Episode 062 :: Dan Huston :: Communicating Mindfully: Mindfulness-Based Communication and Emotional Intelligence

Dan Huston

Professor Dan Huston joins us to speak about his university class and text book Communicating Mindfully: Mindfulness-Based Communication and Emotional Intelligence.

In your meditation practice, you may have noticed how much internal dialogue is happening, moment by moment, distracting you from just being present with your experience. That’s our default mode, thinking and perhaps doing, rather than being. Our practice helps us to see and experience a little more directly what’s going on in our external and internal environment. Now consider the situation when we’re communicating with someone else. We may still have that narrative locomotive, fueled by the fire of emotions, memories, habit patterns of behavior and speech, and so does the other person. Communication is tremendously complex! What would it be like if our mindfulness practice helped raise our awareness of that complexity, and gave us a little space to respond, rather than react, in communications?

As a professor in the English Department at NHTI, Concord’s Community College, Dan Huston has been incorporating mindfulness, meditation, and emotional intelligence into his communication curriculum for over fifteen years. He was awarded NHTI’s 2008 Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and has received training at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His publications include the textbook, Communicating Mindfully: Mindfulness-Based Communication and Emotional Intelligence; an essay, “How Mindfulness Can Help Us Become Better Communicators,” published in the 2006 Rowman and Littlefield anthology Teaching with Joy: Educational Practices for the Twenty-First Century; and a chapter, “Waking Up to Ourselves: The Use of Mindfulness Meditation and Emotional Intelligence in the Teaching of Communication,” which appears in the Jossey-Bass Sourcebook Contemplative Teaching and Learning.

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Music for This Episode Courtesy of Rodrigo Rodriguez

The music heard in this podcast is from Rodrigo Rodriguez. You can visit his website to hear more of his music, get the full discography, and view his upcoming tour dates.