Open your heart to free the soul

The Untethered Soul by Michel Singer, is a book that will hold your hand and take you on a journey towards greater self-awareness, love, and compassion.

Energy, it says, is one of the fundamental truths of our lives. Every movement, every emotion and every thought that passes through our mind is an expenditure of energy. It’s like gushing water in a river that constantly flows. We all are reservoirs of this energy. It’s the power that keeps us going. The fuel that charges us to get up and do what we do every day.

Blockages to the lucid life

There are times when we cannot feel this energy or feel too drained. Our cup seems empty. This happens when we block the flow of energy -when we close our heart and mind. When we get stuck and do not express. It’s natural that when you obstruct something, you will break the flow. The more we hold on to what we feel, the more it blocks the flow of energies from us and to us.

“Closing your mind does not protect you from anything. It just cuts you off from the source of energy, In the end it only serves to lock you inside. As long as you define what you like and what you don’t, it will open and close you. You are the one who defines your own limit.”

You vs ‘it’

It’s important to realize that the feeling and emotions we experience are not us. We are the observers of these feelings and emotions that pass through us. Our attachment to these and our response to them are the unfinished energy patterns causing the disturbances inside. If we allow them to come and allow them to go without going with them, we will experience the flow, we will experience the calm and thereby be open to all experiences. “If experience is the best teacher, then nothing comes close to the experience of life”.

Letting go

Clinging and pushing are both forms of control. We are constantly fighting them instead of experiencing them. If you truly want to experience the gift of life, experience it by living it each moment instead of holding on to it, judging it, deciphering it.

Focusing on the emotion you are feeling or going deeper in it, will demand more of your attention. Because your attention feeds it, it gets infused with more energy and draws more attention. It’s a vicious cycle. Letting go means falling behind the energy. It is deciding not to get sucked in in the sinking sand. It takes a moment of consciousness to detach yourself from the emotion and identify it for what it is instead of identifying yourself with it. It’s telling yourself at that moment that I am not going there; that is not me.

Freeing yourself

The universe indeed conspires. It brings in our lives people, situations that stimulate growth. You don’t have to expend your energy in deciding what is right and wrong. You have to just open you heart in the face of anything and everything ( that is why they say where your heart on your sleeve) to allow for the purification process to happen. That is when you will mystically see that situations will unfold to hit your stuff. You will experience the good when you let go. Your vision expands to look beyond the occurrences.

Embrace your thorns

Real transformation happens when you embrace your thorns and see them as growth agents versus causes of disturbances. It all comes down to trust doesn’t it? If you have faith in the process of life and truly know that problems are the steppingstones to transformation, you would have immediately cleared the blockage that restricts you from acceptance and curbs the energy flow. Awareness of thorns allows for release of feeling rather than fighting it, camouflaging it, or not touching it.

Change and pain

Change, as we all know, takes us out of our comfort zone. However, it brings with itself discomfort albeit pain. Sometimes our avoidance of pain stifles our growth. Real growth happens when you finally decide to deal with the pain. Remembering that pain, too is just an energy that needs a passage to pass, helps us transcend it.

Breaking boundaries

I have read enough about how boundaries help, protect and heal but Singer feels that these limits that we put on ourselves do not allow us to see potential or understand the core of the being. “things seem finite because they hit mental boundaries. In truth, everything is infinite……To go beyond, you must keep going beyond your limits that you put on things, this requires change at the core of the being.”

Unconditional Happiness

Understanding your energies is the first step to happiness that is whole and absolute. You were born to experience life. Observe when you are happy; your heart feels open, and energies rush inside. When you are down, you feel discomfort, like something is trapped inside. That is when your heart is closed. Therefore, to be happy, open your heart. The key to an open heart is, in not giving in to the strategies of the mind.

I had a wonderful time unraveling nuances of the self while reading this book — understanding why I feel and what I feel. I spent time knowing what I needed to free myself from and how an open heart is a steppingstone to a beautiful and bountiful life.