Jonathan Reams

The words just flew out of my mouth — “I think I want to be with her as well.” Although part of me recognized the insanity of telling my partner this, I was driven by some overwhelming emotional state that I was not in control of. The next six months were spent trying to understand and extract myself from that moment and recover the relationship I had.

On a trip to visit online work colleagues, I’d had a very deep and overwhelming experience of connection with one of them. Unknown to me at the time, this had activated some unresolved issues from a past relationship, and the energy of that relationship had found an opening to insinuate itself into my current relationship.

I came home from this trip, firmly placed my foot in my mouth, and was now suffering the consequences. My partner’s natural reaction was basically a version of “like hell you will,” and my counter-reaction only spiraled things further out of control. This interplay between us generated enough tension that a few days later the only way to relieve it was to break up.

But deep underneath all of this, there was still an abiding presence that held a space for reflection and understanding to gradually emerge. There were many tangled layers of illusion to unpack and sort through, but persistent attention to this process gradually allowed the energy between us to recover its natural flow, and we moved beyond this karmic glitch.

The lessons learned from this experience helped me to see that there is often a hidden side to our communication that, if not examined, can keep us generating lifetimes of karma to work off. I would like to describe a model I think can help make sense of how these hidden aspects of our communication operate, and what we can do to counter them.

Imagine that we have not one body, but three. We know about our physical body with its various characteristics that make us unique. While our physical bodies also contain chemistry that is connected with emotions, we can imagine an emotional body that is made up of our more subjective experience of emotion. In a similar way, our brains have much to do with our thoughts, but we can also sense that there is more to our mental experience than our brains can contain and thus we can also imagine a mental body. Who then is the “we” that has these three bodies? We can call it Soul, or essence, higher self, whatever is meaningful for us.

Within each of these three bodies we have attachments — systems of energy that we take on as karmic baggage. These can be physical such as different physical body issues, emotional such as unresolved trauma from past experiences, or mental such as an attachment to an ideology or belief system. These attachments perform a variety of functions for us, many useful, and others not.

In relation to communication, when something comes to us from someone else, it most often gets caught, filtered or even distorted by one or more of these attachments. What we hear is not what was being said, but a combination of it with our attachments. When we respond, we can also have what we intend to say get distorted by our attachments, leading to the kind of spiraling situations like I described above. In fact, it is most often not our true self or Soul that responds, but a reflex reaction directly from one of our attachments. A communication theorist once said that people do not listen, they reload.

So, with this model in mind, how can we become more aware of the hidden side of communication? How can this awareness help keep us from foot-in-mouth disease, or further rounds of karmic repetition? I will offer three simple practices — reflection, suspension and listening.

We can use reflection to examine, or take a perspective on something that might previously have operated automatically in order to build up awareness of our attachments. If we are unaware of something operating within us, then it can easily control us. We can even think that these attachments are us, forming part of our personality — “it’s just the way we are” — and we fall victim to them. Taking time to reflect can give us the space necessary to take that first step of becoming aware of an attachment and how it can filter our communication.

Once we have done this, we can practice suspending our attachment. Suspension involves lightly holding out in front of us what normally operates automatically in the background. By suspending our attachments, we enlarge the space between the attachment’s energy and our actions. We do not try to get rid of it, nor do we allow the energy of the attachment to act reflexively. We simply allow our attention to be greater than our attachments. Doing this, we can then move the attachment off to the side, and see what is actually in front of us instead of only perceiving images filtered by the attachment.

Listening involves shifting our attention from the attachment we have suspended to the space opened by moving the attachment to the side. In that space, what is real and true for us, Soul, can enter our awareness. The voice of God is always whispering in our ear, but our attachments filter it out and dominate our attention. The Jesuits have a lovely phrase for the practice of this kind of listening — the discernment of spirits. We develop a greater sensitivity for discerning between the voice of our attachments and the voice of God. This can bring us into a deeper sense of integrity with ourselves and from this awareness we find new choices for action emerging.

Practicing these steps can keep us from foot-in-mouth disease running rampant and perpetuating the karmic patterns that seem to determine the course of our lives. They can also help us extract our feet once they have been firmly planted. We can gradually disentangle the enmeshed threads of our many attachments, allowing the hidden side of our communication to be illuminated. Attending to our physical, emotional and mental attachments through this process of communication awareness can help us reverse the spiraling cycles of karmic activity that can keep us trapped. It can release us little by little from our karmic bonds and give us more freedom to live a spiritual life.