Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Michael Singer: Let Go of Yourself and Surrender to Life

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Michael Singer (NYT bestselling author of The Untethered Soul, The Surrender Experiment, and Living Untethered) breaks down his life changing spiritual awakening and teaches us how to separate the consciousness from our anxieties. Mayim and Jonathan open up about how Michael’s first book brought them together after 8 years of not speaking. Michael explains why he believes his life story prior to his awakening is irrelevant and how he maintains an enlightened, centered lifestyle out in the real world. He discusses ways to create distance between you and your suffering, how to reach a state of unconditional love and spiritual growth, and provides practical examples of how to surrender one’s ego. He considers how our thought patterns and life experiences can prevent us from having our own spiritual awakenings.   Michael Singer's New Book, Living Untethered: https://www.newharbinger.com/9781648480935/living-untethered/ BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But listen to me, right? That identification with your personal self, which is just your mind's thoughts, are what keep you from waking up. But I have millions of people that know all these things about me. I just have to disappear and build a cabin. No, do not do that. Oprah asked me that once. Me and Oprah. I found out you don't need to do that.

Hi, I'm Myambiolic and welcome to my breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. It's My Ambioly's Break. This is going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. So now she's going to break. This is the place where I weep openly so you don't have to. Before we introduce our incredible guest, Michael A. Singer, author of The Untethered Soul and the Surrender Experiment, I'd like to introduce, and you'll have to listen to the whole episode to understand this reference, my favorite extension cord, Jonathan Cohen. That's awesome.

This is also the place where you have spiritual awakenings so people can also have them, not so that they don't have to. Michael Singer told me I don't have to have a spiritual awakening. I just need to incrementally be in spiritual awareness. This is a very, very heavy, awesome, amazing experience that we just had. He is also the author of his newest book, Living Untethered, Beyond the Human Predict, which I love because humans are in, a big predicament most of the time, and he basically tells us how not to be. He had a very, very surprising awakening in 1971 while he was working on his doctorate and economics, and he went into seclusion and founded in 1975 the Temple of the Universe, which is a

now long-established yoga and meditation center, where people of any religion, any set of beliefs, come together to experience inner peace. He has nearly five decades of spiritual teaching under his belt. He also has made incredible contributions in the areas of business, education, health care, environmental protection. This is a man who I just started crying the second I saw his face because the untethered soul is one of those books that I recommend to people that really is potentially life-changing. It actually has a very interesting tie-in to Jonathan and my connection. So it's also a really special episode for us. It's kind of the reason why we're both on mics right now.

It's a little bit the reason that we're both on mics right now, yes. Let's welcome Michael Singer to the breakdown. Break it down. It's really an honor to have you here. I'm very nervous and going to cry. It's really very excited to have you. We've been looking forward to this day for a long time. And where are we finding you?

I'm in Gainesville, Florida. Okay. Is that where you? You live? I live in a town called Alachia just outside of Gainesville, and I'm at a studio in Gainesville. Okay, got it. Jonathan, why are we so excited to have Michael Singer here? We have a very, maybe it's not unique.

Maybe this happens all the time with your first book, but we have a, what we think is a unique story. That book actually was one of the ways that we reconnected after not speaking for almost eight years. she and I. Yes, Jonathan and I, we met when our kids were young, and back in those days, people didn't keep in touch the way they do now. Like, we would email from time to time, and I thought it had been like a year since we had spoken, and apparently it had been many, and I emailed him about your book, because I discovered the untethered soul right around the time that I had vocal cord surgery, and

I was not allowed to speak. I had three months of complete silence. And this was one of the books that I read in that time. So it was a very specific time in my life. And I have no idea. I mean, I guess I do have an idea. But I felt like I needed to ask Jonathan Cohen, this guy that I hadn't spoken to if he has read this book. So we've been together since.

That's the true story. But I really, I feel very, I'm very nervous. I'm very excited to speak to you. I never thought you would talk to us because you're such an enlightened person. And I just felt like you might think, who are these people? And why do they want to speak to me? I rank your book as one of the most important books that I have read in my life. And it's very deep. This is not a light, easy read. It's a book that makes you look very, very hard, not just at yourself, but as the subtitle says, Beyond Yourself, you have another book as well, which I think, Jonathan, you have one of the physical copies. Do you have it right there? Jonathan's been sending me screenshots of living untethered. When Maim says it's not an easy read, what you managed to do so successfully is break

things down that are very complex into very, very simple and easily digestible parts. And one of the reasons that I got so excited when Miami emailed me asking me if I had read that book is because I quote your first book as the easiest and most accessible entry point to the deepest, you know, thoughts and practices of the human experience. And right before you, she had messaged me literally the day before, I was in a room of 30 people explaining that if we wanted to create content, any type of information on how to help human beings get beyond their state of suffering, your book was the first thing to read. Thank you. And then she messaged me the next day. Yeah. So we have a very, very special connection to you without you even knowing

it. You have a very interesting path that led you to the person who, who wrote this book. Tell us a bit about your life before, before 1971. Is that general enough? It's general enough. My general answer to that is it's not worth talking about. I live my life, and then I woke up. And prior to that, I wish I could go back and redo it and treat everybody much nicer and be a conscious person throughout my life. But in 7071, I had a very deep experience. I wrote that. And I don't know, I've ever seen the Surrender Experiment, my second book? Yes.

I shared that experience. And that's when my life started. You know, that's when I woke up, you know, and I realized, oh, my goodness, I've been asleep walking, you know, just driven by desires and knees and fears and so on. And then I tell the story in the Surrender Experiment that I was sitting on a couch, with a friend and I was you said you're nervous I was nervous I was stopped talking but we had stopped talking and there's nothing to talk about and my mind kept thinking I need to say something I was not comfortable the silence is not comfortable all right it's not normal and so my mind kept thinking of the

weather and that sounds stupid what about food we could eat something and that's how stupid and I'm just sitting in there with my mind doing this which you probably did lots of times throughout my life but this time for some reason and I don't even want to explain or know the reason. I don't need to know the reason. I was not being the mind. I was watching the mind. And I realized, my gut, this thing is neurotic. You know, this thing can't even see here for a minute and not say anything, all right? And that's when I woke up. And I started watching it. And just the witness woke up. I don't know how to say it any other way, right? The consciousness was no longer completely associated with the nervousness

and the anxiety that was going on in the mind. It was seeing that that was going on. And that was the end of it. That was it. My whole life changed period. In that very moment, I was never the same period. I'm going to ask a dumb question. Were you on drugs? No. You were sober? Yes. You were just just like just having a day. That's right. And for people who are only listening, my name's face when Michael's describing this is like contorting because she's fascinated with this idea of awakening. And the questions that are running through her mind right now are like, does it happen all at once? Is it just that you begin to realize it, but then the next day you fall back into your patterns and then you build the muscle or like is this an all of a sudden transformation? And now you're only the witness and nothing phases you.

like how does it build from the first witnessing of the fact that you are not your mind to you know how you've embodied it now that's a very beautiful question and the answer is it's different for everybody it's not that there's some scientific occurrence that happens for everybody right it can be any of those things you said so i can only answer like that's not true because now i've been teaching for 50 years so i i haven't interacted with a lot of people and watched a lot of it a lot of the wakening. But basically, in my particular case, it's almost frightening, all right, is I woke up and that was that. I was never going back to sleep. I would never go back into there. I was fascinated by the fact that that was going on. I was earning my PhD in economics at

the time, right? Never finished. But basically, you know, I had my master's, and I was going to be an econics professor. He was being groomed to be an economic professor. That was very good in school, and the chairman of the department was under him. And basically, I woke up and I went to the, what they call the stacks at the University of Florida, the graduate libraries, and I pulled down every single book that Freud wrote that I could possibly get my hands on. Well, I had never taken a psychology course, a philosophy course, a religion course. I was symbolic logics, advanced calculus, you know, that's who I was, all right? And I wanted to know what this wife was. I just, I mean, surely Freud had talked about it. Well, he didn't. He didn't. He analyzed the

mind beautifully. I love Freud. In fact, I am born on his birthday. My birthday is the same with Freud's. I figured that must mean something, right? But basically, I brought it down, read the different, I didn't read, scan through the different books, because it would have stood out if you start talking about that voice talking inside your head. But it did not appear that my friend Sigmund had popped out. He was analyzing other people and did a brilliant job. of analyzing aspects of the mind, the ego, the super ego. You're just analyzing the mind like a scientist, all right? But to be back there watching it, I kept looking to see if he had done that, right?

And so I didn't know anybody. My friends were all in economics and so on. And one day, a friend, I started talking to everybody about that voice. It was my life. It began my life. Have you seen that voice? You know you have a voice? It's like, I don't think it was much fun to be around in those days.

And a friend of mine who was my fellow graduate student in economics, Mark Baldwin was his name. I remember it. I always will. He apparently had been more broadly and educated than me and more at broad interests. And he handed me a book called Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Capul. And they were talking about that voice. It made me cry. I was like, my God, here it is.

Zen is talking about shutting up that voice. It's talking about that voice. It's talking about what happens when that voice. is not talking. That's the whole path. That's their gig. And so I didn't know anybody and I just took the book and I did it. And Zen is not funny. All right. It's sure is Zen and Sur Zen. And I just made myself do it and I started meditating in this and that and the other thing. And then I did that which I don't recommend to anybody. I was so fascinated by that that I said I need to take time aside in my life to focus on this. It may never happen again. I may never have the time.

time again, right? I'll get jobs, all this or that. But right now, I'm in graduate school and I'm going to step aside. And I stepped aside. You went into seclusion. Is that right? Basically, I went into seclusion. Where'd you go? In 1965, when I graduated high school, I went to the University of Florida. I stayed there, all right? And I found a piece of land and 10 acres of land way on the country. And I bought it. I had a little money I left over from my graduate education because I was on fellowship and basically

two friends of mine and I who had not built things before built a cabin but it's not a cabin as a gorgeous house all right of my friends he was a master's in architecture

and so he made a balsam model and I just wanted a little hut but we built this thing and it's still standing and I went into seclusion I'll never forget them I told Tony Robbins once he asked one of the most meaningful moments

of my life when the house got built I was so sincere. All I wanted to do was go way back in there because I had had an experience subsequent to the awakening that really was out. And basically I stopped at the doorway to that house and, you know, like the Buddha, I sat there and said,

I was that sincere, I'm not coming out, tell them out. I'm going to do whatever I need to do to work my way outside of that crazy mind and find out what's beyond that. And so I spent a long period of time doing that. And then I realized that that wasn't going to do it. You know, I was meditating six hours a day, killing myself, whatever it was. But I was still there doing it.

That was when I woke up. I don't know why I was able to do this myself, all right? And basically, I saw that I could not do this through discipline, that I could not do this by just trying because I was the one that was trying. and that just became another neurosis. It's another reason to be upset, another reason to get uptight, another reason to be whatever. And so in the surrender experiment, I explained that and then I don't want to go too deep into that book. I, again, a realization, I realized I need something stronger than me that I have no control over that I surrender to, that I let go so that I don't have to do it myself or listen to this thing.

And I decided that there is something like that in my life, life. it doesn't ever do what I want it just does its thing people do the thing life does its thing and I have always manipulated it or fought with it or cared what it was doing and I decided that the highest way

to do this for myself I don't mean anybody else was to let go of myself by surrendering to life and that's what the surrender experiment is about and what happens subsequent to that leaves my mouth dry I can't even believe it I can't even talk about.

I wrote it in the book. Just all these things unfolded on their own. It was just a total path unfolded. That led me to businesses, it led me to the money, led me to the books, led me to full interactions. Everything never happened because life did it. That's all I can tell you. So I surrender to that.

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membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. Okay. We're going to take it back a second. So, I mean, there's so many things here. So one of the, I've just, I'm going to cry, I think, this whole time. So one of the things that I want to ask about is, um, If you can just clarify a little bit because, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, kind of colloquially refer to like the voice in their head, you know. And we talk about like, oh, you know, you can hear negative, you know, negative things about you and you can trace them back to like, oh, my mom said that or my dad said, you know, those kind of voices in your head. And so obviously anyone who's even, you know, dabbled in simple meditation, you know, there's this notion of like, clearing the mind and not attaching to the thoughts as they come, blah, blah, blah. But what you're talking about is literally, and this is, you know, I mean, I, you know, you really go through it in the untethered soul very specifically, but just for people who may

not know, you're literally just talking about the consciousness that we have, that we exist, which is represented by the thoughts that we have when we're trying to think about nothing. Is that an okay way to describe it? I think the simplest way to describe it is do you notice that sometimes your mind bothers you? Yes. Okay.

You have two directions you can go from there. You can go into psychology and start understanding why the mind does what it does. Or you can step back into spirituality and says, who notices? You just told me you noticed your mind bothers you. That means you're not your mind. You notice a picture.

You notice things, all right? Who notices it? So that's the separation. I'm not my thoughts. You are, how do you know that? Because I'm aware of my thoughts. Okay? I'm aware of my thoughts.

I like to, I don't do a lot of techniques, all right? But yet people think that the way I live is a technique. And they do it and it works, all right? but I didn't develop it like a technique, right? So if I tell you, both of you, right now, inside your mind, say hello over and over again, how do you know it's doing it? Because I'm aware of it. That's right.

And that's where it starts. And by the way, that's where it ends. That's everything. Who are you that's aware of that? Okay. And then you work your way back. And we can talk about how I did that. And people seem to do pretty well with it.

I don't consider myself a spiritual teacher. You know, as a person who's trained as a scientist, but I'm also a very, very emotional. I happen to be a religious person, but I'm also a very spiritual person. You know, one of the things about your writing, which really struck me, is that it is not highly emotional. It is not, you know, it sounds like it was written by someone who was getting a doctorate in economics. And I say that in a very, I say that in non-judgmental way because you use the least amount of words to communicate. Meaning you use the minimally necessary words to communicate concepts. And that is really, it's very accessible and it's very, it's what makes it also feel very heavy.

Because there's no there there about it. You're not offering a warm hug to make you feel okay about existing. You simply do. You exist. You have consciousness and you have then your entire life that is laid out on kind of that template. And that is, I see why you don't consider yourself, you know, a spiritual teacher. However, you know, the information here is really, it's very transformative on a spiritual teacher. deeply spiritual level.

I know you don't want to talk about it and it's okay. We recently spoke to Byron Katie, who also does not talk about what happened before her spiritual awakening. And the reason that it makes me like emotional is because like I want to have it. I would like to have something happen that provides a sense of like clarity that then determines the rest of my life. And I know that that's not everyone's journey. but it's true. I want to know like, you know, were you raised with a religion or you were just like this dude getting your doctorate in economics? And we know what kind of people those are. Those are very by the books numbers, guys. Like, what, I want to know. Like, what were you like? Were you a spiritual child? Were you an emotional kid? You were just like a dude? I can assure you it's irrelevant. It has nothing.

It has nothing to do with the awakening, but there's no foundation for it. And also... But I base my whole life on what happened to me. I know. And that's, like, that is the story. That's the only story, you know, that I have. And I love telling it. Like, I'll tell you all of my misery.

Okay, okay. So what... What is that? Fix that. Well, we know what that is. Basically, the mind is very strong. And one of the things the mind does is develop methodologies or ways of thinking that let it interact with life and not get hurt and be more comfortable. And it's the ego when we develop a self-concept and we change it through our lives.

But in general, there's a self-concept sitting under there saying I was the one that did this and I was the one that went to this school and I'm the one that went there and the one that my father left or stayed or whatever hell it is. excuse me, and basically all of this unfolds and you end up developing patterns of thinking based upon the experiences you've had, all right? And what I'm saying, at least certainly in my experience, is that's not what makes you wake up. That's what keeps you from waking up, all right? The fact that you're identifying with these past experiences and saying that's who I am, well, it's not who you are. You are watching your ego, you see it get upset,

see it fix things, you see it have concepts and views and et cetera, et cetera, and even you're obviously very intelligent. You can use your intellect to support the ego, to support that and so on, right? And yes, you're a very special person, very intelligent person, and therefore that becomes part of your self-concept. Okay? And then you say you're a religious person, part of yourself concept. All of these things are ways you think of yourself. And there's nothing at all wrong with that. It's wonderful. You've been successful. You're happy. You're doing well. All right? I'm not happy.

I'm not doing well. I just said that as I'm supposed to. I'm also like weeping openly at this moment. Okay. But listen to me, right? That identification with your personal self, which is just your mind's thoughts are what keep you from waking up. But I have millions of people that know all these things about me.

I just have to disappear and build a cabin. No, do not do that. Oprah asked me that once. No, I do not recommend anything. I found out. you don't need to do that. Okay, I also used to fast three days a week and eat a salad, the rest of the day. No, I ruined my digestive system. No, I'm so glad I tried that because you don't need to do that. You don't need to do anything like that. You can be married,

you can have children, you can have a career. It makes no difference, no difference. As long as you're willing to notice, it's not you. As long as you're willing to notice that you have going on inside your mind thoughts that are saying this is okay, this is not. not okay. I did good. I didn't do good. And oh my God, I want to get this job and I'd rather do that. You know, it's just deciding, it's talking based on your past experience. All that's based on your past experiences. And you know, what does Skinner say? Right? Man is the sum of learned experiences. No, your mind is the sum of your learned experiences. You're not. You're the one who notices that your mind is a summary of learned experiences. So any way you can do it, by hook, by crook,

whatever it is, can you step back and be willing to watch that you're doing this? I love that you say you're uncomfortable. That's wonderful. Okay, notice that she's uncomfortable. You're not uncomfortable. You who notices the discomfort, I promise you, is not uncomfortable. In fact, it's the most comfortable thing in the universe. But because we project our consciousness onto the part that's uncomfortable or the part that's depressed or the part that's scared, then we identify with that. So spiritual awakening, it really has nothing to do with that. And that's why it's not all tied to your past. Your ego is tied to your past. Your self-concepts tied to your past. But at any point, no matter where you are at any point, you can decide to step back.

I have a beautiful story. I wasn't going to tell it, but I did prison work for 30 years, not because I thought it was supposed to. It just happened. Somebody asked me to go visit someone. They were visiting in prison and blah, blah. The next day I knew I had a class that I was teaching a maximum security prison for 30 years. And the reason I'm telling that is one day I was teaching this class and this really big dude came into the class and I'm on the floor sitting down with maybe 30 students and he walked in and he tried to sit on the floor and he couldn't see it's a cross leg. He was like a big NFL lineman, all right? No no fat. It's serious. At the end of the class he walks up to me. Here's a beautiful story. I'm sitting on the ground and he says,

ha my name's creature and I'm an outlaw well the outlaw is a hell's angel type gang in florida all right and so i stuck my hand up and said hi i'm mickey right that guy got so awakened unbelievable what i i watched him wake up he had held meditation classes in his cell block he eventually got transferred to some other places and somebody just rode me 20 30 years later that they were in prison with him at another place, and he was running meditation centers there and working in the chapel. My God, right? This guy was, he was held for murders, all kinds of stuff had gone on, right?

So it doesn't matter what your past is. What matters is what your present moment is, and are you ready to step back and say, I'm not creature, I'm not a hell's angel, right? And yes, I have that in me. That is how I came up, right? but I am the consciousness that's noticing that and he was able to step back I could I tell there's a chapter in the surrender experiment that talks about him all right and it's just so powerful that someone like that could wake up and just step back

it's amazing so that's the answer the answer is not what was your past the answer is not how do you think of yourself whatever it is can you notice that you're noticing you're back to what they call witness consciousness or mindfulness can you notice that you notice not can I try people try to notice that's ridiculous of course you notice if you look at the wall in front of you do you have to try go on both of you look look at what's in front of you how hard was that that's how hard it is to see what's going on inside of you it's you know it you know it if you say i always tell everybody i can't be a therapist or psychologist you all would fire me instantaneously why

You'd come in, Mickey, Michael, I tell you, I'm so depressed. All right? Ever since my girlfriend or boyfriend left me, I've been totally depressed. I know what I'm going to say to you. I can ask you, how do you know? What do you mean? How do I know? You start get mad at me.

How do you know you're depressed? How do you know you're depressed? Because I feel it. Who feels it? How do you know you feel it? That's always the answer, and that's how simple it is. Are you willing to, instead of getting all caught, up in what you're aware of, paying attention to who's aware of this. And that will wake you up.

The profoundness in the simplicity of what has just been shared to me is like I want to just like put a fence around it so that it doesn't get skipped over by the audience. If you're listening to this right now, I'll go back and listen to the last minute and a half. The key, to most suffering has just been described and it is as easy as he says of you have a feeling most people and the way I see it is most people are sandwiched up to that feeling you know my hands are together for people who are only listening and they're just intertwined with it and they're waiting for that to ride out and they're going on the roller coaster of whatever the emotion is and simply by doing what you described, which is asking yourself to witness it,

I see you begin to create space between the experience and you. And in that space, it becomes less of a roller coaster because you're no longer, and again, I don't have any other way to describe it, but sandwiched or interlocked with it. You're able to say it is happening, but in saying it is happening, you take a step back. I see it in my mind's eye. I see it like a controller, like a video game controller. And it's like a little player way in the back of my head right in the occipital that has like has a visual big screen of everything else going on.

And it sounds simple. And if no one has experienced it before, you don't really understand the lightness that starts to be created for me first in little bits. But the further you get away from the fact that I am feeling so sad. right now instead of feeling this excruciating pain in someone's chest from sadness or depression or whatever it is that noticing makes it feel lighter and then that experience has room to shift and change and transition to whatever it is by not holding it so tightly so you're the spiritual teacher now i understand that's beautiful that's exactly right okay and the more you hang out in what we call the

self you're going to give us some name who's back there all right not George okay and so we'll call it the self atman call whatever you want it's all the soul self out it's all the same thing it's basically what Christ i'm a nice jewish boy like you are like you why am but i love christ teachings okay i love christ teachings he said it's so simple the kingdom is within you and that's what you just said jonathan that it's back here it's within you it's within literally it's within you Like when I ask, are you in there? That's the you Jesus is talking about, right? The soul, the essence.

We make it so mystical. I don't like the word soul because there's so many concepts that go on with that, right? I just want to know, are you aware? And yes, if you are willing to do the work of little by little, doesn't have to be all the ones. In fact, in the new book, you'll see I talk about low-hanging fruit. Take a step back and notice what you're doing. what I favorite lines in the new book is the following.

The moment in front of you is not bothering you. You're bothering yourself about the moment in front of you, correct? So if you notice that I'm driving my car and the driver in front of me is going below the speed limit, I can't pass, and I'm doing all this stuff inside of me, why? What good is it doing? And so if you're willing to say nothing, and I will work with that, I'll do a mantra or I'll say an affirmation, or I'll sing a song. I don't care what you do. Just don't get into the part of you that's neurotic,

the part of you that causes all this trouble. And you're going to find out that what you just said, Jonathan, that the distance gets greater and greater. And the next thing you know, you do it with little things. It's fun. You're right. I like you to see it as a video game. I love that, okay? And you're back here and you're watching. And it's not healthy. You don't eat. I hope you don't. Maybe one should do, but I hope you don't keep eating things that make you sick. We're doing things that, one of the big things in a new book, because I went through business school, I get the right to talk about cost-benefit analysis. That's what we do, right?

And if you're brought an investment or something, an opportunity, and the cost is 100%, and the benefit is zero, I don't think you're going to choose that one, Miami. You're a business person too, all right? So that's what you're doing when you're bothering yourself about stupid things, like the weather, like the driver in front of you. like I think somebody said something that maybe wasn't nice. Now, I mean, give me a break, okay? And then the next thing, you know, you're bothering yourself, yes or no, you bother yourself

about it. And so, or you're doing your job and you didn't do something perfectly. You sometimes, oh, my God, I hope I don't get fired. I wonder who saw that. What are you doing? What are you doing? You're sitting in a planet, spin it in the middle of nowhere is making yourself angst. And then you're wondering why you need a therapist.

You're doing it to yourself. 90% of the time you're doing it for yourself. I mean, yes, are there situations outside that are difficult to handle? Yes, but those aren't. The low-hanging fruit are not. You don't have to make yourself anxious about everything. But the mind will do that.

And in the new book, in Living Untethered, I build the mind. I go to great detail, like you said, by them, to sit there and say, why would my mind be causing me all this trouble? Why would that happen? I told you how I, and I'll do it very simply in just a tiniest amount of sentences.

All right? Is it not true than when something bothers you, you push it away? You don't want to handle it. You don't want to think about it is you push it away. You're storing it inside of you.

It's not going away. You're resisting it. And so it stays there. And you basically have made a collection of everything that ever bothered you inside of you. You do know that, Maya, don't you?

Oh, yeah. Okay? Well, if you collect everything that bothers you inside, I think you're going to be bothered. It's that simple. I swear to God, it's that simple. And so you just get to the point where you sit there and say, well, maybe I should stop doing that.

That's the joke, doctor, it hurts when I do this. So don't do that. That's literally it. Well, basically, we create the mess within our own mind. Our minds, I love your, the fact that you went back and got your doctor and did all that stuff while you were working. I honor that. I respect that tremendously. all right the mind is brilliant and you know your mind is brilliant okay i think everybody's mind is

brilliant i think they're just so caught up in the personal stuff that they can't experience the brilliance of their mind but the mind is brilliant why would you take this brilliant mind and use it to make yourself neurotic it'll do good at it's really it did good at getting your doctorate it will do good at making a neurotic just tell your mind to worry about something and see how good it does it's very good it's a really that's my other my other my other doctorate is in worrying. Okay. But mind, it's the same mind. It's the same intellectual, intelligent mind that's figuring out what to worry about and what to do about it and how you can't fix it and just worries and thinks and does that. Why do that? Why don't you use your mind to fly

the moon or get a doctorate in neuroscience or something like that? So, all right, I've talked too much. No. Jonathan? Again, I don't think it can be overstated. that most people believe that this is just life and their experience and they are caught up in this endless cycle of reactivity where they think something, they think that is real, they feel something based on the fact that they think something, for example, someone said something, I'm disrespected by the fact that someone, they said this thing about me. I then feel insulted. They didn't invite me to, they didn't invite me to this thing or I think she looked at me wrong. I'm just listing all the things that can happen. They spend all this time in analyzing it, trying to think about why they would do

that. It's a huge amount of emotional and creative energy that goes into imagining all these scenarios. All the stories they're telling themselves about that experience, then flood their body with anxious chemicals, and they're gearing up to fight this person, you know, psychologically fight them. They're engaged, you know, we can't tell the difference between real and imagined threats. So we're imagining all of these threats. It's having this very visceral physical response. And we're caught in it. And we think that the only way to adjust that is to create a different external scenario. And you have an amazing example also just in terms of what people are striving for in the book. They want the wedding. They want the car. They want the beach house.

They want all of these external things without realizing that that might not and likely won't give them the peace that they're really trying to strive for in their life. Like my own said, I try to keep things very simple because otherwise it's a mental exercise and that's not what I do. All right. So why do they do all that? And the answer is just they're not okay. If they're okay, they wouldn't be doing that. If you felt love all the time and filled with peace and joy and tremendous great energy, you wouldn't be worrying about things because you already feel wonderful. But it's because you don't that because you don't be okay inside you're doing all this stuff outside to try to compensate so then the question becomes why don't you feel okay inside i already told you because you have

stored every single thing that ever bothered you down to the tiniest little thing that somebody said or did or anything inside of you you stored it inside how do i know i did that because it keeps coming back up you understand that it's obviously still in there and it doesn't want to be in there and that's what i talk about in this book and so basically because you stored every distribution you ever had inside of you, that's why you're disturbed inside. So the answer is not to go out there and try to worry about and compensate how to get something that make you feel better, is to stop storing that stuff in there. I'm telling you, if you don't store that stuff in there, it's beautiful in there. It's incomprehensively beautiful. That's when you get to real spirituality. I mean, literally,

waves of ecstasy, of joy well up inside of you all the time. And any given you see the sky is pretty, you get turned bliss, right? You don't need drugs. You don't need anything. Basically, you're the highest thing I walk the face of the earth. Yoga ghananda, who I follow, a great master, basically said there's a river of joy flowing inside of you. Find it, get in.

There is, I assure you, there's a beautiful energy that is stronger than anything that can come in through your senses. So why are you playing around to keep your problems? and then try to compensate for them. If something happened in your childhood that disturbed you, that was 50 years ago. It's not doing it anymore.

Why is it still disturbing you? My, I'm asking you, why is it still disturbing you? Because you're keeping it in there because you weren't willing to let it go and you're still not willing to let it go. So the answer is, let it go. Is it easy?

No, nothing that's worth achieving is easy. All right? And this is the highest thing you're achieved. Why is it not easy? easy because it was stored with pain, it's going to come back with pain, correct? Are you willing to what I teach, because people ask me to, right, is when it starts to come up, and you know it's coming up, it comes up a lot of times during the day, when it starts to come up, relax. You're going to want to do something, right? I want to do something about it. That's what you do. You relax. No, that's

not intuitive. I want to protect myself. Relax. Relax. Relax your shoulders, relax your tummy, relax your buttocks relax now relax your heart relax relax relax that's all if you will do that you will go way beyond where you think you want to go because what will happen is you won't push it back down it will come up naturally and cleanse and it will pass by you and next thing you know it'll never bother you again i mean i'm not saying to it once it'll never bother you but if you're willing to do this you will purify you will release this stuff that's inside of you and then you'll fill all this beautiful energy that's underneath that stuff. Something that is inherent in what you're saying that I wanted to just articulate,

which is that each of us has a programming and an inherent ability to clear this stored trauma or emotions or whatever it is. And so many of us, I mean, almost all of us, have packed all of these issues in. And we're not really aware that we have a natural ability. you know, like a tree is always trying to get upright, we all are moving towards releasing it. And so when you say just relax, I think it's important for people to know that in that relaxation, there is a natural process that is unfolding that we can allow to happen or we can harness by doing that relaxation and that it is our natural state to be in this bliss and that most of us,

you know, are just disconnected from it. That's beautiful. Because I think a lot of people think that this is like this, you know, there's a, at least when I started trying to do this, and I'm by no means mastered and I don't claim to be, this is 100% our practice for me anyway, that we assume that it like requires some magic or that, you know, when we don't associate that that feeling of discomfort is actually an opportunity to release something. We think that there's something wrong because that's our, we've been trained that, oh, I feel this thing. There is something wrong. I need to fix it. I need to do it. distract myself. I need a pill in order to make it go away. But sometimes it literally is the rising of these stored emotions that we almost, I mean, I don't want to talk about birth because it's not an equivalent, but it is this moving through a discomfort state to know that we are not, we will not break during it. We will not be damaged by it. And actually being able to have that experience of allowing it to move through is the opening that is required in order to feel.

enormous amounts of other sensation. It's like you can't feel the very big highs without allowing the negative emotions that we've stored to pass through us. It's completely true. In the Living Untethered, I explain that the natural energy, spirit, Shakti, Chi,

whatever you want, the underlying energy is trying to flow up. But all this stuff you store is in the way. So it is literally trying to push it up. That's a natural cleansing, just like your body throws out impurities. Your mind is trying to throw out these impurities. And you keep thinking it's bad. You think, no, it doesn't feel good.

Of course, it doesn't feel good. Right? It doesn't feel good when you're cleansing your body either. Okay? You go through people fast and they feel pains all over the place. When you get a massage, you go, oh, oh, there, right there. Why did you say that? Because it hurt. See, you're willing to do it, all right?

This is the massage inside. It's basically saying I am willing, if I keep this stuff inside of me, it's going to be there for the rest of my life. And I have to do all kinds of things to be okay. And I'll be scared. I don't want it inside of me. Then as it comes up, let it go. As it comes up, let it go. Now, people, like you said, people are not used to that.

They're used to, I don't want any pain. I don't want to feel any discomfort. But you are feeling discomfort. You're carrying it around inside of you all the time. So are you willing to do that which really works, which is to say, come on up, come on up. I'll do the best I can. You won't be perfect, but do the best I can to relax while you're coming up. And if you want to, if you're into spiritual things, God and stuff, offer it to God, right? People give flowers to God to give all kinds of things. This is what God

wants. You want your stuff. Okay, if you sit there and take that and say, I'm willing to go through anything to let this go so that I can feel real natural spiritual energy flowing inside of me. That is, that's a very spiritual path. I am, yes, no. Yeah, I mean, it's hard not to, you know, relate this to other spiritual practice that, you know, that I've studied. And I'm not saying this to make you uncomfortable, but this is a very, very, this is a very Jewish mystical kind of set of concepts that resonate with me. around this and there's this kind of notion of, you know, we get very, very attached to, I mean, well, you know, Christianity, you know, introduced a, you know, kind of a concept of salvation and,

you know, what's waiting for us next, you know, and it's one way to approach a life. And what you're talking about is a very, very grounded, like, what's here and now, what's right in front of you and what's in here. Rabbi Salavachicich, who was the father of kind of modern orthodoxy in the United States, like who brought it to United States. You know, there's a famous story that he gathered all his students, you know, one morning and he banged on the table and he said, I've witnessed a miracle, you know, and everybody's like, oh, what happened? You know, what did he see? And everybody's staring at him, like, waiting, like, what did he witness? And he said the sun came up, you know? And just like, that's, you know, that's that notion of, I mean, that's, that's mindfulness, right? It's present,

It's that present notion. But when you were just talking about kind of like giving it over and it's true, like the purpose of sacrifice was it was an OLA. It was an offering that went up. It was it was part of you that is elevated, you know, despite everything that that's here. And so I just, that notion of like turning it over. It's also, you know, it's the imagery and the kind of concepts that 12 step programs use. I think one of the one of the things that keeps coming up for me is and I, you know, I love all the things that John. Jonathan is saying and all the things that, you know, are so deeply meaningful on a spiritual level and also, you know, practically speaking, I'm, I know that a lot of people are very curious. Like if you don't understand things the way Jonathan clearly does, right, or the way that the two of you are able to kind of like communicate, like, I'm kind of, you know, the first thing I think is, obviously you don't need to go live by yourself, you know, to have this. And I, you know, Henry David Thoreau had an entire experience with that as well of a different variety, but, you know, a similar kind of concept.

But I'm kind of thinking like, can you do this and still live a normal life? And, you know, I think of you lived in the world. I mean, you founded a center in 1975, correct? Yeah, the Temple of the Universe. which is a center that you founded the year that I was born, as a matter of fact. And, but you, you did not stay there. You came back down from the mountain, as we say, and you lived immersed in a corporate world. You lived, you, you like did normal people things.

So, you know, the kind of Old Testament version is like Moses went up and he had this experience, but what actually is most valuable is that he came back down and, you know, brought whatever, you know, enlightenment he experienced to people. So what is it like to have the kind of awareness that you had and then also still be in the regular world? Because you're, like, how do you maintain that? Like, practically speaking. I was CEO of a public corporation, went through all kinds of stuff.

I see no difference between being in the temple of universe, whatever it is, and I found it kind of people started coming out there so it happened that's how my whole life is right i never decided to do anything i just followed the energy like i was saying i'm there doing services you know meditating whatever it is and different events unfold the one particular one that i tell in the surrender experiment is a sheriff came out to the land and i was barefoot a hippie you know walking around my land and he walked up to the temple building that we built which i was a little concerned, you know, has Krishna and Jewish things and has all the different religions represented. And he's all dressed up in his officer uniform and pulls his big car up there.

And I'm walking around barefoot, no shirt on. And he says, you in charge here? Okay. Yeah. I guess I am. He says, did you build this building? He said, yes. He said, would you build an addition on my house? I swear to God, that's exactly what happened. And because I was surrendering to life, nothing inside of me wanted to build, clothes in the garage of this sheriff, all right? It's like, I'm not even a builder.

I built a couple of buildings on my own land, you know, roughsaw and timber, etc. And I said yes. And that founded my first company, built with love. And they ended up building custom houses and this and that. And then I got into computers. And the next thing I knew, people were asking me to write computer programs.

And I never took a course of my life. I just started writing, I found it interesting. Like you find stuff interesting and bought a TRS80 Model 1 when Radio Shack first came out with a little tiny computers, all right? And wrote an accounting program to run built with love. And then people wanted to buy the program. That's literally how this company started. And so I said, okay, I guess. And then start surrendering.

And then I got to write this and write that and do this. And eventually somebody asked me to write a medical building system. And I didn't even go to the doctor in those days. And I'd never seen an insurance form of my life, all right? And I took it and I did it. I did it. And it became this major company, you know, with 2,300 employees and public and the whole ballgame. And so I just had to do it.

I just did it. Well, while I was doing it, I didn't change. I didn't say now this is what I'm doing. Now this is a wonderful opportunity to let go of me. Like, you can bet you know for sure. You can bet that being in that environment. I mean, literally, I'm on earning calls with Wall Street. Give me a break, all right?

I can't relate to any of it. But I'm doing my best. I'm serving and working hard, doing everything as an act of letting go of myself and serving the universe. I never, it wasn't about business, it wasn't about this, the other thing. But you do that, you try as hard as you can and just try to serve everybody. And you can do pretty well. And so we were very successful.

But so it's not like I had two lives, you know, the meditative, quiet, spiritual life and this business life. No, no, they were the same thing. I was doing the same thing every day. I literally, I give suggestion of the book to people can do that. I'm a CEO of a corporation running this stuff. Every single time, my secretary buzzed in there and said, so-and-so was on the call. Before I picked up that phone, I stopped. It only takes a second.

I dared him to stop and let go. You know, I do, I'm sitting, for 50 years, I remind myself, I'm sitting on a planet, spend in the middle of an empty space. You want to know why? Because I am, all right? And it's so tiny. I love telling that story. Do you know that 1.3 billion Earths fit inside the sun?

You know you're small, but you know that small, okay? All right? and the sun is one of 300 billion stars, all right? And one galaxy, and there's two trillion galaxies, can you stop for a moment and remind yourself what is really going on? And I would do that before I pick up the phone. And I want to hang it up, I'd do the same thing. That will wake you up so fast.

So you ask, how do you stay centered while you're doing all this? Because you stay centered. You decide that's what my life is about, and this is really good growth. You hear me? This is good growth. And if you read the surrender experiment, the last whole section, you'll see there was a serious growth. And basically, you just go through it. Why? Because you have to. Life gives it to you. Remember, I surrender to life. Life's my guru. Life's my teacher. And it strips you away. In the last 50 years, like, are there times when you lose it? Like, I am so far from perfect. I am better than I used to be, okay? And I don't have the tendency now for that to happen because the consciousness is way back, it's back. It's okay, all right? But during those years that I go through my stuff, absolutely. Okay? And, you know, it was funny. It was a great saint from India called Ramakrishna, Sri Ramakrishna. And it was fully enlightened, very, very high being. And they asked him once, his disciple asked him, does an enlightened master

ever feel anger? And they were shocked by his answer. He said, yes. He said it's like riding on water. As it happens, it goes away. And that shot we were just talking about, right? Things happen, they come up, and you let them go. So he was that evolved to where if a situation would happen that would have caused a problem with somebody, he felt it, and it passed through.

And you're going to understand the same thing. He said, I'm not different than any other man. I have the same drives. They have the same things. They just go through. I just don't hang out with them. They just pass through. I'm curious how you would approach this because some people when you say surrender, they say,

well, I shouldn't have any wants or desires. I should just sort of give my will to a way to other people and just do what they say versus, you know, be self-directed. And so if two people are in a situation and, you know, there's a standoff, one person wants one thing, one person wants another, neither are going to budge, but they're sort of, you know, you can't move forward without some form of agreement. What are the principles that can be applied that the surrender experiment would suggest that you're not sort of budding heads, but you know that you don't want to give your will over to someone else? All right. So I haven't thought of this, but you made me think of it. I will give an example. I can recall sitting at my desk in charge of the company talking to,

you know, Smith Klein or some large lab company because I was in medical, medical software. and they wanted to use my software to tie their labs in. It doesn't matter what it was. But I'm talking to their head guy, you know, senior vice president, this and that. And I think that I'm having a rational conversation. Okay? And I sit there exactly just described. This guy was trained to be at age, right?

So basically, we're sitting there and I say, well, we can do this. You know, if you'll do this and so on. And first he puts down his, this is what I want. This is what I want. And I said, well, okay, we can work. with that and we'll do this and that and that and he says oh great that's perfect that's perfect I feel like I'm getting somewhere and all of a sudden we say okay what are we gonna do and he goes right back to what he said originally just I mean he was

trained that way okay literally exactly what I thought we just had a conversation right so I do it again I just let go okay don't get upset don't do anything let go and I did it again he did the same thing three times just right back he did not budge one single drop, okay? And so I sat there and looked at it, and I had to let go of the frustrated part of me that didn't understand what's going on and realized we're not going to get any worse, okay? This is the game he wants to play. I'm not going to get upset. I'm going to do anything. And just said to him, if you want to do something together, when you're ready, come back and talk to me, because obviously you're not ready. And that was it. And guess what happened?

Somebody else came down later, and we got this big contract that was way, from anything he ever talked about. It just wasn't the right time. And you gave it the time and the space, but you didn't get upset about you and take a personal. Fair enough. That's how you deal. That's how I've learned how to deal with things. You let go of yourself. That's what surrender means. Surrender doesn't mean surrender to him. Surrender doesn't mean not do what you're supposed to do, okay? Surrender means there's a part of me that can't handle what's happening right now. Well, if I can't handle it, then I can't handle it. I don't have the right to handle it because I can't. I'm not the right person for the job because I just said I can't handle it.

So first, handle it. You have to be able to handle what's happening because it's happening. Then decide when you're clear what's the best way to go forward. And it may be there's no way to go forward. Then that's the best way to go forward. So you're not all caught up in desires or needs or fears or anger or frustration. You're clear. Does that answer you?

Yeah. No, it makes total sense. and often the timing isn't right, the situation, the timing, and a lot of people have an expectation, myself included all the time. This is actually my biggest thing lately is when is the timing right? Just because I think I want something to happen or I think I need something to happen, pushing it through or trying to exert will to make it happen won't necessarily make it happen. Right. And that goes into a whole other discussion of where did you get the idea of what you want and who says that has anything to do with what's supposed to happen.

Michael, there's not enough, there's not enough time in this, in all of the galaxies to uncover the answer to that question for Jonathan. There's so many assumptions that we're all operating with. And we think that, you know, it feels real that something is urgent, something needs to happen. But unpacking that is huge and letting go of that changes motivations for. For sure. I try to touch that in a new book. I don't know how many people are willing to open up enough to comprehend the following.

At any even moment, I'm going to think, at any even moment you're having an experience. Like right now, you're having an experience, right? And you're learning from that experience. You've become a greater person, you've met me, you've been here at Jonathan, all this stuff's going on, right? What I want to know is at this exact moment, how many experiences are you not happy that are going on simultaneously. Come on, you're smart. Come up with the number. I mean, infinite. Infinite, that's the right answer, all right? Therefore, you only know the nothing of the tiny,

statistically insignificant amount of experience that you're having. And that's happening every moment. So, Jonathan, you don't know anything. And all of your desires and preferences and concepts and views are based on the data you took in during those nothing moments. I am, you see that? Yeah, absolutely. So how can we know anything? If you had had a different experience, you'd be different. You'd think differently, wouldn't you?

Throughout your life, every moment. If your boyfriend was different at high school, every single thing, right? I think like that. I hold Michael to the point that, remember. that you don't know anything. You think you do and you think you're right because everything you picked up, which is nothing, fits perfectly in the way you think because that's the data you have. Okay. And that's one view on the right and the other view is that people work so hard to reinforce all the things that they know to justify their knowledge base and then try to apply that to

the world instead of saying, I know very little and I'm not sure what should happen. You start with truth. We're talking about truth. What I just said was the truth. It's a difficult truth and people don't want to hear it. That really doesn't fit the ego at all. That I don't know anything. But by definition, you don't because you missed everything and you only stored the nothing that you experienced and a whole bunch of nothing rounds to zero. It's frighteningly true, isn't it? And then people stand there and do what Jonathan said and sit there and say, I know what's right. No, I know it feels right. I know you had that experience. But now look at all experiences you didn't have. And if you had, if a born-again Christian, right, had gone to a Hindu temple

and gotten enlightened, they would be different. A different experience, right? So that's what, like I said, by what, I really like that you're known to be very intelligent. You obviously went through neuroscience, et cetera, et cetera. Why don't we use our mind to think like this? That's a very intelligent way to think. Well, because it's not, it doesn't have instant gratification. I mean, it feels good to blame things on other people. You don't have to look at yourself.

I mean, like, honestly, but that's what a lot of interactions are, you know. And one of the greatest challenges, you know, of, I think, the human experience. is being in partnership, you know, with an other. And that doesn't always have to be a romantic, you know, conversation. But there's something that Jonathan sent that I actually was going to be kind of my next set of questions. And, you know, I instantly think of these principles that you're talking about and what it was like being a parent, you know, to small children. because that was an environment of extreme stress and tension. And, you know, I lost a lot of my, I mean, I gave away a lot of my sanity, you know,

because of really not having this kind of grounding. But if you don't mind, you wrote it, so I'm sure you don't mind humoring us for one second. So this is from your new book. If you're in a relationship, the other person has lots of patterns of their own, quite different from yours. This is why relationships are so complicated. And you give a good example. If somebody yelled at your partner at work, they're different when they come home than if someone hadn't yelled at them at work. This is something, you know, that I have a lot of feelings about that because we do. We carry everything that have, I mean, we carry it to our kids. You know, it's with us.

And what you say is don't get scared. All this doesn't mean you don't have meaningful relationships. There are beautiful relationships and they can last forever. In fact, they can get more and more beautiful all the time. And you talk about somsara. Am I pronouncing it correctly? They're not based on the world outside matching your inner patterns. They're based on unconditional love. Once love is always flowing freely inside of you, you will be pleased to share it with another person. Such love is not based on needs or expectations. It's based on pure love wishing to express itself. unconditionally. And you ask, how do you reach such a state of unconditional love and well-being? Instead of trying to get the world to match your blockages, you work on letting go of the blockages.

And that is the secret of real spiritual growth. That is the real paradigm shift. So, I mean, this is incredibly powerful. And I would like to know you, you know, love comes up a lot. did you choose to partner with someone in your life? Did you have a traditional relationship? Are you a dad? I am a dad and a grandfather three times over. Wow. And I've been married 45 years or something.

And so, yes, I love that I can point to that also. Okay. And our relationship from the very beginning was founded upon the fact that we were both trying to let go of ourselves. So not everybody has that fortune, okay? So Donna had moved out, was living in a little hut next to where I was up the hill, and basically we ended up falling in love and being together, but basically we both very much wanted to follow this path,

and we gave ourselves the room to do so. And the entire foundation of our relationship is based on, I'll try to let go myself to best of my ability and you try to let go yourself the best of your ability and I think she's done better than me but basically

she's beautiful she's beautiful she's radiant just always glowing just filled with love and so on right very very beautiful but she did so by letting go of herself

you know by by bothering to say I'm committed to the life that is in front of me and I will do my best to let go and it was hard not necessarily the relationship aspect but just our lives.

You know, lives are, you have to let go. If you let go of yourself, life is easy. Life is easy. This is so silly. You're sitting on a planet for a handful of years, and it's a beautiful planet. I mean, God, look at this planet, all right? We've been, Mars has nothing.

Would you rather be on Mars or Jupiter or Saturn or Pluto or anywhere? There's nothing. We haven't found anything. Give humans a couple more years, and it might look a little more like those planets. Yes. But the net result is you just look at it that I should be able to handle my few years on earth, which is beautiful, and have fun and be happy. I don't need to make this mess inside myself.

But there is the tendency, well, as I said, you don't want to feel disturbance and things happen in life that are disturbing. So let them go if they're disturbing. Why do you want to keep them? That's the silliest they ever heard of. Okay, okay, I'm super-duper with you. but I want and I want to ask I'm not trying to be a jerk but I want to know I'm assuming you raised children in this all in this emotional environment as well like you didn't then have children say like you do as I say you know not as I do like I'm assuming you you brought this to you

can bring this to parenting of right of course of course so what are those children like are they enlightened beings? First of all, I had one daughter. Okay, one. Is she an enlightened being? Like, did you figure out the formula for raising the perfect human? I didn't even ever think about it. That's not, I never thought of the business.

I never thought about being a teacher. I don't, you're going to get it from your mind, right? Ram Dass's one said, you're not going to think your way through life. That doesn't do it because the only data you have is this nothing you've picked up. And your mind is going to keep telling you, I know, right? So the way I always looked at it is, if I'm willing to let go of myself, to the best of my ability, I'm not perfect, right? But if I'm willing to let go of myself, then that which is greater than me can be the parent, right?

I don't want her. I wouldn't want her to have to deal with what's left of me, all right? So basically, keep letting go, keep letting go, and then interact. You know, help with school, it's this, or has a problem, whatever it is. but don't do it from the personal point of view. And you have to be willing to even say, your children are not, your children, your children are not your children. Right?

That beautiful, right? They come through you but not for you. And so basically, if you let go of yourself, I teach people who have trouble with children, they come and talk about it. And I said, you're making yourself neurotic by trying to think how to perfectly bring up this child. Why don't you get out of the way and let God be the parent?

Because that's what's left when you're out of the way. Man minus mind equals God. God. Okay? So if you keep letting go of yourself, you're letting a greater part of your being be the parent. What's wrong with that? And she turned out beautiful. She's beautiful. She's beautiful. Does she live in a spiritual community? No. Is she married with three children and a beautiful husband? Yes. You know, do they, they apparently live a normal life and they're very happy and the kids are happy, right? But I know her, right? She imbibed the teachings. We need. We need to never made her come to the temple. We never made her meditate. I never, I don't know if I ever taught

to meditate. Okay. In fact, I remember, I shouldn't tell the story. I remember one moment where one of the spiritual teachers, the saints came through and gave her Mala beads, right? Gavees a set of malabedes. And she was young, I don't know, 14, 13 years old. And I walked her in a bedroom, and she's sitting there, and I said, do you know what to do with those? I shouldn't tell the story. She said, well, I think I do. Because they do. I think they do. And so I showed her. how to turn a mullah, right? And I walked out of the room, and I walked back in a little bit later.

Her eyes are turned up. She's in complete peace, all right? And she says, is this right? Yeah, that's really good. So they're natural. You know, just, I didn't force anything on her, right? Period, nor did Donna. So, and, but she grew up in a beautiful environment, right?

You grew up with loving parents. She grew up with nobody laying a trip on her head and et cetera, et cetera. But she was like a hippie child could do whatever she wanted, right? You know if you will let go of yourself, you know what to do. You can almost be sure that what you're coming up with is your mind because of your fears and your anxieties. How do you're like, I literally people tell me, I've had a person tell me, I don't want to have children because I'm afraid I'll screw them up. Man, what an attitude, all right? Just use the child.

to help let go of yourself. Use the business to let go of yourself. Use the relationship to let go of yourself. If you're willing to use all of these things to constantly relax and release your ego, your personal silly self, right, that thinks it knows everything, you're going to do much better, much better because you let go of the problem. There is trust in a larger plan, call it the universe, call it some force of nature that helps guide all of our lives, and a trust in our own knowing beyond the mind. Most people are so conditioned to listen and look to the mind for answers, saying don't do that or saying, let, you know, witness the mind instead of being in direct relationship to

it or with it means that there is another knowing that we have that we potentially have not experienced or is unfamiliar to us, which I think can scare a lot of people? Well, I like how simple my teachings are. I'll tell you the truth, right? Because I don't ask people to believe in that or do anything like that. Okay. And when I talk about mind, as we talk about letting it go, I'm talking about the personal mind. There is a purely intellectual aspect, abstract aspect of the mind, that which went out and studied neuroscience. okay it's brilliant it's brilliant it's brilliant it created spacecraft it flew the moon it split the atom it founded it found this quantum field i mean my god i'm speechless all right i'm not talking about

that mind when i say let go with the mind that's pure that's pure intellectual mind it is what the mind is good at it's what it's meant to do when you take that pure intellectual mind and instead of saying develop air conditioning and find drugs that can fix people you know healing and so on you tell it find out what i can do to be happier okay you it's like an ingrown toenail you make your mind focus on yourself all the time that's what builds the personal mind okay that mind you know let go of it doesn't mean you're not left with a tremendous power that can help solve things you you do bring that in it's just this part of you that's not what happened is the mind it's stored all this you store all this stuff in your mind that's not okay

And now you're as an intellectual mind, figure out what everybody else needs to do and what has to happen every day for me to be okay. That's the problem. Okay? So when you're letting go of the problem, I don't think it takes that kind of faith that there's something greater, right? You're just letting, I know that this is a problem. So if I let it go, it's going to be greater because I let go with the problem. Let go with the anchor. How's that?

So it's very, very solid, very grounded, okay? This kind of writing takes a tremendous amount, I would imagine, a tremendous amount of energy and work and thought and editing. Did you always think that you would keep writing? Did you write untethered soul and feel like, all right, I'm done. I don't need to do anything else. I guess I'm, I mean, what I said to Jonathan, you know, when we were talking about your new book, I said like, if I were Michael Singer, if I had written this book, I would be like, I don't have to do anything else in this world because I wrote this. I wouldn't want to write anything.

I would just like, I would just live in peace forever. Is there a feeling of, oh, there's more to say that I collect in a certain way and that's what sort of drives that? Do you have other things that you think to, I mean, I kind of want like an untethered soul for every aspect of my life. like untethered soul if you work in, you know, psychology, untethered soul if you're a chemist, you know. How does that sort of, how does it work for you when you think about what to write? I don't. I hit to say, I feel embarrassed. I don't do that. I don't live life at that level.

I do what's put in front of me and it unfolds and I always know what to do. That's all. I just, but it's not a thought process either for money. I've never done anything for money or for for pride or for this or for fame or for success and like that. It's just sort of like, give me a job, universe, and I'll do the best I can. All right? And that, I can explain it. I'm going to do it now, but each one of those books, each one of them unfolded in a very natural way, and then I put my whole soul and heart into it, and then look what it did.

Look what it did, right? Oprah asked me, interviewed her a few weeks ago, is, did you have any idea of the untethered soul? would have the impact that it did. You know, so three million copies, all these people. Of course not. One, I never thought of it or even thought to thought of it. You understand that? Like, the ultimate is like when I wrote that computer program.

I was just sitting alone in a room by myself taking a tiny little, there were no books then. Okay, literally, you can go in any store you want. You never have a computer programming book. There was no such thing, all right? You just got this little manual, like one page, a code. I don't talk about it. for kids, all right? And I figured out, all right, I'm playing. Did I think that this would become a Pillar guitar company or something like? That's ridiculous.

I would never think about it. I would have got scared. I wouldn't have done it, right? And you just do what's in front of you with all your heart and soul, and that's good enough. There's no thought of reward or fruits of your labor. Then you don't have to worry about anything. You're just doing what the universe gave you to do. How do you know? Because it's in front of me. And that, I know people get scared, but they don't understand that. But that's how my life has been lived. And look what happened. Jonathan, do you have anything else?

I mean, I'm just writing down the quote, do what's in front of you with all of your heart and soul. I'm like, also, then my mind is like, does he have a schedule? He clearly has a schedule because he showed up here today. So he books things on his calendar. But that becomes part of it. There's part of doing your best is there may be an assistant. There may be a scheduling. We have to hire somebody, right?

It just unfolds. That's all I can say is... It's funny, Jonathan and I were talking yesterday. He was... He's at a point in his life where he has a lot of decisions that he has to make, can make, has the opportunity to make. And one of them was... He was thinking about purchasing a house.

I'm just going to say it. He was thinking about, you know, should he, shouldn't he? And I had a little bit of a Michael Singer moment, I think, because, well, because he was very, you know, he was very in his head about it. And he was saying, you know, he was saying things like, I feel like I don't have enough information to even know what information I need to make the decision with the information, you know. And he was saying, like, no one knows my story and all the intricacies of the things that I need

and want but me. And, you know, you can speak to a realtor and they know part of your story. And you can speak to a financial advisor and they know part. You can speak to your father. and he knows part of you, right? And what I said to him is that at a certain point, you can sit in indecision forever. You can sit there forever.

And you can wait. And at another point, it's all going to be okay anyway. And what I said is I wouldn't take every single dollar you have and put it into a house, but you can do something that is not the end of the world either way. and every other decision then will roll from there. But until you take that first step in faith, right, knowing that there's a staircase, even if you can't see it all,

then you can sit in that place literally forever. And that's that paralysis that many people experience, you know? It's that fear of not, it's like you said, it's the fear of not raising the kid right. It's the fear of buying the wrong house, you know. And it's funny, there's certain, you know, certain parts of me where I'm always like, I don't care where I live. Find me a house. I'll make it my own. Like, I literally don't, you know. So there's so many things, though, to sit in deliberation about.

Anyway, just don't want you to think that Jonathan is always this enlightened soul. I could send him to you and you could just have a field day with this one. But he is very, very, very much a spiritual teacher of mine. So it's really special also to get to talk to both of you. Because as we, told you this book is very special to us and um yeah it's just um it's very overwhelming to get to speak to you and um you know to be in in your presence because i just it's um there's so many things about the way not just that you think and the things you've experienced but again the way that you communicate them that um just really it pierced something it really broke something that really something open for me. And yeah, I can't say it was as powerful as what happened to you in

1970, 71, but, you know, I'm only, I'm only 46. It's so beautiful because everything you go through, like Jonathan, it's decision-making. What you want to do is say what's behind the anxiety. So when people talk, I don't help people make decisions, but we talk about decision-making is the first thing that matters is what's your motive, not what should you do? How can you figure what to do if you don't even know your motive, right? And you became the spiritual teacher with every word you said about this, which is start from the point of view, do I want to get a house or not? Well, okay, yes, I'd like to have a house, right?

Can I afford a house? Don't worry about what house. What's your motive? It's very simple. You know, it's just, I'm just on to express myself and have a house and that's that. And then stop there. Don't say it has to be a certain way.

When it's all said and done, if you're afraid of making the wrong decision, who defined it as wrong? You? Well, then don't. That's what I was saying, right? If you don't define it as wrong, I was a builder.

Okay, you know, before my personal product, before the program company, I did build with love with my company. I built this house for this beautiful lady, all right, who happened to be the manager of the local bank

and her name was penny dollar I swear to God her name was penny dollar right this was a long time ago back in the 80s and basically she once came to me and sat there and said I'm so scared I said look I'm going to build

a beautiful house for you we've got it everything fine so I stay up in nights I can't sleep what are you worried about isn't it turning out night I'm afraid listen to this I'm afraid that I will build the house and that I'll go a plug in a lamp and the cord won't reach the outlet.

Wow. Thank you. I said, that's why they make a stedgy cord. I was going to say that's why they make therapists. But yes. What I'm saying is like that that was the framework. I mean, look, I grew up in post-Holocast neuroses. Like it literally was served to me for breakfast, you know, with the milk that I was allergic to and no one knew.

But that kind of thinking, that's like, that's literally, that's what I was bred in. Yes. You know. But what I'm saying to Jonathan is, don't let your mind do that, right? Let your mind say, wouldn't it be fun if the outlet doesn't reach and I can support the extension cord companies, right? Or I can get a lamp with a longer cord, right? Or whatever. Don't let it say.

Don't let it say that there's. there's a way that you'll call wrong. You're the one who called it wrong. Do you understand that? That's right. You don't have to do that. Otherwise, your mind will go crazy, trying to make sure you figure all your preferences

and how to meet them. And who says they're the same, right? All kinds of preferences come up and you make your mind and then you change it. Don't do that. Just sit there and say, okay, I'm going to build a house. I'm allowed to build a house. I got some funny money for the house.

Like my mom said, don't spend all of it. It would be reasonable. Just be reasonable. There's no absolute answer. And then make it be reasonable. right by working with yourself. I love it. I love it.

Well, don't you notice that the paint didn't, I didn't think I would like it? I love it. I just love that it doesn't match on those bedrooms. Oh my God, every time I go in, it turns me on. You get to do that. You're the one who decided it's wrong.

Just don't decide it's wrong. And some people say, you don't get to do that. Yes, you do. It's your house. It's your mind. It's your life. And you can make it beautiful by not making it ugly.

You understand that. So decisions aren't hard unless you're trying to feel that they satisfy all your desires and all your fears and all your preferences. Remember the Third Zen Patriarch? The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. It isn't. My own. Oh, I love it.

That's the greatest teacher that ever lived in Thirds in Patriarch, right? He wrote something called The Treaters on Faith Mind. That's the first line. The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. If you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. That was Bob Dylan, the other great prophet. One final question. What is your middle name? Alan. Alan. Michael Allen. A-L-A-N, yes. Really such an honor, such an honor to speak to you, and I hope we were more interesting than Oprah.

And you ask beautiful, deep questions. And you don't look for that awakening. I don't like when people look for a spiritual experience. What matters is your spiritual state, not just spiritual experience. And the only reason you're not in the highest state right now is because you're paying attention to these anchors that you're holding inside of you. All right?

And if you would just daily be willing to just, okay, fine, she didn't like that, okay, she didn't like that, let go. Practice letting go. You're going to find out that your spirit will soar and that's higher than a spiritual experience. It's a spiritual state. All right.

Thank you. Amen. Thank you. Mr. I say things and Michael Singer says I'm a spiritual teacher. You must be feeling. How about that sound bite? You must be feeling pretty good about yourself. No, I'm not. It wasn't me. Oh, I see. Oh, this is got it. Okay. New Jonathan. Great. I guess we have nothing to talk about then.

What we have to talk about is the fact that we don't talk about our problems anymore. We don't talk about anything. We don't talk about anything. We just witness our problems. Everything's fine. I've never going to therapy again. fee. I'm going to throw away all my pills and see what happens. All of your stored stuff will just come up because you're not suppressing. No, and I don't mean to, I don't mean to belittle also, you know, kind of what his approach is and what he's talking about.

And it is a process, though. And the notion is not, and, you know, we didn't, we didn't specifically cover this. But the notion is not like you don't have to work on yourself. The notion is not that he can, he believes he can cure. schizophrenia or, you know, he's on a very, this is a very different level of conversation that applies kind of, you know, to everyone in terms of a way to approach understanding, in particular, you know, he calls them neuroses. But, you know, the things that this kind of consistent thinking and practice helps with is things like chronic anxiety, is things like depression that's not just like feeling blue for a day or so, but constitutional kind of depression, major depressive disorder, things like that. I instantly am thinking of like the people I know who are like super

anxious, like everything indicates that they're super anxious. But, you know, many people don't, they also don't want to go to therapy. They're just like, give me a pill. Like, make it go away. And also, I'm not passing judgment on that. But this is not. necessarily made for those people. This is made for people who really want, I mean, he said it's very hard work. What did he say? You know, your memories, they go in with pain. They're going to come out with pain. And sometimes people need support to understand that process because it can feel so intense. I believe everybody needs support to understand that process. And, you know, especially with trauma work and things like that, you know, we are relational creatures. So it often is

important to have really a partner, you know, kind of witness. that process. That being said, you know, this is a book that you do not go through in a day. The only thing I can compare this to is the deepest, like the most difficult, challenging ancient Jewish texts that I have read have this kind of mental energy that it requires, meaning sometimes a page is enough. Like, to truly read it, to truly ask yourself every sentence, do I understand this? Is this resonating? It's exhausting. I mean, this isn't, again, this isn't something you do like at the end of a day like, I just had a shit day. Better pick up this and I'll feel better. This is a, this is really, it's a life approach.

And I'm just like so in awe of his journey and just how I just have a million questions. And, you know, I was very, very overcome, you know, getting to, like, see him and hear him speak and just like, you know, I feel like I'm in the presence of someone with tremendous wisdom, like tremendous presence. You can feel it talking to him. No, just on Zoom, the way that he just looks and just his way of being. I mean, it's hard to describe except for it feels significantly different. to sit in his presence, even on Zoom, than other people. Yeah. What do you think about this idea that we inherently have access to this unbridled joy

and, you know, ecstatic feelings that we're capable of as our natural state of being? I mean, look, as someone who has struggled with a lot of things, it doesn't, it doesn't feel, it doesn't really feel, like intuitively logical to me, meaning from my experience, but like, what's my experience? It's just my perception of the experience. But yes, I will say that the moments in my life that have tapped into that, I call upon the birth of my second child where I, you know, was alone until pushing. And I had an incredibly intense and enormously ecstatic experience. And like that feeling, it's the closest that I can tell to when he describes what it feels

like to not even like experience love. It's just you are love and it's just like welling up. So I'm not expecting to feel that every day all the time. But I have experienced, you know, people have seen me laugh till I cried and peed my pants here with you, like there's a source of, you know, a certain kind of connection that you can have with other humans, you know, that makes you feel like you're outside of the realms of like the normal descriptions of an experience, you know? I've seen you in nature having similar experiences where on a lake, kayaking, being in

nature, being around waterfalls where you're just, you know, I'm not saying it's your second and child birth experience, but it's a level of emotional... We all have a deep capacity for that. Like, I don't think that I'm special in that way. And I think that's what, you know, what Michael would say. I call him Mickey now. But, yeah, we do. We have that capacity.

And I think for me, if we're talking about me personally, which you just went there, yeah. I mean, we both went there. Yeah, when you take me out of my computer, my schedule, my, the things that I allow to make me nuts because I, you know, I give my serenity away on the daily. Yeah, I can have a vet. But then I also feel like, but I have to go back to the real world. I can't live in this waterfall forever.

And then he like ran this gigantic company and like, look, it's amazing. He's amazing. I brought up the nature because I think it's important to reset an expectation. It's not like, oh, you have to go do mushrooms to be out in nature. Like you can have an awe-inspiring experience simply by existing and that we're capable of that. And then in terms of his company, I just think that re-framing his expectations. It's not like I'm getting on a call to make a deal. It's getting on a call and like I don't know what to expect because I know.

There's so much I don't know. And that level of being humble and in awe of what I, it sounds to me, universe beyond himself. I find fascinating and like I definitely am going to start to use little bits of this. Like I'm going to go back in this interview and I'm going to listen for those sound bites because the words of wisdom that he shared, like I'm taking notes feverishly. And just by incorporating some of them, getting on a meeting and remembering the insignificance of what I'm about to do makes the reaction or interactions that I may find difficult so much less difficult because they're, I change it from this is the most important thing in my day to like,

oh, this is generally insignificant and that everything is going to be fine. Another thing is like when you were talking about the house, I was in this constant like trying to figure it out in my mind. And he's like, you can't figure it out in your mind. And one of the things that you said to me, which really helped, was like it doesn't sound like it's time to make that decision. If it's so fraught with all of this like unknowing, then I could figure out an entire plan,

but that doesn't mean that that's the time to make the plan. Totally. And also, you know, while being present is extremely important, you know, Michael, when we were just talking as an example, you know, about like buying a house, he's like, you know, be reasonable, right? And so, you know, being reasonable is part of an entire decision. And as I said to you, when you think about buying a house, it's not just buying a house. It's all of the, I mean, it's a million things. And, you know, there are many days, you know, where I think like, gosh, I see why sometimes people don't want to, you know, be this kind of adult.

You know, I'm just being honest. Like, sometimes adulting is really hard. and it's dumb and I'm not even talking about owning things or like first world problems like my garage door broke the other day like yeah that's kind of a thing that needed to get handled right um but you know the other part of me which is like I could just devote my life to like studying this book and until I get it right I don't want to reenter the world you know it's like I want to like and part of why this is an emotional episode is because like of course you Where does my mind go? I've wasted so much time. If I Byron Katie it, is that true? No, it's not true. But I want it to be true.

Can we put Byron Katie and Michael Singer in the same room and have a conversation? They're the same person. He puts on a different wig. Just in different forms. Well, I mean, we have now spoken to two human beings who have had profound, profound. And by profound, I mean like transformative. Profound spiritual awakenings. They will not talk about what they were like before. Both of them said the same thing actually. They're like, it doesn't matter. And you went in,

you're like, I really want to know. Your mind was like, I need to figure out what it was about his childhood that primed him for this experience. I'm just like, I'm just so curious. Like, I mean, like, what if you were to find out, um, you know, that he, well, he told us he's, well, he's Jewish. You know, what if you were to find out that he was raised like super, super religious, like orthodox, like had never met a Gentile, you know? Like, then that would be also interesting to be like, oh, he was in college as this, like, cloistered, like, you know, person separate from other things because, like, he's not part of,

you know, whatever. Like, that would be interesting to me. Or maybe he was raised by, you know, total hippies. And, you know, but you're right. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he was primed for it because it's true. That's just looking for a place of comparison. And that was the question I wanted to ask him and then you cut me off and that made me cry.

I wanted to know what other texts he studied in his earth because there's clearly like it's very Eastern philosophy. Like, no, he's very, I mean, that's what he's studied. So it wasn't just the yoga and meditate. That's the thing that I was worried about that people would get from this episode. Like he had this spiritual awakening like, good for him. And then he's just like this like genius person who like, you know, writes a little. these books and he's amazing. No, this is a person who he studied. He continued studying and reading. He doesn't just like know all these names of these gurus and masters. He studied them.

Like he read text. He dug in deep. And it's Eastern, I mean, it's, I don't want to say exclusively Eastern philosophy because there's also, there's a tinge of, you know, Jewish mysticism in there. But yeah, a lot of Eastern, it's Eastern. Like he started with Zen Buddhism. Do you feel comfortable talking a little bit about when you said you wasted all this time? I kind of cut you off, but I think it's an important area because you had a really big emotional reaction at the beginning. It's like he was talking directly to you. There were parts of that interview that it felt like he was like just sort of looking at you and like bringing you into his field and like doing energy work on you. Well, what felt uncomfortable, you know, is that like I feel very like unworthy.

And then I was thinking, gosh, he has all these like, not preconceived notions, but, you know, it's a big deal to get a doctorate, you know, in the science field. And he knows that because he, you know, studied, you know, he studied economics and he was deep in a lot of similar, you know, worlds that I was in in academia. And so, you know, then there's this notion of like, gosh, I wonder why he thinks I did that or, you know, does he think I'm this, like, technical person? And I'm. I'm really just like I'm weeping openly, you know. I just, you know, I, I'm sad that he can't be my special friend. I don't mean special like that. I'm sad that everyone doesn't get to have more of Michael Singer, you know, conversations in their life. But I guess that's why he writes books. I felt so stupid asking, like anything.

I feel very, I tend to like, I feel a little bit dumb around people like that because it's like, I ask something and it's like, it doesn't even matter. Like, oh, but, you know, like, how do you decide to write? conversation. Right. He's like, how do you, like, how do you decide to write? I don't decide. Oh, right. Okay. Only, like, you know, corporate capitalist jerks like me think that way. Sit down and like, I'm going to write something. Here I wrote it. Pretty much. Versus the universe is telling me to write. I will channel that information to the best of my ability and share it with the masses and then talk to Oprah. I mean, us and Oprah in one week. I want to just touch for a second on this notion of reinforcing or building like the mind's paradigm around the issues in our life versus his approach.

And I do believe that understanding ourselves requires a level of examination that is healthy. as well, we can get into an analysis paradigm where we analyze so much that it doesn't allow us to feel or separate from the thing that we're analyzing. Like, for example, when I feel an emotion, if I try and ask myself, why am I feeling this emotion and where is it coming from? I don't feel the emotion. I go into the mind and I can't process it. and I was wondering if that, you know, was any part of sort of what you were feeling at the beginning when he was talking. That was just a powerful section and you were having, you know, you were emotional. Yeah. I mean, oh, I don't feel like I was having a reaction to that specifically.

And I think, as he said, like it's, it takes all kinds, you know, there's a lot. lot of different, you know, pathways and, you know, he doesn't know everyone's particular mechanisms, you know, for why they got the way they are. And, and like I, you know, like I said, like there are certain aspects also of people's chemical makeup and there are a lot of other factors that influence our ability to slow down and think that way. And, you know, as someone who's had depression that was so dark there was no light coming in. I know for sure that we can get into ways of thinking that do not allow us to even contemplate thinking another way. And that's very scary. And those are like the darkest edges, you know, of our human experience. And so I have a lot more experience with that than kind of like,

you know, the stuff that you and he, I mean, I understand what you and he were talking about, but it's also like that's at a very like it's very heady you know it's very heady like this stuff you know and I have you had that experience though that where you're and I think like I think I've had that I've seen you have that experience where you're like having a reaction and having an emotion and you're like oh wait a second I'm kind of like it's almost like you're going through the emotions of an of a reaction and you even like said to me like oh I'm acting in a way that like you're aware of the fact that you're acting versus I mean I think so in it that it that it feels real Yeah, I think, I mean, what I've noticed, you know, when you describe what happens for you, I think that happens to a lot more men in our culture, you know, than women in terms of like when the feelings start coming.

I think for a lot of, and I'm not just saying just men, but, you know, in a patriarchal, you know, kind of structure like we're in, there's kind of an instant like shutting it down to sort of like analyze it because then I don't have to feel. feel it because I can solve it, you know, or I don't know. I think that's, no, you don't think that's what it is? It's not, it's not that. So, well, you, you don't think that's what it is. It's not analyzing it. That's, it's, it's not the, like, it's, it's that I'm going to just take a step back from being so in it that I can't tell what's, you know, leading me. Because it's very important to not shut it down. And if I personally begin to analyze it, where's it coming from? What does it look? All that things. Then I don't feel it enough. And then it sort of doesn't pass. The only way I would describe it is instead of being so, for example, angry that the anger is motivating all of your behavior,

you're able to just step back one second and say, oh, I see the anger is happening. And instead of being just sandwiched together with no differentiation, you just step back a tiny bit. Sometimes. There's a point of no return, which if you don't experience rage, like I do, you don't know what I'm talking about. There is a point of no return where you're like you see red. Yeah, there's a, well, yeah, there's, the idea would be to learn to stop it before it gets there. But if we're talking about the last time that I got upset at you and you literally said I looked like a cartoon character, like I blew my top. Like I looked like anger in inside out. That's what

it felt like. I felt like that person. There's not much witnessing in that moment. Now. That moment is all being propelled by anger energy. But that's a thing. Michael Singer would say there's probably a million opportunities before that. Just to witness it rising, to take a breath. That was all the stuff that I had been storing for the last eight months, you know what I mean? So. For sure. Anyway, have a great day, everyone. That was really intense.

It was amazing. And wow. Check out the Instagram account Appialic Breakdown for clips. We're going to get some of the best sound bites and words of wisdom. You can share them with your friends. And I'm certain Jonathan will compile some photos of me weeping openly while Michael Singer spoke to me. Oh, no. I actually messaged Valerie while we were doing this.

I said the fact that she's slack-jawed in the first 10 minutes of the interview would make a perfect gift. What I was actually thinking is I put on makeup today because I, whatever, I had some other stuff to film and I don't usually wear makeup. Like it's the new me. It doesn't really wear makeup when we record. And I was thinking, I really hope that my eyeliner doesn't run all the way down my face. But then I was like, wouldn't that be amazing if my eyeliner ran all the way down my face? It would be such a visual of like, this is what happened when Michael Singer came to play.

And I just looked like Tammy Fay, just weeping. Well, next time. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We will see you next time. It's my ambiolyx breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction.

And now she's going to break down.