A common mythology in American culture continues to be the myth of the cowboy–the rugged individual who goes it alone. Cowboys don’t need to know what they are feeling or needing, because they spend all their time identifying and exposing bad guys who need to either be killed or punished. Once you’ve completed the job, then you can ride triumphantly off into the sunset on your horse–alone.
So it may come as a shock to discover that this unspoken myth is impairing your ability to communicate in a healthy and proactive way with others. And this diminished communication is reducing the amount of trust you could otherwise have with the people you work and live with every day.
At the Zen Life & Meditation Center of Chicago (ZLMC), we teach many skills that can help you improve the quality of your communication with others. I’d like to give you a few suggestions about ways to begin doing this:
1. Learn how to Listen
There is nothing more important than listening. And listening is not something we generally do very well. We are often distracted, or we are busy thinking of what we are going to say next, before the other person has finished speaking themselves. That means we really don’t hear what they’ve said at all. This kind of deep listening is something you can practice and improve. You get a chance to do this many times each day. Notice what a difference it can make in your relationships when you really listen to others sincerely and wholeheartedly.
2. Cultivate a Needs Awareness
In our Gateway Series at ZLMC, we teach a skill called “Nonviolent Communication” (NVC). NVC is a way of communicating more proactively with others. This happens because you develop an awareness of the importance of needs. And this seemingly simple step is revolutionary. Most likely, if you reflect on what you learned about needs growing up as a child, you learned some negative things about needs. You really shouldn’t have them because that was considered selfish. And if it was OK to have them, it probably wasn’t OK to speak about them openly. This negative bias in our culture regarding needs is a consequence of the unspoken cowboy mythology which still rules our lives.
Needs in NVC are understood as anything which supports your life. So they are basic and fundamental to living. We have many needs such as needs for shelter, clothing, food, understanding, to be heard, fairness and many more. And needs are at the heart of how you can begin communicating more proactively. Being aware of needs can help you shift from hanging on to judgments to a more empathic awareness, both for yourself and for others.
3. Stand Your Ground
Healthy relationships arise when you are able to stand in your own experience without surrendering to a impulsive desire to please or be liked by others. When you don’t stand your ground, you cave in and fuse with the other, which means that you’ve gone missing in action. Standing your ground may mean you have to step outside your comfort zone and that knee-jerk reaction to please others. But when you learn how to do this, you’ll find that the quality and depth of your relationship with others improves.
4. Learn How to Ask for Help
Who ever heard a cowboy ask for help? That would be beneath them. It would be ridiculous–a sign of weakness. So take a good look at this one. If you’ve taken on a task that you can’t complete for whatever reason, learn to ask for help. It requires some humility to do this. It requires being able to trust others. You might be surprised that often people are grateful to be asked, because you’ve placed your trust in them. You’ll giving them an opportunity express their generosity by working together with you on a common task.
5. Let Go of Your Agenda
It’s hard to listen to another when you’re busy preparing and rehearsing what you’re going to say next before they’ve finished speaking. Enter into conversation in the spirit of learning something new from the other person. By letting go of your attachment to the outcome, you free yourself to open to the person. The space between you is sacred. It’s a bridge that can carry you across to the other’s experience. You may be surprised at what you discover on the other side.
by Robert Althouse
“An ethic of care involves a morality grounded in relationship and response . . . . In responding, we do not appeal to abstract principles, though we may appeal to rules of thumb; rather we pay attention to the concrete other in his or her real situation. We also pay attention to the effect of our response on the networks of care that sustain us both.”
from Speaking from the Heart: A Feminist Perspective on Ethics by Rita Manning
Spring is a time when something new arrives. New shoots emerge from the soil. New leaves appear miraculously all at once. When you think of something new, perhaps you imagine buying the latest iPhone or iPad. You might approach spirituality this way too, collecting sacred objects to comfort you and ease your troubled mind. Buying bright, new and shiny objects is enticing, but it doesn’t make room for something fresh because it actually fills up your psychic space with more stuff. What is genuinely new only arrives when you begin doing some spring cleaning.
When you live a Zen-inspired life you begin a spiritual journey. The trouble with this kind of trip is that it comes with no itinerary or pre-existing answers. It comes with no guarantees or insurance policies. You don’t know how the journey will turn out, and you won’t unless you actually take the journey yourself. The journey begins as an inquiry. Zen is an ancient tradition but the role of that tradition is not to restrict or limit your search but to open you to your own journey. Tradition should inspire you to keep going or challenge you when you get stuck.
Meditation is the boat you use to take the journey. It’s purpose is to more fully engage you with your own experience, with your suffering and with your world. Myths can provide some helpful hints. The journey will be hard. It may be dangerous, so you’ll need all the help you can get. If you meet animals, dwarfs or strangers at the side of the road, slow down and show them respect. They can help you. They are a grace that arrives unexpectedly. Don’t try to figure it out. Accept it when it comes with gratitude and joy.
Your journey will be uncomfortable. You will often be tired, sleepy and hungry. Open to the discomfort. Open to your body. The task of some myths is to retrieve a precious jewel at the bottom of the ocean. Remember, this is a spiritual journey so you won’t find the jewel somewhere outside of your own experience. You’ll find it by descending into the darkness of your own body. The jewel is something new that arrives when you fully inhabit your body and surrender your conceptual mind’s need to know, control and objectify. This kind of surrender and letting go is the way you begin cleaning house.
Corporate culture rewards those who can keep up. It values efficiency and being in control. It easily dismisses the wisdom that arises from your embodied experience–the intuition and empathic awareness that help you listen and open to yourself and others. You might be successful in business by putting yourself on this kind of treadmill, but you’ll pay a price for it as well. As Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men leads lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
The spiritual journey teaches you how to re-inhabit your body. You are not a separate object floating in space. Your objectifying mind knows only things and turns every process into an object, a dead concept with no value of it’s own. This is how you become disembodied because you live your life primarily through your discursive mind. You begin treating others as if they were expendable objects. And this leads to much suffering. Here there is no space for anything new to arrive at all. No journey is taking place. You may be in control of your life and it may be safe and predictable, but the joy has mysteriously disappeared. And sometimes you wonder where the grace has gone too.
Your real life is full of uncertainty and paradox. Your discomfort or embarrassment is actually an opportunity to open further. Rather than avoiding it, approach it with respect. You may find such experiences surprisingly enlivening and refreshing. A steady diet of meditation is an excellent way to keep yourself company and make space in your life for the strangers the show up at the side of the road. Enjoy the spring!
Robert Althouse
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