Be careful how you are talking
to yourself because you are listening.
Lisa M Hayes
I often find myself deeply in conversation with myself seemingly unaware of what’s transpiring in my mind. At times I’ll be walking down a flight of stairs when I become conscious of two things. The first is that I’m caught in a conversation in my mind, and second that I don’t fully remember walking down the flight of stairs. Of course I have a faint memory of the descent but most of my awareness was focused on the conversation, in effect my awareness was not in the moment.
When I say conversation in my mind I’m not referring to the thinking we all do when we are working out say a logistic problem at work or trying to decided which school is best for our children. What I’m referring to is the mindless (automatic) conversations we have all throughout the day having a life of their own, and generally these thoughts are judgmental or fantasizing in nature. It’s when you are listening that the amount of thoughts being produced becomes clear, and at times somewhat disturbing.
Examples of mindless thinking may include telling someone how to live their life, explaining to a friend why another friend is wrong or a myriad of subjects being created non-stop within our minds. It’s these conversations we need to become aware of if we hope to fully integrate intimacy with others and embrace the power of dialogue with our teams.
Take a short break (10-15 minutes) a few times each day and listen to your thoughts. Be aware while you listen to the continuous stream of thoughts randomly bouncing around or maybe forming conversations in your head. Ask yourself, am I these thoughts I’m listening to? And also ask yourself if you are the one who is aware of your thinking.
It’s not even necessary in the beginning that you answer these questions. What’s important is to ask them each time you sit to watch and listen to your thoughts. The questions are but a device to help sweep away some pretty thick cobwebs. It’s the questions that sharpens our awareness of these floating thoughts streams.
Trust me I know this little exercise and the questions I’ve asked you to think about may seem way out in left field if you’re new to this. But if we have any hope of slowing down or even stopping the internal dialogue crashing around within our skull it’s important that we grow our self awareness. Our mind is populated with bias, assumptions, judgments and a myriad of mazes and tunnels we are not even aware that we’ve created.
Once you settle into sitting and listening to your thoughts try adding paying attention to the space that forms between your collection of thoughts. This space will appear as one thought fades and before the next one takes center stage. When you can let your focus rest within these thought spaces the size of the spaces will grow as will your silent awareness of current reality.
Throughout each day our minds generate thousands and thousands of mostly random thoughts. Most of these seemingly random thoughts escape our notice, they pop into our mind and pop out only to repeat themselves over and over and over each day. We want to become aware of these thoughts, become aware so we can move beyond random thinking.
Whoops! I looked up as I was clicking on publish to realize I was caught in a swirl of thoughts having nothing to do with what I’m trying to convey here. I forgot to include what may be the most important tip about how you are listening.
When you take a break from your busy day to learn more about how you are thinking, the first and most important thing to remember is to not be judgmental as you watch your thoughts. The thoughts will pour in like a waterfall and our job is to watch but also to be aware of when our judgment side starts yapping loudly about how bad, negative, terrible or even how good your thoughts are. Your thoughts are simply your thoughts and are neither good nor bad, your thoughts are automatically being generated within your brain, you’re not sitting there plotting to do something. I hope
The more you watch the more random you’ll see your thoughts are. As you go about your day and you notice thoughts remind yourself they are only thoughts, and gently go back to what you were doing. When I see myself trapped in thoughts I simply say to myself or at times out-loud “thinking” and return to what I was doing. At times I have to say “thinking” a few times in a row to break the spell the thoughts are casting on my imagination, but mostly I know I’m thinking… Nothing more.
Leave your judgements and assumptions outside in a heap, as you watch your thoughts. This exercise is not about labeling your thoughts as “thinking”, no the act of saying to yourself “thinking” is simply a tool to snap your awareness into focus. I may become aware of having a spirited argument with a friend and instead of attempting to stop or judge the conversation I say “thinking”. Once I acknowledge I’m thinking I imagine the thoughts as a balloon that floats away and silently pops. Poof, poof, and poof. All this happens in less than a second.
When we don’t paint our thoughts with the big brush of judgement we are merely waking up our awareness from its distractions. Another benefit to not adding judgement to the mix is we avoid stuffing our thoughts and emotions down deep into our mind.
Acknowledging our thoughts allows you to Be Aware Of Your Thinking, we add nothing to our thinking and nothing will be left.
Example
Imagine yourself in the shower, out of nowhere you find yourself having a conversation in your head with a coworker, a loved-one or someone you don’t even know on a street corner. Now imagine the conversation turns into a heated argument, but of course you rise to the occasion and with wit and sparkle you prevail. Your conversation partner changes their mind gleefully adopting your point of view.
Is this a familiar scene? Do you have conversations with others in your mind, or should I say do you debate and lecture others while you are in the shower, in the car, riding an elevator or maybe walking around the block. If you’re like most people you have over 60,000 thoughts a day and many long discussions with other people.
All those thoughts and conversations take place in your mind, not in the physical world. All your thoughts are confined to your mind. What if you called your best friend and started yelling at her for things she said in one of your conversations that occurred in your mind. What do you think she her reaction would be?
Be Aware Of Your Thoughts
It’s simple, all our thoughts streaming through our mind come and go without have much effect on us until we grasp them. It’s the grasping onto our thoughts that creates a cascading ride on our emotional roller coaster. Once we start to connect out thoughts with the glue of belief we attribute reality to them and we suffer.
Choosing to be aware of your thoughts takes away their power over your emotional well-being. this disconnecting from your thoughts allows you to more clearly see and understand current reality.
