The Deeper Purpose of Mindful Speech, Part II: Making Conscious Changes in Speech

 

As we saw in part one of this blog post, just observing our speech can produce significant changes in us. But sometimes something more is needed. A personal example will be useful here

After teaching for 7 years I got a job at a very tiny college in California in a rural area. After being there several years it became clear that there weren’t enough students at the college to sustain a full time teaching position in philosophy. And if I didn’t get more students to fill up my classes I would lose my job. Up until that point in my teaching I tended to view most students as poorly prepared for college, lazy, and lacking intelligence. I resented the existence of poor students in my classes, was not very helpful to them, and focused on the small number of students that were thriving (this all sounds terrible, I know).

Because I had to have more students to fill my classes I decided that I would start treating them in a more friendly and kind way in order to increase my enrollments. I became more student-friendly, more helpful, more sympathetic, and I did get more students in my classes. But in addition, I actually discovered that liked how it felt teaching this way and it became part of my permanent teaching style. 

Behaving differently changed me.  I found myself liking the students and adopting an attitude of being of service to them.  If I was a teacher, I should be able to start from their present knowledge and abilities and find a way to help them learn something useful.  I should look for how I could help them develop and grow. It was a nurturing attitude, and it vastly changed my teaching style and my way of engaging life across the board.

What I learned from this experience is that changing your behavior on the outside changes you on the inside.  And speech is just another form of behavior. This is the basic principle of the second half of mindful speech:  consciously changing your manner of speaking in order to profoundly change yourself—your beliefs, attitudes, desires, emotions, habits, and how you see the world.

Let’s see how this works using an example from Part I of this post:  my deeply ingrained habit of looking for and pointing out flaws and errors in the beliefs and behavior of others.  As pointed out previously, this was not serving me well:  It made the world look like a terrible place to live, it drove people out of my life, and it blocked conversations from producing any learning for anyone—all participants simply “dug in” and defended their existing beliefs and behaviors.

Solutions to the problem?  Carefully observing my own speech, both external and internal, enabled me to see what was happening.  I also saw that not every inaccuracy or mistake needs to be pointed out—many of them make no difference, and pointing them out at the beginning of a conversation immediately shifts the interaction into argument mode.  I saw that I needed to look for the places we agree and start from that and build on it.

I began to retrain my speech.  Suppose Sandy says to me “I made a gallon of hummus this morning,” and I reply “It couldn’t have been that much, there wasn’t enough time to do that much.”  My reply may have been true, but it served no useful purpose.  A better response would be to say “You really made a lot of hummus—that’s great!”  The better alternative reply is still true, and it’s much more constructive.

Or suppose Mike says to me “The government needs to do x, y, and z to pull us out of this mess.”  I strongly disagree with him about doing x and y, but is saying so the best initial response?  A much better and still truthful response would be something like “What you said about doing z is really a great idea—it really solves some huge problems for us.”  And even if there is nothing I agree with—which is unlikely—I can still say “I can tell this is really important to you; tell me more about it.”  When I hear more about it, I will find things I can agree with.  I made this sort of thing my constant practice:  look for the places where we agree and share common values, and then make my spoken response based on that.

In my own experience, this has been enormously useful in in having productive interchanges when there is strong disagreement about things like climate change, alternative energy, racism, protecting the environment, and more.

Our habits, however, can be quite strong.  The changes that happen as a result of deliberately changing our speech typically unfold in stages.   When we first start working with the second aspect of mindful speech, we may find that we only notice our negative response after we have made it.  Sometimes we only notice several hours or even days after we have said it.  Still, this is progress because we did, in fact, notice it.  We can then reformulate our remark in our minds and say the new and less judgmental statement silently to ourselves.  This begins the retraining of the mind.

An even more powerful practice might be to seek out the person we made the remark to, and say “I said earlier that you were wrong about x and y.  That’s not really what I wanted to be saying to you. I really should have said something about z, which I think is such a great idea.  I’ve been working hard lately to break my bad habit of being negative but it still needs more work.”   This is the first stage:  we discover after the fact that we have spoken in a way that strengthens negative tendencies, and we then do it over again in a way that will help us to change.  A “do-over” is always possible, even if we have to do it silently and speak only to ourselves.

                As the practice continues, less time will go by before we notice unskillful speech.  Instead of two hours, it becomes thirty minutes, then five minutes, then right after we have said it.  This is wonderful progress!  At some point we catch ourselves right in the middle of saying it and stop, and then rephrase what we are saying.  This is even better!  After a while longer, we can notice the impulse to say something negative arise in the mind, and then choose not to act on it.  This is a profound shift! 

Each time we do this, we are withholding water from the seed of habitual negativity within us, and over time the impulse to say such things gets weaker and doesn’t arise as frequently.  After a while, we simply have a new habit of speaking that feels quite easy and natural.  Looking for areas of agreement becomes our new default setting.

 

Note:   My intention is to add new posts to the blog approximately every 2 to 3 weeks. If you would like to receive an e-mail notification each time a new blog post is made, please let me know and I will add you to the list of recipients. This notification will also include the title of the new post.  Some of the material that appears in this blog is copyrighted, but in keeping with the Buddha’s teaching that the dharma is not to be sold, the contents of this blog may be freely copied and given away, but not sold. 

            If you have questions, comments, or ideas for new Blog topics please contact Dale at ahimsaacres@gmail.com.