The Voice

The 'Ah ha' moment and that voice. When you realise that the voice in your head is actually not you.

At least, not the whole of you. And this is huge! When I fully comprehended this I felt the clear shift. The voice nagging you daily is not the final authority on who you are, what you're worth, or what is going to happen next. It’s just a voice, a part of you, not all of you. Yep, it’s annoyingly loud most of the time, it’s persistent and convincing. But it's not you. You're simply the one listening to it.

That distinction sounds really small but it really, really isn't. It is, without exaggeration, the single most important shift you can make in the course of your entire inner life. Because as long as you believe you're the voice, you're trapped inside every thought it produces. Every fear it generates. Every cruel, reductive, catastrophic thing it whispers at three in the morning when it feels like the four horse men are chasing you. Because, if that voice is you, then its opinions are your truth, it's panic is your reality, the judgements are your identity. But if you're the one hearing the voice, everything changes. Because when you separate yourself from it to the one who hears it, then the one who hears is not broken. The one who hears - is simply aware. And awareness, unlike the voice, doesn't have an agenda.

The voice I mistook for myself

Most of us go through life completely fused with an endless internal monologue. We don’t experience thoughts as something that happens to us. We experience them as something we are (I am anxious, I am worthless) There is no gap between the thinker and the thought. No sliver of daylight between the commentary and the person it's commenting on.

You fall into the spiral of not just thinking thoughts, you become the thought in that moment, absorbed and trapped. And because there is no separation, there isn’t a choice. If the voice says you are failing, you're failing. If the voice says this will end badly, it'll end badly and if the voice says you're unlovable, difficult, too much, not enough, then that is what you are. You don't question it any more than you would question the jolt of pain when you burn your hand because it feels so immediate that it's undeniable.

But thoughts aren't sensations, they're constructions that are assembled from memory, from fear, from inherited belief, from pattern recognition that may or may not be accurate. They are the mind doing what it does, which is to narrate, predict, warn, judge, and catastrophise with breathtaking speed and with absolute confidence, regardless of whether any of it is true. The mind is a machine that produces thoughts . But you're not the machine, you're the person standing in the room where the machine is running.

The discovery of the observer

There is a part of you that watches. It has always been watching and you may have felt it even if you didn't have a name for it. It's the part that notices you are spiralling before you hit the bottom. The part that sits, quietly, underneath all the noise:

That part isn't loud or argue with the voice. It doesn’t need to argue, interrupt, or shout over the top of the noise, it simply observes. And in that observation, there is something remarkable - a space. A gap between the stimulus and the response. A crack of daylight between what the mind is doing and what you choose to do about it. That gap is where all growth lives. Every meaningful change you'll ever make in your life happens in the space between the voice and the one who hears it.

Why we stay fused

If separation from the voice is so powerful, why do so few of us experience it? Because fusion has become the default. Simple as that. We can analyse the thoughts of others with remarkable precision. But when it comes to our own internal voice, we remain enmeshed like we're locked in a hopeless codependent relationship..

Fixed in and fused in. Totally identified. Unable to tell the difference between a thought and a truth. This isn't a character flaw but it does ask you to make a choice - do you stay there?

What the voice actually is

I would also like to clarify that the voice is not your enemy and this matters, because the temptation, once you start to see the separation, is to go to war with your own mind. To treat the voice as a problem to be rid off and to believe that growth means silencing the internal monologue permanently. Please don’t - and anyway, you can’t.

Instead view the voice as a collection of parts. Protectors, managers, exiles, controllers. Each one formed in response to something that happened to you. Each one trying, in its own distorted and very often counterproductive way, to keep you safe.

The voice that tells you not to trust anyone learned that lesson in a relationship where trust was actually dangerous. The voice that says you're not enough absorbed that message from a system that required you to earn your right to exist. The voice that catastrophises is trying to prepare you for the worst so that you're never caught off guard again. They’re not irrational malfunctions, they're in fact understandable adaptations. They made sense at one stage in your life, the problem is not that they exist, it's that they've been running unchecked and unquestioned for so long that you forgot they were separate from you.

You're not the protector and you’re not the critic. You’re not the panicked voice at three in the morning insisting that everything is falling apart. But you are the one who hears all of them. And the one who hears is the only one with the authority to decide which voice to follow.

The practice of not believing every thought you have

This isn't a one off ‘ah ha’ moment to be moved on from. (Again, - please don’t this). It's a practice. A daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes minute by minute discipline of catching yourself in the act of fusion and gently stepping back and dis-identifying.

A thought arrives such as: “I am going to fail at this”. And instead of absorbing it as prophecy, you instead notice it. You let it sit in the room without giving it the power to rearrange the furniture. You observe it the way you might observe weather. “Ah Interesting. That showed up. I wonder what it's responding to”. And then you let it pass without following it into the spiral it's trying to create, (and yes, I acknowledge this is no simple task, it takes repetition and practice)

This isn't suppression, (rest assured). Suppression is pushing the thought away and pretending it didn’t happen. This is something different, it's allowing the thought to exist while refusing to let it be the last word.

You don't have to believe every thought you have. That sentence alone, fully understood and consistently applied, will change your life more than any self help book, any retreat, any podcast ever could.

The one who hears (YOU)

You are the observer of it, the one who can hear without all the panic. Without all the incessant judgement. Who can choose not to spiral or collapse under the weight of it's own wail. In the witnessing there is a kind of freedom that nothing else provides.

It's not freedom from pain. I don’t want to give any false expectations here. You’ll still feel pain because its not freedom from difficult thoughts. They'll still arrive, uninvited and wanting to over stay, but it is freedom from the assumption of believing that every thought is a fact. Understanding that the loudest voice in the room is not the most trustworthy.

You can’t get rid of the voice entirely, but you can change your relationship to it. You can hear it without obeying it and you can acknowledge it without being consumed by it. You can let it speak without handing it the microphone and letting it karaoke the hell out of your life.

That is the big shift, not the silencing. Realise, fully and irreversibly, that you were never the voice.

You're simply the one who hears it. And the one who hears gets to choose what happens next.