Right now there is a chill in the room. At least I think there is.Perhaps the chill is in me instead of the room. My wife has had the flu, a nasty bronchial congestion and cough, for about a week, and I’m feeling like something has been trying to get hold of me for the last few days.No cough so far, but I am dizzy if I turn my head at an angle or when I get up from lying down or lie down from walking around. The walls and the doors move from here to there and I find myself walking sideways. I put out my arms and touch something to brace my body and anchor my vision. For some reason doing that makes the place stop whirling.I’m also tired. I would like nothing more right now than to pull a comforter up to my chin, close my eyes, and let everything go its way.Yes, I’m sure the chill is within me. It’s in my body.A colleague has written a couple of great little books about the body. In 2001 Ruella Frank’s ‘Body of Awareness’ was published. The publisher described the book as follows:“Merging scientific theory with a practical, clinical approach, ‘Body of Awareness’ explores the formation of infant movement experience and its manifest influence upon the later adult. Most significantly, it shows how the organising principles in early development are functionally equivalent to those of the adult.“It demonstrates how movement plays a critical role in a developing self-awareness for the infant and in maintaining a healthy self throughout life. In addition, a variety of case studies illustrates how infant developmental movement patterns are part of the moment-to-moment processes of the adult client and how to bring these patterns to awareness within therapy.”That book was intended to help therapists enhance their skills of attunement by heightening their observations of subtle movement patterns.Last year Ruella teamed up with psychoanalytic writer Frances Le Barr to publish ‘The First Year and the Rest of Your Life: Movement, Development, and Psychotherapeutic Change’. The PsycInfo database for the American Psychological Association described that book as follows:“This book is the result of the collaboration between two people a gestalt therapist and a psychoanalyst who bring their two different psychotherapeutic traditions in train yet share a common and important understanding… Because we come from two different psychotherapy cultures, each with its own jargon, we have chosen to use ‘the language of the body moving’ to describe complex theoretical ideas.Rather than offering a series of ‘how-to’ techniques, we instead offer and illustrate our theory foundational movement analysis to be integrated within any form of psychotherapy. Each chapter of this book presents theoretical constructs and case examples to demonstrate our theory. These cases also show what, how, and why we do what we do… This book is an application of infant research and movement theory that significantly augments clinical acumen and promotes greater understanding of the nonverbal basis of all relationships.”However, I bet that if you looked at me right now, and you had not read either of Ru’s books, you could still figure out that I was not feeling good. In fact, you might even feel a bit dizzy or nauseated yourself from being around me (no, I don’t always have that effect on people!).We sometimes experience in our own bodies the things that others are experiencing in theirs and all we have to do for that to happen is to observe them. Neurologically, the movements and emotional states we observe in others resonate within our own bodies with the activation of “mirror neurons” that allow us to have a first-hand experience of what we see taking place outside our own bodies and in the bodies of other people. Is this kind of intersubjectivity, this taking the other’s perspective, what we call “empathy”?Some would say that empathy is assuming the emotional perspective of another.It is to be distinguished from sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorrow over another’s misfortune, feeling in agreement with another’s point of view, having a favourable attitude toward someone else, or having support for another, feeling in common with another. However, these things are not feeling or experiencing what the other feels or experiences.Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Heinz Kohut, a famous self-psychologist and theorist, described empathy as the ability to think oneself into the inner life of another person.Carl Rogers, a famous interpersonal psychologist, described empathy as the ability to sense the feelings of another and to grasp the reasons for those feelings yet never to lose the sense of being a separate person oneself. Edith Stein, a philosopher of the last century, described empathy as the ability to experience foreign consciousness the ability to have a first-hand experience of someone else’s first-hand experience.So, I am now going to make some chicken soup. Actually, I’m going to heat up some chicken soup I made for my wife when I looked upon her tired and aching expression and listened to her coughing so deeply and forcefully that I wondered if she would be able to catch another breath. I ached for her. I thought at the time how wonderful a bowl of warm, steaming chicken soup might seem. I thought that surely it would be conducive to her getting better and feeling more strength again.However, since now I’m feeling bad for myself, I’m going to see if chicken soup can help me to feel better.If by this time you are feeling a bit ill yourself, then the thought of warm chicken soup might just seem soothing to you as well. If so, consider yourself to be an empathic and sensitive people person. I made the soup with slices of potato, peas, carrots and a whole, boiled chicken. I took out the bones, of course. I made a whole pot of it. I brought it to work.“Work?!” you might ask. What am I doing at work if I feel this bad? That is what our office manager wanted to know. Now, it’s not that she was feeling empathic at that moment; it’s that she did not want to get what I’ve got. In fact, her look scolded me and the tone in her voice made me question myself.“What AM I doing at work?!” Now, is that me or my empathic entering into her experience that prompts me to ask that?Ugh. Too much effort. Just give me the comforter.