30 Nov [Book] – The untethered soul

I could’ve walked past this book a thousand times, and never picked it up. It’s the opposite of what I usually read. Everything about its cover screamed spiritual nonsense – from the horse riding over a beach, to the choice of soft, pale colours and text. Terrible marketing for someone like me.

But when a dear friend gave it to me and insisted, “you have to read this book”.. I’ve put it straight to the top of the pile, with some curiosity but also fairly low expectations.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It turned out to be a fantastic read, and one that hit me really deeply. I found myself underlying hundreds of passages, writing on the margins, and often pausing for minutes to reflect on why it moved me so much..

I’m still not fully sure, but I think it’s because it touches some very real, raw pain, and spoke the truth in a way that feels like a relief. And because ultimately, it’s a story of freedom. Freedom from unnecessary pain, freedom from fear, and freedom to live a fuller life.

If you’re familiar with mindfulness topics, much of this won’t be completely new. But you may find it shares deep principles with very simple language and practical examples of everyday life.

I found countless lessons within its pages. One old saying kept coming to mind:

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

I know I wasn’t ready before. When I finally was, it found me at a perfect time.

Maybe it will find you at the right time too.

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The key concepts

There’s a manic voice in your head:

• We all have this voice in our head – a constant dialogue narrating the world. An incessant speech, often meaningless, that gives us a version of reality that feels under our control. Unfortunately, it turns out we experience more of this narrative than the actual reality. And that is at the origin of our suffering.
• “You’ve been locked in there with a maniac”. This inside voice is similar to a grumpy roommate, always unhappy about something. It never stops talking, happy to take all sides of any argument as long as it can continue verbalising the world. Chances are it’s talking to you now, as you read these words.
• If you had a roommate like this, it wouldn’t last a day. Yet, given it comes from inside us and feels like it’s us, we give it a lot of undeserved importance and attention, and often identify with it. This dialogue builds our inner world. An imaginary state born out of the need for comfort and, most of all, avoiding fear. While in this state, we’re never fully present.

You’re not your inner voice:

• Realise you are not the voice, but rather the one who notices it. Slow down. Watch the voice. Personify it. Observe it without resisting it, and get to know it like an object outside of you.
• You are consciousness, the observer. Objects constantly pass in front of you at all levels: physical, mental and emotional. They compete for your attention. If you don’t stay centered, you’ll focus on them, and feed them with energy. The more energy, the more they’ll capture you.
• Consciousness tends to go where it’s the most distracted. Just like in a cinema, where you’re unaware of sitting in a cold room, you may be unaware of the nature of reality, while lost in your thoughts. Often for days at a time.

In an attempt to prevent suffering, you’re limiting your infinite energy:

• Each of us has an unlimited amount of energy, though most likely it won’t feel that way. We constantly block this energy to prevent pain, and this leaves us feeling tired and depleted. Energy needs openness and receptivity to keep on flowing.
• We’re programmed to close or open ourselves based on our past experiences. When you close though, you block energy. That’s when experiences get stuck, and a blockage will hold you back. Life must now compete with this blocked event for attention, and you’ll be less present as a result. That’s how overwhelm is built: stuck energy that needs to be released.
• This is a power you don’t want to delegate to the environment: you have to learn to be open, no matter what, and reclaim this energy for yourself. Remember, your energy affects other people. If you’re open, energy will flow and you’ll be a fantastic source of light for others.

Closing causes the most suffering. And it’s never worth it:

• Closing creates enormous work. If you close, you’ll carry that weight for the rest of your life. You can be free of this burden instead, releasing the energy, let it pass, and start growing in return. “Every day we bear a burden that we should not be bearing.” It’s an inner weight that we carry. We don’t have to.
• Living in your mind gives you a semblance of control, but that’s where suffering starts: in the “attempt to hold the world together, you’re really just trying to hold yourself together”. Growth happens when you transcend this need for protection.
• If you protect yourself, you’ll never be free. Just like the person who locks himself inside a house, afraid. That’s not freedom. It’s just a fancier prison.
• Your mind is always telling you that you have to change something outside in order to solve your inner problems. The outside is not the root cause of your suffering: no outside change will fix it. The root problem is that you don’t feel whole and complete within yourself. If you don’t identify this properly you will seek someone or something to cover it up. You will hide behind finances, people, fame. All you did was involve something / someone else in your problem.
• You should not have to devote your life to your psyche. Your current relationship with your psyche is like an addiction. It is constantly making demands of you, and you have devoted your life to serving these demands. If you want to be free, you have to learn to treat it like any other addiction.

There’s a way to be free:

• You can look deep inside yourself, and decide that you don’t want the weakest part of you running your life. That’s the purpose of spiritual evolution. **** It’s a sure way out, but it takes the strongest commitment from yourself. An unwavering commitment to be free.
• Only you can choose to be free. Only you can chose to take that freedom away from yourself.
• Realise that your psyche is not okay. It’s actually quite fragile in there. Your psyche is communicating through its natural language: fear. You told your mind something like: “I want everyone to like me. I don’t want anyone to speak badly of me. I want everything I say and do to be acceptable and pleasing to everyone etc…. now figure out how to make that happen”. You’ve given your mind an impossible task. No wonder it is so active and overwhelmed.
• When you’re fully aware, life will pass through you and be a moving, wonderful experience. Every day can be filled with energy and excitement if you learn to let go.

Embrace the obstacles as nudges:

• Embrace your problems as agents for growth. Remove your inner thorns, don’t build your life around not stimulating them. Love your edges as they point the way to your freedom.
• Things will unfold that will “hit your stuff”. Use them as an opportunity to let go, and grow. Let go right away, because the more you wait, the harder it becomes.
• Use disturbance as your cue, it’s time to grow. It’s a good thing to see a blockage be hit. Open up, let its energy come up and be released. Begin with little things. It’s like a game. Relax and release. Be an explorer – enjoy discovering experience and witnessing all of it. A world of energy will open up as you’ll break the habit of the constant draw of the lower self.
• Examine the process of resistance. Stress starts with our own preconceived notions of how things should be. To break this cycle, deal with each situation with acceptance. Events can make it through you without resistance.
• Do not ever fight your mind, but gently disengage. Don’t participate in its games, just be quiet and relax. Thinking is something you watch the mind do. You’re just in there, aware. The mind runs because you’re giving it the power of your attention. Without your attention, the thinking mind goes away. Stop putting energy into your psyche. Relax and release. In most cases you’ll find that there’s nothing to deal with except for your own fear and desires.
• Relationships are the easiest test for this. Letting go of yourself is the easiest way to get closer to others, without unnecessary expectations. “Imagine if you used relationships to get to know other people, rather than to satisfy what is blocked inside of you”.

Pain is the price of freedom:

• Your personality is built to avoid this pain: growth happens when you start dealing with it. As long as you try to avoid the pain, pain will run your life.
• You can handle the feeling of pain, or insecurity, or embarrassment. It’s just a feeling. It cannot touch you unless you touch it. View it as energy. Release it, let it pass through you. If you close around it, it will stay with you and become a building block of your identity, hiding itself in multiple complex layers.
• On the other side of pain is freedom, and ecstasy. There’s joy, beauty and love within you waiting to be witnessed.
• You were not put on this earth to suffer. You’re floating in empty space in a universe that goes forever. Things are going to happen. Why shouldn’t you be happy? You gain nothing by limiting your possibilities. It doesn’t change the world, you just suffer gratuitously.

The journey is never over:

• You have a choice. Two ways you can live. Devoting your life to staying in your comfort zone, or working on your freedom. If you decide to stay in your cage, it’s because you’re afraid. And you use the brilliance of your mind to stay inside your comfort zone. Spirituality begins when you decide that you’ll never stop trying. It’s an infinite journey exploring your edges.
• Your only choice is whether you want to be happy. With no conditionals ifs and buts: any conditions you put will limit your happiness. You have to give an unconditional answer. Really mean it and don’t break your vow. It’s the start of this path.
• The rule is simple: don’t close your heart. When you feel the need, just question whether you’re willing to give up your happiness. Is it worth it? If you stay open enough, waves of uplifting energy will fill you up. Affirm that you don’t want to close, no matter what happens. Affirm that all you want is to be at peace and to appreciate life.
• Life is giving you a gift. The flow of events that takes place between your birth and your death. They are exciting, challenging, and create tremendous growth. Your only way out is the witness of this experience.
• Start using every day to let go of that scared part of you that won’t let you live fully. If you live life fully, you won’t have any last wishes. There is no reason to be afraid of life. The fear will fade once you understand that the only thing there is to get from life is the growth that comes from experiencing it. Life itself is your career, and your interaction with life is your most meaningful relationship. What gives life meaning is the willingness to live it.
• Everything has two extremes. Gradations of the pendulum swing. The Tao is in the middle. It’s the place where there is no energy pushing in either direction. Where the pendulum can stay at rest forever. When you stop swinging between the opposites, you’ll find that you have far more energy than you ever imagined. You waste tremendous energy at the extremes. You must reach the point where your whole interest lies in the balance, and not in any personal preference for how things should be.

Death is the most amazing teacher:

• Turns out, the best teacher is death. A great Yogi said he lived every moment of his life as though a sword was suspended above his head by a spiderweb. He lived his life with awareness that he was that close to death. You are so close to death. You must not be afraid to discuss death. Think about how you would live your last week. Everything is a million times more meaningful in our final week. What if you were to live every week that way?
• Ask yourself why you aren’t living this way. The beauty of embracing deep truth is that you don’t have to change your life: you just change how you live your life. It’s not what you’re doing: it’s how much of you it’s doing it.
• You may start thinking about all the things that you’ve always wanted to do, and think that you had better go do them. That’s not the answer. You have to understand that it is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life. Life exists without you. It has been going on for billions of years. You simply get the honour of seeing a tiny slice of it. If you’re busy trying to get something, you will miss the slice you’re experiencing. If you’re not living life, you’re living mind.
• You really don’t need more time before death: what you need is more depth of experience during the time you’re given. That’s the way to live your life. You let it fill you completely. You let it touch you to the depths of your being.
• Death is the landlord, you are just the tenant. Don’t be afraid of death. Let it free you. Let it encourage you to experience life fully.