Ultraspeaking and Vajrayana are like peanut butter and jelly because...?

Ultraspeaking trains you in confident, effective speaking; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation.

Vajrayana trains you in confident, effective action; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation.

We find them startlingly similar, although one offers courses in a consequential everyday competence, and the other is an ancient Indian religion.

This thirty-nine-minute video records a spontaneous, mostly-unplanned conversation between Charlie Awbery and David Chapman.

Charlie is an Ultraspeaking coach, currently leading the Fundamentals Level Two course; and co-founder of the Evolving Ground Vajrayana meditation community. David writes about Vajrayana at Vividness, and has written previously about his brief Ultraspeaking experience. We are married, and co-teach Vajrayana sometimes.

Ultraspeaking’s Fundamentals course trains you to let go of trying to sound polished or professional while speaking, in order to communicate confidently and naturally, which connects you with your audience emotionally. That means being fine with “um”s and silences and restarts and garbled syntax. Your audience doesn’t care about that—they care about you!

Accordingly, when David edited the video, he left all that in—where he’s usually edited his videos to “sound more professional” with constant cutting.

Effective conversation, and also effective professional presentations, depend almost as much on eye contact and body language as on what is said. Although this recording is available as an audio podcast, you will find it more engaging, and it will make better sense, if you watch the video, at meaningness.substack.com/ultraspeaking-and-vajrayana.

Transcript

Charlie: So you were shy about recording a game, and you said you didn’t want to record a game.

David: Yeah, I’m feeling better today than I was. Uh, we could try it and, uh, see what happens.

Charlie: I’ll go into coach mode and, uh, share my screen with you and… What’s your favorite game?

David: So I haven’t done any of these in six months, so I don’t remember what any of them are. I think the one that is, uh, a whole series of three second prompts was, was fun.

Charlie: Autocomplete, rapid.

David: Yeah.

Charlie: I’ll put it on fairly slow too. Let’s give you 15 rounds so you can get into it. All right.

David: I said, “I don’t want to do this!”

Charlie: Yes, you did.

David: Okay, coach!

Charlie: That’s, that’s contrary. That is totally contrary to the spirit of Ultraspeaking.

David: Right.

Charlie: You can spontaneously leap into it. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. The whole point is that you should make a mistake. Otherwise you’re not at your edge, right? You’re not pushing yourself beyond your usual capacity.

But anyway, this is a warmup. So off you go.

David: Ready, set, go!

Rolling windows down is like cash because you have to peel them off.

Paper is like a dentist because you can clean your teeth.

DNA is like artificial sugars because it’s sweet.

Blue cheese is like sweating because it’s salty.

Meeting your soulmate is like building a bridge because it’s a connection.

Staying up late is like plumbers because, I don’t know!

Time travel is like alcohol because it’s disorienting.

A judge is like…

A puzzle is like babies because they’re annoying.

Toothpaste is like breathing because you put them in your mouth.

An engine is like beards because it’s um.

Breaking your phone is like fear because it’s horrible.

Shame is like reptiles because they’re scary.

Underwear is like tipping because they’re annoying.

Anxiety is like friendship— bleagh!

Charlie: You haven’t done it for six months. Not bad. You didn’t end strong. You did, you did a bleagh at the end. So, do you remember one of the tenets is “end strong”? So it doesn’t matter what you say, you end with a good, strong line.

And “staying in character” is you, um, you stay in the mode, you don’t break out of what you are saying or, or delivering. So you would not let your inner critic come in. So you don’t comment on yourself like, uh, that was bad, I’m doing terribly or, uh, got it wrong again. Or, you know, you never step out of that, uh, that mode of just going with the flow, whatever’s going on inside.

How was it? It looked fun.

David: Yeah. I mean, it is inherently fun.

Charlie: Yeah.

David: Because I haven’t done this in six months and, you know, I only did this introductory taster course and have been meaning to go back to Ultraspeaking ever since, but I have not had the time to do that. Uh, I, I was planning to do a bunch of the games to prepare for our recording today, and I got violently sick two days ago and have recovered this morning.

Charlie: I’m glad you’re feeling better. And you know, it may be, uh, it may be better that you’re unprepared. From the Ultraspeaking perspective, a lot of it is about being willing to step into the unknown, and sometimes preparation goes against that. But you can over-prepare for things or, uh, try to follow a set of bullet points or something like that, and then find that you’re actually not, uh, not alive in the speaking in some way.

David: Yes, that was my experience when I did a lot of public speaking, for work and for school, that it’s definitely possible to over-prepare, and sticking closely to a script is a real mistake. Uh, on the other hand, when you want to deliver a bunch of specific content, then having the right degree of familiarity with that is helpful.

Charlie: If you’re familiar with your content, then you have this bow and arrow technique that Ultraspeaking teaches in, I can’t remember where, it’s probably the Professional level course that we teach this. It’s that you set yourself a direction and you can meander all over the place so long as you’re heading in roughly that direction.

You can tell stories, you can go off on a tangent, you can, go with, uh, something that you hadn’t thought, and you can connect with your audience at the same time as still heading in that direction.

So the arrow is the way that you’re heading. It’s your main point, your one key point or whatever it is. And then your bow is the heading off in that direction, doing all of the embellishments or finding different things to include.

David: I thought we might start by talking about how we found Ultraspeaking and first did it and what happened.

Charlie: That’s a good idea. Yeah.

David: It’s a bit difficult to remember because this was three years ago, something like that.

Charlie: 2022 was when I did my first course in February, 2022.

David: There was, uh, leading up to that, there were several months when various friends of ours were really excited about it and had done it and, um, we both found it intriguing and I wanted to do it or at least was considering doing it, and I didn’t have time, and you went ahead and did do it. And it was amazing for you, I gather.

Charlie: Surprisingly, I had not, uh, I had not expected to have the kind of breakthrough and personal, um, I think I would call it personal transformation that happened during that first Fundamentals session. Five weeks, the Fundamentals course is five weeks. And then I immediately did the Fundamentals course again because I had such a good time doing it. I loved it.

But it was week two of the Fundamentals that I had what I would call a breakthrough in understanding something experientially in my speaking, and it’s very difficult to put a finger on exactly what that is, what happens.

One of the promises that Ultraspeaking makes is, we will, we will give you a breakthrough. And they keep to that promise and follow up with each individual, and hundreds of people now, hundreds of people I have seen have that experience, and go through that same transformative process as I did.

David: I think that’s remarkable. It’s personal for me in a way. Partly from my own brief experience with Ultraspeaking, but more from just seeing from the outside how dramatically you changed. And you didn’t talk about it at the time, but I could just see that something major had happened that your whole way of being really changed.

I think for me, I sort of saw, I only became aware of it gradually over a period of a small number of weeks, but it was only that. I guess for you, it was just at a very specific time.

Charlie: There was a moment, there was a moment in a cohort, in a single rep that I remember, um, that was a turning point. I think a lot of people do have that, uh, instantaneous realization, which is, we were going to talk about how this is similar to Vajrayana in some ways, and, uh, instantaneous understanding, something just clicking, uh, that experience of suddenly finding myself in flow, telling a story.

I don’t think I had ever, ever in my life told, consciously decided to tell a story before. And it hadn’t even crossed my mind that that’s something that I could do. And, you know, maybe many people do naturally do that. Certainly I didn’t, at all. And having the experience of being in that and telling the story, and suddenly understanding something that had not been clearly seen previously. I hadn’t seen it myself, that I had a very strong public/private boundary. There were certain things that I would think not appropriate for public speaking, and other, uh, a kind of presentation mode, and a way of speaking to an audience that was appropriate or was congruent; and that there was a, um, set of experiences or a way of being or a private mode that I had that really was very, very private as well.

And just experiencing that boundary come crashing down, it was like a, it was like the floodgate. So not in ter— not, uh, you know, I wasn’t crying or, uh, or anything. It was much more sort of energetic, high energy, uh, fun experience for me, for, for others. It’s an opening up of a deep vulnerability. I think those things go together as well.

But it was like the, like, uh, a water pressure having built up on a dam and then that just pushing, like cascading and everything suddenly flowing. And it was very exciting, really exciting and very funny. And, you know, everybody in the pod was laughing, and we were just having a good time. So I remember that moment very well indeed.

But I think that was, that was a point in a gradual change that occurred in my speaking as well. Because there are lots of techniques. Ultraspeaking isn’t, eventually, a technique or a set of techniques. It’s, it’s far greater than that, but there are tenets, there are techniques, there are many, many, many practice methods that you can engage with.

And as you go through that process, then something in your demeanor, your way of being, your capacity in different circumstances, comes online.

David: Overall, I think what is most interesting for Ultraspeaking for me is its usefulness as a means of personal transformation or personal development, and I’ve seen that in you.

Charlie: Those two are not the same, you know. I want to interrupt there.

And this is another way that it is fascinatingly, uh, parallel to Vajrayana. Within Vajrayana, there’s, uh, uh, tension between developmental path, progressive path, linear step by step; uh, and the transformative path, which is you, you go through and include, and find a more expansive, uh, more inclusive, uh, way of being in the world. This is very Buddhist Tantra. And Ultraspeaking, from my perspective, Ultraspeaking is about including more and more and more in your speaking.

It’s not rejecting. It’s not saying, Oh, you, you’ve got to do this one thing and you mustn’t say “um,” and you mustn’t do, you mustn’t have your, uh, you know, the, the very kind of public speaking style where you’ve got to be, um, in speaker mode. And I’m going to tell you a story. And we’ll start with this way. And I’ll use my hands and, you know, go into very professional speaking mode.

And it’s not about doing this thing and not that thing. It’s about how much more range do you have? How much more energy can you have than your usual range? What else can you include? More and more and more.

And in the Opening Awareness book that I wrote, that’s one of the tenets that we have in meditation practice as well. You don’t cut off certain parts of your experience. You become more aware, more attuned to what is happening in your sense fields, in your experience, visual field, in your, in your, everything you can hear in the sensation in your body, in everything that’s going on around you.

So Ultraspeaking is more connecting like that.

And that, that is akin to the transformative approach in Vajrayana. And yet, at the same time, it’s very clear that you can say, Oh, last week, uh, I was a bit shy about doing that sort of communication; now, I feel really quite confident with it. And six months ago, I wasn’t, uh, I wasn’t able to speak in a more conversational tone. I still had a little bit of a performative mode going on and, uh, I seem to have been able to drop that. And then if I look a couple of years ago, Oh, I didn’t know how to pause. I wasn’t even comfortable with silence.

Like, how many people are uncomfortable with silence in, in a conversation? Even just with friends, you know. It’s extraordinary. Week three of the Fundamentals is actually quite challenging for many people. It’s my favorite.

David: That one is about silence?

Charlie: Yeah, it’s about pausing and silence, and I ended up running some workshops for Ultraspeaking on pausing, confidence and pausing. And that comes very naturally to me, maybe because of having spent so many months in silence? Enjoying, enjoying my own company.

David: That’s in the context of meditation retreats.

Charlie: Right.

Actually, let’s, let’s do a game, why not? Do my favorite game.

So Snowglobe trains you to take a breath and relax.

David: Do you want to contextualize these games a bit, to explain what a game is and how they function, in terms of, uh, Ultraspeaking, or do you just want to go into this?

Charlie: I think it will become clear through a demo. Ultra, the Ultraspeaking app has a number of different games and they’re all set up to help you practice, through multiple reps, one particular method or aspect of speaking.

So Snowglobe is set up to facilitate pausing, breathing, while you speak.

Sitting in a tea house on the top of a mountain with a view over the sea into the distance.

I can hear sounds from many, many, many miles away. They’re very faint.

Sweating buckets. I have been sitting here for hours. I mean hours. There are flies buzzing around. It’s, it’s intense. I can feel drips down my body, but I’m not moving.

I’m not moving.

I can think of so many experiences like that. And there’s something about sitting in discomfort over many hours. Suddenly, it pops. Something changes. And the idea, the very idea of being uncomfortable doesn’t exist anymore. It’s weird.

Charlie: And there’s nothing, nothing except vividness, vastness, intensity of sensation and the present moment. And it’s beautiful.

I wish that for everybody.

That was a little bit perform-y.

And I think it’s quite good to be able to push yourself a little bit into that edge of, uh, of putting on a show for others in a little way.

And yet that was also for me, uh, very sincere. I was talking from my own experience and remembering, reliving a moment, going into what that actually was like, and doing my best to speak from that experience.

And that kind of dropping in, tuning into an experience, and speaking from that place: that was one of the ways that I experienced a real breakthrough in being able to connect with people that I’m speaking to.

So I think there are many ways in which it’s possible to say, oh, there are these parallels with Vajrayana, like silence. Being comfortable with silence, being comfortable with uncertainty, not knowing what on earth is going to pop out of my mouth next. I don’t know! I never know these days. I don’t care.

David: That was, I think, the aspect of Ultraspeaking that was most salient for me, was the experience of spontaneous action, where the action is actually the speech. That, spontaneous action is considered to be, in a sense, the pinnacle of accomplishment in Vajrayana, from the point of view of the Dzogchen branch of Vajrayana at least.

It’s… spontaneous action is a expression of the recognition of: everything is transparent and unreal, and at the same time, everything is solid and extremely real, and because you have both of those at once, you can act in the real world on the basis of “This is solid and real, and this situation needs something that’s going to come from me”; and at the same time, because it’s the whole thing is a, you know, a movie that is playing and fundamentally, you know, just a joke, then you act without needing to have a whole kind of commentary and elaborate theory of what you’re doing and planning and preparation. You just do what’s needed.

Charlie: One of the ways that that works, I think, both in Vajrayana and in Ultraspeaking, is that your mind just clears. You’re not preempting. What am I going to say? What are they going to say? What am I going to say?

And we wrote together that piece “Relating as beneficent space.” That is coming at the experience from a different direction. It’s clearing your mind and then being able to drop into the present and not have all of the chatter going on. An effect of Ultraspeaking is that it drops you into that experience, because you very gently, very carefully can put aside your inner critic, your, “Oh, what are they going to think of me? What is, um, what am I going to say here? How am I, how am I sounding to everybody else?” But all of that, you can drop it because you’ve got the confidence to just be with whoever you’re speaking to, whoever you’re with.

So Ultraspeaking, I think comes at that spontaneous, uh, communication, spontaneous action in context, from the perspective of speaking.

In Vajrayana, one way of categorizing is mind, speech, body. A lot of what I’ve been doing in the recent, um, stuff that I’ve been creating for Evolving Ground, the Liberating Shadow, a lot of that is coming at it through body first. And only after experiencing that spontaneous activity through embodied interaction, first of all on your own and then embodied interaction, only then do you start bringing voice online.

So there are these different windows in, I think, or different routes that end you up in a pretty similar place.

David: That theme of confidence born from the courage of, which I have manifestly failed to display here, but I did when I, I did a, an introductory taster course, um, six months ago in Ultraspeaking, which was an extraordinary experience for me. And I have been meaning to go back ever since.

The confidence of being able to do those games that that you get from, from just doing it, and from getting feedback from a cohort of, of people who are also discovering that they can do things that seem impossible. There’s a kind of buoyancy that also comes with specifically… I’m thinking of some particular tantric practices from Vajrayana that produce that same kind of buoyancy, in my experience.

Charlie: Actually this is reminding me that, um, that I think that’s highly intentional in Ultraspeaking and in Evolving Ground. And we have the same intention to create, uh, an optimistic, positive, supportive, holding environment, a community, we call it in Evolving Ground, it’s a “community of practice,” and we have very explicit norms of being, ways of communicating.

We have, um, how to skillfully disagree, we have, uh, engaging with doubt, we have, uh, curious skepticism. These are all norms that have come about organically through, um, being meta to, and being aware of our interactions, patterns of interactions, and dialing in those that really work well, to be supportive for people in their practice. So we’ve done a lot of that conscientiously in Evolving Ground, and there’s a very similar, it’s not, not quite the same, but there’s a similar atmosphere.

I love that word. There is an atmosphere of communication in the two communities that I think is really complimentary. So a lot of people from Evolving Ground, because I’ve raved about Ultraspeaking so much, people have gone from Evolving Ground into Ultraspeaking, and have become coaches now as well, which is fantastic.

And then people from Ultraspeaking have come into the Evolving Ground community, and have just fit immediately into the community group dynamics, because of that similarity.

And what I want to say about it is that there, there is a, there’s a supportive, positive mode of feedback. One of the ways that we describe that in Evolving Ground is: “There are no rules.” There’s kindness and there’s awareness, and you bring those into your support, so that if you’re critical, you do that in a way that is positive and helpful. It’s, it’s inclusive of more, rather than don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s much more about, uh, and what else I want to see, or something else you might consider.

The similarity between the two communities, that they’re very complimentary. And Evolving Ground, as a community of practice, we have created a sandbox environment, which you can step into and try things out, and practice a mode of being, a way of being, without having to take that with you immediately into high stakes situations, or have it as a personality, or a, this is something that I have to do on a permanent basis, or whatever.

So there’s this sense of creating almost like a method box, or a, uh, a trial place. Again and again and again and again, we do it in Zoom rooms, we do it in our different monthly gatherings, we do it on all of our events. It’s a safe, supportive, testing environment.

Ultraspeaking does the same thing. You have small pods. The coach to student ratio is amazing. It’s usually one coach to three students, and we go into breakout rooms and often the students are also giving— participants, I should say, are also giving feedback to each other, so you get very good at testing things out, in reps with each other. So there’s a similarity in methodology there that I think is really effective. Really effective.

So we’re talking about something completely different in Evolving Ground. We’re talking about maybe, uh, tantric practice or, um, or engaging with our Fundamentals path, or whatever it is, but we have a very similar way of, way of enculturating a particular kind of interactive dynamic that works. It works beautifully.

And you see people transforming as well in that. People changing over, uh, over years through friendships that they’ve made, through practices that they’re engaged with together.

So actually in Evolving Ground, we had an Ultra Tantra apprentice group all of last year, and it’s still continuing into this year, which was apprentices, eG apprentices who have done Ultraspeaking, and are talking about and bringing their Ultraspeaking experience into Evolving Ground, and looking at the similarities.

Like for example, we had a whole session on yidam practice. In some way, yidam is a formalized, traditional way of stepping into something different. A structure is externally provided, you step into it, and you simply become that. Now a lot of the Ultraspeaking games are doing that for speaking. You’re following a timer, you’re given a topic, and off you go. You’re stepping into being confident and talking about pickles, or whatever it is. And if, if you can feel confident talking about pickles in the fridge, or any topic that’s given to you, then you begin to find that confidence in relation to whatever your context is.

And tantric practice is a lot about confidence in context, about coming from a spaciousness that means you’re kind of comfortable in your own skin. You can be in any context, it doesn’t matter how difficult or unusual.

Life is full of unknowns, and there’s something about the spaciousness that comes from Buddhist tantric practice that I have experienced is similar in the Ultraspeaking context as well. It facilitates relaxing because you’re okay with silence, you’re okay with space, you’re okay with going with the flow.

Actually, a lot of the, uh, the topics are quite funny and, uh, and enjoyable in the Fundamentals. And then you have the Professional level course, which I think is really much better to do that after you’ve done the Fundamentals. And in the Professional level course, you get thrown some really quite challenging uh, presentation topics.

One of the things that, uh, PL1, that’s the Professional Level One, ends up doing, and I don’t want to preempt anyone’s experience here, but you, you basically are put on the spot and you have to give a presentation, a five minute presentation, uh, off the top of your head with only a few minutes to prepare.

And that is very, very good practice. I didn’t like it at all the first time I did it. It was all over the place. It was an absolute disaster. But I’ve gotten a little better at that now.

David: I had a thought about why practice in communication, and developing the ability for communication, is particularly functional as a method of personal transformation. And from a Buddhist point of view, one is what one is in interaction. There isn’t a solid, separate, continuous, defined self. And there’s, there’s an accumulation of habits, which are sort of what we think of as self. In, in spontaneous communication, you’re not being driven by those habits as much, because you are responding to the interaction and you’re nodding at me in a way which suggests I can go on here. And, and, and what I say is, is spontaneously relevant.

Charlie: Right. So the, the phrase that I use for that is that your, your center of awareness is in the space of interaction. Very often when we’re communicating, our center of awareness by habit is inside our head. And culture, and psychology, and everything that we’ve learned since we were knee high to a grasshopper, is training us to be inside our head. And to worry about what is going on inside our head. And if we can train ourselves a little bit to let that drop, and move into the space of interaction, so that that is where our attention is, and that is what we’re interested in, and that is where our, uh, possibility where the center, yeah, the, the space of possibility is, what is happening here now, rather than everything that’s going on inside. It’s quite freeing. It’s really liberating.

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