E224: Stop Controlling and Start Releasing

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: Mm-hmm, Jai guru dev, jai masters. If you don’t have a basic, root-level understanding of what’s going on—not only in your spiritual path, but especially in your spiritual path—you’re going to struggle a lot. And it takes a real long time to make it through all the pitfalls that great masters have tried to help you bypass.

But if you’re not there, you can’t hear it. You can only hear what you’re capable of hearing. So that’s where right understanding and root-level understanding come in. So, for example, I’m not advocating for or against anything. You have to understand, I don’t do that. But people are taught to control their minds.

A very important part of the spiritual journey. Why? Because the mind is a major problem. Why? Because it distracts the self, it distracts the consciousness, to where it’s looking down into that distraction, as opposed to releasing itself from the distraction. And that is, in truth, the essence of the spiritual path.

You can talk about God, you can talk about devotion, you can talk about diet, all kinds of health things. When it’s all said and done, if the consciousness, the indwelling consciousness—you, who’s in there, we’ll talk about it in a minute—are staring at your mind and staring at your emotions and staring at what’s coming in through your senses, which hits your emotions and stimulates your mind, you’re not getting out.

You fight it all you want. The very fact that you have to fight it means you have to be there to fight it. That’s a very important aspect of struggle. What are you struggling with? And if you’re struggling with it and you think you won, you didn’t, because you’re just suppressing it. You’re pushing it away.

“I can live with it. I can handle it.” What’s “it”? The part that I can’t handle. And so you end up suppressing. You end up pushing it away. You push your mind away, you push your thoughts away, you push your heart away, you push your emotions away, and you do things outside that you think are going to make everything good and pure and this and that and the other thing.

Now, it is true that if you do things outside that cause disturbance in the mind and turmoil in the heart and mind, it’s just going to cause more distraction. So it’s true that there are things you can do outside that don’t stimulate the mind as much and don’t stimulate the emotions as much, okay? We can discuss those as we move on.

I’m just laying the groundwork for what it means to truly work toward liberation, as opposed to struggling and winning the struggle. You can’t win a struggle. All you can do is keep it away from you. If you get rid of the cause of the struggle, if you get rid of why the mind is noisy, you’ll know what to do about it.

There’s a very important distinction. Everybody’s busy trying to figure out, “What do I do about problems with my emotions? What do I do about problems with my heart? What do I do about problems with my mind? What do I do? How do I solve it?” I’m sorry to tell you, you can’t. As long as there is a stimulus, a reason, a foundation for why the mind is disturbed, you can just suppress it.

You can keep it away from you. You can make yourself get high for a little bit, but it’s still there, because you didn’t deal with it properly, and dealing with it properly means truly right understanding—knowing why the mind is the way it is. Not— I’m going to put stress on this. It is not “what do I do about it?”

It’s “why is it that way?” If I solve why it’s that way, I don’t have to do anything about it. It won’t be disturbing anymore. It won’t be distracting anymore. But as long as it’s distracting me and I’m caught in that distraction, I don’t know what to say to you. You’re going to struggle to get out. It’s going to be difficult, and it will stay that way.

But there is a way to come to peace, and it’s not by suppressing the mind. It’s not by controlling the emotions. It’s about working with the foundational cause of why the mind is the way it is and why the emotions are the way they are. That is working at the root. So that’s what we’re going to discuss today: the difference between “what can I do to fix it” versus “why is it the way it is.”

I’ll repeat that. Those are very different things. “What can I do to fix it? Okay, it’s this way, what do I do to fix it?” Versus, “Why is it this way?” And if you work at the root, the struggling can be over very, very quickly, in stages, but you’re guaranteed to move forward constantly if you understand why it’s the way it is, instead of fighting with the way it is.

First of all, can the mind be disturbing? And a lot of times I look at it, and my talks talk about the driver in front of you, or the weather, and people write, and they say, “Well, you know, those I can deal with. But what about the girlfriend who leaves me? What about the car accident?” You know, bigger, much bigger things.

Finances, relationships—they’re a little different than weather and the car in front of you. In the new book, Wisdom Untethered, we directly address that level, and above and below that level. But for this discussion, remember, the distinction we’re talking about is not “how do I fix it,” it’s “why is it the way it is?”

Okay? So why is the mind the way it is? It’s easy. It’s hard when you’re lost in it. But once you take a step back, you see: my mind is disturbed because everything that ever disturbed me throughout my entire life, I pushed away. I was trying to make it go away, trying to make it not bother me, even though, by definition, the fact that I’m pushing it away means it is bothering me, and the best I can do is take what is bothering me and keep it at a distance from me.

And believe it or not, as simple as that sounds, that’s why the mind is the way it is. If there’s a clear flow of a stream, a river—call it a stream—and there’s no debris, there are no obstacles, there’s nothing blocking it, it will flow smooth. There are no rapids, no eddies, no currents. It just flows. Take one rock and put it in that flow.

You’ve got issues. It splashes off the rock. There’s spray. There could be rapids, and things get created because of that block. Why? Because energy is trying—energy is a flow. Energy is trying to flow in its natural course. An obstacle has been put in the way of that. It is going to change the course of the energy.

There’ll be swirls—visualize it. One rock can make quite a current, can’t it? Quite a disturbance. That is what is happening inside of you. It is exactly that. It’s not any different. It’s not just an analogy, it’s the truth. You have an energy flow inside of you, whether you know it or not, and I don’t think you should be here if you didn’t know that.

There is an energy flow inside of you. We call it Shakti. Spirit, Shakti—I don’t care, I like Shakti. It flows inside of you. How does it flow? If there are no rocks in there disturbing its flow, it flows in ecstasy all the time. It’s always flowing up, feeding you with the joy, the love, the inspiration. It’s just this beautiful energy, right?

But why don’t we know about that? I don’t know. Christ taught you about it. What do you mean? “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that leaveth the mouth of God.” We’re talking about the outside world, things that come in from the outside world. Yes, they can make you happy, they can make you sad, they can make you good or bad.

Yes, all kinds of things come in, don’t they? That is not your life. There’s a flow of energy in you that is completely independent and transcendent of what’s coming in from outside. The outside has nothing to do with you. It’s just going about its business. The problem is you’re lost in it. You’re always paying attention to it.

If you learn not to let it make a mess inside just because it’s not the way you want it outside, you will find this energy is not being disturbed, because you didn’t shove all this stuff in there, which you’re doing all the time. If it bothers you at all, you save it. I’ve talked to you a million times.

It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of. “If something disturbs me, I’ve got to keep it.” That’s Freud. “I’m going to keep it.” He called it suppression, repression, denial, right? “I’m keeping it in here. I ain’t letting this go.” Well, that’s really very intelligent. And what you end up doing is building inside of you every single thing you ever pushed away—ever, no matter what it is.

Somebody doesn’t say hello, they’re slamming the brakes because somebody ran a light and you managed not to hit them. If you can’t handle it, if you can’t say, “Okay, that’s what happened, let’s move on,” you’re going to push it away. You’re going to say, “I can’t handle it.” Have you ever said, “I can’t handle it,” about anything?

If you say, “I can’t handle it,” you’re going to protect yourself from it, aren’t you? And sometimes it’s so strong you can’t handle the fact that you can’t handle it. And sometimes it’s okay—you can stay above it a little bit. You do whatever you can to push it away. Rationalization: “He really didn’t mean that.

I’ll get even someday.” There’s some way to keep it from being caught constantly in your face. When you do that, I’m telling you, it is a rock. You’ve got to see that. Every one of those things, even the littlest and the biggest, are rocks in the flow of the stream of Shakti, and every single one you keep in there, and have ever kept in there, is why your mind is so disturbed. Whoa.

They don’t tell you that, do they? They teach you how to cope. No—”cope” is a four-letter word to a yogi. What does “cope” mean? “I couldn’t handle it, I can’t handle it, but I’m managing to go forward anyway. I’m coping with it.” That’s what coping means. It doesn’t mean you took care of it. It means it’s still in there, but “I’m coping with it.

I’m learning to live with it.” All right? I don’t ever want you to do that, because that will stay in there for the rest of your life, causing currents and disturbances, and they keep coming back up, don’t they? You don’t have to do anything. They keep coming back up. Somebody says something, it reminds you of this, it hits this.

Can your stuff get hit? It’s a vernacular we use: “it hit my stuff.” What stuff? The rocks you put in there. That’s the stuff you’re talking about, okay? So you understand, in just this short period of time, I’m talking about why the mind is the way it is, and that is the truth. You’re going to meditate long enough and deep enough, you’re going to take a look at that and you’ll say, “Holy mackerel,

I’m doing that. Every single thing I push away stays in there,” and then it acts as a disturbance to this beautiful energy. That’s what Christ meant: man does not live by bread alone—the outside world, trying to get it the way you want—but by every word that leaveth the mouth of God. There’s this inner energy flow.

It’s beautiful, it’s true, it’s real, but we don’t feel it because we’re too busy trying to get the outside world to be the way we want, so it doesn’t disturb us so much. “I need to find the right relationship, I need to have finances. I’m not okay, and the outside is going to fix me.” It has never fixed you. It can temporarily do things, all right?

But it has never solved the problem, because it’s not the problem. The problem is, you couldn’t handle it when it happened. And so you hold it inside. You go to a job, you get a new job, you left your previous job because you couldn’t handle it, and then it’s working really well. You feel inspired, and so on.

Then all of a sudden—you’re very much into women’s lib, and all of a sudden this woman who was running things, your boss, got fired, and some man took over. Now all of a sudden you’re not doing okay anymore. It’s called conditional. If it’s happening from outside, trying to fix the inside, it’s conditional.

Ever had a relationship? Ever had it not work out? How’d that happen? “It didn’t solve the issues I was having. It didn’t fix the problems I was having. Now I’ve got to go look for a new relationship. Somebody who loves me more, somebody who treats me the way I want to be treated, somebody who respects me, somebody who has proper finances so I can get what I want in life.”

What are you doing? You’re saying, “I’m not okay, and I’ll set conditions for the outside”—bread alone—”I’ll set conditions for how the outside needs to be so that I feel better inside.” Well, what if they change? “No, no, I don’t want to think about that.” Well, if you do think about it, if you worry about it all the time, it doesn’t solve anything.

You think it does, it doesn’t. There—that’s a mature yogi speaking. Things change, including you. So over time, that which conditionally makes you feel better becomes as much of a problem, if not more, than it was before you found it. Now you have to compare everything. “Find something you want.” How would you be if it wasn’t there?

“Oh, it was terrible. I just told you it’s what I want.” Okay, good, very good. What if it’s not there? “Why’d you tell me that? That’ll make me think about it.” You hear me? Well, what if somebody had a bad day, and they come home, and they’re just in a bad mood? “They don’t love me. I knew that. I shouldn’t trust it.”

I… In other words, you conditionally thought you found something outside that will fix the inside. It will not, it never has, and it won’t. I’m not talking against it—by all means, go for it, and when you’re 80 or 90… Oh, no, forget 80 or 90, I like the 40, 50 midlife-crisis part. What’s the definition of midlife crisis?

“I’ve tried as hard as I can my entire life to get it the way I needed it to be, so I would be okay, and I’m not okay. I got the wife or husband, I got the kids, I got the car, I got the job, I got this, I got that, and I look at it, and I’m not okay.” And some people just get weird and run off, and some people don’t run off, they suppress it.

“I’ll live with it, I’ll live with it. I have family responsibilities, I have kids, I have jobs, I have so on. So, okay, so I won’t be happy. It’s okay.” Anybody listening? That’s very sad. Why? Because you can be ecstatic in the same job with the same family and the same kids if you didn’t suppress it, if you didn’t block yourself.

If you’re not blocked, you’re in a constant state of creativity, inspiration, joy, and love. Why? Because that’s what’s in there. I know they’ve told you that before, but I’m assuring you, what’s in there is so beautiful that the highest you’ve ever felt, because something came in from outside, is only because for a moment it cleared your blockage.

“You found a way”—all your blockages: “Oh, he loved me so much, and he’s so handsome. She’s so beautiful, and it made me…” So now you distracted yourself from yourself. There are lots of types of things that can distract you from yourself. Vacations and new relationships—they’re all wonderful things, temporarily.

Okay? Go on a vacation. That’s unbelievable. The nicer it is, the less you want to come back. And then you want to go back next time, and it turns out it’s raining all the time, and there are hurricanes and tornadoes and volcanoes. And you just reach the point where you say, “Wow.” That’s the point. When you reach the point where you can look me in the eyes and say, “You know what?

It doesn’t work.” It’s not wrong. You can practice renunciation, but renunciation doesn’t work either. Shh, I didn’t say that. Why? How did you decide what you want to renounce? That which bothers me—there you go. That’s how you decide. “Have it not bother you, don’t interact with it.” But then you worry if… “I did all that.

Moved out to the middle of the woods, alone. There was nothing out here, boy.” All right? And meditated all the time. If I’m meditating and a dog is barking in the distance, not able to struggle to hear it—”Oh, my God, I didn’t find quiet yet. Why does that dog have to…” It doesn’t work. I tried it, okay? And so what do you find out?

You find out that if there’s a problem in there, it’s because you have blockages. Because over the course of your life, you were not able to handle things, and now you have sensitivities in those areas. And you have hopes and dreams and concepts and views and opinions and preferences, don’t you? And they’re all based on—I’ve talked about this before—there’s a world out there.

Check. There’s my concepts, views, opinions, preferences, hopes, and dreams inside. Those two are very, very different things. The world outside of you was not made by what you want. What you want was made by your past experiences. Not a single desire and fear that you have is not based on your past experiences.

I mean, other than a lion jumping at you—that’s very primal, okay? But as far as your psychological fears and desires, they are based upon past experiences you had that you either didn’t like or liked. You didn’t just make them up. You wouldn’t even know how to make it up. You understand that? Okay?

They left impressions on you, and now you define what you want, which is fine. It’s true. And psychology says man is the sum of learned experiences. Okay, you’re not—you’re the consciousness that’s aware that your psyche has been programmed by your past experiences. That’s a big difference. But it doesn’t matter.

You’re going to be affected by what you suppressed, by what you held onto, by what you didn’t like and what you did like. Well, why would I be affected by what I like? I always feel bad when I talk to you about this, because if it happens and you really, really like it, what do you want to bet you want it to happen again?

And what do you want to bet that you start worrying that it won’t happen again? And what do you want to bet that if it starts to happen again, it isn’t exactly the way you remember it? That’s disappointing. Can things be disappointing? If you appoint them, they can be disappointing, and that’s what happens with things we like.

We appoint them. We want them to be exactly like that again. Well, okay, I don’t want to talk about it too much, but I always say it’s worse that you store all your garbage in there. It’s okay to store some of the nice things—just pay attention. Just pay attention. And when you’re not doing well, you open up the wedding album, you try to look through it and try to feel the feelings you felt then.

What are you doing? Trying to live by bread alone. Why would you have to do that? “Because I’m not feeling what I felt when that was happening.” What if you were feeling what you felt when that was happening? Bring it on. Let’s see what’s new. Let’s have another experience. Maybe it’ll be better than the last one.

“No, I want the exact same one, because I know it made me feel good.” Is it okay if we talk like this? All right. Is it the truth? Have you found that you cling—it’s a Buddhist term—that you cling to things that you want to happen, and you push away and reject and block away things that you don’t want to happen.

So now that’s what you have in there. And then you come into the outside world. I have to discuss this with you time and time again. I handle myself. The outside world is not the sum of your learned experiences. It wasn’t even there. The moments that happened to you now—it doesn’t know where you grew up, doesn’t know what mommy said to you and didn’t say to you, didn’t know about the first boyfriend or girlfriend.

Does it? What does it know? It knows the sum of its learned experiences. It’s called cause and effect. There are things that happened prior to this event, and they all coalesce together, science, to create the moment in front of you. That’s beautiful. It’s real. It’s not bad that it’s raining on your birthday.

It doesn’t know it’s your birthday. You’re doing that. And so basically, the world unfolds based upon science, the laws of—is it right or wrong, or good or bad? It’s everything. It’s what is. It’s reality. Can you make it better? Of course you can. You can work with it so it passes by you. You can try to raise it.

You should try to raise it—not a passive thing, right? You can bring beauty and love into the world if that’s what you’re feeling inside. But what you’re feeling inside is, “I’m not okay, and I need the moments unfolding outside to make me be okay.” Do I need to finish the sentence? All right? They say east is east, west is west, and never the twain shall meet.

How about inside is the inside, outside is the outside, and never the twain shall meet? Except inside of you, you can’t handle the moment that’s passing by. Is it passing by? Yes. Does it stop? No. Do you stop it? Sure. You stop it inside yourself, then you miss all the rest of the moments, and you end up building this self-concept, this ego.

That’s what it is. That’s what an ego is—something you made up out of the bricks and mortar that you held inside as the moments passed by. You didn’t hold them all in there. I challenged you before—you don’t hold the white lines in there every time you drive by them. You don’t hold all the cars that pass you by on the LA expressway, do you?

You just hold some of them in there—the things that bothered you, the things that didn’t feel good—and now you’ve built this whole, whoa. Once you step back far enough to see mind for what it is, that’s what mind is. It’s an accumulation of all the rocks you put in there, and you put a lot of rocks in there along the way.

The accumulation of all those rocks—and the Shakti’s not just hitting it, it’s blocking it, so you don’t feel that love. You don’t feel that inspiration. You don’t feel that joy, unless you open. It’s called being open. What does “open” mean? It means you can be closed. What can? Your whole inside can be closed, can’t it?

It can be dark and closed. But if something happens outside that distracts you from yourself, it tends to open—no question—and you feel wonderful energy, right? And then, “I want it again.” Now you get another blockage, because it’s not happening the way I want it to. So you end up making a complete mess of your life, because you want things to happen and you don’t want things to happen, and then you build plans in your mind, which is a problem anyway.

You build plans in your mind about how to make it happen. You call it planning, and it’s adorable. But again, don’t get me wrong—life is not a passive thing. It’s an interactive sport. But if you’re not okay, and what you’re doing is trying to make it be the way you want it to be so you feel okay, you’re in trouble, and it’s in trouble, and everybody around you is in trouble, because you’re out there trying to manipulate moments that are not naturally in harmony with what you want inside.

What are they in harmony with? They’re in harmony with all the forces that made them be the way they are. Somebody yells at you. Somebody’s yelling at you—let’s take that. Is that okay? It better be. Why? Because they’re yelling at you. How do you know? I think I know. What do I do about it? I have a choice.

Punch them out, shut them up, hate them, run away. Okay, or—here’s yelling. There’s a little spot on the planet Earth, there’s somebody yelling. Probably a lot of spots on the planet Earth, somebody yelling. Had nothing to do with me. They had a bad day the day before. They missed a phone call, or somebody dumped them, or they ate something that made them sick.

Now they’re not feeling good, okay? So they’re dumping the energy. Why? Because they have their blockages too. What if you were like that? You just sit there and say, “Okay, wow.” Well, I told you once, this lady, Ma Yoga Shakti, a very great saint who gave us the Durga statue—she once leaned over, very quiet, hardly ever talked personally, but we were very close.

She passed some years ago. She leaned over to me, she said, “Mickey.” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Don’t you just love when they yell at you? There’s so much energy.” Isn’t there a lot of energy? You feel it, don’t you? And you close. You close because you don’t want to be yelled at. You close and block it. She didn’t close.

She let it come in, and it got her high. How would you like to live like that? Kind of nice, isn’t it? Right? But you can’t. So what you do is push it away. How many things have you pushed away? It’s a constant. How many things every day do you push away? The weather’s not the way you want it to be. The driver in front of you is not the way you want them to be.

The person didn’t say hello, at least not with enough gusto that you’re expecting them to. Somebody who you love walked by because they were talking to somebody else, they didn’t stop talking the moment they saw you, and it bothered you for three days. So that’s what it’s like to live in there when you’re full of your concepts and views based on your past, and the world is the result of its own experiences.

Talking about this made me cry at times. How can you not see this? “Well, we can make it be what we want.” For one thing, I hope not. Why? Because so what you want, nobody else wants. So if I sit down and meditate as hard as I can to manifest what I want, what’s happening to everybody else who doesn’t want it? “I don’t want it to rain on my birthday.”

The farmer has a plight and it’s dry. It’s a drought. So a great being doesn’t do that. They sit there and say, “Why am I not okay with what is?” If it rains, it rains. If it’s hot, it’s hot. If it’s my birthday, it’s my birthday. I don’t have to do that inside my mind to make a mess of myself, so I worry about everything and do everything.

And so you look outside and you realize, “Well, why am I doing that?” That’s why we start our talk—not “how can I make the world be the way I want so I feel better?” No, no. You look inside and find out why you don’t feel okay to start with. You work at the root. The Buddhists call it working at the root. You work at the root.

The root is that you stored these rocks in there, and the energy flow that’s supposed to be taking you into God—this heavenly, beautiful flow that rushes inside of you all the time and brings you up—it’s blocked. By what? The stuff you stored in there. How many times have I talked about that? People like my books.

That’s why. They say, “Huh, you’re right. I really did store that stuff in there, and it really does block my heart. It really does.” If I got a divorce seven years ago, and then I’m starting to date somebody, and they slurp their soup like the other guy did, or the other gal did, or they even have a little bit of a lisp that reminds me of them, I don’t—nothing to do with that.

Or, “Oh, it was love at first sight. He parted his hair the same as my brother, and my brother died years ago, and I always think about him. This is my soulmate.” In other words, you have this stuff in here that can close you and open you, and you think that’s the most important thing in the whole world, because you only feel open when something opens you.

You’re not open yourself. Something has to happen. It could be a good movie, a good vacation, a good something that helps to open you. I don’t deny that it feels good—of course it feels good—but it’s going to close again. It’s conditional, as long as that thing doesn’t stay that way. In fact, is it okay if it stays that way, that opens you?

That opened you before? No, it gets boring. You like change, don’t you? I always talked about a thing called the law of diminishing returns. I studied that in my doctoral program in economics. Very important law, very spiritual law. But as I say, the more you get something that you like, the less you need it.

Somebody gives you this beautiful, beautiful ring, or whatever it is you like, right? And it’s like, wow. For a while you really look at it, and you show it to everybody, don’t you? Then what? The more you show it, the less effect it has, until eventually it’s just a ring. It ends up in the jewelry box. Then, “Oh, look, there it is.

I remember you said…” Yes or no? The law of diminishing returns. That which turned you on before is not going to turn you on the same way next time, because you already had the experience. And once you get used to the experience, then it’s not new. Have you noticed? Am I being bad by bringing these things up? I’m just telling you, you’re a great being.

You are a great being. It’s beyond your comprehension how great you are, right? But you’re blocked, so the answer is not to get things that match your blockages and then try to cling to them and hold them, worry about them. It’s to get rid of the blockages. That’s the whole purpose of my talk. If you get rid of your blockages, you won’t be blocked.

Then what? There’s nothing blocking the energy flow. Then what? Oh, my God. What did Yogananda say? “Wave upon wave of endless joy saturates me day and night, throng upon throng.” Oh, I see. It sounds kind of interesting. It doesn’t mean you don’t come back and work in the world, but that’s what you’re bringing with you.

That’s what’s emanating from you. Not, “I’m not working with the world, I’m working on the world”—you know what I mean? “I’m trying to get it the way I want it to be so I can be okay.” That’s very different from: you are okay, and you bring that energy in. I’ve been quoting Rumi lately. Rumi said—ancient Persian poet—Rumi said, “Yesterday, I was clever.

I was trying to change the world. Today, I’m wise, so I’m changing myself.” That is what it means to work on yourself spiritually. It doesn’t mean you get what you want, it doesn’t mean everything goes the way you want. That’s not how you measure—we’ll talk about that—that’s not how you measure your growth. There are people who write to me and say, “Oh, I read this thing, and I’m open, your books.

I felt so open. I felt, oh, God, I’m just watching the mind. I understand the difference,” right? “And I was doing wonderful. I was doing wonderful. And now, I don’t know what changed. There’s turmoil inside. I feel all this stuff. What did I do wrong?” You didn’t do anything wrong. You did everything right. It means the stuff that you stored in there is now coming up.

It has to come up to pass through. “But I don’t want it to.” Okay, fine. Push it back down. Push the rock back in the water, because there’s a lot of current going on, and when I took it out, then it hit other rocks and… Eventually, you catch on that your spiritual growth is not about getting what you want.

It’s not about getting it the way you want. It’s about noticing, why do I need it to be that way? All right, why? Because as long as I need it to be a certain way, it’s not going to be that way. How many of you have found that every single thing unfolds every minute the way you want it to be? Well, you’ve been around the block.

Never. How hard do you have to work and struggle to try to make it be what you want? Fine. Get tension, anxiety, fear of loss. Anything can happen that can cause all kinds of trouble, all right? Fine, go through it. Learn about it. Someday you reach the point I’m talking about, that says, “Eh, maybe I’d rather be okay inside, naturally, than struggle to make the outside so I can feel okay inside.”

That’s the essence of the deep spiritual teachings. “I would rather cleanse inside, no matter what it costs, no matter how long it takes, no matter how difficult it is. If I’ve got stuff in there that makes it difficult in there, I want it out. I don’t know about you. I don’t want it in there. I don’t want to struggle for the rest of my life to keep anything from hitting my stuff.

I want to have no stuff. Or at least less, okay?” I want to go through every day of my life, and when I wake up the next morning, I’ve dealt with life in a way that got rid of my stuff. And that’s how you work with your mind. Very different. You can do the others, by all means—you can do many things along the way.

All right? And they’re all very helpful. But when it’s all said and done, you don’t want that stuff in there. You don’t want to have to struggle to be okay. You want to be okay, and the only way to be okay is to get rid of what’s making you not okay there. You can’t be okay by not being okay and trying to make things be a way that makes you feel better.

That was a mouthful. You can get rid of why you’re not okay, and then you’re okay. That’s it. But we don’t do that. It’s funny, a lot of you normally do it with your body. “I broke my finger. Don’t look. I’m not going to the doctor. I don’t want anybody to talk about it.” No, I didn’t break my finger, I’m hiding it on purpose because it’s important to me, and I’m keeping it safe.

What are you, crazy? Go to the doctor. Get your finger fixed. Well, it’s the same thing inside. If you’re not okay inside, get rid of why you’re not okay. Don’t compensate for it. Don’t adjust to it. Don’t adapt to it. Don’t cope with it. Every one of those words is: “This is the way I am. Always been that way.

I like…” That’s my favorite. “You don’t understand. I am the way I am. I’ve been this way since I was little.” What is that telling you? Yeah, you had a messed-up childhood. You store all this stuff inside, and now “I am that I am.” Of course you are. But that’s not who you are. You’re the consciousness that’s aware that there’s a mess in there, and now you’re going to go out there and say, “I can’t change.”

Of course you can change. Of course you can change. The other day I was talking about it to somebody—they never get it when I try to talk deep, right? Throw a ball up in the air. This is now your job, each one of you—you’re going to throw balls up in the air. Someone’s going to throw a ball up in the air, and you’ve got to catch it.

It could go way far over there. Run, run, like tennis, right? Run, run, run, catch it, catch it, catch it, catch it, okay? How hard is that? Very hard. Let me give you a different task. Pay attention. The balls—same balls—they’re going to be thrown up in the air, all right? Your task is to not catch them. How hard is that?

Are you kidding? It’s the natural way of things—they’ll just do what they do. “I have a job.” No, you do have a job. Don’t catch them. Kind of funny, isn’t it? That’s what’s going on inside. You’re trying to fix it. You’re trying to catch it and neutralize it and rationalize it and push it away. You’re trying to do whatever you can to keep it okay.

Catch the ball, catch the ball. What if your job is to leave the thing alone so that it can naturally cleanse? Because it will naturally cleanse, just like the river or the stream will carry the pebbles or the rocks away if it’s strong enough. It’ll do anything, unless you hold onto them. So that’s what’s going on inside.

The stuff has been left in there. Now you say, “I’ve always been this way.” Sure you have, because you’ve been storing stuff in there your whole life. What does it feel like to come out? You tell me. “It feels just as bad as it did when it happened, except I was young when it happened, and I pushed it away, and I don’t want to feel it ever again.

I didn’t like what my uncle did, and I don’t like it. I…” Okay, fine, catch it and suppress it. How about, in order to grow spiritually, leave it alone? “I don’t understand.” Don’t touch it. Let it be. Let it be, speaking words of wisdom. If it’s in there disturbing you, you have a choice: keep it in there because you don’t want to be disturbed, or welcome it up so it can be over with.

That is spirituality, and that’s very different than thinking about being happy all the time and getting what you want and attracting what you want. It’s still conditional. It only works if what unfolds in front of you is what you want, and we know it doesn’t naturally do that. You have to struggle real hard to get it the way you want.

What if you let go of the part of you that’s making you want and need things? That doesn’t mean you don’t go to work. Doesn’t mean you don’t have kids. Doesn’t mean you don’t do finances. You do all this stuff for fun. It’s just fun. You go to work because it’s inspiring. You go to have a family because it’s fun, and you have wonderful people you get to know.

And wouldn’t that be better than “I need it, I want it, it has to be the way I want”? All you have to do is let go of the stuff you have stored in there, and over time, the energy will come up. You will feel it. And sometimes it’ll come up, and you’ll feel, “Oh, what did I do wrong?” You didn’t do anything wrong.

The rest is now coming out. There’s an analogy I use sometimes. Some of you are from Miami, all right, or it doesn’t have to be—someplace where you have pools. Silt, sludge can get into the pool, especially if it’s not screened. What does it do? It settles, so the water looks clear. Go swim. See what happens.

Go diving. All the sludge comes flying up. So now go hire somebody to get the sludge out. You don’t want to be out there looking when they’re doing it, because that water’s getting dark and black before it’s clean. That’s what it means to cleanse inside. There’s this sludge in there, and it’s been suppressed and held down.

But what happens if you don’t hold it down? It will come up. “Well, I don’t like that.” Okay, don’t like it. Keep it instead. Don’t clean the pool. And don’t go swimming. Or maybe you can figure out how to float above it with one of those floats, so you’re not stirring the water up while you’re in it.

Anyway, listening? You either struggle to keep your stuff, which to me is absurd, or you be willing to deal with the fact that that stuff is not meant to be in there, and that is why your mind is the way it is. If you have real turmoil in your mind—we’ve all had it at various times in our lives, a lot of times, right?

Where something is just not the way you want—it’s not treating you the way you want, your job’s not the way you want, finances are not the way you want, your body doesn’t look the way you want it to. You get old—oh boy, I don’t know about that. Things are not the way you want, and your mind can have real disturbance because of it.

All right? What’s the solution—fight to make it be the way I want, or check, why am I doing this? Why can’t I handle what’s unfolding and let go inside and let the cleansing process take place? If something’s bothering me, it’s because there’s something in there that can be bothered. What if there was nothing in there that could be bothered?

I’m inviting you to it. This is called liberation. It’s not some little game where you’re trying to get what you want. It’s about: what if you were fine with every single thing that happens, and then came down and dealt with it? Not, “I’m not okay with it, and that’s why I’m dealing with it.” Because if you’re disturbed, I don’t want to see why.

I don’t want to be around when you figure out how to deal with the fact that you’re disturbed, and you dump that energy out there, laying it on everybody else to make them be the way you want while you’re disturbed. Does that sound like fun? Have you ever done it? Of course. Does it work out? No. You hurt people.

You hurt yourself. You do all kinds of stuff. But not if you’re filled with love and willing to honor and respect the cleansing process taking place, which we can talk about how, but just get the principle down. That is called true spiritual growth. You just are willing—how do those words go? Oh yeah, die to be reborn.

You’re willing to go through this in order to be free, in order that every single day can be better and higher, and you can see—you keep your pole star aimed way up high, and you go through what you need to go through. How do I know what I need to go through? You obviously know—you’re fighting it. You understand that?

How do I know I’m growing? How are you doing? How should I know what to deal with? It will let you know. Are you willing to say, “I am willing to grow, I’m about growth,” and then wait to see what happens? You’re going to find out that life has a purpose, and the purpose is not getting what you want. The purpose is letting go inside to let this beautiful energy flow and rise and raise you constantly, ascend.

And the thing—how do I learn to ascend? You don’t. You let go of what’s keeping you down, and it goes up by itself. You do not struggle to be high. You let go of what’s keeping you down. You’re naturally high—that’s your natural state. If I have a hot air balloon and it’s tethered by these ropes that are tying it down, don’t put more helium in there or hot air.

It’ll bounce up and down. It ain’t going anywhere. Cut the tethers, and it will go up by itself. That is what’s going on inside of you, and the tethers are the rocks that you stored in there from the past. And you keep them in there. You think it’s all about “I’m supposed to be happy all the time.” I would rather go through what I need to go through so I’m unconditionally happy, as opposed to conditionally happy.

All right. Now we understand the foundation. That’s why your mind gets so disturbed—because something hit that energy, the blocks that stimulate fears and anxieties and tensions and so on, and then that energy comes up into the mind, which is a pool of energy, and it disturbs that pool, and it is hard to stop it.

The mind does not have a mind of its own. There is a root, and the root is the blockages that you created, and when the energy comes through there, it becomes extremely disturbed. And by the time it hits the mental plane, which is a vibration rate of energy, that energy gets caustic, okay? And you just catch on.

It is not hopeless or helpless. You are in charge in there. You’re the only one living in there. If it’s a mess, it’s because you stored all this stuff in there, and you don’t understand, you’re not willing to let it go. But what you learn is that only one thing works, and that is letting go of the stuff that’s in there.

If you keep that stuff in there, you will never be free, by definition. You understand that? And it happens to be the exact same thing the Buddhists teach. By the way, you have so much in there, you need many lifetimes to get it out. No, you need one—the one you’re in—and the willingness to let go. Right?

I just teach what I know and what I experience, right? So karma—the word karma is very different for me than I see when other people use it. They say, “Oh, he’s got bad karma. He’ll pay for that as a punishment.” No. If you have stored stuff inside of you and it is disturbing you and other people, then it’s not going out until you stop doing it, right?

As long as you’re doing it, you’re dumping stuff out there—dumping bad energy out there. But it’s not a bad thing, it’s a lesson. If you hurt somebody, either it bothered you, or somebody else talks about it, or you’re afraid to see them again—that’s karma. It comes back. Why? Because it’s still in there.

What if it’s not in there anymore? Then it doesn’t come back. Why would it? You don’t even know that it didn’t come back, because it didn’t hit anything. Hey, you hurt somebody when you were young and you feel terrible about it, you feel guilty and everything. Okay, you’ve kept it inside of you. You do things when you’re young and things happen.

What if you grow enough that it goes? You apologize inside. You don’t have to see the person—you apologize inside, you feel remorse, and you realize, “I would never do that again.” That’s how I talk to you guys about guilt. If you tell me you did a terrible thing, and I ask you, “Would you do it again the same way if the same thing happened?”

The majority of the time, almost every time, they say to me, “No, of course not. I would never, ever do that that way again. I’ve changed. I’ve grown.” Then you’re done. Why are you sitting there feeling guilt? You learned your lesson. It’s like you took third-grade math and failed. Now you’re a PhD in mathematics.

“Yeah, but that third-grade thing was so embarrassing.” No, it helped you, because you got held back and got more teaching. So don’t think of karma as a bad thing. You are growing, and you have the right to learn and grow. All right? But if you keep your stuff in there and that’s what you’re doing—”Yeah, I would do it again.

I can’t believe what she did”—okay, then you have to live through the results of that. You are given the right to work through your stuff. Are you busy doing it? And that’s how you work with your mind. It’s not going to change tomorrow. I said there’s stuff in there that’s got to come up. The attitude is: are you ready, willing, and able, to the best of your ability, to let that stuff come up, do what it needs to do, and do your best to let it go and not push it back down?

Have you made that the meaning of your life? Because the meaning of your life is not getting what you want. That is so overrated, it’s ridiculous. Have you ever not wanted something else? Is there ever a time you get what you wanted—wife, husband, children, this, that, finance, the corner office—that you didn’t want anything else? You immediately want something else, right?

You get money. “Wow, I got money.” But you need a boat, a house, a thing, and you’re just still trying to be okay. It doesn’t do it. And so it’s okay to work for what raises you, as long as you’re doing it out of love—then it’s love to start with. Fine, go to work, and express, and paint, and do things, whatever it is you…

Even business, it’s fine. But do it because you’re inspired, you feel love, and you’re letting go of the part of you that would hold you back. All right? You get so high that if it’s raining when you go to work, you’re not complaining. “Oh, boy, I can’t wait to go to work.” “But it’s pouring rain.” “I didn’t notice.”

You just—you can grow. Earth is a place that souls are sent to evolve. Earth, that little planet out there, is a place that souls are sent to evolve. That’s how you work with your mind. You understand it’s not the mind. The mind’s not doing anything wrong. The current is hitting the rocks. That’s not the rock’s fault.

It’s the fact that you’re holding the rock in there, okay? And so the mind is innocent. Do you understand that? Your mind is innocent. It’s a field of energy that’s being fed from underneath, like springs. The spring comes up, and it makes all these waves and bubbles when it comes up. That’s not the spring’s fault, or the water’s fault.

It’s the nature of things. If you have junk down there, rocks that are causing the stuff, then when it comes up into the mind, it’s disturbed and rough and hitting everything in turmoil—that is what the mind’s going to be. If you don’t have that stuff down there, then it’s going to be at peace, naturally, without a struggle, without any effort, because there’s nothing making it be that way.

So that is the ultimate way to work with the mind and with the heart: to get rid of the stuff you’ve stored in there. How? Just when it comes up, don’t push it back. That’s all I ask. You don’t have to go seeking it out. You don’t have to find it. You don’t have to figure out why. You can, you can, right?

But you don’t have to. You just have to be in there, willing to do your best to relax through it, to relax through the disturbing energy that’s coming up. Oh, somebody once wrote me, “Why does it have to be disturbing energy that comes up?” If it was stored with pain, it’s coming back with pain. Can I make it not be that way?

You can rationalize. You can make it feel a bit better. But when it’s all said and done, you want it out, and it’s stored with pain. You can spend your whole time trying to make it feel a little bit better, but what are you doing then? You’re keeping it and trying to make it feel better. And eventually you sit there and say, “I don’t want to keep it.

I want to explore what it’d be like to be free.” That’s called liberation, freedom. And so you work on yourself, and letting go of yourself. I’m telling you, that’s exactly what Christ meant by “thou must be reborn.” It’s just a clear, clear understanding that you don’t keep yourself not okay and then think it’s going to be okay.

You just be willing to let go of yourself. So I started off by talking to you about the nature of mind. I’ve been talking about that lately, okay? Do you understand it better? Do you understand why the mind is the way it is? Do you blame it? You can’t blame your mind. It didn’t do anything, right? It doesn’t have a mind of its own.

It is the result of what you stored down there. And so if you want it to be at peace, if you want it to be clean—not tomorrow, it’s not going to happen immediately. You wake up in the morning—here’s… I don’t teach meditation. I meditate, but I don’t teach meditation. I teach what to do when you’re not meditating. So what do you do?

Here it goes. Here’s your technique. You ready? You wake up in the morning: “Oh, I’m back.” “Oh, okay, you’re back,” and the stuff starts. It doesn’t take long, does it? On your way up, it starts coming back. “What I didn’t get or think, what’s not working, what I have to do today, what I messed up yesterday, I hope nobody knows.”

You know, “Oh, here it comes.” In other words, the stuff that’s down there starts stimulating the mind. Just take a minute—five, ten, fifteen minutes. If you meditate, fine, it’s wonderful. I’m talking about when you wake up in the morning, you put aside five or ten minutes, you put something aside to say, “Okay, I see it, I see it.

Today, I’m letting go of this stuff. I’m not doing everything I can to suppress it back, to avoid the disturbance.” And you just sit there and say, “I’m sorry that I stored this stuff down there. I know that’s why the mind is the way it is.” It helps a lot when you know, you understand why it is the way it is, instead of freaking out.

“This is the result of everything I stored in there, and that was a lot, all right? And right now, some of it got hit, and it’s coming up, all right?” And you ask, is that okay with me? You say yes, because I don’t want it in here, all right? It’s not going to come up all at once. You’re going to say, “But I worked it through the other day.”

No, you worked some of it through. Right? That’s strong stuff down there, isn’t it? And the other thing you do during the day, if you’re wise, is ask yourself a question. Have you noticed that somebody who’s a friend of yours cannot say hello to you, and all of a sudden the mind’s bothered? “Why didn’t they say hello, and what did I do wrong?”

And you make up reasons. Okay? How about we don’t want to put more in there? Forget the old stuff. It doesn’t do any good to let old stuff up if you’re putting new stuff in. So you say, that’s like not catching a ball. So you sit there and say, “Today, whatever needs to come up will come up, but I’m not putting more in there, and I’m doing the best I can, so that if it comes up, I do what?

To relax through it. That’s the key. I’ve done this for 55 years. Relax through it. What does that mean? You’re going to try to protect yourself from the disturbing feeling, from disturbing thoughts. Instead, relax. It’s like the inner being says, “I need to do something about this. This is disturbing. I need to do something about it.”

I’m not saying to you, don’t. I’m not telling you don’t do something about it. Do something about it. Relax. What do you mean, how can I relax? Because you’re in here experiencing the disturbance. You’re not the disturbance, you’re the experiencer of the disturbance. You’re aware that it’s disturbed in there.

How are you aware? Because I’m in here. Okay, you relax. Don’t try to make it relax. That’s a mistake people make. They can’t make anger relax. They can’t make jealousy relax. But you can relax behind the jealousy. You can relax and understand, okay, this is coming up because I had past experiences that created disturbances before, and it’s stored down there.

I can just relax—literally relax your shoulders, relax your buttocks, just relax to the best of your ability. Every moment you relax instead of resist, less is in there, because you let it out a little bit, and you just find—I don’t know how to tell you. I’ve been doing it a long time. Wait till you see what happens.

You start becoming capable of handling more and more, not being disturbed as much by different things that happen, and then the next thing happens, you can handle that, then that, and little by little you’re becoming free. You’re liberating yourself. It’s not a struggle. It’s a surrender. It’s an acceptance of letting this stuff pass through, and then you do the best you can, not to get what you want, but to bring good energy into this world—not because you need to, but because you feel love, because you feel light, because you’re doing better.

All right. That’s the best I can do for you. I hope you can understand. What’s the main thing we’re teaching? The reason the mind and the heart are the way they are is because of the stuff you stored in there from the past. So if you’re willing to not put more in there, that’s a really good move. So during the day, if someone doesn’t say hello, ask, “Can I handle this?

I don’t want to”—but I don’t ask whether you want to. Can I handle this? Can I handle the fact that the person didn’t say hello? Not even trying to figure out why. Just, okay, that’s what happened, and let it go. Phew. And you just keep doing this, and then the old stuff will start coming up. Why? Because you’re not putting new stuff on top of it.

And wait till you see how fast you grow. It’s an amazing, true process of liberation. Jai guru dev.

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.