Mental Chatter Quotes

It is possible to stop the mental chatter, regain your emotional balance and live free of stress and anxiety when you create a new habit of daily energetic self-care using the four powerful tools in Nurturing Wellness through Radical Self-Care.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. [...] Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head. It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

the voices of culture influence our parents’ inner voices, which in turn influence our own, and so on through the many cultures and generations that combine to tune our minds. We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

Our observer is not affected by emotional ups and downs, our personal life dramas, or by the events of the external world. It is our observer, at the core of our being, that teaches us to let go as we begin identify with it rather than with all the hubbub of our moment-to-moment experience and our mental chatter about it.

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.

This distinction between headspace and the emotion of happiness is an important one. For some reason we’ve come to believe that happiness should be the default setting in life and, therefore, anything different is somehow wrong. Based on this assumption we tend to resist the source of unhappiness – physically, mentally and emotionally. It’s usually at this stage that things get complicated. Life can begin to feel like a chore, and an endless struggle to chase and maintain that feeling of happiness. We get hooked on the temporary rush or pleasure of a new experience, whatever that is, and then need to feed it the whole time. It doesn’t matter whether we feed it with food, drink, drugs, clothes, cars, relationships, work, or even the peace and quiet of the countryside. If we become dependent on it for our happiness, then we’re trapped. What happens when we can’t have it any more? And what happens when the excitement wears off? For many, their entire life revolves around this pursuit of happiness. Yet how many people do you know who are truly happy? And by that I mean, how many people do you know who have that unshakeable sense of underlying headspace? Has this approach of chasing one thing after the next worked for you in terms of giving you headspace? It’s as if we rush around creating all this mental chatter in our pursuit of temporary happiness, without realising that all the noise is simply drowning out the natural headspace that is already there, just waiting to be acknowledged.

Learn to clear your mental junk, filter your mental chatter, take mental vacations, feed your mental cravings with only what will amplify your mental health.

Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you’ll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you’ll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it’ll seem much less upsetting.

Form follows thought. Your intentions have wings Which carry your life To the very same things That fill up your head. You think you’ve no choice Like you’ve been taken captive, You obey the voice Which over and over says things to you It relentlessly chatters Sometimes it will spew! It’s goal to disarm you of thoughts Pure and true. It makes you a victim You get stuck in it’s glue! And it's all in your mind.

When you pay attention to sensory details in the present moment, your thoughts and mental chatter fade into the background. Your nervous system settles down. It makes room for positive feelings to bubble up within you.

While walking, for example, if we are talking or thinking at the same time, we get caught up in the conversation or thoughts we’re having and get lost in the past or the future, our worries or our projects. People can easily spend their entire lives doing just that. What a tragic waste! Let us instead really live these moments that are given to us. In order to be able to live our life, we have to stop that radio inside, turn off our internal discourse. How can we enjoy our steps if our attention is given over to all that mental chatter? It’s important to become aware of what we feel, not just what we think. When we touch the ground with our foot, we should be able to feel our foot making contact with the ground. When we do this, we can feel a lot of joy in just being able to walk. When we walk, we can invest all our body and mind into our steps and be fully concentrated in each precious moment of life. In focusing on that contact with the earth, we stop being dragged around by our thoughts and begin to experience our body and our environment in a wholly different way. Our body is a wonder! Its functioning is the result of millions of processes. We can fully appreciate this only if we stop our constant thinking and have enough mindfulness and concentration to be in touch with the wonders of our body, the Earth, and the sky.

we try to quell the mental chatter by self-medicating with too much food, alcohol, drugs, work, sex, or exercise. But these are temporary solutions to muffle the noise and ease the pain. Soon enough, our thoughts are back at it again, and the cycle continues.

Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry.

They decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that most people who call themselves 'truth seekers' - persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible seperable thing, like houses or salt or bread - did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the 'secret of life' in laboratories which did not seem to be provided wtih Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one's navel. To these high matters Martin responded, 'Rot!' He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. (260)

Putting It into Practice: Neutralizing Negativity Use the techniques below anytime you’d like to lessen the effects of persistent negative thoughts. As you try each technique, pay attention to which ones work best for you and keep practicing them until they become instinctive. You may also discover some of your own that work just as well. ♦ Don’t assume your thoughts are accurate. Just because your mind comes up with something doesn’t necessarily mean it has any validity. Assume you’re missing a lot of elements, many of which could be positive. ♦ See your thoughts as graffiti on a wall or as little electrical impulses flickering around your brain. ♦ Assign a label to your negative experience: self-criticism, anger, anxiety, etc. Just naming what you are thinking and feeling can help you neutralize it. ♦ Depersonalize the experience. Rather than saying “I’m feeling ashamed,” try “There is shame being felt.” Imagine that you’re a scientist observing a phenomenon: “How interesting, there are self-critical thoughts arising.” ♦ Imagine seeing yourself from afar. Zoom out so far, you can see planet Earth hanging in space. Then zoom in to see your continent, then your country, your city, and finally the room you’re in. See your little self, electrical impulses whizzing across your brain. One little being having a particular experience at this particular moment. ♦ Imagine your mental chatter as coming from a radio; see if you can turn down the volume, or even just put the radio to the side and let it chatter away. ♦ Consider the worst-case outcome for your situation. Realize that whatever it is, you’ll survive. ♦ Think of all the previous times when you felt just like this—that you wouldn’t make it through—and yet clearly you did. We’re learning here to neutralize unhelpful thoughts. We want to avoid falling into the trap of arguing with them or trying to suppress them. This would only make matters worse. Consider this: if I ask you not to think of a white elephant—don’t picture a white elephant at all, please!—what’s the first thing your brain serves up? Right. Saying “No white elephants” leads to troops of white pachyderms marching through your mind. Steven Hayes and his colleagues studied our tendency to dwell on the forbidden by asking participants in controlled research studies to spend just a few minutes not thinking of a yellow jeep. For many people, the forbidden thought arose immediately, and with increasing frequency. For others, even if they were able to suppress the thought for a short period of time, at some point they broke down and yellow-jeep thoughts rose dramatically. Participants reported thinking about yellow jeeps with some frequency for days and sometimes weeks afterward. Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it. You’ve taken the first two steps in handling internal negativity: destigmatizing discomfort and neutralizing negativity. The third and final step will help you not just to lessen internal negativity but to actually replace it with a different internal reality.

We live in a state of constant mental churn and meaningless chatter.

However it manifests itself, when the inner voice runs amok and chatter takes the mental microphone, our mind not only torments but paralyzes us. It can also lead us to do things that sabotage us.

I am one of those persons who, when sexually immersed, require serious silence, the hush of impeccable concentration. Perhaps it is due to my pubescent training as a Hershey Bar whore, and because I have consistently willed myself to accommodate unscintillating partners - whatever the reason, for me to reach an edge and fall over, all the mechanics must be assisted by the deepest fantasizing, an intoxicating mental cinema that does not welcome lovemaking chatter. The truth is, I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say; and dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the body above or beneath us - those images our minds accept inside sexual seizure but exclude once the beast has been routed, for, regardless of how tolerant we are, these cameos are intolerable to the meanspirited watchmen within us.

man who has one pet monkey might be viewed as charmingly eccentric. But a man who has made his home into a monkey house, with scores of chattering chimpanzees capering through the rooms, will have lost credibility with the mental-health authorities.

As you’ll read in this book, the keys to preparation are clarity, commitment, and composure. These are necessary for developing a sound, consistent routine. The ideal state of mind for action is feeling confident, focused, and in the flow, with body and mind synchronized in the present moment. This allows you to execute a shot free from the interference of mental chatter or paralysis from analysis. The best response to results is one that enhances future performance. You’ll be introduced to a unique “post-shot routine.” This special way of relating to the outcome of a shot is highly effective in fostering confidence by building on success and learning from mistakes without negativity.

Looking back to [Christendom's] youth, we recall the emotional stirrings, the deep sense of Christian purpose, when a temple, say, challenged the existing social order... Where is our Christian duty, our Christian aim? We do not know, we cannot say. Yet our ignorance and silence are certainly not due to the fact that the welfare state has made Christian thinking out of date and irrelevant. The reason we have nothing to say to the contemporary situation is that we have not been thinking about the contemporary situation. We stopped thinking about these things long ago. We stopped thinking Christianly outside the scope of personal morals and personal spirituality. We got into the habit of stepping out of our Christian garments whenever we stepped mentally into the field of social and political life. Becuase the subject was social or political, we left all of our well-tried and well-grounded Christian concepts behind us, and adopted the vocabulary of secularism. We put aside all talk of vocation, or God's providence, or man's spiritual destiny, and instead chattered with the rest about productivity, assembly line psychology, and deployment of personnel.

. . .In a heartbeat, you will fall right into that novel, that poem, the story that you are most in love with right now. When you learn to be able to decide in the moment to take breaks from your internal voices—even though it’s only for a split second—you will be taking your first baby steps toward the full-out exhilaration of living in the midst of the wholly realized writer’s life. Then all the negatives—yes, even your cherished writer’s block ego trip—will fade into background noise, then you will find silence, and your story will take over. Before you know it, you will be working calmly and clearly for hours, rather than for a couple minutes. 1 hour, not 1 second, 2 hours, not 2 seconds, 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours of allowing your mind to come to rest from the horrid, every day, mental chatter we lock ourselves up with—a time to anchor within the natural spaciousness that you already know instinctively, know from deep within will make you feel full inside. . . .

Our mind is so untamed, out of control, constantly creating memories, prejudices, mental commentaries. It's like a riot act for most people! Anarchy within. We have no way of choosing how to think and the emotions engulf us. Meditation is where you begin to calm the storm, to cease the never-ending chattering of the mind. Once that is achieved you can access the deeper levels of consciousness which exist beyond the surface noise. Along with that comes the gradual disidentification with our thoughts and emotions. You see their transparent nature and no longer totally believe in them. This creates inner harmony which you can then bring into your everyday life.

Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations? To pose that question is to answer it. We despise, ostracize and punish the addict because we don’t wish to see how much we resemble him. In his dark mirror our own features are unmistakable. We shudder at the recognition. This mirror is not for us, we say to the addict. You are different, and you don’t belong with us. Like the hardcore addict’s pursuit of drugs, much of our economic and cultural life caters to people’s craving to escape mental and emotional distress. In an apt phrase, Lewis Lapham, long-time publisher of Harper’s Magazine, derides “consumer markets selling promises of instant relief from the pain of thought, loneliness, doubt, experience, envy, and old age.” According to a Statistics Canada study, 31 per cent of working adults aged nineteen to sixty-four consider themselves workaholics, who attach excessive importance to their work and are “overdedicated and perhaps overwhelmed by their jobs.” “They have trouble sleeping, are more likely to be stressed out and unhealthy, and feel they don’t spend enough time with their families,” reports the Globe and Mail. Work doesn’t necessarily give them greater satisfaction, suggested Vishwanath Baba, a professor of Human Resources and Management at McMaster University. “These people turn to work to occupy their time and energy” — as compensation for what is lacking in their lives, much as the drug addict employs substances. At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only towards the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future — the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the centre, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit, with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action- and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction— and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.” So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, emails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames and non-stop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

To match the complexity of your conscious experience and your unconscious processing, to deal with the constant confusion bombarding your senses and the noisy chatter of the agencies within your mind, you’ve developed the ability to knit everything together into something simpler and less accurate, something less informative but more entertaining, and most times more useful.

A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single shelf better society and far more select company than all the drawing-rooms of Europe, America, and South Africa.

There are many ways your intuition can get a message to you. You will start to pick them up once you learn to quiet the mental chatter.

But how can you tell normal mental chatter apart from Soulful visions, names, or songs? Typically, the images you see or words you hear will have a particular theme that seems foreign (e.g., it could be from an ancient culture such as an African tribe), and the images, sounds, or melodies will be very repetitive, yet gentle. You will also have the sensation that you somehow need to pay attention to these spontaneous occurrences and that they’re important, even sacred.

It’s as if we rush around creating all this mental chatter in our pursuit of temporary happiness, without realizing that all the noise is simply drowning out the natural headspace that is already there, just waiting to be acknowledged.

The simple act of visualizing, which requires mindfulness, focus, and creativity, frees the mind from mental chatter and negativity.

Fear I had already ran a marathon Without even running Making my heart throb That anxious starts to sing You can hear the drums Far away on the rampart The wind in a whistle speaks to me About that turbulent nightmare That overwhelms me every hour And goes with me all day Without letting me rest Filling me with fear Of not reaching My sweetest dream In which you are fundamental For this shattered scenario Where everything was in place Inside the mental Where your smile lighted me up And your voice made me happy I could stay looking for years Those two big stars That chattered in cinnamon Everything comforts me But anything is the same Is like a broken glass That I do not throw away Just because it has a soul That contains a memory Full of joy I sit down to see it Knowing that tomorrow I will felt sorry for each tear.

With mindfulness the rumour is wrong that the point is to empty your mind; you need your mind to analyze, memorize, create and most importantly exist. It can never be empty while you’re alive, even in a coma your mind is still chattering away. The trick is to learn to live with the unrelenting sound track. It isn’t easy. Mindfulness is like training in a mental boot camp, it is not for the fainthearted because the mind is like a wild animal demanding you obey its every whim. And you’ve become so used to being the slave, you obey, ‘Gotta do this, gotta write email, gotta garden, gotta learn judo, gotta row across the Atlantic.’ The ‘gottas’ never stop and we always do as we are told. It’s so much easier to go along with what you’re used to; certainty is less threatening than uncertainty even if you suffer because of it.

If we begin to breathe incorrectly in this way, our gross mental activity—the “chatter” of our minds—increases. The energetic system becomes imbalanced, creating a sense of pressure, tightness, and heat in our head and shoulders. Our voices become weaker.

We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

Can practicing meditation help you accept reality? Yeah. But it’s amazing how little it helps. [laughs] You can be a long-time meditator, but if someone says the wrong thing in the wrong way, you go back to your ego-driven self. It’s almost like you’re lifting one-pound weights, but then somebody drops a huge barbell with a stack of plates on your head. It’s absolutely better than doing nothing. But when the actual moment of mental or emotional suffering arrives, it’s still never easy. [8] Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment. [8] A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control. I have lowered my identity. I have lowered the chattering of my mind. I don’t care about things that don’t really matter. I don’t get involved in politics. I don’t hang around unhappy people. I really value my time on this earth. I read philosophy. I meditate. I hang around with happy people. And it works. You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness. [10]

[Floating in an isolation tank] is the first time that we’ve been without sensory experience, sensory environmental stimuli, since we were conceived. There is no sound, no sight, no temperature gradient, and no gravity. So all of the brain’s searching and gating information from the environment is relaxed. Everything that was in the background—kind of ‘behind the curtain’—can now be exposed. When done consistently over time, it’s essentially like meditation on steroids. It starts to recalibrate the entire neuroendocrine system. People who are running in stress mode or sympathetic overdrive start to relax that over time, and you get this bleed-over effect into everyday life. It’s not just what happens in the tank. It continues outside of the tank. You see heart rate normalize, hypertension normalize, cortisol normalize. Pain starts to resolve. Metabolic issues start to resolve. “Anxiety, insomnia, and mental chattering can be significantly improved in [2 to 3 times per week for a total of] anywhere between 3 and 7 sessions. For pain, it’s normally 7 to 10 sessions. I recommend doing a 2-hour float if people are able.” TF: According to Dan, most people get exponentially more benefit from a single 2-hour session than 2 separate 1-hour sessions. Nonetheless, 2-hour floats still make me fidgety, so I routinely do 1-hour sessions.

Despite all of the chatter, there is little to no indication that a psychiatric diagnosis has any predictive value when it comes to gun violence. Being diagnosed with illness [x] can give you information about what treatments might be appropriate, but it doesn’t tell you whether someone will engage in behaviour [y] six months from now.

Trees and grass seemed to act like mental vitamins that fueled their ability to manage the stressors they faced. As it turned out, Ming’s findings were not a fluke. In the years since her study, more green revelations have followed. For example, using data from more than ten thousand individuals in England collected over eighteen years, scientists found that people reported experiencing lower levels of distress and higher well-being when living in urban areas with more green space.

In recent years, a robust body of new research has demonstrated that when we experience distress, engaging in introspection often does significantly more harm than good. It undermines our performance at work, interferes with our ability to make good decisions, and negatively influences our relationships. It can also promote violence and aggression, contribute to a range of mental disorders, and enhance our risk of becoming physically ill. Using the mind to engage with our thoughts and feelings in the wrong ways can lead professional athletes to lose the skills they’ve spent their careers perfecting. It can cause otherwise rational, caring people to make less logical and even less moral decisions. It can lead friends to flee from you in both the real world and the social media world. It can turn romantic relationships from safe havens into battlegrounds. It can even contribute to us aging faster, both in how we look on the outside and in how our DNA is configured internally. In short, our thoughts too often don’t save us from our thoughts. Instead, they give rise to something insidious. Chatter.

What an extraordinary degree of pride and blindness is contained in those Principles of ours! In our views—on things about which we really have no idea; on knowledge, of which we have no inkling of even a hundredth part, on faith, on love, on hope . . . We talk about it so much, as we imagine, when in fact each of us has something quite different in mind. We have no firm footing in the wider context, in the whole, the system, the general, the One. We grab a word from out of its context or a concept, or a state of mind, and we chatter on about it incessantly. Our so-called thought process is mere psychotherapy . . . which we practice in order not to go mad, to preserve the illusion that we have won the right to mental equilibrium. How worthless we are!

Practice authentic, loving communication at every opportunity until it becomes second nature. The more honest, mindful, and kind words you use, the quicker you’ll feel your vibes waking up. You’ll feel lighter, freer, more empowered, and liberated from inner chaos. Your chest will expand, your shoulders will straighten, your heart will open, and you’ll feel present. Your mental chatter will quiet down, and a softer, sweeter but more powerful tone will take over. Your inner voice will speak up, leaving you feeling more peaceful, far more creative, clearly and confidently aligned with who you are, and guided to where you need to go.

Your vibes are subtle and unobtrusive, and even though they’re always present, they can easily get drowned out by your clamoring mental chatter. It’s not that your spirit is reticent or shy; it’s just low-key and doesn’t often interrupt. So, until you are mentally quiet enough, you can easily miss your vibes. Just as it’s nearly impossible to listen to two people talk at the same time, you can’t hear your vibes if your ego is blathering nonstop over your spirit, competing for attention.

When you are fully engaged in sensory perception, you are drawn completely into the moment and released from your mental chatter.

Zhanlu’s standard AI personality was a cold-faced chatter-box, but this nature was always under suppression in Lin Jingheng’s hands like an AI with no rights. He finally met someone that was also just as chatty and was finally able to show off himself; the two talked endlessly under Lin Jingheng’s mental network to the point where they were only just missing some snacks in between them

Regardless of the physical world that a person finds himself or herself mired in, everyone can attempt to control the angle of their psychological reference point through constructive self-evaluation and by conscientiously refining their heightened cognitive viewpoint in order to revise and upgrade their mental autobiography. Apprehending our self and assessing our place in the world is an inherent activity of all human beings. Each one of us must make our own way and determine how to fit into a world that is constantly changing. Each of us posits our perception of a self and makes conjectures regarding how the world functions.

Be it sports, or be it anything in life … everything boils down to how you handle your idle time (the free time between two balls, innings etc.). The time between two balls in cricket, the time between two shots in shooting or the time a person spends idle dictates how he will perform. What happens generally is that what your mind tells you in your free time, defines your complete story in cricket or for that matter in life.

The first wife symbolises our mind, deeds and actions. Always with us, but remains unnoticed. It is the most important one, but is ignored and something that one often realises only towards the end of one’s life.

secretly dissolved mescaline in coffee or alcohol and began an innocuous conversation with the unsuspecting test subjects. After thirty to sixty minutes a change took place. The alkaloid had passed into the bloodstream via the mucous membrane of the stomach. The experimental subjects who were “opened up” by the drug were now informed that in this special zone where the interrogation was taking place Plötner had direct access to their soul. He suggested they should tell him everything of their own free will or something terrible would happen. The perfidious strategy worked: “When the mescaline took effect, the investigating person could extract even the most intimate secrets from the prisoner if the questions were asked skillfully. They even reported voluntarily on erotic and sexual matters. . . . Mental reservations ceased to exist. Emotions of hatred and revenge could always be brought to light. Tricky questions were not seen through, so that an assumption of guilt could easily be produced from the answer.”39 Plötner could not finish his series of tests. The Americans liberated the camp and confiscated his documents. It was a treasure trove for the U.S. Secret Service. Under the leadership of Charles Savage and the Harvard medic Henry K. Beecher, the experiments were continued under the code name Project Chatter and other rubrics at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Washington, DC.

Mental noise’ is the constant chatter of the mind that never stops. It is the inner conversation or the inner monologue that is constant. It analyses everything about our life, circumstances, and the people we meet.

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I shall tell you now and for no extra charge that “living in the present” seems to be the key component across every scripture, self-help book, and religious group I’ve encountered. To harmonize with life in each moment, not to make happiness contingent on any prospective condition. Not to be tormented by the past but to live in the reality of “now,” all else being a mental construct. Osho, Eckhart Tolle, Jesus, Buddha, Oprah—anyone who’s anyone who’s ever grown a beard or shaved their head or dropped out and looked back at the material world with a sage shake of the head, a knowing wag of the finger, and a beatific smile—are all saying “Snap out of it”; liberate yourself from the tyranny of egoic introspection. This is the seam of the self that consumerism can continually mine, the unrelenting inner voice that wants and fears, that attaches and rejects. The people in robes and beards want us to learn to live beyond it, to calmly watch the chattering ego like clouds moving across a perfect sky, to identify with the stillness that is aware of the voice, that hears the voice, not the voice itself. Well, that’s easy for them to say, all relaxed in their flowing robes, like giant, hairy babies, it’s extremely difficult, especially when that voice has such omnipresent external allies to rely on, whilst the very idea of a spiritual life has been marginalized and maligned. Perhaps this state needn’t be the product of strenuous esotericism; it’s possible that calm presence of mind is our natural state and our jittery materialism the result of constant indoctrination. Much as I love spirituality to be served up properly branded in a turban, dressed in curtains, the accoutrements are surely an aesthetic, not a prerequisite.

Normally, using one’s own name is associated with eccentricity, narcissism, or sometimes mental illness, but I didn’t identify with any of these. For me, at least in that moment of crisis, I had somehow managed to subdue my inner voice…with my inner voice.

There’s a classic finding in psychology called the frequency illusion. It describes the common experience of, say, learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it seemingly everywhere you look. In reality, the word—or whatever recent new observation you’ve had—has always been present in your environment with an ordinary frequency; your brain just wasn’t sensitized to it before, so this creates a mental illusion. Something

The root chakra is responsible for the processes of life and the place in physical reality to provide a brief overview. The sacral chakra reflects on imagination, individuality, addiction and the child within. The solar plexus talks about your personal power and the way you live your life. The chakra of the heart is responsible for your ability to be soft and loving towards yourself and others, to remain protected while still open and loving. The throat chakra speaks to your authenticity and good communication skills. The third eye chakra is centered on your intuition and your ability to balance both physical reality and mental chatter; and the crown chakra is about being able to see more than one perspective and be open minded.

In short, the voices of culture influence our parents’ inner voices, which in turn influence our own, and so on through the many cultures and generations that combine to tune our minds. We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

In sacred silence, we transcend our human condition. We stand (stasis) outside (ex) our ordinary egoic personality. This self-transcendence fulfills itself in the state of ecstasy, in which our psychic conditioning is temporarily suspended in utter bliss. The spiritual discipline of silence—and it is a discipline or a voluntary self-chastening—is thus not merely the absence of speech or utterance. What appears from the outside to be a negative condition is inwardly experienced as an immense richness, or fullness. For the discipline of silence is practiced not only in regard to the organ of speech, but also in regard to the mind itself. It includes the silencing of the mental chatter that characterizes the ordinary person. This deep inner silence is experienced as peace and, ultimately, as an abundance of bliss. As the British essayist Thomas Carlyle, in his work Sartor Resartus (1834), put it, “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

In sacred silence, we transcend our human condition. We stand (stasis) outside (ex) our ordinary egoic personality. This self-transcendence fulfills itself in the state of ecstasy, in which our psychic conditioning is temporarily suspended in utter bliss. The spiritual discipline of silence—and it is a discipline or a voluntary self-chastening—is thus not merely the absence of speech or utterance. What appears from the outside to be a negative condition is inwardly experienced as an immense richness, or fullness. For the discipline of silence is practiced not only in regard to the organ of speech, but also in regard to the mind itself. It includes the silencing of the mental chatter that characterizes the ordinary person. This deep inner silence is experienced as peace and, ultimately, as an abundance of bliss. As the British essayist Thomas Carlyle, in his work Sartor Resartus (1834), put it, “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.” Sacred silence, then, is an activity that is really a counteractivity, for it engenders stillness. It is stillness. And that stillness opens up the dimension of spiritual existence—that luminous world that awaits our discovery as soon as we redirect our attention from external things to our own radiant depths.

COLD DEFINITION: a sudden or ongoing exposure to uncomfortably low temperatures PHYSICAL SIGNALS: Shivering Blue lips Yawning Eyes that tear up Chattering teeth Tingling extremities Stuttering speech Skin that’s uncomfortably cold to the touch Dry, cracked lips A stiff jaw that makes speech difficult Numbness in one’s extremities A burning sensation in the skin Clumsiness Slow, shallow breaths Lips that tremble Poor dexterity or increased clumsiness Wrapping the arms around the torso Jumping, shuffling, or dancing to get the blood flowing Clapping one’s hands or stamping one’s feet Shoving the hands deep into the pockets Red and swollen patches on the skin (chilblains) Pulling the limbs tightly into the core Slurred speech Rubbing one’s hands together Tucking one’s hands into one’s armpits Pulling a collar or scarf up over the face Huddling inside a jacket Rounded shoulders, the chin dropped down to the chest Cringing and squeezing one’s eyes shut Turning one’s back to the wind or source of cold Pulling down one’s sleeves to cover the hands Curling and uncurling one’s toes to get the blood flowing Rubbing one’s legs; using friction to create warmth Quivering breaths Slapping oneself Shaking out the arms and legs Flexing the fingers Taking deep breaths in an effort to wake up Curling into a ball; making oneself small Sharing body heat with others Blowing into cupped hands to warm them INTERNAL SENSATIONS: Low energy Fatigue or drowsiness The feeling of even one’s insides being cold A weakened pulse Nausea Loss of appetite A burning sensation in the lungs when inhaling A voice that loses strength MENTAL RESPONSES: Confusion Muddled thinking Impaired decision-making A desire to sleep Apathy CUES OF ACUTE OR LONG-TERM COLD EXPOSURE: Frostbite Hypothermia Gangrene Limb amputation Coma Heart failure Death WRITER’S TIP: Emotional attitude makes a difference when dealing with the cold. A person who can maintain mental acuity and focus will withstand the elements much better than someone whose mental condition is compromised by negativity. Return to the Table of Contents

When we can sit in silence, we can separate from all the mental chatter that is often related to and creating our feelings.

Coming out of the closet was one of the most liberating things I’ve done in my life. All the worry, concern, anxiety, all that mental chatter was gone. I didn’t have to carry a secret on my shoulder anymore. Fear, doubt, shame, and worry was suddenly replaced with love and pride.

logorrhea 1. pathologically incoherent, repetitious speech. 2. incessant or compulsive talkativeness; wearisome volubility. The best part about our new word? It’s pronounced law-guh-REE-uh. I’ll let you make your own “sounds like” association. Seriously, could there be a more fitting term to describe the way the chatterbox spews lies and garbage in our minds? It’s a voice that drones on and on, always intimidating, always insinuating. The chatterbox wants to inundate us with logorrhea. To wear us out until we don’t want to try or until we have no idea what to do or how to answer our growing list of doubts and deficiencies. And it’s not just what this chatter says that makes it dangerous. It’s what it keeps us from hearing. Most people go through life thinking God never speaks to them when in fact He’s always speaking. To everyone. Always directing. Sometimes warning. Sometimes affirming. But we hear so little of what He says because our consciousness of His voice is obscured by our mental static.

The idea is to work our bodies physically, so our minds don’t have the energy to overthink or create mental chatter.