Sally Kempton | Yoga Journal
At a dinner party I recently attended, the host asked us: “Did your parents ever say something that you’ve carried throughout your life?” As people shared, we were struck by how many of us had been shaped by a parent’s words. The woman whose father had told her,”Whatever you do in life, be the best,” became a successful entrepreneur. The woman who had heard, “Nobody’s looking at you,” spent her career guiding powerful people from the sidelines. Words had literally defined their lives.
The power of words isn’t lost on anyone—just think of the pleasure you feel when someone pays you a sincere compliment, or the discomfort of realizing you’ve spilled a secret you’d promised to keep. Words and the energy they carry make or break friendships and careers; they define us as individuals and even as cultures. We know this, and yet we often let our words flow out more or less unmediated, like random pebbles tossed into a lake. Sometimes, it’s only when the ripples spread and cause waves, and the waves rush back and splash us, that we stop to think about the way we speak.
The sages of yoga obviously understood the human tendency to run off at the mouth, because many texts of the inner life, from the Upanishads and the Yoga Vasistha to the Bhagavad Gita, counsel us to use words carefully. The Buddha made right speech one of the pillars of his Noble Eightfold Path. On the simplest level, these sages point out, unnecessary speaking wastes energy that could be devoted to self-inquiry and transformative action. More important, though, is the power that words have to change the communal atmosphere, to cause joy or pain, and to create a climate that fosters truth or falsity, kindness or cruelty.
Of course, in an era where unsubstantiated rumors roll endlessly through the blogosphere, where lying and concealment and spin are so much a part of public utterance that words have lost their meaning and most of us automatically suspect anything a public figure says, the very idea of right speech can sound countercultural. And yet, as with so many of the yogic dicta, it makes profound sense. So much of the pain we cause ourselves and each other could be avoided if we were just a bit more discriminating about what we say. Our relationships, our work environment, even our feelings about ourselves, can be transformed simply by taking time to think about how words create reality. Yes, words create reality. That’s an understanding you’ll find in most of the great wisdom traditions, but especially the Vedic and Tantric traditions of India and in the texts of Kabbalah, with which they have so much in common.
The bottom line of the Tantric teaching on words is this: Since everything in existence, including rocks and planets, is made out of different densities of vibration—that is, out of coagulated sound—words are not merely signifiers, but actual powers. The strongest transformative energies are locked into those special words called mantras, which when empowered and properly pronounced, can change the course of a life. But ordinary, mundane words also hold their own vibratory force. All speech, especially speech imbued with strong feeling or emotion, creates waves of energy that radiate through our bodies and into the world, vibrating with complementary word streams and helping to create the atmosphere we live in.
Our bodies and subconscious minds hold the residue of every kind or cruel word we’ve ever taken in. So does the very air and soil. When you feel a particular vibe in a room, chances are that what you notice is the energetic residue of the words that have been spoken there. Words—whether spoken or thought—are constantly altering reality, shifting the vibratory atmosphere in our bodies, in our homes and places of work, in our cities. So the choices we make about what to say and not say are not just of casual importance.
Where Words Come From
To practice right speech is essentially to approach speaking as a form of yoga. The first stage in the yoga of speech is to start becoming conscious of what comes out of your mouth. You might begin by spending a day eavesdropping on yourself—ideally, without activating your inner critic. Try to notice not just what you say but also the tone with which you say it. See if you can sense the emotional residue your words create. How do you feel after certain remarks? How do other people react?
