Tami Simon: Welcome to the Michael Singer Podcast, presented by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information about Michael Singer’s work, access to all prior episodes and information about upcoming releases, we invite you to join us at michaelsingerpodcast.com.
Michael Singer: Jai guru dev, jai masters. People get so lost in these things called goals, and then they ask questions. Is it okay if I have this goal? Is it wrong to have this goal? How can I live life without a goal? And that’s what I mean. They get lost in these things called goals. You’re born and you die. You don’t need a goal for.
That kinda happens totally naturally. When you’re born. None of your business, it just happens when you die. Believe it or not, none of your business. It just happens. You may know a little more about it. Plan this, have a life, life-threatening disease, all kinds of things. But when you die, that’s when you die.
How do you know when you die? I guess that’s when you die in between. And the more I grow it is such a short period of time, what? 80, 90, a hundred even. And sometimes it’s less. That’s a very few number of years. Guys. The Earth has been here for 4.5 billion years. How does 80 or 90 compete with that? It’s nothing.
Not even a blink of an eye. It’s just the truth. So you’re just here on this planet for a tiny, tiny period of time.
Let’s step back for a minute. What is a reasonable goal to have during your life? If you had to pick one goal, what would you pick? If you’re wise, you would pick happiness, joy, love. Wellbeing. Instead, you pick money, relationships, fame, glory, not getting hurt, trusting people. Instead, you got lots of goals, don’t you, hunter, right?
You real goal is to enjoy your life, to enjoy the fact that you’re here on this planet. There’s tons of things going on to do. Aren’t there all over the place, every single place you are, there’s tons of things to do, right? And enjoy your life. Why would you bother wasting your life by being neurotic, wasting your life, being scared?
Was your life having fear and anxiety and jealousy and insecurity and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Is that what you want with your life? And the answer is no. That makes sense. I don’t want that with my life. Then why do you have it? Why do you not feel love all the time? Or do you not feel joy or you not feel happiness?
How do you not feel total wellbeing? Why let that be your goal to find out why I don’t feel these things? Why did I fill my mind with all these thoughts that I can only be okay if when I’m 63 years old? I wanna look as young as I was when I was 40. Good luck. It’s not gonna work out real well, right? I don’t have good finances, but I want people to be impressed with me.
So I’m gonna rent some Rolls Royce, I probably not what you want, but I’m gonna rent something and make believe that for that day that people are impressed with me. What are you doing? You have tension, anxiety, right or wrong. Or, or I want someone to like me. I need love. I don’t have love. I want someone to like me, so I’m gonna behave a certain way that I think that will make them like me.
How does that work out? You worry about what to wear the next day. You worry about what you said. You worry about whether you turn somebody on or off. So you didn’t pick a very good goal in life, right? ’cause you ended up picking suffering. You ended up picking anxiety, stress, worry. Insecurity you. You pick those things.
Nobody told you what to pick. You’re in here and if you want a goal, we’re gonna talk about a real goal. Happiness, let’s just call it happiness. Love, happiness, bliss wellbeing. Give it a name. Alright? We’ll just call it happiness. You can feel happiness first. I wanna know, why would you not pick that goal?
Because the truth of the matter is every goal you pick is really picking them. I wanna have a great relationship. Why I wanna be happy. I wanna have a job that turns me out. Why? I wanna be happy. I wanna have a child. That’s just the best I could at why I wanna be happy. You wanna have child, you think they bring joy to your life.
You wanna get married. You think it bring joy to your life. You wanna have finances. You can travel and go see things and and be changes in your life. ’cause you don’t like boredom. You don’t like being stuck. So you want happiness. Every single thing you say you want. I could knock it down to you, right?
Lord would say, no, I, I want that person. I’m so in love with that person and that that will make me happy. Notice it will make me happy. Not I am happy. How do you know it’ll make you happy? Do all marriages end up in happiness all the time, by the way. So you pick something that says, in order to be happy, something has to happen.
Otherwise I won’t be happy. That’s the gross mistake. That’s the primal misunderstanding of life. It is because you pick something that you have trouble being happy. ’cause I’m only happy if she loves me. I’m only happy if she loves me and treats me that I wanna be treated around my parents. I’m only happy if she loves me and doesn’t ever act like she doesn’t love me no matter what’s going on.
Like, okay, you are not gonna be happy ’cause you made it conditional. Happiness is called unconditional wellbeing, unconditional happiness. They don’t teach you this. They don’t tell you you’re capable of that state. It is your natural state. If you’re not in that state, it’s not because something didn’t happen.
It’s ’cause you put a cloud in front of the sun. And the sun represented permanent happiness since for 4.5 billion years too. You know? And you’re just here for 80, 90, gimme a break. How hard is it to be happy for 80, 90 years? There’s nothing that a sneeze. So there must be something that you’ve done that keeps you from feeling filled with joy, filled with love, filled with bliss.
And the answer is yes, there is something, but they don’t tell you that. They don’t talk to you that way. They tell you you have to set goals and meet them in order to be happy, and you have to make sure that there are things that you don’t want to happen and make sure they don’t happen and you won’t be happy.
It’s conditional wellbeing. Okay, let’s start simple. Who set the conditions that are conditional? How someone’s supposed to treat you, how they’re supposed to talk, what you’re job supposed to be like, what you’re both supposed to be like, how long you’re supposed to be married. They’re all conditional. Who set the conditions you did?
You at one point in your life said, ah, I wanna get married and have it last for 50, 60 years. Only have one relationship in my entire life. I’m so happy. Somebody else watched some other movie and said, man, I like change and be happy all the time. How can I be happy with one person? Which is right. Don’t, don’t be stupid.
You decided what has to happen for you to be happy. Neither is right. Because they’re both conditional. You set conditions under happiness. Unconditional happiness says there are no condition in my happiness. I am going to be happy every moment for the rest of my life. Why? Why not? If I have a choice to be happy all the time, to feel love all the time, feel freedom and beauty, why wouldn’t I choose that?
Because you just fell into the trap. Saying something has to happen in order for me to feel happiness, in order for me to feel love. And it’s not true. It is not true. Nothing has to happen for you to feel love. Nothing has to happen for you. Feel happiness. Nothing has to happen for you to feel total freedom.
Your wings are open all the time. Nothing has to happen. Something has to not happen, which is you deciding that you can’t be happy unless this happens. Listen to me. People won’t dare to think like that. They don’t understand why. They have evidence I wasn’t happy, and then something happened and made me happy.
I better keep that. I better cling onto that. I better make sure this keeps happening. Or if I thought it was happening and then it stops happening, I better find another thing that will make me happy. It’s not working anymore. Okay, and so you struggle because of what you did. Nobody did that to you. The problem was you weren’t paying attention when you were born.
Someone should sit down with you and say, Hey, come on. Happiness is your goal. Just make happiness your goal and stay true to it and let go of anything that blocks it and you’ll be happy of your rest of your life. I’m serious. You think I’m kidding? Alright, so why can’t I do that? Because you block yourself.
I’ve talked to this over and over again. There’s only one problem in your life. Well, there’s many of them, but it’s one problem. You have blocked experiences that you have had that were not pleasant to you and decided I cannot be happy while those things are going on, or where they went on. By the way, a lot of you have things left in there that they’re not going to go away.
They’re willing wanna go away. You want them not to have happened. Will they ever not have happened? They will never not have happened. Therefore, you’ll never be happy. So you put blockages to your happiness inside of you, and those blockages determine the conditions for your happiness. It’s just at some point you wake up and say, why did I do that?
’cause you didn’t know any better things happen. They were difficult to experience. Do things happen that are difficult to experience? Yes or no? Do they come and go? They don’t stay in there your whole life. You’re divorced ’em five years ago is not happening every day, but your mother did, or daddy did, or in Freud and stuff.
That’s gone a long time ago. Why are you keeping it in there? And that, I’m telling you, that is the only reason you’re not happy all the time. You’re. You stored inside of you that which blocked your happiness, and now it becomes conditional that unless this happens or that happens or this doesn’t happen, I can’t be happy.
So what’s the solution? Going out there and trying to make the world make you happy? Good luck. That one made you happy yesterday. Makes you miserable today. Have you seen that it could happen a build, not even yesterday. You’re doing really well with somebody. They’re talking to you, love them, and so on, and so, and all of a sudden they, they stand differently.
Remind you of your Uncle Charles he didn’t like at all. Alright? Or they, or they scrubbed their nose in a way you don’t like. That’s it, man. It’s over. Can it change quickly? Yes or no? Alright. You are doing that. You have to understand that you’d be happy all the time. You have to own what’s making you not happy.
Now you have to go out there and make the world match what, what you stored inside. It’s not gonna do that is it? It’s not gonna match the stuff you decided you want to happen all the time. So you’ll struggle to be happy sometimes and you’ll struggle to not be unhappy. That’s a waste of your life. Every once in a while you’ll be happy.
A lot of times you won’t be happy. You’ll be worrying about how to be happy. Be wondering, why couldn’t I be more, what’s a midlife crisis? Here’s a midlife crisis. I struggled my entire half of my life to be okay. I’m afraid it could change. Afraid it could go away. It feels so tenuous. I still get jealous a little bit.
I still get worried about my finances. I’m in a midlife crisis saying I’m halfway here and I’ve wasted it. I’m not any happier than I was when a child maybe not even as happy. Why? Why would you do such a thing? Because you’re not paying attention that you couldn’t handle the situations that happen to you, and therefore you store them inside of you.
It’s not the essence of every teaching I’ve ever taught you. When things happen that are not comfortable to you, you push them away. You try to make them not have happened. You suppress them, repress them, deny them. You do something. I don’t like that this happened because you don’t like it. You keep it. If it happened and okay it happened, and then you don’t keep it, you’re fine.
You can tend to close. It’s about open closing. You can tend to close for a moment and catch yourself and say, I don’t think so. I don’t need to close over this. And guess what? You won’t. But if you say, I can’t handle this. I can’t, I never was able to handle this. I’ll never be able to handle this. Alright.
I don’t have anything to do with this ever again. You’re never gonna be happy again, not truly happy ’cause you stored unhappiness inside of you. I. It’s, don’t you see that? Do you understand that? And now you’re saying to be happy that has to be placated. I have to somehow make it so that, you know, I can handle what my mother did or, or whatever it is.
I, I could go and show many examples that I don’t bother because it’s so voluminous that it’s ridiculous. You make yourself unhappy by storing the things that bothered you inside of you. You do do that, don’t you? And then you try to compensate by taking vacations, having drugs, doing this, winning an award, have people applaud ’cause of you not feeling rejected.
You try to do things for the outside that make you feel better inside. I don’t want you to think like that. I wanna know why you don’t feel wonderful all the time inside. Is your natural state. You can be that way all the time, and the only reason it’s not is you store that garbage inside of you, and that’s the essence of yoga.
By the way, all this stuff about chakra and Shakti and Kundalini don’t even bother. It’s all about cleansing the centers that are blocking your Shakti flow. Well, why is it blocking the Shakti flow? It’s a mystical thing. No, it’s a mystical at all. You stored this stuff in there and it’s blocking the flow of your energy, and as long as it’s in there, it’s going to block the flow of energy.
You can get high once in a while, have a wonderful experience, go to a big, long retreat. That’s wonderful. How long does it last? Oh, I had this really beautiful experience. Had a two, two week routine, right? It was it three years ago. Lemme tell you about it. I don’t wanna hear about it, right? I wanna know why you’re not there.
All the. That’s why you’re not there all the time because you stored this garbage aside. So the cleansing, the chakras, the opening of the heart, all the centers is all about letting go of what you stored in there. Nobody put it in there, you know? Yes, you have drives. Can you handle your drives? Oh, go to Freud.
Talk about the it. Can you handle your drives? Of course you are drives. There’s a body. You, you live inside of a body. It’s an animal. It is an animal. Do you understand that? Don’t ever say your body’s not an animal. It is an animal and it has drives, it has impulse, it has fears and anxiety. It has animal level things.
Can you handle that? No. Well, then you’re in trouble. It’s a reality of what you’re living with and you’re capable of called transmuting the energy. You’re capable of taking any of these drives, any of these animalistic tendencies or more base basal level tendencies and raising them up instead of pushing them back down and saying, you’re not supposed to have done that.
You shouldn’t have done that. This is wrong. You need more of that. You just find that you can work with the energy and you can work with yourself, but it all comes down to cleansing the entire path. It’s about letting go of the stuff you stored in there. The entire path from Lost to Enlightened is about letting go of what you stored in there.
Yogananda has a technique, it’s called Crea Yoga. I don’t wanna tell you about it. I’m gonna tell you what the word crea means. Cleansing is a technique for cleansing. The chakra system. Cleansing it of what? How to get dirty. Because you store junk in there and so it’s still in there and it keeps trying to come back up.
And it does come back up, doesn’t it? You push it back down. So happiness is about not doing that. If the cause of not being happy is that you’re blocked, you don’t feel your energy flow. You don’t feel the shockty welling up inside of you. It’s because you’ve blocked it. So the answer is not getting things the way you want.
Getting what you want is so overrated. It’s almost the beginning of your path. You catch on boy. But I lost there. If I get what I want, I’ll be okay. No, if you get what you want, you’ll worry. You’ll lose it. If you get what you want, you’ll struggle to try and get it, and then plus you’ll change what you want anyways.
The minute you actually get what you want and you feel fulfilled, you want something else, there’s no end to it. So goal orientation, and I’m not fucking against it. It’s just, it’s not, there’s nothing wrong with goal orientation. You pick the wrong goal. It doesn’t work. And all of you have the exact same goal, enlightenment, socialization, cleansing, purification, uplifting of the energy.
Well, how do I uplift the energy? And that’s again, well, I’ve learned over my life. You could struggle, do all kinds of junk to uplift the energy. Or you can say, wait a minute, why is it not uplifted by itself? How come the energy doesn’t shoot up in there? ’cause you’re blocking it. Prove it to me. Okay. I will say one word to you.
You don’t like, you’re outta here. You are determining what turns you on, what turns you off. And when you understand that it’s all about opening and staying open and not closing, and when stuff comes back up, now let’s talk real. How do you be happy? Worship the stuff you have down there. Give it the opportunity to come up.
The more it hurts, the better, the more difficult it is to let it go. Wonderful. Don’t push it back down. Do the best you can to let it up. What does that mean? Now you’re getting into the real spiritual teachings. It’s not about chakras and saying, yeah, yes, of course. It’s that, but it’s deeper than that.
It’s about understanding. Well, that stuff’s down there. Here you got divorced five years ago. It was a terrible divorce. Bother the hell out of you. Alright. You know, talk to anybody who ripped the pictures out of the photos, you know, it was not a good thing. Can that happen? Yes. Alright. Is it happening now?
No. So are you willing to say, I got a problem and it’s my problem? It’s not his or her problem, it’s my problem. I was unable to handle the situation that took place and so I stored it inside of me. How do I still in there? ’cause it comes back up all the time. You’re sensitive about the subject. You’re sensitive about hearing somebody’s name.
You’re sensitive. I heard that. Oh, he remarried. Who? What? It’s just you still got stuff in there? Is it possible to not have stuff in there? Yes, you are not supposed to have stuff in there. You have experiences. You handle them, you grow through them. You let them go and you let them go. Why? ’cause they’re not worth holding in there.
’cause they’re stealing the meaning and depth of your life. Don’t ever doubt that anything that is still in there from your past, whether it was 10 minutes ago, somebody said you didn’t like, or 15 years ago something happened, if it is still in there, you will not know happiness. You’ll try to compensate for it by going to a movie or doing this or doing that to try and make yourself feel better, but it’s coming back.
You understand that unless you are willing to let it go, it’s going to come back. And so instead of waking up and saying, that’s why I’m not happy, you say, I, I need the relationship. Make me happy, and the money made me happy. I need your travel to make me happy. I need the drugs to make me happy. Do you understand that?
You don’t need anything to make you happy. It’s not about getting things, it’s about getting rid of things. Has the depth of the spiritual teachings, like people talk about law of attraction. Is there a law of attraction? Yes, there’s a law of attraction. You can learn to do mantras and focus and really focus on stuff and learn to attract it to yourself.
Alright. I would just ask you, how did you decide what you wanna attract yourself? How’d you decide a bigger house? I want a better relationship. I want the kids to stop getting all screwed up. I want, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna attract? Okay. I want, I wanna travel. I see the world more. Okay? It’s not going to make you happy.
That one event will momentarily distract you from the garbage you stored inside that makes you want something or need, let’s be stronger. There are no needs. There are no psychological needs. They won’t tell you that there’s physiological needs. But they’re pretty simple. Food, clothing, shelter, not mansions, and you know, lobster.
It’s just there’s food, clothing, shelter. No one’s questioning about that. You have responsibility to take care of your body. Beyond that, there are no needs. You made them up and you watched a movie once with Grace Kelly in it, and it was so beautiful. Right? And you wanna have a, a wedding like she had right?
To Rock Hudson, whoever it was, she married, I don’t know. Right? And, and, and now you got that in your head and now you can’t be happy in your life unless someone’s got the chin of, you know, whatever. So that regard is. You have limited your happiness by setting conditions on it. So even attracted to what you want is setting a condition on your happiness.
It’s way higher than that. So instead of trying to get what you want, you have to look inside and say, why did I set these conditions? Why did I say I needed a boat to be happy? Doesn’t mean you can’t have a boat. It’s not about renunciation, it’s about not setting conditions on your happiness. If you’re happy and someone offers you a boat ride, you take the joy of the boat ride and you go and you have a lot of fun and somebody comes and you say, Hey, by the way, do you like the boat ride?
I like riding my, here’s my boat. Oh, take the damn vote. But you didn’t have to go down in order to compensate to go back up. You don’t need the boat to be happy. You take the boat, you’re fun with the boat, it sinks.
Tami Simon: Boy, that was fun.
Michael Singer: Just enjoy your life. We haven’t learned how to do that, have we? We’ve only learned how to struggle to get what we want and avoid what we don’t want.
Can I repeat that? You struggle to get what you want and you struggle to avoid what you don’t want. Therefore, you’re struggling, therefore, you’re not happy. The fact that every once in a while you get a shot of happiness because having to match what you wanted, it doesn’t impress me. Not at all. I I love you.
I want you to have eternal, constant, unending joy welling up inside of you all the time. Now, go out and have fun. Now go and have a relationship you don’t need. By all means, it’s wonderful if it happens. It’s there. It’s natural, you enjoy it, but if it breaks up, you enjoy it. But isn’t there pain? Yeah, you enjoy the pain.
You learn to enjoy every single moment of your life. Not tolerate, not put up with not compensate that. No way that’s good enough, is it? You just sit there and say, if I have a choice of what I wanna do in my life, bliss out sounded really good. Constant state told you what yoga one said. Oh, what has that done to me?
Wave upon wave of endless joy saturates me day and night throng upon throng of ecstasy. You want some of that. It doesn’t mean you don’t live your life. You get married, you have children, you have a job, earn money, right? It doesn’t touch it. You’re already whole. You’re already complete. You’re enjoying every second of your experience.
And people say to me, how can you enjoy death? ’cause death is part of life, but, but it doesn’t feel good. Of course, it doesn’t feel good. There’s a sense of loss. It’s perfectly logical. We talk, I talk about it in living Un tether, if your energy flow comes out and connects with somebody else’s heart, somebody else’s being with that breaks, it feels lost, it feels disconnected.
Is that okay with you? Can you enjoy the experience of the depth? Of humanness, of feeling. You just learn to enjoy everything. Not he, he, he, he. But just deep inside this sense of learning, the sense of contentment. I always give you the example of Roman Juliet. Roman Juliet is not a comedy. You don’t go there to watch Roman Juliet to laugh, right?
But you do go back. If they were really good, you bring your friends back. Oh my God, I cried for days. You feel a sense of loss. You feel a sense of missing and it touches you really deep and it’s beautiful. All of life is beautiful. All of life is joy, love Shakti expression of your being totally open all the time.
That’s called. What is your goal in life? Some people say, I have no goals, right? You can have that goal. The goal is unconditional. It doesn’t change. Well, what about things that I like? Why can’t I go after things that I like? You don’t have to. You don’t understand. Every moment in life is an opportunity to blis out every second in life.
If you’re driving down the road and all of a sudden the lines instead of being white are yellow and they’re perfectly parallel to each other, it should blis you out. You be here now you pay attention to what’s happening and everything that’s happening has the effect of touching you to the depth of your being.
You don’t need. I was gonna say, you don’t need special things. They’re all special. They’re all special. Let’s say you have thoughts, they’re all special. It’s not that you suppress your thoughts, it’s not that you don’t wanna have the thoughts. You’re just in there saying, wow, there’s thoughts, and look at this one.
Whoa, you’re pretty negative. You just have fun in there. Please, the only issue you are not having fun in there is you decided not to. You decided if so and so doesn’t like me, I can’t have fun. I used to tell you this story. Here’s high bean lives. You’re talking with your friends and all of a sudden you see somebody coming from the distance.
And you kind of get a little quiet and you tell your friends, right? Like it, it’s very embarrassing to me. This person, I swear they think I walk on water. They just think I’m just flowing on air, right? Just wait and it’s okay. Just watch the person comes up. Oh my God, it’s you. I just love seeing you again.
You’re so beautiful. They’re very, they. I mean, your presence there, you feel so much love, right? You’re standing there, put up with it, right? And they walk away, right? And you tell your friends. See it. Told you, right? So then all of a sudden you talk a little more and another person’s coming from over there.
You have the exact same reaction. Oh, oh look, it’s so and so. He can never talk negative enough about me, anyone he sees. He just said tears into peace. Just wait, wait, wait. What do you see first comes out? Tear into pieces. Oh my God, you’re a piece of dirt. I can’t believe what you did, how you live. Terrible and worst person ever lived.
Then I walk away. You say, well see needed. Then you’ve arrived. You don’t deed. People, places or things to be a certain way for you to be okay. Why? ’cause you are okay in there. You’re more than okay and it’s crazy. I keep quoting Christ I Jewish Yogi, I more, and where I grow. I just love Christ’s teachings.
He says, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that leaves the mouth of God. It means you’re not living off us. Coming in from outside. You are living with that flow, destructive spirit of energy pouring inside of you, which is always there, and just the whole attitude, I am not going to close, period.
I’m staying open and nothing’s gonna touch me. And you just take that attitude and you sit there and say, isn’t that fun? You still go to work? Why? It’s fun. Why not? Doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Somebody else got the raise that you wanted. That’s not how it works. It works like you’re fine. You don’t need the raise, you don’t need the money.
You actually feel good for the person that got the raise that you wanted. You have to fight with it. You don’t struggle with it. You actually feel compassion about every single thing that could ever be. They’re all growth experience, they’re learning experiences. They challenge you to be okay no matter what happens.
Are you willing to even look at that as a goal? They’re, I’m, I’m goal oriented how you like your goal I gave you so far. You just understand if you do that you’ll be the happiest person of walk the face of the earth all the time. And the funny is sometimes they write me, they say, isn’t that selfish to wanna be happy?
If you are there, everyone comes along with you. You’re always bringing positive, beautiful energy into every situation and helping everything and everybody. So until the soul, it’s the path of unconditional happiness. A lot of people are challenged by that chapter. Are you willing to say, no matter what happens, I am to be okay?
Now the question becomes fine. Now we set our goal. I would love for you to be your goal. Not everybody succeeds all the time with their goal, but you set one that that few succeed. It’s over. You won. You won the prize. Okay. It’s not temporal. Why can’t you get there? Because you’re not paying attention. It really is that it’s not all this spiritual work.
It’s, I’m in here and I notice that I don’t like things and I don’t like it. My storm in there, I’ve done it my entire life. It rained on my birthday. Somebody didn’t call for half hour when I was dying to hear from him. When I got jealous and I got insecure. Entire life, I stored garbage in there. So if that’s what took your happiness away, getting rid of that will give you happiness back.
And it’s the truth. So you decide that I’m gonna do what? I’m gonna work on myself, not work on everybody else. Not work on making the outside world be the way I want. That’s a whole nother talk I give, which is just phenomenal that you think that the answer to you not being happy is to manipulate every single thing that happens that comes in front of you to be the way you want it to be.
Wow. That is a task for you and you just wake up. You wake up, he’s really not. I’m gonna do that anymore. What am I gonna do? I’m gonna look inside and I teach. Start with the small things. It’s really funny. Other people start with the big things, the butt’s bothering you. Let’s go through therapy. Let’s rip it out.
Whatever it is, you know, push yourself through it. And I respect, expect anything anybody’s doing to grow somehow as I grew 55 years, right As I’ve matured in the process. That’s the opposite. Take the small stuff first. Take the fact that you can’t handle the rain. Take the fact that you can’t handle the car in front of you, how they’re driving.
Take the fact that somebody didn’t say hello when you said hello to them. Like a really earth shattering things and notice you can’t handle them. You notice that you have a conversation with somebody and then you say something at the end, that last, last interaction, right? And your mind keeps saying, I wish I didn’t say that.
I wonder if they took it the way. I didn’t mean it that way. Should I ask them? Has anyone ever done that? Okay, you’re making yourself miserable. You have to learn to stop doing that. But doesn’t it encounter a certain amount of risk? If that went on inside and you’re afraid that you said the wrong thing, but I’m willing to say, I don’t know whether they took it that way.
I’m so busy with me. They probably need to think about me again. They want you understand that you’re busy thinking about you. They’re not busy thinking about you. They’re busy themselves. They don’t ever think that something you said bothered somebody. ’cause you don’t know. It looked like it from your point of view, and even it bothered ’em a little.
They probably let it go in 15 seconds ’cause they got overwhelmed by their own problems. And so this concept of you fixing it and getting it right and apologizing, just do the best you can at every situation you’re in and do your best you can to let go of all that garbage that comes up in the aftermath.
It does no good. It doesn’t, right. Let’s get real. How many things have you worried about that never happened. Talking about every little thing, right? Oh, I’m gonna be late. I’m gonna be late. Oh my God. Oh good. I’m not. Look, the power tire pressure’s down. Do I have a flat? I don’t know. What’s the thing you worry about Everything.
You think everything’s gonna go wrong. What if you didn’t do that? What if you sat there and said, let’s just start with the simple things in life that just, I call ’em low hanging fruit, the things that are easy to let go of, but you don’t bother. Here, drive down the road and the light turns yellow right before you go under it and you’re concerned that you ran the red light.
You don’t know. Now look around, see there’s any cops around, and then think for a while, what if I had run it? I’d be late for my appointment, A cop would pull me over. You’re making yourself miserable for no reason. So there’s a certain amount of risk involved in my teachings, right? Not a whole lot. Like if I sit there and you say, I don’t want it to rain tomorrow, okay?
It’s not a great risk to let it do what it does, because it’s gonna do it anyways, right? If you step all night worrying whether it’s gonna rain or not, you got an issue, right? We could do better than that, but this thing about the light or something like that, it’s like you’re afraid. You start worrying about all kinds of stuff.
Are you willing to stop, look and listen? Don’t fight it. Don’t ever fight your mind. There are reasons. It’s doing what it’s doing, your fears, your insecurities, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You sit there and say, am I willing to take the risk that I went through that light and that maybe I should have stopped and maybe three blocks later, some cops gonna show up.
Am I willing to take the risk and just say, alright, that’s what happened. Drive on. ’cause I’m telling you, 99% of the time nothing’s gonna happen. You made it up in your mind. You make up. What can, don’t you make up? What could go wrong? What can you make up? What could go wrong? Anything. Everything. Anything can go wrong.
A meter could hit your car, like anything can happen. So anything you wanna think of can make you miserable. How about taking the attitude? If you wanna be happy, let go. What does that mean? Let go of the part of you that’s making you neurotic. 99% of the time doesn’t happen. I swear to you, if you watched the negativity and issues and worries that you do inside your head, really watch them.
You’ll see 99% never happen. Wow. This is a good talk then. I can liberate myself and, and, and I’ll say right now, if I have a choice that 99% are not gonna happen. I will take that chance of 1% every time and I’ll enjoy it. They say, there’s yin and yang. I’ll pay the 1% for the 99% that I don’t have to do it for.
And you’ll find out every single time you’ll be just fine. And because you didn’t make yourself miserable for the 99, you’ll be filled with strength and Shakti to able to handle the 1%. And so you wake up, it’s called Waking up, and you realize, I can be happy. What’s that song? You can be happy if you let yourself be as a true statement and don’t think your problems in life are making you unhappy.
They’re not. You are making you unhappy. But wait a minute, I fall in love and I really live love this person very much, and I I wanna be around them lot to leave him. What if they left me? Do they seem to be accidentally gonna leave you? No, but my past relationship left me and it really hurt me. Really bad.
You’re in trouble. You think like that. ’cause that will never go away. And now you’ve taken away the love that you felt to feel anxiety and jealousy and worry, and you traded love for that. So that’s one form of feeling love and joy. Don’t trade it for anything. If your goal is to feel unconditional happiness all the time and unconditional love, catch yourself when you’re ready to trade it off.
I feel tremendous love for this person, but I’m worried that they might leave me. They might hurt me. I got hurt once before. You wanna trade off that for the love ’cause you just traded it off. Your heart will not stay open if you’re sitting there saying, but I got hurt before. I don’t want it to happen again after protect myself, not so fast.
Oh you, you close your heart. Do you understand that? Or does that sound rational to you to worry about whether you need to get hurt? If you’re worried about getting hurt, you don’t know what love feels like. ’cause love has this tremendous openness and what this is the difference, right? You don’t love somebody.
You love what you feel in their presence. For some reason, the energy, the aura, perfume, I don’t care what happens, it hits you and the next thing you know, you feel love and you say, I love you. That’s not true. You love, love. You love the feeling of that beautiful open heart welling inside of you, but you make it conditional.
You say, only if you keep behaving this way and don’t do this, and don’t that. And make sure you don’t ever hurt me. You promise. You promise you won’t hurt me. I got hurt last time you really bad. I can remember in younger years you were juvenile high, this kind of thing. Talking to somebody and saying stuff like that.
If I love you and I open, you won’t hurt me, will you? No, I won’t wanna hurt you. Are you sure you promise? Isn’t that funny? In other words, you can’t feel love. You will not feel love. You’ll feel a conditional holding back because you’re afraid otherwise, you wouldn’t be asking those questions. Otherwise, you sit there and just, I, I just, the sun is shining.
I love it, and if it stops shining, I will still be wonderful and fine. That’s how you think. Do I feel joy and love in the present of this person? I absolutely do. Can I handle if they change or something’s different than what I thought it was going to be? Yes, ma’am, I can. I’ve practiced every moment of my life to say I am okay no matter what.
Now you practice the goal of unconditional happiness. Anybody catching on or do you feel, do you feel that protecting yourself makes you feel more love? There’s no way telling your heart. Don’t open. Do not fully open. So you’ll never know what it feels like to just melt, so you’ll completely melt the Masters live there.
That is where Enlightened being lives, it’s a constant state of whatever’s happening. It’s just touching or depth of their being. Robert Christian, they used to walk behind him ’cause at any moment he would think of God, he’d hear something or see something. He’d fall over backwards in Samani, they’d have to cat Lily.
One of the devil tapes had to walk behind the master every day, all the time. At any point he just go, oh, every hair in his body was standing in. His head would go back, tears would pour down his eyes and he’d go into somebody go next. You have to catch him. Anybody wanna do that? Alright. You are a high being.
There’s nothing, these higher beings, these high beings have reached that are not already going on side of you, but you temper it. With this garbage that you put on top of yourself. So it does take a certain amount of risk to be willing to say, if 99% didn’t happen throughout my life, check it out. I want you to check it out.
Keep score of everything you worry about, everything you’re afraid of, everything. You have anxiety about. How often does it happen Instead to say, okay, am I willing to dare to risk the 1%? You wanna risk the 1%. You do wanna risk it, okay? Like, people are amazing. Let’s say you, you’re an older person and you watched a movie, whether it’s a plane accident and people died.
Even a news clip could be real. Alright? You know, 55 people died in, in the plane crash. Alright? You watch that movie 20 years ago. You have grandchildren in California live in, in Florida, but you never see them. Why I, I’m not gonna take a plane. They’re not safe. People like that aren’t there? Right? Have you checked the statistics of how many car accidents there are people dying in car accidents versus playing progressions?
Not close is ridiculous, right? But you got in your head that’s not safe, and now you can’t do things. Are you willing to trade off this absurdity that you do every moment life to trade off love and joy and happiness in order to protect yourself? And eventually you’ll sit there. No, I’m not. But what if I get hurt?
I, I can handle being hurt. As opposed to limiting the love and joy of my life throughout my entire life to try and never be hurt. I will take being hurt sometimes. And you know what? I will learn that the reason I got hurt and had expectations, I had needs, I had desires. And the more I let go of those things, the more you don’t get hurt.
You just experience life fully. Be here now and you eventually trade off this craziness. Thinking that happiness is a goal that you have to achieve things, do things better be right all the time? Have you ever thought you could blow it? Don’t look at me now. You don’t wanna, have you ever thought you could blow it?
If you say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, act the wrong way. Yes or no? Isn’t that fun? Why you can’t blow it? It’s inside of you. It’s your natural state. It’s because you stored all this stuff in there. Nothing can go wrong. See, you can’t hear that. What do you mean? Nothing can go wrong? Nothing can go wrong.
You’re a great being inside, experiencing God’s love and joy. Things happen. Yes. Can they be difficult to handle in the moment that happened? Yes. That’s not wrong. That’s learning. Every time you go through a difficult experience, you become stronger. Assuming you don’t suppress it, you become stronger, more capable of handling those things and eventually you don’t look down and say, I wish that hadn’t happened.
You say, thank you for happening. Thank you for giving this opportunity. To go through a thing. You’re in a relationship with somebody. You love ’em tremendously, they do something. You start question, right? You know you do it, or you have insecurities or fears or this or that, and you just stop. You stop. You say, I don’t care if it happens.
I can handle it now. I don’t have to worry about it. Now I don’t have to be the one who brings up the topic of the subject and pick on somebody. I can handle whatever happens. And eventually, like I said, when things happen that are challenging, you reach the point I, I’m rushing you. You reach the point where you say thank you.
You don’t wait for it to be over. You don’t pray to God to make it go away. It’s look at it and say, if I can handle this, I can handle the next thing. I want to be able to handle life. Every moment in life, every situation in life. Okay. You are a great being, but you need to start practicing, handling things, practicing saying the meaning of my life.
His happiness, his joy is love. And I’m not trading at all for anything. And I’ll wake up in the morning and remember it. I’ll remember in noontime, remember in the evening, if I didn’t do well, I’ll learn from it and grow from it, and I’m ready to be higher the next day. And the next day. Believe me, your significant other will love you for it.
And if to tell ’em anything about it, they’ll just see this change in you. You’re not jealous, not clinging, grabbing, worrying. It’s just like, wow, free yourself. Liberate yourself. Okay. Hope that helps. You’re a very great being. You’re a very great being who’s holding yourself down. Let go.
Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to the Michael Singer podcast, produced by Sounds True in partnership with Shanti Publications. For more information on Michael’s body of work and all back episodes, please join us at michaelsingerpodcast.com. Thanks so much for listening. Sounds true. Waking up the world.
