Voices in your head

There is a big push now around meditation and I could not be more excited. I love meditation, I love finding the still soft voice in my own head and learning how to move the voice aside.  What I've found with this quiet time is that I have more of an awareness of the other running commentary in my head.

I learned to meditate after a gift from my dearest friends.  I was afraid to sign up for a writers retreat at Red Feather Lakes in CO hosted by the Shambhala Mountain Center and taught by the amazing Susan Piver (www.susanpiver.com).  Susan taught this ADD girl how to sit still for 30 minutes at a time and turn off the voices-or at least how to recognize them and let them go.  I've done the retreat twice, it's a blessing to have a week in the mountains with nothing to do but write and breathe.

I have met some amazing people with incredibly diverse backgrounds.  There is the marketing guru who takes care of her husbands business, he's an artist.  A consultant who turned into a childs book author.  A farmer who is a small town newspaper editor and an expert on lichens who lives in Alaska. Each of us took time to just breathe.  I mention all of this to talk about meditation and recognizing the voices in my head and how that can tie to writing.

Meditation requires commitment, time and patience.  Susan taught me that.  Susan has instructional guides and weekly emails on her Open Heart Project. (http://susanpiver.com/open-heart-project/).  If you are interested in meditation I highly recommend checking Susan out.  She is an amazing, committed and passionate teacher.

Once I started meditation on a regular basis, I am able to recognize the voices in my head that aren't filled with kindness.  But I found a very strange way to silence those voices. the voices that tell me I'm ugly or stupid or that I did something idiotic.  The voice that says I look insane running and that the guy in the car shouting out his window was right.  The voice that hates me and anything I'm trying to change.  When I hear that voice, I turn it into my best friend's voice. Immediately the diatribe stops, immediately it ends because Jen would never, ever speak to me like that.

If you are like me and the negative voices sometimes win, put them in a voice that's kind, put them in a voice that would never hurt you, put them in a voice who loves you, especially when you can't love you. So for me meditation works into my life as recognizing my voice and learning to trust the silence.

There are many different avenues out there for learning how to meditate, find what works for you and breathe.  This all ties to writing in a very intimate way.  Those same voices control my pen, they control the creativity that I so desperately want to flex, they control my fingers over the keys but meditation brings awareness to the moment.

I've learned so much about myself, I've learned to be still and how to quiet the voice, but bigger than that I have learned that there is a voice at all.

May you find peace in this new year, may you find quiet and may you find your true voice.