Sacred Communication

 

Eric Butterworth, the late Unity minister coined the phrase Verbal Toxemia to denote the toxic effect of negative words. We take our speech for granted, but words influence what shows up in our daily living. We need a program of detoxification where we take the negative words out of our vocabulary.

In his book the Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz writes that the first agreement, “Be Impeccable with Your Word,” is the most important and the most difficult to honor. Our word is our power to create. He says it is a gift from God. Through our word we manifest everything. Ruiz goes on and says that our word is, “a power to express, communicate, to think and to create the events in our lives.”

Mother Teresa wrote that, “Loneliness is like leprosy of the west.” Lama Surya Das says that many people feel a sense of isolation and separateness. We all need to feel the warmth that comes from our connection to others. We hunger for genuine communication and connection, after all the quality of our lives is determined by our relationships.  Dennis Merrit Jones tells a story that demonstrates perfectly. A woman lived in an apartment with thin walls. Every night her neighbors put their baby to sleep in a dark room, and the child being fearful would cry. The parents were not responsive. The neighbor was not sure what to do. Then she realized if she could hear the baby, it could hear her. So, every night when it began to cry she sang lullabies to it. The baby stops crying and falls asleep. The warmth of a stranger’s voice saves a scared child from fear and loneliness. How many opportunities do you and I have to make someone’s life more pleasurable by showing them some love?