{"id":1288,"date":"2014-09-07T21:09:38","date_gmt":"2014-09-08T01:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2014-09-08T18:14:19","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T22:14:19","slug":"i-dont-have-an-accent-you-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/i-dont-have-an-accent-you-do\/","title":{"rendered":"I Don\u2019t Have an Accent, You Do!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Discrimination<\/a>

Courtesy of \u00a0 http:\/\/chapmangamo.tumblr.com<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cYou talk to her.\u00a0 She\u2019s got a thick accent, and I can\u2019t understand a word she said.\u201d\u00a0 These are the words I overheard from the nurse on the other end of the line. Before the nurse who took over the call began to speak, I wondered if I\u2019d been in the South so long that I\u2019d lost all my northern pizazz and somehow traded it for a southern drawl. But that couldn\u2019t be it \u2013 people I meet still call me out on my New Yorkish pronunciation of \u201ccawfee.\u201d \u00a0I had grown up on the East Coast, gone to school in the North, meandered in the Midwest, and landed in the South. In each location I was faced with adjusting my understanding and accommodating my own style.\u00a0 I hung on for what seemed like eternity as my professor from Mississippi pronounced my name at such a generous pace, that for the first time I discovered that it took three syllables to get through it.\u00a0 At first I held back my laughter, thinking it was a joke.\u00a0 Later, I held my tongue so as not to finish the word for him. \u00a0On another occasion, I drove around a four-block area in Indiana for a half an hour, looking for a street I had transcribed as \u201cAhaya Boulevard,\u201d only to discover the gentleman giving me directions meant \u201cOhio Boulevard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though humorous moments occur as we all try to understand one another, I suspected that the source of my current misunderstanding, as my long-distance call was shuffled from the first nurse to the second, was much more pervasive.\u00a0 I believe it had to do with the quick conclusions we all jump to.\u00a0 Another way to conceptualize this idea is our ongoing process of judging, both overtly and covertly.\u00a0 Yes, we are judgmental beings who draw conclusions in a blink of an eye.\u00a0 This fact is not all bad and can serve to be adaptive for our survival. Indeed, there is a wonderful book based on this premise titled Blink<\/em>.<\/p>\n

However, in my practice of meditation, I have become more interested in the ways that judgments cause us distress.\u00a0 Meditation is not about annihilating all assessments. Like much of mindfulness, it is about becoming more aware of judgments and preconceived notions that we make. As we \u201csit\u201d with our minds, we tend to become more aware of thoughts about ourselves and others.\u00a0 In this spaciousness we can challenge our views, particularly ones that create distress.\u00a0 It\u2019s not uncommon to meditate and realize that along with our suffering we are telling ourselves they we are stupid, lazy, or in some other way not good enough.\u00a0 Once we become aware of the underlying dialogues about ourselves and others, we can open to the possibility of seeing with greater clarity. This process brings us the opportunity to experience even difficult situations with less distress and decrease our prejudiced thoughts of others.<\/p>\n

As for my phone call, you see, I was calling the hospital near where I was raised to speak to a nurse about my recently admitted mother.\u00a0 My mother does have an obvious accent since she grew up in Europe.\u00a0 I was raised in the US and thus do not have \u201cthat\u201d type of accent.\u00a0 So, I asked, the nurse what kind of accent it is that I seem to have and she chuckled saying she didn’t know and offed the explanation that there is a bad connection so perhaps the other person had not heard me well.\u00a0 Still, I noted how very quickly a conclusion had been drawn that had little to do with me.\u00a0 It made me wonder what other judgments would be made about my mother, that might affect her medical care.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, as linguistics professor Walt Wolfram confirms in his article Everyone Has an Accent<\/a>, \u201cPeople\u2019s intelligence, capability and character are often judged on the basis of a sentence, a few phrases or even a single word\u2026 Views about dialects also affect how we feel about ourselves.\u201d Perhaps, as more and more people engage various methods, including meditation, to gain greater self-awareness, we can help shift this damaging paradigm.<\/p>\n

So, how about you? What ways might you be judging and being judged by others as well as yourself?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou talk to her.\u00a0 She\u2019s got a thick accent, and I can\u2019t understand a word she said.\u201d\u00a0 These are the words I overheard from the nurse on the other end of the line. Before the nurse who took over the call began to speak, I wondered if I\u2019d been in the South so long that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mindfulness-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2YyuX-kM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1295,"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions\/1295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mymindfulwayoflife.com\/blog4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}