Unfolding Insight 1: What is the voice in the head?
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It’s an experience that’s common to many folk who meditate:
You take your seat.
You take a few deep breaths to settle in in anticipation of some peace and quiet and — if you’re lucky — some insight.
Things feel good as your breath slows and you feel those sit bones relax towards the floor.
Then BAM!
After a moment of quiet — two if you’re really lucky — a voice pops up that nags away and just. will. not. shut. up.
“No, do it that way! You’re doing it wrong! Do it this way! And sit up straight!”
“Why are you even meditating anyway!? It’s a waste of time! You’ll never achieve the peace you’re after!”
“The presentation’s due tomorrow. You really should check it over. You don’t want to disappoint the client. Or your boss.”
“Call your mother! Have you called your mother lately? You really should call your mother…”
On and on it yaps, driving you to the point of distraction and, often, to the sense that meditation’s more trouble than it’s worth. Many‘s the time I gave up my practice because the voice in my head was so strong.
For the longest time, this voice was me. It was my own worst enemy, always there inside my head, always ready with a wretched remark that could cut right to the bone because it knew me so well. And it wouldn’t just show up when I was meditating, either.
If I was trying to make a decision — about asking for a raise, say — there it would be, telling me I should know my place and be more patient before asking for more money.
Or if I was trying to set a boundary with someone who wasn’t treating me right, it’d tell me not to risk upsetting them even more.
Worst of all, the voice kept me in shitty jobs and shittier relationships because it told me I should always have something else to jump to before walking away. Or that I wouldn’t find anything better. Or that I wasn’t worth anything better.
How could a part of me be so cruel? Why would it want to keep me so small? And what could it be trying to achieve by keeping me that way?
Here’s the big secret about this voice in my head: it’s not my voice.
The one in your head? It's not yours, either.
Rather, it’s an accretion of all the voices we had around us as kids that were trying to manage us, for better and for worse, in to life.
It’s the parent that was struggling to do their best, but needed to keep us under control.
It’s the older sibling that felt threatened by us and needed to keep us small.
Or it’s the teacher that projected their unhappiness with their own life onto us, their student.
But because these people were supposed to love us and were charged with our care, and because we were small and didn't know any better, we took on their voices as the voices of love and care.
And in a truly gnarly twist, we learned to appease them and flatter them to avoid punishment or abandonment, so that we might stay safe in their presence.
Here’s the bigger secret: if we never bring our attention to these voices and how they continue to show up in our adult lives, they'll continue doing what they’ve always done: keep us "safe".
They'll continue to keep us small through their constant criticism and cajoling.
They'll take us away from our presence, fucking not just with our meditation, but with our lives.
Here's a little experiment you can run:
Close your eyes for a minute.
Just settle in and quiet your mind.
I'll give you a minute to just sit there in peace.
How long did it take for the voice in the head to spark up and start nagging you?
And what did it have to say?
“This is stupid”?
“That' wasn’t a minute”?
Or some variation on those petty little themes?
By bringing awareness to our voice in the head, of recognising that it's not actually us that's yabbering away, that we can start to build a different relationship with it, one in which — over time — we might even befriend it.
One of the simplest methods I've learned for building this awareness into day-to-day life is this:
10 times a day — you can set a reminder on your watch or your phone — ask yourself "who's looking out from behind these eyes?".
If your voice in the head is running wild, pulling you away from the present moment into internal battles, this can be a beautiful, gentle way to bring yourself back to presence and awareness.
And that question — who's looking out from behind these eyes? — points to the most important truth here: we are not the voices in our heads. And we don't have to take what they say at face value.
Over the next few emails, I’ll dive deeper into how to build awareness of the voice, explore where it comes from and what it’s trying to tell us, and share some ways in which we can start to befriend it.
In the meantime, if you'd like to jump in to your own exploration of how the voice in the head might be holding you back from unfolding in to life, I'd love to explore that with you, too. You can check out my coaching offer at unfoldi.ng
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H/T to Joe Hudson and The Art of Accomplishment for changing my life by teaching me about The Voice in The Head