Recently my friend Nancy, who I haven’t seen in years, sent me an email with some photos attached. “You’ll love these,” she wrote.
The photos circulating through the Internet were of a polar bear and a dog playing together. I first saw them in a National Geographic magazine many years ago and was captivated by the story. A dog named Churchill was tied up to a stake in the ice. His owner spotted a starving bear, just out of hibernation, through the window of his cabin. He watched in horror as the bear approached his dog. Feeling powerless to protect his pet from certain death, he grabbed his camera and snapped pictures of the scene unfolding before his eyes. But to his amazement, what he ended up witnessing was how Churchill saved his own life.
As the bear lumbered towards him, Churchill crouched down and wagged his tail. In spite of his ravenous hunger, the bear responded to the signal and switched from predator to playmate. One of the photos shows Churchill and the bear embraced in an affectionate hug as they tumbled and rolled around the ice. Then the huge polar bear turned and ambled away. Over the next few days, the bear returned to the site several times to play with his new friend.
What is Mindful Communication?
The National Geographic photo essay came into my life at the right moment. I had been preparing to teach a series of workshops on mindful communication, where students would learn practical skills in bringing awareness, insight, compassion and choice to their communications. In preparation, I was paying close attention to my own interactions, especially with the difficult people in my life.
Bringing awareness, or mindfulness, to the way we communicate with others has both practical and profound applications. During an important business meeting, or in the middle of a painful argument with our partner, we can train ourselves to recognize when the channel of communication has shut down. We can train ourselves to remain silent instead of blurting out something we’ll later regret. We can notice when we’re over-reacting and take a time-out.
We begin practicing mindful communication by simply paying attention to how we open up when we feel emotionally safe, and how we shut down when we feel afraid. Just noticing these patterns without judging them starts to cultivate mindfulness in our communications. Noticing how we open and close puts us in greater control of our conversations.
Simply being mindful of our open and closed patterns of conversation will increase our awareness and insight. We begin to notice the effect our communication style has on other people.
Practicing mindful communication brings us face to face with our anxieties about relationships. These anxieties are rooted in much deeper, core fears about ourselves, about our value as human beings. If we are willing to relate to these core fears, each of our relationships can be transformed into a path of self-discovery. Simply being mindful of our open and closed patterns of conversation will increase our awareness and insight. We begin to notice the effect our communication style has on other people. We start to see that our attitude toward a person can blind us to who he or she really is.
A Simple Practice to Label How You Feel
In my mindful communication workshops, the metaphor we use to notice whether communication is closed, open, or somewhere in between is the changing traffic light. We imagine that when the channel of communication closes down, the light has turned red. When communications feels open again, we say the light has turned green. When communication feels in-between, or on the verge of closing down, we say the light has turned yellow. Participants learning mindful communication find that the changing traffic light imagery helps them to identify their various states of communication, and to recognize the consequences of each.
We’re all born with sensitive receptors in our body, heart and mind that keep us tuned into the flow of energy and life going on around us and within us. Each of us already has this natural communication system that feeds us information all the time. So when we close down and become defensive—for a few minutes, a few days, months or even a lifetime—we’re cutting ourselves off not only from others, but also from our natural ability to communicate. Mindful communication trains us to become aware of when we’ve stopped using our innate communication wisdom, a state symbolized by the red light.
The Red Light: Defensive Reactions
When I let my bullying co-worker Robert intimidate me, my red light came on. I became defensive and closed down. When we react to fear by shutting down the channel of communication, we’ve put up a defensive barrier that divides us from the world.
Signs you’re in the red light zone:
- We justify our defensiveness by holding onto unexamined opinions that we are right. We tell ourselves that relationships are not that important. We undervalue other people and put our self-interest first. In short, our values shift to me-first.
- Closed communication patterns are controlling and mistrustful. We see others as frozen objects that have importance only if they meet our needs.
- When we are closed and defensive, we feel alone and emotionally hungry. Then we look to other people to rescue us from our aloneness. We might try to manipulate and control others to get what we need. Because these strategies never truly work, we inevitably become disappointed with people. We suffer, and we cause others to suffer.
- Regardless of how self-assured we may feel or appear on the surface, the sense of isolation that our defensive barrier triggers is subconsciously terrifying. If we are indeed isolated individuals, how do we get our supplies? How do we ward off enemies?
- Suppressing these inner fears makes us even more rigid and out of touch with the flow of energy in our body, mind and heart. We tighten our muscles and thoughts; we harden our hearts.
The Yellow Light: In-Between
When my defensive reactions to Robert became so painful that I began to be curious about them, my yellow light came on.
Signs you’re in the yellow light zone:
- In practicing mindful communication, eventually we ask ourselves: what exactly causes me to switch from open to closed and then open again?
- We begin to discover the state of mind that exists in between open and closed. In between is a place we normally don’t want to enter. We find ourselves there when the ground falls out from beneath our feet, when we feel surprised, embarrassed, disappointed—on the verge of shutting down.
- At this moment, we might feel a sudden loss of trust, an unexpected flash of self-consciousness.
- Learning to hold steady and be curious at this point is critical to the practice of mindful conversation—Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, calls this “holding your seat.”<