Edges of Empathy – Reflections on Feeling with Others

As I listen to their stories, their emotional pain courses through my body. I feel the familiar urge to fix, yet any solution I might offer feels painfully limited in the face of what they are living through. And I find myself reluctant even to let my heart expand beyond my intimate circle, because the suffering in the world can feel like more than this body knows how to hold.

There was a time when I would have immediately jumped into fix-it mode, believing, perhaps a little too confidently, that I could somehow solve what troubled the people I loved. I have come to understand that my impulse to fix is often a form of self-protection: a way of defending myself against the unbearable feeling of powerlessness. My mind tries to close the gap between what I believe should be happening and what is actually happening in this moment.

There was also a time when I attached my own “okayness” to the “okayness” of those around me. If someone I loved was suffering, I felt I had no permission to be happy. Their pain became my pain; their inability to find solid ground meant I could not find mine. Eventually, I realized that this way of loving was leaving me drowning alongside them.

So today I practice something different.

I practice being present with what is – not only with the other person, but with what is happening inside me. I notice when tension begins to rise in my body. Rather than immediately trying to push it away or act on it, I breathe slowly and deeply. I ask the tension what it is trying to tell me.

Often, the message is surprisingly simple:

Relax.

Trust what you cannot yet see.

My mind does not always appreciate this message. It wants evidence. It wants a plan. It wants to know what happens next and, preferably, how we are going to make it better.

But when I allow myself to soften into the stillness, something shifts. My mind quiets, and beneath it I feel a kind of vibration—a stillness alive with possibility. From there, I begin to sense possibilities that are difficult to perceive when I am caught in the frenzy to fix.

Not necessarily possibilities that the suffering will disappear, but something more subtle.

Possibilities for a soul’s mysterious journey. Possibilities for deeper connection through our shared vulnerability. Possibilities for simply witnessing our humanity with love.

If an impulse arises from within that stillness, I listen. I may offer a thought, a question, an act of support—gently, as a possibility rather than a prescription. And then I practice releasing my attachment to what the other person does with it.

This is becoming one of my deepest practices: learning to discern the difference between the impulse that comes from my worried, conditioned mind and the impulse that arises from something freer and more expansive within me.

The impulse of the mind feels urgent.

The impulse of the soul feels spacious.

I am still learning the difference. I am not always successful. Sometimes I catch myself halfway down the familiar path of fixing, carrying, worrying, absorbing.

But more and more, I am finding my way back.

Back to presence. Back to trust. Back to the sacred space between caring deeply and taking responsibility for what is not mine to carry.

And perhaps this is where the edges of empathy begin, as reflected in this poem.

EDGES OF EMPATHY

-Tejal Tarro

At the edges of empathy, I find myself asking: What is the distinction between carrying someone’s suffering and accompanying them through it?

What does it mean to love someone deeply without entering their suffering so completely that I lose my own ground?

For me, it has meant discerning how I choose to feel others.

Feeling for someone can create a certain distance – a sympathetic pity that subtly separates us. Others can sense my subtle withdrawal, and I can sense their polite recoil in response.

Feeling as someone feels too intertwined. Empathy becomes entanglement, and entanglement can become an unconscious attempt to make their pain my responsibility to solve. Others can sense my desperation to fix us, and I can sense their shame in not being okay enough for me.

When I allow their expression of pain to touch my own vulnerability, something opens. Their pain does not become mine, but neither do I turn away from it. Instead, it becomes a portal to deeper connection. They can sense my receptivity, and I can sense their tenderness. For a moment, we meet in the sacred space of intimacy – without either of us needing to make the other okay.

And within this space, a deeper trust in the unfolding mystery of life can emerge.

Trust does not mean believing that everything happens for a reason. It means allowing myself not to know what this moment means, or where it will lead.

I have come to recognize that this practice of empathy is not only personal. It has profound implications for how we lead.

For many years, I have worked with leaders whose hearts are so big that they devote their lives to caring for others. I have witnessed how their empathy can fuel extraordinary social change. I have also witnessed how that same empathy can lead to exhaustion and burnout.

Compassion fatigue is a term I have heard often in these spaces: the experience of feeling the pain of injustice so deeply, while knowing that we cannot fix it for everyone, and yet remaining determined to keep trying.

I hold these leaders in deep reverence, and I recognize something of their struggle in myself.

There is a temptation, particularly for those of us who care deeply, to believe that our capacity to lead is measured by how much suffering we can hold. How much we can absorb. How much we can do. How many people we can help.

But I am coming to see that this is not a sustainable or even effective measure of compassionate leadership.

What if the deeper practice of compassion is learning how to remain open without becoming overwhelmed?

To allow another person’s pain to touch us without taking it on as our own. To act when action arises from clarity rather than fear. To know when to offer our hands and when to simply offer our presence.

I often feel as though I live in a bubble, protected from much of the world’s pain. And yet I am beginning to see that this space has something to teach me, too. Perhaps I do not need to make this body large enough to hold all the suffering in the world. I sense I am being invited instead to become spacious enough to meet what is directly before me – with love, with presence, and without needing to carry it all.

Maybe this is another way of leading.

Not by fixing. Not by absorbing.

But by creating enough sacred space for ourselves and others to breathe, to feel, to remain human – and to trust that something larger than any one of us is still unfolding.

This is another dimension of what living between worlds asks of us: to stand at the threshold between what we can change and what we cannot, between action and surrender, between holding another’s pain and releasing what was never ours to carry.

And perhaps, in that sacred space between knowing and not knowing, between caring and carrying, another question emerges:

Can we stay open long enough to discover what love is asking of us?