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Witnessing: You Are Not the Voice in Your Head

In Walter and the Little Voice That Forgot to Be Kind, Walter discovers something at the heart of the practice of Witnessing: we can notice what the voice in our head is saying without judging it, fighting it, or believing that the voice is who we are.

The following essay delves deeper.

There is a voice in your head.

It comments on what you are doing. It remembers what happened yesterday. It worries about what might happen tomorrow. It rehearses conversations that may never take place.

Sometimes it congratulates you.

Sometimes it criticizes you.

Sometimes it can spend an astonishing amount of time explaining why somebody else is wrong.

Most of us become so accustomed to this voice that we seldom notice something rather remarkable about it:

There is also something that can listen to the voice.

I call that the Witness.

I have practiced witnessing my thoughts for many years. Over time, something has gradually changed. The voice is still there. I still need it. But I identify less with the voice and more with the Witness that observes it.

For me, this is more than a psychological technique.

I believe the Witness represents what might be called the God-self.

You do not have to share that belief to experiment with witnessing. You can simply observe what happens.

The Voice Is Useful

It would be easy to make the inner voice the villain.

I don't think it is.

We need it to operate in everyday reality.

The voice remembers that we have an appointment at two o'clock. It considers whether we have enough money to buy something. It notices that a car is approaching while we are crossing the street. It plans, compares, calculates, remembers and anticipates.

It helps maintain the story of an individual person moving through the world.

That is useful.

The problem begins when we assume that this voice is who we are.

Listen to it closely and you may discover that it is not nearly as authoritative as it sounds.

It contradicts itself.

It exaggerates.

It replays old arguments.

It predicts catastrophes that never occur.

It worries about what other people think.

It remembers embarrassing events from twenty years ago for no particularly useful reason.

It can manufacture an entire emotional crisis from an event that hasn't happened.

And yet we commonly experience all of this as me.

I am afraid.

I am angry.

I am guilty.

I am a failure.

But there is another possibility.

I am aware that a fearful thought is occurring.

That small change is the beginning of witnessing.

Don't Fight the Voice

Witnessing is not another way to fight with yourself.

Suppose the voice says:

You really made a mess of that.

You could answer:

No, I didn't. I did the best I could.

The voice might respond:

Well, your best wasn't very good.

And now you have an argument going on inside your head.

You can spend quite a bit of time this way.

There is another approach.

Listen.

Notice the thought.

Don't agree with it.

Don't disagree with it.

Don't condemn yourself for having it.

Don't congratulate yourself for noticing it.

Just witness it.

There is the voice criticizing me.

That is enough.

If you judge the voice for being judgmental, you have merely recruited the voice to fight with itself.

The Witness doesn't need to win the argument.

It doesn't need an argument.

Fear, Guilt and Separation

I believe excessive identification with the inner voice contributes greatly to human unhappiness.

The voice is necessarily concerned with the individual.

My history.

My possessions.

My reputation.

My mistakes.

My injuries.

My future.

My death.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. An individual human being has to function in the world.

But when we identify completely with this running account of ourselves, the boundaries of the individual can begin to feel like the boundaries of existence.

There is me, and there is everything else.

From that sense of separation, fear comes easily.

So does guilt.

The voice can resurrect something we did years ago and make it psychologically present again. It can accuse us of failing to be the person we think we should have been.

It can also project itself into the future and suffer over events that have not occurred.

Past and future become almost inexhaustible sources of unhappiness.

The Witness can observe all of this.

Who Is Listening?

This leads to an interesting question.

If you can observe your thoughts, what is doing the observing?

I first encountered ideas about witnessing many years ago in spiritual writings, including the work of Deepak Chopra. Over the years, however, the question became less theoretical for me because witnessing became a practice.

I have come to identify the Witness with the God-self.

By that I do not mean a little divine personality sitting somewhere inside my head watching another personality talk.

I mean something much simpler and more difficult to describe.

Awareness itself.

The part of consciousness that can observe thought without being the thought.

You may interpret that experience differently.

You might call it awareness, consciousness, the observing self, metacognition, or simply a useful feature of the human mind.

The terminology matters less than the experience.

You can investigate it directly.

Try It

You don't need special equipment.

You don't even need a quiet room.

At some point today, notice what your mind is saying.

Don't deliberately produce a thought. Wait for one.

It probably won't take long.

Then notice it.

Perhaps the voice says:

I need to get this finished.

Or:

Why did she say that to me?

Or:

I'm getting too old for this.

Or:

I shouldn't have eaten that.

Don't try to improve the thought.

Don't replace it with a positive affirmation.

Don't analyze where it came from.

Simply notice:

There is a thought.

Then consider the strange fact that you were able to notice it.

For a moment, there was the thought.

And there was awareness of the thought.

That space between the two can be very small at first.

In my experience, it can grow.

The Voice Doesn't Have to Go Away

After many years of practicing this, I still have an inner voice.

I expect to keep it.

It is useful.

But I don't identify with it as completely as I once did.

Increasingly, I identify with the Witness.

That does not mean fearful, critical, guilty or foolish thoughts never appear. It means their appearance does not necessarily determine what happens next.

A thought can simply be a thought.

It can arrive.

It can make its announcement.

And it can pass.

There is an idea in my Gentle Night Friends story, Walter and the Little Voice That Forgot to Be Kind, that expresses this particularly well.

Walter doesn't destroy the troublesome little voice.

He doesn't defeat it.

He doesn't even have to persuade it to behave.

Something quieter happens:

“It simply wasn’t the most important thing in the room anymore.”

That is very close to what witnessing has come to mean to me.

The voice remains.

Life remains.

The ordinary problems of being human remain.

But behind all that noise, there is something capable of noticing.

I have gradually come to identify more with that something.

With the Witness.