Just as people do physical workouts to feel vitality during all of life and not just while exercising, we also don’t meditate just to experience greater openness, clarity, and depth during our sitting, but to enjoy those positive fruits during all of the rest of our life too. One area where our meditation practice can specifically help us is in difficult conversations that we may have with other people.
One strategy that meditation practice can provide for us during spicy and delicate conversations is to be more grounded in our own power and truth. When we practice body mindfulness during a dedicated period of meditation, we are cultivating a positive skill that we can also deploy in the midst of a challenging conversation. Being able to stay connected with how our body feels, and not get lost in words and concepts, can have us be more grounded in our own needs, our own beliefs, and what we are comfortable with and not comfortable with. When we do so, we are more able to hold on to our own frame of reference and not just get sucked into how other people see things. When we can be grounded in our own physical feelings when talking to others, we are less likely to let ourselves get rolled over.
A different strategy is to use the powers of concentration and sensitization to details that we develop during our meditation periods to deeply focus in and empathically listen to what another person is saying. When we tune into such phenomena as how energy seems to be flowing in another person’s body and how their breathing is, to the rising and falling of the volume and timbre of words that they use, and to the deep meaning of what they are saying (and thus getting a sense of how the world seems to them), then, suddenly other people in difficult conversations seem less like fire breathing dragons and more like just another human trying to get their needs met in a way that we can understand. When we use our power of mindfulness to be deeply present with another person, we’re more likely to feel empathy for where they are coming from and to respond in a positive way.
These two strategies – grounding in our own power by feeling our own bodies, and developing empathy by tuning deeply in to the reality of other person – actually work well together. When deployed, they can lead to better outcomes from difficult conversations that are in the end more satisfying to both us and others.