How Femi Koleoso’s Beautiful Description of Joy as a Resource Shows Us The Difference Between Empathy & Compassion (i.e... Equanimity?)

& A Festive Freebie You Can Gift

Why Connecting With Joy Is No Cause For Guilt

If you’ve ever been to an Ezra Collective gig, you’ll know the sensation of being filled with collective joyful energy. The band leader and drummer, Femi Koleoso, is stood up playing the drums and leading the entire audience in dancing together, as the band and audience pour their energy into this incredible shared experience. And today I loved reflecting on how joyful experiences like these, and even the most split-second moments of joy, are powerful fuel for everything else we do.

A lovely friend sent me this podcast today, and listening to it really made my day (thanks Han!). It features the aforementioned Femi Koleoso, talking to Annie MacManus around the topic of joy. There were so many beautiful things in that conversation, but the one that has spurred me to immediately sit down and write this was about how joy is such important fuel for our souls. How joy feeds us and enables us to be more engaged and present with things in life that are more difficult.

Sometimes we can fall into feeling guilty for enjoying life when others are suffering, or feeling wrong to engage with joyful things when we have other stresses and responsibilities looming. Femi Koleoso flipped this on its head by beautifully describing the importance of joy in fuelling us so that we can engage with suffering and challenge in a more supportive and productive way.

“There is a time to be joyful, and that joy will power you up to fight the things that are making your heart break.” - Femi Koleoso

Compassion With Equanimity

Recognising this need to fuel ourselves reminded me of the ‘compassion with equanimity’ exercise that I learnt during the 8-week MIndful Self-Compassion course I did last year (and which a friend of mine is running online, starting in Jan, and is offering free taster workshops for - highly recommend!).

‘Compassion with equanimity’ was all about attending to ourselves when we are caring for others. It was a recognition of that phrase ‘you cannot pour from an empty cup’. A simple but powerful exercise (check out an explainer and recorded practice here). The key element is that it gets you to remember, recognise and attend to your own needs, as well as the limits of what is within your control, when you are concerned about another person.

The Difference Between Empathy & Compassion

The other thing that the podcast made me think about was the difference between empathy and compassion. Before I did Mindful Self-Compassion training, I had used the terms fairly interchangeably. For ten years I’ve been teaching medical and physician associate students about how we need to use empathy within our communication. Not infrequently I receive questions about whether it’s necessary to become shut off to other people’s emotions, for fear of getting overwhelmed by them. The Mindful Self-Compassion training provided the best answer to this that I’ve yet come across.

In fact, this topic is one I’m such a fan of that I already have a half-written blog post about it where I described the “mega-lightbulb-constellation-of-stars-pinging-into-brightness moment when our teacher talked about the concept of empathy fatigue vs compassion fatigue, and showed us this video of Matthieu Ricard (‘The Happy Monk’) talking about the difference between the two.”.

Previously, I hadn’t had the right pieces of the puzzle to feel the answer was complete to this question - how do you empathise with people without becoming burnt out? In the past I’ve answered this by saying that empathy is important in preventing burnout because it allows us to connect with people, to gain satisfaction from our work by building human connection, and to acknowledge what we are witnessing. I’ve also emphasised in the past how important it is to debrief and connect with colleagues, to acknowledge the impact on us and to actively do things to avoid holding onto those painful experiences we’ve witnessed.

Really some of what I’m describing there is compassion. Because here’s the difference:

• Empathy is feeling with others.

• Compassion builds on empathy, and involves providing support for the part feeling the emotion. We can provide compassion for ourselves as well as for others. Compassion involves observing and holding a wider perspective in mind.

There Is No ‘Compassion Fatigue’ - It’s ‘Empathy Fatigue’

In the video that was the big ‘aha!’ for me, Matthieu Ricard talks about his experience of undergoing two lengthy functional MRI (fMRI) scans to observe his brain when he thought about a distressing experience that happened to someone else, and connected with empathy for them.

In the first fMRI, he was asked to empathise without carrying out his usual practice of self-compassion while feeling the empathy. In the second fMRI, he brought in self-compassion alongside empathy.

When experiencing empathy on its own, he became completely overwhelmed by emotion, and the fMRI showed pain centres in his brain lighting up as he empathised.

However, on the second MRI, something different happened. As he responded to himself with compassion, the scan of his brain looked very different - with less activity in the areas representing pain and distress, and more in areas representing soothing. He described it as being embraced by compassion. In contrast to the first version, where he’d felt immersed in the fear and angst of the painful experience, in the second version he felt held.

So he challenged the concept of ‘compassion fatigue’, saying that in fact, compassion is the thing that helps soothe and regulate us, and that it is empathy without compassion that leads to fatigue - so perhaps the more apt term would be ‘empathy fatigue’.

When we tap into compassion, we are able to feel our emotions, and feel with others (empathise), and at the same time zoom out, so that we can soothe those emotions by holding them in a wider awareness of calm, love, and perspective. Where empathy involves, metaphorically (or literally), sitting with someone in their emotional experience, compassion is similar but also occupies a wider space, where you can both be with the experience AND recognise that it too will pass.

It makes me think of a quote I jotted down from a podcast ages ago (it was on ‘We Can Do Hard Things’ and was someone quoting their kid who had summed up the power of being able to observe our emotions by saying ‘if I observe the worried part, I’m not the worried part’. In other words, if we keep hold of our ability to observe ourselves - to notice how we are feeling, and what we are experiencing, then we hold onto the ability to take a broader perspective, and to know that our painful experiences are not the totality of who we are. They’re not all of our reality. This helps us to move out of the limiting thinking that stress and distress creates (all-or-nothing, absolutism) and into a more integrated way of thinking, where we can see nuances and know that things will pass.

Joy Feeds Compassion

So all that to say - let’s experience more joy, it’s food for our souls! Even when we might be going through difficult times, what are some ways we can turn to joy and fuel ourselves up, so we can more easily tap into our compassionate Self¹? For me, it’s going to be having a dance round the living room to this:

If you decide to get up and dance as well, let me know, and if you have other impromptu get-up-and-dance tracks I’d love to hear them!

And a few more autumnal moments that brought me joy…

1. Noticing this cat posing as a fence panel:

2. Mingling autumn colours:

3. Cuddles & cosy textures:

Connecting With Compassion

One very powerful way of connecting with our compassionate Self is through the magic of coaching conversations. At the moment I am on a drive to expand my 1:1 coaching practice, and I would really appreciate your support in connecting me with people who would value it. Here are three ways to help, if you can:

1. Share this article.

2. Recommend subscribing to my Substack publication (i.e. this - The Reconnect).

3. Give the gift of FREE coaching (free for you as well!) - share this flyer with any friends and colleagues who might be interested in trying coaching (or use it yourself!). It’s a great way to dip your toe in, lighten the load and get a bit of a boost during this hibernation season.

(After battling with format, I think this link is the easiest way to share - or if you’d like a PDF I can email/whatsapp it to you (but can’t seem to upload one here - PDF has all the links embedded). Here’s a gif to show you what it looks like…

***********Thank you so much!**********

1. I’ve written Self with a capital S because I’m referring to the quality of ‘Self’ as described in the psychology model called Internal Family Systems (IFS) - the version of ourselves/qualities that we all have capacity for, and are sometimes tuned in with, characterised by 8 Cs and 5 Ps (calm, connectedness, clarity, confidence, compassion, courage, curiosity, creativity, playfulness, perspective, patience, persistence & presence).