Recognize the value of the gift of communication

Here is your daily dose of Wisdom for Living Your Best Self!

Our desire to communicate mindfully starts with a recognition that the ability to communicate is a gift – a gift of the Creator who gave us the desire, the knowledge, the ability and the equipment to communicate with others.

Imam Jafar As Sadiq (as) says:
Consider the blessing of speech, bestowed upon him by the Almighty, which is the medium for the expression of his inner thought and his warm feelings springing from his understanding and with which also he understands the inner points of others. Without this faculty he would have been like quadrupeds, neither able to convey his own inner thought to others, nor to understand the words of the speaker.

The physical process of speaking is rather complex and involves four different process which start in the lungs, go to the larynx where there are the vocal folds, then to the pharynx where the air goes up the nasal or oral cavity and finally to the mouth where the articulation takes place by involving the tongue, the teeth, the lips, the roof of the mouth.

While the physical production of sound is itself is quite amazing, we know that speaking or communication does not, in fact, start in the lungs or the vocal cords. Even animals have vocal chords and lungs and can also produce sounds but their sounds are not distinct words and their ability to communicate using sound is very limited.

Modern scientists tell us that speech does not start in the lungs, rather in starts in the brain which sends messages to the lungs about how to produce sound to communicate.

Spiritual traditions, ancient scriptures and eastern medicine go one step beyond. They maintain that communication in fact, starts in the heart. The heart is, in a sense, the data base, the initiating source of communication. The message then goes to the brain to be processed and is then delivered through the tongue.

The heart-tongue connection is really fascinating and can be found in many Eastern traditions:

Physically the heart muscle is connected to the tongue muscle. The heart we know is a very complex organ. While in the West it is seen as a muscle that functions to circulate blood and oxygen, essentially keeping us alive, in the East, it's an organ with physical, emotional, and spiritual importance—all of which work together to provide us with balanced holistic health.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, for example, the organ systems have an energetic connection with specific body parts. The tongue has this connection with the heart. The condition of the heart can be seen by observing the tongue. Being an organ of expression of what originates in the heart, doctors of TCM consider problems with speech such as stuttering, speaking quickly, or even very soft speech and difficulties speaking clearly as symptoms of a heart in disharmony.

In Islamic spirituality it is said that "a man is hidden behind his tongue", a simple saying which has so many layers of meaning, physical and metaphysical.

Imam Ali (as) also said: Speech is implanted in the heart and deposited in the thought strengthened by the intellect conveyed through the tongue its body is the letters its soul is the meaning 
its adornment is punctuation and its order is reason.

We will keep coming back to the heart-mind-tongue connection in this series.

For now, let's consider that communicating mindfully is much more than simply learning the tools of effective communication.

It starts with recognizing the deepest longing of your heart that wants to be expressed.

Deep, huh? :)