Liberating Spaces

empathy: “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”
from Greek empatheia (from em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’)

This is an ability I didn’t understand until very recently. Then, thanks to someone who was very close to me and who had an amazing empathy, everything came to me, first as a blow and then a gradual, increasing understanding. In our rationalising world is not an ability easy to develop, though I believe it’s becoming a very important one to go through our lives. In this blog, I talked before about empathy here. I said

This sums up what empathy is: I am here with you, I give you hope, and accompany in your feeling.

At first, when we don’t know how to feel it, we may be afraid of our empathy, for it makes us vulnerable to the bad feelings of others, and we naturally avoid feeling bad. But empathy is not ‘feeling bad with another’, it is just ‘feeling with another’. Yes, feeling with her the sorrow when someone she loved died or her pain when she is sick, but also feeling with her the joy of making love, or when she passes a difficult exam. Empathy is part of a life attitude of openness necessary to get both the ugly and the beauty of our world, if we close ourselves to the former, we close ourselves to the latter. The best two TED talks I’ve seen so far show us amazingly what I mean: “The power of vulnerability” and “I should have a daughter…“.

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“And yes, it means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things fall out of the sky, I am ready to catch them.”

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Sir Ken Robinson’s lecture is a loud and clear call for change. We must change the current paradigm of education based on the intellectual ideas of enlightenment, and the practical considerations of the industrial revolution. It is actually numbing our humanity, our feelings, real interests and emotions, killing our creative potential for the sake of a narrow view of the world and the material interests of a few who are the actual profiteers of industrial production.

As a child, I went to seven different schools. I was expelled of some of them, recommended to leave in others and just moved by my parents from a couple. The first time I changed schools I was 7 years old. Unknown to me until very recently, that first time was a very emotional and traumatic affair for me. I had to leave my friends, those with whom I shared so many memories and experiences until then. Why was I thrown out? Basically because I was often not putting attention into what the teachers were saying. I preferred to either talk to other students, read, draw or do other stuff instead of focusing in one single point. I actually felt alienated, it felt like someone was hammering me down into a box. My whole being was resisting. Always with a big smile though.

Robinson’s talk wakes these feelings again up in me. It is so true, so right what he says. It is so at the core of what I call the emotional revolution, a change of paradigm that takes seriously us as emotional beings, who feel and create in our freedom and diversity. Rationalism and standardisation tries to kill this by making us all the same – like classifying us by our production date (i.e. birthday). I believe that understanding and accepting what’s inside us, the combination and collaboration of our reason and emotions, is an essential step to make a future which is freer and fairer for us.

In late May, I went with a friend to Saint Petersburg. That trip was probably one of the best trips I’ve ever had. The company, the weather, the city, the country and the people around brought us into a state of mind and heart that was very special. We had a few experiences that have marked our lives. I’ve already told you about two of them – an orthodox religious ceremony and life and stones. Now I want to tell you about the third and last of these life experiences. It is about a museum, paintings, beauty and overwhelming feelings. It is about the Hermitage and its impressive collection. It is about what makes us human: creativity.

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For the last months I have written quite a bit about emotions and reason. In what I called the emotional revolution, I see a process of transformation through which we realize that reason is not the only legitimate source of knowledge and meaning in our lives. We are starting, as individuals and as communities, to get into contact with our emotions in ways we can share and give them common meaning by new and rediscovered means – images, music, movies, farming, cooking, exercise, travelling, comedy, Internet and social networks, etc. – at a global level. Emotions are becoming essential to understand our environment, our peers and ourselves. We are as much emotional as rational beings. To give full meaning to our reality, reason and emotion need to be accomplices.

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Before I left Moscow on Monday afternoon, I went to Saint Petersburg for a short weekend trip with a friend of mine. We left Moscow for Saint Petersburg at 6.40 am on Saturday 22 May. We arrived back to Moscow at 10.50 am on Monday 24 May. We slept a total of 6 hours during the whole trip. It was a total success (except for the tiny detail that I lost my iphone on Saturday night ).

On my previous post I wrote that it was always a pleasure to travel with David Luff, my companion in this trip to the imperial city, for

We both love to walk in cities to explore those corners out of the tourist trail that hide its real essence.

How truthful this is. We’ve enjoyed like “des fous”. The weather couldn’t have been better, the city is beautiful and the people are very open and smiley (the sun might have helped). Among many experiences we had in just two days (it looked like a week), I’d like to mention three, divided in three different posts. The first concerns two very special religious ceremonies.

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Radically inspiring TED talk by Eva Ensler. It is worth watching from beginning to end. Though I don’t agree with all of it, particularly with the idea that the “girl cell” is THE future, for I believe it is just part of the future. We should not fall into the same opposite mistake: the girl despising and ignoring the “male cell”, our masculinity.

“this girl cell is compassion, and it’s empathy, and it’s passion itself, and it’s vulnerability, and it’s openness and it’s intensity and it’s association, and it’s relationship, and it’s intuitive.

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I saw this image in the fantastic Jonathan Klein’s TED talk on the power of image to change the world. It was taken by John Moore in Arlington cemetery.

If you follow regularly this blog, you have probably seen that I like to use images to communicate what text cannot communicate. This video with Jonathan Klein from Getty Images where he shows how some images can make change happen in the world because they have emotional power that make people act and change their meanings of the world. A must see, particularly if you feel the meaning of pictures.

Paulo Coelho in his novel The Alchemist wrote

“Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there. Wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”

It is a simple, but powerful statement. Yet it is much more difficult to follow than it seems. Listening to your heart is not an easy thing. For very often we think we are doing it, but we are actually listening to the layers of values, ideas and practices that we have learned in the past. They look like our feelings, our intuition, but they are not. Other times we are captured by our fear, which muffles what the heart has to say. Listening to your heart is to go beyond the learned values and the fear, and feel what your intuition is telling you. The communication with it doesn’t come through the language, it is not logical, but through your emotions.

Sometimes in life we are presented with rare opportunities that can make our life a special experience. These are life treasures. Yet, very often we don’t see them as such, and we lose them. We miss these opportunities because we haven’t listened to our heart, to what our deep emotions, to what our intuition is telling us. Either because we cynically rationalise them, we convince ourselves that treasures, these special encounters that can make our life different, do not exist, that they are never what they seem. Or because we are afraid, fear tells us that these treasures hide something bad in then, that sooner or later they will bring us pain.

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Some time ago, the first time I saw this painting I thought it was beautiful. Now, after the most wonderful experience, I see more in it because I’ve seen what absolute beauty is.

The painting represents Ophelia from Hamlet singing while floating in the river just before she drowns. It was painted by the pre-raphaelite John Everett Millais. The model is Elizabeth Siddal, who became the muse of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (a group of English painters, poets, and critics, who have been considered the first avant-garde movement), and who was described for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who eventually married her, as
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Lately, I’ve been talking a lot to friends and new friends, women and men alike about emotions. Some of my male friends take a very rational position to what I tell them. They try to find explanations, analyse it and propose solutions, while comparing my problems with their previous experiences, and telling me how they went out of it. Most women, on the other hand, bring a more empathetic view to it. They do not try to get the truth and give me their solutions, they mostly accompany me in my feelings, share them and help me going through them, for me to understand them, while giving me hope by showing the nice colours in my windy emotional painting.

Today, in the gym after I came back from swimming, they were playing in the changing rooms a song by Noah and the Whale called “Blue Skies”.

This is a song for anyone
With a broken heart
This is a song for anyone
Who can’t get out of bed

I’ll do anything
To be happy
Oh cause blue skies are coming
But I know that it’s hard

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”The division between reason and passion, or cognition and emotion (an opposition that goes all the way back to Aristotle), is, from a neurological point of view, a fallacy.’ – Jonathan Bate

Baruch Spinoza in his masterwork “Ethics” argued that body and mind are not two separate entities but a continuous substance. In accordance with his belief that God is an infinite substance more equated with Nature, the continuity of reality applies to emotion and reason. Until now, we have lived in a world dominated by Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”, but recent scientific studies prove this abstraction of the rational mind from the body and our feelings as being a wrong description of what we actually are.

The world we have built on the basis of rationality and the scientific method as the prime way of make ourselves happy, and our societies prosperous is crumbling. We are realising that our nature and reality is a continuity in which emotions are not the enemy of reason, but the necessary accomplice. This change is the “emotional revolution“.

Eduard Punset, a Spanish thinker who writes about many different ideas around networks, neurology, society, economy…has posted today on his blog about the new emerging way of relating to each other (here in Spanish, translation in English). According to him we are witnessing the emergence of the structures of relationships between each other, other life beings and our environment based more on independence, diversity and respect (these three dimensions are my interpretation of his words). One of the most important factors of this change is social networks. Very recently, I have experienced a direct evidence of this.

This process is part of what I call the “emotional revolution“, a movement of conscience about the importance of our emotions, how we feel them, know them, communicate them and work with them. A process that will put at the centre of our lives and our societies the emotional energy that pushes us forward as individuals and communities, in harmony with our environment and all life beings around us.