The Inner Tyrant

This week, we kick off a series on Michael Singer’s personal development classic, The Untethered Soul.

Today, we examine the role our inner monologue plays in shaping our lives and what we should do about it…

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

🎯 The Idea In a Nutshell:

• We spend our days consumed by a constant inner dialogue.

• We become so engulfed in this mental chatter that it defines our entire lived experience.

• It shapes our moods, opinions, behaviors, likes, and dislikes.

• But we can learn to separate ourselves from this voice.

• And this separation is the foundation of transformational personal growth.

📝 Diving Deeper

We spend our days lost in the incessant internal chatter of our minds. It’s so ever-present that most of us never even notice what’s going on.

But the voice is always there, always with an opinion, and is never shy about it. Judging. Narrating. Ruminating. Predicting. Worrying. And ceaselessly reminding us about all that’s wrong… with our day, with our lives, and with everyone around us.

Over time, the voice begins to define our entire existence. It decides if we’re having a bad day. What we accept as truth. What we perceive as a slight, and how we react to it. Our moods. Our opinions. Our behaviors. Nothing is beyond its purview.

Without realizing it, we are constantly yanked around by an inner monologue that we never consciously chose.

But Michael Singer calls us to a liberating truth: You are not the voice; you are the one who notices it. This might sound like an abstract or confusing distinction. But it’s the essential insight that sits at the very core of all mindfulness practices. And it alone holds the power to free us from the tyranny of our inner dialogue.

The moment you realize this, a small gap opens. And in this gap, you can learn to watch your thoughts instead of being swept away by them.

You will start to see how much of the chatter is just meaningless noise. A desperate attempt to explain and control, and to fit the impossibly rich and complex world we live in into arbitrary little boxes of our own creation.

You will never be able to shut the voice off. But you can learn to stop being jerked around by it.

👉 Why it matters:

• Learning to gain some distance from the constant commentary is the first step toward profound personal growth.

• It is in this separation that we find the space needed to gain perspective.

• This allows us to examine our thoughts more objectively, spotting patterns and impulses that are no longer serving us.

🤔 Prompts for Reflection

• In what situations is your inner voice the loudest?

• Can you find even five minutes today to sit in silence and just notice it?

• In what ways might you be letting this internal narrative shape your experience without even being aware of it?

Make today impactful.
~Jason