NOISE WITHIN
THE INNER ALGORITHM GENERATING NEGATIVE THOUGHT
AND HOW TO DISABLE IT
My name is Boris Bouma, and I spent most of my adult life touring the world. 20 years of which in recovery from drugs and alcohol.
I could fill a book name dropping artists telling tales about my adventures as a tour manager.
BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT THIS IS
This is about the tools I gathered to regulate my nervous system in extremely chaotic and stressful environments. How I found equanimity during big wins, failure, loss, grief, joy and heartache.
If I can stay sober, present, and regulated through all the NOISE, anyone can.
Especially once you realize that most noise comes from within.
Our minds thrive on creating content to keep us engaged in thought, and usually that thought is negative. Perpetuating early learned fear and anxiety.
Keeping us trapped in loops, and patterns that make us live inauthentic lives.
But we can disable that inner algorithm, and regain authorship of who we really are.
With the help of ancient wisdom like stoicism, Bhuddism, Vedism, The Bible, Torah, Bhagavad Gita and modern day healers like Eckhart Tolle, Gabor Mate, David Dayan Fisher and David Ji, I add myself and hopefully you to the equation.
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MEDITATE
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MORNING SAHADNA
11 MINS
Ideally done between cold plunge and quad espresso. But generally before getting in character
OVERTHINKING
11 MINS
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of our thoughts” – Marcus Aurelius
GRATITUDE
11 MINS
Always come from gratitude, if not for selfish reasons.
RIGID EXPECTATIONS
11 MINS
“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions” – The Bhagavad Gita
WHO AM I?
11 MINS
“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable” – SENECA
RADICAL ACCEPTANCE
11 MINS
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference“
EXERPT FROM “NOISE WITHIN” THE BOOK
THE PRE-DAWN ASSAULT
My eyes haven’t opened, but I am waking up.
In a seamless transition, it begins. My mind firing off thoughts.
Automatically.
Involuntarily.
Incessantly.
And these thoughts are usually not positive.
“When is the next check coming, she hasn’t texted me, I owe taxes, I should not have sent that email, my kid eats too much sugar, my music has zero streams, missed the gym yesterday, and I’m behind with advancing this next tour”.
Before the alarm even goes off, I am under siege by a cacophony of self-critique, doubt, and fear of impending doom. A full-on ambush. In today’s cyber speak, negative content, fed to me by the inner algorithm that is every human’s default setting.
That default setting has the average human thinking 60,000 thoughts per day.
As the great Eckhart Tolle taught me much later in life, this mind activity is in cahoots with something he calls the “pain body”. A collection of dark energy and low vibrations, a residue from our experiences, fears, and trauma, that we store in our body over a lifetime. We all have one.
Some are mostly dormant, but some are obnoxious, and need to feed. Our mind, when unobserved, will make it its mission to keep that pain body morbidly obese with involuntary, repetitive, negative thought. And today, like most days, before I even open my eyes, I am already served a smorgasbord.
But not today, Satan.
With just under 20 years in recovery from addiction and alcoholism, I found out he hard way that getting out of my head is my only way to sanity. Years of taking the long way around, half-assing the work and ending up miserable even after years without drink or drug led me to a very simple truth: we are not our thoughts.
Simple, yes, but not easy. Really fucking hard actually, especially after a lifetime of engaging with said thoughts and professionally and thoroughly numbing any type of feelings that come with them. But I’ll get to that later. The actual feeling of feelings.
Right now, as I am lying here, I need to reclaim myself and not be run by this mind nagging me. A lot has been written about meditation, presence, stillness. Connect to your breath, etc. When I try to focus on my breath, I do just that and begin controlling the breath and start breathing deep and heavy and the thoughts go on and it can be very frustrating.
Until you have a very dialed in spiritual practice, there really is no right or wrong, and what has worked for me in moments like this, is asking myself: “I wonder what my next thought will be?”. An admittedly cheesy “hack”, but for whatever reason, when I do that, no thoughts come, at least not right away.
And that is nothing short of a breakthrough. A spiritual awakening.
That moment, however short-lived it may be, is where I become the observer of my thoughts. I am no longer my thoughts, but a separate entity from the thoughts. I am no longer identifying with any of the negative shit my mind is pitching me. And THAT creates space for the real me.
Now before you know it, the algorythm will fire back up and start pushing out narratives, looking to find angles to engage me, and overtake me while feeding that starving pain body hiding inside me.
MORE COMING SOON. This was a preview of my book coming out in 2027.
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