If empathy is the process of understanding the experience, feelings, and perceptions of others, what is *self-empathy*? Doing the same thing for yourself. "Wait," you may ask, "Aren't I doing this all the time?" Eckhart Tolle famously said that his thought, "I can't live with myself," led him to seeing the parts of himself, of which there were at least two: the part that was judging and the part that was being judged. You have many different parts, due to [[Healing Trauma Map of Content (MoC)|trauma]] and perhaps for other reasons as well. Feelings that have been buried (pushed down and out of awareness) and thus become emotion require an exact *opposite* process to bring back *into* awareness for processing. There are good reasons for the unconscious content to remain unconscious: these are reasons of self-protection and function. If we had no map, we would die. Better to have a bad one than none. To bring emotional content back *up* into awareness for processing requires a spaceholding *equally strong* to the energy which pushed them down in the first place! This is where the [[What is the Pain Release Meditation|Pain Release meditation]] is helpful. It gives you a method to create the time and space for different parts of yourself to be able to present themselves (what they felt and need) in order to process the energy which has been repressed and heal. In other words, instead of providing verbal and somatic cues to *someone else* about what they may be feeling and looking for them to confirm or clarify their experience, you do so for *yourself* (or parts of yourself). This is helpful once you are able to ground to a point to be able to reach *observer state* for yourself and not be excessively triggered during your own emotional self-explorations. That said, even if you become triggered during a meditation, generally the emotional waves will pass eventually. Continue to: [[What is meditation]] --- Other resources: [[What is grounding]] [[What is spaceholding]] [[Healing Trauma Map of Content (MoC)]]