Living Beyond The Voices in Your Head

By Arjuna Ishaya

My life used to be all about the outdoors – guiding adventures, teaching in wild places.

I chose that career because it offered an incredible gift: an immediate, rich present moment where my problems simply melted away. For a few blissful hours or days, I’d find reprieve from my mind’s endless loop of worry, frustration, and anxiety about outcomes or what others thought. I’d feel deep gratitude for simple meals, shared campfires, and the true rest that followed a long physical day.

But that silent mind, that simple joy, never lasted.

After the high of a trip faded, my complaining mind would inevitably resurface. I realised then that it wasn’t more time in nature I needed, but a new relationship with the thoughts in my head – the head I carried everywhere.

It could be my best friend, and my worst enemy. I had glimpses of that profound truth: “In life, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”.

But how could I capture that? Make it my life attitude?

This became my burning question, one I suspect many of you share: how do we find something more, live something deeper and more authentic, when our own minds often stand in the way?

The Bright Path Ishayas taught me a few critical realisations about this very challenge:

Thoughts Are Opinions And Commentary, Never Reality

Watch your mind, and you’ll see it constantly changing. How tired, hungry, lonely, or even how others have treated you, will colour the character of your thoughts.

Treat these with a pinch of salt – they aren’t the truth. Whatever they’re telling you, you don’t have to listen. The permission to ignore these alone will bring you a great deal of peace.

Your mind is a mercurial, ever-shifting bundle of voices: sometimes encouraging, sometimes damning. You never know what you’ll get, do you? Go on, try and predict your next thought … I’ll wait. And if you’re sitting there thinking, “What voices?” — that’s precisely what I mean.

Do see them as personalities, as voices that might show up. You don’t have to like them, but realise – point two – they aren’t you.

You Are Not Your Thoughts

Watch these voices do their thing – at some point, you’ll realise you are not them. What a revelation! You are the awareness that watches, not the voices themselves.

These characters that pipe up are just like the weather. The weather isn’t personal; it’s not your fault, you didn’t cause it – it’s a force of nature.

These voices are internalised caricatures of your history – your attempts to navigate the world, avoid pain and seek pleasure, influenced by parents, family, friends, and teachers.

We’re rarely taught structured thinking for a good life. Even with enlightened guidance, we seem to prefer learning through direct experience – crashing and burning.

So, what you’re seeing is history, probably harsh and risk-averse, but never now.

But if you assume, and rightly, that these voices aren’t you, then you can let them pass like any storm, watching without being lost.