“A man lies dying in a hospital bed. He has spent his entire life building for the future, doing what needed to be done to amass wealth and raise his status to a level he thought worthy. Now he has reached the end of his days and finds himself filled with remorse rather than satisfaction.

In his final moments, he turns to his doctor and says, “I spent my whole life stepping on people in order to get to where I want to be, and now there’s no one left for me. It’s only now that I realize it’s so simple. It’s who you love and how you love and the rest of it, the rest of it never mattered.”

That is a powerful lesson, yet he has little time left to make use of it. 

He came to clarity at the end of his life; what if you could get this clarity now?”

I often write about the demanding and criticizing voices in our heads because they are so amazingly prevalent and I figure just about anyone can identify with that and almost all of us need support with them. Every day these voices arise out of habit, telling us “I can’t do that right,” “I’m never going to achieve that,” or “I’m not good enough.”

More often than not we indulge and get overwhelmed by these limiting beliefs or as Thich Nhat Hanh says,” we water the seeds of our own suffering.” The end result is we end up hating ourselves. But what if these voices were trying to help us in some way?

That may sound crazy, but really, consider it for a moment. What if these negative and limiting voices were looking after our best interest?

We all have them; they’re the most prevalent thoughts in our heads at times. Sometimes I think if our minds only spoke out loud we may not have any friends and we certainly wouldn’t want to be friends with ourselves.

It’s the inner critic that lives in our heads that is constantly judging ourselves and others. This inner critic doesn’t make us feel good and can keep us stuck in cycles of stress, anxiety, depression and addiction. So why do we let this auto-judge run rampant? The reality is most the time we’re not aware enough to keep it in check and even when we are we don’t know what to do about it.

Here’s one trick to get your self-judgments in check:

Every moment of our lives our brains are rapidly taking in information and making snap judgments, interpretations and decisions based on what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Depending on how we’re feeling we’ll interpret it differently.

Even though we believe our thoughts represent reality, the truth is, our thoughts are not facts. A lot of us live without an awareness of this, operating mostly from a state of auto-pilot, sleepwalking through life.  The good news is we can train our minds to become more aware of this automaticity, get perspective and tune into what really matters.

Here’s an example I often do with my own patients to illustrate why we don’t need to believe everything we think:

At this point the mental health benefits of a mindfulness practice are fairly well established. However, cultivating a more mindful life isn’t often easy – there are many obstacles at play.

The places we work and the people we surround ourselves with are likely not trying to put mindfulness at the forefront of their lives. We’re also looking for that perfect quiet time to sit, stand or lie down and practice intentionally, paying attention to the present moment with fresh eyes. Sometimes we get restless, agitated, bored or begin to doubt ourselves that we can ever truly be mindful and so we reactively avoid it.

The following is a quote by the 15th century Indian poet Kabir that I love to bring up again and again because it gets underneath these obstacles and drops us into mindfulness.

A short while ago I opened an opportunity for people to send me stories of mindfulness that can show the rest of us how it has had a practical impact on a particular event or their lives. I’m calling this column of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, “Voices.”

A number of people continue to write in with stories. If you have a story, continue writing in and as long as there are good stories that teach the rest of us how mindfulness can work in our lives, I will choose from them from time to time to post on Mindfulness and Psychotherapy.

Of course those that get chosen can also send me a link that I’ll include in the post where people can learn more about them.

Here’s a wonderful story that teaches us the wisdom behind slowing down in life by Angeliki: