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We can think about our communication in terms of nourishment and consumption.
What you read and write can help you heal, so be thoughtful about what you consume.
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.
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.
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.
If the relationship has become difficult, it’s because we’ve nourished our judgment and our anger, and we haven’t nourished our compassion.
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.
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.
If our minds are blocked, there is no device that will make up for our inability to communicate with ourselves or others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’re used to thinking a lot and talking a lot. But to communicate with ourselves, we need to practice nonthinking and nontalking.
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.
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.
Please do come back home and listen. If you don’t communicate well with yourself, you cannot communicate well with another person.
our mindfulness will be stronger and we’ll get more healing and communicate more successfully if we take the time to pause and sit quietly for a few moments.
Mindful walking is a wonderful way to bring together body and mind. It also allows you the additional opportunity to communicate with something outside yourself that is nourishing and healing: the earth.
Every step brings you home to the here and the now, so you can connect with yourself, your body, and your feelings. That is a real connection. You don’t need a device that tells you how many friends you have or how many steps you’ve walked or how many calories you’ve burned.
If you think while you walk, you’re not really walking.
Home is the here and the now, where all the wonders of life are already available, where the wonder that is your body is available.
You don’t need an app or an outsider to tell you whether you have arrived. You will know you have arrived because you will recognize that you’re comfortable being.
We spend many hours every day forgetting we have bodies.
Our suffering has been trying to communicate with us, to let us know it is there, but we have spent a lot of time and energy ignoring it.
Acknowledging our feelings without judging them or pushing them away, embracing them with mindfulness, is an act of homecoming.
If we are able to understand that suffering and thereby transform it, we are healing our parents and our ancestors as well as ourselves.
Our suffering also reflects the suffering of others. We may be motivated by the desire to do something to help relieve the suffering in the world. How can we do that without understanding the nature of suffering? If we understand our own suffering, it will become much easier for us to understand the suffering of others and of the world. We may have the intention to do something or be someone that can help the world suffer less, but unless we can listen to and acknowledge our own suffering, we will not really be able to help.
The amount of suffering inside us and around us can be overwhelming. Usually we don’t like to be in touch with it because we believe it’s unpleasant. The marketplace provides us with everything imaginable to help us run away from ourselves.
We consume not because we need to consume but because we’re afraid of encountering the suffering inside us.
If we take the time to listen deeply to our own suffering, we will be able to understand it. Any suffering that has not been released and reconciled will continue.
Understanding suffering gives rise to compassion. Love is born, and right away we suffer less.
If we know how to take good care of suffering, we will know how to take good care of happiness.
If we know how to handle suffering, we will know how to handle happiness and produce happiness.
We all should learn to embrace our own suffering, to listen to it deeply, and to have a deep look into its nature.
Then our communication with others will be based on the desire to understand rather than the desire to prove ourselves right or make ourselves feel better. We will have only the intention to help.
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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?
When you can recognize the suffering in the other person and see how that suffering came about, compassion arises.
Our relationships depend on the capacity of each of us to understand our own difficulties and aspirations and those of others.
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As you connect with yourself, you begin connecting more deeply with other people. Without the first step, the second step isn’t possible.
It’s helpful to remember at the beginning of every communication with another person that there is a Buddha inside each of us. “The Buddha” is just a name for the most understanding and compassionate person it’s possible to be.
The lotus flower of your hands is an offering to the person in front of you. When you bow, you recognize the beauty in the other person.
As you smile, or say hello, or shake hands, in your mind you can still be offering them a lotus flower, a reminder of the Buddha nature in both of you.
We communicate to be understood and to understand others.
There are two keys to effective and true communication. The first is deep listening. The second is loving speech.
We want to begin by expressing ourselves. But talking first like that doesn’t usually work. Deep listening needs to come first.
But talking first like that doesn’t usually work. Deep listening needs to come first.
Y pensamos por aca que hay wue hablar siempre de primero
When we listen with compassion, we don’t get caught in judgment.
Juicios!!!!!!
