This is the second part of a four-part series about being aware of thinking and feeling.
Listen to Your Mental Talk
One of the most liberating attention skills a person can develop is the ability to listen to their verbal thoughts as sounds sometimes.
When people learn about mindfulness, many hope it will help eliminate the thoughts they find annoying. Despite how carefully a mindfulness teacher chooses their words, people often interpret them as saying, "Begin by clearing your mind."
This misguided advice is promoted daily on social media and in popular culture. I'm unsure whether the makers of the most recent season of White Lotus were mocking this misinterpretation or unintentionally perpetuating it.
Practicing mindfulness doesn't eliminate thoughts or feelings, but it can gradually transform the ways you relate to them.
To effectively navigate this difference, we need to distinguish between the mechanisms that drive our thoughts and emotions and the content they express.
Our inner dialogue is a vital part of being human, and we wouldn't want to navigate life without this remarkable ability. It helps us remember, predict, and plan. Mental imagery allows us to reminisce about the past, anticipate what lies ahead, and strategize based on our experiences. While the combined ability to create internal "movies" is often taken for granted, it's easy for us to develop habits that make us feel entangled by our thoughts.
Mindful awareness skills empower us to approach our mental movies more intentionally. Through dedicated practice, we can learn to observe our visual thoughts as images and our verbal thoughts as sounds. The content of our thoughts doesn’t go away, but we can learn to let it be secondary to the mental phenomena that convey the meaning.
This is difficult, but not impossible. It requires the same kind of practice needed to learn to cook, play a musical instrument, or get better at public speaking.
The only thing more impactful than being able to observe our thinking process with a bit more objective distance would be to witness our emotional feelings in a similar way. [Psst: Stay tuned.]
I've learned something valuable about this challenge that I want more people to experience for themselves: the thinking process acts shy when we try to observe it. It’s good at conveying meaning. It prefers to make provocative movies rather than notice us peeking behind the curtain to observe the inner workings.
We can use these insights to our advantage. When we get curious about watching our mental screen, it tends to become less active, and our verbal thoughts vie for our attention. When we get curious about listening to our verbal thoughts, they tend to quiet down, too, and the visual side of thinking kicks into gear. Breaking the thinking process into separate strands allows us to become better acquainted with the mechanisms of mental activity and downplay the content that emerges.
The good news is that focusing on where the mental components seem to play out gives us a small dose of observational distance. Once you’re oriented to this perspective, you can concentrate on collecting instances of it—more often than never—until your thoughts begin to settle on their own a bit more frequently. When this happens, you'll have a greater appreciation for the paradoxical challenge of allowing the mind to quiet on its own instead of trying to silence it.
This sets the stage for noticing the feelings behind the thoughts that grip your attention. You might start to wonder whether your unintentional attempts to avoid certain emotions contribute to your mind seeming, at times, like such an inhospitable place.
We will invite those feelings to the party next week.
Exercise
This exercise sharpens your ability to notice the presence of verbal thinking and detect when the internal speakers are quiet.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Sitting on a park bench
Waiting for a meeting to begin
Taking a bus, an Uber, or a plane
