Listening to the Voices

I recently spoke with a good friend and former English teacher who is now a LifeCoach, named Gwen Griffith (you can look her up on Facebook under LifeCoach Gwen Griffith). During our conversation, she shared some of her initial process and framework, which include identifying the various voices in one's head and labeling those voices. She mentioned that sometimes voices outside ones head sneak in, which rings true for me.

In 2008, my Master's Program team and I  worked with Professor Michael Skelley on internal voices, trying to listen for different parts of our selves. We invited different parts of ourselves to be heard and voiced through a several hour meditation. The process is called Genpo Roshi and is called "Big Mind" (bigmind.org). His main focus is on Mindfulness Meditations and he is both trained as a Jesuit Priest and works with a lot of Buddhist philosophies. One of the most amazing pieces beyond my classmates trusting one another to listen and share these bits, was how we thanked each voice for its intention and doing its job and then asked he to allow other parts of ourselves an audience. It is the lightbulb of boundaries or ordering or the realization that we are made up of so much more than what yells the loudest and that we can train to use an inside voice or help to take a rest.

I have been thinking about what goes on in my mind and realize that the critical, disappointed, protective, "put others first" and impoverished guys rattle around the most. Additionally, the projected voices of older outsiders like my Grandma and the Perfectionistic "Religious" types tend hijack my attention. My kids have to yell sometimes to reach me amidst this demanding crowd and if you try to call me, chances are, I'm a little too busy with the above mentioned racket.

I am embarking on a this Project of Ordering and one of the largest pulls in this ordering is the one on my mind. One more book to throw into this mix is The Mindful Brain, by Dan Siegel. Recently my therapist pulled out a diagram from it's pages, that made me run back to the text and read. He identifies a HUB within us, which is "our ability to choose what we focus our attention on." Possible areas to attend to include, Body, Mind, Sensory World and Relationships.

I created a prayer to focus me as a starting point to this work and have others praying it for me.

More to come (as always!)!