How to Hear Yourself After a Lifetime of Others’ Voices

How do you hear yourself and separate your own voice from the voices of parents, society, fear and duty? In this conversation with Tatyana Tsvetkova, I look at why the question itself often works like a trap: when a person says “I don’t hear myself,” they are already living in doubt and searching for another reality where things will be easier.

What does a person actually hear when they “don’t hear themselves”? What does it mean to expand perception, and why does the answer always turn out to be somewhere you never imagined? And at the end — the central practice that lets you truly hear yourself.

The trap in the question “How do I hear myself?”

– How do you hear yourself if all your life you have listened to other people’s voices: your parents, your teachers, your boss, the voice of society, the voice of fear telling you what you have to do? People usually spend their whole lives living by someone else’s rules. And I think at some point it becomes hard to separate where you yourself are, and what you believe is right, from what other people say. What do you think?

– Look, when we talk about how to hear yourself, how to do what you need for yourself, how to start fulfilling your own dreams, the main thing is that the question itself is something of a trap. The key trap is that, first, the person immediately states as a fact that they don’t hear themselves. They are stating a fact, right? The person says: “How do I hear myself? How do I understand who I really am?” So there is already a certain doubt in them from the outset. And second, this person assumes that there is something that will give them something more interesting, more refined, more real, more serious. That some other reality exists, some other life.

I was just about to tell you that in recent years, in recent decades, society has supposedly reached a point where it is constantly searching for itself, while in the past things were supposedly different. But I think that twenty, thirty and forty years ago too — judging at least by how people perceived things, by how people analyzed them — many were endlessly searching for themselves, trying to find themselves.

It’s just that now we live in a world of enormous social opportunities, and people have access to an incredible amount of everything. Someone will say: “I don’t have access.”

– So there are more tools.

– You know, yesterday I was at my daughter’s concert, and some of the teachers on stage spoke very sophisticated English. And I thought: I went to a special English-language school. Later, when I was studying programming at university, my teacher actually told me: “I can’t teach you anything, don’t come to class.” And I thought: why didn’t I sit down back then and study English — interesting specialized things, fashionable words, tricks, phrases?

I sit and think: how could I have gotten access to all of that? In theory, I could have bought some specialized textbooks or books in English, but that’s a very hard way to learn. And now — here you go: type “fifty interesting phrases in English” into the internet, two hundred phrases, a hundred phrases about plants, five hundred phrases about children — and you’ll be offered endless variations. There’s a ton of access now. Not to mention that people have access to the whole world of plants, for example, the whole world of music or the whole world of books.

Could I have read Rudolf Steiner back then the way I read him now? Impossible. I bought up all his books printed in Russian — simply as a collection for my library. He has, I don’t know, three hundred works or however many — a hundred and something. A hundred and something books have come out in Russian, and I probably have all of them, or ninety-five percent. Listen, Stanford’s library alone has a hundred and fifty books by Steiner.

– Really? In English?

– A hundred and fifty books in total. I think it’s not only English there, but these are distinct books, and they are in four Stanford libraries. I went there once and even took out a book and read it. But what’s the point? The Rudolf Steiner library is open on the internet. You can go there and download his books in different languages. They have a very well-structured online library, and it’s completely open to everyone. Could I have done that in 1998, in 2001 or in 2008? Or my sister, when she was studying philosophy and heard about Rudolf Steiner at university? Hardly. She didn’t have that opportunity.

Accordingly, with a developed, highly developed and accessible system of everything, many people are in a state of constantly searching for something.

But look: the reason for this search is mistaken. This search is driven by the illusion that something good lies ahead.

So when a person says “how do I stop listening to others,” it means that right now, at this moment, they are in the perception of themselves. And if a person is not in the perception of themselves at this moment, then the work is not about finding themselves socially but about starting to listen to themselves, starting to perceive the world differently. It is not a question of listening to others.

Look, when you say “how do I stop listening to others,” or someone asks that question, it’s shifting responsibility onto others. It’s purely a story about shifting responsibility. There’s nothing else in it. What else is there, besides shifting responsibility?

– I think the question is not what else is there, but what is missing. The person asking the question is missing. There are some people and their opinions, but it’s as if the person themselves isn’t there.

– And shifting responsibility. You’re saying: there are some other people who make decisions for me.

You can only feel bad because of yourself

I know many people who live as though they aren’t being given the chance to do things, and they feel bad because of other people.

I always allow for this and always say it: if you suddenly see a bear and start to feel bad, that’s natural and normal, but you feel bad only because of yourself.

There’s a very good video. A few days ago my children saw a snake — I posted it in our chat: a rattlesnake this thick, a decent size, a meter long. A serious snake, and they were scared of it. And right after that I saw a reel, on Instagram I think, showing an experiment: small children were playing next to a huge, harmless snake — I don’t know, a python or something, I don’t know much about them. And it made no difference to them at all. The snake didn’t interest them in the least; they were interested in the toys around them. And I immediately started worrying: how could anyone let such a big snake near small children — surely it could squeeze them, do something to them? But the children didn’t care about it, because this is not a normal fear, it’s an acquired fear.

There are people who feed bears by hand, and it doesn’t stir any fear inside them: a bear’s presence can give them a sense of awe and calm. That doesn’t mean it won’t kill them. In the same way, it in no way means that a car passing by while you stand at a crosswalk won’t kill you, or the plane you’re flying in. You’re afraid of flying, and I’m not. A simple example: you’re afraid and I’m not. It doesn’t come up for me.

– I know it’s completely irrational. The fear has nothing to do with planes at all — my psyche just attached it there somehow.

– Yes, completely. Likewise, there’s the person who is afraid to go outside, afraid to sit in on a meeting or to record a video. I, for example, am sitting here recording a video now — after a certain amount of time has passed. I remember there’s a speaker in the Russian-speaking world who first became very well known for public speaking — Radislav Gandapas, remember? He said it’s all simple: thousands of hours of speaking, and the fear goes away.

But I know that I have a fear of a large audience or an unfamiliar place. If you took me to some unfamiliar audience and asked me to speak in English, it could give me a certain feeling of anxiety. But that’s natural, absolutely normal. If you treat it naturally, calmly accept that it’s possible and that it arises, and at the moment it arises you see it and live through it, it will be much easier for you. There’s even a public-speaking method: if you’re nervous, go on stage and tell the audience: “You know, I’m very nervous, I rarely speak in public.” And you’ll take the edge off for yourself, not for the audience.

People essentially don’t care how you speak: you can give a brilliant talk and still get called names. That’s the society we live in — someone will definitely do it. And someone else will listen to you avidly, and to someone you will be simply one of a kind: their life will change, and you won’t even know who they are. And that, by the way, is the trouble.

I have a whole range of channels, three on YouTube alone. And they have a decent number of subscribers — you and I have ToTheMoon together, which already has almost a hundred thousand subscribers.

And the thing is, when you read one negative comment, just one, it often affects you more than the thousands or tens of thousands of people who watch you for an hour every week and say thank you.

Even if hundreds of people say thank you in the comments, or someone writes separately — and each of those hundreds is an individual person. It’s incredible. Sometimes I get comments where people write: “I live in Odesa, and I thank you for conveying love through your meditations.” I open the profile, look at the person and see that they are over sixty. And I think: this is the real truth.

So why are you afraid on stage? With a bear, you’re afraid it will kill you. But on stage you’re afraid of social judgments, of social rejection, you’re afraid of the social outcome. They do say that in the end a person is always afraid of one and the same thing — death. It’s just that sometimes it comes through something else.

– But look: social rejection is essentially death, sooner or later.

– There’s social perception here. On stage you can take death out of it and say that they’re not going to kill you, right?

– Right. But if they cast you out of the tribe…

– That’s another question. But we haven’t lived in tribes for a long time. Our souls have a different structure.

– The brain still sometimes thinks that way. Some things have been preserved.

– Yes, but our souls do have a different structure now. You have a karmic plan you have lived through, and, believe me, your karmic spiritual system influences you far more than the tribal instinct. The tribal instinct acts genetically, within your physical body; it has a certain layer, a certain range of influence. But the range of influence of your karmic lives is preset in you far more — in terms of what happened somewhere, sometime, I don’t know, ten thousand years ago, if you even had such an incarnation. It’s not a given that you did: a huge number of people had no incarnations back then at all. That’s interesting, by the way.

What a person actually hears when they “don’t hear themselves”

So what actually influences us? Look, we’ll go through a very important aspect. When a person is on stage, it’s a similar theme to when a person says: “Other people influence me, I listen to other people, I don’t make my own decision.”

And the question seems reasonable — how do I start hearing myself — but from the outset it’s framed in the wrong context. You could ask it this way: how do I start truly perceiving more of everything that’s happening? Because you need to listen to others too. And it’s also an illusion that you don’t listen to yourself.

In fact you listen to yourself very closely — to your psychophysical programs — and, based on them, you judge another person’s wishes or lack of them.

People sometimes tell me certain things. Recently there was a story: a close friend and I were discussing my life, and he told me something about certain people close to me, about how they relate to me — and it completely contradicted my perception. Completely. Given certain traumas of mine and how I perceive some people close to me, some family members. That happens to you too. There are some people who really make me put up barriers.

And he told me something that, for me, was… Imagine someone tells you, for example: “This person doesn’t respect you.” Let’s take some outside example. “This person doesn’t respect you,” and you sit there and say: “All right, thanks for the information.” I said “thanks for the information,” then left, and very clearly realized that I didn’t believe it, that my system didn’t accept it.

I want to work it through, because I’m a very open person in terms of being a learner, but I really caught myself not perceiving it that way.

Imagine the two of us went out onto the balcony — today you came out and said: “Sasha, oh my God, it’s so beautiful here, like a hotel.” You brought up an association: you connect it with something. Now imagine I didn’t understand what you meant and said to myself: “Actually, I don’t think it’s beautiful here,” — but kept quiet. But since I would be in a learner’s perception, you would say: “Wait, Sasha, let’s talk this through. Why do you think it’s not beautiful?” Or I would say to you: “Tanya, can you explain what you mean by ‘beautiful’? Why do you think it’s beautiful here? Someone else would find it ugly, uncomfortable, disharmonious.”

You know this like no one else. Today you came out into my garden — and you’re my partner in these things — and you went: “Oh, wow!” I don’t know a single person who would have understood exactly what you meant about my garden today.

Look, here’s an interesting aspect. Many people like my garden — my mother, for example. Or a friend came to visit, Dima Muginov; another friend came, Vitalik. I told him: “When you see my garden, you’re supposed to say: ‘Oh, Sasha, how beautiful, so many flowers!’ You have to squeeze it out of yourself.” Because he can’t: he probably doesn’t perceive it that way. But he heard what I meant and tried to understand me. That is the important thing: when you try to truly hear and understand another person — what they actually mean.

Seeing this structure in yourself

So my friend tells me certain things. I come away and think: inside, I don’t agree that this respect is missing. I can’t believe it. Maybe it isn’t so? But look: I knew it was so. From the way the whole discussion had gone, I already understood that it was so. Imagine: you know it’s so, and you observe it in yourself.

If you look at the human structure, even in terms of energies, human energy is divided into the physical and the etheric body, but in reality it’s an enormous complex, a whole complex of an infinite number of bodies. I would even say infinite, because at some point there is a kind of non-3D transition between different worlds and spaces. Even now I saw how this was expressed.

Within my system I know: I checked this information with the spiritual world. I know he’s telling me the truth. I know it’s all true. My brain perceives it from the soul, understands that it’s all true, but I see that part of my system is shaking. I can literally see this inner etheric space shaking and shaking inside. I understand that something is off. Look, this is very important, Tanya: I clearly knew it was true. Seeing this in yourself, discerning this structure — that’s a separate aspect.

– All right, that’s accessible to you. It isn’t accessible to everyone else.

– I agree with you that this is a certain level of being a learner, of understanding everything that’s happening. But we’ll still go through this example — I’m giving it, after all.

I come to him and say: “I clearly understand that I’m not recognizing this.” He goes: “Great.” And we walked around together, and at some point I realized that I had accepted it all, completely accepted it. This thing was very hurtful to me. Admitting it was like being destroyed. Not just a knife to the heart — you’ve been destroyed. But I accepted it. And there was joy in my soul, because I was set free. Of course, I was in the truth, because I have no judgment of the other person, no judgment of anyone else, no judgment of people.

Look, I’m highlighting a very interesting aspect for you. What happens next? Next, something incredible happens. I’ve realized all this, there’s joy in my soul from realizing everything that’s happening. He and I arrive in another city and meet someone we know. And at that moment my friend fires off a particular phrase — as a confirmation of my realization. And this person voices the absolute, total opposite — and thereby confirms the very fact of this whole truth.

My friend turns, looks at me and says: “There’s the truth for you, exactly the same, only from another person.” So it wasn’t only someone close to me who perceived it that way, but another person too. It turns out that the other person shows the manifestation of their own — in our case, disrespect — in full, simply in full.

Let’s imagine: you and I came and said it was beautiful. A third person came and said: “And what’s beautiful about it?” Then a fourth person came and began with the phrase: “Oh my God, how hideous!” And you stand there and realize that you hadn’t recognized this. You tell me: “Sasha, the third person didn’t like it.” I say: “Not necessarily. Maybe they did. We probably imagined it.” And then a fourth person appears who openly tells you to your face: this is hideous. But when they say it, they don’t see a problem in it. People have their own perception of reality.

What it means to expand your perception

And it turns out that the person who says, “How do I start perceiving myself instead of listening to others?” — the most important thing is that they don’t hear others either. That’s how we come to the continuation of this topic, its most important continuation: a person doesn’t hear other people. They think they hear the other person, but they don’t.

The fundamental thing worth looking at and realizing is the chain I described: getting to the point of seeing that you don’t perceive the other person. You don’t fully understand what the other person actually feels and how they feel, who they really are, what their opinion really is and what reality they are in. Moreover, if you start asking that other person, they will give you the same kind of destructive reaction — essentially, what they too have invented about you within their own system.

And when you and I look at the garden — not to try to prove that it’s beautiful or ugly, but to try to understand why another person finds it beautiful, or why another person wanted to create it. Or to realize: why do I, as a person, find this garden ugly? To try to understand that, or to ask yourself why I find this balcony beautiful while another person finds it ugly. To try to understand that.

– You know, for that a person also needs to have the inner capacity and to be honest with themselves. That’s a rare quality too.

– Look, it’s an enormous task. You did ask how to do it.

– Yes. Someone will come and say: what an ugly house and terrace you have — because they themselves would like a house and terrace like that, but can’t even imagine that they could achieve it in this life. The thought doesn’t even occur to them. Instead of a goal, what occurs to them is that it’s all ugly and bad: “I wouldn’t even want that for free.” I think that’s a very common story.

The central practice: allowing for different possibilities

– A person needs to allow for different possibilities. A couple of days ago I was sitting in town, I had a consultation. I bought a coffee, sat down on a bench and was conducting it — talking through my headphones. And suddenly a thought comes to me: why not open some kind of store in Los Altos — or for my wife? The thought just comes. From a business point of view, you couldn’t come up with a sillier idea than opening a store.

For me it’s an easy, absolutely elementary task, you understand that perfectly well. But what do I need this store for at all? I text Polina: “Polina, would you like to open some kind of store in Los Altos?” And she writes back: “Great idea.” For my wife, writing “great idea” instead of shutting down right away is real progress. Then I come home and say: “Why aren’t you asking what I meant?” She sits down next to me: “So what did you mean?” I told her that for some reason I’d just thought we could open something — and even told her what exactly. She said: “Oh, how great.” But then, when I started talking about the particulars, she started shutting down.

I said: “The only way to carry out an idea like this, the only way to do it, is to remove absolutely all the blocks.” That is, first discuss the very structure of the thing — not block it, allow yourself different probabilities, simply treat it calmly.

It’s as if I came to commission a design — this goes back to beauty — and you were offering me anything at all. I would simply allow it from the start and tell myself: “Since this person is suggesting it, I allow all the possibilities and won’t reject them. I’ll walk around with it and think about why this person suggested it to me. They did suggest it, they put their soul and their time into it.” It’s another matter if you went to the wrong place from the start, into the wrong story altogether, the wrong address. Then why did you go there? That’s a different story. Don’t go to Home Depot and ask them to do a design for you. Or ask them what furniture to buy for your new home.

– They can give advice, but it will be a Home Depot design.

– Yes, and what kind of design will that be? What exactly can they suggest? You’ll go and ask: “What paint do I need? What color should I paint the walls — red or green?” You can probably ask that question. I don’t know what you expect from it. But the question here isn’t about paint, right?

– Yes. You know, design brings up so much from the depths of the subconscious.

– So the only thing you can do when opening yourself up, when coming to know yourself, is to understand that things can turn out any way at all.

Why the answer always turns out to be where you never imagined it

– Listen, that’s amazing, by the way. While listening to you, I realized that in some situations I behave in a similar way. I limit the number of possible ways things could unfold so much! And only now has it occurred to me that I will never guess how things will turn out. Why not just give it room and allow the thought that anything could happen? Most likely it will even be something I would never come up with.

– Look, first of all, it will definitely be something you won’t come up with. That’s what we were talking about off camera — about our own goals, our own projects. The point is that it will definitely be something you can’t imagine. No matter what.

The main shape of your life will be something you can’t imagine.

– Sasha, could we have imagined six or seven years ago, when we used to talk in Moscow — remember? — that we would be sitting here?

– Impossible. We wouldn’t even have imagined it. Even if we had decided to let our imaginations run wild, we wouldn’t have imagined it, wouldn’t have seen the full picture. No chance. We might have come up with some example, but it certainly wouldn’t have had the structure of our current life — with you in California, with our families, with work, actions, details, all the circumstances. It would certainly have been completely different, nothing like this at all.

You raised an interesting point: you say that when you interact with a person, you yourself cause damage from the outset, because you’ve set a limit. That is exactly where an enormous aspect of perception lies.

It turns out that by blocking yourself and saying that you’ve been restricted somewhere, that you can’t accomplish something, or that another person is to blame for something, you’ve put yourself in prison, you’ve completely restricted yourself.

That doesn’t mean everything is available to you. That’s the whole point: not everything is available to you, not at all.

– All of YouTube is about this now: that you can get anything you want. Honestly, I think it’s a kind of sham.

– You won’t get it at all.

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