EMPATHY
Examine your emotions with honest self-reflection. Listen and see how people are reacting to your choice of actions and words. Examine and recognize other people’s feelings, intents, and reactions within their environments or situations.
Martial arts may be an individualized competitive sport, but it creates bonds with your classmates in a unique way. Through hard practice with your classmates, you start to develop insights about how different people react and think.
Why Empathy
Empathy is a hard trait to learn, but it really completes someone’s thinking about a situation. It allows you to think behind someone’s else motives and reasoning and possibly gain insight about their actions. Maybe it was because you did something that you weren’t aware of, or something else that you can’t control. By understanding all aspects, it might help defuse situations that can turn into more than just a one-time incident. Be There’s Empathy tenet requires you and everyone in your community to Be There to help you progress through this tenet.
The Stance
This stance invokes empathy by portraying openness by sitting on your legs with them folded underneath and your arms resting on your thighs with your palms open facing the sky. This stance enables you to take in what you see and hear without putting much thought into what your body is doing. This is a vulnerable stance, which helps open feelings of honest self-reflection.
Performing the stance
This stance helps you associate with empathy because the positions of your hands are open and inviting. Sitting with folded legs is a formal position and helps with back posture. This stance shouldn’t be held for too long because it does induce your legs to fall asleep.
Sit on your folded legs.
Keep your shoulders and back straight.
Rest your arms on your thighs with the palms facing up.
Keep your fingers together and fold your thumbs in.