Meera works as a Software Engineer in Bangalore, navigating the relentless pace of deployment deadlines, coding and endless Slack notifications.
One evening, after an exceptionally brutal production outage, the pressure caught up with her. Sitting at her desk, her chest felt tight. Her mind was racing.
“I am incredibly anxious”, she thought. “I can’t handle this”
Seeking a moment of quiet, she closed her laptop and picked up a book on Vedanta she had been wanting to read. As her eyes scanned the verses on the unchanging, silent Witness (Sakshi) that lies beyond the mind, an idea occurred to her.
What if she stopped claiming the anxiety as her own?
She took a deep breath, looked at her racing thoughts, and stated calmly to herself:
“Meera is feeling anxious right now. Meera is overwhelmed by her deadline”
It sounded a little bit strange—perhaps even a bit silly at first. But instantly, the tight knot in her chest began to loosen.
Fascinated by the immediate shift, Meera decided to turn this into a continuous, everyday practice. She began applying it to everything. When lunchtime rolled around, instead of thinking “I’m starving”, she would note, “Meera is hungry”. When a wave of moodiness hit, she observed, “Meera is feeling sad right now” or conversely, “Meera is happy today”.
How to Not Look Crazy in Public
Now, let’s be honest: if Meera walks into a high-stakes sprint planning meeting and says out loud, “Meera is feeling highly triggered by this architecture design”, her team is going to look at her very strangely. Publicly speaking in the third person can sound a bit eccentric—like a cartoon character or a professional athlete talking about themselves in an interview.
But here is the secret: This is an internal linguistic hack.
You don’t need to say it out loud to the world. It is a private, silent dialogue within your own consciousness. In the middle of a chaotic office or a crowded metro, you can quietly whisper it to yourself or simply think it. The psychological and spiritual magic works exactly the same whether it is spoken to a crowd or whispered in the mind.
The Prison of “I am”
Without realizing it, most of us live our lives trapped in a linguistic cage. Every single day, we use two of the heaviest words in the human language: “I am”
When anger flares, we say, “I am angry”. When exhaustion strikes, we say, “I am burned out”.
In doing so, we commit a massive spiritual error. We completely identify with a passing state of the body-mind. We become the emotion or the physical sensation.
But by substituting her own name for the word “I”, Meera accidentally stumbled upon a potent psychological and spiritual mechanism. She created a gap.
Turning the Subject into an Object
In Vedanta, there is a foundational practice known as Drig-Drishya-Viveka or the discrimination between the Seer (Drig) and the Seen (Drishya). The core law of this practice is absolute: Whatever you can observe, you cannot be.
You can observe your hand; therefore, you are not your hand. You can observe a bug in the code; therefore, you are not the bug.
Before her shift in language, Meera was completely drowning in her experiences. But the moment she used the third person, the dynamics shifted:
- The Character: Meera became the Observed. She became a character on a stage, experiencing a temporary wave of corporate stress, physical hunger, or emotional sadness.
- The Witness: She became the Observer (Sakshi). She was the silent, unmoving awareness watching the storm pass through the mind and body of “Meera the Engineer”.
She didn’t suppress the hunger or fight the sadness. She simply stopped claiming ownership of them.
Modern Science Catches Up
While ancient sages called this Sakshi Bhava (the Witness Stance), modern psychologists call it Illeism – the practice of speaking about oneself in the third person.
Recent studies in cognitive behavioral science show that using your own name during times of high stress instantly reduces emotional reactivity. It lowers the cognitive load of anxiety and provides immediate psychological distance.
It turns out that your brain treats your own name as if it belongs to someone else. By thinking in the third person, you gain the clarity, wisdom, and objectivity you would normally offer to a colleague or a friend.
How the Masters Lived It
This isn’t just a clever psychological hack for a modern workplace. The greatest realized masters lived this exact detachment as a permanent reality.
Sri Ramakrishna almost never used the egoistic word “I”. He would point to his own physical form and refer to it simply as “This” or “The Outer Shell”. When throat cancer ravaged his body, he calmly told his weeping disciples that the body was suffering because it is the nature of matter to suffer, but “this” was perfectly untouched.
Sri Ramana Maharshi famously abandoned first-person pronouns for decades. If asked if he was coming to the dining hall, he wouldn’t say, “Yes, I am coming”. He would reply, “The body is coming”. He treated the ego like a thief in a crowd—the moment you look at it objectively and call it out, it loses its power and vanishes.
“Fake It” Until You Realize It
The ego is incredibly sticky. It has lifetimes of deeply ingrained habits whispering, “I am this body, I am this stressful job, I am these heavy thoughts.”
When you are deep in the trenches of a chaotic day, you cannot always intellectualize your way into absolute spiritual peace. The ego moves too fast for abstract logic.
That is why practicing at the level of everyday thought and speech (Vak) is a brilliant, practical bridge. By changing the grammar of your reality, you gently train the mind to loosen its grip.
The next time your world feels overwhelming, step back. Take a deep breath. Look at the character you play every day, call them by their name inside your head, and watch the show from the audience.
You might just realize you were never the one on the stage to begin with.
Vedik Mind 