Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Our class participants often ask how we can give our full attention to somebody speaking and dip at the same time. The analogy we give is peripheral vision. When we are looking at something, we have central vision and peripheral vision. We can see the chosen object clearly (with central vision), and at the same time, we have a visual sense of what is around it (using peripheral vision). Similarly, we can think of our attention as having a central component and a peripheral component, so we can give our central attention to the other person for listening and still maintain a peripheral attention to ourselves for dipping.

You can practice mindful conversation either formally or informally. The formal practice involves creating an artificial environment for each person to practice the three techniques of listening, looping, and dipping. The informal practice is simply to use those techniques in everyday conversation.

FORMAL PRACTICE OF MINDFUL CONVERSATION

The three parts to this skill are listening, looping, and dipping. Listening means giving the gift of attention to the speaker. Looping means closing the loop of communication by demonstrating that you have really heard what the person is saying. Do not try to remember everything: if you really listen, you will hear. Dipping means checking in with yourself, knowing how you are feeling about what you are hearing. Part of the practice is becoming able to give full attention to the speaker, with full awareness of your own feelings.

Instructions

Part I: Monologue

Person A speaks in monologue for 4 minutes. When you are speaking, maintain some mindfulness on your body (this is the dipping part). The entire 4 minutes belong to you, so if you run out of things to say, you can both sit in silence, and when you have something else to say later, you may just say it.

Person B listens. Your job is to give your full attention to the speaker as a gift, while at the same time maintaining some mindfulness on your body (this is again the dipping part). You are giving him the gift of your attention, without losing awareness of your body. You may acknowledge, but do not over-acknowledge. You may not speak except to acknowledge. Part II: Resolution

After that, B repeats back to A what she thinks she heard. B may start by saying, “What I heard you say was…” Immediately after, A gives feedback by telling B what he feels B got right or wrong (for example, what she missed, what she misrepresented, etc). Go back and forth until A is satisfied that he is completely understood by B. Do this for as long as it takes, or until 6 minutes are up. (This is the looping part).

Then we switch places, so B gets to be the speaker and A the listener.

After the exercise, spend 4 minutes in meta-conversation discussing the experience.

Some suggested topics for conversation:

• Your self-assessment. Your impressions of yourself, what you like, what you want to change, etc.

• A difficult situation that happened recently or a long time ago that you want to talk about.

• Any other topic that is meaningful to you.

You can think of the informal practice of mindful conversation as the stealthy version of the formal practice. You do not have to tell your friend, “Hey, I want to try out this practice I read from a really nice book, so I’m going to loop you and dip myself.” That may be awkward. Instead, you can just say, “What you say sounds important. To make sure I understand you correctly, I would like to repeat to you what I think I heard. Let me know if my understanding is correct. Is that okay for you?” Most likely, your friend will really appreciate that because you are taking the time and trouble to listen and to understand him or her correctly. In making this request, you are implicitly demonstrating that you value and respect your friend.

This is very beneficial for relationships.

INFORMAL PRACTICE OF MINDFUL CONVERSATION

You can practice mindful conversation during any conversation, but it is most useful when communication is at an impasse, for example, in a conflict situation.

The three parts to this skill are listening, looping, and dipping. Listening means giving the gift of attention to the speaker. Looping means closing the loop of communication by demonstrating that you have really heard what the person is saying. Dipping means checking in with yourself, knowing how you are feeling about what you are hearing.

Begin with mindful listening (see Informal Practice of Mindful Listening). Give the speaker the gift of your attention without losing awareness of your body. If any strong emotion arises, acknowledge it and, if possible, let it go. After the speaker is done expressing her views, make sure you fully understood by asking for permission to repeat back what you heard. You may say something like, “What you say sounds important. To make sure I understand you correctly, I would like to repeat to you what I think I heard. Let me know if my understanding is correct. Is that okay for you?” If the speaker says yes, repeat back what you heard and then invite the speaker to let you know what you understood correctly or incorrectly. After the speaker offers her input, repeat her corrections in your own words to make sure you understood those correctly. Repeat this process until the speaker is fully satisfied that she is understood.

After demonstrating that you understood the speaker, it is your turn to speak. If you are comfortable doing so, you may explain the looping process and respectfully invite the other person to participate if she wants to. You may say something like, “I want to make sure I do not miscommunicate anything, so if it is okay with you, after I speak, I’d like to invite you to let me know what you heard. Shall we do that?” If the other person accepts the invitation, you may apply the looping process.

Sustaining Your Practice

We have discussed mindfulness practices for developing a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time, and practices for extending that mindfulness into everyday situations. The keyword is practice . Mindfulness is like exercise—it is not sufficient to just understand the topic; you can only benefit from it with practice.

As an instructor, I found it fairly easy to get people started on mindfulness practice. I usually just need to show them the brain science, explain the benefits, introduce a short two-minute sitting, and voilà, people get it. That is the good news.

The bad news is after the first few days, many people find it hard to sustain the practice. Many of us start the first few days with great enthusiasm, committing ourselves to ten or twenty minutes a day of this wonderful practice, but after that initial enthusiasm, it starts to feel like a chore. You sit there bored and restless, wondering why time goes by so slowly, and then after a while, you decide you have more important and/or interesting things to do, such as getting stuff done or watching cats flush toilets on YouTube. And before you know it, you have lost your daily practice. One person who has a funny way of describing this state is the Tibetan meditation master His Eminence the Very Venerable Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (but hey, call him Mingyur, he insists). Talking about himself as a very young beginner, he said, “Although I liked the idea of meditation, I didn’t like the practice of meditation.”

How can we sustain a mindfulness practice?

Happily, the difficulty of sustaining a mindfulness practice often lasts only a few months. It is like starting an exercise regime. The first few months are usually really hard—you probably have to discipline yourself into exercising regularly, but after a few months, you find your quality of life changing dramatically. You have more energy, you suffer fewer sick days, you can get more stuff done, and you look better in the mirror. You feel great about yourself. Once you reach that point, you just cannot not do it anymore. The upgrade in quality of life is just too compelling. From that point on, your exercise regime becomes self-sustaining. Yes, you probably still have to cajole yourself into the gym every now and then, but it becomes fairly easy.