Everyone has a drama queen in their life in one way or another. Either we can get caught up in the chaos and let them influence us or we eliminate them completely from our life.

But what about the internal drama queen inside of us? How do we run away from that? We can’t—our inner drama queen is active 24/7 even in our dreams; they do their work.

The inner drama queen is that constant chatter or inner critic that never ever really has anything good to say. The one who is constantly filled with negativity and self sabotaging words. This voice is hardly ever supporting us, it’s always established in our past failures and mistakes rooted in fear and insecurity.

Human beings have an average of 70,000 thoughts a day which means we have a different thought every 1.2 seconds. No two thoughts are logically connected. They all appear randomly, independently and aimlessly. Our thoughts are continuously flowing from one to the next.

This cycle continues as one thought replaces the other and this is how our thoughts run all day. The problem is we think they are connected and we link them creating either a pain or pleasure shaft. We start connecting the thoughts together from past memories or future worries and forming a story which has no relevance in the present moment.

Then we start believing we have a problem.

The problem is we start connecting the thoughts. All our thoughts are related to either the past or the future. We cannot have thoughts about the present moment. In the present moment we can only have consciousness, no thoughts. Thoughts are either related to some joyful experience we had in the past or want to have in the future, or painful experiences that we had in the past and don’t want to have again.

By our very nature we can only have one thought at a time. When a new thought comes the old one has already left and has lost its power or influence over us. Instead of dropping each thought we start clinging to the last one or try and bring it back so we can cherish it and brood over it. It’s just like cleaning out our inbox of emails, we delete them but then we go back and pick them out of the trash again. This is how our suffering starts.

A Five Minute Experiment:

Take a sheet of paper and pen. Set your alarm for 5 minutes.

Start writing down whatever thoughts come to mind. Do not suppress, or edit any thoughts that come up, write them down. It should be a stream of consciousness flowing without any inhibitions. No one is going to read this so you don’t need to sensor what comes up. No matter how ridiculous the thoughts may seem write them down. One minute you may be writing about what you are going to have for dinner, then the next how bored you are, etc. Just write down whatever comes up. Then once the alarm goes off stop writing. Now go back and read what you wrote. You will see a bunch of chaotic, fragmented thoughts. Just think these are the thoughts that are disturbing our inner space and entrusting our life to.

It is possible to silence them with the next technique.

How do we silence our inner chatter? By “unclutching.” This technique was developed by Paramahamsa Nithyananda.

Just imagine that when you are driving a car and shifting from first gear to second gear to third gear, we have to pass through neutral every single time. We have to depress the clutch (unclutch) to be in the neutral space in order to move to the next gear right? The same way we experience a neutral space between two thoughts in our mind. That neutral space that exists between two thoughts is pure consciousness, joy and bliss, our very true nature.

When we are no longer grasping onto thoughts and connecting them to the past and future, we remain “unclutched.” As we remain “unclutched” from our thoughts we become more and more aware of the neutral spaces between the thoughts. The gap between the thoughts will automatically extend when we remain “unclutched” from the stream of thoughts. We will dwell in the neutral space longer and experience a more peaceful inner space filled with joy and bliss.

This technique can be practiced daily for 11 minutes as part of your meditation practice. Just sit and visualize your thoughts as fish jumping from the stream one at a time and “unclutch” from them one at a time. You will start to experience less thoughts and thus less of the Inner Drama Queen.
~
~
~

Love elephant and want to go steady?

Sign up for our (curated) daily and weekly newsletters!

 

Editor: Travis May

Photo: Pixoto/ Matt Buvvart