Shadowing Practice: Sam Harris basically breaks down the secret to life (again) - Learn English Speaking with Video

You've got the cacophony of the unpleasant experience, and then you've got this place in the middle of it, or apparent place in the middle of it,

from which you're trying to resist this experience, right?

Or trying to figure out how to change it, right?

So let's say you have a terrible pain, you know, somewhere in your body.

You know, there's the pain, there's the strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation, you know, the burning and stabbing and twisting feeling.

And then there's this reaction to it from apparently some point outside the pain, very likely, you know, for most people up in the head.

I mean, most people feel like they're a subject in their heads

that is not truly coincident with the rest of their body.

Most people, for the most part, don't feel identical to their bodies.

They feel like they have bodies and these bodies can misbehave in various ways.

And again, so you have a terrible pain, the pain's down there.

Let's say it's in your knee.

You're up here now a hostage being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body, right?

And you're trying to find some way of resisting these sensations.

And so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts, right? you know, that you can have thoughts that terrorize you.

And all of it seems to suggest, I mean, this is, you know, this is the extreme case of stark unhappiness.

But even in the best of times, right, even when things are going really well, and every experience is very smooth, and we're getting what we want, and that, you know, we,

you know, our favorite treats are just an arm's length away, and we're filling our mouths with gumdrops or whatever it is,

we're gratifying this thing at the center of our experience.

And it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent.

It's just, you know, it's just, you get to the thing you want and you gorge yourself on it.

And then not only - Then you want a new thing.

You want a new thing.

Then you need a drink of water because this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is, is too cloying and too much.

And you got to wash that out so that you just, I mean, you wouldn't want to stay in that state even if you could.

And there's kind of this rolling dissatisfaction, even in satisfaction, that we all encounter, even in the best of times, right?

Even when you literally can get anything, more or less anything you want.

And yet we know, at any moment, it can be subverted by something terrible happening.

You know, at any moment, you can suddenly feel like you might be having a heart attack, right?

And then that becomes the thing that the sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon.

And it makes life, I mean,

again, the sense of being in this vulnerable center,

it makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience, right?

We have to control this thing because at any moment, we're constantly, if you just look at...

At any moment, we might die.

Yeah, we're avoiding death, you know, but even, you know, even for those of us who don't think about death very often, and there are those people,

we're constantly modifying our experience so as to avoid discomfort,

whether it's social discomfort or physical discomfort, or just every every correction in our body.

I mean, if you just try to sit still for an hour, you'll notice that all of the micro adjustments in posture that you're now no longer making

are made because you really don't have to wait long before you feel miserable.

I mean, your body, the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home

and just resolving not to move is quite extraordinary.

It's just, you know, it's, it's just, there's no position that's comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now.

And so it is in fact true to say that for most people, I mean, literally 99 .9 % of our audience,

they couldn't pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say, even if their lives depended on it, right?

It's just like, it's simply not in the cards.

It's not, it's, you know, the fate of the world could depend on it.

And someone who's not really fairly well trained in this just couldn't do it.

And so that's interesting, right?

What's interesting is that despite your best efforts, you get carried away by thought helplessly moment after moment.

Now.

Being able to break that spell, being able to see thought as thought, eventually once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand,

you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object.

You begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience.

So it's just, you know, sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness,

but when you can, but this is where, this is the kind of the crucial, you know, kind of almost binary difference,

which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit.

The moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness rather than what you are in each moment.

Because what happens is, in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us in some sense.

They kind of come out of nowhere.

And that just feels like me, right?

So I'm, you know, I'm trying to...

It's a reflex of identification.

Well, you wouldn't act the damn things out if they didn't feel like you, you know?

And so they have to have that impulse to action in them that's part of felt identity.

Right.

So you're saying that you're saying, and this is part of, I suppose, part of the Buddhist tradition,

particularly, although not only that being the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering,

at least under some circumstances, especially being the puppet of them.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so, and so this is so, but the people, you know, listening to us now can feel this.

So, you know, the, you know, we're talking and people are trying to understand the thread of this conversation, but it's that they have a voice in their head that's competing with this, right?

They, you know, they're trying to listen to us, but they're also thinking, right?

And they think, so they might think, well, what the hell is he talking about?

Right?

Like there's just some, some intrusive thought comes in or like, oh, no, wait a minute.

He didn't answer the question that thought that that feels

if you're identified with it if you don't see it as mere language appearing in consciousness

or mere imagery right it feels like me it's like

that is the self

that isn't it feels like what i believe yeah that's interesting

yeah well one of the things you do in clinical work

all the time especially in the cognitive behavioral field is you

help people identify those thoughts in some sense as as objects

that yeah to no longer identify with them

and to say you know just because you think

that it's not necessarily true it's not necessarily you

and it's not necessarily helpful yeah

and it is it does have this dream like character of both coming out of nowhere

and seizing completely seizing the reins of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere.

And also we forget it, it has a...

That's part of the totalitarian spirit of rationality, that proclivity.

Well, but a lot of these thoughts aren't rational.

It's just, you're just rehearsing your experience.

It's just like, I mean, you'll tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row and never, and you won't be bored on the 10th time.

You'll, like, if you just imagine

what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loud speaker for everyone to listen to, you know, and you were just, it was just helplessly, you know, externalized.

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Every, every normal person would sound insane, you know, because, because of the, the perseveration and the, and the, just the redundancy and the,

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and the strange structure to the discursiveness this.

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I mean, this is ever -present.

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It's so ever -present that it doesn't strike people as strange.

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But to be presuming...

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We have a dialogue with ourselves as though the eye could talk to the me and that made any sense at all.

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It's like, you know, I'm sitting here

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and you're getting set up for this interview right

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and i i'll think um oh i gotta get some water right now i know

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if i'm the one to say it

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and i'm the one to hear it i know i need

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water who am i telling yeah it's like it's like i'm

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telling someone else right who needs to be informed about this well you're probably telling the prefrontal cortex

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and it tells the motor cortex

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so you know it's that's probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex

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because it doesn't have direct output over the motor cortex.

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It's something like that.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and its connection to suffering.

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And one is at the level of thought itself, right?

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So you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts.

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And you can get some, you can triangulate on your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself and engineer a better conversation with yourself, right?

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And that's, you know, yes, in cognitive behavioral therapies.

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Yeah, you can stop thinking like a six -year -old, for example, and start thinking like a 30 -year -old.

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Right, right.

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And what's more, a 30 -year -old that actually has good intentions for you, right?

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Like a friend, right?

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Yes, right, right.

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You can make your mind your friend.

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Yeah, yeah, a loved one even.

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Yes, yeah, yeah, can you imagine that?

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Yeah, imagine that.

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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Este vídeo tiene 132 frases y 1715 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 10:19. El hablante habla a un ritmo natural de unas 166 palabras por minuto, cercano a una conversación cotidiana. El 89 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés; conviene repasar el resto antes de empezar.

Vocabulario clave de este vídeo

15 palabras del vídeo que vale la pena aprender, con su pronunciación y significado:

Palabra	Pronunciación	Significado
necessarily adverbio	/ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/	necesariamente
sensation sustantivo	/sɛnˈseɪʃən/	sensación
unpleasant adjetivo	/ʌnˈplɛzn̩t/	desagradable, desapacible
discomfort sustantivo	/dɪsˈkʌmfɚt/	falta de confort, incomodidad
suffer verbo	/ˈsʌfɚ/	sufrir, penar
nowhere adverbio	/ˈnoʊ.(h)wɛɹ/	en ninguna parte, en ningún lugar
breathe verbo	/bɹiːð/	respirar
depend verbo	/dɪˈpɛnd/	depender/pender (de), ser dependiente (de)
resist verbo	/ɹɪˈzɪst/	resistir
consciousness sustantivo	/ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/	conciencia
mere adjetivo	/mɪɚ/	mero
cognitive adjetivo	/ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/	cognitivo, cognoscitivo
behavioral adjetivo	/bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/	del comportamiento, conductual
puppet sustantivo	/ˈpʌpɪt/	títere, marioneta
seize verbo	/ˈsiːz/	agarrar, apoderarse de

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

Palabra	Significado
carried away adjetivo	embalado, enajenado
figure out verbo	averiguar, captar

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

El hablante usa 48 contracciones y formas reducidas, como you're, we're, I'm. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.

Los sonidos de “th”: breathe /bɹiːð/, thread /ˈθɹɛd/, smooth /smuːð/
Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: sensation /sɛnˈseɪʃən/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, crucial /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, identification /aɪˌdɛn(t)ɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/
Palabras largas — cuida el acento: necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/, extraordinary /ɪksˈtɹɔːrdɪn(ə)ɹi/, psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, identification /aɪˌdɛn(t)ɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/

Cómo practicar con este vídeo

Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como necessarily, sensation, unpleasant.

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.

Técnica de shadowing: lee la guía completa paso a paso →

Shadowing Practice: Sam Harris basically breaks down the secret to life (again) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Vocabulario clave de este vídeo

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

Cómo practicar con este vídeo

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?