Voice in Your Head

Do you have a voice in your head that criticizes your every move or is it 100% self-supporting?

The inner voice is a habit, but a habit is only a habit when it stays unconscious. When you learn to be aware of it, it becomes a choice. I’ve learned to catch those inner talks, trying so hard to paint a picture of “self”, either negative or positive, and of course, as you can imagine, mostly, indeed, negative.

How do we catch them? You ask. Every passing voice generates a feeling in you. By developing an acute awareness of how you feel, moment to moment, you can’t miss those “habitual thoughts”. We can all take conscious control of our unconscious processes.

Then there are a lot of ways that you can deal, or play with them.

• For the beginner: You can always use a positive inner voice to reverse self-critical. When a negative inner voice comes into play, it’s actually attempting to be positive and it’s function is to try to spur you on. Whenever this occurs, you can reassess the situation and put a positive spin on it. As they say, “How can I find something to be thankful for even though I hate this situation?” – Recommending Abraham Hicks’ Work.

• For the daring: You can examine the thoughts, one by one, see how they pretend to be you, and how ridiculous they actually are. – Recommending the beautiful work from beautiful Byron Katie and her “The Work”.

• For the more advanced: You can stay just being aware. Thoughts come and go. Sensations rise and fall. Do nothing, but know that you are not the thoughts or sensations. Who you are is the one sitting there being aware, so you naturally realize what an impermanent world we live in. And you smile, head on with the voice. – Recommending Buddhist meditation.

• For the short-cutters: You can seek for counseling or therapy help. Surely you were not born with those voices in your head. Who’s voice was it firstly? How was it conditioned and internalized in your head? Hypnotherapy can be a knife cutting right through the confusion. – Recommending yours truly.

• For the even shorter-cutters: NLP helps you develop a great inner voice unconscious strategy.  That’s how I developed a linguistic approach to helping people with panic attack and anxiety. It all starts between the ears.

The greatest problem is not the inner voice itself. It’s that we believe in it. A lot of people try to construct an Identity out of the inner voices – I’m not good at this or that. I’m always late. I am lazy. I can never find the love I want… Oh just heard one from a client the other day, “I still listen to old music, I must not be up for growth.”

The inner voices are Not us, and they are not even ours, although we hear them in our head. They are the voices that we have internalized – from our parents, teachers, TV programs, churches…

We all want freedom, freedom to express ourselves, life and beauty, yet the inner voices keep us small and constrained. However, the true freedom doesn’t have to come AFTER we get rid of the inner voices. Freedom is already here. We just need to recognize the voices are not OURS and they don’t define who we are. Simply put, don’t believe what you think.

Think about THIS freedom, where the voices are free to be wherever they want to be for however long they want to be, and we know they are not us, they are not even ours. We know that there is no ME that can be found in the voices.

Then, you ask, where do I find ME?

Aha, welcome to the path. The bad news is, nobody can answer that for you. The good news is, “Seek and you shall find.”

At least, miraculously, the critical voices leave us when we allow them to be there for however long they want.