So, I know some people may take umbrage with the idea of happiness as “lurking”. After all, it’s happiness! It’s that shiny, bright, bubbly space that seems to spill from every pore when it suffuses our hearts. Something like that doesn’t lurk, does it?

Except I kind of think it does. I mean, if happiness was just sitting there out in the open, like a lump in the middle of the road, something we could just pick up and put in our pockets, would there really be soooo many books and blog post and manuals and tweets and leaflets telling us where to find it? If we need to go in search of it, it must be hiding—maybe behind a fence or a car fender, lurking stealthily, waiting to ambush us when we least expect it.

On the plus side, it’s an ambush most of us would welcome. Think of it: “How was your day, honey?” “Oh, pretty good. Got a latte, picked up the dry cleaning, was ambushed by happiness just after lunch.”

So, ya, maybe it’s just me, but that’s actually how happiness seems to find me. As a shot out of the blue, standing in a spill of sunshine but ready to bolt the minute cloud cover starts rolling in.

Or at least that was once true. It’s not so true anymore. Recently, when happiness jumped me, I gently lassoed its wrist, and now it follows me around like a puppy with its tongue hanging out. Want to know how I did it? I stopped listening to myself.

The voices in my head

Back in the day, I wrote a poem called Being that started off like this:

The voices in my head speak so assured,
Sometimes in whispers, sometimes loud as shouts
With smirks that hint I cannot cast them out…

I got a fair amount of response for that poem, often from people grateful to hear that they weren’t the only ones hearing voices. Anyone who’s tried to meditate for even five seconds knows the truth of that. Our brains are constantly narrating the world around us and providing us with “helpful” comments, tips, opinions, concerns, warnings, observations. And because it’s coming from inside our own heads, we imagine the messages are important. Maybe it’s our intuition talking. Maybe we’re receiving hints from the universe.

After years of examination, research, study, and analysis, my considered response to this idea is: hogwash! Those voices in our heads? They’re not insight! They’re the detritus of a messy mind—like that odd mass of pulp left over after juicing apples and carrots. I know some people shove that shit into muffins, and maybe you want to compost it, but you definitely don’t want to feature it as your main meal. It’s garbage, and nothing you do to pretty it up is going to make it more than garbage. So why not just throw it out?

Never listen to Mikey

Michael Singer, author of The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment, created an awesome course on Sounds True on the topic of surrender. In one of the episodes, after urging listeners to stop listening to the voices in their heads, he quips: “I never listen to Mikey.” More and more, over the years, I find I’ve adopted that as my adage.

Whenever my brain starts feeding me anything at all, I literally ignore it. I know this sounds kind of insane. I mean, our brains feed us constant input. Should we never listen to it?

As part of my personal experiment, I decided to answer that question yes. Yes, we should never listen to that voice. Ever. Not because everything it says is wrong (although it often is). But because everything it says is irrelevant. I don’t need my brain to narrate the world I’m living in. I’m living in it! What use is there for a soundtrack?

At first, I worried that ignoring those voices would cause me to miss important cues. But the longer I do it, the more I realize that’s simply not true. In fact, I find myself even more tuned in to what’s happening around me and capable of responding with greater consideration. Turns out, removing the narrative layer drops us into the here and now. Who knew?

As an unexpected and entirely welcome upshot of this practice, happiness is coming out of hiding, tiptoeing closer, sometimes napping at my feet. Which is entirely what people mean when they say it was there all along. The quieter you get inside, the louder it speaks.