I can't get you out of my head
Hello! …. How are you?
I’m sure you’re familiar with that incessant chatter in your head that sometimes feels like torture. Let’s see how we can unmask our inner critic to live a more nourishing life and for our mind and heart to be in alignment.
You can listen to the podcast with this player, or if you prefer reading you have a written version below. Enjoy it!
Have you noticed how we’re caring and respectful of others, and how we can be ruthless in dealing with ourselves? To a greater or lesser extent, we attack or boycott ourselves and that behavior can last a lifetime. We sometimes have a completely toxic and irrational relationship with ourselves based on unrealistic and even distorted expectations. "Do something because nobody’s going to accept you", "kill yourself in everything you do because you’re not up to it", "what do you expect from that child if you never had a clue about how to raise him", and our inner voice can continue like that infinitely.
My epiphany came when I started meditating and doing tapping / EFT daily. One day, I was able to observe my thoughts without identifying with them, I could see how cruel I could be to myself and how much self-compassion I needed. And I didn’t do it on purpose, of course, nobody wants to weaken their lives like that, the truth is my destructive thoughts were rooted in experiences I had as a child and as a teenager. Mind you, I don’t want to give you the false impression that I’ve overcome the subject. I continue working on my inner voice, which becomes more persistent when I go through life on automatic pilot, fast, stressed, happy but overexcited about everything I have to do. It seems to me that a sane way to get out of our inner critic’s spider web is to take a sacred pause.
"There is nothing more important to our real growth than realizing that we are not the voice of our mind - we are the ones who listen to it", Michael Singer in the course "Living from a Place of Surrender". I’m not the voice that attacks me, I’m the one who listens to it. That realization brought me so much peace, the invitation to not identify with my inner critic and to leave some space between what I hear and my true myself. If my inner voice tells me something hurtful, it’s just a thought, that doesn’t define me, I don’t buy it, what I can do instead is take it as a messenger because most certainly there’s something deeper to heal behind all that. Ex: "Don’t show up, no one is interested in what you have to say" might be a messenger for my fear of rejection, disapproval or making a fool of myself.
When we pause our emotions -pain, anger, fear, etc – make themselves present in our bodies as a response to our inner critic. In my case, I feel some pressure at the base of my throat. Some people might feel discomfort in their belly or in their head. It’s important to recognize and accept what we feel at bodily level in order to calm down. A great teacher taught me the soothing effect resting both hands on my chest has. As we calm down, we can soften our attitude by asking ourselves "if the one who told me all this weren’t me, would I let him guide my life with that attitude?" I don’t think so. This is an important point, what are we going to pay attention to our critic or our inner wisdom?
I know you’re probably telling yourself that you don’t know how to distinguish between the voice of your inner wisdom and that of your inner critic. If what you hear is a voice that judges you, that is worried about what others will say or how others will see you, that compares you with others, that is competitive, that is controlling, that is obsessive or that thinks in binary terms of success or failure, you'll be listening to the gremlins in your head. The voice of your inner wisdom, on the other hand, is the one that feels as a loving and wise adult who pushes you gently despite your fear. It encourages you, it wraps you up when you decide to pause, your inner compass looks inward, it’s focused on the processes and not on the results, it doesn't need external validation and it’s connected to the here and now. It’s key to differentiate where the messages we hear come from. Our inner critic will still be there but we can train ourselves to detach from those messages that devastate us. Reeducating ourselves will certainly give us a more wholesome quality of life.
Poet Mark Nepo says something that I love and that I identify as our inner wisdom, something that we were all born with: “there exists within us a place which is free of expectations and regrets, free of ambition and shame, free of fear and worry; an umbilical point of grace where God touched us for the first time”. And on that note, I don’t think of God as someone far and outside me, but as the greatest form of love that gives life to everything. Others will call it Life, Divinity, Universe, etc.
We’re invited to live a life where we can unfold like origami birds, where heart and mind are in alignmet, redirecting our energy and being true to who we really are.
A big hug ❤