The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Good morning everyone and welcome to the second talk on Wise Listening.

It's a really fantastic thing to become a listener.

To listen well, to listen well to ourselves, to listen well to others.

And so I want to read a poem by a Japanese poet named Shin Kichi Takahashi.

It's a short poem.

I don't take your words merely as words far from it.

I listen to what makes you talk, whatever that is, and me listen.

So it's not just listening to what people have to say, certainly that's important,

especially if they want us to understand, but it's also listening to what makes them speak,

what's the motivation, what's the underlying kind of inspiration or movement to speak.

Because there's the message of the words, and also there's the message of what's making a person say, what they're going to say.

Is it a movement to feel more connected to you, or is it a movement to pull away, to avoid you,

or is it a movement to praise themselves and get affirmation, or is it a movement to apologize for themselves

and to somehow make themselves smaller in relationship to you?

Is it because they want to get something from you, or is it because they want to support you and see what they can offer you?

Are they saying what they're saying, so that in fact they do feel maybe safer with you, or feel more like a sense of friendliness or connection,

or they're saying what they want to say because they want to be safe and they're trying to create some safety.

So there goes on, the list can go on and on, but if we are only taking the literal meaning of the words into account,

we might actually be missing a huge part of what's really happening in the conversation.

And so to go along with the teaching last week on the right speech, where the second criteria for right speeches is a true,

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