The Art of Communicating

by Thich Nhat Hanh

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once you can communicate with yourself, you’ll be able to communicate outwardly with more clarity. The way in is the way out.

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.

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.

Please do come back home and listen. If you don’t communicate well with yourself, you cannot communicate well with another person. Come back again and again and communicate lovingly with yourself.

When we begin breathing mindfully, feelings of loneliness, sadness, fear, and anxiety may come up. When that happens, we don’t need to do anything right away. We can just continue to follow our in-breath and our out-breath. We don’t tell our fear to go away; we recognize it. We don’t tell our anger to go away; we acknowledge it. These feelings are like a small child tugging at our sleeves. Pick them up and hold them tenderly. Acknowledging our feelings without judging them or pushing them away, embracing them with mindfulness, is an act of homecoming.

When you see the suffering inside yourself, you can see the suffering in the other person, and you can see your part, your responsibility, in creating the suffering in yourself and in the other person.

If you can’t accept yourself—if you hate yourself and get angry with yourself—how can you love another person and communicate love to him or her?

I am listening to this person with only one purpose: to give this person a chance to suffer less.

Loving, truthful speech can bring a lot of joy and peace to people. But producing loving speech takes practice because we aren’t used to it. When we hear so much speech that causes craving, insecurity, and anger, we get accustomed to speaking that way. Truthful, loving speech is something we need to train ourselves in.

1. Tell the truth. Don’t lie or turn the truth upside down.

Be consistent. This means no double-talk: speaking about something in one way to one person and in an opposite way to another for selfish or manipulative reasons.

Don’t think that if you hear or read something that inspires you, you should then repeat it word for word. Think of how to make these truths you heard resonate with your own.

Listening deeply is a kind of looking deeply. You look not with your eyes but with your ears. When you look with your eyes, you can see the suffering.

Look for the many ways people communicate their love without saying it. Maybe, like the tree, they are supporting you in other ways.

The first mantra is: “I am here for you.” This is the best gift you can give a loved one.

When your loved one is suffering, your impulse may be to want to do something to fix it, but you don’t need to do much. You just need to be there for him or her.

A wrong perception can be the cause of a lot of suffering. All of us are subject to misunderstanding. We live with wrong perceptions every day. That’s why we have to practice meditation and looking deeply into the nature of our perceptions. Whatever we perceive, we have to ask ourselves, “Are you sure your perception is right?” To be safe, you have to ask. We’re subject to many wrong perceptions in our daily lives. It may be that the other person didn’t have the intention to hurt you. Mindful communication has the potential to ease so much of the unnecessary suffering in our relationships.

You have to recognize that you are the continuation of your father, mother, and ancestors. Cultivate mindfulness so you can recognize the habit energy each time it arises and embrace it with your energy of mindfulness.

The way you think about your work and your work relationships affects how you communicate in your work environment. You may be under the impression that the purpose of your work is to offer a service to others or to produce an object or commodity. But while at work, you’re also producing thoughts, speech, and actions. Communication is as much a part of your job as is the end product.

As powerful as compassionate communication can be when we use it in our individual relationships, its power is magnified when we bring it to our communities. Both communication and community have the same Latin root, communicare, meaning to impart, share, or make common.

When you produce a thought, it bears your signature. It’s you who produced that thought, and you are responsible for it. If it’s a thought of compassion, forgiveness, nondiscrimination, you will continue beautifully, because you are there in it. You are the author of that action. Your speech and your physical actions, both compassionate and violent, also bear your signature.

Communication isn’t static. Even if yesterday you produced a thought of anger and hate, today you can produce a thought in the opposite direction, a thought of compassion and tolerance. As soon as we produce the new thought, it can very quickly catch up with yesterday’s thought and neutralize it.

Our parents and ancestors may have suffered all their lives without knowing how to look after the wounded child in themselves, so they transmitted that child to us. So when we’re embracing the wounded child inside us, we’re embracing all the wounded children of past generations. This practice doesn’t just benefit us; it liberates numberless generations of ancestors and descendants.