than yourself so that you might be able to understand their actions, feeling and motives.

The ability to empathize is really the ability to get outside of your ego. Another way to say this would be to say that empathy allows your ego to grow so that it learns to see through different eyes. In order to begin to understand what I mean by empathy, I want you to do the following exercise.

Empathy Exercise

Take a comfortable seat in front of a plant. A house plant would be perfect but if you don’t have one, you can always go sit outside in front of a bush or tree in a nice quiet area. You will want to place yourself in a position where you can comfortably gaze upon the plant. Hopefully you are indoors in a quiet room or outside in a nice place where you won’t be disturbed.

Next, lightly gaze at the plant. From this light gaze, I want you to slowly begin to focus exclusively on the plant before you. Without strain, I want you to try and see into the plant. That is I want you to pretend that you can see into the plant and into its inner soul. This exercise will take a number of imaginative leaps. These imaginative leaps should be performed without strain, think of them more as a child’s pretend game rather than any kind of work.

As you gaze into the soul of the plant, imagine that you feel a tug from the plant so that your soul and the plants soul are now directly connected. This connection that feels like a small almost surreal tug at your insides, allows you to send a piece of yourself directly into the plant. You are now imagining entering the plant with a small thread of yourself. This little thread becomes one with the plant so that now you feel that you are you but you are also the plant.

Imaginatively feel what it’s like to be this being that you are gazing at. How do you as a plant feel the world around you? Using your imagination, try and feel what the plant is feeling at this very moment. Plants do not have eyes but they can feel the world around them in a way that is most amazing. Plants are very sensitive to emotion, temperature and humidity. Their entire bodies are very complex receptors that can tell them about the most minute things in their environment. Imagine that you can see the world through the plants eyes. What do you see/feel?

Practice seeing the world through the plants eyes for a while. Through your empathic vision, you might begin to understand why it is a little droopy or why it’s starting to turn a little yellow. The plant might be able to show you the room or the environment it sees, which will allow you to see this environment in a whole new way.

This kind of exercises is basis for all empathic work. You don’t have to work with plants. Anything animate or inanimate will work. It is pure egotistical garbage that makes you believe that a chair or a pencil don’t share as much individual reality as anything else. All things are rich in information and experience that you can tap into.

As you grow in your empathic work and become better, you will start to see a greater depth of detail. You will have access to more information and understand some of the subtleties of that information better. Finally you might want to try this exercise with another person. Perhaps your lover or best friend. The intuitive understanding that you will develop with each other will blow your mind!