Everything you're pushing away or trying to cling to is showing you what you need to release in order to experience the abundant energy of life within you.
How to get the most out of these Wisdom Quotes:
Put aside everything you think you already know.
Open your mind and heart to receive something new.
Take your time going through each point.
Return to any points that particularly touch you.
In the coming days, listen carefully to the wisdom within you.
1. What Determines Your Level on Energy?
"First, the awakening, the excitement, the realization that you don’t have to be who you thought you were, and that there’s a way out - there’s promise, there’s hope. And then the realization that there’s beautiful energy inside of you and you want it and that it comes and goes.
If you’re wise, you watch, and you see why it comes and goes.
It comes and goes because of the opening and closing of your heart. It’s that simple. The secrets constantly come down to the open and closing of your heart, the opening and closing of your mind, which are directly related to each other. As the mind goes, so the heart goes. As the heart goes, so the mind goes.
You start to realize that it is the opening and closing of my heart that is determining the level of my energy, and so I need to stop closing my heart, I need to stop doing this so that I can experience the energy and grow."
~Michael A. Singer, from the video: Author's Insights on the Untethered Soul - Vol 1 The Untethered Soul Lectures
COACHING NOTES:
There's a beautiful energy inside of you. It's not important what name you give to it. What matters is whether it's flowing freely or it's blocked.
You may think that the flow of this energy depends on circumstances beyond your control, but it doesn't. It's directly related to the opening and closing of your heart.
Before reading The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, I had never heard of the opening and closing of my heart as something that determined my happiness. In fact, I was completely oblivious to what I was doing with my heart. This week is an opportunity to tune into your heart and experience this life force energy that is wanting to flow through your life.
There is a direct relationship between your mind and heart. If you have skeptical thoughts, your heart will close. If you have judgmental thoughts, your heart will close. Fortunately, you don't need to try to open your heart. You simply need to see what you're doing that's causing it to close.
2. The Need to Work Through Your Stuff
"There’s no playing around here. You have to go through your stuff. Why? Because it’s causing your heart to close, it’s causing your mind to close, and when you close you don’t experience the energy. If you’re not experiencing the energy, you’re not growing spiritually.
It’s all about you and the amount of energy that you’re experiencing, and you can’t experience the energy when you are closed and blocked. And you can’t make believe that you’re not blocked, because you are blocked.
The only thing you can do about the block, like any other block, is to remove it. But this is work.
Why do I have to work through my stuff? You have to work through your stuff because you have stuff. It’s that simple. And as long as there’s stuff the world is going to activate it and it’s going to block your energy.
You can purify your heart and you can purify your mind. Every single time you release something that is blocked inside of you, then the world can no longer bother you about it. And because the world can no longer bother you about it, you’re not bothered. And if you’re not bothered, you get to stay open. You get to enjoy the experience of life.
So you commit yourself to working through this stuff."
~Michael A. Singer, from the video: Author's Insights on the Untethered Soul - Vol 1 The Untethered Soul Lectures
COACHING NOTES:
"When you close, you don't experience the energy." You have this beautiful energy inside you, but something is blocking the flow. Let's examine more closely what that is.
Anything that closes your heart blocks the flow of this energy. What closes your heart? Everything you're fighting with life about: things that happen that you don't want to happen, things that don't happen that you want to happen, things that have already happened and are still bothering you, and things that you're worried might happen in the future. Basically, everything in your virtual world of memory, imagination, and preference that doesn't line up with how life is unfolding.
Michael tells us that we have to remove the blocks, but that it takes work. What kind of work does it take? Releasing work. This means, when you realize that you're bothering yourself about something, letting go of it and setting yourself free. "Every single time you release something that is blocked inside of you, then the world can no longer bother you about it."
The process is very simple really: if you can notice what bothers you, you can release that resistance inside you, which means that you are no longer bothered by that thing (if you are still bothered, keep releasing until you are no longer bothered), which keeps your heart open so you can experience the flowing of the beautiful energy within you, thereby enjoying your experience of life.
3. Like the Sun and the Clouds
"Eventually, through clarity of witness consciousness - watching, observing, seeing, learning, you come to see that, underneath, there’s a tremendous ocean of energy. When it flows, that’s the nectar of your life. That energy is everything.
When you feel it, you use words like happy, high, love, joyful, contented, peaceful. When you don’t feel it, you use words like depressed, down, burned out, etc.
Underneath, there is energy. Above, there’s you. In between, there’s mind. What stands in between your consciousness, your experience of being, and the joy of your life - your chi, shakti, spirit, energy, juice, high, love, call it whatever you want - what stands in between you and that is mind.
It doesn’t look like that. What it looks like, is what stands in between you and that is the world. It's very important to see what’s going on.
It looks like I don’t feel love because he or she won’t pay attention to me, or because this didn’t happen, or because that happened; that I don’t feel good about myself because somebody else got a raise, or got an A, or is more interested in somebody than me. This is what it looks like, and you have to see very carefully to see past it.
Mind blocks your ability to see and experience the shakti (divine power), the same as clouds block your ability to see the sun.
The sun is always there, even on a cloudy day. The sun is always there. You go into outer space, and you look toward the sun, what you’re going to see is that, not only is the sun always there, but it never rises and it never sets, and it never has a bad day and it never has a good day and for five billion years it has been exactly the same.
That’s not what it looks like is happening. It looks like it’s going up and going down, not coming out on cloudy days, and so on and so forth. That’s not true! It’s just there.
That is what is true of your chi, of your shakti, your spirit. It is like the sun, it’s just there. Nothing can stain it; no matter how dark the clouds are, the sun does not get dark. Do you understand that? No matter how long the clouds stay, it does not get dark. Nothing happens to the sun. Nothing ever did or ever will happen to the sun because of the clouds.
The clouds block your ability to see the sun, so the mind blocks your ability to experience the shakti. That’s your first understanding."
~Michael A. Singer, from the video: Freedom From the Mind - Vol 2 The Untethered Soul Lectures
COACHING NOTES:
Remember the picture of the sun and clouds to help you understand what is happening in your experience.
Michael tells us, "It's very important to see what’s going on." It looks like things are operating a certain way, but we need to see through that to what is actually happening.
It looks like you're not feeling the "nectar of life," this beautiful energy, because of something 'out there.' You can blame it on a person or a situation - have you noticed how we can always come up with a reason not to be happy right now?
"The clouds block your ability to see the sun, so the mind blocks your ability to experience the shakti." It's not anything 'out there,' but the mind that's doing the blocking. And, as we've already learned, the heart follows the mind. Seeing this can cause the mind to relax, the heart to stay open, and the energy to flow.
4. Thinking Up a Storm
"The mind closes down based upon what it thinks is supposed to be happening. If the mind decides it wants certain things to happen that are not happening, you might have noticed the mind gets upset. When the mind gets upset, it’s like the weather getting upset, it gets tumultuous, it gets thick, the clouds darken. More and more thoughts get created when your mind doesn’t like something: Why is it this way? Who did it? What should I do about it? Every one of those thoughts is a thicker, darker cloud.
Therefore, the more you think about something, the worse off you are. That’s why that happens.
If you sit there and decide, I can’t be happy unless this person likes me, that’s a thought. I want you to chalk up every single thought to a cloud. A thought creates an energy cloud, and depending upon how much energy you put into that thought, and the vibration of that thought, it can be very dark. And if you put energy into it, it grows, it stays, and then, because it’s dark, you sit there and say, God, if this person would only like me, then I’d be okay.
The more you think about it, the more clouds you create. Then, when you’re in the presence of this person, your mind starts thinking, why is he paying attention to other people, why is she doing this? More thoughts, more depression, more closedness, more heavy feeling.
If, all of a sudden, that person turns and pays attention to you, and says really nice things to you, your mind is shocked. Your mind has gotten what it wants, and when the mind gets what it wants, it doesn’t even know what to do with it. So it disperses. It doesn’t know what to think about now because it was worrying about this and now, all of a sudden, it didn’t happen.
And so, if the mind gets what it wants, or it starts to look like the mind is going to get what it wants, the mind starts to thin out because there’s not that much more to think about.
If the mind is not getting what it wants, it starts to think about how to get what it wants, and you think that thinking about how to get what you want is going to move you closer to feeling energy. It’s not. It just creates more clouds in the mind, and therefore you actually get denser and thicker and you get more tied up in yourself and more screwed up in yourself.
But when the mind gets what it wants then the mind thins out, suspends for a moment. The moment the clouds suspend and thin out, you are able to experience what is underneath the cloud - pure ecstasy, pure joy, pure love."
~Michael A. Singer, from the video: Freedom From the Mind - Vol 2 The Untethered Soul Lectures
COACHING NOTES:
"The more you think about something, the worse off you are."
Realize that every thought creates an energy cloud. This thought energy can easily grow dark and murky, creating an unpleasant environment in your mind.
All the while, it looks like that person or scenario in the world is causing the stress. But things are not what they seem.
What happens when you get what you want? Suddenly, the clouds disperse and the sun can shine through again - the flow of that beautiful energy is back! It seems that the world (what happened 'out there') is responsible for your happiness, but, actually, it wasn't.
5. The Tricks of the Mind
"The problem is, it reinforces your feeling that it’s outside. You thought, if this person likes me, I’m going to feel so much love, it’s going to be so wonderful, it’ll be the joy of my life. And then it got reinforced by the fact that, when the person said they liked you or paid attention to you, you did feel all that joy. And so your mind says, see, I was right.
It’s very tricky, and you have to understand this because that’s what’s happening. The mind is blocking you, and then, when the mind gets what it wants, it’s unblocking you and then it’s taking credit for everything that happened.
It would be like if somebody was hurting you, squeezing your arm and hurting you, and then says, you want to see how good a friend I am? Watch, I’ll make you feel better, and they loosen up. You really are a friend! You must be a doctor. I hurt really bad before you did that.
The mind is doing the same thing. It is blocking you, then thinking about how to unblock you, which makes you feel more blocked, and if life just happens to line up - you had no control over that person suddenly deciding they like you or pay attention to you - life just unfolded that way - it just happened that what the mind wanted, that’s what life did, and when you get what you want it makes you happy.
It is not true that the thing outside of you somehow has something to do with you and combining it with you creates the chemistry that makes you happy.
What is happening is the thing outside of you has a relationship with your mind. So the relationship between your mind and the object outside is that your mind has preconceived notions of what it likes."
~Michael A. Singer, from the video: Freedom From the Mind - Vol 2 The Untethered Soul Lectures
COACHING NOTES:
Do you see what's happening here? Let's take a closer look at the tricks of the mind.
"The mind is blocking you, and then, when the mind gets what it wants, it’s unblocking you and then it’s taking credit for everything that happened." You want something, you feel frustrated - until you get what you want, and then you feel happy. It seems logical that your experience is being created from the outside in.
Come back to the picture of the sun and the clouds. Remember, the sun is always there, but the weather is interfering with your experience of it. The empowering thing is seeing that you're creating the weather. When you become conscious of your thinking mind and how it's interfering with your experience of the life energy within you, you are no longer at its mercy.
"Your mind has preconceived notions of what it likes." This is where all the trouble lies. As long as you're blindly directed by your mind and its preferences, you're at the mercy of what happens, and you will be bothered time and time again. But look at your experience more closely. When you do get what you want, why aren't you ultimately satisfied? How long is it before more clouds gather and you need to be, do or have something else in order to be fulfilled? Wisdom is showing you that your experience is actually being created from the inside out.
6. Grow Through Everything
"The things that you’re uncomfortable about, either because you’re afraid of them, or because you think you need them - they are the solution to your problems in life.
Either fear or need creates a sense of discomfort inside. These are the things you’re not done with. These are the things that the soul, the consciousness, who is whole and complete within itself, doesn’t know that it’s whole and complete within itself in these areas. It thinks, I will only be okay if this doesn’t happen, and I will only be okay if this does happen. The depth of your being experiences that.
When these things get activated, you get involved and this becomes the process of your life. It’s being thrown from desires and fears and needs and these different things. So you will grow at different rates through different things.
The result is, you get all this shakti (divine energy), you get all this power, what are you doing with it? There’s only one thing you do with anything your entire life. You use it to go to God, you use it to release yourself, you use it to finish off the purification."
~Michael A. Singer, from the video: Author's Insights on the Untethered Soul - Vol 1 The Untethered Soul Lectures
COACHING NOTES:
"The things that you’re uncomfortable about... are the solution to your problems in life." Read that again.
Everything you fear, and everything you desire and think you need, is showing you where you're closing your heart.
Everything you're pushing away and everything you're trying to cling to is showing you what you need to release in order to experience the light of the sun, the abundant energy of life within you.
"When these things get activated, you get involved and this becomes the process of your life." Your work is to be aware of these triggers and to use them to awaken. Rejoice when you catch yourself being bothered! It means you know what to work on, what to release, and what you need to be done with in life. This awareness is the blessing that transforms your world.