The Voice Inside Your Head…5 minute read

Hi everyone, this is Joe speaking. I am the guest writer for Kristin’s blog this week. I hope that you have enjoyed reading about the Kleshas in the past few blogs, I know that I have. The Kleshas are super important to understand, so I thought I might write about a reading experience that is helping me clarify how the Kleshas are affecting my everyday life.

14 Years Ago..

In 2007 I was living in a van down by a river somewhere in New Zealand. I woke up each morning next to my friend Matt Church. We would then embark on some skiing excursion, forget to put on sunscreen, and end up at a pub striking out with women, or being kicked out due to bad behavior. 

Also in 2007, Michael Singer published a book called The Untethered Soul. Although I like to think Matt and my journey was epic, Michael Singer’s book will truly stand the test of time. Over the course of my life I have read many books. I like to consider myself “well-read”, but it turns out that’s not who I am at all. 

Today.

Okay, so I Kristin, my wife, suggested I read Michael Singer’s book a long time ago. But I never did. I should have. Once again she was right. And I don’t really feel like making this blog post a book review. I know I could just say “read Michael Singer’s book”, and some of you may and some may not. What I want to write about, and I really mean this, is how reading this book has seriously changed me. I’m not even finished with the book yet. I have to take time between chapters, like a week or more, to digest what I have read. And sometimes, I reread and reread, almost like I don’t want to reach the end of this book. Anyways, I’m turning the pages slowly and taking it all in, but there is this idea that I told Kristin I would like to share with her blog readers, so here it goes. 

We all have a melodramatic, incessant, out-of-control inner voice

The first thing I learned, in the first chapter, was that my mind has a voice, and I call the voice Drama Joe, and the voice never, ever shuts up. Drama Joe, the voice, will talk and talk, and even when I am asleep, Drama Joe will talk. Most of the talk is melodramatic and completely crazy, full of hypotheticals, and more often than not, end of the world scenarios. I’m not kidding. 

So Michael Singer says, “true growth is realizing that you are not the voice of the mind-you are the one who hears it”. What we have to try and do, is observe our inner voice objectively. We have to pay very close attention to what our inner voice is saying, because it says a ton of things, and most of them are complete garbage. The problem is we habitually believe what our inner voice is saying, and then we choose to believe that this inner voice is an accurate reflection of who we are, but it’s not, not at all. 

The Weather in Alaska is beyond Drama Joe

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself and confuse things, I really don’t. See if this makes sense. Our second year in Alaska I became obsessed with the weather forecast, I mean obsessed. I looked at it ten times a day, and fretted when it wasn’t showing the little snow cloud picture, or cursed when the temperatures were not cold enough. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and stare out the window and wonder why the forecast wasn’t matching up with whatever was happening right before my eyes. I became frustrated and upset at times, which is totally ridiculous because I don’t control the weather. In fact, the weather doesn’t care about me at all. The truth is, the world is a harsh place and when I am gone, it will continue without me, almost like I wasn’t ever here. 

But my thoughts want to tell me otherwise, they really do. If I can objectively watch my thinking I can see that it is attempting to organize and control a world that is completely beyond its control. I can pray for snow, or sun, or rain, or wind, but in the end my thinking will not change the weather. What my thinking will try and do is convince me that I have some sort of control, like being in the passenger seat of a car and pressing the imaginary brake pedal. 

Drama Joe and the Kleshas

I can’t explain this concept of “watching your thinking objectively” like Michael Singer can. Maybe I should just write ‘read his book’ a bunch of times…but somebody might ask why, so here is another take on it.

After a few weeks of closely watching my thinking, I began to easily recognize when Drama Joe was trying to take over. I would be walking up a trail, following Krisitn of course, and I would glance at the valley below, and think how pretty it was in the March sunlight, and then I would think about our house, and then I would think about the military bases on the Cook Inlet, and then I would think about a book where a guy is on the road with his kid during a nuclear holocaust, and then I would think about the military bases being bombed and then…stop Drama Joe!. 

Watching my thinking objectively was helping me stay focused on the important things, like enjoying the afternoon with my wife. This was an initial victory and is still a recurring one. But after objectively watching my thoughts, I started to connect them to the different Kleshas, or forms of suffering, that Kristin taught me about.

Fearful thoughts, ignorant thinking, thoughts related to identity, thinking about things because of attachment issues, thoughts guided by aversion, all of my thinking was now being categorized because I was paying attention to it using the best objective lens available to me. This is still happening, like right now. I can think about pulling the plug on this blog post because it might not make sense, in other words, this is an insecure thought, or one that is connected to the Klesha of fear. But whatever, because it’s just a thought, and I am not my thoughts, I am the one who observes them. 

Try this…

Buy Michael Singer’s book. Also, simply observe what your inner voice is saying to you. Don’t give positive or negative values to what it is saying, just pay close attention to what it says. When is your inner voice being melodramatic? When is it taking both sides of the argument? When is it patching up your ego? When is it jumping to conclusions? Watch your inner voice from a completely objective point of view, that’s it. Don’t do anything beyond that, but keep doing it. Keep watching your inner voice, get good at it, make it a habit. Don’t worry, it’s not hard to do because your inner voice never shuts up, you just have to tune in and watch the show.

The Objective Truth: “Reality is just too real for most of us, so we temper it with the mind”-M. Singer

Reading The Untethered Soul is an experience that will continue to change me, hopefully for the better, but along the way there have been some painful realizations, just warning those of you who might seriously consider picking up this book…and then maybe you email me one day and tell me that you liked the book, but the email doesn’t go through because the internet is down, it got hacked by some Chinese agency, now our online banking won’t work and we can’t buy food because nobody uses cash anymore, and…Drama Joe is always up to no good. I told you, but find out for yourself what trouble your inner voice can cause. Oh yeah, maybe think about giving it a name and externalizing the troublemaker.