I want to talk about The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer. This book is masterfully written as a guide to your own spiritual journey.
Michael is an American author, journalist, motivational speaker, founder of Temple of Universe, and founding CEO of the Medical Manager Corporation (now a subsidiary of WebMD) where he wrote groundbreaking code to help medical practitioners digitize their medical records.
Each of us has the ability to find ourselves and free ourselves. It begins by focusing on the voice running inside our heads and the recognition that if we are witnessing it, then it can’t be us. The voice expresses the pressure within. It releases energy and narrates the world outside. This gives us a sense of relationships. It also brings us a sense of control through recreating the uncontrollable external experience.
However, by identifying less with our part in our play, we gradually stop clinging to the inner world and experience the expansiveness behind our thoughts, emotions, and body. As consciousness grows we are able to move from the finite to the infinite.
Pitfalls in finding your untethered soul
It takes a great deal of energy to recall, generate, and direct thoughts and emotions. The more we close ourselves off and close our heart and mind, the less energy we experience. In contrast, opening allows the energy to flow. If we choose to stay open no matter what, then we maintain access to energy. Our heart closes when it is blocked by stored unfinished energy patterns from the past. Eventually, though, every part that we try to protect has to pass through.
Most of the time we take something in, experience it, and let it pass. And this repeats in the next moment. With each experience, we learn and grow. Sometimes though the experience is unfinished and creates a cycle of emotional and mental activity. This is usually due to defending some aspect of the self-concept. Every time this happens the energy becomes a little blocked due to something that we want to have more of or less of. To undo this, if an old experience arises we have a new opportunity to let it go.
Our consciousness can selectively concentrate on the mental, emotional, and physical and get lost in the object of its focus. When this happens, we are no longer witnessing and instead are staring in our own movie. Events happen and we resist how they make us feel and this blocks our heart energy flow. It builds up such that a person blows up or shuts down, often with an autoimmune disease or burnout.
Ways to create witnessing
From time to time, we might experience a shift from identifying with the voice to observing the voice talk. this follows switching from identifying with problems by asking “What I should do about it?”. to asking “What part of me is disturbed by this?” In others words, we move from looking to rearrange what is going on outside in order to find a solution to instead letting go of the part within that is disturbed. We go beyond roles, story, form, and experience to the “one that sees”.
The key is to stop trying to fight with life to control and prevent what is feared from happening. Situations that unfold alert us to these fears so that we can let them go. Do this by staying in the seat of awareness and emptying out what gets hit. On occasion, we will lose objectivity and move into cycling the energy. As soon as we realize this has happened, stop and let go of the original blockage. By acknowledging pain, fear, and weakness we can move out of suffering. We can support ourselves by setting up prompts to watch what arises and create moments of centered consciousness.
There is a choice between resisting reality or going beyond the limits of our model (self-imposed cage). When this model doesn’t work in times of tragedy, we are forced to face a different more conscious reality. With increasing awareness, the psyche starts to resist the limits of the model (cage) and so we spend more time at the outer limits of our comfort zone. We learn to keep pushing through discomfort to expand those limits. When we keep relaxing and leaning into the edges eventually we fall through to the infinite.
Overall this is teaching us to be happy regardless of what occurs or without conditions on our own or other people’s behavior for our happiness. With a dedication to clearing out everything within that is a source of pain, you can experience greater bliss, compassion, and nonjudgment, and ultimately being in spirit or oneness with God – an untethered soul.
The key coaching technique here is witnessing. In coaching, we provide space to do just that and direct the client’s attention to when they get identified with their story as opposed to being with their story. It takes practice to maintain the distance between the thought and the thinker and you can model this.
Check out my Self Alignment Program to learn more about up-leveling your own use of the Law of Attraction.
