Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 72. I am your host, Noah Rasheda, and today I'm talking about Mindful Communication.

Before I jump into the topic of this podcast, I want to remind you of the Dalai Lama's advice, to not use what you learned from Buddhism to be a Buddhist, use it to be a better whatever you already are. This has always been a key message that I try to reinforce throughout the podcast and in my general approach to teaching Buddhist concepts.

So, I want to introduce you to this idea of the topic for today, Mindful Communication. About a year ago or so, I did a corporate mindfulness workshop. It was a two-day workshop for a company in Miami called Light King.

They install LED lighting, billboards, LED billboards, digital signage for companies. When you're driving and you see a digital sign that's lit up, that's what these guys do.

So, I went down there and spent a couple days doing a corporate mindfulness training workshop with all of the employees of that company. It's an awesome, awesome company. If you're ever looking for any kind of digital signs or digital billboards or anything along those lines, look them up. Light King outdoor, I think is the name there in Miami. Really good group of people.

But anyway, after that workshop, we've maintained a relationship and it's developed into once a month, 30 to 45-minute mindfulness follow-up with all of the employees there.

So, I had that call with them this morning and the topic I've been preparing for this month's call is Mindful Communication, specifically tips or tools to be more mindful with how we communicate in the workplace, with co-workers, with bosses, with customers, but also with loved ones' family.

So, I've had this topic on my mind for a while now and then yesterday I discovered this internet phenomenon that's going around with the sound of Yani or Laurel.

And those of you who don't know, you're missing out. So, you may recall from a while back there was the audio clip or an image of a dress. And some people could see the dress was like, I can't remember the colors, it was like pink and white or it was black and gray, whatever those two combinations were.

And you have some people who see one and other people see the other. And that's been around for a while and I always thought that was interesting. But this is the equivalent of that with an audio clip. And this one to me is fascinating because it's like a, you hit play, it's a direct experience, whether I'm listening on my phone or on headphones or the speaker in the house, it doesn't matter.

But if you have a group of people there and they listen to it, some people will hear the audio clip saying the name Yani. Other people will hear it saying Laurel. I am one of those who hears Laurel. There are some people who can hear both. There are some people who can't hear either one of those names. They hear a different name like Larry or, you know, some, just a whole different option.

But what I find is fascinating is there doesn't seem to be a formula that helps know which one you are. At first I thought it might be age, but I've tried this around kids and some kids here won, some kids here the other.

So it's not, it doesn't seem to be influenced by age, it doesn't seem to be influenced by gender. It just seems like some people hear one name and some people hear the other.

So I have this clip, I'll play it for you and you see what you hear.

Okay, so that was the clip. Now some of you probably heard Yani or some variation of that. Others of you heard Laurel.

And it's very likely that whichever one you heard or you may have heard both or you may have heard something completely different.

But whatever you heard, you're probably thinking to yourself, how on earth can somebody else hear, you know, if you heard Laurel, you're probably thinking, how on earth can somebody else hear Yani?

I don't even, like for me, I don't even hear anything that remotely resembles a Y sound. But yeah, I don't hear that at all.

But I tried it this morning in my office with my coworkers, all five of them very clearly heard Yani, not a single one of them heard Laurel.

In fact, they all thought I was kind of joking or pretending to hear Laurel because they were incredulous. There's no way that that sound clip is saying the word Laurel.

And I just find that fascinating. When I played this audio clip this morning on that conference call with the guys at Light King when we were doing our mindful communication follow up call for the month.

Every single one of them heard Laurel, nobody heard Yani. In fact, it was hard for me to try to convey the teaching that I wanted to tie to the audio clip because nobody heard the other version that they could only hear what I hear, which is Laurel.

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