This is a three part, three week, series about how to become aware of the negative self-talk we all have on some level, and how to replace it with a kind, loving inner voice, all inspired by the plot twists of travel. Part I: In which I describe this voice, and give you concrete writing exercises …
This is a three part, three week, series about how to become aware of the negative self-talk we all have on some level, and how to replace it with a kind, loving inner voice, all inspired by the plot twists of travel.
Part I: In which I describe this voice, and give you concrete writing exercises to finally shed its destructive nature.
Part II: In which I make a case for getting away from your normal life in order to find a new, loving voice. Rich in inspiration from Mexico City.
Part III: In which I share some places that inspired me while in CDMX (Mexico City), as well as some other local spots to check out.
To read all three parts now, please subscribe to my paid Substack.
Exiling the Voice by Exiling Yourself
There is this voice in my head. Dogging me. Driving me. Running me. And I let it. Much more than I want to admit to myself or anyone else. But if humans aren’t willing to admit their truth, then how are we going to evolve as a civilization? So I’ll admit it here: this voice feels all-powerful. All-knowing. And (big dirty secret): I speak to it. Out loud and a lot. Like it’s in the room with me. “Okay okay OKAY! I’m TRYING! Alight??? I’m going as fast as I can! I’m doing my best!” But I don’t believe that really. What I believe is this: If I ignore the voice, I will get into big big trouble.
It says things like:
Hurry up! You’re going to be late! (When I’m perfectly on time.)
You’re not doing enough! (When I know that if I did more, it would require working through the ight.)
You’re not doing it right. Look at how that other person does it so perfectly. You’ll never be that good! Which is why you should keep trying trying trying to get better! You’ll never be perfect, but you should try try try! (When I’m totally aware of the fact that said person has their own voice that tells them that someone else is better than they’ll ever be, too. And that they should keep trying trying trying, too.)
But when I look at it honestly and rationally…just how much real trouble have I gotten into in my life? Not. That. Much. So what’s the rub? Why have I courted this craziness? I am fifty-seven years old. I’ve danced to that voice all my life. It has one decibel: 10. And I’m finally doing something about it.
To analyze the genesis of this voice is less interesting than to accept its reality, be aware of its destructive role, and exile it. I mean: I could blame it on my mother. But that’s sort of a cop out. When I was a child and would ask her how her day was while I was at school, she’d say, “What do you think I do? Sit around and eat bon bons all day?” Message: being a bon bon eater was bad. Whatever bon bons were. You were supposed to move. Produce. Prove. Leave a lot in your wake. Historically, when I’ve ask her how she is, she never responds with how she is. Instead, she reports what she is doing and what she’s done. Productivity is her value and her power. She used to scream at tennis balls when she’d hit them out or into the net. I always wondered why she was so mad at errant tennis balls. With hindsight, I’m fairly certain that she had her own version of the voice. Empathy always works better than blame. So no, I’ll take full responsibility here: Whether I created the voice or not, I listen to it. I give it power. I let it lord over me. Five decades in, I know that the voice is no one’s but my own. Which is what is so ultimately terrifying about it.
Do you have your own version of the voice? I think that most of us do. Maybe we’re aware of it. Maybe we’re not. Managing it starts with the awareness of just how truly and brutally dangerous this voice is to our mental and physical health. I lead writing retreats, and while most of my clients are learning their craft and working on a writing project, many of them are really longing most of all to find a voice inside them that serves their authentic self-expression, not tries to kill it. A connection to the essence of who they are. After all, if we don’t have that connection, what we express won’t ultimately land in anyone’s heart. We have to start with ourselves. And I’ve found that writing is one of the best ways there is to do just that. So not long ago, I decided to give myself a dose of my own medicine and I created this exercise. It is highly potent. I hope that you will try it. Now. Can you afford not to?
A Writing Exercise that might change everything. It did for me.
So for the diligent, brave-hearted, and just-plain-sick-of-the-voice readers out there, I invite you/implore you to grab a notebook…I mean it…and take just an hour of your day to notice what the voice says to you.
Note: this exercise is not just for writers and it’s also not at all what I do with my clients on my writing retreats. This is just for us. I want your wonder to come back to you. It’s been waiting. And it’s full of kindness. It isn’t scared at all.
· As your hour unfolds, write down the words your voice speaks to you verbatim.
· Write down your response, whether it’s thought or spoken. Maybe you have a rapid-fire dialogue. Maybe your response comes slowly. Maybe you have no verbal response at all, like someone taking a beating. Write down whatever is your true pattern when it comes to how this voice speaks to you and how you respond to it.
· Now, write down how you feel as a result of your dance with your voice.
· You can choose a high-stress hour, or a low-stress hour. It’s interesting to try this exercise both ways. I mean, the voice can be very loud and mean even when you attempt to take a nap!
· Be kind to yourself as you track your dialogue.
· Be honest.
· And if you’re reading this and thinking, “My voice is all self-loving and kindness and cheerleader and wonder-lustful and peaches and cream”…good for you. I’d like to go on your retreat.
The next step is to ask and answer some good questions to help bring even more awareness to your relationship with your voice. Some of these overlap with the above exercise, but please trust that these questions are designed to help you really see how prominent your voice is in your life. So give them some thought, but be kind to yourself as you do so. They are not meant to give your voice even more fuel! As you answer them, check-in with your self-judgement. If you answer yes to any of the below, again, please be gentle with yourself. Just be sure to be honest. This exercise is meant to help you liberate yourself from what might be at the root of what’s in the way of your self-love and self-acceptance:
· Just who is it that you’re hearing in your head? Is it you? Or is it an outside force that you’ve let inside you? Is it a combination of both?
· Is it a real person from your life, or is it a completely fictional one?
· Is it a composite of various people?
· Is it more than a voice? Does it have physical attributes in your mind? If so, write those down. You might even draw it.
· Do you let it run you…and if so, to the detriment of your peace, happiness, well-being, wonder?
· Do you catch yourself in verbal dialogue with this voice? Is it something you hide? Is it something you do around other people?
· Why do you feel the need to respond to it or even to acknowledge it at all?
· Do you feel that you deserve this voice’s abuse? (You do realize that it’s abuse. Right?)
· Does your voice actually want to be in a dialogue, or solely a dictator with a whip in hand?
· Or is being sparred with your voice’s fuel to dole out more abuse?
· When you play victim to the voice, does it know that it’s got you on the hook? Does it like to see you struggle there, playing with you, letting you think you can swim away, but ultimately pulling you out of your waters? Dinner time?
· Would you be willing to see this voice not just as abusive, but as an inner terrorist?
· Do you somehow actually like the voice?
· Do you think it keeps you motivated to perform? Do you think it keeps you in check?
In my case, the more aware I have become of the voice, the more I see that it has my number, not my back. It makes high-pitched ringing in my ears a welcome distraction. For years I’ve tried to turn the voice into a soft, loving one. But that seems to only work for a few seconds. Maybe.
But then it’s back to the painful ping-pong:
What’s wrong with you!? You need to figure it out! Now!
I’m TRYING! Leave me ALONE!
Hah! Never! Work work WORK! You need to be better better better! You need to do more more more!
The voice is not just something that you can exile all-of-an-afternoon. At least not in my case. It takes practice. And this writing exercise helped me. I’ve learned to train my mind such that I’m aware of the voice and can attempt to calm it down and even replace it. But it’s taken me a long time, and I’m still not that good at it. The voice loves that about me.
When I look into the rearview mirror, I now see that this is a self vs. self fight that I’ve been in all my life, mostly without being conscious of it. I’ve prayed, meditated, written, walked in the woods, ridden horses, sang, read, played music, baked bread… And those things work for a while. But the voice finds a way to ooze in, just when I least expect it. I’m somehow able to keep the voice out of my writing life, which is perhaps why I’ve lived it with all my might for my adult life. Even when I wrote a whole memoir about managing that voice, I was able to keep it mostly at bay when my pen was moving, and practice liberation from it. I’ve given speeches about it to packed auditoriums. I thought I could shake it. Exile it, even. But it turns out, unless I’m in the act of writing…I just don’t seem to be able to. And in doing this exercise, I think I’ve figured out why:
The voice is made of fear and old programming. And those are very hard to erase. I still believe that it’s possible to re-structure your neuro pathways. But all truth be told, for me…the only thing that seems to work, aside from my writing life…is to run away for a while. To go someplace completely new and different from my regular life. A complete system re-boot. The voice doesn’t recognize me there so the voice doesn’t really know how to behave and what to say. So it’s on these solo pilgrimages, outside of my daily life, that I can practice the voice of loving kindness with myself. Invite in a new voice and get serious about habituating that new voice where the other voice can’t find me.
Exile Yourself:
To that end, I finally figured out a trick that’s become a sacrosanct, personal pact: if my voice won’t leave me for long stretches of time, then I get away from it. Once a year, I make a deeply deliberate solo pilgrimage away from my normal life, and toward something very new. Where it’s safe to stop “trying,” and let my mind, body, spirit, soul move the way it wants to as a collective whole…and at its own rate. I don’t think of it like a vacation, and it doesn’t have to be somewhere exotic and expensive. It just needs to be far away from my normalized life. I think of it as something that my very core well-being requires. I’ve done this for the last five years every January, in different iterations. It requires some major work/life juggling, but so far, I’ve been able to pull it off. And so far, it’s a magical solution to the voice vex.
The poet Emma Mellon writes, “allow yourself to be spelled differently.” That’s my goal. It usually takes a few weeks for me to unscrew my head, and un-spell myself, and two more weeks to fill my being with newness. Newness that hopefully stays for a while, and in loving kindness, at least through winter. I realize that not everyone can leave for a month. But you can find some solo time away if you really understand how critical this is for yourself. If you can manage to exile your voice in your daily life for days on end, again, I want to come on your retreat. For me, I need to get out of dodge.
This sort of self-preservational, deliberate exodus really pisses the voice off. It wants you to stay where you are and take your beating. Because if you move into another lane, with another perspective and other influencing factors, the voice stands the chance of losing you altogether. The voice wants you to try and try as fast as you possibly possibly can. Until you die. So the more you get out of its way, the meaner it gets. Like any good Narcissist. Meaner. And louder. And louder. It pushes you harder and harder until you forget that there’s any other choice but to allow it to be your lord.
Notice how it’s speaking to you right now. Telling you all sorts of mean reasons why there’s no way on earth that you can take solo time away from your life. It’s yelling at you with a litany of refusals, and judgments. It would be so so very selfish. It would be so so rude and bad. You are very very bad for even considering it. Go back to your work! Shackle up! Take your bitter medicine! Tick tock! Stop wasting your time on this nonsense! Stop reading this foolish drivel! Right now! Never do a stupid, selfish, rude, bad writing exercise ever again!
Could you please just tell it to shut the f*** up for a moment? One golden moment. So you can read on and maybe get rid of that tightness in your chest and that shallow breathing and those shoulders up to your ears?
If you’ve gotten to this paragraph, good for you. It means that you got big and the voice got small for a moment. Let’s take it, because I have good news. Proven good news. I have tested and proven that there’s a method to this madness. This madness of not saying yes to the invitations of our lives which help us shed the mean, scared voice. The madness that tells you that you can’t leave your normal life, not for one second. The madness that says that you are a horrible human for even considering it. Here’s how to begin, and you can do it wherever you are, right now:
The First Step to Your Self-Exile:
· Wherever you are in your daily life, stop.
· STOP. (Try to say it with a loving voice: Sweetheart, could you take a moment to stop?)
· Could you take a moment and do nothing that the scared, mean voice is telling you to do? Just for one moment. Dig in your heels. Stay put. Just sit there and breathe. Drop your shoulders. Look around. Put your hand on your chest and imagine it relaxing.
· You’re REALLY pissing the voice off now. Oh well. It’ll be back.
· If it’s hurling huge waves of horror at you, just imagine ducking under it all for a moment. Let the voice terrorize something else in the room. I can promise you: your dog doesn’t even acknowledge it. Let the voice think it can pick on the dog for just this one moment in your life. Believe me, your dog is way safer than you are.
· Now…notice what happens when you stop.
· Has the voice finally devoured you?
· Or is your head strangely quiet?
· Try to be quiet for one, deep breath.
· Now, before the voice can attack, try to hear other sounds. Gentle sounds. Try to hear your breathing. Try to hear the wind. Try to hear the heater clicking on. Try to hear nothing.
Now:
· Could you ask yourself to stay there in that stillness and imagine what would happen if you took some extended time away from your life? To “allow yourself to be spelled differently,” whatever that means for you? To go somewhere far away and do something very different from what comprises your normal life?
· Think of a place that would likely confuse that voice. Where its constant berating has nothing to attach to. Maybe it’s not a whole month that you can pull off. Maybe it’s a weekend. But wherever it is, can you imagine a place you’ve wanted to go that’s very different from your normal life? Maybe it’s across the valley or in another neighborhood in your city. Let your mind land on a place very different from where you are right now. The more different, the better.
I live in an arctic snow globe all winter, so I usually imagine a place where there’s substantial vitamin D. A few years ago, it was Morocco. One year, a small hill town in Mexico. One year a tiny island with wild horses off the coast of Georgia. Another, a small cabin in the hills of New Mexico. This year it was the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, where I’ve wanted to go since fourth grade when I wrote a paper on Darwin. I was fairly confident that the voice wouldn’t be able to find me there, and that part is crucial. I mean, what was it going to say to me in the Galapagos Islands?
You need to see more blue-footed boobies?
Dive in the water and swim with more sharks!
You’re not snorkeling hard enough, long enough.
You’re not the last one out of the water.
You’re pigeon-toed, even in fins.
What I’ve learned in these solo pilgrimages, is: if the voice is all meanness on the outside, but all terror on the inside, then it doesn’t know how to manage the spelled-differently brand of fear. So I have found that the voice can’t find me in the sorts of places I choose, because I choose places where I am already disoriented and scared. When I am far from home, allowing myself to be spelled differently, the voice doesn’t recognize the letters nor the language, so it can’t speak. And if it tried, it knows it would be powerless. Silly, even. Nonsensical. Like Oz. It might fume smoke out of its nose and threaten to blow me into oblivion with its terrorist attempts. But it knows that when I’m far from my normalized zone, I know that all that racket is just a little, scared voice behind a green curtain. With no true power at all. So I pulled out the binoculars, water shoes, rash guard, sun hat, got some heavy duty sunscreen, and prepared for the rare flora and fauna feast of my life.
Welcome the Plot Twists:
And then came the plot twist. And it makes me wonder if my inner terrorist has been conspiring with real live terrorists. Because after a solid year of planning and saving and juggling…the day before I was scheduled to land in mainland Ecuador for one night, Galapagos-bound the next, real terrorism hit. One of the country’s top gang leaders escaped from prison and a news station was taken, during live programming, as well as a university. Hostages. Horror. Hysteria. State of emergency. Curfew. All in the city where I had planned to stay. So why not an airport or a hotel? I knew that this wasn’t my year for blue-footed boobies and swimming iguanas, even though a part of me wanted to walk into that terrorism just to escape my own.
Instead, I found myself laid-over in Mexico City. A place I’d been warned about as “dangerous.” Much more so than Ecuador. Instead, miracles happened.
Stay tuned for Part II next week…or read all three parts now by subscribing to my paid Substack.
If you want to find your heart language, consider investing in one of my 2024 Haven Writing Retreats in Montana. You do not have to be a writer to come. Just a seeker. And a human who longs to wander in your words. Learn your craft. Find your voice. Haven truly meets you where you need to be met. I’ve seen it change lives over and over again. Email: info@lauramunson.com to set up an intro call.
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