Yoga with Tilak Pyle

I sometimes hear voices. When I told the following story in class, a student who works at a mental hospital said to see her afterwards, that she may be able to help me with that. :) In all honesty, it rarely happens, but occasionally when my mind gets really quiet I am aware of a distinct dialogue already in progress just below the surface that I can listen in on. It’s different from my own normal mental chatter in that these voices have different accents, rhythms, genders, and the really wild thing is that sometimes I even hear both sides of an ongoing conversation. I find myself asking, “How did this guy with a New Jersey accent get in my head!?” or “Just who is this lady?” . . . I know what you’re thinking; trust me, I’ve thought it myself, but just hang in there with me. I’ve learned that they sometimes have things to teach you.

Halfway through a meditation one morning with Asha, everything was silent and still when all of a sudden a woman pops into my head. This time I could even see her face. She was talking to herself in a steady, determined voice, making a commitment to extricate herself from the games that she repeatedly found herself playing in her life, conversations, and relationships. She was making this declaration in the form of a list of all the things that she was no longer going to do. ‘I am going to stop doing X. I am going to stop doing Y. I am going to stop selling yesterday’s papers. I am . . . ’ And then she got halfway into the next one and I went, “Woah! Woah! Woah! Hold on! ‘Stop selling yesterday’s papers.’ I don’t think I have ever heard that phrase before. That is fascinating!”

I kept mulling it around, playing it all of these different ways, exploring what it could possibly mean. I ended up getting so much mileage out of it. The main image I got was that of a kid on the streets of New York City finding a stack of discarded, day-old newspapers and then going out on the street and trying to sell them to the people walking by. And knowing that those who come up to him, once they see what they really are, aren’t going to buy them because they know they are worthless, pointless. So I think what this lady was saying was that she had realized that her normal way of being in the world and with other people was essentially a commodity exchange using worthless, irrelevant parts of her life drama; stuff she should have been done with, worked through and processed yesterday, not stuff that she should still be working on and bringing to the table today.

I spent the rest of the day thinking about how much of our time and conversations with people are spent rehashing old issues, dramas, and identities that we should be done with by now, things that don’t really have any real relevance to today and to where we’re at in the moment. So whoever that lady is, I have to thank her because it was really a sweet, sweet little gift – the kind of gift that those voices will sometimes give you if you listen.