How To Use Tone Of Voice To Enhance Your Well-being | Guided Meditation #105
A guided-meditation transcript that teaches listeners to notice and transform condescension, arrogance, superiority, and righteous tone of voice. It opens with grounding (body scan, creating a private calm space), prompts honest self-observation of tone in close/attached relationships, and offers situational strategies (when to express needs vs. when to internally accept, workplace example). Emphasizes humility, honesty, and using intention to shift tone toward care and dignity; closes with a brief prayer to remember these practices in challenging moments.
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Meditation is for so many people, the best way to truly gain benefit in your response to personal challenges. As you invest in bringing your own experience to the guided meditations, you'll give yourself the best chance to change long standing patterns from suffering toward a state of well being, peace and healing. It's important to put yourself in a comfortable body position in a private space where you're not disturbed. Turn off your phone and be ready to really be alert.
So just start off by doing a body scan and seeing how does your body feel. And notice if there's any tension in your jaw or your stomach, your shoulders. And feel free to just move around a little bit to care for your body itself, See if breathing helps or movement helps, but just know that you want to care for your body's ease. Because we can be on such automatic pilots. You can be on such automatic pilots that you forget that of course I want to have my body be as relaxed as possible. And as you find this place of a bit more relaxation, ask yourself, when have you been condescending or arrogant, superior, righteous, and look for examples of it. And if you can't find any examples of yourself, look harder. And also, I'm sure you can at least find examples of people around you that were condescending or arrogant or righteous and see your challenging emotions. And particularly for this meditation, we're using condescension and arrogance so that you can identify it and see the subtlety of how when we're condescending or when you're condescending and arrogant, typically it's like a blindfold. It's like it's not socially appropriate to be condescending and arrogant and just say out loud, oh, by the way, I'm just being condescending and arrogant with you. We have trained ourselves to be unconscious when, when we're condescending or arrogant. Unless we really have a more serious issue where I'm condescending and arrogant and I don't care, because everybody deserves it or you deserve it. So by being aware of the condescension, arrogance, superiority, righteousness, that is a gift, because by being aware of it, you no longer are being driven by it. You have a choice to be able to start to impact that tone of voice. So just pause again and look at your life situations, really glimpse the times that you've been interacting. And very likely these kinds of feelings will come out most with what psychology refers to as your attached relationships, which means relationships where you're living with someone or have lived with someone, or they're really Important to you, which is a thing that most people don't understand. Well, because it seems like if somebody's really close to you, there'd be the people that you would not be that way with. But typically, because you need them so much, if they don't fulfill your needs, that's when you see the condescension. So really sensitize yourself to see the paradox that if you can see from a neutral observer, from a witness, from just an honest awareness, this quality coming out of your vocal cords, you've just opened the door to lessen the chance for suffering. So as you keep scanning, just as gently as possible, identify the feeling of condescension and arrogance. And as you do, ask yourself, do I want to find a way to be more caring and still take care of my needs? Of course you do, if you ask the question. But you need to ask the question. So again, do I want to find a way to be more caring and still take care of my needs? When you're in that moment, you're at a pivotal place where you can change the quality of your relationship. It's quite miraculous when you see how much potency it has if you're honest and humble enough. Humility is a big part of this. Honesty is a big part of this. To see yourself naked and not let yourself be believing, I did it because you did xyz, or it was you first. Almost all of us are conditioned to believe that if someone doesn't treat us well, it's a version of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. If you're angry at me, I'm going to be angry at you automatically. And this really is. It's not turning a cheek. It's temporarily turning the cheek, but then coming back and being able to find your best self. Because you're asking yourself, how can I express my tone of voice that has a musical quality that is just the right kind of music, and discover and express my need in a way that dignifies myself, my relationship, and really, life itself? Because if you get this and if you keep tracking right now and ongoing where your tone of voice creates suffering, and you know that you want to bring your heart and your wisdom into your tone of voice, you have a dynamic relationship with yourself. You're not a fixed entity. You're a process. You're alive. You're using your honesty and your intention to care as a dynamism. But you need to remember, and then you need to be wise enough to look at, gee, how did it really work out when I just reacted impulsively and emotionally. How can I make it work out? When I really pause and accept, ah, this is my feeling state. I don't want to just act it out and I also don't want to suppress it. I want to recognize that it's there. I want to recognize that I have a need that wasn't satisfied. I want to identify the need and then I want to do my best to communicate the need if it's at all possible. And when it's not possible, I want to go through the same process internally. Let's say you're with your boss, maybe that's the situation you're flashing on and your boss will not tolerate anything at all. Then what you are going to want to do is say, okay, I'm furious at my boss and if I express this, I'm fired and I need the money, I need the work. And if I express my need even cleanly, he or she's going to be defensive. And so I need to work it out inside myself. I need to come to a tolerance and, or an acceptance of my feeling and then ask myself, how do I best take care of myself? And then you might say, you know what, this is not the time for the truth to be expressed even cleanly. I need to keep my work unless I have another alternative. So I just want to be relatively peaceful or benign and recognize that is the wisdom of sometimes recognizing that being authentic is not the right path. Not when you have someone that's completely unreceptive. So this is not a one size fits all situation. You also need to read the situation of where you are and ask yourself, how do I best take care of myself in this unique situation? As you do this and you're looking, see if you can sense the potential optimism, the potential wisdom that you can impart or inwardly experience. That can be your sense of identity. This can actually go so deep if you practice it for a long while, where this is much more powerful than your feelings themselves. Your wisdom, your wanting to care, you're wanting to be sensible can start to become more important to you than your feelings. Now that's an evolutionary step, a big leap. For right now, you're just trying to do the little moves that will give you a chance of best taking care of the situation you're in. So it's so important to keep staying aware of your own rationalizations. So look for them now where, well, they deserve it. Yeah, I don't want to stop my feelings because they just shit on me and see that these are half truths. It may be a fact that that happened. Let's say it is a fact. But that doesn't mean that for you to respond in kind is going to leave you living a fulfilled life. This wisdom, your wisdom, ask it. Does it not want to live a fulfilled life? Do you not want to take care of your needs and discover them? Do you not want to have both that clarity of need and capacity to send the music that's needed to define yourself more and more as that mixture of heart and wisdom? So just pause. Don't just trust your feelings. This is not a time to trust your gut. See if you have largely trusted your gut like most of humanity, and see if you can realize that by taking the step of acceptance of your condescension, arrogance. And then ask this question and just let it give you all kinds of alternatives as to how you need to relate in your tone and your words to inspire your life, to leave you encouraged to develop trust and peace. See if you can leave this meditation with a prayer. May I remember when I'm most challenged to be aware of my needs and my tone of voice so I can take care of myself in a way that's really going to allow my life to be intimate and more inspired and more fulfilled.
