Skip to content

June 2018

Mandala-gold1

Mindful Conversation

MINDFUL CONVERSATION

Communication is a mutual act;  it takes two to communicate,  one to speak and the other to listen.    As Henry David Thoreau once said, “the greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought and attended to my answer”.

Since we spend a large part of our lives talking to people, mindful awareness of speaking and listening provides a wonderful opportunity to open the senses, heart, and mind to receive the moment more fully.

The following are some important guidelines:

  • Listen to others with appreciation for the gift of what is being communicated.
  • When participating in conversation, rest quietly and receptively in open awareness.      If I am not present with me, I cannot be present with others.
  • Listen to emotion, facial expression, and tone of voice as well as meaning. Listen to the silences between words or between speakers.     You are listening to a fellow human being.   Listen with kindness.    Let the words, the stories, touch a compassionate heart.

Relational Inquiry

 

Human beings are relational beings.  We spend the majority of our lives conversing and interacting with others against a complex backdrop which includes the culture of our social connections.  In a multitude of different ways, we are continually mixing minds with others (including in cyberspace).    It is not an exaggeration to say that we are made of relationship.  Relationship is the way we ­inter-be with others.

Relational inquiry can be defined as the investigation of experiences that occur at the surfaces of our connection with others:   the “relational field”.   But there are many layers in the complex dance of human connection.  We can delineate several different components of relatedness that fall within the scope of relational inquiry:

  • Interactions are the behavioral events that occur between self and other. Some dimensions of interaction are explicit— what is said or done—and some are implicit or nonverbal. I liken the implicit dimension of interaction to the music of connection, behavior to the choreography of the dance.

 

  • Relational Mindfulness is the moment-to-moment awareness we bring to our experience of engaging with or interacting with someone.  The essence of relational mindfulness is simply noticing what is happening between ourselves and another.   Drawing from the paradigm of mindful awareness in Buddhist practice, relational mindfulness involves deliberately paying attention to the elements of thought, feeling, and body sensation that arise for us in the relational field and holding these experiences in nonjudgmental awareness.

Relational mindfulness consists of layers of meaning organized around a felt sense of what it is like to be with a particular someone else; our embodied, whole person response to being with the other.  Felt sense consists of the somatic and affective dimensions of experience.

Emanating from that core felt sense, perceptions of the relational moment are elaborated based on our attachment history with others.  For example, in some moments with others we may feel well received while in other moments the connection between us falls flat.   Such interpersonal responses have deep roots in our past experiences.  They are rooted in our needs for contact and connection as well as on our defensive needs for safety.   Relational mindfulness provides a window of view into the basic interpersonal and psychodynamic dimension of relationship.

  • Relational Turbulence

It is informative to make a study of the things that upset us and that we are emotionally reactive to.  Our psychological vulnerabilities are revealed most clearly in events that engage primal emotions such as anxiety, despondency, and shame; anger and blame;  jealousy, envy, and competition;  sexual attraction and lust.  By intentionally paying attention to moments when we get interpersonally ‘hooked’ or caught up in something someone did or said,  we can glean valuable information about our unmet psychological needs; what we need to wake up to and where we need to grow.

  • Speaking and Listening: the dance of communication.  Because we spend so many hours of our lives talking to other people, conversation provides an especially rich opportunity for relational mindfulness.  In conversation, we have the opportunity to listen to ourselves as well as to the listening of the other; to observe our relational patterns.   We can see what we choose to say about ourselves and what this reflects about who we think we are.  And, we have the opportunity to observe our reactivity as it happens.

 

There is a mysterious interpersonal chemistry that happens when we interact with others and “mix minds” in the relational field.    Through the practice of relational inquiry, “inquiring deeply” about our interactions with others,  we can become aware of how our particular minds are organized around relationship and the issues which get in the way of our feeling free, spontaneous, and authentic with others.     Exploring how relational inquiry can be a foundation of dharma practice will be discussed in the next issue of this Newsletter.

Ultimately, relational inquiry enhances our self-understanding and our capacity to be intimate both with ourselves and with others.  It supports us in staying present, open, and compassionate as life unfolds moment by moment. And, in so doing, it deepens our experience of being with others.

 

 

Are Relationships Becoming Obsolete?

It was several years ago when I first heard about a new smart phone app which touted its ability to listen to and decipher the complexity of baby sounds to help the new mother discern whether the baby was hungry, wet or tired.   As a relational therapist, I was appalled by the potential significance of such substitutions for natural human empathy.  Woefully few parents are relationally adequate as it is.    A poor omen for a society which already seems so dysfunctional and disordered.

I thought of this in the context of the chillingly frequent scene of families sitting silent around a restaurant table, each person individually absorbed with their own phone.    Another observation that woke me up was this:    A patient told me about a painful incident with his son, in which another 11 year old boy came to visit and spent the entire three hours of their “playdate”  engaged with solo video games on his device.  Only one or two sentences were spoken between the boys in the entire afternoon, and my patient’s son reacted by becoming quite despondent.    Fortunately for him, his father— an extremely relational and psychologically minded man — was able to help his son recognize his feelings and put them into words, and the incident became a wonderful (and intimate)  learning moment between father and son.

And now enter “SNOO”, the smart bassinet from a company called Happy Baby, which for $1200 will swaddle, rock, vibrate, and soothe your baby with white noise while you sleep.   Described by its creator as a “4th trimester”,  SNOO promises to “hear your baby’s cries and automatically respond with 5 levels of gradually stronger white noise and motion to find the best level to soothe fussing”.

Undoubtedly a dream come true for a sleep deprived young mother.   But what, I wonder, will be the psychological consequences?    Will the SNOO’d baby be exceptionally well-regulated and emotionally balanced?   Autistic for lack of human connection during basic distress?  Or maybe both??

**********************

We can abstract this question to the future of Relationships in the era of Artificial Intelligence.   In 2013, the futuristic fantasy film “Her” envisioned one possibility.   It told the story of a man who became enthralled by—

or fell in love with—  his operating system, an intuitive entity in its own right whose bright voice and playful personality enabled him to form a romantic attachment to “her”.  

Fast forward to 2018:   A recent television documentary aired footage of young Chinese men and women who related to Siri (or her Chinese equivalent) as a best friend.

*********************

Dystopian prophesy?

********************

What do YOU think?