The Healing Power Of Empathetic Listening

“They don’t listen to anything I say,” are words we often hear. People long to be acknowledged, and from my experience this is something people in many parts of the world are missing, as we all rush from place to place. The inhabitants of a modern day home tend to become like passing ships in the night to their loved ones, and hardly communicate with one another.

Really listening to another goes straight to the heart. It opens the empath and the medical intuitive’s eyes to that which any X-ray or computerized tomography (CT) scan cannot. Active listening is the most powerful catalyst for change in any healing therapy.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand ~ Karl A. Menniger

When someone reaches out to us for help, be it a friend or a customer and, in order to put into effect actual therapeutic change, it’s so important to try to understand the other person’s world as they see it. If we don’t genuinely hear what the other person is saying, and they are often opening up their soul and showing us great trust, we tend to evaluate rather that to empathize.

Empathy is not a psychic pry into the mind of another person, but a respect and openness for the ‘personhood’ of that soul, who has entrusted us to hear them out. Those signals we perceive from other people and even pets, are often interpreted in a context of what immediately springs to mind, and it’s important not to be judgmental.

People often thank me for not judging them. Who am I to judge them anyway! I was brought up amongst very judgmental people. Maybe I was like them too for a while, but have blocked out the memory. I know I was judged myself, and so began my journey at a young age to be a ‘people pleaser.’

The worst type of being judged is when you know you are, but cannot prove it, but a nagging gut feeling tells you it is so. Feeling judged is very upsetting to many of my customers, so helping along their journey to really believing that the only opinion of them that really matters is their own, is my goal.

Empathy is the recognition of another’s suffering and this does not mean that we have to share their suffering. It is the ability to identify with how the other person, or a pet feels, and to show understanding so that they know their communication has been noticed.

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply ~ Stephen R. Covey

Unlike sympathy, which contains an element of sorrow, empathy is an impartial, but caring understanding of another’s experiences and feelings. It is never to make light of an event, or issue which is bothering them. If it is important to them, then it matters. We can help shift their perception of a situation or a person, based on looking at it from a spiritual and predictive perspective.

Recent studies suggest that the spiritual dimension infiltrates all aspects of one’s well-being and outlook on life. Spirituality has a positive correlation with hope and the coping styles of an individual. When a person’s hardship seems beyond verbal communication, a simple acknowledgment can be the most powerful statement of support and caring. While words are often limiting, our presence and genuine attention can mean so much.