Open Your Heart and Let Go: Find Freedom by Untethering Your Soul

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​Are you able to see the difference between your awareness and the voice in your mind?

​ According to Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, “There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.”

While reflecting on the many amazing truths in this book, I also stumbled upon the movie, Inside Out.  Once Again, everything connects with everything else..​

This animated film shows the battle of emotions and logic in someone's head.  Based on a true story, a young girl has a beautiful upbringing full of happy memories that she developed into her personality.  One day everything she knows about her personality, through memories of positive emotions, vanishes when the family moves across the country and her joy gets lost.

The film takes a look at the control center of emotions in which joy is trying to fight off sadness, fear, anger, and disgust, but she gets lost with sadness in the maze of long term memory.  Disgust, fear, and anger took over this adolescent for a while until sadness was rediscovered and was able to play her fair role.

This movie was both touching and inspiring because it paints a visual image of our struggle in daily unexpected events or situations in which we have trouble deciding how to balance our emotions.  "If you continue to cling to what you built, you will have to continually and perpetually defend yourself.  You will have to keep everybody and everything straight in order to reconcile your conceptual model with reality.  It's a constant struggle to keep it together...The only permanent solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality."

Further, "To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them...Once you've made the commitment to free yourself of the scared person inside you will notice that there is a clear decision point at which your growth takes place.  
I have noticed this phenomenon in my own life as well.  With a history in waiting tables, greeting passengers, and teaching large groups of kids, I have been expected to mask and surpress any emotions that may rise to the surface.  I was not allowed to noticeably feel anything except joy.   As Singer states, "Just relieve you mind of the job of making sure that everyone and everything will be the way you need them to be so that you can feel better inside.  Your mind is not qualified for that job.  Fire it and let go of your inner problems instead."

If you don't feel and let go, negative emotions get backed up and they look for a way out.  to spend your life avoiding pain means it's always right behind you.  I have recently realized that I tend to unload those negative emotions onto my intimate relationships.  There have been times that I cried for hours over a silly misunderstanding just because I was feeling for all of the previous moments that I did not allow myself to feel or notice.  One of the essential requirements for true spiritual growth and deep personal transformation is coming to peace with pain.

"If you feel insecurity, it's just a feeling.  You can handle a feeling.  If you feel embarrassed, it's just a feeling.  It's just a part of creation.  If you feel jealousy and your heart burns, just look at it objectively, like you would a mild bruise.  It's a thing in the universe that is passing through your system.  Laugh at it, have fun with it, but don't be afraid of it.  It cannot touch you unless you touch it."

A wise person affirms, "If with one breath all of this can change, then I want to live at the highest level while I'm alive.  I'm going to stop bothering the people I love.  I'm going to live life from the deepest part of my being.

So, you may ask, how does this relate to yoga or art?

Art can often times be an outlet to express love or other emotions that need to be released.

In yoga, we ask ourselves, who am I?  Am I my body?  Am I my mind?  I am awareness. Awareness of my breath.  Awareness of my sensations within my body.  I strive for light and love to shine through while I let go and feel anger sadness or disgust only for the brief moments that they need to be noticed.  I don't need to stay tethered to them or make them a part of my being.

"When you feel the pull like somebody pulling on your heart, you just let go.  You fall behind it. You simply relax and release.  An no matter how many times you're pulled that's how many times you relax and release.  Because the tendency to get drawn in is constant, the willingness to let go and fall behind has to be constant."

So, there are two ways you can live: you can devote your life to staying in you comfort zone, or you can work on your freedom.  In other words, you can devote your whole life to the process of making sure everything fits within your limited model, or you can devote your life to freeing yourself from the limits of your model.

All of the quotes are from The Untethered Soul:  The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer​