BCBS warmly invites you to join us for a six-week donation-based online course with Oren Jay Sofer this summer, Wise Speech: An Introduction to Mindful Communication, on Tuesdays starting June 16.
Wise Speech: A Practice for Our Time
by Oren Jay Sofer
A few minutes into my toddler’s latest tantrum, I can feel myself teetering toward the edge of my capacity. I take a deep breath, knowing I’ll only make things worse if I lose my cool too.
The heaviness of the headlines fades as my world narrows to this one interaction. I muster one line of empathy: “It makes sense you’re upset—you really wanted another lollipop, and I said no.”
Some days, it’s hard to say what’s more challenging: the dizzying pace of change and collective pain we’re living through, or raising two children under the age of four. (Most days, it’s parenting.)
Communication is where practice meets real life. There’s a reason the Buddha singled out “Right Speech” in the Noble Eightfold Path: words are powerful. They can heal or hurt, soothe or inflame, unite or divide. Communication is hard. It’s messy. And for all of these reasons, it’s also a ground for deep transformation—if we’re willing to take it on as a practice.
Bringing Speech into Practice
The Buddha offered inspiring teachings on Wise Speech, but little technical guidance on how to implement them moment by moment. Meditation cultivates insight into change and suffering, but without a method, those insights don’t always translate into our conversations.
I first noticed a gap between formal meditation and my communication in my twenties. Any calm or goodwill from meditation dissipated when conflict arose—a disagreement in the kitchen, a family conversation, a decision that didn’t go my way.
During this same period, I came across Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which offered practical tools to embody the intentions of Wise Speech. At the heart of this approach is a simple but radical shift: learning to understand all behavior and emotion as expressions of fundamental needs. The more clearly we can sense this level of experience—in ourselves and others—the more capacity we have to respond compassionately.
Looking back some thirty years, I’m humbled by how tenacious communication habits are—and I also have no doubt that genuine transformation is possible. We start by knowing the tools, then we practice to internalize them. I feel more agency and flexibility in my speech, more tenderness for myself and our world, and I’ve seen similar shifts in countless others.
Communication is a daily practice: we enter the complexity of relationship, with all its beauty and richness as well as its pain and vulnerability. It includes not just what we say, but when, how, and why we say it. It includes how we listen. It invites us to be rigorously honest, and brings us directly into contact with the places we tend to get caught—our feelings, needs, and attachment to being right.
In the process, we cultivate strengths of heart: humility, patience, and fierce truth-telling married with genuine kindness. These days, when I feel defensive with my wife, pausing and getting curious often helps me stay connected to her needs without abandoning my own.
A Practice for Our Time
This training extends far beyond close relationships. Wise Speech is a vital resource for civic life. It helps us stay human in times of dehumanization, disinformation, and division. As we witness ongoing harm—from the atrocities of war to the obstruction of humanitarian aid to the targeting of immigrant communities—our words can perpetuate violence or help interrupt it. They can pit us against one another, or they can help us cross divides and restore dignity.
In moments when silence protects brutality, Wise Speech becomes an ethical necessity. To speak with clarity and care can be an act of conscience and solidarity: a way of refusing dehumanization, making space for grief, and affirming our dignity and shared humanity.
Speech cannot mend all that is broken. But it plays a vital role in how we engage, repair, and reimagine together. I think of people speaking courageously under pressure: judges striving to uphold integrity in the courts, climate scientists repeatedly sounding the alarm, ordinary people refusing to normalize cruelty.
Communication can become a powerful site of practice: Are we adding to fear, animosity, and despair, or creating space for understanding, integrity, and truth? Even amid conflict or collapse, the way we speak can be a refuge, a bridge, a seed of something new.
Making It Real
How do we bring these aspirations to life? We don’t have to act out our pain or stay frozen in helplessness. But we do have to work at it. Like the rest of the path, transformation happens gradually—one moment, one conversation at a time.
Pause before you respond. Feel your feet, soften your belly, or notice the tone of your voice. Even a short pause interrupts the momentum of habit. It gives the nervous system a chance to settle and creates room to choose words that reflect your values rather than your reactivity.
Don’t believe every interpretation that pops into your mind. Get curious instead. Beneath every action and reaction—our own and others’—are deeper needs: for safety, respect, care, autonomy, belonging. When conflict arises, ask yourself: What matters here? What do I need? What might they need? Getting curious doesn’t mean agreeing or being passive. It means listening beneath the surface so our speech can be more honest, powerful, and kind.
This is the path. Speech is where practice comes alive.
If you’d like to learn more, join me for my six-week donation-based online course, Wise Speech: An Introduction to Mindful Communication, which starts on Tuesday, June 16th.
