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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So, hello. Welcome to this third talk on wise speech.

And then calling it wise speech, it includes the idea of

kind speech, or speech which supports healthy relatedness, healthy relationships with others.

And bring that to the forefront that we want to establish healthy relationships that are beneficial,

that are mutually supportive, that are caring, that express love and respect.

And it's all too easy for our words to not do that.

Our words to carry with them sometimes hostility, sometimes our frustration, sometimes our criticalness of others.

And in that the habit formation and then of saying things which are mean or harsh, saying things in which the relationship doesn't come together into some kind of

connectivity or healthy relatedness, but actually the opposite.

We're pushing people away, we're creating bigger divisions between people, bigger rifts between people by what we say.

And if in extreme versions, relationships might take a lot of work to repair.

Or maybe some times when we use our harsh voice, we do it to strangers and we never have a chance to repair anything.

But it's clearly created, we push people away and maybe that's what we want to do.

We're yelling at someone who's driving we don't like.

And we'll never see them again.

But it contributed to the society of angry people, frustrated people of people who somehow feel now defensive or feel more likely to be triggered and stressed by everything.

And so why speech, supportive speech, speech that connects people, creates unity, unifies people, not divides people.

And these are teachings, clear instructions from the Buddha. He talked about the importance of speech which unifies and rather than divides.

And he talked about abandoning malicious speech which divides people, but speaking in supportive ways and kinds of ways that unifies people, brings them together.

So one of the ways in terms of these five areas, five ways of why speech.

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