Practice 4  – Letting Go of Our Inner Editor

Points of view, opinions: enough already

“It is our deep attachment to this false or manufactured self that leads us into our greatest illusions. Most of us do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.”  Richard Rohr

Summary: Inside our heads mental traffic is playing out on the visual screen and in our chattering voice. This is all day, every day. One big segment of this traffic is our inner editorial team, which seem capable of working 24/7. These editors form some useful points of view but many of them are not formed well at all. Quality is not one of the teams’ strong points. Volume is. The team comes up with a lot of opinions.  This Practice is directed at valuing our inner editors less, bringing humility to our points of view and holding our thoughts lightly. It helps us keep our soul level lenses on so we see past the constrictions of all these unnecessary points of view. We can access deeper knowing and let go of our shallow emotionally colored thoughts that water down any chance for more wisdom and for more heart energy. Demoting our editorial team makes room for more substantial mental and heart-balanced output.

Valuing Our Opinions

Forming viewpoints about, for example–this restaurant’s burgers, this car’s steering capability, this blogger’s worst post, this mayor’s three best policies, the next putdown for your too talkative brother-in-law, the putdown you will never say but play over and over in your head—these may not be how we want to spend the majority of our time. We negate the lighter view of life, and on-going self-awareness, the kind that keeps us flexible and at ease, with opinion flows that never end. With this practice we slow down and lighten up the unexamined, habitual thought processes we generate continually.

We all need to do our own thinking. A sea of information, models, and knowledge options is open to us: we are exposed to it whether we want it or not. And we also choose–from early on in our lives and as we move through the decades and life stages–what to expose ourselves to, make up our minds about, and how we continue ahead with life-enhancing information and goals. This is all good.

But the less-than-good happens too. All issues have many factors and angles and it hard to know all of them. In spite of this, we take our thoughts and our positions on endless items seriously, and way too seriously on occasion. We have all read about confirmation bias. We also identify our personal worth with the opinions we have, some parts of which are originally ours but many parts are borrowed from others, not even fully consciously.

Holding our points of view dear, too dear

We stick with our opinions and see them as truths while our emotions get attached to them, so they get mixed with anger or sadness or pride. The emotions attach us to the “bank of knowledge” our accumulated positions become in our minds. This can be all about a subtle but strong vanity—preserving our favorite stories and phrases and polishing them for desired effect. (The opposite also happens for some, devaluing opinions to an extreme—we are talking about balancing, not denigrating our good minds). Some jobs, like first responders, do have urgent decisions to confront regularly and must use highly informed opinions on the data they are observing and the decisions to make. We are not talking about that part of life, but the more regular happenstances, the less immediate and less weighty ones.

Additionally, our expertise in one area can give us too much confidence and inflate our opinion of how we “have it together” on more aspects of life than we do. This happens, as one example, when technicians and specialists know the right algorithms, make a lot of money for their considerable know-how about a limited field, and don’t develop their hearts or emotional maturity. In my own case when I was in a training job for many years, I started to believe my own stories and cherish my mental models, and assumed I was wiser than I was by a long shot.

Practice for Letting Go of Our Inner Editors

Like the other practices we are working with our mind here and using heart to help our grand thinking capability be more useful and beneficial to all concerned.

All of the below are part of this practice.

— Drop the entertainment value of having clever opinions. This is a step to drop the pride, all the while knowing that there will be times, and this can even be often, when your thoughts can move a conversation along in a positive insightful way. This takes some reflection, to look for our hidden motive and our subtle feel goods. I have another example of mine. I was genuinely interested in getting a degree some years ago because the topic of psychology interested me a great deal. When it was done, however, I got a little ego-kick out of telling people my two MA degrees were 44 years apart, a kind of “look how vital I am” kind of thing. I can still claim the positives here, but I can also work on dropping the pride in my story. Name it when needed. Own it, gracefully. Zero puffery allowed.

— Form less positions, stances, angles. We can all replace opinions with higher thoughts: an observation, drop into our heart for a quick caring hit (Practice 3), say a prayer, take a breath, zoom out and witness. (Practice 1 and 2). My Uber driver recently, in a conversation about our habituated thoughts (sometimes we talk about the weather or the Buckeyes) told when he prays it helps him not have to have to figure out everything. He was enjoying the freedom of not thinking that he needed to have an opinion on all matters. So can we all. (side note: he had moved to Colorado from Detroit to smoke legal weed, and he did a lot for a few years, but when he totally exhausted that scene, he decided to create some direction in his life. Hooray for his leaning into more than the next high.)

— Speak more provisionally and tentatively versus declarations, definitions (“here is the way it is” territory), and most of all condemnations that pull us away from our hearts (“that asshole was at it again with…”). “I have heard” is a good way to start our thoughts in conversations, a useful idea from David Hawkins, whose writings work this inner editor material very cogently.

— Don’t own your thoughts, even clever ones. If we have language skills to give our opinions some verbal flair, further trouble accumulates. We can spin our opinions with some originality, entertaining ourselves, and this makes them feel even more like something we “own”, thereby defining us. I know this one too, as an author of books and articles (like this one). It took me a while to realize my way of expressing myself may indeed help others, so I keep at it. But the good and impactful thoughts are way beyond anything I can claim as my own. My experiences are mine, but little else: and if I compose a worthwhile sentence, or essay or chapter, I am usually channeling some combined version of Tolkein, Homer, Mary Oliver, the Bible, Gandhi, Billy Joel or other artists that I have somehow internalized.  

Language is a great gift. Some of our thoughts are life-giving and important. But without humility and perspective, our own gifts can be used against us and increase the compilation of unexamined habits we can hold too dearly as “our” opinions.

— Go to the energy under your thoughts—the energy of inner knowing. Intuitively we know that the big mystery that is ours to live, ready to be engaged every second, disappears from our attention when we do surface thinking, opinionating and blabbing. Even in the midst of a sentence, a conversation that is newsy and light, add some heart energy to the moment with a silent intention to be in a space of deep caring connection this moment with this person. Sense your heart (practice 3) often during the day, in a kind of awareness double-tracking of the outer reality and the inner you experiencing the moment.

—Slow the need to get to the next thought quickly.  Enjoy saying your next sentence or asking a question, while adding heart energy to it. Savor it a bit and space out the words even just a little. This sprinkles any point of view with love and depth, emotional coloring it is sometimes called. To do this takes practice of course, and that is why we call it a Practice.

That’s it for practice 4. We slow down opinionating and editorializing. We build on this practice with six more practices.

Here is the introduction to the 10 Practices if you missed it earlier.  http://www.evocateurblog.com/2023/09/14/ten-practices-helpful-habits-of-mind-and-heart/

And here is a beautiful poetic summary by Artie Isaac on practice 4, clinging to opinions, or holding them lightly, our choice.

And a few elegant haiku by Fred Anderle.

too hot, too cold                                                                   life’s every moment
too damp, too dry                                                                filtered through                                  
the seasons humanized                                                     belief