The Untethered Soul

I quite liked this book—it’s often mentioned in the same sentence as Eckhart Tolle’s books, but it’s the better read. There’s a few perennial lessons here; basically, they’re the meeting ground of a variety of religious traditions, as well as psychotherapy.

For one, you are not your thoughts. You’re the observer of your thoughts. Sometimes, it feels like my mind won’t shut up, and I associate those thoughts with me. I fall into this recursive rumination, and it’s exhausting. One thing mentioned here that I find useful is to imagine that it’s someone else talking to me. I still won’t be able to turn it off, but it allows me to take it less seriously.

There’s an important section here on trauma, although it’s not called that in this text. We always think about trauma as something so severe; but it’s just emotion trapped in the body. The author falls back on the language of chakras and blocked energy, which I have a natural suspicion of, BUT it is an illuminating visual metaphor that helps to make sense of what’s taking place. It’s true: when there is enough negative energy, it “clogs up” everything else and it’s difficult to see the good. In fact, no positive feelings come in. I feel that a lot lately.

The major argument of the book is to just let go. Holding onto good emotions and bad emotions both prevent us from living our full depth of experience. The way forward is to let ourselves experience what comes up in a given moment without resisting it. To “unclog” bad energy from the past, we have to just sit with it and let ourselves experience it without rationalization, explanation, or fighting back. It’s the only way to really be honest with ourselves, and it’ll past in time.

This is a process that isn’t going to happen all at once, especially if we’ve let the debris from the past accumulate (like I have).

I’m glad I read this; it’s what I needed to hear at the moment. Still, my reading it was probably a distraction (something to avoid!) to avoid sitting with the emotions themselves. I tend to cognify (cognitize?) everything, and that’s part of the larger problem.

So, just let go.

I don’t know where to start this review, though a bit of context is necessary:

I’ve never been a spiritual person, so I was expecting this book to challenge my perception of things. I also wasn’t planning on finding much value from it, my exceptions were fairly low. Well that was all wrong.

While some parts of this book are still difficult for me to wrap my head around, I can officially say this book is formally my first real experience with exploring my spiritual side.

I’ve always been a “recognize the issue” then “fix the issue” kind of person. Extremely logical, accepting all my life experiences as the reality. If these life experiences deviated from my internal concept of reality, then I need to go through some emotional stress to re-integrate what I learned from the event into my new reality.

It’s not a terrible strategy, and it’s been fairly successful for me. However, this book has introduced entirely new concepts that flip all of my strategies on their head. Rather than engaging with these stressors in the first place, why not just welcome them in? Why not just step back and watch them unfold without allowing them to impact my happiness and reflect who I am? Why not treat events as just events and not as anything more than that? Why would I tie my happiness and well-being to things outside of my control? Why would I pretend like I have any sense of control over the world?

These are all questions this book forced me to ask, and countless more. Some other incredibly important topics this book covers are: - consciousness, and how to recognize it inside you - who “you” are - how to deal with our inner voices - different ways of thinking about death - a whole new way of looking at the world, where you accept all outcomes

I really can’t condense everything this book has taught into a single review. All I can speak to is I feel this has triggered an entirely new journey for my life, where I’m going to learn a lot more about not just myself and who I am, but gain deep understanding about the world.