(Kuan Yin is the Compassionate Savior of the East)

Empagenesia or the discipline that studies the ability of the Psychotherapist to intuitively grasp beyond the patient’s verbal message. Quality of presence that can only be compared with that of some doctors now and healers of yesteryear who perceived the meaning and thereby practically cured.

A common criticism of health professionals who do not have enough time … to establish a compassionate and empathetic relationship with the patient. But those critics overstate the difficulties in conveying compassion.

A revealing study of patients with rheumatoid arthritis suggests that we cry as a way to release inflammation and pain.

These Japanese researchers from Tokyo’s Nippon Medical School exposed rheumatoid arthritis patients to deeply emotional visual stimuli and discovered a high correlation between the ease with which they broke down and several neuroendocrine and immune responses of their body. Among those responses were the rate of cortisol, the stress hormone, blood, the immune protein Interleukin-6, CD4, CD8 and natural killer immune cells.

They discovered that patients who cry most easily have, after one year, a better clinical development than those who do not cry, with less pain, less inflammation and less pain medication.

The conclusion, therefore, to which the researchers came was that crying suppresses the stress influence of the neuroendocrine and immune responses, thus facilitating the control of their rheumatoid arthritis.

According to this study, the ability to cry is closely linked to the ability to experience compassion, empathy and the feeling of connection with the evocative situation or with the person in need.

This experiment also suggests that compassion is positive both for the individual who experiences it and for the person to whom it is directed, which seems to coincide with the saying that the healing effort is as beneficial for the person who heals as for the person healed