Did you know that there’s not an intrusive thought you could have that would make you a bad or unworthy person?
Some people are very good internal hearers. They hear everything going on inside of their minds.
But the thing is, the stuff in our brains is not always our own. Our brains are a recorder of everything we’ve ever internalized—everything we’ve ever heard and seen and experienced.
So if you’ve got good internal hearing and you don’t like what you’re hearing and you’re trying to clean up your brain of that noise?
Well, that’s about as useful an endeavor as cleaning up the internet. Stuff is in there. And to stop taking it personally, you’ve got to reframe it.
For instance, if you hear something disempowering or mean or maybe something lewd or crude or just plain scary, be curious.
Don’t stand guard and pull out specific sound bites and make them mean something bad about who you are. We’re complex beings—a container of surviving animal and eternal spirit, of healed and unhealed parts, constraints and possibilities, inspiration and insecurities. And what we focus on is what we’ll see.
So if you pull a sound bite from the data bank of your mind and put yourself on trial for having it, does that make any sense?
You’re giving that random sound bite prime real estate in your awareness.
If you want to give it attention, do so as a detective or as an explorer or an even as a compassionate triage nurse—observe, identify, study its origin—and then insert some humor and compassion and reassurance.
When I think of the databank of my mind like my own personal internet, it helps me to remember that I’m the one who gets to search for the kind of content that supports my self-created, deliberate values.
Just as we share the earth with healed and unhealed behavior, peacemakers and war makers, with things toxic and things wholesome, and everything in between, all that stuff also exists in the microcosm of our brains.
Your awareness is what you notice, and your level of understanding determines what you‘ll choose to make it all mean.
You are a complex wonder! Give yourself some appreciation! Use your amazing databank to create something that represents your favorite parts of who you are!
-JLK
