We can approach this question by recognizing that with the Green arising in your experience, you become present and open to the situation in a gentle and sensitive way. You directly feel the content of the soul’s experience. You do not mentally deduce what’s happening—you know it intimately by feeling it through vulnerable and sensitive openness. Green imbues Being’s openness with a transparent vulnerability. This vulnerable awareness points to the quality that the Green Essence represents for our Being—a sensitivity of consciousness. Consciousness requires sensitivity in order to feel, to experience, to be in touch with itself. The Green latifa provides heart sensitivity, which is not just awareness or consciousness. Our consciousness becomes delicate, supple, soft, and minutely considerate of what’s happening. It attains a refined, exquisite awareness, which we feel as a sensitivity. It is as if each atom of our soul had become a tendril, a nerve fiber that can sense and feel in a very delicate, subtle, refined way. This sensitivity pervades the whole field of experience, the whole soul, when the Green aspect of Compassion is dominant. It makes it possible for us to recognize the inherent discrimination in our experience through feeling, through intimacy, through contact.

When we study the quality of attunement and empathy in openness, a great deal of pain and hurt is bound to come up for most of us. This signifies several things. First, that by being attuned to where we are, we recognize more fully and exactly what we are truly experiencing. The arising of pain signifies that there is much suffering in our human experience. When we look with an attuned, precise lens, this suffering is what we see. In fact, one important reason why our experience is ordinarily so limited is that we resist seeing the amount of pain and suffering we have. The soul closes down to avoid feeling the hurt, pain, suffering, and difficulties that are normal in human experience. Another thing this observation indicates is that the pain and suffering in human experience require the presence of Loving-kindness—the sensitivity, gentleness, and healing quality of the Green Essence. It also shows that our inquiry needs to embody not just what feels good and wonderful, but also a true openness that welcomes our pain and suffering. When our inquiry is open to our pain, our pain will open up and expose itself to the healing agent of Loving-kindness. Furthermore, our pain and suffering will open itself up and reveal the truth that is hidden when we close down the pain. If our inquiry doesn’t open up to our pain, it cannot proceed very far, because the route to our own truth is blocked by our positions and defenses that protect us against the pain we have—the pain that is natural for human beings to experience.

Understanding more fully the nature of the Green Essence makes it more available for our soul to use for attunement and inquiry. It is evident that sensitivity is necessary to attune us to exactly what is happening. Attunement, in other words, like empathy, is a particular expression of this sensitivity. The quality of sensitivity is obviously very important in our inquiry. The sensitivity makes the content of experience fully and truly available. Without this very present and available content, our inquiry will tend to be intellectual, and disconnected, and it won’t unfold the soul. The more we have this sensitivity, this softness, the more directly we become aware of experience—by touching it from the inside. If God creates the world in order to experience it, how is God going to do that without this sensitivity? What some spiritual traditions refer to as witness awareness perceives things at a distance; it is not an involved awareness. But with the emerald green of Loving-kindness, consciousness becomes an awareness that touches and feels, that knows through intimacy. The inherent knowledge of Being now has an extra dimension, a new kind of depth and fullness, that makes the discriminating awareness full of aliveness and tenderness. The sensitivity of the Green aspect brings in a vulnerability and openness characteristic of life itself. It creates a sense of delicate, virgin aliveness. All of our feelings and sensations appear as if they were leaves that are just being born—very delicate, very soft, but very alive and very fresh. It is not surprising that leaves happen to be green. The soul’s heart is awake and sensing with intimacy the unfolding of its own nature.

So, if you see a person hurting and you want to support them, you don’t give them a pat on the shoulder or some sweet words of encouragement. No, you do something to help them go deeper. The prevailing understanding of empathic attunement is that you should make somebody feel safe, assure them that there is no danger. But true support is not a matter of making somebody feel safe. It is a matter of precisely seeing and recognizing where the person is so that the person will trust—not because there is no danger but because there is true understanding. For example, if somebody was repeatedly hurt by her mother, you can be kind and help her feel that it is okay to be hurt, it is okay to be mad at and hate her mother. But that is only part of the story. Emotional attunement recognizes that there is hatred because the soul has been hurt, and hurt naturally produces hatred when one feels powerless to stop what is causing the hurt. But the true attunement of the Green Essence is aware that the real reason she is suffering is that she has lost touch with her true nature. She is not really suffering because her mother hurt her, but because this hurt has disconnected her from what is most precious in her. We see here that from the perspective of the Diamond Guidance, the impulse to be kind to this person because her mother hurt her is only the beginning of true Compassion. The Compassion of our true nature responds from the knowledge that even though hurt, pain, abuse, and trauma happen in childhood, the most central element in our soul’s suffering is that those experiences disconnect us from true nature.