Sympathy and empathy. Empathy is more, where you put yourself right into that person's life, you try to understand everything they're feeling fully, you try to understand all the pain, and you basically just about feel the pain yourself. Sympathy is not that strong. Sympathy is "feeling with" but not "suffering with." There's a difference between feeling with and suffering with. When we suffer with, then we get weighed down with the same problem. We're experiencing it, the empathy can be too strong so that we actually experience the problem too much. Whereas with sympathy we keep a bit more distance so that we can stay more balanced and have equanimity to be with our compassion. When you think of the word compassion it includes sympathy and empathy, but we want to stay more balanced with an equanimity base, a wisdom base, which ultimately goes to the fact that everybody is the owner of their own Kamma. This allows us to keep a little more distance as far as the empathy issue, we don't have to feel the pain itself. Yet we can feel with the person having the pain. So sympathy is more balanced in our way of teaching. Empathy has to be watched very closely to prevent it falling into grief. "How could this be happening? Why? Why? Why?" But sometimes it is helpful for those who have a tendency to be too distant or indifferent. So we may try to put ourselves in another's place to stimulate the understanding of their humanness. Sympathy has more of the equanimity with it, and usually more wisdom with it.