This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Sit with Matthew Brensilver - Dharmette: Empathic Resonance. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Bright, Steady, Open; Dharmette: Empathic Resonance - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 06, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Bright, Steady, Open

Folks, let's practice together. Find your posture.

Life is not in front of you, but all around you, through you. Threats and opportunities and "what's next" feels like it's in front of us, but life is all around. We're in a sense trying to know more and more of what's around us.

Suffering is the collapse into the center of gravity of self. Freedom is increasingly a kind of solidarity. The vastness of space, time. Can we know the world without self?

We're practicing knowing with a lot of clarity, brightness, stability. Equanimity¹—a kind of indifference about what this phenomena means about or for me. Right. Steady. Deep permission.

Maybe we can do this because we're doing it together. Because we're sharing in this moment. Maybe we couldn't do it if we didn't have each other's back, but we do, and we're here. And so we practice. Yes.

If you feel clear, bright, stable, allowing... there's nothing else to do. Just let time be your ally. Shinzen Young² would say, "Let time be your ally."

Let us be humbled rather than humiliated by this practice, by our minds. And bow to the depth of our conditioning, but not fully acquiesce to it. In the space between bowing and acquiescing—it's not big—that's the place of our gentle effort.

From the point of view of the universe, what are you? Not much, but not nothing. Maybe that's relieving. Maybe that's restful. But being not much more than nothing starts to win us everywhere.

Dharmette: Empathic Resonance

Hey, good to practice with you. If this isn't apparent, I just presume that everyone here knows how to meditate, kind of. And then I'm just... I don't know, doing something. But I hope it's okay.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I think I spoke about protecting empathy at all costs. I got a question about empathic resonance and thought to expand on some of what I was saying about empathy.

Before, as I sometimes say, we stand in someone else's shoes, we have to know what it's like to stand in our own. And without a kind of attentional practice, people have a very impoverished sense of what it's like to stand in their own shoes—to understand their own mind.

And so mindfulness is, we could say, maybe a kind of practice of self-directed empathy, a deep listening to what it's like to be me now. A thousand times, ten thousand times, we witness the almost unbearable poignancy of suffering and witness the longing for peace. Every movement of the mind, on some level, is an expression of that longing.

And this highly vivid, nuanced, topographical map of our inner life is really the precondition for empathizing with the other. And it's interesting that even mindfulness-based interventions that feature zero explicit instructions about sīla³ and ethics and that kind of thing—even those kinds of interventions seem to increase pro-social feeling and behavior. It’s like the gesture of awareness has a quality of nonviolence.

So in the neuroscience literature, empathy is often defined as three components: an affective response to another person (emotional resonance); the cognitive capacity to take the perspective of the other (mentalizing or theory of mind); and then some regulatory mechanism that keeps track of the origins of self-feelings and other-feelings.

To be in the shoes of another... I think Carl Rogers says, "as if it were your own, but without losing the 'as if' condition."

And so we're really cultivating these three skills, and they're not always correlated. The first capacity is sharing another's feelings. That's independent from the cognitive mentalizing capacity. Researcher and meditator Tania Singer⁴ said strong emotional empathizers are not necessarily proficient mentalizers. And a conman can know and predict a lot about the inner life of others but feels zero emotional resonance.

We are cultivating both capacities. In other words, we're cultivating love and understanding. Secretly, we have to fall in love with sentient beings.

Kramer⁵ says we're feeling our inner life and we're studying our mind and the causal unfolding as best we can. And we're in the game as practitioners of becoming better predictors of happiness, of seeing how some predictions fail, trying to understand our inner life by making guesses about what happens next. And all of that learning, all of that studying of our life helps us understand the inner life of others.

We could say that empathy is a kind of dance between knowing and not knowing. And I might look into the eyes of a practitioner with some hypotheses about how they suffer, about what their freedom might look like. But it's merely a hypothesis.

We have to be careful to stay poised in a sense of not knowing. Careful not to act on a kind of confirmation bias where we prematurely select a view and then look for more and more evidence to confirm that view. Stay open.

We develop a reverence for what's shared and a reverence for difference. We open to what is shared deeply: suffering, longing for peace. And we open to difference. We're not projecting our stories into the open space of the other. We're not filling the unknown with the familiar platitudes of our life. We're not trying to make them too similar to us. Reverence for difference.

And this takes a great deal of humility, self-knowledge, and humility. The dominion of the self-story must perish.

I was talking to a 22-year-old yesterday... she had existential questions. And I could sense her pāramīs⁶, you know? And in some moments, even though she had come to me, I might as well have been her student.

On this path, we're all doctors and all patients. [Clears throat]. And we have to be deeply fluid in how we incarnate in this moment.

Mentalizing, understanding... we're modeling their strength, their goodness, and modeling their pain as best we can perceive. We're asked to understand their egoic fragility, kind of pressure points in their being. Sacred cows of their ego. And any intervention needs to accommodate the clinging that cannot yet be spoken.

And egoic fragility is not merely about the curation of self-stories but the egoic investment in views and opinions and conventions of all kinds. And this is why it feels so freeing to be with someone who's free. You sense that you cannot clank into their pain, their rigidity.

Now, empathy is about mirroring, but it's not a perfect mirroring. It's a process sometimes called ostension⁷—a kind of pointing out or a markedness to the mirroring where we give a kind of slight emphasis to something we're perceiving. So that our empathy becomes a kind of pedagogical moment. In other words, we're tracing out the trajectory of freedom for them. We're perceiving them and tracing something out. Just a little accentuation of this or that.

Empathy is calibrated. Calibrated in the sense that too much empathy, too much intimacy can feel intrusive. And sometimes I kind of do the energetic equivalent of turning my gaze away. Sometimes I almost want to invite people to turn away. Sometimes there are the conditions, the permission for boundaries to melt. Right? The whole tragedy of human existence, Krishnamurti⁸ already said, lies between subject and object. Love is the face of emptiness.

And this love is both deeply attuned and entirely impersonal, indifferent to all particularities.

We cannot lose the "as if" condition—as if it were your own pain. But don't lose the "as if" condition. We have to track the origins of self and other feelings. And [Snorts] we must know the context where we're prone to lose the "as if" condition, where maybe my own history gets me confused, where the pain of the other floods my mind in some way. We have to know the kind of context conditions where that happens.

My partner asked what I was going to talk about tonight. I said empathy. And I asked her, "How am I doing?" And her reply was, "Good, not great. Good, not great." And she said, "No, no, you're doing good. But sometimes I can sense that you're noticing how I'm caught in a kind of web of my own thought-based suffering, but it's better if I can come to that realization on my own."

Okay, fair enough.

We can lose the "as if" condition when our heart is tied to another being in a particular way. We can lose the "as if" condition when the pain of the other resonates with our wounds rather than our love. And when that happens, when that kind of collapse happens, the impulses we will have tend to be counter-therapeutic.

Compassion is not the intolerance of the other's pain or the refusal to open to the endlessness of saṃsāra⁹, the ungovernability of dukkha¹⁰.

So empathy... it's the realm of love, of art, of literature, of healing. And may we cultivate and protect empathy.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you all. See you next time.