mysticallion:

Most of what we  normally take to be our “self” is actually an ongoing inner babble—sometimes a monologue, sometimes a dialogue, sometimes a conversation, sometimes a shouting match, sometimes just a whisper or whimper of fear. We talk ourselves out of bed in the morning and into the shower. We comment of the warm spray, on our aches and pains, on our current mental cloudiness or nervousness or excitement. We talk ourselves through the bathing process, the grooming process, the dressing process, all the while entertaining our own inner commentary—narcissistic or fatalistic– about our appearance. And we continue to do that in one form or another all day. And interspersed with all that, we contemplate our future and re-imagine past events; One moment we spend hoping like hell nothing bad will happen today, and in the next we find ourselves rehashing old arguments—with our own mind acting as all the players, playing all the parts. And so forth and so on, etcetra ad nauseam.

We meditate to see all of this, to recognize our own internal madness. We learn to simply sit and watch our own experience with great curiosity, great sensitivity, great openness. We do this because this very act of seeing—not participating, not identifying with and following the drama, but seeing/feeling/tasting all this objectively in our own actual, present experience—is what allows us to eventually disengage from it, to cease feeding it with energy and attention, and in time to even become free from its chronic babbling lunacy. And then, but only then, in that space that remains, and with the energy and attention freed up from those prior runaway processes, we can explore and feel deeply into ourselves, into the depths of experience, where we can re-discover and re-claim and re-unite with our own real Essence, our own luminous spacious nature, our own Truth.

~The Mystical Lion