The roommate in your head

There's a voice in your head that never stops talking. It comments on everything, argues with people who aren't there, replays yesterday and rehearses tomorrow. Michael Singer's question, in The Untethered Soul from 2007, is the simplest one in this chamber: if you can hear the voice, who's listening?

Singer was a graduate student in economics in Florida in the early 1970s when he noticed the voice, really noticed it, and couldn't stop noticing. He spent the next decades building a life around the practice of stepping back from it, and along the way built a software company and a meditation center, which is a reminder that this isn't a monk's practice. It's for people with jobs.

His picture is a roommate. Imagine the voice in your head were a person who followed you around saying everything it says. You'd throw them out in a day. But because it's inside, we assume it's us, and we take orders from it. Singer's practice is to notice that you're the one hearing the roommate, not the roommate. That shift, which he calls the seat of awareness, is available any moment you remember it.

The second practice is release. When something comes up, a fear, an irritation, an old hurt, the instinct is to close around it, to protect. Singer says: relax and let it pass through. Don't resist, don't indulge. The energy that was trapped in the closing goes free.

It's in the month of Awareness because it's awareness at its most practical. No cushion required. The roommate is talking right now, reading this. Notice that you can hear it. That's the whole key.