#014 -mindfulness and the self in social situations when speaking a foreign language.

#014 - Gabi explores in this episode the how mindfulness can help us become less self-concerned when speaking a foreign language in a social situation.


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Transcript

Welcome to the Learning Languages and Society with Gabby podcast, where it's all about the fascinating world of languages and culture. Let's rock. 

Hi everyone, my name is Gabi and today I want to address our attention to a really cool subject. I would like to talk about mindfulness and the social self when speaking a foreign language.

There is some valuable knowledge from mindfulness one can certainly use when speaking a foreign language within a social context.

Sometimes you happen to be in a situation where you have to speak a different language, you are suddenly surrounded by people who might pay attention to what you have to say but you have very little time to make a good impression and you suddenly feel the rash of anxiety take over, suddenly, you are all thumbs, the words come out of your mouth in an unintelligible way and you realize that you can’t really talk or get your message across even though you know damn well you know those words. 

Maybe you’ve known them for as long as you can remember but for some reason you’re just too anxious and they simply won’t come out.

This is exactly where mindfulness kicks in. 

Now I’ve said in different occasions that within the realm of mindfulness the illusion of the self is very real however not every self is a mirage. In meditation you are not a thing but you are a kind of process and we all experience different states of self. 

I will give you an example:

When I was at school I had the experience of being an older adult in my university so I was cool and knowledgeable and experienced but simultaneously I was painfully old just to be a university student. 

So I was both a celebrity and part of me was also ashamed at the same time. So I felt the drastic change from walking from the bar where I would be having a couple of beers with the other students, who were younger than me, into the faculty building and facing my teachers who knew I had probably been a school dropout in the past. 

So my perception of my own self changed drastically depending on how the other person saw me, or rather how I imagined the other person saw me. 

The other kids from school would look up to me, while some of the teachers would look down on me, but we’re all in this situation in a way.

We all have encounters with people that seem to destabilize us where we feel we don’t have access to our full capacities as humans or to our best version. 

So many encounters turn out to be less than perfect, and the degree of dissatisfaction is generally associated to the degree that we are hampered by neurotic self concern. 

Let’s say you’re going home for vacation to see your parents and siblings. So it doesn’t matter how hard you try to make them see you under a different light, your family will always somehow manage to reframe you into the old version of you, or who they thought it was you. 

And then, as if by pure magic, you might begin to feel the way you used to feel in the past when you lived with them.

Mindfulness could help you in situations like this, but you don’t want it to become a source of self-consciousness when you’re with others your meditations shouldn’t make you become more aware of yourself. 

It’s not a mode of inwardness that causes you to recoil even further from relationship. Ideally mindfulness should help you pay more attention to who you’re talking to, and if you’ve broken into a non-dual state of mindfulness then social situations become situations where this change can be appreciated most strikingly.

When somebody is talking to you and is looking at you what are they looking at? in your experience you are not a thing being looked at you are the condition in which they and the world are appearing this is not speaking metaphysically, this is the actual character of conscious experience.

 You don’t see your face the only face you get to see actually belongs to the other person who is now talking to you and looking at you if you follow the other’s person gaze back to where you think you are you might suddenly experience that consciousness is just the space in which everything is appearing.

 If you look for yourself in that moment you might find that only the world remains but whatever the character of your experience the role of mindfulness at this point is not to prevent negative states of mind to arise, you should go to these situations knowing you’re going to have negative states of mind like self-judgement, self-doubt, annoyance, anxiety, go in like you’re playing a video game, challenges will appear, feel negative emotions, but let them go, don’t act on them, just let them pass you by.

In your next social situation just become interested in noticing one negative emotion and not do anything about it, do not be reactive, just let it pass away, everyone you meet is practically drowning in self-concern.

Just look at them, they’re worried about what others think of them, if you take a step back from feeling implicated, you will realize that you’re surrounded by a procession of human frailty, so compassion is good, we’re all in this sinking boat, whatever is true in the cosmos, this is it for us,  however depressing this might sound, this is the only life we have and we have to enjoy it.

Another question: How is it that you feel awkward with some people and so good with others? Why do some people have so much power over your mind?

And none of these changes are who you really are, there’s just a flow of experience, there are patters, but you don’t have to conform to those patters, you don’t have to be the person who felt bad last time in a given conversation, and whatever happens when you leave a social situation, mindfulness allows you not to carry that with you.

You don’t have to finish whatever argument you had with you sister or with your mum or with your parents in your head, you don’t have to finish the conversation with her in your head, the time to talk to her is gone, so who are you talking to now?