I read the advice years ago – it would be good to pay attention to the voices in my head.
This is what I read, taken directly from Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now (1999): “When someone goes to the doctor and says, ‘I hear a voice in my head’, he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.”
“You have probably come across ‘mad’ people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other ‘normal’ people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry.”
“Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or ‘mental movies’. Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past, and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.”
“The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by ‘watching the thinker’, which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence.”
(My commentary again) I have barely revisited this concept since my initial effort fifteen years ago. Back then, I figured out that when I am really upset, I say to myself (softly and gently, which is a good thing) “It’s okay.” Now, when I hear me tell myself “It’s okay”, I know that I am having a significant negative reaction to a situation; that I am more than mildly disturbed about it.
Flash forward to a girlfriend in the support group that I have a long history of hanging with. She seems to have me on her radar. She has watched me during the twenty-five years that we have been meeting, and has picked up on how darned hard on myself I am, in my head. I am critical of me a lot, probably constantly; I am self-doubting, always thinking of what I could have done to handle a situation better, or to have made things come out “right” instead of “wrong”. She said to me, “You do all of these things, and then you think that you haven’t done enough, and that you aren’t good enough. I don’t get it.” She shook her head in some combination of disbelief and wonder.
I am saying these things because I’m clearly not the only one afflicted. Have you ever paid attention to what you are saying to yourself, to the thoughts playing on your gramophone? I am spurred on by a recent Twitter post by @tinybuddha which reads, “You will never speak to anyone else more than you speak to yourself in your head. Be kind to yourself.”
You might enjoy listening to Be Kind To Yourself by Andrew Peterson; either via the video on YouTube, or the song on Spotify.
I am going to, once again, pay attention to these voices in my head, and hear what they are saying; what I am saying to me. I will try to be as kind to me as I am to others. Will you?
Photo credit, Google images.
Somebody Else's Wisdom 