UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Michael Singer. Michael Singer is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, the spiritual classic, The Untethered Soul, a book in which he shares the essence of releasing whatever might block us from inner freedom and flow. He’s also the author of a sequel called Living Untethered, which Sounds True co-published in 2022 in partnership with New Harbinger, the original publisher of The Untethered Soul. Together we’ve also released a new hardcover gift edition of Living Untethered and a card deck that focuses on 52 essential teachings from the book.
In celebration of these new Living Untethered releases, we asked members of our Sounds True community, our digital community– it’s called Sounds True One– to vote on which of the teachings in the Living Untethered Card Deck they most wanted to learn more about. And that’s the focus of this special episode of Insights at the Edge with Michael Singer. Michael, welcome.
Michael Singer: Thank you, Tami.
TS: It’s great to be with you.
MS: Here I am.
TS: Alright, let’s go to one of the cards that received some of the highest votes from the Living Untethered Card Deck, the teaching that’s quoted on the card. The goal of this journey we’re taking together is not to change your thoughts or emotions, it’s for you to stay in the seat of self while accepting these different shifts that are taking place. I thought this was a good place to start and for you, if you would, to teach us about this notion of staying in the seat of self. Right?
MS: Well, some people make it much more complicated than it is. It’s actually very, very simple. Do you have thoughts? Yes. How do you know? I swear to God that is about as deep a question that any spiritual question can be. Do you have thoughts? Everybody knows they have thoughts. How do you know you have thoughts? Because I’m conscious of them. What does that mean? We just throw the words out. I’m conscious of them. It means you are conscious and there are objects of consciousness such as thoughts and emotions. You’re not them. You’re not any of them. You’re none of your thoughts, none of your emotions. Doesn’t mean you don’t have them, right, but you are aware of them. So the seed of self is the seed of consciousness from which you are aware of your thoughts and your emotions. The problem is the thoughts and the emotions are so distracting.
We can get into that I’m sure over this hour. Why? It’s that way. They’re so powerful and so distracting that they pull your consciousness into them and you start identifying with them as you. That’s like saying you’re a car because you’re looking at it. You’re a boat because you’re looking at it, your house because you’re looking at it. You are not your thoughts. You are looking at your thoughts. You’re aware of your thoughts. You are not your emotions. What about terrible emotions? You’re not terrible emotions. You are aware of terrible emotions and there are terrible emotions. The question becomes, can you handle that? And if you can’t handle it, then you’re a mess and you can’t really be a much service to the rest of the world. You can’t even handle yourself. How can you help somebody else? So your work, it talked about the goal of life is to learn how to stay centered, clear in the midst, not just uncertainty like we said, but in the midst of looking at a car, in the midst of looking at a house, in the midst of looking at your thoughts, in the midst of feeling your emotions.
Are you capable of doing that? And the answer of course is no, right? No, I’m not. But that’s like saying if you’ve never played the piano, are you capable of playing the piano? No. You never played tennis. You capable of playing tennis? No. Can you learn? Are you capable of learning to play tennis, learning to play the piano? Are you capable of learning to be able to stay centered and clear and not get lost in the thoughts which you are not the thoughts and not get lost in the emotions? It doesn’t mean you don’t deal with them. It doesn’t mean you don’t have them. Okay? They’re natural. It means you’re able to handle your center of peace inside. While these things were going on, and like I said, I have found through my life, I used to try and get out. It was always about getting out.
How do I get out? How do I go to gone? And now it’s not like that. It’s like, why do I have to get out? I can’t handle being in, well, why am I in? Because I’m not in, because I’m actually sitting in deep consciousness. In the end, the great ones know they’re sitting in God, but they are looking at their thoughts and their emotions. If you can handle that, then your daily life and your spiritual life are exactly the same thing. The Shakti pulls you back into it. You don’t have to do anything. But if you’re fighting with yourself and fighting with thoughts and emotions, if you can’t handle them, then there’s a struggle. Your spirituality becomes a struggle. So the meaning of life is to practice being centered, practice being able to remain centered in your seat of consciousness while your thoughts and your emotions pass by. And then you’re capable of being a servant to the rest of the people of the world.
TS: Now, Michael, you mentioned the Shakti will pull you back in. And it’s interesting with sounds true, we’ve released the Michael Singer podcast and often I’ll read comments that people write about it and comments about interviews we’ve had. And often people will say, what’s he talking about Shakti? And they spell it in all kinds of funny ways. And people are like, what are you talking about is Shakti? What do you mean?
MS: The way I like to explain Shakti is not in some great yogic state or sense. I sit there, say, I’ll look at you. I know you have. Have you ever felt love come up inside of you and just overwhelm you? And it comes up, doesn’t it doesn’t go down. It comes up. Have you ever felt an enthusiasm that all of a sudden you’re so excited, so enthused, enthusiasm, love. That’s what Shakti is. That’s an expression of Shakti. That energy that you call love. It’s just a name for how Shakti is the note. C in a piano is still the piano note. E is a piano, right? So Shakti is all of these energy states, but you give different names to them. So when love comes up inside of you, you’re feeling Shakti, that energy, I like you to relate to it as something you really like.
Alright? When you’re totally enthused, you can’t wait to get to the project you put aside last night. So you go to bed, you wake up in the morning, totally excited that energy is Shakti. So that all the positive and constructive and expressive and cultural and creative energy that comes up inside of you is Shakti being free to flow. Well, why isn’t everything like that? Because the Shakti gets blocked and we’ll talk about that later. You actually block that flow of energy so you don’t feel it. Then you get depressed, you get scared, you worry, you have anxiety. That’s what happens when you block the Shakti. It’s sort of like if light is shining and you close the blinds, there’s no light. So Shakti is that light that when you’re not closed, it naturally comes up inside of you. And if you fall in love with somebody, it’s just different chemistry, interactive reasons.
The way they look, the way they act, the way they talk to you, the way they treat you, whatever it is, causes you to be willing to open. You trust them, you’re open. Then you feel the Shakti. It’s like opening the blinds. So Shakti is that energy that is the most beautiful thing in all of life. Everybody wants it. Everything they do is to try and get it. They going to have vacations. They do all kinds of things to try and get that flow. Because what happens is when you distract yourself from yourself, from your blockages, you feel energy, you feel the Shakti. So let’s just say Shakti is the inward upward flow of energy that is always inside of you, but you block it. When you stop blocking it. Now you start talking about Shakti. From the yogic sense, it starts going so high that it opens all the centers, which you call chakras. I don’t need those words, but you feel your heart open, right? You feel clarity in your mind. You go into meditation, the mind gets peaceful. All of that is upward flowing. Shakti and Shakti’s always trying to flow up, but you block it. So that’s what Shakti is the most beautiful thing in the whole universe. And no one disagrees. Whatever you’re doing, you’re trying to get Shakti. Fair enough,
TS: Fair enough. As I was rereading the spiritual classic Living Untethered, I felt this Shakti energy in me increasing. So when you say you can surrender into it, I’m like, oh yes, thank goodness for the reminders. I get it. But I want to address that person who’s like, I hear what Michael’s saying, but upwelling energy, feeling it moving up. I’m not sure I’m actually tuning into something real or I’m making this up, or I’m not really sure I’m with you here.
MS: Good. I like that person because I don’t teach really. I do it on the side. It happens, right? But I really don’t teach her. She should try to make the shakti flow up because I know that she’s always flowing up. The sun is always shining. There is no nighttime, there’s no winter, there’s no summer. The sun is sitting out there in space shining exactly the same all the time. You turn away from it, you block it, there are clouds. That’s what’s happening with the Shakti. You are blocking it. So of course you can’t feel it. You’re blocking it. I would rather have you work with understanding and releasing the blockages than you won’t come to me and say, I don’t know what Shakti is. They write me from all over the world. Oh my God, I didn’t know it could be like this in here.
So if you get rid of why you don’t feel it, you’ll feel it. As opposed to you leave the blockages there and start reaching up. What can I do to practice and stretch and do something? Alright? It’s like of course the book of The Untethered Soul. So what happens? You have a hot air balloon and it’s tethered, right with the ropes down to the ground, but you’re in it. You want to go up. So you put more hot air in it. You jump up and down, you throw out the weights that are in it, right? And it’ll bounce a little bit, but it’s not going up. You untether it, alright? And the moment you untether it, you won’t ask me, how do I get it to go up? It goes up by itself. So that’s what I like to teach is there are blockages. I want you to understand them.
And very fortunately, you put them there. Nobody else did. You put them. You’re the only person in there and you put them in there and we’ll talk about why. But the net result is instead of saying, what is Shakti or how do I get it? Or why don’t I feel joy? Or how can I feel joy? You say, what am I doing to block this natural energy that is inside of everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done. If you do the most terrible things in the whole world and then you let go inside, you’ll feel that love. You’ll feel that Shakti, you’ll feel it coming up. It never ever will go away from you. It doesn’t judge you, right? It’s you that’s creating a psychological mess in there that makes it so that’s what you’re looking at. The clouds instead of looking at the sun.
TS: Okay, Michael, this brings us to the number one card. The number one teaching from Living Untethered that people want you to address. Here it is. Since blockages were stored with pain, they’re going to release with pain. That’s where commitment comes in. Do you want to be free to live a deep beautiful life more than you want to avoid discomfort? Since blockages were stored with pain, they’re going to release with pain. Help us understand that.
MS: We just talked about the Shakti being blocked. So let’s do it. What are blockages? You don’t have to take psych courses and read all kinds of stuff, right? You block yourself every single day, maybe every hour, maybe every minute. Okay? Things happen outside. That’s natural. There’s weather, there’s cars, there’s people, there’s words, there’s colors, there’s shapes. There are so many things outside. It’s unbelievable. They come in, they come in through your senses. You live inside, you’re back here. Okay? The world comes in through your senses. When it comes in, you experience it. What if the experience is not comfortable? What if the experience is a little caustic, like seeing a rattlesnake coiled up, hissing in front of you, like having your mother not come home when you were little when she was supposed to and you waited for her. Now things happen outside that when they come in, they don’t feel comfortable.
Other things happen outside. I was using the example of rattlesnakes and butterflies. When a butterfly, you love it. It just naturally has a vibration of nature to it that makes you feel comfortable when it comes in and a rattlesnake does not, okay, what do you do when it’s not comfortable? I don’t have to teach it to. You know what you do? You don’t want to experience it. Why would anybody want to experience discomfort? Okay? So what you do is you attempt to protect yourself from that experience. You’re not protecting yourself from the outside. It already happened. You understand that mommy already left or she can come home now she’s home, alright? Or you had a bad relationship or things happen outside. Then they come in, then they’re over, but they’re not over inside. Why? Because you don’t want to experience them. So what you do is you push them away.
I always teach and everyone shakes. Yes when I say it. You have hands inside that can push things around. You can clinging to things if you like them, you can push them away if you don’t like them. The essence of it is this. If you kept your hands to yourself, everything would come in all the way in past your heart, past your mind, directly to experience self. You’d experience it fully. Like you turn the corner, there’s a sunset. It blows you away, right? And you say things like it touched me to the core of my being. Everything is meant to touch you to the core of your being, but you won’t let it go in there. I’m not letting this bad vibration touch me at the same place I let your hug touch me. You understand that? Okay? So what you do is you push it away.
Where do you think that goes when you’re resistance? Is this resistance and have to call it suppression. You don’t have to get psychology. You just resist that energy that came inside that gets stored inside of you. Every single thing you ever pushed away is still in there. You didn’t let it go. So what happens is it doesn’t want to stay in there. It’s trying to release. It takes your willpower inside to resist it. I mean, things are in there from four years old F before I taughts you that when you’re four years old, you resist. You took my blanking way too soon. This happened. That happened. Parents got divorced, whatever it is, even little things. A friend was friend leader with somebody else than with me. Okay? It didn’t feel good. So you push it away, it’s still in there. It is. You have dreams.
That’s what psychology is about, right? That you have that stuff stored in there. You had dreams about it. If somebody says something in somebody’s name that reminds you of high school, all of a sudden you get weird inside because when you resist it, it stays inside. That’s the most important thing you have to learn spiritually. If you can’t handle it passing through, it’s going to stay in there. And so what happens with that? You have to keep holding it in there. You have to keep manipulating and rationalizing and what you end up doing is every single thing, you pushed away everything, understand that everything is, Sally didn’t say hello when you said hello to her and it made you feel a little bit weird. You might walk away from her. Next time you see her, you might go out of your way to not have to deal with her.
Or if you do deal with her, first thing you’re going to say is, why didn’t you say hello to me yesterday when I said hello to you when she was wearing earbuds? But even these tiny little things, you push them away and they stay in there. You know that they come back up. It means they stayed in there. Those are your blockages. And what you do is in order to be able to live in there with those blockages is you make a house out of them. You take this one and say, well, this is a person that hurt me. I don’t like them. This is what happened with a divorce. I don’t even want to get married. This is what happened when I was in Paris. It was embarrassing things, embarrassed me. I don’t like going to France. You literally held onto these things and made them part of the eye.
You made a self-concept. I’m the one that didn’t like this. I’m the one that liked this. I’m the one that, and you take your whole past experiences that there, the past is over. The past is over. Doesn’t mean you can’t bring it back from your memory, but it’s not going to come back by itself, okay? It is just something that it’s a memory bank that’s in there. You both are, bring it back. But the past itself passed through when it happened, but you didn’t let it. You stored it inside and now you built a whole self constant about yourself. Like I said, I’m the one like this. I’m the one who played Dorothy and Wizard of Oz in the fifth grade and everybody clapped. That’s not who you are. You would still be there if you didn’t do that. So you built these things. You made a house out of your blockages and now you defend it and you fight with it and you try to get everything in the world fit what you built in there.
That’s what ego is, is a set of thought patterns that you held onto and then built a house out of them and you’re completely addicted to staring at them and protecting them. Those are your blockages. What’s meant by blockages. So what you brought up was they stored this pain, they’re come back with pain, you store them with pain. That’s why you stored them. You pushed them away. You took my, something happened. I won’t give you an example. So it hit somebody, but something happened in your youth or something happened yesterday or something in high school. I figured high school really was a lot of blockages, right? Very interesting place. So basically you push it away. So now if somebody mentions the name of the person that hurt you in high school, it’s going to come back up because it got stimulated, it got brought back up and it’s going to feel exactly the same.
You literally can walk into a room and have a smell like what your mother used to cook. And all of a sudden if you loved your mother, you feel all this love. You just, oh my God, all this energy comes up inside. And if when you get along so good with mommy, right, you close and you get moody. That’s what all of that is about, is that you store these blockages. So if you store them with pain, in order for them to release, you’re going to feel the pain. But when you store them, you didn’t have to. I know it’s hard to talk about. People want to hear it. Yes, you didn’t know how not to, but philosophically you don’t have to store the past. It’s over. It comes in and it goes away. And you weren’t able to, you just weren’t evolved enough, you weren’t ready.
And so you stored it. Now you understand, I don’t want this stuff stored in here. I don’t want to sit on top of a mine that can blow up. Christ said it. Don’t build your house on sand. You built your ego on this garbage stuff. You built your ego on the stuff you couldn’t handle. And so now you have to go out there and manipulate the world to try and make it be a way that you can’t handle and it’s very, very difficult. So spirituality is about catching on. That’s not about getting what I want. It’s not about avoiding what I don’t want. It’s about letting go of the blockages that are creating the sense that one thing is good and one thing is bad. I’m able to handle everything now. I can serve, I can help. I can raise the outside, but I can’t do that when I’m protecting my blockages.
So if they were stored with pain, then come back with pain and then the next I’ll stop. The next question is, okay, I didn’t handle it when it happened. How do I handle it now? But you have to want to decide. I don’t want to live my life protecting the worst things that have happened to me. I don’t want do that. I want to be free. Now we’re talking about freedom. Freedom is not freedom for yourself. It’s freedom from yourself. It’s freedom from all these blockage you stored in there and they can be released, all of them. And when they’re all released or at least enough of them, I’m telling you, you will be teaching me about the Shakti. I don’t care if you ever heard the word, don’t hear I ever practice yoga. I don’t care if you ever meditated. You’ll come to me and say, oh my God, there’s all this energy rushing up inside of me since I let go of this. Well, let go of that. What is this? It’s beautiful. It’s unbelievable, right? And the great ones, the great masters not only had that stuff gone, so enough energy flowed inside. They let go into the energy. They let go of themselves so fully that the energy pulled them up and merged with source of consciousness. And that is what enlightenment is and that a liberation is, and every single one of us are capable of that state. But only if you release the blockages.
TS: Okay, just one little point of clarification. Why do I have to release the blockages that were stored with pain? With pain? Why does pain have to be part of this process of release? Why can’t I just see, oh, there’s this thing. Woo, poof, poof, no pain. Why do I have to go through more pain to release the stored pain?
MS: Okay, let’s say you saw snake when you’re little and it scared you. Okay? People have those experiences, correct? Right? So what did it feel like to see that snake? It was scary. I got scared. I got panicked, I got really scared, but I don’t want to feel that. So I don’t want to think about it, but I have to call it denial, right? I call it resistance. So you push it away your will, you have will in there. Don’t you ever let them tell you don’t have will, right? They don’t know what they’re talking about. You have will. You can push things around in there, okay? And when you push it away, what happens is energy can’t stand still. So the energy of the experience, everything has energy comes in, passes the through. It’s like electricity passes through a wire. If it can’t pass through the wire, something’s going to happen.
Alright? So you used your will, inner will to hold this event from passing through you, the event’s already over, but the impact, the impression of the event coming through you, the energy of the event is being held down away from your consciousness by resistance. Alright? What is that energy pain? Why’d you store it? Pain, I was afraid. I felt fear. I felt scared i’s what you stored. You stored the actual fear that you were feeling. You weren’t willing to feel it. You weren’t willing to let go at that time. So you stored it. So now when you start to let go, such as meditating or doing yoga or doing mantras or breathing, don’t really want or get into a relationship and want to feel love and then everybody, somebody say something reminds you of something or have them tell you, I was into reptiles when I was young. I used to keep a snake aquarium.
All of a sudden you don’t like the person anymore. You feel all kinds of fear what want to do with them. You understand that, right? You stored it with pain. When you try to let go, when of that resistance, what’s coming up is what you stored. I don’t care if it’s 50 years ago, you still have it. And sometimes you feel they go through psychology, they have a breakthrough and they say, I felt the same as they felt when I was five. That’s right. Because you stored the emotions, the thoughts, the smell you stored the entire package that was trying to come through and pass through, you resisted it. So when you let it go, it’s coming up with pain, period. Alright? And in my opinion, it’s just my opinion that what I’ve experienced is if you try to make it so you don’t feel pain when you’re releasing pain, you ain’t getting any worse.
You’re still protecting yourself from what you were not capable or willing to experience when it took place. You have to sit there and when it comes up naturally, I don’t say go find it. You don’t have to find it. Go find you. When it comes up naturally, you have to say, I couldn’t handle this experience 10 years ago or three days ago or two days ago. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle what the person said to me. Now I’m uncomfortable when I look at them, when I think of them. You understand that. Now, am I willing to learn to handle the experience when it comes back up? Or am I going to rationalize, push it away, say, well, no wonder I feel terrible about it, but I can’t believe he said that. Nobody should say that to anybody, right? In other words, I’m not willing to experience it.
I’m not capable of experiencing it. Therefore staying down there and it spreads throughout your life when it comes up, you have to be willing to say wise enough to say, I couldn’t handle when it happened, but I’m going to practice handling it. I want to be able to live a free life. Rui said it beautiful. One of the most favorite posts from Ru, he was as follows, right? Yesterday I was clever, so I was trying to change the world. Today I am wise, so I’m changing myself, okay? So I’m willing to work with what I wasn’t able to work with yesterday. Just like you play the piano, you get better every day, right? If you will work with these things, then it’s not that it won’t come up with pain, but you don’t say, Hey, people have childbirth. They go back for first, second thirds.
I hear it really hurts a very difficult situation, but it’s worth it. Do you understand that? You have to look at this. That way you’re birthing your soul, you’re birthing your liberation by being able to handle the discomfort that you weren’t able to handle before. And eventually it gets to the point where you realize a lot of this stuff that I’m storing down there, like the fact that the driver in front of me didn’t use their blinker or that this went wrong and that it’s hot and Florida was very, very hot. Or they’re going hurricane. Well, I don’t want it be a hurricane. I don’t like to be hot. I don’t like it. Then you’re just not learning how to let things pass through. Ultimately you want to experience life. It is God’s creation. Here it is. It’s in front of you. You’re experiencing it.
Let it pass through, experience it, learn from it, and then come out and help come out and serve. So it’s going to come up with pain. I understand it’s stored with pain. It’s coming back with pain. Why? Because that’s what you right? And it doesn’t go away down there. You understand that the pain does not dissipate. It’s like we say, if I pollute the air with my factories, it doesn’t matter, it’ll dissipate. No, we’re finding out it doesn’t dissipate, right? It does not dissipate down there. It’s like a virus. It goes down there, it destroys everything. Alright?
TS: There’s so much I want to ask you about here, Michael. But one thing is you don’t use the word trauma very often. And yet in the current discourse about what do we do with these things that have been pushed down. That’s the word many people use, how do you relate to that notion that what you’re talking about is our stored trauma?
MS: Well, trauma’s a very special word. Meaning this was so bad that I can’t even think about it, deal with it. A child can see a car accident when their parents got in, happen to see it and never talk again for the rest of their life. They’re traumatized. So I saved trauma for that. There was just an extreme situation of what we’re talking about. And it is true that just as our physical body has protective mechanisms came through evolution, we’ve now done that with our psyche. Things can be so much that we don’t like it that psychologically, this is psychology, not yoga, alright? But they touch each other that psychologically the reaction was still the same process. The reaction was so strong and so powerful. This is not coming in here. Denial, resistance, suppression, repression, those are all those words from a very traumatic experience. Okay?
Can it be released? Of course it can be released. You are holding it down there. Now I have to qualify. Can there be physiological problems with the brain with this, with that to where you’re not able to handle things. It is not a psychological thing, it’s a physiological thing that can happen to people. It’s rare. Most of it is a psychological thing that the experience was so damaging, so scary, so overwhelmingly negative that the immediate reaction was push it away and keep it away. And don’t talk to me about it. It’s like this one, we don’t talk about that subject around your father or daddy. You understand that because he stored stuff down there. So there is trauma. It’s just an extreme situation what we’re talking about. Okay, can it be released? Yes. Not ever. Let them tell you you can’t be released. But it can’t be released now, just like you can’t play Mac and Rowe for tennis right now, okay?
You can’t play Beethoven and Sikowski when you sit down at the piano. You have to learn. You learn, you learn with the simplest things. Learn to handle the heat instead of complaining about it. Try to find some positive, constructive ways to look at the things that you don’t want to experience. I know we don’t have a lot of time, but I always use the example. It happened to me back in the seventies. It’s hot out here in Florida. I’d have air conditioned in the car or in the house and he would complain a lot. And I sat him down one day and I said, okay, why are you hot? Talk to him. Why are you hot? The sun’s hot. What is the sun? He says A star. Of course I’ve always loved astronomy. A star. You don’t like a star. Imagine being so close to one of those twinkly little things out there, the big dipper and Orion on that.
You’re so close to a star that you feel this heat. Wow, he thought it was neat. That’s a pretty special experience. And then you sit there and realize that there’s lots of stars out there and it expands your consciousness. And all of a sudden now every time I get out of a car and it’s hot in Florida and I get out of the car and I feel the sun, he stops. He just naturally stops, looks at it and realizes, my God, that thing’s 93 million miles away, 93 million Miami’s 360 from Gainesville, right? It’s 93 million miles away and I feel this heat. How hot must that thing be? And it elevates me now, period. I don’t care how hot it gets, it brings me up. You could do that with everything. The driver in front of you is driving 10 miles out of bullet speed limit. Take a breath, think.
Well, that could be my grandma. It’s her last year of being able to drive like a beep at her, A tailgate, right? Let me make a nice experience. You can use positive thinking, you can use release, you can use meditation, you can use breathing. But don’t let yourself instinctually push these experiences down or they stay down there, right? You literally go, you go to work. You could just drive in front of me. Oh my God. Didn’t use his blinker. I couldn’t even almost say, whatcha are you doing? He is a past experience. It’s over. Let it be over. That’s what ess meant by be here now, isn’t it? Okay, be here now by letting go of the part of you that wants to be there then or hold onto what happened in the past.
I did. I answer you on trauma. I am not a psychologist. I don’t want a psychologist to talk to me and say, but people are really traumatic. I know that they need to start with simpler things and learn how to let go. And over time, I’ve met lots of people that have PTSD from war and stuff like that who told me psychology told them they would always have this. They have to learn to cope with it, right? But they started letting go and practicing and they realized I don’t have to have this inside of me. I can look at the experiences and that’s an experience I had. It’s over. Well that’s how I want you to feel. You can let go of everything. You’re capable, but not at this moment. You have to practice simple things first and then it will happen.
TS: Alright, let’s talk about this process of releasing blockages. And one of the things you write is that the roots of these blockages, these unfinished energy patterns live in our heart. And I thought this was really interesting. And the one diagram you include in Living Untethered is a diagram about different ways that energy can either be blocked or move out or move through the heart. And I wonder if you can take us through that.
MS: Yeah, somebody once said, the root of the mind is in the heart. It took me a long time. I used to fight with my mind. Alright? The root of the mind is the heart. Okay? The heart is extremely sensitive. You know that somebody says one word the wrong. That’s just the word how they said it. What accent were they covering? Their third chakra with their body language. We are so sensitive. It’s absolutely ridiculous. There’s no word that we can’t live in this world. Alright? And then what happens is that generates your thoughts. So if something hurts you in the past and you stored it inside your heart, you’ll start thinking about things. You start thinking about how to avoid it. You start judging people. All of it comes from the sensitivity and the stuff you stored in your heart. So basically it comes back down to the exact same thing.
If you’re blocked, the energy can’t flow through your heart. You say you want love, you think you need to find somebody. I’m sorry, I know it’s not politically correct. Talk who I am. You think you need to find somebody to feel love. That’s that true love is a flow of energy inside of you that’s passing through your heart, passing through the fourth chakra. If that flow comes up, you feel that for relief. You feel that for a bird, you feel that literally you wake up in the morning, hear the birds are chirping, tremendous love comes pouring through your heart. In fact, you’ll reach a point if you’ll work with this, that if you wave your hand across your heart, you could lay down in love and pass out for as long as you want. That’s how open you are. Okay? So that basically the heart is capable of being open.
I already told you, why is it not open? Because you closed it, you blocked it, you do it all the time, right? You feel open to somebody. You say one thing that you don’t like. Bam. Let things close it. Funny, right? It’s not so easy. It is easier to close the heart or open it. Ha ha ha. Right? It can close in a build of a second for a million reasons, kind of hard to get it open. Everything has to be exactly right and stay that way, right? Catch on. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to close your heart. You’re closing it willfully to protect yourself, but you’re not protecting yourself. You’re protecting the garbage you stored down there that is getting hit because the events in the world are bringing back up. All the pain you stored down there. So you have to be willing to sit there and say, I don’t want to spend my entire life protecting the lowest part of my being.
I am willing to say I will go through life. It hits what it hits, it brings up what it brings up, and I’m going to first try to let go, try to learn from it, learn to free myself. Then I don’t have to be perfect. I will then with the clarity I get from that look to see can I help? Is there something I need to be doing this situation, not the benefit of me, not a reaction, but for the benefit of the situation, the benefit of the people, for the benefit of all. And that becomes a very beautiful life. That’s the servant. But the heart gets closed because you have that stuff down there. So as you release the stuff, Shakti comes up. It’s a very beautiful process. Enough Shakti, at some point, there’s a name for it in India, something like that. I don’t know what it’s where.
Literally yogis say the energy changes direction and it starts to flow up. Now you don’t realize it. You’re down, you’re pushing down, you’re looking out to make sure things don’t hurt you and you control everything. That’s a downward flow of the energy. At some point you let go of enough and it starts flowing from deep inside and it doesn’t stop all day. It just comes up. It just keeps coming up feeding you until you don’t like when something happened. And then you’ll see it stops because you closed it and you’ll reach a point. Great ones reach the point in their life where they say, I ain’t closing this. It’s not even a matter of opening your heart. It’s a matter of taking the door off. There is no door. It will never close again. I will go through Christ hung in that cross saying that I’ll go through whatever I must go through to say seating in God, to constantly feel that spirit pouring up inside of me, feeding me. I’m not going to close ever again. And that’s not easy because things happen. They hit your humanness. But you use that as an opportunity. What Ramdas used to say, use it to go to God.
TS: We have a listener who wrote in curious to know whether thoughts or emotions come first in your view of looking at how we respond.
MS: I think they can be either way. You can have a thought and all of a sudden it brings up emotion. You can feel an emotion and the mind starts talking about it can go either way. Alright? In the end as I talk, the reason it’s a mess in there is what you stored in your heart. When you push those energies away, they’re stored in your heart. They’re stored down in the lower area of your heart. So it generates the mind. But now we’re dealing with one affects the other. There includes with each other. It’s a conspiracy. It’s a conspiracy. Your mind thinks something, your heart feels it. Then you think it’s true. People say, oh, I feel it in my heart. They know it’s true. Give me a break when you’re purified and there’s nothing in there. I want to hear what the heart has to say. It’s going to say, God. God, God. That’s all I was going to say. Love.
TS: Alright, let’s go back to this teaching from Living Untethered. Since blockages were stored with pain, they’re going to release with pain. That is where commitment comes in.
MS: That’s right.
TS: What is the commitment, Michael? What is it?
MS: I want to be free. I would like to know while I’m alive in this lifetime, what it would be like to be able to wake up in the morning and say, I’m back. I wonder what’s going to happen today. Wouldn’t that be exciting and mean it? And go through the day in the appreciation that I sit on the most beautiful planet. We haven’t seen anything even close. It’s just sitting there spinning through outer space, this beautiful little blue ball, alright? And everything else is so far away and they’re so big. We talked about the sun a moment ago. So you recognize that the sun is a star. There are 300 billion of those stars in your galaxy and there are 2 trillion galaxies and you’re on this little beautiful planet filled with life, filled with people and plants and animals and everything, and you are always in a state of awe.
Okay? That’s where you are. Are you committed to say that the pole star of your life is to get there? I don’t care if it’s one minute. I want to experience what it’s like to be free, truly free, and to feel real love, unconditional love. That doesn’t change. Alright? And to get in the presence of what is the source. Ultimately you’ll get high enough and you realize my consciousness is experiencing all this Shakti, that wonderful, that’s nice. But at some point it’s going to dawn on you. Where did the consciousness come from? What’s the source of consciousness? And all these very high thoughts or openness open you up to devote your life to that. And you commit yourself to that. You commit yourself to, if nothing else, I’m going to use life to go to God. I’m going to use life for self-realization. You’re going to lose life to find out what are the true secrets of the universe.
Where did the masters go when Mayor Baba said, my consciousness was like a drop of water staring at my mind. It fell away when I stopped staring, it fell back into an ocean. Find that drop of water out of the ocean you’ll never find it emerges. So these are the great aspirations and pole stars of beings who caught on that? There’s something very great going on. They don’t have to struggle, right? It’s an inner release, inner growth, but it’s not selfish. People who reach that state like Christ and Buddha and the great ones, they change the world. So everybody’s capable of bringing something very beautiful into this world instead of trying to make it be what they want so they’re not being bothered by it. That’s the commitment you commit yourself. I will go through what I must go through every day, every minute to let go of the garbage that’s holding me down. Okay?
TS: Let’s say someone makes that commitment sincerely, but then finds themselves doing something. They do a lot like worrying about this or that. What can they do in that moment where they’re like, oh, now I’m worrying and I’m cycling around my worry trip.
MS: Yeah, they all have that experience. You start by looking at it. Don’t worry about the worrying. I’m having a problem on my mind. Okay, what I want to do with it. There’s so many things you can do if you start with positive thinking, what I always do if I have to is I make him look and say, what if the worst happened? Could I handle that? Instead of, I don’t want it to happen. I have a preference that it’d be this way or that way. You’re going to worry. That’s not going to be that way. It’s going to be the way you don’t want. I’m not telling you to do it, but I’ve learned to step back and say, what’s the worst that can happen? And then say, I can handle that. I didn’t even give her a chance to ask, can you handle it?
I can handle that period. And when I did the interview with Oprah on this book, on Living Untethered, she said when she read the book, she ended up with knowing what the best mantra for the Western mind is. I can handle it. I can handle this. You should always say that. Never say I can’t handle this. So if you can handle it, there’s nothing to worry about. You now have a bottom line. I can go through and I need to go through and maybe painful, but I’ve learned to handle pain. It may be discomfort, whatever it is, but I would rather than worrying about the future or bothering myself about the past, I’d rather have my mind understand, I’m here to help you. The self is higher than the mind. I’m here to help you. We will be fine. Heart. Same thing, right? The mind’s, the brother, the heart’s, the sister, and you’re God.
And so the self in there looks down at that and says, we are going to handle it. I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. Now, is there something I’m supposed to be doing? Maybe there is. Maybe there’s something that you can help but not help yourself. It’s about helping others. But if you worry, you’re worrying about yourself, you’re worrying about, do I like this? Will I like this? Is this going to bother me? Right? You have to cut through that. And the way I found ultimately is to sit there and say, I’m going to handle, no matter what happens, whatever happens, I’m going to handle it. So can you understand that as your way out from the mine is, don’t fight with the mine and don’t try to figure out what to do. So it doesn’t have to worry. They’ll go on forever. Just say, I can handle this right? And again, I like we both love Ram Dass plus the soul, right? Whatever happens, I will use it to go to God. It will make me greater. Do you understand that? No matter what it is, if I can handle it and I work with it, I’ll end up being a greater being. So I’m not afraid of it. I’m not afraid of the future. I’m not afraid of what happened in the past. I can handle it. That’s like what Oprah said. That’s a great mantra. I can handle this. That’s how you undercut worry.
TS: This brings us, I think, in many ways to the centerpiece of what we’re talking about, about being willing to feel pain, to release stored pain. And why could somebody not handle something? Why could I, in my own experience, say I don’t know if I can handle it. It’s because of how much it’s going to hurt the pure, raw, unbelievable burning pain. And the last part of this card that we’ve chosen from the Living Untethered Card Deck, do you want to be free to live a deep, beautiful life more than you want to avoid discomfort? I’m talking not just about discomfort, Michael. I’m talking about burning terrible pain about why I couldn’t handle the loss of this or that person in my life or this or that tragedy happening. So talk about that. Right in the center of our heart, that unbelievable pain that we have to be willing to handle.
MS: It’s so easy to take the extreme situations and say, what about that? My answer is, if you haven’t been working on yourself along the way, I don’t have an answer for you. You’re going to go through what you go through. If you have every day, every minute handling the salad, didn’t say hello, that the restaurant was too late giving you your food, or it wasn’t as big a portion you wanted, or the driver in front of you is going 10 miles hour. If you don’t deal with that, you haven’t bothered learning. You haven’t bothered building the power within yourself to be able to handle yourself. So it’s very important that people say to me sometimes, Mickey, you’re always talking about drivers in front of you and the weather. What about these big things? If you will deal with the driver in front of you and you will deal with the weather, and you will deal with the fact that someone didn’t say exactly what you wanted to say, wanted them to say in just the, you hear me?
All these little things that are painful, but they’re not big. If you can’t handle those, how in the world are you going to be able to go through something big? If you learn that it is worth it to practice handling life, you practice handling reality. What is reality? In the book? I defined it. I didn’t need a treatise. Here’s reality that what’s already happened, alright, if it happened, it’s reality period, but there’s no buts if it happened, it’s reality. Can you handle it? You practice handling reality every minute, every day, constantly. You wake up in the morning, I’m going to handle what unfolds today. You won’t, right? But you do your best. Then during the day, you think about it, you yourself. Then at night, did I handle it? If I didn’t, can I let go a little bit? You’re not going to be perfect.
You’re going to be close, but you’re going to be better. Just like you play tennis, you be better every day. If you played a piano, you’re better every day. Do you understand that? If you practice letting go, if you’ve practiced being able to handle reality because you want to, but he had no right to say that to me. Fine. He did. He said it. Can you handle it? No. Okay, then make a mess. Yes, I can handle it now. I’ve handled it. Now should I do something about it? Most of the time you’re going to find out, no, my problem was that I couldn’t handle it Once I can handle it, fine. He said something, alright. Then what happens is these bigger things will happen. And you’re right, you can get to a point where it’s just white hot in your heart burning, alright? And you sit there, I’ve been there.
You sit there. Do I want to make it through this or not? Am I willing to relax and release through this white hot? Alright? And you will find yourself on the other side. Okay? I am going to get biblical on you. Alright? The Bible says at some point God took a cher of him with a flaming sword and set him at the east gate of the garden less man. Figure out how to get back into the garden and either of the tree of eternal life like he ate at the tree of self-knowledge. Okay? That caribou with a flaming sword, is that burning that heart, right? It’s like you’re not evolved enough to make it back to God, to make it back into the garden, until you can walk through that, until you relax through that and you can’t do it. Now I understand that, and that’s wonderful.
That’s what compassion is understanding, okay? I understand you can’t do that. Now, compassion is different than sympathy. Compassion is not. Oh yeah, I know what you’re feeling. I have felt it too. That sympathy. Compassion is, I have been through these sort of things and I know you can do it, but I know you can’t do it right now. Compassion is a love to take a child and say, yes, I know it hurts, but you can learn. You can learn because you learned. So are you willing to walk through that heat? Right? And it’s not easy, right? But you just remember. That’s what it’s about. It’s about life. Life. I say it, you are a giant block of marble, right? And life is Michelangelo with a chisel. Oh no. Ow. Ow. Then you start seeing the arm of David coming out of your chair and you realize that’s what this is all about. Life. Is God freeing me to be the most beautiful thing that could possibly be? Am I willing to go through that? Am I willing to do this? Alright? And the answer is yes, of course. Of course. I’m
TS: Something I don’t hear. You talk very often about is this notion that these blockages could be something we inherited from previous generations in our biographical lineage or from the collective in some way. And so there’s this idea, well, you put the blockages there where I think some of us are like, wait a second, I think that I discovered that this was part of my genetic makeup or the collective that I tuned into in some way. Annie, I’m wondering what you think about that, Michael.
MS: First I don’t. And second. So that’s where I’m at. All these philosophies and concepts and views and opinions and all this stuff, they just get in the way, okay? They just give you an excuse for not letting go. Do you understand that? Or past lives? You don’t even mention past lives. Okay? This stuff is stuff in there from past lives. It depends on what you believe. It doesn’t matter. Yes, okay, you need to come down here clean. Let’s get that straight, alright? And that’s why a lot of the stuff is there. So what? So let go of that. Do the exact same thing. You understand that if you have blockages that come because you came from an ABA and work your way up to a human body, alright? You don’t need it now, you don’t need a tail. Monkeys need tales. You don’t need this stuff.
Keeping your consciousness distracted from who you are, your God consciousness, looking at this, there’s that. Do you understand that? I teach that, right? It’s not about going to God, it’s about not leaving. You’re already there. You are universal consciousness and the ray of that consciousness is completely addicted to staring at your thoughts, your emotions, et cetera, et cetera. Alright? So what difference does it make where they come from past lives, inheritance, collective, whatever. It’s still distracting you from who you are. You’re a great being, a very great being. The greatest of all beings, and you’re staring down at something that’s not so great at your humanness. Do you have it? Yes, you have it and it’s going to express itself. Can you handle that? That’s the key. What do Christ say? I’m a nice Jewish yogi. I love Christ’s teachings as I sit with the throne of my father.
That’s not a seat made of gold. It’s a state of consciousness as I sit with the throne of my father. So you too shall sit by my throne and these things that I do should do these and even greater things. Go look it up. That’s who you are. You’re a very great being staring at something that’s not so great. This human, this psyche, this thing that you collected, whether it came from evolution, whether it came from collective, whether it came from past lives. It’s still something you’re looking down at. So it’s all the same to me. You understand that? That’s why I get along so well with everybody. I don’t have to argue about it. Can you not have that be who you are? It’s not who you are. It’s something you’re looking at. You understand that wherever your thoughts come from, there’re still thoughts here.
There’s waves in an ocean. I’m looking at them. Where do they come from? Who cares? They’re just wavelets in an ocean. The ocean expressing itself that come from a volcano or to tidal wave or rain or whatever. Can I learn to look at it and not get caught in it? To have appreciation and compassion for it? Raise it up. The Gita we’re talking about the Bible, the Gita, it says something very beautiful. It says, one should raise the self with self, not trampled down the self for self that can be self friend can become self foe. It’s talking about capital case opin. The higher self raising the lower self. So I don’t care where the lower self came from. I give you explanations and it is true in the different things I teach and especially in living on Tether. But the point is, if it’s down there, raise it up. Raise it up. People say I have animal tendencies. Yes you do, but you’re not an animal. You are looking at the tendencies of an animal. You are higher than that. Raise that shakti up so that now you don’t feel like killing somebody or hurting somebody to get even. You feel compassion. Buddha say compassion is the highest state. So you just keep raising the energies up. Do you see why it doesn’t matter where they come from? I do. I do.
TS: Alright. Here’s I think a good note for us to end on our final card here from the Living Untethered Card Deck because we’ve, I’ve received several questions here. Michael, I’m following this. I want to release the blockages. I’m not quite sure how though there’s this burning in my heart. How do I do it? How do I do it? Here’s this card. You are capable of simply relaxing and not engaging with disturbed energies. At first, this seems impossible because you’re trying to get the disturbance itself to relax. Don’t do that. You relax, you who are witnessing the disturbance, simply relax in the face of it, right? Maybe you could teach on this and this will be a good note for us to end our conversation on.
MS: Alright, I’ll do it as follows. I’ll start at the highest date, then we’ll work down a little bit. You’re in a tug of war. You don’t want to be in a tug of war. You want to go have lunch, okay? But you’re in a tug of war and the entire football team’s on the other end and you’re being dragged through the mud and you’re trying to figure out what to do. And so I do this in living and tether. So you start learning how to dig your heels in, how to lean special ways, learn martial arts, just work with the Q and the energy to get the balance right. You’re doing all that because you want to go eat lunch. You know there’s an alternative. What? Relax your hands. What? How’s that going to make me win? What is winning? I thought you want to go have lunch, relax your hands.
It’s over. That’s the difference between having to win the energy to get it to be the way you could handle, as opposed to saying, fine, there’s pain. Fine. Somebody says something to me. It’s not comfortable to me. Do I have to rationalize it? Do I have to justify it? Do I have to do what I can to tell everybody about it so they agree with me that it should have hurt? Alright, do I have to change what I’m experiencing or can I, the one who’s experiencing it, not the experience, the self, the consciousness. Can it just say, okay, relax, lean back and let go. That’s equivalent to letting go of that rope and all of a sudden you realize, oh, mg, I’m fine. I’m fine if I’m not flaking with it. Alright? And again, I always make the point because people bother me when they try to challenge me about it.
It doesn’t mean you don’t interact with the world, you just don’t interact with the world because you can’t handle it. That’s a whole different ball game. I can’t handle what you said then. I shouldn’t be talking to you about it. I have to handle what you said and then see if I can do anything to help you understand that. Otherwise, it’s all about me. Okay? So that’s what the answer is. Now, you can’t do that when all of a sudden your heart hurts, something leaves you. But if you work with yourself every minute of every day, like people say to me, you don’t teach meditation, I meditate. Meditation’s wonderful. Everything was meditation. So my job isn’t to teach meditation. It is to teach you what to do when you’re not meditating. It was just more important than meditation. I didn’t say that. Okay.
TS: Very good, Michael. I always benefit so much and I know our listeners do from hearing you, so thank you so much for this special session. Thank you.
MS: I always love talking with you. Thank you so much. Bye-Bye.
TS: Living Untethered, the new gift edition available in a few weeks and the Living Untethered Card Deck. Thank you friends for being with us. Thank you. You’ve been listening to Michael Singer, the author of The Untethered Soul and Living Untethered, which is now available in a special hardcover gift edition, as well as highlights from the book in a new Living Untethered Card Deck. Sounds True also offers a free podcast with Michael Singer that features two new talks per week from Temple of the Universe, which is the yoga and meditation center in central Florida that Michael Singer founded in 1975. New free talks are posted every Monday and every Thursday, and you can find the Michael Singer podcast at SoundsTrue.com or on your favorite podcast platform.
Thanks so much for listening. Sounds True: waking up the world.
