The Person You Stopped Listening To

That gap is not a flaw in mindfulness. It is a consequence of a decision — a defensible one — to offer a technique and leave the anthropology to the user. But the effect at cultural scale is that we have handed millions of people the first half of a discipline and let them conclude they were bad at it when the second half never arrived.

The second half has three parts, and none of them is mystical: knowing what you value, decided in advance; rehearsing the response before you need it, the way any athlete rehearses; and accepting that the answer is yours.

There is a reason the practices that only ever go inward tend to produce people who are calm and slightly absent.

The turn outward has a technique, and it is not complicated to describe. You listen to another person with the same discipline you would bring to the breath: attention on them, and when you notice yourself composing a reply, rehearsing a defence, or consulting the mirror — you let it go and come back. Not as politeness. As practice. Five minutes of it is harder than twenty minutes of sitting, and it changes marriages faster than anything else I know.

Tonight, when the person you live with says something ordinary, try this: assume you do not already know what they mean, and ask. It is a small experiment. It is also, in miniature, the whole discipline.

This is an excerpt. Continue reading the full essay →

Julius Barreto-Lins, MD, MPH, PhD, is a physician and the creator of Logomeditation, a contemplative method grounded in Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy.

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