Prologue —
In case you’ve missed any Starter Program Shifts…
Starter Shift 1: The Presence Shift
Starter Shift 2: The Mind Garden Shift Into Flow
Starter Shift 3: Shift Your Inner Voice (found below) has an introduction right here.
In today’s Shift, you’ll listen to the silent words flowing through your Mind Garden to shift your inner voice.
I often complete the ‘Shift Your Inner Voice’ sequence before starting a therapy session, a meeting, or recording a new Shift.
Hello friend.
Let’s take a long deep breath and close our eyes.
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Get comfortable.
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Relax.
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Allow your shoulders to fall toward the ground.
Settle in and listen.
Listen to life.
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Listen to the words flowing in your inner world now — the words flowing as your inner voice.
That’s what we’ll be doing today.
Let’s start with that.
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Listen to hear the words flowing through you in this moment.
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Can you quickly identify any words or any ideas emerging out of the silence of your inner world?
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Do you hear anything floating around in your Mind Garden right now?
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What words or ideas is your inner world producing when you listen without judgement?
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What do you notice?
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Whatever you noticed, let it go.
Let everything go.
Release all words and thoughts.
Let’s come into quiet, into peace, into inner silence.
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Sit and listen to life with all of your attention.
Empty your inner world of words.
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Nice.
The following two terms will help us focus this Shift.
Mind Garden refers to your inner world, imagined as a living garden.
Weeds refer to persistent, unwanted aspects of your Mind Garden. They’re usually perpetuated by words and ideas that flow repetitively through your Mind Garden.
We’ll pay close attention to our Mind Gardens and Weeds today.
To Shift Your Inner Voice you’ll navigate through your Mind Garden and notice how authentic the words that are flowing inside you feel.
Your authentic voice is never far away.
One reason that our authentic voices are so powerful is that the journey to finding your voice has inevitably taken many turns.
You navigate through life’s challenges and rediscover personal authenticity along the way.
Your authenticity is reflected in your voice.
Your authenticity is experienced by anyone who hears your voice.
Anyone who listens to you hears, on a primal level, what you’ve traversed on your way to becoming your voice.
Your life is embedded in your voice.
Let’s take another long deep breath.
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The stamp of your voice carries all of your history and all of your dreams.
All of your living dreams and all of your broken dreams.
They’re all condensed into now, through your voice — through how you express yourself.
When you connect to your voice, everyone who hears you, knows you.
You also come to know yourself by consistently listening to whatever automatically flows through your inner world and into your Mind Garden as your voice.
Knowing your authentic voice is key to being able to shift your mind on demand.
And that’s our Shift Starter Program intention.
Now, let’s make an intentional visit to your Mind Garden and listen with even greater focus.
Imagine yourself sitting at the center of your Mind Garden now.
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Find your patch of grass or your favorite, most comfortable seat, placed at the exact center of your Mind Garden.
Sit down there at the center — settle into your Shifting Seat.
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Settling into my seat feels like falling into a soft, thick, pillow-cushioned recliner that slowly recedes as I’m immersed into it.
Feel yourself enveloped.
Relax completely into the space of your inner world.
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Can you see yourself sitting at peace in your Mind Garden?
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See and feel the colors, the textures, and the movements of your Mind Garden.
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Flowers opening and blooming.
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Your Mind Garden is alive.
You can almost smell it.
Your beautiful, peaceful, blooming inner garden.
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Feel yourself settling in even further.
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Nice.
Keeping your eyes closed, listen to the words flowing through your Mind Garden now.
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Let’s listen closely for words or thoughts flowing through our minds.
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Good.
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Listen and feel the impact of the words that you hear in your Mind Garden now.
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Listen without judgement.
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Closely feel your inner world’s subtle reactions to whatever is arising — whatever you notice or hear.
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If you listen closely, you’ll notice that there's a feeling associated with the ideas and the words that you hear flowing through your garden.
What does it feel like?
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Perfect.
Good start.
Okay, let's take another step deeper into our Mind Gardens now.
At the center of your mind garden — right where you're sitting now — there's a hidden opening that leads you even more deeply into the silence that surrounds you.
You’re sitting at the hidden entrance right now.
As you deepen your connection to inner silence, you’ll begin to feel your hidden entrance opening slowly beneath you.
Listen to your inner world with all of your attention.
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Feel yourself sinking now as the hidden opening carries your Shifting Seat downward, with you in tow.
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Shift slowly down, through the bottom of your Mind Garden.
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Keep drifting down until you find yourself floating weightlessly below your Mind Garden, and into the pristine space of silence.
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I’m down here now, enveloped in silence.
Breathe in the cleanest oxygen.
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Feel the soft air tickling your skin, buzzing your body and recharging you.
Feel it?
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We're fully at peace.
Nothing to fear.
No worries.
Let's stay here in the silence and listen together for a little while.
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Take another long deep breath.
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Feel yourself sinking even more deeply into the silence, into life.
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Feel the buzz of silence through your entire body.
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Blend into the silent world below your Mind Garden.
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This is the world where your silent words are flowing from — into and through your Mind Garden and into your life.
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With your next breath out, feel yourself centered, completely at peace and floating in silence below your Mind Garden — merged with silence.
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Find perfect inner silence.
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Good.
With your eyes still closed, look a few feet out in front of you now.
Keep breathing deeply as you look through your closed eyes.
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Open your inside vision — though your eyes remain closed, look out in front of you a few feet, as though you're looking through your forehead, rather than through your eyes.
Doing this will help relax your gaze and keep you connected with the silence.
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You’re just looking and listening to life right now.
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You may see a sea of lights in your inner world.
Of course, you’ll usually see darkness too.
You're deep in your inner world now, below your Mind Garden.
Whatever you see, whatever you hear, whatever you feel when you’re down here in silence is your inner world speaking.
Listening closely from down here shifts your inner voice.
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From down here, you can see your Mind Garden.
If you shift your gaze upward, you'll see the bottom of your Mind Garden.
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You’ll see its soil bed.
You’ll see the bottom tips of your longest roots, leading up to the flowers, the weeds, and the rest of your Mind Garden above.
Just look.
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Good.
See if you can feel the energy that's flowing from your Mind Garden now.
The energy state of your Mind Garden is always projecting outward, in every direction.
Feel yourself melting further into presence as you look up at the bottom of your Mind Garden.
Just feel.
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Remember, ‘weeds’ are persistent, unwanted aspects of your Mind Garden.
They're often perpetuated by the words and ideas that sustain and repeat in your Mind Garden.
Listen and feel for any roots of weeds catching your attention right now.
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Listen for any unwelcome words that you've been repeating lately.
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Listen for any ideas or words rooted to a Mind Garden weed.
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I call this process ‘weeding’.
Keep relaxing your entire body and listening for your inner voice.
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Settle in further.
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Whatever regularly distracts you in your life is connected to a weed.
Notice the distraction that comes to mind next.
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There's a feeling associated with the ideas and the words that you hear.
This feeling comes from whether you feel authentic about what you’re hearing.
What do you hear?
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What do you feel?
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If no weeds have popped up, bring to mind any issue you've been grappling with.
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Whatever weed you notice, set an intention to spend a few seconds focused on connecting with its roots.
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If you can, imagine seeing a root coming from that weed through the bottom of your Mind Garden.
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Whatever you notice, feel any automatic reaction to the experience.
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Don't respond to it.
Just observe it.
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Good.
You've heard — and perhaps seen — a root.
Let the genius of your mind address it from here.
You’ll return to listen again later.
That’s great shifting for now.
Listening from silence cultivates your inner voice.
That’s how you shift your inner voice into authenticity.
That’s all it takes.
You shifted your inner voice by simply listening and watching closely.
We’ll make many more visits to observe our Mind Gardens and shift.
Open your eyes whenever you’re ready.
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To finish up, set an intention to be fully present for the rest of your day or night.
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Feel that intention.
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Nice job!
Stay present.
I’ll talk to you soon.
Sean
P.S. If you enjoyed Shift Your Inner Voice, check out the ‘MORE SHIFTING’ suggestion I’ve shared below the ‘Recap & Prep’ that follows.
Recap & Prep —
Starter Shift 3: Shift Your Inner Voice
You now have strategies for shifting into peace, presence, flow, and for shifting your inner voice anytime.
And, you’ve seen that shifting isn’t hard.
It just takes a few minutes of listening to life.
Anytime you notice that peace is missing as you listen, reset your intention to come back into presence with a Present Shift.
If you notice that the conversation occurring in your head has been overtaken by any distractions — fears, shames, regrets, stresses (i.e., weeds) — take a few minutes to garden your mind.
As you continue shifting your mind, you’ll notice you're spending more of your time in peace.
If you’re like me, you’ll discover that shifting is a self-reinforcing practice. It’s contagious in your life — and it will become contagious for those around you too.
You’ll begin to hear specific inner conversational patterns repeating themselves throughout your days.
The more you take note of the inner conversation cycles that bring you into anxiety, stress, sadness, or any other weed-driven state, the more they’ll begin to reduce — just your noticing them will shift your inner voice.
Keep shifting and peacefulness, presence, and flow will take deeper hold in your days.
Congratulations! You’ve completed Starter Program Shift 3 of 4.
You’ve almost completed the Shift Starter Program.
Starter Shift 4 is right here.
MORE SHIFTING —
Shift Your Inner Voice with the OnePerfect app.
One of the primary reasons I built the OnePerfect app was to provide you with a tool that teaches how I create Shifts, to help you to create and share Shifts that work for you.
Using it, we can collect our best ideas as we Shift together.
I use the app all the time, because speaking my insights (in private, or to share with others) is a deeply rewarding practice.
If you save your recorded insights, you can listen to them and track what's important to you anytime — and as you refine your insights, you’ll refine your voice and your life.
I recommend that you begin using the app by recording whatever you most want to remember about the Shift Starter Program.
That way, you’ll always have the insight that’s most relevant to you, saved in your own words — to blend into your personal Shifts anytime.
To record a private insight in the OnePerfect app —
Download and login to the free app trial on iPhone or Android.
Then you get to the dashboard, tap ‘Shift My Mind’ to create your first personalized Shift in the app.
When prompted, record a personal insight.
Add an insight title and privately save your insight into your audio journal.
After you save your recorded insight it will appear in your app’s private audio journal.
