The Best Present You Can Give to Yourself: Find Your Voice Through The Practice Of Meditation

If Meditation is about quieting your mind, how can it help you to find your voice? And in a world full of noise, how can you be heard?

Finding your voice isn’t always about others hearing it. Sometimes it’s about you hearing it. In my therapy practice, people often tell me that they don’t know what they want for themselves in life. The practice of meditation allows other louder voices, and the noise, to settle out so that your own voice may rise to the top.

When I was a child, I naturally radiated toward helping others and knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a psychologist. My parents advised against it, however, and I thought they knew better. I listened to their voices. At the beginning of college, I took a test to see what I should pursue for a career. I scored highest in medicine but it didn’t occur to me that mental health is a part of medicine so I pursued a degree in Environmental Science, which was my second highest scoring category. It wasn’t until my mom, who had a dominant voice in our family, died, that it came to me in the silence to teach mindfulness to children, which is very much like my original interest in psychology.

This noise doesn’t come from people only, but also from social media, cultural norms, the ideology of peers, even if unspoken, and maybe most precariously, from your past. Why precariously, you might be wondering? Between the ages of 0-7, we are living in primarily a theta brainwave state, where we are essentially in hypnosis, and therefore very easily programmed. The effects of this programming can be insidious, leading us gradually, over our lifetime, to make choices that we don’t even realize are harmful to us until it’s too late, as well as to stay stuck in habits.

With meditation, however, we begin to become aware of the programming, along with all of the other voices that are not our own. The definition of mindfulness meditation is moment by moment awareness without judgement. Oftentimes, the judgment is the voice that isn’t our own, and therefore the practice of noticing it arise and letting it go, over and over again, can help us to chisel away at the layers to find the truth of our own voice underneath.

While meditation is often thought of as a breath awareness practice, it can incorporate several other types of meditation. In fact, the concept of “mindfulness” is essentially being present or in a meditative-like state, which means not thinking about the past or the future but rather being in your senses while doing something. For example, I just gave my clients a homework assignment of playing fetch with their dogs as a meditation!

Body scans are a type of meditation that can bring about awareness of experiences that have become energetically stuck in your body. Historically, not much credit was given to energy, however we now know that everything is information and energy. In his book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. explains how “trauma can cause the body to develop a hyperactive alarm system, which can lead to a constant state of fight-or-flight or freeze.” He also states that trauma is a fact of life, giving statistics on how many of us are affected by the various aspects of trauma, and that meditation, as well as other practices such as yoga, sports, drama, and neurofeedback can help.

At the age of 53 while doing a body-scan meditation, I became aware of a knot I was holding high in my stomach, just below my solar plexus. I recognized the knot as an integral part of my being, something that had always been there or at least acquired at some point in my childhood, but that I had not noticed until now. I suspect it may have been from shoving down my words, and even my cries, as my mother didn’t respect boundaries, talking to me while I was trying to do homework or sleep, leaving little room for anyone else to talk. And my dad would tell me, “Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about.” I don’t blame either of them. They had their struggles that stemmed from their childhood, not to mention life itself. I saw them overcome the challenges of alcoholism, smoking and a troubled marriage along with health issues, which inspired me to become a creative problem solver in my life.

Noticing the knot in my stomach allowed me to relax. If you can imagine noticing you’re gripping the steering wheel of the car and then making the choice to relax your grip, it was like that. Now, if I start to tighten in this part of my body, I immediately notice and return to ease. I still have trouble starting conversations with strangers sometimes and I almost always feel a sense of trepidation standing up for myself with men but I am better. One of the most important lessons I teach my clients is that our thoughts are not always true, something I picked up from Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is often referred to as the “godfather of modern mindfulness”.

Since our thoughts drive our emotions and then our emotions reinforce our thoughts, interrupting the cycle with that statement, “My thoughts are not always true” allows us to choose a different thought, and then the feeling changes and we can start to shift into a new way of being. Instead of living in a state of fight-or-flight or freeze, based on fear, which is based on thoughts that are not necessarily true, I can choose the thought that people value what I have to say, which makes me feel respected. The more I do this, the more successful I become making changes in my life as I am creating new neural connections and weakening the ones I no longer want. You can do this too.

As you meditate, notice thoughts arise, and then like a book you don’t want to read right now, put them back on “the shelf”, returning your focus to your breath, or your body if you are doing a body scan. With practice, the voices in your head will become your voice. When you choose your thoughts, your feelings will follow. You can also choose a feeling first, allowing the thoughts to follow. As you do this, your voice will become more authentically yours and you are likely going to notice you feel heard more often.

Meditation helped me overcome a habit of yelling at my daughters. I can guarantee they listen to me more now because I no longer yell at them! The shift happened as the result of two walking meditations where I was able to notice and let go of a voice from the past. I will share that story here in a future edition!

Presently Yours, Trice

As a leader in the mindfulness movement Trice began teaching mindfulness 2011. She started a non-profit in 2012, The Michigan Collaborative for Mindfulness in Education, and has taught kids, teachers, & administrators from Detroit to the UP! As a Certified Meditation Instructor, also certified in the neuroscience of change by Dr. Joe Dispenza, she has trained numerous individuals & organizations, including GM, U of M, and more.