Mindful Speech, Part Two: Listening

This is Part Two of a series of articles on Mindful Speech. Part One focused on Idle Chatter. This installment looks at the art of Listening, and the role of Emotional Intelligence in authentic communication. Part Three will examine the Six Points of Mindful Speech taught by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.


Listen Up

I heard a story about Mother Teresa. Once, during an interview, a cocky young reporter asked this great spiritual leader -- whom most people considered to be a saint, even while she was still living -- about her daily prayer habits. "What do you say to God when you pray?" he asked.

"I don't say anything. I just listen," was Mother Teresa's reply.

The reporter's curiosity was piqued, and he ventured a further question. "So what does God say to you?"

Mother Teresa replied: "He doesn't say anything. He just listens." I imagine she watched the reporter for a long moment, and let this point sink in. She then added: "And if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you."

I draw several lessons from that story. One is that there may be less difference between prayer and meditation than we commonly imagine. Another is that prayer itself -- perhaps the highest form of speech, from a spiritual perspective -- does not necessarily consist of what we think of as "speech" at all. In fact, speaking -- which probably involves carrying our little agenda into our meeting with the Divine, and spelling out for Him or Her what we think He or She should be concerned with -- is somewhat beside the point. For Mother Teresa, authentic, two-way communication with the Divine was based first and foremost upon listening -- on both sides.

The same principle applies to our "ordinary" conversations with other people. Authentic communication can only take place when all of the parties involved in a conversation are actually listening to each other. But this happens, in our human realm, far less often than any of us would like. When real listening is present and authentic communication takes place between people, it can feel like a form of prayer. Through listening, we recognize and respect the divinity with each other. And when our listening is absent or eclipsed, we essentially say to the other person: I don't recognize or respect you.

Lately I've been watching our conversations at the dining table, here at the Abbey -- trying to step back and observe, somewhat impartially, what kinds of things we're talking about, and how we're talking about them, and even speculating on the reasons why. As I mentioned in a previous article, it seems that we get involved in a lot of idle chatter at mealtime, and that quite a few people share a wish that we could have more meaningful conversations. Some people have taken this to mean that we should be talking more about Dharma at mealtime -- which makes sense in a way, since Dharma is what we came here to the monastery to study and practice. This has even led to the creation of a new, twice-weekly "Dharma discussion group" during the dinner hour -- which is great. But my observations lately have reinforced my conviction that merely talking about a meaningful topic doesn't make a conversation meaningful. What makes it meaningful has less to do with what is being talked about, and more to do with the how and the why.


Emotional Intelligence

We're often not fully aware of how we speak, and how the way we speak affects others. I used to work with someone who is very sharp and intellectually perceptive, and always has compelling things to say. But because he habitually speaks with an angry tone, other people have difficulty hearing what he says -- they primarily hear the "how," and their negative reactions to the "how" keep them from really hearing the "what." Trapped in a vicious cycle, he ends up feeling like no one listens to him, which only makes him more angry, and on and on it goes. What seems to be missing, on his part, is some basic awareness of how his speech habits are affecting other people; lacking this awareness, he constantly undermines his own happiness and increases his feeling of alienation from others.

This kind of thing happens more than we might imagine. A person who speaks in a loud and brassy voice might make other people cringe and recoil from her, but remain oblivious to the reasons why people react that way. A person (like me) who often speaks in a timid, quiet tone and forgets to project his voice adequately might make other people grow frustrated and give up trying to listen, and they might then speak over him, causing him to feel frustrated too.

Being aware of the "tone" and "feel" of how we speak -- and how others speak to us -- is a basic skill of emotional intelligence, and a fundamental part of the practice of Mindful Speech.

Recently, on an open day here at the Abbey, I was sitting around the table with several people at breakfast. We were talking about various Dharma teachings and ways of practicing the teachings in our own lives. After having been frustrated with encountering a lot of idle chatter during mealtime, I was delighted that the conversation didn't stray into trivial things, but stayed with topics that felt, to me, by comparison, fairly significant. But as the conversation went on, stretching towards an hour, I began to feel that, somehow, it was starting to sour. At one point, someone interrupted me and spoke over my words, raising her voice to assert her viewpoint and eclipse what I was saying. And I noticed myself wanting to do the same thing.

Sensing that the conversation had gone off its axis, I began to withdraw. I grew more quiet and tried to pay attention to the emotional dimension of the dialogue. Somewhere, it seemed that we had crossed an invisible line and now there was less open listening and responding taking place, and more assertion of prepared statements. I felt my own frustration at having been interrupted by the other person, and my feeling that she wasn't really listening to me but was just upholding her own conversational agenda. In observing the emotional dimension of her communication, I sensed a feeling of insecurity on her part, which may to have led her to interrupt me -- and then I saw the same insecurity reflected in myself. I saw my own ego's involvement in the conversation -- my need to be heard and my need to be right, a vulnerable feeling that showed up as an urge to react impulsively to what other people were saying. I realized that what I was frustrated with another person for doing to me, I was also doing: I wasn't really listening to the other person, and I was starting to cop a resentment that she wasn't listening to me. Somewhere along the way, a meaningful conversation had deteriorated into idle chatter -- a dialogue in which listening and authentic communication had been lost, replaced by a competition of viewpoints, a meeting of egos, each one of us dragging his or her own emotional baggage into the conversation.

"Speak only if you can improve upon silence," said Gandhi. That morning, I realized that my own more dubious motives for speaking had crept into the conversation, and my own speech was no longer an improvement upon silence. It was time for me to shut up and listen. In AA, old-timers often advise overly talkative newcomers: "Take the cotton out of your ears, put it in your mouth, and just listen."


Listening Is the Better Part of Conversation

There is a traditional teaching about how to listen to the Dharma properly -- how to hold one's mind so that the truth that's conveyed in the teachings can actually reach us -- which I've written about here before. The same principles apply equally to the art and practice of authentic conversation between people. For meaningful communication to take place, our minds need to be like a clean, sturdy, upright container or pot that's ready to receive whatever is placed in it.

If the pot is upside-down, nothing can be put into it: this is what happens when we don't really listen with an open mind, but instead we assume that we know what the other person is going to say. Our minds begin to wander distractedly while the other person speaks to us. Caught up in our own internal chatter, we may be thinking about something else altogether, or mentally preparing our response to what they're saying before we've really heard them out. And we forget that other people can usually tell when we're not really paying attention; if they have any emotional intelligence at all, they pick up on the subtle cues in our expressions as our minds wander to other things or begin preparing a response prematurely, and this undermines their trust in us. They may feel disrespected because we're not really listening, and we may not even be aware that we've made them feel that way. To really listen to another person, we have to be open-minded and humble of heart, and drop our assumptions and our prejudices in the moment that we're listening.

If the pot has holes in it, then even if it's right-side-up, whatever you put in it will leak out and be lost. This is what happens when we don't actually absorb and remember -- accurately -- what the other person is saying. We may think we're remembering it accurately, but if we're challenged to repeat it back to them, our memory is patchy and full of holes, and may be distorted in important places. If we repeat to someone else what was said to us, our distortions and omissions are carried to the next person, and then that person distorts it a bit further. When it finally gets back around to the person who originally said it, her words may have been completely changed and people think she said something she didn't say at all.

If the pot is contaminated with something poisonous -- maybe it's really a container for food, but somebody has used it as a mop bucket -- then whatever is placed in it will also become contaminated. This is what happens when we listen with a mind that's caught up in its own emotional reactivity. We hear something that the other person has said and it triggers a reaction in us -- anger or jealousy or fear or lust, whatever it might be -- and it's like we can't hear anything else they say after that, because we're so consumed by our own emotions. If we don't possess a certain degree of emotional intelligence and self-awareness in the moment, we may be largely unaware of this process as it takes place; and if we're reacting to what the other person is saying, we may be reacting more from this emotional mind than from a place of understanding and listening.

"Conversation is a give-and-take," writes the Zen teacher Norman Fischer. "If we don't listen, we don't hear anything, and real conversation is over before it begins. We haven't taken anything in, and so we are just beaming our message at the other person."

The next time you have a conversation with someone, watch your own mind and try to notice when you are really listening to the other person and when you are not. Are you daydreaming while they talk to you? Are you mentally preparing your response as soon as they've begun to talk? Will you be able to actually remember what they are saying? Are you getting caught up in emotional reactions? What effect does this have on the conversation and on your relationship to this person? What role does Listening play for you in the practice of Mindful Speech?

I would love to hear about your experiences with this.


-- Read Part Three: Witchcraft --

Mindful Speech, Part One: Idle Chatter

This is Part One of a series of articles on Mindful Speech. This piece focuses primarily on Idle Chatter, one of the unskillful or unvirtuous forms of speech according to Buddhism. Forthcoming articles in this series will focus on the role of Listening and Emotional Intelligence, and the Six Points of Mindful Speech taught by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.


Foot in Mouth

In my life, many of my most painful and confusing moments, my biggest embarrassments and regrets, have come about because of my own mouth: either I said something I shouldn't have, or I didn't say something I should have, or I said something but didn't say it the right way and so it was misunderstood. Of the remaining painful moments and embarrassments -- the ones that didn't come about because of my mouth -- most of them probably came about because of my ears: something significant was said to me but I wasn't really listening, or I flat out refused to hear it, or I heard only what I wanted to hear, distorting what the other person was saying to make it match what I thought they should be saying or what I wanted them to say. Recognizing this, I try to take the Buddhist teachings on Right Speech to heart. I don't always succeed: speech is still the area where it's easiest for me to fall flat on my face -- which I do, and frequently -- but it's a practice. In fact, it's my main practice, according to some of my teachers.

When the Buddha taught about the Ten Unvirtuous Actions, he was well aware of how much trouble our speech habits get us into. Four of the ten items on his list relate to various kinds of speech:

• Lying or false speech
• Harsh speech
• Malicious or slanderous speech
• Idle chatter and gossip

In Buddhism, an action is considered virtuous or unvirtuous not because there's a tablet of commandments somewhere that lays down the law, or an external deity who passes judgment on us based on how well we play by his rules. Rather, a virtuous act is one that leads to greater happiness and well-being for oneself and others, while an unvirtuous act is one that leads to greater harm and suffering. It's an ethical outlook based on an understanding of what actions are generally skillful and unskillful, rather than a moralistic outlook based on a concept of right and wrong or good and evil. In fact, from the Buddhist point of view, an act that is generally considered unvirtuous could be considered virtuous in certain cases -- it depends most of all upon one's motivation for doing it.

If we forget this, and interpret the concept of unvirtuous actions in a moralistic way -- like a parental figure wagging their finger at us, telling us not to misbehave or disobey the rules -- then we've missed the point of Buddhist ethics altogether.

It's not difficult to see why lying is considered unskillful speech: when we deceive other people we betray their trust, and we burden our own minds with trying to keep track of the lies we've told and the fear of getting caught. It's also not difficult to see how harsh speech and malicious speech are unskillful: when we yell at someone or insult them, their feelings are hurt; and when we slander another person behind their back, we create or reinforce divisions and conflicts between people. All of these forms of speech harm other people, and harm the one who engages in them.

But idle chatter and gossip -- we might wonder, what's so wrong with that? It's fun. Small-talk and chit-chat are part of how we build relationships and establish trust. And who does it really harm? If anything, it's like a victimless crime, isn't it?

Here's the probem: we resist recognizing the downside of idle chatter precisely because we're so addicted to it. If we were to acknowledge the extent of the problem, then we might feel compelled to change our habits -- and what would we talk about if we threw out perhaps 80% or 90% of our everyday speech?


The Search for Meaning

Everyone longs for greater meaning in their lives. Our connections and conversations with other people, and the intimacy we share with them, can be one of the channels through which we find meaning and fulfillment. But if the speech we share with one another is habitually devoid of meaningful content and unfulfilling, then it becomes little more than a distraction and a burden upon our awareness.

"What primarily keeps us feeling lonely and misunderstood -- and fuels our hatreds and prejudices -- is simply a lack of conversation. We all talk most of the day. We talk at work, at school, at home. But how much do we really say, and how often do our words get at what really matters to us?"

-- Zoketsu Norman Fischer, "Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up"

The issue of idle chatter and meaningful speech came up in two community meetings here at the Abbey within the past few months. In the first meeting, about 35 of us came together to address the topic of silence, a practice we work with quite a bit in the monastery. We talked about the various things that support our practice of silence and the things that hinder it, as well as the reasons why we practice silence in the first place. At one point in the meeting, I suggested that one of the most compelling reasons to practice silence is because most of what we say when we're talking isn't meaningful in the first place. This comment seemed to touch a nerve, because there was an audible murmur of dissent among several people in the room. One or two people in particular seemed to react quite strongly against it. (It's possible their reactions arose from the thorny, relativistic question of how to define what's meaningful -- one man's garbage being another man's treasure, and so on. But that's a whole other ball of wax that I'm not particularly interested in dissecting here.)

At the second meeting, we addressed the topic of friendship and how we can build more meaningful connections and real bonds with people in the community. Towards the end of the meeting, I raised my hand and said that since I've been living at the Abbey, I've frequently felt a bit put off by the superficiality of the conversations I typically hear -- and engage in -- in the dining room. Sometimes when we break a long period of silence, I find myself really looking forward to connecting with people again and engaging in good conversation -- but then when I get to the dining room and sit down with others, I discover that people are talking about the same useless trivia they were talking about the day before, and the day before, and the day before. Dismayed, I've found myself on more than one occasion wishing we could go back into silence again.

And this is not to let myself off the hook or to look down condescendingly on others' speech habits: very often, I jump right into less-than-meaningful conversations, and sometimes I too am the one who instigates them. But in a spiritual community of people committed to living a meaningful life, one might reasonably expect that the level of discourse at the dining table would be somewhat more elevated than what one might find among the people dining in, say, the average McDonald's or Burger King. Like anyone, I yearn for more meaningful connections, but I, too, have a hand in creating the situation; I don't always practice what I preach, and I don't always have the skills or even the self-awareness necessary to steer a conversation away from idle chatter and towards something more meaningful.

When I made this observation in the community meeting, it met with a mixed reaction. A few people nodded their heads in agreement; I got the sense that numerous people in the community were aware of this habitual pattern of idle chatter at the dining table and felt that something essential was missing in our conversational habits. But I also sensed that some people in the room heard my plea for more meaningful conversation as a request for more talk about Dharma -- which would be a good thing in itself, but is not necessarily what I meant.

Remember that in Buddhism, an action is considered virtuous or unvirtuous based not so much on the outward action, but on the intention and the state of mind behind it. So it's not only about what we say, but also about how we say it, and why. We can talk about random trivia from pop culture, and it can still be meaningful if we're really communicating from the heart. By the same token, we can talk about meaningful, spiritual topics like the Dharma and it can still be idle chatter if we're just trying to assert our point of view or make ourselves sound smart to the other person.


The Chatterbox Inside

As meditation practitioners, we also realize -- to our great dismay -- that idle chatter is taking place almost all the time, in our own minds. The distracting chit-chat we encounter in the outside world is usually proportionate to the distracting chit-chat in our heads. And there is a feedback loop between the two. The more discursive we are internally, the more compelled we might feel to ventilate our discursiveness in conversation with other people; and the more we do that, the more discursive we tend to become. We egg each other on towards higher and higher levels of internal and external chatter. At the end of the day, we might have been running our mouths off from sunrise to sunset without saying anything significant whatsoever.

Practicing what the Buddha called Right Speech or Mindful Speech is not easy -- it requires a tremendous degree of self-awareness and mindfulness, and a commitment to staying open and present with other people in a state of uncertainty and vulnerability. Often we chatter because we're uncomfortable with silence, and we feel compelled to fill up the empty space. Mindful Speech also means applying the crucial but uncommon skill of listening -- which is, or should be, the better part of conversation -- rather than just talking.

Refraining from idle chatter may be the most difficult part of Mindful Speech, for most of us. We've all engaged in lying, slander and bullying speech at some point, but chances are we don't practice those things most of the time, and we find them relatively easy to avoid if we even try. But idle chatter often gets the better of us. It can, and frequently does, occupy massive sections of our mental bandwidth, and it can, and frequently does, dominate our conversations with other people -- so much so that we may be blind and deaf to it, and unaware that we're even doing it.

Make a commitment to watch yourself for one whole day, and try to notice all your verbal interactions with other people. Pay attention to the content of your conversations, but also to the tone and the context, and also try to see how much you really listen. Pay attention to what is really being communicated -- and what isn't.

How much of your speech is truly meaningful?


-- Read Part Two: Listening --