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Empathy headsets.
I was advised to buy one, for a group to practice Non Vioent Communication. Over Skype.
The following musings result from this:
My recent experience with headsets and ‘ mindsets’ necessary in different communication situations.
I used to be an intellectual! Now I am finding it comes much more naturally for me to speak and act from a heart-centred or empathic outlook.
I recently bought a headset recommended in the file attached somewhere to the Facebook NVC beginners group. A Seinhesse one I think.
It has 2 pins (pink and green) to plug into a PC. Also you can have an adaptor and use it by USB or into an iPad etc.
The only issue I have with it is that my earlobes get sore after a while and I just have to shift the position of the ear covering bits.
It seemed excellent for empathy calls. I tried it with Ray. I was upset and needed someone to talk with. We had a wonderful and helpful interaction.
In a fascinating way, I found the empathy headset to be totally unsuitable when I tried to use it in an international conference telephone call on facilitating courses.
The subject was how to facilitate an 8 week course in Spiritual Awakening. We used a free conference phone line. There were two facilitators and five students.
It seems that people could hear me at first, but then I was asked to read out to the group, the notes I had written about my experiences in spiritual awakening.
I spoke and shared from my heart (empathy situation❤️)
Nobody seemed to understand what I was saying. They described that it was coming across as a mumble. They could tell I was speaking words, but could not hear me. Trying to ‘speak up’ did not help. I switched to my Apple earbuds instead, and attempted to get into a more objective frame of mind. I got a ‘Hallelujah! I can hear you now.’
The phone call continued much more smoothly, and all was flowing easily until one man tried to express his own experiences, and to ask for empathy I guess. This time I found that his voice was only a rapid mumble. I got the general impression that the words expressed something which made him feel good. I asked if he could repeat what he had written down again, but slower. This time I heard and felt it with ‘my heart’. It felt true and my body became more relaxed.
On this particular call, the ‘mindset/headset?’ needed was an objective, focused one, to get through all the material over the 6-8 hours available, while ensuring that everyone was catered for as far as possible with regard to taking breaks, current emotional states, stress, family emergencies cropping up, unexpected issues with phone batteries, callers knocking at the door and so on.
It seems that different situations call for our minds or heads to be in different ‘set-ups’. Mainly objective and analytical, using the head, versus mainly intuitive and open-hearted.
Talking from a mindset of giving and receiving empathy, we tend to talk quietly, and to feel our own emotions and bodily sensations, as they arise, and attempt to feel our way into where the other person is coming from. We are willing to tune into, and to attempt to verbalise the feelings and needs of both of us.
My impression is that our minds’ ability to process and make sense of speech seems to depend on the mindset we are in. It may be difficult to switch between head and heart centred mindsets.
Perhaps with practice, I can learn to combine them and have a more integrated outlook. I hope so.
Sent from my iPhone
There is a 3rd that I like to add. The situation itself. Head and heart seem nice but a little insignificant when you look at the energetic potential formed in the situation at hand. If one can see potential and match that potential impersonally then head and heart just become tools rather than factors that directly impact decision making. There really is only one option so you just have to see that and follow it up by acting and withdrawing at precisely the right time. Acting is just matching potential. Withdrawing happens when you don’t cling to the situation and can see when to let it go.
Thinking about mindsets is clinging to information, perhaps. When you forget about this stuff you just see the situation as it is and adapt as you need to. Empathy changes from being receptive to emotions to just plain receptiveness in general. It’s quite intelligent actually. You just know what to do.
Yes. That is helpful.
The situation itself
Matching potential
Withdrawing.Thank you
This explains things some more.
It’s not those sharing the same language
Who understand each other
It’s those sharing
The same feelingsEureka.
https://www.facebook.com/andyraytaylor/posts/10153660480928598
Nice comment, Cameron. Thank you. With our thoughts we agonize over decisions, possibilities and choices. Which is correct? What should I do? We play with and entertain ourselves with the sheer variety of thoughts that arise. We are fascinated or terrified with our thoughts about what happened and what might happen. All of it amounting to absolutely nothing. We lose sight that these are only thoughts. They are not reality. They are truly meaningless, containing only the meaning and importance we give to them.
It is our habit to give meaning and importance to some thoughts. It is our habit to give attention to thoughts. It is not our habit yet to question thoughts, to question the validity, meaning, importance and value of all thoughts. When this becomes our habit, we soon lose interest in thoughts entirely seeing for the first time their lack of validity, meaning, importance or value.
They are useful tools, nothing more, equipped for the mundane tasks of repetition, much like a computer’s memory circuits. We input information. It stores it. It combines it with other bits of stored data: images, memories, words. It repeats it. Very much like a computer’s memory circuit.
And, like trying to create a computer with “artificial intelligence”, we have assigned our minds with the name intelligence. The true intelligence is not in our thoughts. There is a “ghost in the machine”. Something that cannot be seen, something before and beyond thoughts. Only when all thoughts are laid to rest and there is some space can we realize this true intelligence.
Thoughts alone are nothing. Fussing over them just perpetuates this addiction to thoughts and the belief in them. It is like being obsessed with the data stored on computer disc and believing that by continually looking at it some great truth will be discovered, possibly even happiness. But true intelligence, true wisdom, does not speak from thoughts. It speaks from Silence. Thoughts and our attention on them creates such noise in our consciousness that this deep Silence and Stillness can not be heard.
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