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The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill Spiral-Bound | October 1, 2013

Karla McLaren

$22.79 - Free Shipping

What if there were a single skill that could directly and radically improve your relationships and your emotional life? Empathy, teaches Karla McLaren, is that skill. With The Art of Empathy, she teaches us how to perceive and feel the experiences of others with clarity and authenticity—to connect with them more deeply and effectively.

Informed by current insights from neuroscience, social psychology, and healing traditions, this book explores:

  • Why empathy is not a mystical phenomenon but a natural, innate ability that we can strengthen and develop
  • How to identify and regulate our emotions and boundaries
  • The process of shifting into the perspective of others
  • How to provide support in a sensitive and healthy way
  • Insights for navigating our hyper-connected social landscape
  • Targeted chapters for improving family, workplace, and intimate relationships
  • Ways to expand our empathy to our community, global levels of society, and the natural world

Empathy, reflects Karla McLaren, is the skill that builds bridges— a skill that not only creates connection, but that helps us to be more effective in all areas of our lives.

Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 328 pages
ISBN-10: 1622030613
Item Weight: 1.0 lbs
Dimensions: 6.0 x 0.8 x 9.0 inches

"Karla McLaren illuminates the rich, textured landscape of emotional intelligence. And in The Art of Empathy, Karla wisely explores the most important of all human feelings-empathy, the glue of all positive human relationships."
-PETER A LEVINE, PhD
Author of Healing Trauma, and Freedom from Pain



" Empathy and emotional sensitivity are important parts of our psycho-social makeup. They function, for the most part, in the background of our conscious awareness. After four decades of study, Karla McLaren has come up with lots of ideas for accessing those aspects of ourselves in constructive and organized ways. A natural empath, she has combined her own experience with current advances in neuroscience, psychology, and sociology to create this indepth, down-to-earth handbook for making empathy an active force in our lives. She includes specific mindfulness exercises to deal with issues such as grounding, boundaries, emotional honesty, and recharging our emotional selves. Whether your customers are highly empathic by nature or more emotionally constrained, this book provides lots of suggestions for making communication and interaction with others easier and more fulfilling."
-ANNA JEDRZIEWSKI, Retailing Insight -October Issue -




"Karla McLaren's unique, empathic view of emotions surprisingly revalues even the most 'negative' emotions and opens pathways to understanding the depths of the human soul."
-MICHAEL MEADE
 Author of The World Behind the World

Empath Karla McLaren is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and pioneering educator whose empathic approach to emotions has taken her through the healing of her own childhood trauma, into a healing career, and now into the study of sociology, anthropology, neurology, cognitive psychology, and education. She is the author of The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You (Sounds True, 2010), the online course Emotional Flow: Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions (Sounds True, 2012) and The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill (October, 2013).

Karla has taught at such venues as the University of San Francisco, Omega Institute, Naropa University, Kripalu, and the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Additionally, as a prison arts educator with the William James Foundation, she has utilized singing, drumming, and drama to help men in maximum security prisons explore and heal long-held emotional traumas. She is currently developing new forms of Empathy and Social Interaction curricula for neurologically diverse populations.

Karla lives in California with her husband, Tino Plank, a Master's level nurse educator who works in hospice and end-of-life care.