Right Speech Applies to Self Talk

In one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite dharma books, "Loving Kindness," Sharon Salzberg talks about how she'd been practicing metta, loving kindness meditation, and wasn't sure it was having any effect -- until one morning when she broke something, said to herself what she always said, "You're such a klutz," and then surprised herself with, "But I love you anyway."

Wise or skillful speech is one of the steps on the Buddha's Eightfold Path to liberation from suffering. While it's often looked at as relational -- how we speak to others -- it also applies to how we talk to ourselves. Is it kind? Is it useful? Does it need to be said?

It's been a loud, short-tempered week in the office. Blame it on the full moon, Mercury in retrograde, new-and-not-yet-up-to-speed staff, a dozen other things. When I hear people talk meanly to others, I try to consider that they also talk that way to themselves. I know how uncomfortable it is to experience it coming from someone else. I suspect it sounds just as harsh directed at yourself.

NPR this week had a story on self talk as it's used in therapy for people with eating disorders. It quotes David Sarwer, a psychologist and clinical director at the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania, says that one of the first things he does with new patients is stand them in front of a mirror and coach them to use gentler, more neutral language as they evaluate their bodies. The goal, he says, is to remove "negative and pejorative terms" from the patient's self-talk.

It also matters how you address yourself, the report says.  Psychologist Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan studied the pronouns people use when they talk to themselves silently, inside their minds.

"What we find," Kross says, "is that a subtle linguistic shift — shifting from 'I' to your own name — can have really powerful self-regulatory effects."

... He asked volunteers to give a speech — with only five minutes of mental preparation. As they prepped, he asked some to talk to themselves and to address themselves as "I." Others he asked to either call themselves "you," or to use their own names as they readied their speeches.
Kross says that people who used "I" had a mental monologue that sounded something like, " 'Oh, my god, how am I going do this? I can't prepare a speech in five minutes without notes. It takes days for me to prepare a speech!' "
People who used their own names, on the other hand, were more likely to give themselves support and advice, saying things like, "Ethan, you can do this. You've given a ton of speeches before." These people sounded more rational, and less emotional — perhaps because they were able to get some distance from themselves.

"It's almost like you are duping yourself into thinking about you as though you were another person," he says.

This is interesting from a Buddhist perspective. Since the self is only a collection of constantly changing constituent elements -- the skandhas of form, feeling, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness -- when we speak to our selves as "I," it's our confused mind talking to our confused mind. When we speak from awareness, from our innately clear and confident buddhanature, it has a different quality.

I just gave this a run-through. Looking in the mirror, "I" told myself I looked like I had gotten dressed out of the lost-and-found bin at the yoga studio. Awareness said, "Pay no attention. You look fine."

The practice -- and practicing it in meditation helps -- is to notice the self-talk before you act on it and question it. "I look fat," I say. "Really? By what standard? The irrational one in your head?" Well, yes.

Ask the magic questions: Is it kind? Is it useful? Is this the time to bring it up?

Kindness to yourself inevitably spills over into kindness to others -- genuine kindness, not indulgence. Covering up self-hatred in designer clothes doesn't actually make you feel any better. A person who feels at home in their skin does have to cover it in status symbols to prove their worth.

Try it. You, as much as anyone in the world, are deserving of your kindness.

Are we who others think we are?

In the novel I'm currently reading, the protagonist has to go through An Ordeal, one of the tests that's required to fulfill the hero trope. In this story, a work of magical realism in which existence is revealed to be a dream and dreams turn out to be prescient, the Ordeal could turn out to be anything, really. But what it is is the complete loss of everything that seems to be his identity.

Buddhism says we have no fixed, solid self. We do have, as we go about our days, many identities, We are workers, residents, citizens, coffee or tea drinkers. We groom ourselves. Part of practice is to see the ways we grasp onto those identities, and, through awareness, relax our grip.

In this story, a man, a middle-class, white-collar, average guy, one who likely would go unnoticed, is stripped of all that defined him and dropped back into his customary place. He is in a subway station, but instead of being the crisp, clean, worker bee off to an office, he is jobless, homeless, dirty, confused. Friends recognize him, and he has to sit with their pity, their flinching friendship, their averted eyes.

He is unmoored from everything, groundless. Self-less.

What if you lost everything that makes you you? It happens, and not just in fiction. It happens in layoffs, divorces, fires, and other catastrophes. What if you had nothing but the skin on your bones and even that was damaged, even that was not the skin you had creamed and buffed and soaped each morning? If you had, as our protagonist does, a carbuncle? Who would you be then?

I once heard a story from a Zen teacher, who said he had a student who was certain he had gone beyond self, who was not concerned about what others thought of him. Fine, he said. Go stand in front of the group and sing. Without accompaniment. Perform. See if that makes your self conscious. The student stayed in his seat.

Someone commented (on an an unrelated Facebook post) that "a truism in the study of psychology is that we are not who we think we are, but rather we are who we think others think we are." 

What if we are not?

Then others are not who we think they are -- or who they think we think they are. They are, in fact, just like us. There but for fortune (or karma) -- good or bad -- go you or I.

A recent study found that readers who are emotionally transported into a work of fiction display increased empathy. Art can open our eyes to a different way of seeing things. It can change the way we see real people.

Alan Wallace talks about our ephemeral identities in this commentary on the lojong slogan Examine the nature of unborn awareness:

When we seek something to grasp as our personal identity, we naturally arrive at the mind. What Sechibuwa challenges here is precisely this instinctive sense of personal identity that regards the mind as an entity in its own right. He asks us to investigate whether awareness does in fact exist in its own right, whether our minds exist intrinsically, independent of other people's minds, of the environment, and of our bodies.

In the continuum of such mental events we then discover behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns. Out of these patterns we develop a sense of personality, which we identify as "I am". But to equate ourselves with these patterns is fallacious. There is no real personal identity, no "I," no self, in these ever-changing, dependently related events that constitute our stream of awareness. In an ultimate sense, the nature of awareness is unborn; that is, it does not intrinsically arise from some preceding cause. Only on a relative or conventional level can we speak of awareness arising and passing again and again. The concept of mind as an abiding, isolated, changeless entity that performs a variety of mental events-choices, memories, imagination, hopes, fears-that mind as an entity existing in its own right is in fact a non-entity. It is a purely artificial fabrication, and by identifying with that false concept of mind we do ourselves great damage.

You are the news

Look at this screenshot from early January. Enlarge it if you need to. Contemplate it. Just another day in the New York Times?

Well, no. The headlines here are from Fox News. (Screenshot for proof.) This faux home page was created by Dan Schultz, the MIT grad student also responsible for Truth Goggles, using his NewsJack point-and-click “remixer.” I've lifted it from Jonathan Stray at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard's website.

Stray's blog post is titled "How Do You Tell When the News is Biased? It depends on how you see yourself."

Stray cites various studies that have been done that found that perception of bias in news reports had a lot to do with the news consumer's perception of the news source, not the content. Some, for example, involved showing Al Jazeera content under other banners.

This is of interest to me as a journalist and a Buddhist. Both involve trying to remove the filters from our perceptions that color our understanding. And both require detachment from praise and blame -- one pair in the Eight Vicissitudes -- to operate with integrity.

People I respect in the Buddhist community, who are working to see the world with clarity and compassion, often dismiss my profession as inherently unmindful. But maybe the mindfulness is in the mind of the perceiver.

Stray talks about "hostile media effort," in which both sides in a story think the story in attacking them.

Like a lot of experimental psychological research, the hostile media effect suggests we’re not as smart as we think we are. We might like to think of ourselves as impartial judges of credibility and fairness, but the evidence says otherwise. Liberals and conservatives can (and often do) believe the same news report is biased against both their views; they aren’t both right.

...Communications researcher Scott Reid has proposed that we can explain the hostile media effect through the psychological theory of self-categorization. This is a theory about personal identity and group identity, and it says that we “self-stereotype,” placing conceptual labels on ourselves just as we might make assumptions about other people. We all have multiple identities of this kind: gender, age, political preferences, race, nationality, subculture, and so on.

Here are is more about Reid's experiments. Stray's article lays it out in more detail. There's even a chart.

For my purposes, this is the nut: Our perception of bias changes depending on the self-identity we currently have in mind.Those self-identities are insidious. In Buddhism, we generally just call it the Self. The Self is the thing that we create in our minds then treat as a solid, unchanging real thing that has to be dressed up and defended and credentialed and compared to all the other Selves out there. We feel good about our Self or bad about it, depending on how we think it's doing in regard to all the Other Selves.

That opposition between Self and Other creates suffering. It leads to feelings of inferiority or superiority -- or at best, separateness.

Stray suggests that the way for journalists to overcome accusations of bias from all sides is to downplay the divisions, to not pit one side against the other. (Obviously some journalists don't give a shit about this; I'd argue that they're not true journalists but propagandists.)

The trick would be to shy away from invoking divisive identities, preferring frames that allow members of a polarized audience to see themselves as part of the same group. ... Encouraging the audience to perceive itself as unified — this seems simplistic, or naïve. But the consideration of identity is foundational to fields like mediation and conflict resolution. Experimental evidence suggests that it might be important in journalism too.

In all of life, seeing life or society as "all" seems to me to be the best way to reduce complaints because it reduces suffering about problems that are only problems if you're protecting a Self.