Many of us think of mindfulness as something that we develop alone in silence. But sometime practicing being mindful when interacting with other people can be among the most positively transformational practice that we can do.
We spend many, often most, of our waking hours communicating with others. The patterns through which we engage in social interaction determine, to a large extent, the quality of our relationships, and therefore of our lives. The effectiveness level of our communication often emerges from – as much as our words themselves – where we’re coming from, the qualities of our presence, and where our attention is as we speak and listen.
A mindful person can aim to fully show up for ourselves, the people we interact with, and whatever happens between us, bringing composure and depth to the process of making genuine contact with another human being. Sometimes it starts with having a simple intention to bringing to our conversations mindful qualities such as genuine care, open curiosity, friendly acceptance, patience, clarity, settled stability, and focus on what most matters.
Many times, when interacting with others, we go into unconscious autopilot or getting tangled up in our own minds can have us lose touch with the living person we are talking to. This can deaden the interaction, feel unsatisfying, and have us lose track of what is actually being talked about.
Part of mindful social interaction is being aware of ourselves – what is actually happening with and motivating us, what sorts of thoughts emotions and body sensations we are having, what is sincerely important and matters to us, where our attention is focused, and how we truly see others and the conversations that we are in
One tool that we can use to have mindful conversations is to stay grounded in awareness of our breath and body sensations, just as we might in silent solo meditation, but when in the intensity of social interactions. Another tool is to make more space for silence, taking a micro-pause before responding.
And one of the most powerful tools is deep, rich listening where we seek to get attuned with and more fully understand others. Part of that is to listen with empathy, to get a sense how it is for other people to be themselves, to ‘take the ‘position’ of the person you’re listening to. We can listen for meaning, to understand accurately what is important to others, and perhaps what it is that they are actually asking of us.
We can eventually find a balance point, where we combine rich full awareness of ourselves with that of the others around us.
Sometimes deep listening and interpersonal presence can feel uncomfortably intimate and vulnerable in workplace social relationships, or even too intense in our friends, family, and love relationships. The more we practice it, however, the more we are able to open to and tolerate such discomfort, and we can come to enjoy the deeper richness, nourishment, connection, and effectiveness that comes from mindfully truly tuning into the deeper levels of our social relationships.