Time and again, people transcend the paralyzing effects of psychological pain when they have sufficient contact with someone who can hear them empathically.

Empathizing with someone's 'no' protects us from taking it personally.

Be very slow to go into looking for solutions.

If we become skilled in giving ourselves empathy, we often experience in just a few seconds a natural release of energy which then enables us to be present with the other person. If this fails to happen, however, we have a couple of other choices.

Not getting our needs fulfilled is painful - but it's a sweet pain, not suffering, which is what comes from life-alienated thinking and interpretation.

The first step in healing is to put the focus on what's alive now, not what happened in the past.

Empathy lies in our ability to be present without opinion.