How We’re Practicing Empathy Clarity
“The WHY is getting lost.” Andrea Pacheco sat across from me after our first October caregiver support meeting, she’d clearly sat down knowing what she wanted to say and ready to be heard. “People are feeling everything, but they need to understand why we’re practicing this.”
Andrea is able to sit in a meeting where things aren’t working and be with the discomfort until she finds the source. I think she can do this because she’s very sensitive to the group vibe - and she’s learned, through practice, to stay present and curious.
After twenty years working together, she’s learned to trust the sensations that arise in her body when something’s off: that tightness in her shoulders during a meeting, the unsettled feeling in her belly when a practice has drifted from its purpose.
And she was completely right - I needed to be more clear about WHY we were setting aside time and energy to feel feelings.
We make time to feel our feelings because Empathy Clarity, the practice of being present with another’s emotional experience without it becoming your own, starts with being comfortable with your own emotions and how they show up in your body. It’s very hard to hold space for someone else’s grief if you run from the heaviness in your own chest, and nearly impossible to stay steady through another’s anxiety if you can’t tolerate your own racing pulse.
I’ve been leading body scan meditations at our caregiver support meetings for years. “Notice your feet. Now spend the next three breaths feeling the sensations in your feet.” I count through three audible breaths. “Move to your ankles.” Three more breaths. Our breathing syncs for fifteen minutes as we feel the sensations in our bodies together.
It’s not relaxation. It’s practice. Because emotions live in our bodies. Grief sits heavy in our chests. Anxiety races through sweaty palms. Joy spreads in uncontrollable grins. As caregivers, we support people who are facing new and difficult parts of their journey, and if we’re going to support people through intense and challenging feelings, we need to have some comfort in our own emotional landscape.
And Andrea was right. I’d gotten so focused on the practice that I’d stopped explaining why we do it.
In the second October support meeting, I was more clear: “We practice noticing sensations in our bodies because that’s where feelings happen. When we’re comfortable with our own racing heart or tight shoulders, we can stay steady when the people we support are overwhelmed by theirs.”
The room shifted. The caregivers weren’t just following instructions or doing a nice meditation for ‘self-care’; they were building their capacity for their actual work. Andrea had seen the piece I’d dropped.
Everyone engaged more easefully after that. It’s easier to do hard things when we’re working together towards something. Sitting on a big sectional sofa and breathing and feeling together with 15 people you sort of know is easier when you know why you’re doing it.
Andrea’s bravery in leaning into her own discomfort has made her a leader in our organization. When she feels something’s off, she doesn’t push past it or intellectualize it away. She sits with that uncomfortable sensation, explores it, then addresses it directly. This willingness to feel the hard stuff, and act on it, shows all of us what’s possible. This time it showed me the very obvious explanation I’d left out in practicing Empathy Clarity.
We’ve spent four years building frameworks for authentic work: meeting structures with emotional check-ins, peer support systems, accessible financial transparency, and a host of other supports and tools. But the magic happens when people like Andrea embody Empathy Clarity. She holds steady for the organization the same way our caregivers hold steady for clients.
This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on October 21, 2025, under Business Different.
