The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
Death is the greatest teacher in all of life. What are you doing with life? That is what death asks you.
*My quick take: This book isn’t the easiest read. It feels a bit slow but there’s gems in it. I’ve had it on my shelf for years after hearing so many spiritual people in podcasts recommend it, including Oprah. I’ve picked it up and put it down and picked it up and put it down, ever making any real progress or spending time with its pages. Finally in July 2023, I picked it up and finished it within a week. I was finally ready to hear what it had to say.
Chapter 1: The Voice Inside Your Head
This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you came and it will be here long before you leave. In the name of attempting to hold the world together, you’re really just trying to hold yourself together.
Chapter 5: Infinite Energy
You have a phenomenal amount of energy inside of you. It doesn’t come from food and it doesn’t come from sleep. This energy is always available to you. At any moment, you can draw upon it. When you’re filled with this energy, you feel like you could take on the world. When it is flowing strongly, you can actually feel it coursing through you in waves. It gushes up spontaneously from deep inside and restores, replenishes, and recharges you. the only reason you don’t feel it all the time is because you block it. You block it by closing your heart, by closing your mind.
Opening allows energy in and closing blocks it out. Now you have to decide whether or not you want this energy. How high do you want to get? How much do you want to feel? How much enthusiasm do you want to have for the things you do? If enjoying a full life means experiencing high energy, love and enthusiasm all the time, then don’t ever close.
Chapter 8: Let go or fall
How did we come up with the notion that life is not okay just the way it is, or that it won’t be okay the way it will be? Who said that the way life naturally unfolds is not all right? The answer is, fear said so. Because it’s not under your control.
Fear is caused by blockages in the flow of your energy. Therefore, you heart becomes weak and susceptible to lower vibrations, and one of the lowest of all vibrations is fear.
Life is surrounding you with people and situations that stimulate growth. You only have to be willing to open your heart in the face of anything and everything and permit the purification process to take place.
Chapter 9: Remove your inner thorn
In the deepest sense, you free yourself by finding yourself.
Just let things go. That’s what the Self does. Awareness does not fight; awareness releases.
Chapter 10: Stealing Freedom for Your Soul
The truth is, everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything. And that’s the only time everything will be okay.
Take a moment to remember that you’re spinning on a planet in the middle of empty space.
You will see that the mind follows the heart. The heart reacts way before the mind starts talking. When you are conscious, the shifts of energy in you cause you to instantaneously be aware that you are back there noticing. The mind doesn’t even get a chance to start up before you let go at the heart level.
Chapter 11: Pain, the Price of Freedom
If life does something that causes a disturbance inside of you, instead of pulling away, let it pass through you like the wind. If you want to be free, you have to learn to stop fighting these human feelings.
When you feel pain, simply view it as energy. Just start seeing these inner experiences as energy passing through your heart and before the eye of your consciousness. As you relax and feel the resistance, the heart will want to pull away, to close, to protect, and to defend itself. Keep relaxing. Relaxing your shoulders and relaxing your heart. Let go and give room for the pain to pass through you. It’s just energy. Just see it as energy and let it go.
Your true greatness hides on the other side of that layer of pain.
Sometimes you will go through deep experiences that bring up intense pain inside of you. If it is in there, it will come up. You just relax and give it the space it needs to release and burn through you. You do not want this stuff inside your heart. To feel great love and freedom, to find the presence of God within you, all of this stored pain must go. It is in this inner work that spirituality becomes a reality.
Chapter 13: Far, far beyond
When you truly awake spiritually, you realize you are caged.
You have set these limits on yourself. If you don’t stay within them, you get scared, you feel hurt, and you feel threatened. That’s your cage. The tiger knows the limits of his cage when he hits the bars. You know the limits of your cage when the psyche starts to resist.
When you approach the edges, you feel insecurity, jealousy, fear, or self-consciousness. You pull back, and if you are like most people, you stop trying. Spirituality begins when you decide that you’ll never stop trying. Spirituality is the commitment to go beyond, no matter what it takes. A spiritual being feels as though they are always at that edge, and they are constantly being pushed through it.
Chapter 14: Letting go of false solidity
Your sense of self is determined by where you are focusing your consciousness.
The very act of differentiating the amount of awareness focused on one particular object over any other creates clinging. And the result of clinging is that selective thoughts and emotions stay in one place long enough to become the building blocks of the psyche.
You’re the one who’s doing the building.
Because you have this model of who you are, it is easier to know how to act, how to make decisions, and how to relate to the outside world. If you dare look, you will see that you live your entire life based on the model you built around yourself.
You’re literally taking all your memories, pulling them together in an orderly fashion, and saying that’s who you are. But you are not the events; you’re the one who experienced the events.
To live spiritually means that the events that happen in the moment belong to the moment. They don’t belong to you.
Chapter 15: The path of unconditional happiness
Do you want to be happy or do you not want to be happy? It’s really that simple.
Staying open is what the great saints and masters taught. They taught that God is joy, God is ecstasy, and God is love. If you remain open enough, waves of uplifting energy will fill your heart. Spiritual practices are not an end in themselves. they bear fruit when you become deep enough to remain open. If you learn to stay open at all times, great things will happen to you. You simply have to learn not to close.
God is as high as it gets. If you want to be close to God, learn to be joyful.
Chapter 16: The spiritual path of nonresistance
It is not life’s events that are causing problems or stress. It is your resistance to life’s events that is causing this experience.
If you want to understand stress, begin by realizing that you carry around with you your own set of preconceived notions of how things should be. It is based upon these notions that you assert your will to resist what has already happened.
Your work is just what you do with yourself during the day while you’re spinning on the planet through empty space. If you want to be content and enjoy work, you have to let go of yourself and let events flow through you. Your real work is what is left to do after all else passes through.
The way to work with resistance is by relaxing.
Chapter 17: Contemplating death
Death is the greatest teacher in all of life. What are you doing with life? That is what death asks you.
Angel of Death comes to you and says, “come it’s time to go.” You say, “But no. You’re supposed to give me a warning so I can decide what I want to do with my last week.” Do you know what Death will say to you? He’ll say, “My God! I gave you fifty-two weeks this past year alone. And look at all the other weeks I’ve given you. Why would you need more? What did you do with all those?” If asked what, what you doing to say? How will you answer? “I wasn’t paying attention… I didn’t think it mattered.” That’s a pretty amazing thing to say about your life.
It’s not what you’re doing; it’s how much of you is doing it.
Since you know you’re going to die, be willing to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done. Be willing to be fully present without being afraid of what will happen in the next moment. That’s how people live when they face death and you get to do that too because you are facing death at every moment.
Life itself is your career, and your interaction with life is your most meaningful relationship.
What actually gives life meaning is the willingness to live it; it’s the willingness to experience life’s events.