Eckhart Tolle explains how negative self-talk creates real physical symptoms: your body can't tell the difference between an actual threat and a fearful thought, so anxiety and fear become physiological. Most people spend their mental energy on rumination rather than positive thoughts, which feeds illness over time. The first step is noticing the constant mental chatter and watching it without getting caught in it.
Chapters
People don't realize that a significant part of the unhappiness in their lives is actually generated by unnecessary, negative, often destructive mind activity, and they don't even know it. Mindfulness is first of all discovering the simple fact that there is a voice in your head that continuously comments on your life or on what's happening around you. It's the self-talk in there. Everybody knows what the self-talk is in there. You talk to yourself. Sometimes you talk to yourself in the first person, "I." Some people talk to themselves in the second person, "you." So you can get annoyed with yourself and then you say, "You shouldn't have done that." And then you have another thought that says, "Yes, but I couldn't help it." And you might even get a third voice come in that whatever it says, it says, "Why can't I get out of my self-talk?" That's self-talk too. But it's an amazing first thing, what I call the first awakening, spiritual awakening, is something very basic and something very simple. It's the discovery that there is a voice in your head that always talks to you, mostly silently. If it talks out loud, then you are continuously, and there's nobody around, then you are considered insane. But, and that's only if it's loud, but most people have that inside their heads and they are not considered insane, it is considered normal. But there's not such a big difference between the two. And sometimes when you listen to them, there might be a man walking in the street muttering, "Oh, why is fucking Eckhart Tolle—" And you say, "Oh, he's really insane." But it might be that you are doing the same, but it's just not out loud, it's in your head. "Why didn't I, I should have said that. Why didn't I say that? Next time he does that, I'm not exactly know what I'm going to reply." And it goes on and on. Or you lie awake at night and start worrying. You wake up and, oh my God, what's going to happen? What if that doesn't work? And if that goes wrong? And what if he does that? And then you go into it, you get drawn, one thought leads to another thought and another thought. Oh my God. And then the body, the body cannot distinguish between an actual reality, an event that's happening in the real life, and what your mind is saying. So when you have fearful thoughts, the body reacts to every fearful thought, but the— and that's an emotion. The body reacts with an emotion, the emotion you feel in your body. The body cannot distinguish between an actual event and a thought. So when you think fearful thoughts, the emotions you feel are the emotions that are saying, "I am in danger. There is an actual danger here." So you feel the emotion of fear, anxiety. You might feel agitated. And it's not only not pleasant, If you indulge in that kind of useless, dysfunctional, destructive thinking year after year after year, it has its effect on the body. So it's vitally important to discover, first of all, that there is a voice in your head that indulges in self-talk. Most of the time. And for many people, interestingly enough, that self-talk, for many people, is not always negative, but for many people, it is more negative than positive. A good event that happened yesterday, a nice— you might have gone to a nice reunion, or you went out into nature and you witnessed a beautiful sunset. Okay, you can remember it today and think, "That was a beautiful sunset," or, "We had a nice talk yesterday," but you can't do that much thinking about a nice event. But the mind, when there's something negative that happens yesterday, somebody offended you or didn't give you the attention that you that you wanted from him, then you can start thinking of how, oh my God, what he did, he's really, next time he does that, I'm going to say that, or he's really sure, why doesn't he, why the, you can go on for a long time dwelling on something negative, much longer than dwelling on something positive. It is so, seemingly a negative event is much more food for useless mind activity than a positive event. And this is why for many people a significant percentage of their mind activity is negative. For some people it is almost 100% negative, but it is unlikely that these people would get a job in this company. And I mean that because the your predominant state of consciousness, your predominant mental-emotional state, there's a certain correlation between who you associate with, where you find yourself, and even what kind of things happen to you. There is a correlation which is not always immediately recognizable, but there is a correlation between one's a person's predominant mental-emotional state and who they are with, who their friends are, where they work, and even what happens to them. So if you are in a very negative state a long time, you tend to attract also negative events, but you can only You have to find that out for yourself. I'm not saying believe me. I know it from my own life because whenever something bad happened to me, I had a phrase that would occur again in my mind that, "Of course, bad things always happen to you, don't they? They're bound to happen to you. It always happens to you." So I was talking to myself and saying that bad things would always happen to me, and they did. So you can discover first that the spiritual awakening is to discover that there is continuous mind activity. And for some people, it's the discovery that a significant part of their mind activity is negative. But the vital thing is to discover that there is this continuous talk in my head. Which is considered the normal human state. And of course you cannot abolish thinking, of course there will be thinking. But the question is, is there an awareness behind the thinking? If you can become aware that you are indulging or caught up in of that useless mind activity, and you suddenly become aware of perhaps certain repetitive thoughts that tend to recur in your mind again and again. You might see it in others too, more easily in others. When you go for your Thanksgiving dinner, I think is it next week, you will meet your family members or relatives, And some of you may realize you already know what they are going to say this year because it's the same thing they said last year and 5 years and 10 years ago. And if they have negative judgments about you or somebody else, then it's the same thing you will hear again next week when you go to them. So it's easier to see how others are caught up in repetitive thought forms not as easy to see it in oneself. This is why there's a saying that self-knowledge is the most difficult knowledge. It's easier to see others. But if you can discover, even in the midst perhaps, in the moment of a certain thought appearing in your mind, realizing, oh, that thought is, I've had this thought for years, it comes again and again and again. And so there is an observing presence, and from there you get— and that observing presence isn't a thought, it's just the ability to realize that there is a voice in your head and that there are thoughts. And you realize that some of those thoughts are negative, and many of those thoughts actually are not only unnecessary but make your life very difficult, such as worry. So most people live with what I call a cluttered mind. A cluttered mind means they are completely unaware that there's a continuous stream of mental commentary that it goes, and wherever they meet somebody, immediately certain judgments form. And everything they feel, they need to immediately adopt a position towards it, immediately say, "I'm against it," "I dislike it," immediately adapt a mental position and being identified with one's mental position, which is a thought.
