What Happens When You Stop Listening To The Critical Voices In Your Head

In this excerpt from her latest book, This Messy Magnificent Life, Geneen Roth explains what happens when you stop listening to the critical voices in your head.

- Geneen Roth

A few years ago, my friend michael had his prostate removed. From his bed, he told me that because he’d been doing tai chi and chi gong for thirty years, he had created a new kind of “laying-down tai chi,” and was healing much faster than the doctor expected. “You do look radiant for someone who’s just had surgery,” I replied—and he did.

As my husband, Matt, and I were driving home, It started: I can’t believe I didn’t follow through with that chi gong practice. What is WRONG with me?

What if I have to have my ovaries removed and I don’t know how to wave my hands over their absence and heal myself?

I KNEW I should have taken up tai chi thirty years ago when everyone was flying to Hawaii and studying with Al What’s-HisName. Now it’s too late. I blew it. Again.

Along with—and even more pronounced than—the Greek chorus of judgments was the set of physical reactions that accompanied It: a pounding heart; a stomach that felt as if it had fallen through my feet and taken my legs with it; a sense of having withered and shrunk. Then came the wave of emotional reactions to the physical reactions: a feeling of irrevocable failure; desperation to climb out of myself; neediness for “a big person” to rescue flailing me.

Then, the final insult (which seems to be a favorite, although it often has nothing to do with the situation at hand): You are going to die fat, miserable, and alone, with moles on your face that have bristles sticking out.