EMBODIED EMPATHY: HOW PACING TRANSFERS SUBMODALITIES IN NLP

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“I tried to walk in someone else’s shoes and pulled a muscle I didn’t know I had.” Anonymous

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🎯 THE BENEFITS OF EMBODIED EMPATHY THROUGH PACING

“My therapist told me to try second position. I ended up accidentally becoming my mother for an entire weekend.” Anonymous

Pacing for submodality transfer is not a technique you practise for politeness. The benefits are practical, felt in the body, and extend into almost every arena where human understanding matters.

You gain direct access to another person’s internal world. When you pace someone’s physiology with genuine attention their breath rate and depth, the angle of their shoulders, the rhythm of their gestures your own nervous system begins to run a parallel version of their internal configuration. You do not have to imagine what they feel. You begin, in a functional sense, to feel something analogous to it. The difference between intellectually knowing that someone is anxious and actually feeling the tightening in the chest, the shallow pull of breath in the upper ribs, the slight forward weight in the posture that difference is the difference between analysis and empathy.

Your rapport deepens below the level of words. Research in nonverbal communication has long established that people who are in genuine rapport with each other naturally synchronise their movements, breathing, and micro-expressions. When you pace deliberately and with care, you accelerate this process. The other person’s nervous system registers the synchrony and interprets it, below conscious awareness, as connection and understanding.

You become a more precise practitioner. In coaching, therapy, Ericksonian hypnosis, or NLP modelling, the quality of your interventions depends on the quality of your understanding of the other person’s map of the world. Pacing that transfers submodalities gives you a firsthand somatic impression of where that person’s images live, how heavy or light their feelings are, and what rhythm their internal experience runs at. That information shapes every question you ask and every resource state you invite them to access.

You develop a finer somatic vocabulary. Most people live with relatively coarse awareness of their own internal states. Practising pacing and second position exercises your capacity to notice the subtle a slight shift in the location of a body sensation, a fractional change in the brightness of an inner image, a change in the speed of inner speech. Over time, your inner sensory resolution increases.

The technique is reversible and teachable. Unlike some empathy practices that leave practitioners carrying others’ emotional material indefinitely, the exit protocol in this approach is clear and somatic: you shake out the physiology, re-anchor into your own breath, and return to first position. You leave with understanding. You do not leave with someone else’s submodality patterns still running in your nervous system.

You develop a genuinely useful form of non-judgement. When you have inhabited even briefly and approximately the internal structure of another person’s experience, it becomes much harder to dismiss or minimise it. Somatic empathy generates respect. Not because you agreed to be respectful, but because you felt something of what the other person carries.

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🏛️ ORIGINS OF EMBODIED EMPATHY ACROSS CULTURES AND HISTORY

The idea that you can understand another person by taking on their physical form is very old. Its roots run through spiritual traditions, performing arts, and clinical medicine and its formal articulation in NLP is a recent chapter in a much longer story.

Ancient and cross-cultural foundations

In many Indigenous healing traditions across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the healer’s work involves a deliberate taking on of the patient’s bodily state sometimes through specific postures, sometimes through breath synchronisation, sometimes through chant rhythms that match the patient’s distress. The healer does not observe the patient from a safe distance. They enter the patient’s energetic and physical frequency and navigate from there.

The concept of sympatheia in Stoic philosophy the idea that all living things participate in a common sympathetic web carries a related insight: that genuine understanding of another is not a cognitive act but a participatory one. You do not deduce another’s experience. You resonate with it.

In East Asian theatrical traditions, particularly in Japanese Noh theatre, the actor’s preparation involves not merely memorising lines and movements but inhabiting a character at the level of breath, weight, and postural geometry. The tradition assumes that the external form, held with sufficient commitment, will bring the internal state into being. The technique precedes the emotion. The body leads; the interior follows.

In Western acting training, the lineage from Stanislavski through to somatic approaches like the work of Viola Spolin emphasises that genuine emotional truth on stage comes not from trying to feel something but from engaging the body in the specific physical circumstances of the character. The body, treated as the primary instrument, generates the internal experience rather than merely expressing a pre-existing one.

Modern scientific foundations

The 20th century brought formal scientific language to describe what these traditions had long practised.

Proprioception as self-representation. The nervous system continuously samples posture, muscular tension, and movement via proprioceptive feedback, using this information as one source in constructing moment-to-moment internal representations. Charles Sherrington’s early 20th-century work laid the physiological groundwork for understanding the body not as a vessel for the mind but as a constituent part of mental life.

Embodied cognition. From the 1980s onward, cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson articulated that abstract thought is not independent of bodily experience but deeply shaped by it. Their argument that the body’s structure, its orientation in space, its movement through the world is embedded in the very metaphors through which we understand concepts, implies that changing the body’s configuration changes the structure of cognition itself.

Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. Neurologist Antonio Damasio proposed that the body’s internal states are not merely consequences of thought and emotion but active signals somatic markers that guide reasoning and decision-making. The body, in this view, is a continuous feedback loop with the brain, not a downstream recipient of its outputs.

Mirror neuron research. In the 1990s, Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues at the University of Parma discovered, initially in macaque monkeys, that certain neurons in the premotor cortex fire both when an animal performs an action and when it observes the same action performed by another. Subsequent neuroimaging in humans has identified comparable circuits. What this research suggests still actively debated in its exact implications is that observation and action share neural substrate, providing a biological basis for the somatic resonance that pacing appears to produce.

NLP’s contribution

Within NLP, the formal articulation of pacing as a submodality transfer mechanism developed alongside the field’s broader systematisation of perceptual positions. John Grinder and Judith Delozier introduced the concept of perceptual positions in their work Turtles All The Way Down (1987), making explicit what skilled practitioners of many traditions had long done intuitively: that deliberately adopting another person’s physical form is a structured pathway into their experiential world. The NLP contribution was to map this process onto the submodality framework giving practitioners a specific internal vocabulary (brightness, location, size, tempo, pressure) for what they were accessing when they stepped into second position.

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📜 PRINCIPLES OF EMBODIED EMPATHY

These seven principles describe how the mechanism of pacing and submodality transfer operates. They build on each other and together constitute a working model you can use to inform both practice and understanding.

Principle 1: External behaviour is not decoration it is readout.

The body is not a container for the mind that occasionally decorates itself with emotional gestures. Every visible, audible, and kinaesthetic behaviour a person expresses their posture, their breath, their gesture rhythm, their vocal tempo, their micro-muscle tension is a real-time surface expression of their current internal submodality configuration. This means that to observe someone carefully is to read their inner world with some precision, even before they have said a single word. The skilled practitioner learns to read the body as a continuous submodality display.

Principle 2: The nervous system does not sharply distinguish between producing a state and matching one.

Proprioceptive feedback from your own body is a key input into how your nervous system constructs your current internal representation. When you deliberately adopt another person’s posture, breath rate, and gesture rhythm, you feed a different set of proprioceptive signals into your representational system. Your nervous system reads those signals and begins to build a corresponding internal configuration. The body leads; the internal experience reorganises to match. This is the physiological mechanism behind the empathic transfer.

Principle 3: Breath is the most powerful single lever.

Of all the externally visible behaviours, breath rate, depth, and location (chest versus diaphragm versus belly) most directly correlates with internal state and submodality configuration. A person in deep calm breathes slowly and fully into the belly. A person in anxiety breathes fast and high in the chest. A person in heavy grief breathes slowly but shallowly, with frequent involuntary pauses. Beginning by matching another person’s breath is the fastest route into their internal rhythm. Everything else posture, gesture, voice will naturally begin to align once the breath is synchronised.

Principle 4: Duration deepens the transfer.

A moment of matching produces a faint impression. Several minutes of sustained, full physiological pacing breath, posture, weight distribution, facial muscle tone, gesture rhythm, vocal tempo allows the internal representation to stabilise into something functionally close to the other person’s submodality world. The longer you maintain the match without drifting, the more specific and accurate the somatic information you receive becomes.

Principle 5: Your own history is the medium through which you receive the signal.

You do not receive another person’s submodalities directly. You receive them through your own nervous system, which has its own associations, memories, and constraints. What you access in second position is therefore a close analogue to the other person’s internal world, not a perfect copy. This is not a limitation that renders the technique useless. It means the information you access is a translation, and that translation requires both humility and calibration. You may need to check what you have accessed against observable signals in the other person before acting on it.

Principle 6: Second position is the hinge between the external form and the internal content.

Pacing installs the external form in your body. Second position the perceptual shift into experiencing the world as if through the other person’s eyes, from inside their body is what allows you to read the internal contents that come with that form. The instruction to imagine floating into the other person’s body, to look back at the world and at yourself through their eyes, is not merely imaginative exercise. It is the cognitive counterpart to the somatic pacing that preceded it. Together, they produce the full second-position experience.

Principle 7: Exit is as important as entry.

Second position without a clean exit is a professional and personal risk. Prolonged immersion in another person’s submodality world, without a clear somatic protocol for returning to your own first position, can produce what practitioners often call empathic contamination: you carry the other person’s state patterns away with you, sometimes for hours or days. The exit protocol changing your physiology deliberately, shaking out your hands, reorienting to your own breath and body and spatial position is not optional. It is the procedure that keeps the technique safe and keeps you, as practitioner, resourced.

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🗨️ GUIDING CLIENTS IN EMBODIED EMPATHY THROUGH PACING

Observation and presence

Position yourself at the client’s side, or at a slight angle rather than directly face-to-face, so you can observe subtle shifts in facial expression, skin tone, postural geometry, and breathing movement without making your observation feel intrusive or evaluative. Your role in this phase is to gather information not to direct, interpret, or respond. Allow the client’s body to speak to you before your mind begins processing what you see.

Vocal modulation

Use a gentle, measured, and unhurried tone when you speak. Match your vocal tempo to the client’s natural rhythm rather than to your own habitual pace. If the client is speaking slowly and heavily, drop your tempo to match. If they are speaking quickly and lightly, adjust upward but avoid matching agitation you are pacing their rhythm, not their distress. A slightly lower volume than your habitual one tends to invite depth and calm.

Genuine engagement

Genuine engagement means you are actually curious about this person’s internal world not performing curiosity as a technique. The somatic transfer that pacing makes possible is not a parlour trick. It generates real information, and your questions and reflections should flow from that information. When you are truly in second position, the questions that arise tend to be more precise, more relevant, and more welcomed by the client than questions generated from analytic reasoning alone.

Reflective communication

Echo the client’s words and the rhythm of their delivery. If they describe a difficult moment with a particular slowing of pace and drop in volume, allow your reflection of their words to carry those same qualities. If they shift into an unexpectedly bright or energised tone when describing a resource state, let your voice lift slightly to meet them. This is not mimicry it is resonance. You are letting them know, through your own body and voice, that you are present with them in the quality of their experience.

Connecting experience and inquiry

Link your questions and reflections to the client’s experience using temporal and process coordinators “as,” “when,” “and” that create a sense of continuous flow rather than interruption. “And as you notice that tightening in your chest, when does that most often arrive in your day?” keeps the client in the territory of their experience rather than pulling them out to answer an analytical question. The goal is that the client barely notices the transition from their experience to your inquiry.

Step-by-step practitioner guidance

Step 1: Establish a baseline. Before you begin pacing in earnest, spend two to three minutes simply watching the client. Note their breathing location and rate. Note the angle of their spine and the distribution of their weight. Note any characteristic gestures. Note their vocal tempo and tone. This baseline gives you something specific to pace toward.

Step 2: Begin with breath. Quietly align your own breath to the client’s not by taking dramatically visible breaths, but by allowing your internal rhythm to adjust. This single step, done with genuine attention, will begin to shift your internal state.

Step 3: Follow with posture. Without making it theatrical or sudden, allow your postural geometry to move toward theirs. If they carry their head slightly forward and down, let yours follow. If their shoulders are elevated and tight, let yours acknowledge that tension without exaggerating it.

Step 4: Invite second position internally. Silently invite the perspective shift: you are looking at the room from their position, their angle, their weight distribution. Notice what this changes in how the room and you appear.

Step 5: Scan your submodalities. What is the quality of imagery you notice? Where does it sit in your visual field close or far, bright or dim, large or small? Where do feelings register in your body? What is the texture of any emotional quality that arises?

Step 6: Use what you have accessed. Let the somatic information inform your next question or reflection. You might notice a constriction in your throat that the client has not yet mentioned and this might prompt a gentle inquiry about what feels unspoken or held back.

Step 7: Exit cleanly. When the segment of work is complete, or before transitioning to an active intervention, step deliberately back into your own body. Change your posture, take a breath in your own rhythm, reorient to your own spatial position. Note any residual physical sensations and allow them to release. Shake out your hands if helpful.

Step 8: Debrief and integrate. After the session, take a few minutes to note what you accessed in second position. Over time, your somatic vocabulary expands and your reading of clients’ internal worlds becomes more refined.

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💧 EMBODIED EMPATHY AXEL MAGNUS SCRIPT BASED ON NLP PRINCIPLES

Technique: Second Position Pacing with Submodality Inquiry

“I once entered second position so thoroughly that I came out speaking in an accent that wasn’t mine. The client found it hilarious. I was slightly concerned.” Anonymous

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Client, a coach in her mid-forties, has come to a session describing a familiar professional difficulty: she finds it almost impossible to truly understand what her most “shut-down” clients are experiencing. She describes feeling like she is talking at a wall of glass. She can see through it, but she cannot reach through it.

Axel Magnus: seated slightly to one side, relaxed but attentive. He has been observing Client for the past several minutes without speaking.

Axel Magnus: quietly Something shifts in your body when you describe that glass wall. I noticed your chest tighten a little. Your breath moved up toward your collar.

Client: pauses, then breathes Yeah. Yeah, it does that. It’s like I’m watching them and there’s this… distance. Like I’m not landing anywhere with them.

[Axel notices that Client’s shoulders have pulled slightly inward, her gaze has gone slightly unfocused and down-left. He quietly begins to mirror her postural orientation the inward quality of the shoulders, the slight forward heaviness of the chest. He allows his breath to adjust to her rate.]

Axel Magnus: slowly, following her rhythm That distance. Is it a cold feeling, or something else?

Client: It’s… flat. Neutral. Like the colour’s been turned down.

[Axel allows this to register somatically he notices a slight dulling in his own visual field, a sense of grey at the periphery. He registers this but does not speak it yet.]

Axel Magnus: Mm. And the client, when you’re in that glass wall situation where is the client, spatially, in your sense of it? Are they close, or far?

Client: Far. Very far. Like they’re at the end of a long tunnel.

[Axel silently adjusts: in his internal imagery, the space ahead of him stretches and dims. He notices a slight sensation of efforting in the front of his face, as if straining to see or hear something across a distance. His posture carries a faint forward lean.]

Axel Magnus: And you’re doing something with your body when you try to reach them across that tunnel. There’s a kind of… he mirrors the subtle forward lean she was showing moments earlier …a reaching.

Client: looks up Yes. Exactly. I’m straining. And that’s exhausting. And the more I strain, the more they seem to pull back.

Axel Magnus: Right. So you’re in the tunnel, they’re at the end of it, the colour’s turned down, and you’re efforting. He pauses, holding the posture with her. I’d like to try something, if that’s okay. I want to help you find out what your shut-down clients might actually be experiencing. From the inside. Not by thinking about it by briefly taking their shape.

Client: curious Okay. What do I do?

Axel Magnus: Think of your most recent client who felt unreachable. Just hold an image of them in mind you don’t need to tell me who they are. Notice how they sit. The angle of their spine. The weight of their head. The quality of their breath. Where do they tend to hold their gaze?

Client: quietly She sits very still. Almost no movement. Her breath is barely visible. Her head is sort of… lowered. Eyes at about a forty-five degree angle down.

Axel Magnus: Good. Now, very gently, allow your body to approximate hers. Not performing it just allowing. Let your breath become a little quieter, a little less visible. Let your head find a downward angle.

[Client does this slowly. Her body stills. The quality of her presence in the room becomes denser, quieter.]

Axel Magnus: voice very quiet, paced to match her new rhythm And from in here, in this shape… what’s the quality of the space around you? Is it close or large?

Client: after a long pause Small. Very small. Like a tiny room.

Axel Magnus: And in that tiny room, is there sound? An internal voice?

Client: her voice flattens slightly Very quiet. Very far away. Like… like hearing something from underwater.

Axel Magnus: And where do you feel that in your body?

Client: touches her sternum lightly Here. And here. touches her throat

Axel Magnus: What’s the quality of those sensations?

Client: Pressure. A kind of held pressure. Like a stone.

[Axel tracks the shift in Client’s face a slight greyness, a stilling of the usual micro-expressiveness. He can feel, in his own chest, a version of the quality she is describing: a weighty containment, a disinclination to expand.]

Axel Magnus: So from here, from inside this shape, being spoken to by a coach who is straining across a tunnel what would that feel like?

Client: eyes fill slightly Like noise. Like being pushed. Like there’s already so little space and now something large is trying to get in.

Axel Magnus: quietly Yes. And what would help?

Client: long pause Someone who wasn’t trying so hard. Someone who just… she breathes …sat quietly. And waited.

Axel Magnus: allows the silence

[After approximately thirty seconds, he gently shifts his own posture returning to his natural breathing and orientation. He waits for Client to follow.]

Axel Magnus: When you’re ready, allow your body to come back. Change your breath. Adjust your posture. Shake out your hands.

[Client does. Colour returns to her face. Her eyes re-focus.]

Client: That was… really different. That wasn’t me imagining what she feels. That was close to it. The stone. That pressure. I’ve never felt that before in relation to her.

Axel Magnus: What do you know now that you didn’t know before?

Client: That what I was calling shutdown is actually… full. She’s already completely full. And I was pouring more in. She pauses. She doesn’t need me to try harder. She needs me to get quieter.

Axel Magnus: nods What would it mean for your practice to approach her differently next session?

Client: I’d sit still. I’d slow right down. I’d probably say less in the first ten minutes. Just… be there. In the quiet with her. And see what happens when the pressure lifts.

Axel Magnus: And how does your body respond to that possibility?

Client: a slow, soft exhale Relief. Actually relief. Like I can stop pushing.

[They sit with that for a moment. Axel notes the quality of Client’s changed state: softer shoulders, fuller breath, eyes forward and alive rather than strained.]

Axel Magnus: Before we move on, is there anything from that position you want to note any physical sensation or image you want to hold as information?

Client: The stone. I’ll remember the stone. And what helped was stillness. Not fixing. Stillness.

Axel Magnus: Good. Make a note of that if you like. And let’s make sure you’re fully back in your own body now. He makes a small gesture. How are your feet on the floor?

Client: looks down, wiggles toes slightly Solid. Yeah. I’m here.

Axel Magnus: Good. You’re here.

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💪 MEDITATION FOR EMBODIED EMPATHY

A guided Ericksonian practice for entering and exiting second position

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Find a comfortable position seated or lying, it doesn’t matter much and allow yourself a few moments to settle. There is nothing to do yet except arrive. And you might notice, even before you close your eyes, how the weight of your body is already making its own adjustments, finding its own natural resting point.

When you are ready, you might allow your eyes to close. Or not the instruction isn’t important. What matters is that your awareness begins to gather inward, the way attention sometimes softens and deepens on its own when the outer world recedes a little.

And as you continue settling, you might begin to notice the quality of your own breath. Not to change it. Simply to receive it as information. How fast? How deep? Where in your body does your breath most easily land? Perhaps the belly rises and falls with a particular rhythm that is entirely and specifically yours. Perhaps there is a coolness at the nostrils, or a warmth at the back of the throat. These details are not important to name. They are simply here. Your own particular signature of aliveness.

Take a few more moments with this letting your body remind you who you are, somatically. The weight of your hands. The pressure of whatever surface supports you. The subtle temperature of the air on your skin.

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Now and only when you are ready bring to mind someone you would like to understand more deeply. It might be someone you love, someone who puzzles you, someone whose pain you can see but have not fully been able to reach. You don’t need to analyse them. Simply hold an image of them the way they typically hold their body, the quality of their breath as you have observed it, the rhythm of their voice or their silence.

Notice, gently, what their physiology suggests. Their head position. The tension or ease in their shoulders. The quality of their gaze. The rhythm of their breathing as you have seen it whether it is fast or slow, high or deep, contained or free. You don’t need to be precise. Allow an impression to form.

And then, very slowly, allow your own body to begin listening to theirs. You might find it comfortable to allow your breath to slow or quicken to approximate their rhythm. There is no pressure here only an invitation. You might notice that as your breath shifts, something else in the quality of your inner space shifts too. A different quality of light. A different weight in the chest or the belly. A different sense of the space around you.

As you continue deepening this resonance, you might find it natural to imagine, very gently, that your perspective has shifted. That you are no longer looking at this person from outside, but that you are somehow looking back at the world from their orientation. Their weight distribution. Their angle of sight. What does the room look like from here? What is the quality of the light?

Notice what happens in your internal imagery. Perhaps images arise where are they? Close or far? Bright or dim? Large or small? And where do feelings register in this borrowed body? What part of the chest or belly or throat carries weight? And what is the quality of that weight pressure, warmth, constriction, or something else entirely?

You need not force answers to these questions. They are simply open doors. And what you notice, you can receive as information offered by your own nervous system’s attempt to translate another’s experience through your own.

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When you are ready to return and there is no hurry begin to let the shape shift. Allow your breath to come back to its own rhythm. Your own weight. Your own temperature. Your own particular way of meeting the air.

You might wish to move your hands gently to shake them out, or place them flat on your thighs and feel their warmth. Let this be a marker: you are back. You are in your own body, with your own thoughts, your own weight, your own view of the room.

And as you continue returning, you might notice that something has changed in how you understand this person. Not because you analysed them more cleverly, but because you briefly carried something of the shape of their experience in your own body. The knowing that comes from having briefly been, in some approximate sense, where they are.

Take a breath. Notice where you are. And when you are ready, let your eyes open or refocus if they never closed and bring that knowing back with you into your day.

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🗣️ ANECDOTE ABOUT EMBODIED EMPATHY THROUGH PACING

There was a man I’ll call him Daniel who came to me in his early forties describing what he called a total breakdown in communication with his teenage son. “I don’t understand him anymore,” he said. “I sit across from him at dinner and I might as well be talking to a wall. He answers in monosyllables. He won’t make eye contact. And the more I try to open a conversation, the more he disappears.”

Daniel sat in my office with a particular quality of posture that told me a great deal before he had finished the first sentence: very upright, forward-oriented, his hands on his knees in a ready-to-engage position. His breath was brisk and high, sitting in the upper third of his chest. His eyes were direct and intense. He was, in every physical sense, a man who was leaning in pressing toward connection with all the energy he had.

I watched him for a while. Then I asked him to describe, in physical terms, how his son typically sat.

“Collapsed,” Daniel said immediately. “Like he’s trying to disappear into the sofa. Head down. Hoodie up, usually. Barely breathing.”

I asked Daniel if he would be willing to try something. He agreed, a little warily.

“Show me,” I said. “Not describing it become it. Allow your body to take on that shape.”

He looked uncertain. Then, slowly, something in him relented. His back softened. His shoulders pulled inward. His head dropped forward. His breathing slowed dramatically and became almost invisible. He pulled his hands into his lap, and his eyes angled downward.

The room changed.

The quality of Daniel’s presence went from active, pressing, outward-directed energy to something much quieter, denser, and more contained. I sat with him in that quality for a moment without speaking.

Then I asked, very quietly, from the shape he was holding: “From here what does it feel like when someone very bright and energetic tries to get you to open up?”

Daniel’s voice, when it came, was different. Slower. More careful. “Like… too much. Like a light in my eyes.” He paused. “Like they want something and I don’t have it to give.”

I let that sit.

After a minute, I asked him to return to his own posture his own breath and weight and orientation. He shifted back. His eyes came up. His chest opened. He blinked a few times.

“That wasn’t about me,” he said. It was not a question.

“Tell me what you noticed,” I said.

“From in there… from inside that shape…” He paused. “I wasn’t being stubborn. I wasn’t being rude. I was full. Completely full. And you well, in that version you were me, I suppose you were enormous. So much energy. Pouring in. And all I wanted was for it to stop.”

He sat quietly. Then: “I never thought about it from his side. I thought I was trying hard and he was refusing. I didn’t know he was already overloaded.”

Daniel went home that evening and, by his account at the next session, tried something different. He sat down beside his son on the sofa. Not across from him. Not leaning in. He sat the way his son sat slightly collapsed, quiet, hood of his own jacket up as a private joke to himself. He didn’t ask any questions. He watched the same show his son was watching in silence.

About twenty minutes in, his son said: “This is okay, you know. This.”

It was not a breakthrough in any dramatic sense. But it was the first voluntary sentence his son had offered in weeks. And Daniel said that the most surprising thing was how different he felt sitting that way how, when he allowed his body to stop pushing, something in him relaxed that he had not known was tense. “I was exhausting myself,” he said. “I was pushing so hard. And none of it was landing. The moment I stopped, he could breathe.”

The body does not lie. And when you read the body really read it what it tells you is often not what you expected.

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👣 THE BASIC PROCESS OF EMBODIED EMPATHY THROUGH PACING

Step 1: Enter observation mode

Before you match anything, you must first see. Set aside two to three minutes to simply watch the person you wish to understand whether in a live session, or by reviewing a memory of them if you are practising solo. What is their breathing rate and location? What is the geometry of their posture the angle of their spine, the height of their shoulders, the orientation of their head? What rhythm do their gestures carry? What is the quality of their gaze direct, averted, unfocused?

Somatic checkpoint: As you observe, notice whether any quality in their physiology is already beginning to resonate faintly in yours. This spontaneous resonance is a signal that pacing has partly begun on its own.

Step 2: Begin with breath silently and gradually

Begin to align your breath to theirs. Not by taking exaggerated breaths or by mimicking them in an obvious way simply by allowing your internal rhythm to adjust. Let your breath rate move toward theirs. Let the location of your breath (chest, diaphragm, belly) follow theirs.

Somatic checkpoint: You may notice the quality of your internal experience shift almost immediately as your breath changes. This is the mechanism beginning. Note the shift without grasping it.

Step 3: Add postural alignment

Gradually allow your postural geometry to move toward theirs. If they sit with a forward heaviness, let yours acknowledge that quality. If they hold a particular lateral tilt or weight distribution, allow yours to approximate it.

Somatic checkpoint: Notice whether your proprioceptive feedback is beginning to generate a different internal landscape a different sense of the space around you, or a different quality of any feelings in your body.

Step 4: Include micro-movements and gesture rhythm

Without becoming theatrical, allow the rhythm of your small movements the pace at which you shift your weight, the quality of any gestures you make to follow theirs. If they are very still, become very still. If there is a subtle rocking quality, let yours echo it gently.

Somatic checkpoint: Stillness, particularly, has a strong internal correlate. When two people are very still together, the inner quality of the space changes perceptibly.

Step 5: Match vocal tempo and tone

If you are speaking, adjust your vocal tempo, rhythm, and pitch to approximate theirs. Not parody approximation. If they speak slowly and flatly, your voice slows and flattens a little. If they speak quickly and lightly, yours adjusts.

Somatic checkpoint: The quality of your own voice as you hear it internally has a direct effect on your internal state. Slowing your voice often slows your inner experience.

Step 6: Invite the second-position shift

With the external form established, silently invite the perspective shift. Imagine floating forward or sideways into their orientation. You are looking at the room from their position, their angle. You are looking back at yourself, if you are with them. Notice what changes in how the room appears the spatial qualities, the light, the sense of scale.

Somatic checkpoint: Where are internal images arising? What is their brightness, distance, size? Where does feeling register in the body? What is its quality pressure, warmth, constriction, a particular texture?

Step 7: Receive and note

Allow whatever arises somatically to register as information. You may notice sensations, qualities of imagery, an inner voice, or emotional tones. These are approximations of the other person’s internal world as run through your own nervous system. Note what seems most significant.

Somatic checkpoint: If nothing clear arises, this is also information and may indicate either that pacing needs to deepen further, or that the particular person’s internal world is not primarily somatic in the representational sense.

Step 8: Exit with deliberate somatic anchoring

When you are ready to leave second position, make the exit deliberate and physical. Adjust your posture to your own. Take three breaths in your own rhythm. Place your hands on your knees or on a surface and notice the physical contact. If helpful, shake out your hands or stamp your feet lightly. Look around the room from your own orientation.

Somatic checkpoint: Confirm that you are fully back in your own body by noting sensations that are distinctly yours the particular weight of your hands, the specific quality of your own resting breath, your own visual orientation to the space.

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▶️ VIDEO ABOUT EMBODIED EMPATHY AND NLP PACING

▶️ YouTube - To Walk a Mile in My Shoes You Must First Take Off Your Own | Okieriete Onaodowan | TEDxPaloAlto

This is a TEDxPaloAlto talk (April 2017, ~12 minutes) by Okieriete Onaodowan known as “Oak” a Broadway actor best known for Hamilton.

The talk, titled “To Walk a Mile in My Shoes You Must First Take Off Your Own,” centres on one core idea: you cannot truly understand another person’s experience while still holding rigidly to your own identity and worldview. To achieve genuine empathy, you must first willingly set aside your personal frame of reference your “shoes” before stepping into someone else’s.

Oak draws on two principles from actor training to illustrate how empathy is practised as a skill:

• Take the attention off yourself and place it on the other person
• Make their situation an analogy to your own find the emotional parallel in your own life

He illustrates these with personal stories: growing up in East Orange with a distinctive African name, a childhood food stamp moment misread by his mother through the lens of pride, and a chance meeting with a Russian traveller in a Paris hostel where a shared love of music dissolved surface-level difference and revealed the common emotional thread underneath.

The central insight is that we all draw from the same emotional well fear, love, belonging, loss and that recognising this shared substrate is the foundation of empathy. You do not need to abandon your own values or identity to understand another person; you simply need to hold them lightly enough to temporarily set them aside and walk forward.

The talk is especially relevant to NLP second position work: Oak describes, in theatrical language, exactly the mechanism of pacing deeply enough to temporarily inhabit another person’s experiential world which maps directly onto the submodality entrainment process discussed earlier.

❓ FAQ ABOUT EMBODIED EMPATHY THROUGH PACING

Question: Is this the same as mirroring in social psychology the chameleon effect?

Answer: There is overlap, but the emphasis is different. Social psychology’s chameleon effect describes the automatic, largely unconscious tendency to mimic the postures and mannerisms of those around us and shows that this mimicry tends to increase liking and social smoothness. NLP pacing for submodality transfer is a deliberate, structured version of the same natural tendency, with an added layer: the explicit intention to read the internal submodality world that accompanies the external behaviour. The chameleon effect describes a social phenomenon. Embodied pacing is a clinical and developmental practice.

Question: How do I know whether what I’m feeling is genuinely the other person’s submodality world, or just my own associations and projections?

Answer: You do not know with certainty and that uncertainty is important to hold. What you access in second position is always a translation: another person’s external form run through your own nervous system. The most reliable approach is to use what you access as a provisional hypothesis rather than a fact, and to calibrate it against what you can observe. If you notice a sensation of pressure in your chest in second position, you might gently inquire “I’m noticing a quality of pressure as I listen to you; does that resonate at all, or am I off?” The client’s response will help you refine your reading.

Question: Can pacing become manipulative?

Answer: Any technique can be misused, and pacing is no exception. The critical ethical distinction is intent and transparency. Pacing with the intent of gaining genuine understanding of another person’s experience to serve them better is not manipulation. Pacing with the intent of bypassing another person’s conscious awareness to sell them something, or to influence them against their interests, is a misuse of the same mechanism. The tool itself is neutral. The practitioner’s ethics are not.

Question: What if the person I am trying to understand is in a very distressed or dysregulated state?

Answer: This is where the cross-mirroring principle becomes important. If a client is in acute distress breathing rapidly and shallowly, with high physiological activation directly matching that breath pattern is neither necessary nor advisable. You can match the rhythm of their distress in a different channel (for example, matching their tempo with a subtle movement of your hand or a slight nodding of your head) while keeping your own breath grounded. This communicates resonance without importing the dysregulated state into your own body.

Question: How long does it take to develop genuine skill in this?

Answer: The basic mechanism can be felt in a first practice within minutes. Genuine skill the ability to pick up precise submodality qualities, to distinguish between your own material and the other person’s, and to enter and exit second position cleanly in live sessions takes sustained practice over months. The good news is that daily life offers constant opportunities: conversations with colleagues, watching interactions on public transport, noticing the synchrony or dysynchrony in a group meeting. Every moment of attentive observation is a training opportunity.

Question: Is there a risk of becoming overwhelmed or losing myself?

Answer: Yes, and this is a genuine risk for practitioners with strong absorptive tendencies or a history of boundary difficulties. The exit protocol described in this article is not decorative it is a safeguard. Practitioners who find that they regularly carry clients’ states away from sessions, or who feel confused about which internal experience belongs to them, may benefit from working with a supervisor or their own therapist on boundary development before using this technique in clinical contexts.

Question: Can this technique be used in relationships outside of professional settings?

Answer: Yes, and it is perhaps most moving in intimate relationships. Deliberately pacing a partner, friend, or family member who is in distress not to fix or advise them, but simply to understand what they are carrying can produce a quality of connection that verbal empathy alone rarely achieves. The important additions in personal contexts are clear exit: you re-establish yourself in your own body and your own state, so that your understanding of their experience does not blur into a loss of your own groundedness.

Question: What is the relationship between this practice and Ericksonian hypnosis?

Answer: Milton Erickson’s approach to trance induction relied heavily on breath pacing and leading matching the client’s breath and then gradually slowing it to induce deeper relaxation and receptivity. Erickson understood, before the language of submodalities or mirror neurons existed to describe it, that matching another person’s physiological rhythm was the fastest and most reliable way to enter their experiential world. The submodality transfer mechanism described in this article is, in many respects, a systematic account of why Ericksonian pacing works as powerfully as it does.

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😆 JOKES ABOUT EMBODIED EMPATHY THROUGH PACING

• “I practised second position with my cat for three days. I now understand that I exist solely to serve, and the food bowl is never full enough.” Anonymous

• “My NLP trainer said match their breath and posture. I matched my client’s nervous tic for forty minutes. By the end we were both twitching in perfect synchrony. The rapport was extraordinary.” Anonymous

• “I entered second position with my boss during our performance review. I did not enjoy discovering that I find myself as alarming as he does.” Anonymous

• “The good news about pacing for submodality transfer: you briefly understand how another person experiences the world. The bad news: sometimes that other person is someone who finds you deeply irritating.” Anonymous

• “I achieved genuine second position with a colleague who is perpetually calm. I spent the entire rest of the day mildly confused about why everyone seemed so anxious.” Anonymous

• “The therapist said the exit protocol was essential. I now shake my hands after every conversation, including at the supermarket checkout. People are concerned.” Anonymous

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🦋 METAPHORS FOR EMBODIED EMPATHY THROUGH PACING

• The tuning fork: When you strike a tuning fork and hold it near another of the same frequency, the second fork begins to vibrate not because it was struck, but because the air between them carries the frequency. Pacing works similarly: by bringing your body into resonance with another person’s external rhythm, you allow your internal representation to vibrate at something close to their frequency. You do not need to be told what they feel. You feel it.

• The river stone: Drop a smooth stone into a stream and watch how the water moves around it not ignoring the stone’s shape, but responding to it, flowing in the exact contours of its surface. Sustained pacing is like becoming water around someone’s stone: instead of imposing your own shape, you take the form of what you find. The understanding that comes from this is tactile and precise in a way that analysis cannot approximate.

• The musician’s breath: In a chamber ensemble, musicians who play together over years often begin to breathe together without instruction. The shared breath is what allows the subtle elasticities of tempo that no conductor could command. Pacing breath in a session has this quality: two nervous systems finding a shared time signature, within which a different kind of communication becomes possible.

• The wax impression: Before the age of digital signatures, important documents were sealed with wax that received the impression of a specific ring. The wax did not decide what impression to show it received the shape that was pressed into it. In second position, you temporarily make yourself available to receive the impression of another person’s internal form. What you read from that impression is not your design. It is theirs.

• Depth sounding: Ships in unfamiliar waters once measured depth by dropping a weighted line over the side and feeling through the quality of the line and the pull of the current what lay beneath. Pacing and second position is a depth sounding: you lower your own nervous system into the waters of another person’s experience and feel what is there. The reading you get is embodied, not theoretical.

• The shadow following the form: A shadow does not decide where to go. It follows the form of what casts it, faithfully and continuously, without interpretation or selection. In pacing, you aim for something of this quality: a following so close and continuous that the shadow and the form begin, for a period, to share the same shape. What you learn from that shared shape is not about the shadow. It is about the light.

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🧑🦲 AXEL MAGNUS’S EXPERIENCE WITH EMBODIED EMPATHY

The first time I genuinely understood what pacing for submodality transfer meant not as a concept but as a somatic event was not in a training room. It was during an argument.

I was in a difficult conversation with someone close to me. We had reached the particular impasse that is familiar in long relationships: I was doing everything I knew how to do, applying every active listening technique in my repertoire, nodding, reflecting, open-questioning and the person in front of me was becoming, with each passing minute, more withdrawn and more sealed. I could feel it happening and I could not understand why. The more I engaged, the further they went.

At some point I could not tell you when exactly something in me gave up. Not in a defeated way, but in a stop-trying way. I simply could not sustain the effort of the technique any longer. My shoulders dropped. My breath slowed without my asking it to. I stopped leaning forward. I sat with the exhausted, slightly collapsed quality that had crept into my own body while I had been busy ignoring it.

And something changed in the room.

The person across from me did not transform dramatically. They did not suddenly open and pour out everything they had been holding. But they stopped retreating. And after a long silence, they said something small and real: “I just need you to not need anything from me right now.”

That hit me somewhere below the collarbone. I had spent the entire conversation in a posture of seeking reaching, pressing, wanting. And what they could feel physically, in the room, through the quality of my presence was that want. My open, engaged, active-listening body was broadcasting a kind of hunger that made them contract.

It was only later, during a training, that I found the language for what had happened. When my body collapsed with exhaustion and stopped pressing, it briefly approximated the quality of their experience: still, low, contained, not asking for anything. And in that brief alignment, something in them relaxed. Not because I had finally said the right thing, but because the energy in the room changed shape.

I started to practise it deliberately after that. Not collapsing with exhaustion but choosing to pace. Learning to recognise when my own physiology was the obstacle rather than the gateway to connection. And discovering, over and over, that the most powerful thing I could do for another person was sometimes to temporarily become slightly more like them: to let my body find their rhythm instead of insisting they find mine.

What surprises me still is the quality of information that comes with this. When I truly pace someone breath, weight, posture, vocal tempo and then allow the perspective shift of second position, I notice things I did not expect. A specific quality of grey in my visual field that I later learn corresponds to a kind of depression the client had never put into words. A sensation of held breath in my throat that matches, almost precisely, what a client describes as “the thing I never say.” A faint sensation of vertigo when pacing someone who describes feeling out of control.

The body knows. My body can read their body, if I let it if I stop filling the space with my own signal long enough to receive theirs.

The exit is still the piece I attend to most carefully. Because the absorptive quality that makes second position informative is also the quality that makes prolonged immersion risky. I have sat with grief in my own chest for an hour after a session because I did not complete the exit cleanly. I have found myself flat and grey at the end of a day because I carried the submodality world of several clients without shaking it out between sessions.

The protocol exists for a reason. The shake-out of the hands. The stamp of feet. The three deliberate breaths in your own rhythm. These are not superstitions. They are hygiene. They are what allows you to go back into the next session fresh, rather than already coloured by the one before.

Embodied empathy through pacing is the most useful single thing I have learned in this field. And it is also the thing that has required the most disciplined return to myself, to my own submodality world, to my own weight and breath and orientation. Understanding another person is only possible if you know where you end and they begin. The technique develops both sides of that distinction simultaneously.

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🕳️ THE LIMITATIONS OR UNCERTAINTIES IN EMBODIED EMPATHY THROUGH PACING

This approach is powerful within specific conditions, and those conditions matter. Being honest about the boundaries of the technique protects practitioners and clients alike.

It is not a perfect reading. What you access in second position is your nervous system’s translation of another person’s external form, not a direct transmission of their internal experience. Your associations, memories, and somatic habituations are part of that translation. This means the information you receive should always be treated as provisional a working hypothesis to be calibrated against observable evidence, not a ground truth to be acted on without checking.

It requires a baseline of somatic self-awareness. The technique depends on your ability to notice subtle internal states qualities of imagery, the location and texture of body sensations, the rhythm of inner voice. Without this baseline, second position tends to generate vague impressions rather than usable information. Building somatic self-awareness is a prerequisite, not an optional extra.

It is contraindicated without proper grounding. Practitioners who are exhausted, dysregulated, or in the middle of their own difficult material should not attempt to enter second position in clinical sessions. The state they bring will contaminate what they receive and may blend, in unhelpful ways, with the client’s material.

Cultural differences affect expression. Submodalities are shaped by cultural context. The way grief is expressed in one culture postural, respiratory, gestural may differ markedly from its expression in another. A practitioner who assumes that their reading of a cross-cultural client’s external form reflects standard submodality mappings from their own cultural background may misread what they find. Cultural humility is a necessary companion to somatic sensitivity.

The mirror neuron picture is incomplete. Research into mirror neurons and their role in empathy is genuine and compelling, but also contested and incomplete. The claim that human mirror neuron systems function similarly to those described in macaque research is supported by indirect neuroimaging evidence but not yet by direct single-cell recording. This does not undermine the practical validity of pacing the somatic entrainment phenomenon is observable regardless of its precise neurological mechanism but it means practitioners should present the neuroscience as suggestive rather than definitive.

Empathic contamination is a real occupational risk. Without a consistent and disciplined exit protocol, practitioners who work with distressed clients using this approach are at increased risk of secondary traumatic stress, burnout, and boundary erosion. The technique should be taught within a broader context of practitioner self-care, supervision, and professional ethics.

It is not appropriate for all client presentations. Clients who have difficulty with dissociation, or who are at risk of losing the boundary between self and other, may not be suitable candidates for techniques that blur the boundary between practitioner and client submodality worlds even temporarily. Clinical judgment about appropriateness is essential.

Research on NLP remains limited. NLP as a field has a mixed evidence base, and specific claims about submodality transfer through pacing have not been subject to the kind of controlled empirical investigation that would satisfy rigorous scientific standards. The approach draws on well-supported adjacent fields embodied cognition, proprioceptive feedback, social synchrony but the specific NLP framework is not itself a peer-reviewed scientific model.

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✏️ CONCLUSION

The body does not lie and it never speaks louder than when it is being ignored. Every breath held back, every shoulder that does not quite release, every gesture that stops before it finishes: these are not noise. They are signal. They are the surface of a precise internal world, encoded in qualities of imagery and sensation that NLP calls submodalities.

When you learn to pace genuinely, somatically, patiently you stop talking at another person’s surface and start listening to what is underneath it. Your nervous system, offered the right shape to inhabit, begins to receive information that no amount of observation or analysis would yield. Not perfectly, not without translation, but with a quality of direct knowing that is qualitatively different from intellectual understanding.

Second position, entered through the body rather than the imagination, is not an empathy technique. It is a somatic act of witness. You briefly carry something of another person’s internal organisation in your own flesh and then, if you exit cleanly, you bring that understanding back into your own life, your own body, your own practice.

The exit is as important as the entry. Return to yourself fully. Shake out what is not yours. Breathe in your own rhythm. The empathy you gained in second position becomes useful only when you are standing in first grounded in your own submodality world, able to act from that ground with the additional information you have gathered.

This is the practice: enter, receive, return. And repeat, with each person you seek to understand, for as long as understanding matters to you.

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📚 REFERENCES

• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, 1980; Metaphors We Live By
• Steve & Connirae Andreas, 1987; Change Your Mind and Keep the Change: Advanced NLP Submodalities Interventions
• Julian Jaynes, 1976; The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
• Andreas, S. (2002). Transforming yourself: Becoming who you want to be. Real People Press.
• Connirae Andreas & Steve Andreas, 1989; Heart of the Mind: Engaging Your Inner Power to Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming
• Connirae Andreas & Tamara Andreas; 1994; Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within
• Video DVD: Transforming Yourself Complete 3-day Training with Steve Andreas
• John Grinder & Judith Delozier, 1987; Turtles All the Way Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius
• Antonio Damasio, 1994; Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
• Vittorio Gallese, 2003; “The Manifold Nature of Interpersonal Relations: The Quest for a Common Mechanism”; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
• Rizzolatti, G. & Craighero, L. (2004). “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169–192.
• Oberman, L.M. et al. (2005). “EEG evidence for mirror neuron dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders.” Cognitive Brain Research, 24(2), 190–198.
• Pavlovich, K. & Krahnke, K. (2012). “Empathy, Connectedness and Organisation.” Journal of Business Ethics, 105, 131–137.
• Keysers, C. (2011). The Empathic Brain. Social Brain Press.
• The Wholeness Work
• Core Transformation

Image credit Perplexity “EMBODIED EMPATHY - HOW PACING TRANSFERS SUBMODALITIES IN NLP”

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🎬 MOVIES ABOUT EMBODIED EMPATHY AND MIRRORING

• Being John Malkovich (1999) A darkly comic exploration of consciousness-sharing and second position taken to its most absurd extreme.
• The Imitation Game (2014) Beneath the code-breaking narrative, a quiet study in the difficulty and necessity of inhabiting a foreign inner world.
• Her (2013) An intimate meditation on the limits and possibilities of genuine resonance between beings with different internal architectures.
• Rain Man (1988) A road-trip story that becomes, in its best moments, a tutorial in learning to meet another person in their own experiential world rather than pulling them into yours.

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📺 TV SHOWS ABOUT EMPATHY AND PERSPECTIVE-TAKING

• In Treatment A therapist-client drama that models, episode by episode, what it looks like when a practitioner is genuinely tracking another person’s internal world and what it costs them.
• The Affair Each episode presents the same events from radically different subjective perspectives, a structural demonstration of how completely submodality worlds can differ between people in the same room.
• Mindhunter An FBI drama that explores the terrifying and necessary practice of inhabiting the perspective of people whose internal worlds are profoundly unlike your own.

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🎭 DOCUMENTARIES ABOUT EMBODIED CONNECTION AND ATTUNEMENT

• I Am Chris Farley (2015) A study in someone whose extraordinary empathic attunement to audiences came at significant personal cost an implicit lesson in the importance of exit.
• The Social Dilemma (2020) Explores how the manipulation of attention and behaviour works precisely because the body’s attunement mechanisms can be hacked.
• Stories We Tell (2012, Sarah Polley) A deeply somatic exploration of how the same story lives differently in different bodies and submodality worlds.

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📚 NOVELS ABOUT WALKING IN ANOTHER PERSON’S INTERNAL WORLD

• To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960) Atticus Finch’s moral framework, offered to Scout, is essentially a first lesson in second position: you cannot understand a person until you have climbed into their skin and walked around in it.
• The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989) A masterclass in what happens when a person’s entire adult life is lived in third position, never fully inhabiting their own submodality world.
• Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005) Characters who know more than they can yet afford to feel, and the slow somatic dawning of what that knowledge costs.
• Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1966) The protagonist’s changing intelligence shifts his submodality world profoundly, and the reader experiences, through his journal, what it is to inhabit a dramatically different internal architecture.