We all carry voices in our heads. They are the voices of our teachers, parents, friends. They comment on our work, our accomplishments, our failures. Sometimes they cause us to wonder if we have missed something, to wonder if they would approve.
Over time, these voices – these imagined voices – become so familiar that we are no longer entirely conscious of them even while we act and react with them in mind. In this cacophony of judgment and praise our own capacity to see clearly and think for ourselves can be drowned out.
Our students have such voices as well, and over time our own voice may join them. We must be on the lookout for this because as flattering as it is to have a student follow our mental footsteps and wonder how we would view their actions, it is our task to teach our students to see the world around them and think for themselves.
There are many ways to address such thought patterns in a student, some of them overt, such as discussing how we model the people who influence us, and some subtle, such as exaggerating a voice for dramatic effect and seeing if the student recognizes the echo in their own mind.
Most teaching is about strengthening the student’s understanding of our views, but there are times when it is best to seek to weaken the shadow of our voice in the student’s mind. This is not because our words are not worth hearing and remembering, but because we have a duty to teach our students to listen beyond imagined voices of opinion and judgment, to see past the pitfalls and blindnesses of their friends, parents, and teachers.
My offered practice: look for a time and place in which you sense a reflection of someone else’s voice in your student’s thoughts, perhaps even your own. Can you highlight these imagined judgments or praises in a way that helps the student see through them?
Good stuff! Can you speak about how this relates (or not) to the voice of intuition? Would you say that the physical point of origin is significant to identifying voices? I.e. voices in the head vs gut or womb?
“Intuition” catches in its net many things, including, for many, the very voices of judgement and opinion to which I refer – the voices of our authorities, woven into our patterns from early on. Without delving too deeply into the nature of intuition itself, I believe that these internalized voices are not the same as our best possible intuitions, and that part of developing our intuition as an asset is to notice these voices so we can seperate them out from what else our intuition is made up of.
As for physical sensations, I don’t know. My suggestion would be to pay attention to the physical sensations along with the voices. Listen to – and through. Then you tell me if the physicality is significant.
I’m thinking a distinction could be made based more on content. “The voices” tend to tell stories. For me, intuition is generally immediate and not about a story.
I have been reading The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton and this blog reminded me of the evidence of how strongly the messages we hear early on affect us later. In fact, these voices are our conscious as we are learning about how to interact with the world. As we get older, we just act on those without question. I think it is of utmost importance to challenge students to not accept teaching without thought.
Ben, thank you. Yes, of course I very much agree. And yet, to challenge even this, teaching students to challenge teaching might be a bit of a paradox; how do you teach someone to challenge the teaching that is teaching them to challenge? They might well wonder where is the line between following instructions and challenge. There are layers and layers here. Sometimes the best teaching is in demonstration, in the act that does not describe but rather shows what is possible. Thus a teacher might challenge their own teaching, might visibly make mistakes, might ask students to teach. They might show, as students to their students, what forms challenge might take. What do you see in this?
You could well be right about such a distinction. At the same time, a potential weakness with discriminating between intuition and story based on their content is that by doing so you necessarily limit the content of both. What if your intuition provides a story? What if the story-generating part of your mind offers a feeling? Perhaps this is worth asking of your intuition and your story-telling mind.