Whether or not you've been paying attention to it. You like every other human being ,move through each day leading on a ceaseless inner conversation. You talk to yourself and ask yourself what is happening, and what it means. You relate today's events to yesterday's struggles and tomorrow's possibilities.
You define your character and decide which roles you'll play with others. You judge some parts of your experience as favourable and others as unacceptable.
You decide what to fix and what to leave alone.
You give meaning to each dream, each longing, each discomfort.
You formulate ideas about what happens inside other people's heads. Your inner conversation is much more than the sum total of thoughts that roll around in your head from day to day. It is the relationship that you have with yourself and how that relationship connects you to the rest of existence.
It is the lens through which you perceive reality.
Thus, it defines the world you think you live in, a place that might be radically different from the real world. How you talk to yourself decides how you feel about yourself and others. It influences the choices you make about big and little things. It determines the actions you consider essential and the ones you consider dangerous. The desires you honor and the ones you repress, the plans you make for days to come and the lessons you learn from days gone.
Your inner conversation decides the quality of each moment in your life; and beyond the quality of each moment what else is there?
What else matters?
Despite the value, many of us our inner discourse. We seek the answers to our problems outside of ourselves. We buy into the tempting idea that better life circumstances will bring us happiness. How could we not?
After all this message is plastered on our billboards, written in our movie scripts, and woven into our advertisements.
Hypnotized by modern day consumerism, we miss the obvious gaps in such logic.
We all know people who seem to have everything but appreciate nothing . And for every imaginable misfortune ,we can find examples of people who have blossomed from it.
One person loses an arm and falls into alcoholism, shame, and despair. Another person loses an arm and becomes a world - renowned paralympian.
This difference is not inherent within the people or the situation. It is a consequence of how each person translates the meaning of losing an arm. How they respond to life's events comes down to what they tell themselves happened. We seek fulfilment in money, accomplishment, approval, status. We seek it in other people. One particularly harmful idea carried by our culture narrative, is that you need to find someone who will love you.
Imagine if we believed this about any other basic need : Food, water, oxygen.
If you needed another person to provide you with those you'd be considered dependent. If not disabled. Yet we so willingly put ourselves into this state with love. If someone else notices our qualities and talents. We think those parts of us must be worthwhile.
Our potential floats like an island in the sea..
uncharted, unexplored. We long for someone to discover us, admire us, colonize us.
But why must it be another person ?
Why can't you sail the voyage and explore yourself ?
We tend to believe that once we get the right attitude, the right habits, the right belief systems, everything will be perfect.
We place happiness into the hands of some future event ,and we use ourselves to reach it. We think we're looking within, but we're still dabbling near the surface : objectifying ourselves and then becoming frustrated when those objects do not bend to our will. Our ideas about what lies within us keep is from open minded self - exploration. Our unmasked selves do not look as we think they should, so we try our best to keep them out of sight. We hide from others, and we hide from ourselves. We neglect the goldmine of potential within us because we're too busy trying to make ourselves perfect.
We overlook our deepest possibilities while we search for joy in shallow waters. But no amount of money, accomplishment, or romance will bring you joy until you learn to talk to yourself about joy or until you stop talking yourself out of it..
To journey into your inner conversation, you must go deeper than you have ever gone before. Any of us can notice negative self-talk patterns or note the stories we make up about other people, but changing these patterns is possible only for those who see the whole picture. The inner conversation is like a forest. You might read a book about gathering tree sap or avoiding poisonous snakes, and that might be helpful. But when you get out there, the wilderness will not contort itself to match your knowledge about it. It will be as it is. Therefore you must do the contorting.
