MIND CHATTER

Then I shall say to myself, “You have so many good things stored up for years to come. Rest, eat, drink, be merry!” 

 Luke 12:19

There is an old Jackson Browne song, “Take It Easy,” that contains a line that has always stuck in my mind: “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.” What he is referring to, of course, is that incessant inner dialogue that most of us have going on in our heads throughout the day.

Even though mind-chatter can be positive, for many of us it is more often than not quite negative. Though we work hard to improve our situations, our negative thinking keeps sabotaging our work, leaving us wondering why there seems to be no progress.

Are you aware of your inner dialogue? Some say that how much fulfillment you get in your life is directly proportional to the quality of your inner dialogue. Henry Ford was right when he said, “Those who think they can, and those who think they can’t, are both right.”

As a young man, I was told by several adults that I “could not do anything right” and that I “would never amount to anything.” That wasn’t helpful, but the bigger problem was that I had started believing them and feeding myself similar messages. It was only when I started feeding myself positive messages that I began to come into my own.

A positive experience of this dynamic came my way around 1983. Some people were telling me that I should publish my homilies. I always had an excuse. I did not have time. I did not have a publisher. The real problem was that I was still telling myself that I was not good enough to be a writer.

As my excuses were being shot down, it became clear to me one day that I needed to change my own self-sabotaging internal dialogue. I repeated encouraging messages to myself, daily, for two years until one day an editor from a publishing company mysteriously showed up. With 39 books in print, I can now say that I am a writer. As me and my youngest brother like to say to each other, "Anything worth doing is worth over-doing!" Encouragement was not universal. As one brother priest once said behind my back, "Oh, that Knott! He has never had a thought he hasn't published!" 

This dynamic works for our good as well as our undoing, especially if we resist positive messages and constantly feed ourselves negative messages. Victims of spouse abuse never make it out of their abuse as long as they think they don’t deserve anything better. It is only when they are able to say, “I deserve to be treated with respect,” and say it enough that they start believing it, that their freedom can be achieved.

Affirmations, litanies, mantras and prayers such as the “Jesus Prayer” have this in common: they are all a few words, repeated over and over again at regular intervals, until God opens the subconscious mind to accept them and then begins to go to work to bring them about. God doesn’t need to be persuaded to give, but the human heart often needs to be persuaded to receive.

How have you been talking to yourself lately? Have you been critical or encouraging?