Right Speech, if we could perfect Right Speech, we would be incredibly close to being enlightened. Because almost everybody knows times in their lives when they have made Dukkha in their speech, if not more then once. To work on Right Speech is very hard, it's very difficult. Speech comes out so quickly following the thought, that if we are not mindful before speaking, then invariably we are going to say something that is not right. A lot of other meditation practices stress concentration, mindfulness, work, work, work get concentrated, get mindful and so on. And so we go to retreats and we go back and forth, back and forth, and we sit still and we do all that. Not many teachers get right into Right Speech, and we don't even do it that much in the normal retreat because it's a silent retreat.
But this is the area with which we want to use our concentration and mindfulness. This is exactly where we need it. And this is possibly one of the biggest areas we have in our interactions with other people. Australians have a disease occasionally with cattle, "foot-and-mouth" disease. Many years ago, one of my Australian friends said that they recognized how much their speech got them into trouble and they reckoned they had "foot-in-mouth" disease.
So, we have to be more mindful, and practice this ability to kind of pause between our thought and our action, or our thought and our speech. The ability to pause, to kind of step back and think, "Is that really what I want to say, is that really what I want to do?" This is so much of what the mental noting can help you to learn to do. When you're sitting in the hall, and you're trying to be aware, say, of the breath, the mind goes off, and you note it and you come back. If you can do that, then you are more objective about what that thought actually was. Training your mind to just see what is in your mind and not jump into it, hate it, love it, etc. The more you can train that sort of pause, then in your normal life, if you're talking with somebody else and see the thought come up about what you want to say, you can give yourself a little space. Then you can judge, "Is that going to be Right Speech or not?" And if not, then you can try to change it.