What is Being Said

#1 - When I hit construction traffic on the highway I knew I was going to be late for my monthly writing and meditation group. I really look forward to this time and missed it last month so I was bummed, yet at the same time I knew it would be ok. We usually start with meditation so maybe I'd miss that, but maybe I could try to be meditative in the car. Usually thinking I'm going to be late leads to a lot of stress in me, today this didn't happen and I was only late by 5 minutes or so.

#2 - I was coming from a talk at a local Zen center. I have little interest in the specifics of Buddhist philosophy, however I did really appreciate the way the speaker answered the last woman's question. Her response was more silence than words, which clearly was very personal to the woman asking it, she only said two sentences. But I felt her response, it was powerful.

#3 - For one of our homework assignments for my writing and meditation group this month we are to write 20 gratitudes.

#4 - Harville Hendrix, an author of relationship self-help books, says that couples will continue to hurt one another, but that they will also become more adept and quicker (with practice) on the repair process. That happened to me last night and today. I'm hopeful that we are becoming more adept at repair.

#5 - While we were having a dinner my partner initiated an "Imago dialogue" which is the communication technique we learned from reading Harville Hendrix's books. We haven't formally used that in quite a while and I was happy he suggested it. Though we'd don't formally go through the whole process that often. We do use pieces of it all the time. For example, asking the other person to repeat back what we just said to make sure we heard it correctly. It's amazing how often people don't hear one another.

"Harville: In the resting state, when we’re not distracted, the research shows we have a 13–18% accuracy rate. If we’re distracted, the distortion rate goes up to almost 100% immediately. The reason this happens is that most of us are running a movie in our minds, projecting reality as we know it or as we fear it, wish it, or remember it.

Our attention is on our own internal process, and unless we turn the switch off and make a focused effort to pay attention, we actually get very little of what’s being said to us."

https://1440.org/blog/the-art-of-listening-an-interview-with-harville-hendrix-and-helen-lakelly-hunt/