Empathy is the ability to walk in the shoes of another and accept their reality without judgment. Empathy is a capacity of the heart. Empathy is difficult for the psychological personality, the ego, because of the separation of ‘me and others’, ‘me and the world’, created by various forms of conditioning. 

The empathy of the heart, however, is limitless. The heart is an organ of connectedness and knows no other way than compassion. It includes even people with destructive elements. This does not necessarily mean condoning this destructive behavior, but recognizing the innocence in the existence of these people. 

It was the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh who coined the term ‘interbeing’, meaning the interconnectedness of all beings. He used it to describe the fact that we cannot really exist separately, we are also the other, we are also the river, the mountain and all beings. What happens to one part of the whole happens to everything else.