Kate's Nuggets

The Power of Your Inner Witness
Episode 27

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Hello, today I want to talk about the power of your inner witness.

Your inner witness is a part of you that is absolutely crucial for personal development. Without your inner witness, you don't have access to the possibilities of conscious choice about who you are. Your inner witness gives you the power to break past habitual patterns because it is your inner witness that stands outside who you are behaving like you are when you act out old patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving.

If we can't observe ourselves clearly, we cannot gain enough perspective to determine whether we have the skills we need to accomplish our goals, whether we're being the person we want to be, whether our intended actions are having the impact that we want. We have to develop this internal self-observer if we want to achieve our goals. We can't have the relationships that we want if we don't understand the impact that we have on other people, and actually to distinguish our intent from our impact and figure out how we need to change.

Rather than just having habitual patterns that have unintended negative consequences, we need to learn how to witness ourselves.

Most of us first developed the ability to observe ourselves as a response to criticism and feedback about our mistakes. Corrections that we faced as children, whether overtly or implicitly expectations and standards about how we were supposed to behave in order to make our parents feel comfortable and good about taking care of ourselves.

So, because of this, we tend to develop a strong inner critic before we develop our inner witness. And our inner critic sees us as flawed and needing to change, and this is incredibly powerful for getting us to rapidly become who we need to be to have our parents feel good about us and to take care of us. The inner witness serves a counter to the shame and judgment of the inner critic. The inner witness is more neutral, seeing us simply as we are without that judgment.

If you've ever had a craving to be understood fully, to be heard or seen for who you are, your inner witness provides that service for you. And in fact, your inner witness is the only part of any person who can actually truly see the fullness of who you are.

Your inner witness is what gives you that sense of being seen that we all crave. The inner witness is pure acceptance of what is at this moment. The inner witness sees your brilliance and your failings and the ways that you are cowardly and the ways that you are brave and all of the mistakes that you've ever made and accepts without negative judgment that this is who you are and you could not be any other way. This is you.

Our inner witness never judges us as less worthy of love for our faults or because of our mistakes.

Our inner witness accepts us unconditionally for who we are and who we have been. And because the inner witness does not see us with judgment of our worthiness, it can neutrally assess when we fall short of our aspirations and be with us as we work to learn from our mistakes. It is a non-judgmental companion on our journey, and we do so much better in our lives if we cultivate this part of our mental capacity.

Cultivating our inner witness enables us to hold compassionate, non-judgemental space for ourselves. The inner witness allows us to nurture ourselves, to love ourselves and coach ourselves to be better without shame, but purely from a sense of here's where we are. Here's who I am. Here's who I am, here is my circumstances in life. Here are the things that matter to me. Here are the things that I notice that could stand to be improved and here is what I can do about it.

And that acceptance of the limitations of what is possible and the desire for what might be better creates so much ease. If you are somebody who struggles with high expectations for yourself and gets disappointed that the world is not how you want it to be, this all accepting inner witness will be a very powerful ally.

The inner witness is a part of all of us. You may not have full awareness of it and it may not be very active in your consciousness, but it does exist within you. And the exercises that I'm going to suggest at the end of this episode will help you strengthen it. These exercises will function like going to the gym and working out your muscles or feeding part of your brain, feeding your inner witness good nutrition, getting good rest and exercise and it will grow stronger.

This will happen because literally you will practice witnessing yourself from the inner witness perspective and as you practice, you will be rewiring your brain. You will be reinforcing the neuronal connections that already exist and generating new ones that reinforce the pattern of brain activity that is your inner witness consciousness.

So, I want to go a little bit more in detail in the characteristics of the inner witness. This is the part of you that you are looking for and you will access it if you just use your imagination to bring it forth. If you practice seeing yourself this way, you will strengthen those habits and if you just trust that this inner witness lives within you, that will also help it emerge more strongly.

Your inner witness sees everything. Your inner witness sees where you are blocked and where you are succeeding. Your inner witness sees the guilty pleasures and the things that you're ashamed of and the things that you're proud of that nobody noticed, and the things that you've gotten accolades for and the pains that you suffer and the joys that you experience. Your inner witness sees the way that you think clearly and the way that you think in convoluted manner. The way that you think in a convoluted manner, the inner witness sees how when you are not well rested, you're not at your best. The inner witness sees everything.

And more importantly, the inner witness accepts everything as it is right now, accepts that there is no other way that you could be other than how you are right now. There is no you should be different.

What is right now is the only way that this moment could be. Who you are, what you feel, what you think, how you are behaving right now is the only way that this moment could possibly have turned out. This includes the mistakes that you've made in the past, your hopes for the future, the way you want to be different for the future, the things that you see about yourself that could be improved, the things that you're blind to, some of which are strengths and some of which are weaknesses.

Everything is as it must be. There is no other way that this moment could be. There is no other way that you could be right now than who and how you are. The inner witness knows this in a full body knowing with the brain centers in the gut and the heart and the mind. The inner witness knows beyond words.

The inner witness knows that you do not have to be able to describe what is true in order for it to be true. You do not have to articulate what you are able to see of yourself in order for it to be true. The inner witness knows at a much deeper level than words and language. The inner witness sees or knows that you, your identity, is distinct from your thoughts, your emotions and your behavior. Your sense of identity exists separate from all of those things.

You are not your thoughts, you are not your emotions, you are not your behavior, and your inner witness knows this. Your inner witness, seeing that you are not your thoughts, emotions, and your behavior gives you incredible power. It is your inner witness that sees that distinction. That actually gives you the power to make conscious choices about what you want to think, how you want to feel, and what behavior you want to undertake.

Your inner witness finds the data about what exists right now that you can then feed into the part of you that does problem-solving and analysis and chooses what you want to do. That can also study psychology and behavior analysis and habit formation and neuroscience and all of those other things that can combine to create an understanding of how change might be possible and then might learn exercises and practices to make the changes that you want to have in the way that you think, which changes the way that you feel, which changes the way that you behave, which change the way that you think.

These thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all interrelated and when you make changes in any one of them, they have ripple effects through all the others, and your inner witness gives you the power to start making changes.

So how do you cultivate and grow and strengthen this inner witness? There are a few simple things that you can do. And like so many simple things, they are simple to say and not always so simple to do in practice.

One of the things that your inner witness can practice doing is noticing when you succeed and noticing when you have not and accepting both of those as perfect for now, they are the only way that it can be.

The first thing to do is to start getting in the habit of asking yourself, "What am I noticing? What is catching my attention? What am I thinking right now? What am I feeling right now? What behaviors am I doing right now?" Simply asking those questions, exercises your inner witness. Remember that the inner witness is looking non-judgmentally.

So, when your inner witness is asking, "What am I noticing?" You're looking for facts, not judgments or interpretations. Notice I am feeling the cool breeze on my skin. I'm thinking that I don't know what the rest of this sentence is going to be, that I don't know what to say to that person, that there is something I'm probably forgetting. Those are all thoughts that I could be having.

Then there's another level of abstraction, which is to label the thoughts that you have or the feelings that you have or the behaviors that you are undertaking as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And once again, no judgment about whether the thoughts, feelings, or behaviors are good or bad. The labels are neutral.

I'm thinking thoughts. I'm doing actions. I'm feeling feelings. Notice that this makes a distinction between I, my sense of identity, and the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This reinforces that sense that there's a part of me that is witnessing the things that I'm thinking, the things that I'm feeling, the things that I'm doing. That is my inner witness. The inner witness can also be aware of the fact that what you thought, what you felt and what you did up until this moment are reasonably well known quantities.

We rewrite memories in various ways because that's what our biology does every time we remember something. But the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the past are in the past. What exists now in this moment is a memory of those things and some hard-wiring in the brain that makes it more likely that you will do now what you did in the past unless you interrupt it with consciousness.

And the inner witness can help you make the distinction between that past that created this present moment and what is possible for the future by using language like, until this moment I had a pattern of, or in the past, there seems to be a theme that I would, you are not your past. Yes, if you do not interrupt past habits and conditioning with consciousness, you will continue to repeat patterns from your past, but that will be a present or future use of learning from the past and it can be interrupted by consciousness.

There is a meditation exercise that I read in a book when I was in my late teens or early twenties, and I don't remember which book it was, I just know that it was when I was in a phase of studying Asian religions in university, and I suspect that this exercise came either from a book that was recommended reading in class or even a required text or some of the extra reading that I did around the edges because I was interested in not only the academic study that I was doing in my classes, but also about what it was like to actually try these practices in my life.

And there's one that specifically cultivates this sense of inner witness, this part of you that witnesses yourself and goes like this. When you notice you're having a thought, get curious and ask, "Who is having this thought? And when you get an answer to the question of who is having this thought, the next question is who answered the question? And then the next question is, who answered that question? Who is witnessing these thoughts? Who is witnessing the witness er of the thoughts?"

You can also do this with feelings or behaviors. "Who is witnessing this feeling? Who is it that is having this emotional experience? Who is it that is doing this behavior? Who is choosing and who is seeing the chooser? Who is noticing that the chooser has chosen something?"

Practicing this kind of non-judgmental curiosity about who is behind the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that you are experiencing will make you aware of your inner witness, will strengthen your inner witness. All of these tools of becoming more aware of this part of you, this part of you that accepts what is right now without any judgment, without any sense that it should be any other way, that you should be any other way, your inner witness simply sees who you are for all of you and accepts all of you.

All of you is accepted by your inner witness who knows that things are just as they are and you could not be any other way in this moment than who you are and how you are, and you are having thoughts and having feelings and doing things in this moment and you are not those things.

I encourage you to play with these ways of strengthening your inner witness. Your inner witness will both be useful if you decide that you do want to take action to change who you are and more importantly, giving you a sense of ease about who you are and removing any sense of compulsion to change. Your inner witness holds space where you have permission not to change. I wish you ease and a growing familiarity with the experience of witnessing yourself and accepting yourself fully for exactly who you are right now.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.