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Wise Speech (3 of 5) Is it Nourishing?

Good morning, and thank you for those of you who are here. I think I understand what happened to the sound at the meditation this morning, and hopefully in the future I can mitigate that kind of issue.

The topic for this week is the five questions we can ask ourselves around speech, around when we're speaking. This idea of questions is an interesting approach to a spiritual life—a life that asks questions. When I was studying Zen, there was the idea that rather than asking what we want, the question the Zen students carry with them is, "What's being requested of us in any given situation?" What's the request of the thing that we're doing, the people we're with, the activities that are happening around us? That's a very different orientation than the orientation of "What's in it for me, myself, and mine? What do I want here? What are my preferences?" To turn that around and ask, "What is their request?" Request does not mean a demand; it means what is the opportunity that's being requested or asked of me? That is an example of using a question: what is the request?

With speech, we have these questions we ask ourselves, partly so that maybe we're freed from ways in which we're caught in the grip of "me, myself, and mine" or of being selfish, where the orientation is excessively, "What do I want? What are my preferences?" The question that I started off with this week is, "What is true?" If you're going to speak, what is true? Yesterday it was, "Is it timely? Is it the time for something?" Today the question is, "Is it supportive? Is it soothing? Is it gentle? Is it heartwarming?" Exactly what the Pali^[1] original word is is not so clear, but it is clear that it's the opposite of harsh speech. Some people translate it as gentle, some people as polite, but today I'm thinking about it in terms of an idea in modern psychology. We're wired sometimes to either fight or flight, and then in more recent times, people have said we're also wired for something very different: we're wired to approach and soothe. If there's a child who is in distress, we approach the child, comfort the child, and reassure the child.

The idea is neither fight nor flight, but maybe asking what the situation needs to be reassured. When there's conflict between people, we sometimes have the language of "smoothing things out," and that phrase "smoothing out" is close to the meaning of the Pali word. Some people translate it as soft, but what I'd like to point to is a deeper principle. What we're learning through meditation is how to not harm ourselves. Some of the descriptions of this in the texts are: speak words that are gentle, pleasing to the ear, lovable, that go to the heart, are courteous, desired by the many (so other people would like to hear it), and agreeable. It's pointing to a way of speaking that is the opposite of harsh, painful, uncomfortable, or rude, that somehow leaves people feeling uncomfortable.

In meditation, we're learning to do that for ourselves. We're learning to talk to ourselves in ways that are not harsh. We're learning to talk to ourselves in ways that are reassuring, inspiring, or go to the heart, as it says there. In meditation we're learning how to relate to ourselves in a deeper and deeper way. If we can ask ourselves, "What are we being requested by our own heart? What's the request of our inner life to ourselves? What is it that needs our care, our reassurance, our support?"

I know some people report that they are harsher and more critical to themselves than they would ever dream to be to anyone else. Some people only discover this when they sit down to meditate—how hard they are towards themselves, and what the tone of the inner voice that's talking is like. That way they think is quite harsh, and maybe sometimes even angry or cruel. In meditation, we're learning to shift the relationship we have to ourselves, a lot of it not by doing it differently, but by letting go of how we are doing it. Softening, relaxing, quieting the mind, so that the harsh mind, the critical mind, the angry mind is seen as a surface mind that actually requires a lot more activity, that begins to quiet down as we meditate.

The more quiet we are, then the thinking can come from a deeper place inside. The thinking can come from places where there's a tendency to care, to approach, to soothe, to be kind, and to learn the different impact in ourselves of how we speak. How we speak to ourselves, what the inner voice is like, is quite powerful, because then we can also learn what that impact is on ourselves when out in the world we're speaking to people in harsh ways. We start feeling within ourselves the difference between harsh speech and soothing speech, smoothing speech, soft gentle speech, or speech that goes right to the heart.

This goes to a Dharma^[2] principle, that what we're looking for is to live a life which is inwardly nourishing for ourselves and inwardly nourishing for others. Those two are not that separate. If we are harsh towards others, if we speak in words that are frightening or discomforting for other people, we are doing the same for ourselves. We partake in the impact of harsh speech. It's actually painful for ourselves to speak that way, even though we don't realize it. Sometimes we're so motivated by the purpose for which we speak—to push people away, to get our revenge, to attack people, to vent our anger. We're so focused on the purpose of the speech, and because the purpose seems righteous, or it seems like somehow I'm more important that way, or it's just good to be able to say someone else is wrong, that we don't really feel the impact within ourselves. Harsh speech towards others is harsh for ourselves. We partake in the quality of our acts of speech.

If the acts of speech are, as the Buddha talks about, gentle, pleasing to the ear, lovable, go to the heart, courteous, and what many people would like to hear, then we are nourished by that, and others hopefully are nourished. We live a life that is willing to approach and soothe. I've encountered people who are very angry, not necessarily towards me, and I found the important thing to do was a step towards them, to soothe them, to quiet them. I've done that with small children who are angry, to step towards them, to approach them and be reassuring. To go towards a young child who's upset and be angry with the child or be harsh really just makes it worse for the child, and it also makes it worse for us as the speaker. There is this mutuality, this way in which speaking has an impact in both directions: on ourselves inside, and on the world outside.

If we speak in harsh words, it has one impact. If we speak in gentle, courteous, smoothing, smooth, soft, inspiring, heartfelt words, it has a very different impact on self and others.

As we meditate and go deeper and deeper in meditation, we realize more and more that it's simply not worth it to do anything that is the opposite of nourishing, to do anything with our speech that is harmful to ourselves. It goes against what's really valuable and what's supportive for ourselves and the world. This is not an ethical issue; that's not a moral principle of "you shouldn't." Rather, it's as simple as not putting your hand on a hot stove. Meditation makes us so sensitive to the impact of how we live that, of course, we're going to live in a kind way. Of course, we're going to live in a non-harsh, non-aggressive way. So, is it gentle? Is it soothing? Is it soft? Is it inspiring? Is it reassuring? These are all the kinds of questions for this fourth criteria that the Buddha gave. "Are the words we're speaking nourishing?" is my favorite way of saying it right now. And then I guess the follow-up question is, if it's not nourishing, is that really worth it?

Announcements

Thank you, and I think I hopefully have the sound issue understood, and hopefully tomorrow it'll be better.

Now, one announcement. I'm going to be offering another meditation today on YouTube. I'm the teacher for our retreat center, the Insight Retreat Center. Every Wednesday morning we have what we call a mini retreat, and that's about two hours, from about 10:00 to 12:00 or 12:20. I'm the teacher for that, and so there'll be two meditation sessions, and I'll give some teaching. You can find the mini retreats on IMC's schedule page, but certainly if you go to insightretreatcenter.org, there will be a reference, a pointer to the mini retreats. So, thank you very much.