Mind Chatter

The mind keeps us engaged with its inces­sant chat­ter. Its pur­pose is obvi­ous. It must keep up a con­stant chat­ter­ing to hold us cap­tive in our own unique, designed-just-for-us-fear-based story. To allow any space in that men­tal run-on would be to risk the dan­ger of our dis­cov­er­ing that we are not the stress­ful, lim­it­ing, and exceed­ingly unhappy story that the vic­tim mind uses to define us. And the mind is good at hold­ing us cap­tive to that story!

Just try — right now — to stop your inner harangue. Tell your mind to be quiet! And notice what hap­pens. Does it obey your com­mand? Or does it carry you away so quickly that it’s min­utes, if not days, before you even real­ize you’ve been abducted by the mind yet again?

The key is to qui­eten the mind with its’ relent­less story-telling so that the Essence of who we REALLY are can sur­face. As soon as the men­tal chat­ter stops, who we Truly are lies revealed to show us the beauty and peace of Reality.

But HOW do we get the mind to be quiet?

We have learned that we can­not force the mind to be quiet, (what with the right of free speech and all ) but what we can do is “wit­ness it into silence.” In other words, we can stand apart from it, observe its ban­ter, and refuse to respond. We sim­ply watch, and as does all con­ver­sa­tion when left untended for lack of inter­est, the mind even­tu­ally runs out of fuel, sput­ters a time or two, and finally goes silent — not for long, mind you, but long enough!

Observ­ing the mind for what it is, and refus­ing to engage with it, allows us to hear the Inner Voice and therein is found the door­way to freedom.

In the silence of Real­ity, located in this right now moment, we are fully engaged in see­ing, lis­ten­ing, tast­ing, touch­ing, and fully par­tic­i­pat­ing in what we are doing NOW. We have been relo­cated into what’s REAL; we are trans­ported from a less-than-satisfying-story about who we are and what the world is doing to us directly to the only place that really exists — NOW.

We can stand apart from our ver­bose friend, the mind, and watch it chat­ter away like a ner­vous child, and then sim­ply give it some­thing bet­ter to do — like for instance, we can sug­gest that it count our breaths, or ask it to pay full atten­tion to the col­ors, sounds, and energy sur­round­ing us NOW.

But as soon as we think about any of those expe­ri­ences — of what we are see­ing, hear­ing, tast­ing, touch­ing …etc. … as soon as we cre­ate a story in our mind about what those things mean, judge them, or com­plain in our minds about how they should be dif­fer­ent, or as soon as we think about some­thing else, or some place else alto­gether, we remove our­selves from the present Real­ity, and in so doing, we exchange NOW for a story about it.

Once the mind is engaged in NOW, Real­ity auto­mat­i­cally finds and restores us. We do not aim to silence the mind for­ever, just more and more often.

I hope this is helpful.

Bless­ings,

Lynne