Hi everyone, I hope that you're all well. After coming out of the long dark tunnel of January, I then went into a short dark tunnel of a week of being rather poorly. But here I am, I'm back, sort of, although I haven't recently done many of the social media micro-learning posts.
Mantra meditation
So I thought I'd write this week's insights article based on the talk I gave at yesterday's meditation class. In it, I explained a bit about our relationship with our minds in the West and how the Eastern wisdom traditions have developed tools to help us work with them in soft, gentle, and kind ways.
One of those tools is Mantra. A mantra is a phrase you repeat in your mind that provides a point of internal focus. Sometimes these mantras have meaning, sometimes they don't.
Mantra meditation is a key part of focused attention meditation, which is the set of meditations most effective at training us to become aware when our mind wanders and return to the present moment, which is what mindfulness is.
Here's the talk. It's a six-minute read. Feel free to add comments at the end.
You know that voice in your head? The one that replays yesterday's awkward moment, rehearses tomorrow's argument, and reminds you of something embarrassing from 2007? Most people assume they're stuck with it. They think the only option is to think differently or force themselves into a better mindset. But there's a much simpler approach — and it starts with understanding what that voice actually is.
You're Not Your Thoughts — Here's the Proof
Here's a quick test. Can you predict your next thought? Not the general topic, but the exact words that will pop into your head five seconds from now. You can't. Nobody can. That one fact changes everything, because it means you're not the one producing the thoughts. You're the one receiving them. You're the awareness that notices them arrive. Think of yourself as the person checking the mailbox, not the person writing the letters.
So where do the thoughts come from? They're a personalised version of your culture. The language you think in, the value judgments you make, the ideas about what's right, wrong, fair, or unfair — all of it comes from the world you grew up in. When the culture changes, so do the value judgments. Consider how attitudes toward work, relationships, or success have shifted even within your own lifetime. Your inner voice reflects those shifts, because it was never truly "yours" to begin with. It's your brain bringing things to your attention, filtered through the world you absorbed.
Sometimes, to understand the mind, we need to look at extremes and opposites. Feral children — children raised without human contact, usually adopted by other social animals such as dogs or monkeys — don't develop inner speech. No language means no running internal commentary. The Jungle Book character Mowgli was inspired by real cases of children raised by animals. Given the modern world as it is, these cases are increasingly rare. And all we have are cases of semi-feral children who live on the fringes of human habitation in poor countries. Without a culture to absorb, there's no voice narrating their experience. That tells us something important: the voice in your head isn't a fixed part of who you are. It's a product of your environment, running on autopilot.
You Don't Have to Believe Everything You Think
Once you see that thoughts are incoming signals rather than commands, you realise you have a choice. Some thoughts are genuinely useful — you notice something you hadn't seen before, test it against reality, and it proves accurate. You then have some new knowledge. You've learned something. Those are worth keeping. But the self-criticism, catastrophising, and the endless repetition of old mistakes? You can let those pass through without listening to them continuously.
Not all thoughts are equal. You can choose which ones to listen to,
This doesn't mean suppressing thoughts or pretending they aren't there. It means recognising that a thought showing up in your head doesn't automatically make it true or important. Every thought that passes through gets the same confident delivery — your brain doesn't flag the useful ones with a gold star and mark the junk with a warning label. Your job is to notice which ones actually hold up to scrutiny and let the rest drift by. It's the difference between reading every piece of mail that arrives and stopping to read only what matters.
The Trick Isn't to Stop Listening — It's to Listen Differently
About one in ten people report having a constant stream of inner commentary from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep. If you're one of them, being told "just stop listening to your thoughts" sounds impossible. But there's a distinction that makes this practical. There are different kinds of listening.
Think about the classic scenario: someone's talking to you, and you're technically hearing every word, but your attention is somewhere else entirely. You're listening, but you're not listening. That same principle applies to your inner voice. The commentary can be running, but you don't have to connect to it. You don't have to engage with it, analyse it, or treat it as meaningful. It becomes background noise rather than a conversation you're actively participating in.
The difficulty comes when you catch yourself and then beat yourself up about it. You notice you've spent fifteen minutes absorbed in the same self-critical loop you've been running for years, and your first reaction is to criticise yourself for doing it. That's just adding another layer of the same problem. The most useful response is to notice. That's it. Each time you notice an unhelpful thought pattern without engaging with it, that pattern loses a small amount of power. Not all at once, but gradually. The key is not adopting it as yours — not marrying the narrative and making it part of your identity.
Why Fighting Your Mind Doesn't Work
Most of us try to manage our minds the same way we manage everything else — through effort and force. Push harder, try harder, think harder. In the physical world, this makes sense. Push a glass across a table, and it moves. Push harder, and it moves further. But the mind doesn't follow those rules. Push against an unwanted thought, and it pushes back harder. Suppress anxiety, and it surfaces somewhere else. Try to force yourself to relax, and you get more tense.
This is what makes mental training counterintuitive. The approaches that actually work often look like the opposite of what you'd expect. Instead of fighting uncomfortable thoughts, you work alongside them. Instead of trying to eliminate negative feelings, you introduce positive ones and let them do the work. A well-known meditation teacher once demonstrated this by pouring sand into a glass of water and stirring it up. You couldn't see through it at all. Then he set it down on a table and talked for a while. When he picked it up later, the water was clear. He didn't filter it, strain it, or force the sand out. He just stopped stirring.
The mind works the same way. Stop stirring, and clarity returns on its own.
A Practical Tool: Give Your Attention Something Better to Do
If you can only truly listen to one thing at a time, that's not a limitation — it's a tool. When your attention locks onto an unhelpful inner monologue, you can redirect it by giving it something specific and worthwhile to listen to instead.
This is one of the principles behind using a personal phrase or Mantra as a focus point.
The phrase "May I be well, may I be happy, may I be free from suffering" works well for this because it's short, universally positive, and has no downside. But the important part isn't the specific words — it's how you use them. If you just repeat them on autopilot, they become another background noise track. Your mind delegates them to a loop and wanders off to something else. The practice only works when you actually listen to the words as you say them internally. Pay attention to the meaning. Notice the feeling they create. That active listening displaces the unhelpful commentary because your attention can't be in two places at once.
You can also use longer phrases — a few lines of poetry, a passage that resonates with you, anything that requires enough attention to keep you engaged. The Serenity Prayer is one well-known example: "Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." The length matters because it's harder to put on autopilot than a simple repeated single phrase. You have to stay with it, which is precisely the point.
What to Take Away
You don't need to overhaul your thinking or adopt a new belief system. The shift is simpler than that:
- You're the receiver, not the source. Thoughts arrive. You don't have to accept delivery on all of them.
- Not all thoughts deserve your attention. The useful ones hold up when you test them. The rest is just noise.
- Notice without engaging. Each time you spot an unhelpful pattern without getting pulled in, it loses a little power.
- Stop stirring. Fighting your mind creates more turbulence. Step back and let things settle.
- Redirect your attention. Give your mind something positive to listen to — and actually listen. The unhelpful commentary fades when your attention is genuinely occupied elsewhere.
The voice in your head isn't going anywhere. But you can find the volume dial. And once you know it's there, you'll wonder how you ever missed it.
