When we have an unspoken demand, it is about power. To make a true request, we need to remain
open to the outcome and open to allowing the other person to say no.
Just
slow down and notice what is going on inside you. Without this self-awareness, we forget that
what we say is always about ourselves, especially about our feelings and needs,
and is never about the other person, because whatever we say is coming out of
our perception of what is.
Whether I am making a request or a demand is not determined by the
way my sentence sounds. Instead, I know
the difference by how I feel inside my body if the request or demand is
refused.
Strategies are ways of getting needs met, and needs are never in
conflict; only strategies are in conflict.
Many people are reluctant to ask for their needs to be met because
they believe their needs are a burden to others.
Another way to listen in a new way to your inner voice is to hear
whatever anyone says to you as a request. Specifically, translate everything
anyone says to you as either a “please or a “thank you”.
When we choose to hear the other’s statement as “please hear my
pain”, we have the choice to act in a way that will connect us with them.
Anger, along with shame, guilt, and depression, are a special class
of feelings that arise out of judging how the world should be.
If
we are living our own anger, we tend to attract it in others.
You
cannot be angry unless you believe you are right.
Anger is a wall that keeps us dead to what is really going on within
us.
When we have enemy images, we make a moralistic judgment about
ourselves or others, believing that they or we are evil.
When you want to change some circumstance, first use self-empathy to
connect yourself to your needs, and then act in a way that furthers the social
change you value.
Make no mistake: acknowledge our enemy images, choosing to transform
them by finding the need behind the judgment, and getting help to do this is
not work for the fainthearted. Society
supports the habits of thinking and talking using enemy images. But if we are committed to
self-transformation and the transformation of the world, we will learn to speak
from a place without enemy images.
Minute by minute, we all shape our internal environment, and from
that comes the happiness or suffering of our lives.
To practice spiritual speech is to hear not what someone thinks, but
to hear the feelings and needs behind the words.
We feel safer when our partner reveals what he is feeling, because
unexpressed feelings are often received as aggression.
What if we acted as if our requests to each other were actually
giving a gift?
All
criticism is the tragic expression of unmet needs.
All spiritual practices are fundamentally about the
same thing: being present and living with an open heart.
One strategy that can strengthen connection is to consistently
celebrate how the other person is enriching your life. Build the celebration into your relationship
structure; create a space to do it every day.
When your child is facing a difficulty, ask yourself: is it my
problem as a parent, is it the child’s problem, or is it a problem for both of
us to solve…. If it is your problem, you get help for it. If it is your child’s problem, you support
them in solving it. If it is a problem
for both of you, you figure out a way to solve it together. The difficult part
is discriminating whose problem it is.
Children, even young children, have choice about their feelings and
their thoughts. They may do what we want
on the outside, but they will do what they want on the inside. The most successful relationships with
children are based on recognizing that they also have power. This does not mean that we give up our
responsibility to protect and guide, but rather we understand that they are
part of the process.
One of the reasons that power over does not give us what we want is
that it does not recognize or respect the fundamental requirement for a good
relationship: respect for the others autonomy.
People sometimes seem to talk as a way to figure out what they want
to say instead of figuring it out first and then saying it.
If you find yourself irritated or dissatisfied, first connect with
your own unmet need that generated the irritation.
In order to create the kind of world we want to live in and leave to
generations to come, we need to help the suffering person who may be near us,
beginning with ourselves.
Without awareness of the power of our language, we continue to
reinforce the patterns, both emotional and psychological, that contribute to
our suffering and the suffering of others.
The heart of spiritual practice begins with remembering at all times
to be present with my inner states.
I am not my thoughts. I have
thoughts, but they are a manifestation of my being and not who I am.
One of the best ways to remember that I am not my thoughts is to
cultivate the habit of being present first with myself and then with my speech,
both internal and external.
The practice of being connected with yourself in a visceral
non-cognitive way is powerful. We are
unlikely to connect to another human being unless we are connected with our own
needs.
As part of the conditioning process, as we lose touch with our own
needs, we learn to protect ourselves from criticism, avoid punishment, and
redirect blame. Learning to connect at
the level of needs is a way of learning to step out of our habitual ways of
reacting.
Simply
inquire about what needs were and were not met and what might be better ways to
meet them. Thus inquiry, which is at the
heart of the practices of yoga and Buddhist meditation, can be brought into our
daily interactions and activities.
By being connected with our own needs, our intention is clarified
moment by moment. This is speech as a
spiritual practice.
Feelings are signals shouting from the depths of the unconscious
mind, alerting us that we need to pay attention.
Spiritual practice is not the asana but the act of noticing during
the practice of the asana.
When
our needs are unmet, our fundamental humanness is denied, and when that
happens, we cannot be fully human, fully happy, or fully healthy.
We run into trouble when we confuse strategies with needs. Most of
us do this all the time. We think the
need is to get into a specific university or to get a certain job or to learn a
certain yoga pose. But these are all
strategies for getting our needs met.
