Beyond Pain, Anxiety and Anger – Untethered Soul

The pain is too hard to bear. I don’t know how I can survive… At a mind level, I know that I have to grieve but the act of grieving is so painful that I don’t want to do it. I have just lost what I thought was the love of my life. I don’t know how I can ever love someone else. Life seems bleak and useless and I don’t want to live…

The days pass in this half state of grieving but not really grieving, laughing but not really laughing, avoiding pain but not really avoiding…

My friends and others advise me to do meditation – I go to various groups but I am not able to calm myself. There is a raging storm inside my head and no matter what I do, it just won’t go away.

And this is where I come across Untethered Soul by Michael A Singer. I open the first page and the first thing he talks about is the voice inside my head… I sit in stunned silence – he is reading my mind. It’s like he can sense the raging storm inside my head and ever so gently, he pulls me right out.

The purpose of spiritual evolution is to remove the blockages that cause your fear. The alternative is to protect your blockages so that you don’t have to feel fear. To do this, however, you will have to try to control everything in order to avoid your inner issues. – Michael A. Singer

I don’t want to control. I don’t want to avoid pain and fear it but I don’t know how. It feels like a fire touches me and my instinctual response is to pull away. How can I sit there letting myself burn?

Then an idea comes to my head… I take a piece of A4 paper and I write the following on it

I surrender to feeling miserable, lonely and insufficient.

You might say “What the…” but I can tell you that this is the most powerful thing that I have done to allow me to surrender to pain. I look at it every day and somehow it gives me permission to feel my pain.

I continue to read the book. Every page is a revelation. Every page tells me how I have spent my life controlling and avoiding pain, fear, anxiety and anger.

I start to understand what my mind is forcing me to avoid pain… I start to transform.

You said to your mind, “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. I don’t want anyone to hurt me. I don’t want anything to happen that I don’t like. And I want everything to happen that I do like.” Then you said, “Now, mind, figure out how to make every one of these things a reality, even if you have to think about it day and night.” And of course your mind said, “I’m on the job. I will work on it constantly.” – Michael A. Singer

Each time I feel the fear and I recognise that I am avoiding pain, I look at the A4 paper (which is conveniently placed in front of my bed) and say this to myself

I open my heart and allow this experience to flow through me…

This surrender process is such a freeing experience. I no longer need to control myself or my environment; I no longer need to resist my pain and my fear and I no longer want things to be any different…

It is neither good or bad; It is what it is

And then there comes a day when I no longer need to have the A4 page on my wall… I take it off and celebrate my freedom knowing that this is transient too…

Without Untethered Soul, I don’t think I would have survived this period of extreme pain and suffering in my life.

In my blog First Steps towards the Healing Journey, I talk about using body as a gauge to sense where you are at and what’s going on inside you. Many times, I hear from survivors that this is quite hard to do. We spend our lives living outside our bodies and it’s quite challenging to start to live inside our bodies.

Life becomes a “me against it” situation. When you have fear, insecurity, or weakness inside of you, and you attempt to keep it from being stimulated, there will inevitably be events and changes in life that challenge your efforts. Because you resist these changes, you feel that you are struggling with life. You feel like this person is not behaving the way they should, and this event is not unfolding the way you want. You see situations that happened in the past as disturbing, and you see things down the road as potential problems. Your definitions of desirable and undesirable, as well as good and bad, all come about because you have defined how things need to be in order for you to be okay. Michael A. Singer

If you are one of these survivors then I recommend that you read Untethered Soul. I strongly believe that you would be able to have a better relationship with your fear and anxiety. If it were up to me, this book will be a fundamental part of all our education systems. But thankfully, it’s not up to me and you are free to choose whether to read it or not to read it 😉

I will leave you pondering with these last words…

The alternative is to decide not to fight with life. You realize and accept that life is not under your control. Life is continuously changing, and if you’re trying to control it, you’ll never be able to fully live it. Instead of living life, you’ll be afraid of life. But once you’ve decided not to fight with life, you’ll have to face the fear that was causing you to fight. Fortunately, you don’t have to keep this fear inside of you. There is such a thing as a life without fear. In order to relate to this possibility, we must first have a deeper understanding of fear itself. – Michael A. Singer