The Voice in Your Head

Thought leaders, yoga teachers, self-help helpers all mention the voice in your head and how not to listen to it. The way many go about teaching this has always rubbed me the wrong way, and recently I discovered why.

Maybe you’ve also experienced the general shade that gets thrown on this voice in our head, just because it says rather negative and sometimes downright mean things. We’re often taught to battle the voice by choosing better things to say when it whispers “you’re not good enough” or better mind-activities to practice when it drops a “you suck and everyone else sucks.”

I’ve come to discover that the voice in our heads seems like it’s of the devil; it seems like it’s just the negativity bias of the reptilian brain. Though it may seem like something as harmful or as insidious as a criminal, its harm lies in our inability to see it for what it truly is and dissolve the negative part of it with love and compassion. When we treat our own mind as something to watch out for, we’ll end up creating more of the same. A mind to be feared. It’ll have control, we won’t want it to have control, and in that don’t want attitude, that’s what divides yogis trying for inner peace from yogis that have attained inner peace.

The voice in our heads is some part of our youth that warped inward and now lives in daily mental activity. It warped inward when it encountered a real fear or a real blow to safety–a traumatic event or series of events. None of us are born with this voice and our brains don’t just suddenly become reptilian one day. Our brains are human brains that have evolved evolved evolved and we can understand them through psychology and neurology. When yoga teachers say “this isn’t therapy” they’re right, yet then they take liberty to go about speaking on the topic of “mind”. I admit to being one of these well-meaning spiritual cuties, and it’s time we own up to the idea that we dabble in psychology.

Being responsible for this means being more educated on actual psychology, so if you’re a yoga teacher and reading this, cool. Please understand where the line is when we give our students teachings on the mind. The rest of this post is my offering for how we can have background knowledge on how the mind works… and probably say none of this during a yoga class.

When my teenage-self went through some of the traumatic events and through the many years not getting acceptance and affection from family, psychologically, Janan the very hurt and scared teenager rooted trillions of thought patterns in my brain that come up as the voice in my head. And because I was also a 10 year old, 9, 8, 7, etc. I have those plentiful, knee-jerk-reactive, child-like thoughts buried in my everyday thoughts–buried in plain sight, so to speak.

Now with awareness, I can start to see a pattern in when 14 year old Janan has some opinion or belief come up in a day or when it’s a 5 year old’s belief. I’ve found the teenage thoughts are the ones most people label as the negative mind and therefore, need to be changed.

While that’s true on one level, of course, the way yoga teachers and leaders go about this can be unhelpful and in some cases, harmful. This is why I advocate for much of this work to be done by licensed mental health professionals because this is some deep psychological work that I’m blessed/cursed to be learning by personal experience and discovery.

Bemoaning my “monkey mind” and “the voice in my head” as things to be conquered or erased–this is more of what the teenage self fought against, cried against, despaired against in the first place. The way therapy works is that as an adult I discover my teenage self wanted nothing more than to be noticed, to be cherished, to be valued, and to get affection. The way teen Janan went about this, though because she was not yet a skilled adult, was to rebel, curse, and push away affection.

A child’s cry for help can show up in anger, outrage, and seeming as if it has ill-intent. It’s a mask on top of a mountain of terrible sadness and oftentimes, hopelessness, as the child wants to feel like it has some amount of control and power. Of course.

I know that the only cure for this rebellious inner teen is affection and love. I know I don’t need to adhere to the voice, the thoughts, the ideas that come up time to time (or even, all of the time!). And by completely dismissing them or immediately trying to change them, this is fighting adult will against teen will. The adult that I am can turn toward these thoughts, listen with compassion and understanding, and validate them because they’re ultimately coming from a place of wanting to be loved, to be protected, and to be safe. I can listen without handing them the keys. I can open my heart and cry with them without losing my True Self. At times, in the heat of the moment, I do feel like I have completely lost control–emotionally. And there have been a few times with doing this deep inner work that I needed a mental health professional to provide a watchful eye on my health. Without one, the spiral could have gone much deeper.

This is why I know that it’s potentially harmful to step into this realm with any of my yoga students because I don’t have years of training in how to handle this 100%. The most I’ll say is that your mind is not your enemy; it’s another part of you. While you don’t do everything it says, love it.

Next time you discover a voice in your head trying to thwart you or spouting negative thoughts, turn toward it and be it’s loving guardian. It’s actually a precious part of you. Yoga Sutra 1.2: Yogas citta vrtti nirodaha (Yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind). The fluctuations of the mind do not calm with ignorance or with full force. They calm with the paradox of allowing surrender and anchoring in Knowing.