Go 40 Days Without Being Mean (from the Prison Mindfulness Institute)
Do you enjoy complaining? What about sarcasm? Gossiping? Criticizing?
If you are nodding your head, and yet reading on, you may be one among the growing number of people who are coming to see that these habitual patterns of communication may not be so enjoyable after all.
Sure, gossiping feels good, maybe even irresistible, when we start into it, but after a few minutes, is it really rewarding? Sarcasm keeps conversation funny, and life interesting, but are we even aware of how much we use it, and why? Is there a deeper and more satisfying way of communicating that has been buried behind the thick tangle of BS that makes up so much of our interactions with each other? And, can we speak in ways that do not harm others, either when present or not.
Take up a challenge described in Sarah Miller’s article in NYMag:
To examine the potentially aggressive, relationship-impairing, misery inducing habits of speech that we use on a day-to-day basis.
It will be safe to say that every one of us will catch ourselves being up to our old tricks – yelling at our cat, being snarky with our partner, sarcastic with our coworker… etc.
Try to go for a full 40 days, aware of your speech and working to keep it a kind, compassionate and supportive of others as possible.
The point of this exercise, as I see it, is not to be perfectly kind and considerate for more than a month, but just to become aware of how we are communicating. We communicate all the time, and we all have times when we wish we could have done it a little (or a lot) differently. Well, we can’t go back in time, but we can train ourselves to be more conscious of how we communicate for the future.
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