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Guided Meditation: Listening Within

Good morning, good day, warm greetings. Welcome to our meditation time together. I appreciate that you're here and connecting with yourself, with each other. Welcome to your warm oasis community of practitioners practicing together.

I am delighted to be joining you for this fifth session of five, and we will continue our exploration of mindfulness in daily life. But first, of course, we will sit together.

So please, when you're ready, notice any impulse to communicate. Notice any warmth. Notice any impulse to go inside. Calm. Steady your mind, and allow the attention to go inside. Internal mindful awareness.

Inviting your body to be still. Inviting the attention to include all of the details of the moment. Grounding in your feet. Allowing the weight of your body to connect with the chair or cushion, and noticing the details of your body—the internal world of sensations, the language of this body.

Sweeping the attention through and noticing, attending to the breath. Areas of contraction or relaxation, vibrancy, vibration, or stillness and spaciousness. With a few deeper, more intentional breaths, inviting this body to relax.

Inviting the heart and mind to be present. All other concerns of there and then, other places, to distill into presence in this moment. Listening to the sounds in your space. Listening to the quality of now.

Attending to each breath. As it begins, persists for a while, and transforms to an exhale. With each exhale, offering your attention. With each inhale, connecting, stabilizing in the moment.

If the mind wanders, noticing, wondering, responding by appreciating the return of mindfulness. Yes, this steadying of the heart and mind on the details of breathing sensations.

We're hearing, and attending to your heart. Inviting it to open. Being with whatever is here with simplicity. Listening deeply. Listening inwardly to the sensations of this body. The subtle movements of breath, the arising and changing, fading moment of stillness, and listening to hearing, sound, silence. Allowing the moment to unfold through you.

And then, in the last few minutes of our meditation together, tuning in to any places of calm awareness, presence, any feelings of ease, kindness, goodness of any kind. Letting your whole system steep in it. Receive it, even if it feels slight^[1].

Offering the goodness of your attending, listening, your heart, your presence out into the world. All the people, all of the beings, known and unknown, you contact today.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, and peace in the world.

Thank you for the sincerity of your practice.

Dharmette: Mindful Days (5 of 5) Wise Communication

Hello and welcome to our fifth of five talks on mindfulness in daily life. Today we've reached a huge topic that I will just touch on, which is mindful speech and listening.

I probably don't have to mention this, but just to say that speech and listening are expressions of how your internal practice, your internal world, meets the external world. Communication is a profound opportunity—how we cocreate our relationship to reality. It can also be where mindfulness breaks down first, in reactive texts, heated conversations, or digital noise.

So today, I am going to invite a shift. If by chance you are ever impacted with a default verbal reflex or a reactivity, I invite you to shift to intentional grounded presence. There's a phrase that I've begun using now and then that incorporates a Buddhist formulation I really love: before I speak, before I type, is it truthful? Is it useful? Is it wise, kind, and timely?

That's one example of a little phrase you could use if it's helpful, and feel free to concoct your own. Two or three words is plenty. Today I'll cover the top three concerns I've heard from practitioners.

1. The Reactive Impulse to Speak or Type

The concern here is sudden surges of irritation or reactivity during an interaction, or the overwhelming impulse to click "send" on that sharp text, post, or email—maybe before even metabolizing it completely.

One helpful micro-intervention is to wait. Take a five to twenty-second, maybe thirty-second, pause before speaking or typing. Take a deep breath. Feel the body. And if, as so often happens, the words have already started, there's an acronym that I absolutely love: WAIT. This comes by way of Sylvia Boorstein^[2]. It stands for: Why am I talking? Or my riff on this: Why am I typing?

And then pause. Take a couple of deep breaths. It can be a little reset, even in the middle of a moment of communication.

2. Mindful Listening

The second most common concern is mindful listening. This could be termed as reframing the rebuttal mind—that internal argument. So many people find that formulating an answer or a defense while someone is speaking is the activity that's happening when they're listening. This can manifest even as interrupting.

A micro-intervention here is shifting your primary attention away from generating an internal reply and instead practicing what Sayadaw U Tejaniya^[3] calls "50/50 listening": 50% on what you're hearing and 50% on your own experience, especially a somatic anchor. Resting attention in your feet on the floor, the weight or outline of your body, while receiving speech.

A very profound teaching in the ancient discourses, the Bāhiya Sutta^[4], touches on this with all of the senses. But here I'll just quote a tiny bit: In the heard, there is only the heard. And when in the heard there is only the heard, then there is no you there, no you here, or no you in between.

This speaks to treating listening as a simple sensory experience without building an internal narrative, without a defense. Let your body knowing be forward. Your body knowing will have more wisdom than the verbal mind alone. We are able to respond, and taking a little pause before responding can be really respectful to the other person in conversation.

Another one, and this I remember hearing many years ago: I was in a conflict resolution class, and a very experienced conflict resolution practitioner in the summer program would compliment those of us who were showing up in a certain way. That way was letting go of the need to be right, letting go of the identification or need to have it all together, or have that perfect retort, in favor of being present, attentive, and compassionate. And this, of course, starts with being present, attentive, and compassionate with yourself.

3. Absorbing Hostile Energy

This way of practicing can also support the third concern: absorbing the impact of hostile energy from difficult people, maybe a difficult family situation or workplace friction. Again, these are huge topics, so I'm just touching on them.

One micro-intervention is before going into a situation that I know is going to be challenging, it's helpful again to ground in my intention for how to navigate it. This is from the Dhammapada^[5]:

When you get angry at an angry person, you just make things worse for yourself. When you don't get angry at an angry person, you win a battle hard to win. When you know that the other is angry, you act for the good of both yourself and other, if you're mindful and stay calm.

But what if you're already in the situation? Here are some micro-interventions. First, take a pause, trying to treat hostile or provocative speech as just sound waves touching the ear rather than an impersonal assault. It depersonalizes it a little bit. Again from the Dhammapada, like a broken bronze gong, stilling the impulse to retaliate brings natural peace. That's a paraphrase, not a quote.

This can be tough. It's easier if you attend to your body. Many years ago, as my practice was starting to mature but I was still fairly new, I was on a phone call with a loved one that got really heated. She misunderstood something I said, and I misunderstood some reaction that she was having, and we were building our way towards an argument. It was not good. Something in me, the habit of practice, knew to turn to the sensory storm going on in my body. It was intense—like heat rising and heart pounding, and a sense of vibration and wanting to respond in the legs.

I grounded in my body. That turned out to be kind of a revelation, because that time attending to the body instead of my next snappy response bought us the time to then reconnect and reset. Attending to the body is often the best possible place to go in these moments.

And then it's possible to open to another interpretation, recognizing that someone else's unmindful speech might just be an expression of their internal friction, fear, or limitations, rather than a reflection of my self-worth.

There is a story from the suttas^[6] where a very rude man unleashes a tirade on the Buddha—just verbal abuse. The Buddha listens, and without any kind of angry reaction basically asks him, "If you offer food or a gift to your friends or visitors, and they don't accept it, who does it belong to?"

The man responds, "Me, of course."

And the Buddha says, "Just so, I don't accept your angry attack. Your anger responds to itself. Your anger belongs to you."

Closing Reflections

We've only touched on this big topic, and I hope in these explorations you heard something that resonates for you, that might be useful in grounding in mindful communication.

I'll close this topic with a short verse the Buddha offered a monk who was struggling back in his time:

Give up the tendency towards conceit. When you comprehend conceit, you'll live at peace. Speak only those words that do not hurt yourself or harm others. Such speech is truly well spoken.

That is from the Theragatha^[7].

In closing, mindfulness in daily life is a huge area of expansion of practice. We rub against the practice in deepening, broadening, and realizing it. So, gather your own wisdom and experiment, and please keep what's useful and leave the rest here.

May you walk in wisdom, live in love, and appreciate each moment of awareness in the coming days. Thank you.