Ethics – Empathy – The Meditation

Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 8:00 am.
by pre.

This month we present our final guided lucid dream, this time designed to help you dream your way to increased empathy.

We’ve seen how empathy is a skill which evolved though the fact that it offers a personal advantage, to you as an individual, and roughly how these processes work. We intend, then, to introduce a method which attempts to have you focus on that skill, to practice it in your sleep, to fill you with suggestions that you are indeed improving, and so to increase your empathic skills while it’s important, in the real waking world.

As usual this guided lucid dream is intended as an alarm clock, to be started at low volume 10 minutes before you have to get out of bed. It should ideally penetrate your dreams, suggest a new pattern, help you to improve your Empathy as you sleep.

The dream will have you conjure up a conversation, to dream that you are talking to somebody and then encourage you to put yourself in their place. In the dream world it should be literally possible to swap bodies with the person you’re talking to. To use the cues from their body and face and language to imagine yourself in their position. You’ll spend the dream doing this.

You’ll be encouraged to feel your filters lowering, to allow their own emotional state to encroach upon your own, to feel the way they are feeling. To pay attention to your emotional state, to feel it.

In the second third of the dream you will continue to do this, but also learn to discriminate better which of the emotions are your own, and which are the empathic feeling from the person you are talking with. You’ll be encouraged to take note of which is which, to better understand the source of your feelings.

The final third of the ten minute dream will have you try to better influence the person you’re talking to, to have them empathise with you more fully. To exaggerate and encourage the signals in your own body language, facial expressions and speech so as to encourage the infectious spreading of your own emotion into others.

This week marks the last of our guided lucid dreams, the third lap around the spiral. Next week we’ll begin a summing up of this third lap, investigating sleep and dreams and surveying your progress this lap. In April we’ll then begin the final lap, attempting to integrate all the skills we have learned into one transcendent whole.

Guided Meditation File 25 – Ethics – Empathy
Backing Music “Open Space” By Tim Blume
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