Trust (Some of) Your Thoughts

This morning, I heard two messages from inside my head that had rather different “flavors.”

One message arose during a lesson I was teaching. The voice in my head said, “Ask her to sing like a bee.” I didn’t even know what it means to sing like a bee, but my teacher’s intuition has been on the mark such a high percentage of the time that I did not hesitate. I asked my student to sing like a bee and she made some amusing buzzy sounds and then laughed and sang a passage of Verdi with an elegant lightness that had been eluding her.

The other message came while I was watching my elderly mother-in-law wash the dishes. It has become her habit to not use soap or a sponge, but just run hot water over a dirty dish until it looks clean. This method not being in harmony with my ideas of keeping house, my inner voice suggested a response: “What’s wrong with you, stupid woman?” Luckily, I recognized this thought suggestion as not representing my feelings toward my sweet mother-in-law, nor the way I wished to express myself in the world. I (wisely, I think) held my tongue.

I used to be confused about the disparity of quality among the thoughts running through my head. They all seemed to be “speaking” in the same voice, which I came to think of as ME. Now I realize that in both cases my brain is using my inner voice to communicate to me 1) nuggets of wisdom from the well of creativity all of us have access to and 2) really crappy garbage thoughts that come and go in any human brain like clouds in the sky. How can you tell the difference between such similar-sounding yet qualitatively different thoughts?

Here are some clues to listen for:

Thoughts from the Wisdom of Nature tend to pop in when I am paying attention with an attitude of quiet curiosity. They most often have content that is totally new to me, often surprising. My inner voice tends to intone these thoughts delicately and quietly, meaning they can easily be drowned out by competing mind content. Sometimes they arise outside of language, seeming to be a pure idea or intuition. Always, this kind of thought comes with a good feeling: peacefulness or contentment or delight or connection.

Garbage thoughts tend to come when I am ruminating about something. They come in familiar ways, often using the same wording that has come many times. (Yours will be different, but some red flags for me are sentences starting with “You know,” a worry that I am a bad person, and any idea based in racial prejudice.) Garbage thoughts sound harsh in tone or loud and insistent in my head. The closer I get to actually voicing or acting on garbage thoughts, the more I can feel facial and body tensions that I associate with emotions like irritation, anger, or despair coming in to “help” me express the thoughts. If I am unwise enough to act on a garbage thought (or if I innocently react to one, forgetting it is not an expression of the real me), it very likely has an unpleasant resonance: voicing garbage tends to piss off other people, fill me with sadness, bring on tension and fatigue, and create divisiveness in relationships.

Once you get good at distinguishing between wisdom thoughts and garbage thoughts, you will find a whole new source of support for your practice. In your next practice session, voice your inner thinking out loud to yourself as a means of evaluating which category each thought goes in:

Sing some music until a thought arises in your mind. Stop singing immediately and say the thought out loud, getting as close to the tone of the inner voice as possible. Before resuming your singing, analyze what you just said to yourself and determine if it is more like wisdom or garbage. Feel free to act on any wisdom that occurs to you and feel free to completely disregard any garbage that spews out!

Did you get clearer on the ever-shifting quality of your internal dialog? Feel free to post noticings or questions in the comments below.