Should You Listen To Your Inner Voice

“Listen and follow your inner voice” sounds cliche yet inspiring, right? This modern belief taught you to find your inner voice (sometimes referred to as your inner child) and follow whatever it says. People believe that inner voice is your “true voice” telling you what you should or should not do. Should you follow that teaching? Let’s talk about it.

Have you asked yourself these questions:

What is the inner voice? And where does it come from? 

Inner voice literally means the sound from inside. Where is inside? Inside of your body and mind. Your organs can generate sound. Like when you starve, you will hear your stomach growling. When you have asthma, you can hear the sound from your lungs and breathing channels. When you have diarrhea, you can hear the grumbling sound from your intestine. After you have a cardio exercise, you can even hear your heartbeats.

Organs like the heart, lungs, stomach, and intestines never lie in real life. If something severe happens, they will make some inner voices to notify you. Whether you can hear them or not depends on how sensitive you are or how distracted you are.

But there is one very tricky organ. It makes inner voices all the time. I am sure you have guessed it. That’s right; it is your brain. The voices your brain makes are not any type of sound. We call them thoughts.

Why thoughts? Same way as the inner voice from the other organs. When something happens to your brain, it reacts with its inner voices called thoughts. At any moment of your day, your brain is exposed to all kinds of stimuli: sound, light, smell, taste, and feeling nonstop. Even if you are asleep, your body is motionless, and your brain is still busy receiving and recording all the surrounding stimuli.

However, during sleep, you may or may not catch your thoughts. For example, when you remember your dreams, you catch those thoughts.

Some scientists did some experiments on a group of people. They played some Chinese speech recordings when those people fell asleep. Those people had zero connection or exposure to Chinese culture or language in their whole life. Later, scientists captured them reciting some part of that Chinese speech. They astonished themselves at why they uttered those weird sounds. They didn’t know they were speaking Chinese!

But what has it to with inner voices in your head? You see, your brain is like a supercomputer. It records everything and later plays what it recorded. Its storage capacity is enormous. Today’s technology still couldn’t produce a single computer whose capacity is comparable to our human brain.

All these stimuli your brain recorded are your actual experiences and memories. Then your brain processes those data and recycles them into other forms called thoughts and ideas, based on your preferences and personality. In other words, your thoughts and ideas are what you make out of your past experiences and memories. From that perspective, you can hardly have new or creative ideas. Because all your brain does is recycle the historical data.

Inner Voice Trick On Yourself

But this human super-computer, the brain, has its intelligence. It can play tricks on you. Or shall I say, you play tricks on yourself? Because your brain can produce inner voices catering to your likes and dislikes, your identities, personalities, and beliefs. 

Because you believe in inner voices, your brain can create certain voices to affirm them. Most of the time, the inner voice is illusionary. That’s why in spiritual practices, real masters and gurus tell people not to pay attention to the inner voice or inner image, whatever it is. Because they are what your mind makes; they are your illusions.

Especially during practice, Qigong or yoga or meditation, when you relax whole body and mind into a meditative state, your perception sharpens, you can be more sensitive to even more stimuli. But before you have reached the final stage of spiritual awakening and separated from your mind, you cannot tell what is real or just the hallucination your mind creates.

If you are conscious enough, you know that what you can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste are very limited. Therefore you shouldn’t rely on your thoughts or ideas, nor should you take your inner voices from your head seriously. Instead, you should work on enhancing your perception and consciousness. When we design our programs, we aim to guide and support you to achieve that goal. Download Onenergy App to start the journey.