Dave Kashen explains meditation isn't about stopping your thoughts. Instead, he uses a talker/listener model to show how you can observe your inner voice like a drunk person on the street and simply let it talk without engaging. The goal is detachment, not silence.
I ask clients, "How do you know when you're thinking?" And they notice, you know, that voice in their head. And I typically say, "Well, in order to have the experience of hearing a voice talking, there must be a talker and a listener, right? If there was no listener, we couldn't experience that." Which for a lot of people is like, "Oh, that's an—" you know, it's like an unexamined part of their experience of being human. And yeah, like I'll often say, if you were walking down the street at night and some like drunk homeless guy is like, "You suck," it's obvious you could ignore that voice. But because the voice appears to emanate from inside your head and sounds like you, it's not always as obvious, but it is just as true that you could choose to ignore it. And I think that's a really important thing to say about meditation. A lot of people think the goal is to quiet the voice in the head, And it is nice when the voice quiets, and it does sometimes in meditation, and it often doesn't quiet in meditation or not in meditation. That's not a problem if you can see through it, right? If you can ignore it, it's just like, "Oh, this is just occurring. This voice is chatting, chattering on in my mind," and then you go about your business. I sometimes use this metaphor, not to pick on homeless people, but you know, about like, you're like in a, uh, you know, you're in your favorite cafe sipping your tea, and this, you know, crazy homeless guy sits down next to you and starts muttering to himself like, ah, you're a piece of shit, you're, you're terrible, you're— God, what— you know, you wouldn't then think he's talking to you and engage and believe what he's saying. And I think that's another useful metaphor
