Shut Up and Listen to Yourself
72Shut up and Listen to You!
Listening to yourself might just help you find out what is important to you or even what is holding you back.
Right now take a moment and listen to all the noises in your environment. What do you hear? Traffic? Music? The hum of the computer fan? What do you hear? Do you notice that when you shift your focus on those things they appear to get louder? That is because you are no longer filtering those sounds out of your environment. If you focused on them all the time it might drive you mad. It is necessary to filter what we hear so we can focus on the task at hand. We block out all sorts of things. Our mate, our parent, the barking dog, the ice maker, the ticking of a clock. It is a coping mechanism.
This coping mechanism becomes a problem when you block out your own feelings. When we disassociate from our body to push ourselves to do more we can eventually harm ourselves. We can lose track of what makes us happy and that can result in an under current of depression, poor choices and feelings of being separate from the rest of the world and even our own lives.
So, for a couple of days get a little notebook and write down all the things your mind says to you about you. Does it chronically tell you something? Look for patterns. Is your internal monologue mostly positive or mostly negative? Did anyone ever say similar things to you? How do these things your mind is telling you make you feel? Does it make you feel good or bad? Why?
Are you having a problem listening to your own "self" speaking? Okay, then try this exercise. Note what gets your attention. What attracts you? Do you listen more when people are talking about other people, ideas or things? Do you want to know more about positive things or negative things? Do you find yourself wishing people well or feeling bad when something good happens to someone else? Why?
What we give our attention too can tell us a lot about who we are on the inside. Don't worry, if you like to hear the negative it doesn't really mean you are negative. It could just mean you are trying to compare your life with others, or you are fearful that these negative things could happen to you. It could mean it is familiar to you and so we naturally gravitate to what you know. What it means depends on your own interpretation. The important thing is to actually notice what you are doing consciously. Be aware and observe without judgment. This exercise will do you no good if you use it as yet another tool with which to beat yourself up.
Finally, write down how the things you observe make you feel. Really pay attention to the feelings in your body. Do you feel happy or lighter, even younger or do you feel heavy, stressed out, depressed or like giving up? Knowing this information can really be the fuel for a positive change.
Knowing what you say to yourself is the first step to choosing what you say to yourself. If you know that certain thoughts make you feel good and other thoughts make you feel bad you can actively cultivate positive thoughts and catch your negative thought patters and stop them in their tacks by stopping and acknowledging that you thought something that makes you feel uncomfortable. Then you can actively rethink your original thought in a positive present tense. For example:
Original thought: "I'm really stressed."
Acceptance statement: "I accept that I think I am really stressed and I love and accept myself anyway."
Re-think "I am relaxed and safe at this moment."
Do that as many times as you need to with every thought that is holding you back. You can even elaborate and affirm, "I am happy, relaxed and getting better every day."
Listening to your internal monologue does not substitute for counseling, exercise, rest or eating right and proper medical attention but it can go a long way toward helping you find your bliss in life and improve your overall health. Why? Because very often the body as an organism will create illness to get your attention and stop you from over work, or slow you down enough to help you realize and even get you out of unhappy circumstances. There is a saying, "If you don't take your rest, your body will take it for you." Before that happens to you try sitting quietly and listening to you for 5 minutes a day. Make notes on what you catch yourself thinking at various parts of the day and write those in a self speak journal to follow how paying attention to what you say to yourself makes a difference in who you are. .
CommentsLoading...
I'd love to put a link to your book ( tell me how I don't know how to do that.) but I honestly don't think I've ever read a book by you as your name is not ringing any bells. Please let me know specific things you see in my article that you feel is an uncited quote from your book. I was surprised that your book was the same name as my article. Perhaps in the future I should Google any title before posting. LOL. If I was going to copy someone I would surely change the title. Of that much I am sure. J My influences are "What to Say When You Talk to Yourself.” I read a long time ago. I love everything about that book. Life coaching by Terri Levine and I also lean heavily on the law of attraction and a course I took to become a certified hypnotist in the mid 1990's, life coaching materials and a life of reading self help books, participation in meditation courses trying to heal my own illness and even writing a book myself. The irony is I really don't think I have read your book and I’m not pulling your leg. I would love to read it. Am I channeling you? :) If you want I will change the name of this post because I just pulled it out of my back side anyway, or I can take this post down as I have no intention of stealing anyone's ideas only writing an article to post that will help people. As you know, teachers of life improvement and self-mastery teach the same things in different words. When you read as many books on the topic as I have you run into the same ideas over and over as you mentioned in your comment about “re-inventing the wheel” I also am influenced by Holosync tapes, mindmovies,. The secret, The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, kinesthetic practices and meditation courses that I have studied.
I wrote it as I was getting ready to go to a meditation course to observe 10 days of noble silence. (It turned out to be 9.) I thought I would do just that, shut up and listen to myself so I named it that. I had also caught myself blocking my mom out and threw that in cause she proof reads my stuff. LOL. Again, if you think I’ve plagiarized you somehow by reading someone who read you and wrote and assimilating it and putting it back on paper myself or something please give me the exact quote and I will either cite you with your permission or take it down or put a link because as far as I remember I wrote it without consulting anything but my memory and collective information from years of study. P.S. Josh, I took a look at the cover of your book and it looks really cool. I would have e-mailed you all this but as I said I am not technosavy and so I am replying here.
Oh, yeah, and Emotional Freedom Technique. I realized some of what I wrote drew on that as well.
Toni -
I certainly would not ask you to take down any post you are helping people and also mentioned I did not reinvent the wheel as none of us really ever do in the name of offering help.
No need for a permalink just keeping spreading some good common sense in the world, and yes a Google every now and then might help :)
BUT that would be playing by all the rules which gets us nowhere!
Thanks
joshua estrin
I would perma link I am just clueless. I do feel bad about tromping on your ground though and won't write on blanket topics anymore unless I am asked to do so. The world is really big and there is plenty to write about. Actually, I might just go ahead and get a real job. Ha ha. I'm serious though. I will Google from here on out. At least I will be aware of any repetition. Until then the collective conciousness is alive and well. I wish you much success and like I said, tell me how to permalink and I will do it! Of course, now they can google your name. Ha.
dear toni and joshua,i'm a fully trained artist/illustrator and when i studied illustration(back in the late 1980s)i learned that one cant copyright ideas,only images.therefore,as an illustrator if i trace someone elses' photograph i have to significantly change the original composition or i can be sued if i display the work publicly.anyway,you'll find that copyright law now is very likely the same if you research it:that you cant copyright ideas only images. on another note,what toni says about"what we give our attension to tells us a lot about who we are on the inside,"is very true.also,what other people give their attension to tells you a lot about who THEY are on the inside.this is a VERY effective way or reading people. also to both toni and joshua i really appreciate your core message"to thine own self be true"because all my adult life i was expected to be some one else i.e.a gold digger who marries some one they secretly hate or could care less about to live off of them financially.society at large actually expects straight females to do this(witness "the rules"and cosmopolitan the "how to be a ho"magazine). when you're a straight female,you're not expected to have a "self"(you're also not expected to have any desires,outside of money).a straight female is expected to be just some dumb,non existant hole and baby making machine for sale for the government.this is supposed to be your marriage.(unless you want to stop putting out and rake a lot of money out of the creep or dud from the divorce).this is what hetrosexual society considers normal for females:BE FOR SALE. i'd love to hear your response to this signed christine j sojka
Well, Ms. Sojka, I have heard that message loud and clear in certain circles myself. Mostly from older role models and in all facets of popular culture it seems that we are objectified. Keep in mind we are members of the world's largest minority population...roughly 50% of the world's population. We come by our minorty status honesty. Fortunately these same people who told me about this expectation to marry well didn't pass on the skill set needed to be a Gold Digger. I wanted to be smart learned now to fix my car, build things and create so my only need for marriage was for love. I have met my share of lost women who not only fall into the roles you mention but who are actually addicted to having a man or woman for that matter. They think for reasons of their own that their lives will be better if only they have the right man or woman. I agree with what you say about Cosmopolitan. I take exception to the lack of or at least limited factual medical information in the magazine to protect the people who are taking their sexual advice and I am not alone. I find that the messages about objectification go cold after society deems women to be "of a certain age." The label, "Cougar." is moderately offensive to me but what is more offensive if the idea that we are too old to be noticed as human beings other than the roles of mother, nurturer and care giver unless we have obtained enough financial status and plastic surgery to pass as a younger female. This is a very unhealthy trend. Just because people say you should not have a "self" doesn't make it so. These limiting ideas are less in academic and creative talent driven professions and social welfare circles...at least that is what I have found. The sad thing is our society is now a society where most of us have to live in a 2 income household be it room mate or family unit in order to live. That can make the pressure to be someone else amplifed. I know that pressure well. However, I could never make myself live a utilitarian life. I could not stay with someone I didn't love or show attraction where there was none...when the people ask me why I didn't marry someone else or why I don't use my "assets" to attract a money bag I tell them that I have always wanted to make my own. If the money was someone elses and they bestowed it on me because of my marital status they could take it away from me when they left...at least half of it. But if I earned my own way, even if it was less it was mine. Money can be replaced. Your time once spent is gone forever. Life is too short to spend it being someone you are not. That's my response. I will add that I feel that the pressure to marry well is less than it was in the past. However the pressure to be only a sex object and be judged purely on physical traits is greater now and less rewarding than it was even at the peak of the sexual revolution. This I hope is a trend that is reined in quickly as I am seeing too many young ladies who's lives are crushed under the pressure. I hope I didn't ramble too long. I just sensed your passion and I share your concerns. Be true to you.
Dear Toni and Christine, it's interesting to read your comments regarding western society's perception of women, the perceived place of women in our society, and the frustrations of being a woman in our society. I have certainly experienced much of what you have described throughout my own personal life, and many of my female friends have also expressed similar misgivings about their perceptions of their role in our society. However, I do feel obliged to point out that this isn't an exclusively female experience - and the "gold digger" example you have kindly supplied offers a valuable opportunity to illustrate this point effectively.
In light of feminist theory, it may be easy to view the 'gold digger/affluent male' marital arrangement from a female-centric viewpoint - that is, to view it within the context of the woman's perceived role as an objectified infant incubator but otherwise insignificant and powerless parasite within the world of the 'host male'. However, we would also do well to consider that a woman who chooses to live in such a role is objectifying not only herself - and by extension all women, but also the man to whom she has attached - and by extension all men. After all, a woman who is comfortable with living in such an arrangement is likely to view the host male not as a person with needs, wants, feelings and an income, but rather as a host from which she can siphon a degree of financial sustenance, and which also happens to have needs, wants and emotions. The telling point here is the way the innate perceptual frame of the woman causes her to view the man; to her, he is a resource, and any things he might be in addition to that are secondary attributes. While this example definitely illustrates a worldview conforming to your 'Be for sale' comment Christine, one must also bear in mind that the societal structure which perpetuates this worldview is hardly one-sided.
A much less obvious but no less compelling example is the way in which both society and goverment opress males by indoctrinating them into the belief that their only true value lies in their ablity to produce digits on bank statements. It is particularly important to consider the impact that this sort of conditioning can have on the worldview of males, and thus how it can affect how men behave in their interpersonal relationships - especially with women who, unlike the vast majority of men, are for the most part aware of how they are indoctrinated by society, and therefore have an awareness of how to resist that conditioning. In essense, the expectation placed upon men is no different from the expectation placed upon women, merely that women have considerably higher awareness of such opression, and greater access to resources with which to create an alternative life option than men presently do.
I'm certainly not suggesting that women have it easier than men do in our society - after all, I am only one person, and am capable of recognising that regardless of what I know of the opinions of others, the scope of my personal experience is too limited to make such a direct and generalised comparison. However, I am able to see that there's a clear disparity between the respective social limitations placed upon males and females, as well as the way that social conditioning creates within our society the concept of person-as-commodity. Moreover, I can recognise some ways in which some modern forms of feminist theory encourage this type of social conditioning by perpetuating the idea of male-as-adversary, using this idea to wage social war against males from behind a façade of 'equal rights for women', whilst simultaneously promoting what is, at its core, an essentially exclusionist worldview.
As you mentioned in your original post Toni, 'What we give our attention too[sic] can tell us a lot about who we are on the inside.' This is an empowering idea, and it certainly holds a significant degree of truth. However, to fully understand who we are on the inside we must first be able to understand what we see, hear and feel within. To do this effectively we must first consider the limitations of the perspectives that we as individuals have been conditioned to hold by influences from our family, our peers and our society, as well as how these perspectives limit not only our ability to understand what we experience, but also our ability to create useful new perspectives within ourselves from which to create a deeper and more accurate self-awareness.
I agree. You expressed yourself well. To see the world with new eyes daily is an exercise in opening ourself to new and hopefully more accurate perceptions. I will engage in making a blanket statement...being human can be extremely difficult. The difficulty in navigating through our world transcends gender and the roles associated with each. All I know for sure is... I don't know and that like the rest of us, I am feeling around in the dark hoping to understand the world around me and as sure as I think I've figure it out I realize I again don't know as much as I had hoped I knew. I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective and giving us pause for thought.
joshua estrin 4 years ago
Hi Toni-
Great post and I am not usually one of those EGOS that gets his britches in a knot but your post, the name Shut Up and Listent to yourself and the content is drawn directly from my book...I did not reinvent the wheel by any means and they don't call me the Anti Expert by for nothing so this is not hate mail BUT could you give a permalink to Amazon and my book since you are using it in your blog
Thanks and again this is not hate mail I am sure we can find a way to make some magic together
Warmly
Josh