Healing the Mental Hoo-Ha

Non-supportive self-talk is the gold of the self-help guru. You read about it everywhere. Well, there is a reason for that. Try this:

Close your eyes and sit quietly for five minutes.

OK. Good. Did you enjoy the inner silence?

Unless you’re an experienced meditator, you probably didn’t experience any silence at all! Our minds are awhirl with noise. Sadly, much of this noise is made up of judgments, attacks, comparisons and criticisms — the instruments of a war we wage upon our very selves.

We all have our own personal libraries of hoo-ha. Stories we tell ourselves that inhibit our possibilities and constrain our inner vibrancy. And we wonder why we feel depressed. We depress ourselves, dutifully acting out the spoken or unspoken instructions we received to not do this, not say that, not even think that. One of the rules of the mind is that an idea implanted in consciousness stays there — and proliferates — unless it’s acted upon or replaced by a different idea. Unfortunately, as children, we haven’t developed the critical factor that allows us to filter out the hoo-ha. Hence, our mental gardens are seeded for self-destruction.

Any feeling or thought you have that suggests that you’re not OK as you are right now is residue from someone else’s attempt to control you. Advertisements, your parents, your colleagues, your lovers — just about everybody seems to want you to behave in the way they like.

(Don’t go all victim in this. The flip side of others’ attempts to control you is all the ways you try to control other people — by withholding your love, dominating conversations, enforcing strict rules of behavior, demanding your way and throwing tantrums when you don’t get it.)

As an adult, you have the critical factors in place to not allow someone else’s judgments to dominate your decisions. It may not feel that way when you’re still running tapes from childhood. Here's a technique for clearing out the mental hoo-ha.

Do this exercise whenever you have 3 minutes of real privacy. 

Start by growling. Open your mouth wide and make whatever sounds you can in the back of your throat. Increase the volume and try new sounds. Absolutely do not attempt to be musical. If you feel your throat trying to close down to control the volume, loosen the back of your tongue and wag your head from side to side while you continue to make noise.

These noises will probably make you uncomfortable, and cause you to feel embarrassed or stupid. Since there’s no one here to judge you, what does it matter? This is exactly the point of the exercise. Most people tend to lock down their throats on the sounds, words and sentiments they fear they will be judged for. Vocalizing through the discomfort communicates to self: "I will not allow my fear of judgment to control me."

Continue to make these non-musical, chaotic, uncomfortable sounds. Augment the effectiveness of the exercise by visualizing sonic waves coming from the sounds you’re making. See the waves vibrating away old, schmutzy flecks of judgment and criticism. The old debris gets loosened by your sounds. Now take a deep breath and blow it all away from you. Send that old gunk to the molten core of the Earth or to Sun, where it can be incinerated, primordially transformed.

This vibrational healing exercise literally helps clear energetic stagnation from your body-mind system. By clearing the old programming that has you either attacking yourself on the inside or criticizing others on the outside, you have greater access to inner peace and outer influence.