How to Quieten the Inner Critic

Recently I’ve realised just how much my body has been living in a state of chronic stress for much of my life. In the last few years, having broken away from the corporate world, my lifestyle has been much less stressful. Given that I still reside in the same body and mind, this change has given me more clarity on how and why stress still occurs.

For me, a large part of that is my inner critic. I was listening to Matt Khan talk this week about the words I am. He distinguishes between two versions of who this I is, one lives in our heads (the one criticizing, judging and seeing itself as separate from everything else) and the other is the broader part of ourselves that knows only love (and feels connected to everything else).

There are many words used to differentiate between these versions of ourselves. I think of it in terms of there being a version of me that has become encumbered and unwittingly enslaved by my life’s experiences, versus a more authentic version of me that knows only how to love me and others and retains just the wisest parts of all my lives’ experiences.

Becoming aware of these differing perspectives has created such an enormous shift in my own life. I resonated with Matt Khan as he talked about our goal as being, in that broader awareness, to embody and bring that perspective of love into our day to day experiences; rather than continue to beat up, reject and disown parts of our self.

Matt also talked about the need to train our nervous system to deal with sustained periods of higher vibrational energy. Our nervous system can’t hold that energy for long as it is too powerful and feels unsafe.

My nervous system has been screaming for attention lately with neuralgia and a dying nerve in my tooth. So each time I hear the words nervous system, it gets my attention. Just this morning I received an email that started by talking about how beneficial meditation is for calming our nervous systems.

However, the other important word that keeps cropping up is the concept of safety. Only a couple of days ago I listened to a talk by the wonderful Wendy Palmer, about how to shift from our small, reactive self to our expanded, universal self. She refers to that small, reactive part of us as “the personality that references on creating security, using the strategies of control, approval and safety”.

With all this in mind, the other night when I awoke in the early hours and couldn’t get back to sleep; my mind started ruminating on a conversation I’d had the day before. I had been waiting some time for that conversation to find its place to occur, to speak my truth on some important issues, and it had been satisfactory on the whole.

While there are things I wish I’d said, or said in a different way, I’m sure I understood many of the issues better from the explanations I heard, while managing to convey my own point of view, really it needed no further thought or action.

Yet I found I was obsessively going over it again and again in my head while simultaneously being aware of the now alert state of my body and feeling of tightness in my stomach. I’ve been here many times in my life and it wasn’t a space I wanted to be in, I wanted to relax and go to sleep.

I immediately recognised that, on some level, I was feeling unsafe. The fact that I could connect to my deeper understanding of the reason for that was helpful, at least allowing my mind to rationalise that the perceived danger was a conflict of opinion.  

As I said in Play Big in Life, Stand Up and Be Seen, I’ve spent much of my life feeling anxious because of the contradiction between what my parents/society would have me do/believe (the picture that is painted of what is good/right/intelligent), versus what I know to be true for me.

As a young child, like any other, dependent on adults for survival, I took any conflict of opinion very seriously. Unwilling to let go of my desires if I viewed them as important, I was always sure to fully prepare my case and rationale in order to hope for any kind of outcome more aligned with what I wanted.

So it was I had found myself ruminating on this conversation in the middle of the night, like the young child replaying again the pattern of justification and desire for approval. Recognizing how my body has been trained to respond in these situations, I thanked it for trying to keep me safe but now I know it is also keeping me small.

As I was lying there another visual came into my head from something different I’d heard just last week, talking about the solar plexus and the heart. The solar plexus was being referred to as the energy centre for the ego, the small self, and the heart as the energy centre for love, our expanded self.

Recognising the knot in my stomach is right in the solar plexus area, I lay there visualizing the energy moving and flowing up to my heart, while telling myself “Thank you for keeping me safe, I can rise up and shine now. I am safe, I am seen, I am loved” over and over. After a while, the words morphed somewhat and “I am strong” also got added.

This went on for quite some time and, of course, I instantly stopped ruminating about the conversation, it was done. As I dozed in and out of sleep, some part of me took over the chant and I felt the knot dissipate and something within me shift for the better.

In fact, I’d say I felt the love I had for the part of me that had stood up and told me truth, while simultaneously recognizing the difference of opinion and knowing I could do what I wanted anyway, I didn’t need this person’s approval.  As Wendy Palmer would say, “they get to feel how they feel, even if they don’t like you or agree with you, that is okay.”

I thought about what Matt Khan had said about our nervous systems needing retrained to handle higher energies, and there is was right there, the training in practice.

I also reflected on how sad it seems that retraining is even necessary. Our physical lifecycle begins in that love, the powerful and pure energy that babies carry is undeniable in my experience. Then through this process of socialization we become more and more weighed down; entraining our energy downward. So much so that when it experiences the power of love it feels dangerous to our nervous system, wow.

There are stressors that occur outside of that socialization process of course. Just breathing in the air in the urban environment I live in will no doubt be taxing my various bodily systems that have to deal with pollutants and high levels of radiation, and driving a vehicle requires my body to be in a higher state of alert than it would naturally.

But the stressor that has me on high alert too much of the time is that inner critic, those thought patterns that are outdated and still serving the child in me rather than the grown adult.

What are the patterns you’d dearly like to change? What would help reassure your body and mind that it is safe to do so? You will find there are many resources and techniques out there to help, find what works best for you and Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul.

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