Prairie Light Press Reader Preview of:
Still Noticing
How to Step Back from the Voice In Your Head
Preview
Still Noticing
How to Step Back from the Voice in Your Head
Copyright © 2026 L. Phillips
Still Noticing: How to Step Back from the Voice in Your Head
Second Edition, 2026
Formats Available:
Kindle ASIN: B0G7CVD9T9
Paperback ISBN: 979-8254485346
Hardback ISBN: N/A
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This book is for informational purposes only and is not intended as medical, psychological, or professional advice.
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Table of Contents
1. The Voice Inside My Head.......................................................... 7
2. Putting Your Thoughts on Trial................................................. 9
3. Confidence Is Not Evidence...................................................... 11
5. Watching the Mind Misbehave................................................. 15
6. The Island.................................................................................... 17
7. Old Tapes..................................................................................... 19
8. The Guard................................................................................... 21
9. What If I Lose It?....................................................................... 23
10. Degrees of Known.................................................................... 25
11. Peace Is Not Silence................................................................. 27
12. Two in the Morning................................................................. 29
13. The Blame Game...................................................................... 31
14. Little Larry................................................................................ 33
15. The Other Side.......................................................................... 35
16. Attention Is Not Awareness................................................... 38
17. Still Noticing............................................................................. 40
The voice used to run the island.
Now it’s a citizen.
A Note to the Reader
The first book ended somewhere quiet.
Not with answers. Not with a method. Just with the observation that awareness was already present, and that stopping the interference was the whole thing.
What I didn’t write about was everything that comes after.
The old tapes that come back. The fear of losing what you found. The voice that keeps talking, even when you’ve already seen through it. The doubt. The backsliding. The moments when awareness seems to vanish entirely and you wonder if it was ever real.
Nobody much writes about that part. I’m not sure why.
Maybe because it doesn’t fit the story we expect from these kinds of books. The story is supposed to go: confusion, then clarity, then peace. End of book. But that’s not what actually happens. What actually happens is more interesting, and more human, than that.
This book is for the person who read the first one, or something like it, and found something real there — and then watched it get complicated. It’s for the person who knows what awareness feels like and still loses it regularly. It’s for the person who is living the after, not just the before.
It’s written the same way I found it: by noticing. Not by having figured it out.
The chapters are short. You can enter anywhere. None of this is doctrine.
It’s just what I’ve been watching.
— L. Phillips
1. The Voice Inside My Head
There is a voice inside my head that never fully stops.
It narrates. It comments. It worries. It plans. It replays old conversations and rehearses ones that may never happen. It counts things for no reason. It wonders about the architecture of buildings. It offers opinions on people it has never met. It wakes up before I do.
For most of my life, I didn’t notice this voice very much. It was just — me. My thoughts. How thinking works. I had no reason to question it because I didn’t know there was anything to question.
Then I started paying attention, and everything changed.
Not because the voice went away. It didn’t. It’s still there. It’s there right now, probably, commenting on whatever I’m writing.
What changed was my relationship to it.
Before, the voice was the authority. Whatever it said, I believed. Whatever it concluded, I acted on. It had the run of the island. It was the governor, the judge, the narrator, and the news anchor, all at once. And I never once asked it for its credentials.
Now I know it’s just a voice. Useful sometimes. Wrong a lot. And no longer running things unquestioned.
That sounds simple. It took years.
2. Putting Your Thoughts on Trial
The mind makes accusations quickly.
“He disrespected me.” “She’s trying to control me.” “They’re pushing me.” “I’m being snubbed.”
The voice in your head doesn’t wait for evidence. It files charges immediately.
For most of my life, the trial was very short. The thought was the prosecutor. The thought was also the witness. And the thought was the judge. Somehow the verdict was always the same: guilty. And once the verdict was in, the anger followed. Someone had to pay.
What I started doing instead was putting the thought on trial.
Not suppressing it. Not pretending it wasn’t there. Just examining it. Asking it to prove its case.
Sometimes the evidence held up. More often than I expected, it didn’t. Clarification would reveal something simple: they weren’t attacking me. They misunderstood what I said. Or I misunderstood what they meant. My mind could write a villain in seconds. Reality rarely cast them.
The thought isn’t the enemy. Believing every thought automatically — that’s the problem.
Awareness didn’t silence my thoughts. It just gave them due process.
3. Confidence Is Not Evidence
The voice speaks with certainty.
That’s the part that used to fool me. It doesn’t hedge. It doesn’t say “maybe” or “I’m not sure.” It speaks like a man who has already reviewed the facts and is now informing you of the conclusion. Confident. Authoritative. Final.
But confidence is not evidence.
The voice generates accusations about people I don’t even know. It decides their motives in seconds. And then it presents those motives as facts. Not as guesses. As facts.
What I know now is that the brain is filling in gaps. When something ambiguous happens, the mind doesn’t leave it blank. It inserts a story. A motive. An explanation. And it does this automatically, faster than thought, without asking permission.
The story is usually about threat. That’s what the system is designed to do. Assume danger first. Sort it out later.
But the alarm system is very sensitive. It produces a lot of false positives. And once I started questioning the accusations, I discovered how often the case collapsed under cross-examination.
Those thoughts aren’t facts. They’re guesses dressed up as facts.
I call them imposters. Because that’s what they are. They sound like truth. They feel like truth. But when you ask them to prove it, most of them can’t.
4. Nice Try
At some point, something shifted.
The thoughts didn’t stop. The voice didn’t go quiet. The old accusations still showed up. But they stopped feeling serious.
Now when the voice starts in with one of its dramatic productions — the elaborate villain it constructed, the offense it decided was intentional, the conspiracy it assembled from two unrelated events — I sometimes just smile.
Nice try.
There’s a humor in it I didn’t expect. Once you’ve seen the trick a hundred times, the trick loses its power. The mind still runs its routine. But it’s become almost entertaining, like watching a character in a play deliver the same line every night.
What I’ve noticed is that the humor only shows up when you’re no longer fused with the thought. When the thought is you, it isn’t funny. It’s urgent. It’s serious. It requires a response.
When you can watch the thought from a small distance, it sometimes becomes almost comic. The mind files another charge. The judge leans back. “Council, we’ve heard this one before.”
Case dismissed.
The voice is still on the island. It can file petitions. It can make arguments. But it doesn’t govern anymore. And once you see it clearly enough to smile at it, you realize it never had the authority it claimed.
5. Watching the Mind Misbehave
I trade markets for a living. I have watched my mind misbehave in real time, with money on the line, for years.
The mind does things like this: a position moves in your favor and you feel the lift. Then it pulls back slightly, and immediately the voice starts narrating. “I could have taken that. I had more. There goes my money.”
The position hasn’t lost anything. It’s just breathing. But the mind has already anchored to the peak number it saw, claimed that number as owned, and is now experiencing the natural movement of the market as a personal loss.
That’s not trading. That’s a story.
The trading environment strips things down. Fear shows up. Greed shows up. Impatience shows up. The impulse to act before it’s time, the impulse to exit before you should, the voice that says take it now take it now take it now. All of it visible, all of it immediate, all of it traceable back to the mind doing what the mind does.
What awareness gave me in the markets is the same thing it gave me everywhere else: a small gap between the thought and the action. Enough space to ask whether the voice is calling something correctly, or just generating noise.
Some thoughts survive argument. Very few survive awareness.
When you start watching the mind instead of obeying it, its behavior becomes almost interesting. It tries so hard. It means so well. It’s just usually wrong about the urgency.
6. The Island
Carlos Castaneda wrote about something he called the island of the tonal.
The idea is that the known world — everything named, organized, structured — exists on an island. Outside the island is the nagual: the vast, the unnamed, the mystery. The island is where we live. It’s where we have to live. Bills, relationships, schedules, responsibilities — all of it is tonal. You can’t abandon it.
But the island can be reordered.
That’s what happened. Not destruction. Not transcendence. Not silence. Reordering.
Before, the voice ran the island. It was governor, mayor, and chief of police. What it said, went. The emotions it called up were taken as fact. The verdicts it delivered were enforced. Everything on the island reported to the voice.
Now the voice is a citizen. Still present. Still vocal. Sometimes it makes a good point. But it doesn’t govern anymore.
Nothing was eliminated. That’s the part people miss when they talk about awareness. They imagine it means the voice disappears, the ego dissolves, the mind goes quiet. That hasn’t been my experience. The same parts are still here. The protector. The narrator. The old fear. The quick temper.
They’re just not in charge anymore.
The fighting used to be the climate. Now it’s occasional weather. The weather still comes through. But I don’t live inside it anymore.
7. Old Tapes
The patterns I carry today were mostly installed before I was ten years old.
A young nervous system doesn’t philosophize. It adapts. If something keeps you safe, the brain files it and runs it again. If a behavior works, it becomes a habit. If a habit survives long enough, it starts to feel like personality. And eventually you stop questioning it, because it’s just — how you are.
Except it isn’t. It’s how you learned to be.
That’s what I mean by old tapes. Not trauma as drama. Just programs that were written in one environment and kept running in a different one. The environment changed. The program didn’t.
When the old tapes show up now, they show up the same way they always did. The same defensiveness. The same protective quick-draw. The same assumption that something might need to be fought. What’s different is that I can see them. I can notice the tape starting. And in that noticing, there’s a small pause — just enough to ask whether the old response actually fits this situation.
Usually it doesn’t.
The tapes were written by a kid who was doing his best. They worked then. They just overstayed.
I don’t try to erase them. You can’t erase them. What you can do is stop obeying them automatically. And that is enough.
8. The Guard
I didn’t put the guard down. I just stopped letting him patrol unsupervised.
For a long time, the protector in me was on constant duty. Scanning. Anticipating. Assessing threat. If someone’s tone shifted, the alarm went up. If something was ambiguous, the mind filled it in with danger. If I didn’t know someone’s intention, the default was to assume the worst and prepare accordingly.
This worked. Or it seemed to. It kept me ready. It kept me defended. It also kept a wall between me and most situations, because a man who is always protecting himself is never fully present anywhere.
The guard wasn’t malicious. He thought he was helping. He was doing the job he was assigned, back when the assignment made sense.
What’s different now is not that he’s gone. He’s still here. He still shows up. But he reports to something different now. He’s not autonomous. He has to bring his concerns to the table and make the case.
And a lot of the time, the case doesn’t hold up.
My mind learned long ago to defend me quickly. Awareness didn’t remove that reflex. It just gave me time to check if the alarm was real.
Most of the time, it wasn’t.
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