This is the second installment of a four-part series on awareness of thoughts and feelings.
Listening to your thoughts as sounds seems impossible. It’s the kind of thing mindfulness teachers say that makes them sound enigmatic or high. They insist that most of our mental chatter is worthless static we’ve inherited from instincts that kept our ancient ancestors alive. While this perspective resonates, I don’t find it very useful, and it can actually get in the way of developing genuine mindful awareness. The voice in your head isn’t a jerk. Not all thoughts are noise.
Thinking is definitely a double-edged sword, though. It’s a mind-blowing capacity for making sense of the world we take for granted that has made every human advancement possible. But this same ability, shaped by how our families nurtured our basic nature, often comes loaded with unwarranted criticism and can make difficult situations feel even more miserable.
Our inner voice echoes the outer voices we heard in our formative years.1 We absorbed scripts repeated by our caregivers, threats from playground bullies and siblings, and the tones and murky messages of our influential and sometimes inscrutable teachers. The words and phrases we heard repeatedly took root in our minds, forming the scaffolding for what we say to ourselves in our daily lives as adults.
Hopefully, there were also people along the way who encouraged us with their words and showed us how to distinguish between what we feel and who we are. Part of growing up involves revising the way we talk to ourselves, especially as we confront challenges, uncertainty, and emotional pain. Our friends and mentors can help us rewrite internalized scripts. So can therapists and even writers whose voices we hear only in our minds as we read their work. Sometimes, we have to imagine the gentle encouragement we haven’t found in the world to cultivate a kinder inner voice.
Practicing mindfulness can change how you relate to thoughts and feelings, not by trying to force yourself to think differently, but by teaching you to sometimes focus on the composition of your thoughts rather than just their meaning. This helps you become more objective about what’s happening in your mind, experience less internal friction, and strengthen habits that actually align with your values.
We’re not always great at talking about the mind and how it works, but I’ve learned some things over two decades of practicing mindfulness that have really helped me, and I hope they’ll help you too.
Your brain isn’t your mind. Your brain processes sensory information in various ways to manage a highly sophisticated metabolic budget—it’s involved in every bodily process. Mental activity is just one of many functions, and honestly, it’s not the most essential one.
Think of it this way: your heart, lungs, and digestive system each have their own unique missions, but they all work together.
In his book Sanshindo: Integrating the Three Minds, Blake Ashley puts it beautifully:
“The human psyche is united in its mission to derive meaning from the continuous stream of sensory experiences that arise anew in each moment of life.”2
Your mind processes visual and auditory information. You think in pictures and sounds. Most of the auditory processing you’re consciously aware of is linguistic (words and language), but you can also mentally conjure sounds and melodies.
Every poem, song, or symphony you’ve ever heard was processed through the verbal side of your thinking. Emotional processing helped shape them and make them resonate, but let’s put feelings aside for now. I want to help you distinguish between verbal and visual thinking first, which sets the stage for learning to actually hear yourself think.
Thinking can be spontaneous and intentional. You can deliberately picture things from the past, and images can also appear in your mind unbidden or triggered by associations. The same is true for the verbal side of thinking. You can intentionally think in words, and verbal thoughts can spontaneously emerge.
Blake Ashley offers a simple test: “For our practical purposes, the litmus test for determining whether mental talk is intentional or not is simply this: if you can stop it at will, it is intentional. If not, it is spontaneous.”
Here’s the good news: you don’t need to eliminate spontaneous thoughts to be mindful. You couldn’t even if you tried. In fact, trying to get rid of thoughts you didn’t intend to think is like playing Whac-A-Mole—it’s a game you’ll never win.
You can learn to listen to spontaneous thoughts with less resistance. I know this might sound surprising. It’s not what most beginning meditators expect. Experienced meditators aren’t special. They’ve simply stayed with the practice long enough to call a truce with spontaneous thoughts.
Instead of only focusing on what thoughts mean, I’ve learned to observe them—both the verbal chatter and the visual images—similar to the way they see with their eyes and hear with their ears. I try to refrain from habitually fighting my mind anymore and instead observe its activity—the flicker of images on my mental screen, the sound of sentences in the loudspeakers of my mind—as objectively as I can.
One way my mindfulness practice has changed how I live is by gradually revealing that the ways I wrestle with my mind can turn spontaneous thoughts into intrusive ones. This is especially true when the thoughts conflict with my core values. When my daughter was a baby, my mind filled with ideas of her getting hurt or dying on my watch. I checked and double-checked her breathing in a way I now see as excessive, and each time I did, I unintentionally strengthened the grip my thoughts had on me.
The familiar mental patterns and messages reappeared when my grandchildren were infants. By this time, however, I interpreted the fear-based thoughts as evidence of a hypersensitive concern for their safety and practiced letting them trail off as sounds as I focused on playing with them, feeding them, carrying them up the stairs, and singing to them at bedtime. Counterintuitively, calling off the battle with alarming thoughts weakens them.
When you combine this with the ability to observe emotional feelings in your body—without getting tangled up in them—you become better equipped to focus on what’s actually within your control. You’ll start recognizing wiser responses to challenging circumstances, and you’ll feel less at the mercy of those thoughts and feelings that are unfairly harsh about you and the world you live in right now.
Try listening to your thoughts as you would to the hum of a big city—present, but not necessarily demanding that you analyze every detail.3 Sometimes, you can just let it wash over you, and let it ‘massage’ the part of your mind that wants to turn everything into a puzzle you need to solve.
Exercise
This exercise sharpens your ability to listen to verbal thinking as just another sound.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Walking
Waiting
Wondering
