The Art of Communicating

  Contents

  1 Essential Food

  2 Communicating with Yourself

  3 The Keys to Communicating with Others

  4 The Six Mantras of Loving Speech

  5 When Difficulties Arise

  6 Mindful Communication at Work

  7 Creating Community in the World

  8 Our Communication Is Our Continuation

  9 Practices for Compassionate Communication

  About the Author

  Also by Thich Nhat Hanh

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Essential Food

  Nothing can survive without food. Everything we consume acts either to heal us or to poison us. We tend to think of nourishment only as what we take in through our mouths, but what we consume with our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues, and our bodies is also food. The conversations going on around us, and those we participate in, are also food. Are we consuming and creating the kind of food that is healthy for us and helps us grow?

  When we say something that nourishes us and uplifts the people around us, we are feeding love and compassion. When we speak and act in a way that causes tension and anger, we are nourishing violence and suffering.

  We often ingest toxic communication from those around us and from what we watch and read. Are we ingesting things that grow our understanding and compassion? If so, that’s good food. Often, we ingest communication that makes us feel bad or insecure about ourselves or judgmental and superior to others. We can think about our communication in terms of nourishment and consumption. The Internet is an item of consumption, full of nutrients that are both healing and toxic. It’s so easy to ingest a lot in just a few minutes online. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the Internet, but you should be conscious of what you are reading and watching.

  When you work with your computer for three or four hours, you are totally lost. It’s like eating french fries. You shouldn’t eat french fries all day, and you shouldn’t be on the computer all day. A few french fries, a few hours, are probably all most of us need.

  What you read and write can help you heal, so be thoughtful about what you consume. When you write an e-mail or a letter that is full of understanding and compassion, you are nourishing yourself during the time you write that letter. Even if it’s just a short note, everything you’re writing down can nourish you and the person to whom you are writing.

  Consuming with Mindfulness

  How can you tell what communication is healthy and what is toxic? The energy of mindfulness is a necessary ingredient in healthy communication. Mindfulness requires letting go of judgment, returning to an awareness of the breath and the body, and bringing your full attention to what is in you and around you. This helps you notice whether the thought you just produced is healthy or unhealthy, compassionate or unkind.

  Conversation is a source of nourishment. We all get lonely and want to talk with someone. But when you have a conversation with another person, what that person says may be full of toxins, like hate, anger, and frustration. When you listen to what others say, you’re consuming those toxins. You’re bringing toxins into your consciousness and your body. That’s why mindfulness of speaking and mindfulness of listening are very important.

  Toxic conversation can be difficult to avoid, especially at work. If it is going on around you, be aware. You need to have enough mindful awareness not to absorb these kinds of suffering. You have to protect yourself with the energy of compassion so that when you listen, instead of consuming toxins, you’re actively producing more compassion in yourself. When you listen in this way, compassion protects you and the other person suffers less.

  You absorb the thoughts, speech, and actions you produce and those contained in the communications of those around you. That is a form of consumption. So when you read something, when you listen to someone, you should be careful not to allow the toxins to ruin your health and bring suffering to you and to the other person or group of people.

  To illustrate this truth, the Buddha used the graphic image of a cow that has a skin disease. The cow is attacked by all kinds of insects and microorganisms coming from the soil, coming from the trees, coming from the water. Without skin, a cow can’t protect herself. Mindfulness is our skin. Without mindfulness, we may take in things that are toxic to our body and mind.

  Even when you simply drive your car through the city, you consume. The advertisements hit your eyes, and you’re forced to consume them. You hear sounds; you may even say things that are the products of too much toxic consumption. We have to protect ourselves with mindful consumption. Mindful communication is part of this. We can communicate in such a way as to solidify the peace and compassion in ourselves and bring joy to others.

  Relationships Don’t Survive Without the Right Food

  Many of us suffer because of difficult communication. We feel misunderstood, especially by those we love. In a relationship, we are nourishment for each other. So we have to select the kind of food we offer the other person, the kind of food that can help our relationships thrive. Everything—including love, hate, and suffering—needs food to continue. If suffering continues, it’s because we keep feeding our suffering. Every time we speak without mindful awareness, we are feeding our suffering.

  With mindful awareness, we can look into the nature of our suffering and find out what kind of food we have been supplying to keep it alive. When we find the source of nourishment for our suffering, we can cut off that supply, and our suffering will fade.

  Often a romantic relationship begins beautifully, but then, because we don’t know how to nourish our love, the relationship begins to die. Communication can bring it back to life. Every thought you produce in your head, in your heart—in China they say, “in your belly”—feeds that relationship. When you produce a thought that carries suspicion, anger, fear, irritation, that thought is not nourishing to you or to the other person. If the relationship has become difficult, it’s because we’ve nourished our judgment and our anger, and we haven’t nourished our compassion.

  One day in Plum Village, the French retreat center where I live, I gave a talk about how we needed to nourish our loved ones by practicing loving communication. I spoke about our relationships as flowers that need watering with love and communication to grow. There was a woman sitting near the front who was crying the whole time.

  After the talk, I went to her husband, and I said, “My dear friend, your flower needs some watering.” Her husband had been at the talk and knew about loving speech, but sometimes we all need a friend to remind us. So, after lunch, the man took his wife for a drive in the country. They just had an hour or so but he focused on watering the good seeds the whole drive.

  When they came back, she seemed completely transformed, very happy and joyful. Their children were very surprised, because in the morning when their parents had left, they’d been sad and irritable. So in just an hour, you can transform another person and yourself, just with the practice of watering the good seeds. This is applied mindfulness in action; it’s not theoretical.

  Nourishing and healing communication is the food of our relationships. Sometimes one cruel utterance can make the other person suffer for many years, and we will suffer for many years too. In a state of anger or fear, we may say something that can be poisonous and destructive. If we swallow poison, it can stay within us for a long time, slowly killing our relationship. We may not even know what we said or did that started to poison the relationship. But we have the antidote: mindful compassion and loving communication. Love, respect, and friendship all need food to survive. With mindfulness we can produce thoughts, speech, and actions that will feed our relationships and help them grow and th
rive.

  2

  Communicating with Yourself

  Loneliness is the suffering of our time. Even if we’re surrounded by others, we can feel very alone. We are lonely together. There’s a vacuum inside us. It makes us feel uncomfortable, so we try to fill it up by connecting with other people. We believe that if we’re able to connect, the feeling of loneliness will disappear.

  Technology supplies us with many devices to help us stay connected. But even when we’re connected, we continue to feel lonely. We check our e-mail, send text messages, and post updates several times a day. We want to share and receive. We might spend our whole day connecting but not reduce the loneliness we feel.

  We all hunger for love, but we don’t know how to generate love in order to feed ourselves with it. When we’re empty, we use technology to try to dissipate the feeling of loneliness, but it doesn’t work. We have the Internet, e-mail, video conferencing, texting and posting, apps, letters, and cell phones. We have everything. And yet it’s not at all certain that we have improved our communication.

  Many of us have cell phones. We want to be in touch with other people. But we shouldn’t put too much faith in our phones. I don’t have one, but I don’t feel out of touch with the world. In fact, without a mobile device, I have more time for myself and for others. You believe that having your phone helps you to communicate. But if the content of your speech is not authentic, talking or texting on a device doesn’t mean you’re communicating with another person.

  We believe too much in the technologies of communication. Behind all these instruments we have the mind, the most fundamental instrument for communication. If our minds are blocked, there is no device that will make up for our inability to communicate with ourselves or others.

  Connecting Internally

  Many of us spend a lot of time in meetings or e-mailing with others, and not a lot of time communicating with ourselves. The result is that we don’t know what is going on within us. It may be a mess inside. How, then, can we communicate with another person?

  We think that with all our technological devices we can connect, but this is an illusion. In daily life we’re disconnected from ourselves. We walk, but we don’t know that we’re walking. We’re here, but we don’t know that we’re here. We’re alive, but we don’t know that we’re alive. Throughout the day, we lose ourselves.

  To stop and communicate with yourself is a revolutionary act. You sit down and stop that state of being lost, of not being yourself. You begin by just stopping whatever you’re doing, sitting down, and connecting with yourself. This is called mindful awareness. Mindfulness is full awareness of the present moment. You don’t need an iPhone or a computer. You just need to sit down and breathe in and out. In just a few seconds, you can connect with yourself. You know what is going on in your body, your feelings, your emotions, and your perceptions.

  Digital Purpose

  When you don’t feel you can communicate well in person or wonder if what you say will be hard for the other person to hear, sometimes the best way to communicate is to write a letter or an e-mail. If you can write a letter that’s full of understanding and compassion, then during the time of writing that letter you will nourish yourself. Everything you write will be nourishing for the person you are writing to, and first of all for you. The other person hasn’t received the e-mail or letter yet, but while typing the letter you are nourishing yourself, because what you’re saying in the letter is full of compassion and understanding.

  Especially at the beginning of your practice, it may be easier for you to practice mindful communication in writing. Writing this way is good for our health. We can send an e-mail, we can text, and we can talk on the phone and use mindful communication. If our message is full of understanding and compassion, we’ll be able to remove fear and anger from the other person. So next time you hold the phone, look at it and remember that its purpose is to help you communicate with compassion.

  Usually, we are in a hurry to send our e-mails and texts. As soon as we finish writing them, we press send and they are gone. But there’s no need to rush. We always have time for at least one in-breath and out-breath before we pick up the phone or before we press send on a text or e-mail. If we do this, there is a much greater chance that we will be putting more compassionate communication out into the world.

  Coming Home

  When we begin to practice mindful awareness, we start the path home to ourselves. Home is the place where loneliness disappears. When we’re home, we feel warm, comfortable, safe, fulfilled. We’ve gone away from our homes for a long time, and our homes have become neglected.

  But the path back home is not long. Home is inside us. Going home requires only sitting down and being with yourself, accepting the situation as it is. Yes, it might be a mess in there, but we accept it because we know we have left home for a long time. So now we’re home. With our in-breath and our out-breath, our mindful breathing, we begin to tidy up our homes.

  Communicating with the Breath

  The path home begins with your breath. If you know how to breathe, you can learn how to walk, how to sit, how to eat your meal, and how to work in mindfulness so that you can begin to know yourself. When you breathe in, you come back to yourself. When you breathe out, you release any tension. Once you can communicate with yourself, you’ll be able to communicate outwardly with more clarity. The way in is the way out.

  Mindful breathing is a means of communication, just like a phone. It promotes communication between the mind and the body. It helps us know what we’re feeling. We’re breathing all the time, but we rarely pay attention to our breath, unless our breathing is uncomfortable or restricted.

  With mindful breathing, when we breathe in we know we’re breathing in. When we breathe out we know we’re breathing out. When we breathe in, we bring our attention to our in-breath. To remind ourselves to pay attention to our breath, we can say silently:

  Breathing in, I know I’m breathing in.

  Breathing out, I know I’m breathing out.

  “The air is entering my body. The air is leaving my body.” Follow your in-breath and out-breath all the way through. Suppose your in-breath lasts four seconds. During the time of breathing in, allow your attention to rest entirely on your in-breath, without interruption. During the time of breathing out, focus entirely on your out-breath. You are with your in-breath and your out-breath. You are not with anything else. You are your in-breath and your out-breath.

  Breathing in and breathing out is a practice of freedom. When we focus our attention on our breath, we release everything else, including worries or fears about the future and regrets or sorrows about the past. Focusing on the breath, we notice what we’re feeling in the present moment. We can do this throughout the day, enjoying the twenty-four hours that have been given us to breathe in and out. We can be there for ourselves. It takes only a few seconds to breathe in and set yourself free.

  We know when others are breathing in and out mindfully; we can see it when we look at them. They look free. If we’re overloaded with fear, anger, regret, or anxiety, we’re not free, no matter what position we hold in society or how much money we have. Real freedom only comes when we’re able to release our suffering and come home. Freedom is the most precious thing there is. It is the foundation of happiness, and it is available to us with each conscious breath.

  Nonthinking and Nontalking

  Happiness is possible when you’re in communication with yourself. To do this, you have to leave your telephone behind. When you attend a meeting or an event, you turn off your telephone. Why? Because you want to communicate and absorb others’ communication. It is the same when communicating with yourself. This kind of communication is not possible with the phone. We’re used to thinking a lot and talking a lot. But to communicate with ourselves, we need to practice nonthinking and nontalking.

  Nonthinking is a very important practice. Of course, thinking and talking can be productive too, especially when our minds and fee
lings are clear. But a lot of our thinking is caught up in dwelling on the past, trying to control the future, generating misperceptions, and worrying about what others are thinking.

  A misperception can happen in a moment, in a flash. As soon as we have a perception, we’re caught by it. So anything we say or do based on that perception can be dangerous. It’s better not to say or do anything! That’s why in the Zen tradition they say the paths of talking and of thinking should be cut off. The path of speech is cut off because if you continue to talk, you continue to be caught in your words.

  Mindful breathing is a practice of nonthinking and nontalking. Without thinking and talking, there is no obstacle to get in the way of our enjoyment of the present moment. It’s enjoyable to breathe in, to breathe out; it’s enjoyable to sit, to walk, to eat breakfast, to take a shower, to clean the bathroom, to work in the vegetable garden. When we stop talking and thinking and we listen mindfully to ourselves, one thing we will notice is our greater capacity and opportunities for joy.

  The other thing that happens when we stop thinking and talking and we begin listening to ourselves is that we notice the suffering present in our lives. There may be tension and pain in our bodies. We may have old pains and fears or new pains and fears, which we have hidden under our talking and texting and thinking.

  Mindfulness lets us listen to the pain, the sorrow, and the fear inside. When we see that some suffering or some pain is coming up, we don’t try to run away from it. In fact, we have to go back and take care of it. We’re not afraid of being overwhelmed, because we know how to breathe and how to walk so as to generate enough energy of mindfulness to recognize and take care of the suffering. If you have enough mindfulness generated by the practice of mindful breathing and walking, you’re no longer afraid to be with yourself.