I have promised myself that I will work on my book today and it is getting toward dark, so I am productively procrastinating here to share with you some really good reads I’ve had just today!

Last Sunday I was visiting son and asked me to take me to The Temple of the Universe, a place he has spoken of one and off over the years.  It is run by Michael Singer.  I was suitably impressed by the talk – Singer is really good at bringing concepts down to earth.  So impressed, I hopped on Amazon and bought his book, The Untethered Soul:  The Journey Beyond Yourself.”  I have not been one bit disappointed!  I had to start highlighting in different colors to stay with key concepts – which is to say, I was underling a whole lot of the text and needed to be able to find things on my Kindle.  Color it is!

This is towards the end of the book.  The lead up is simple and easy to follow.  I hope you get something provocative from this excerpt too.

Start with this interview with Michael and Oprah (please don’t be put off – he’s very down to earth in person – I didn’t even know about Oprah until I looked him up.   He has an interesting background.)  It ends saying that we all want freedom, and that’s where I pick up in his book:

To live at this level of freedom, you must learn not to be afraid of inner pain and disturbance.  As long as you are afraid of the pain, you will try to protecct yourself from it.  The fear will make you do that.  If you want to be free, simply view inner pain as a temporary shift in your energy flow.  There is no reason to fear this experience.  You must not be afraid of rejection, or of how you would feel if you got sick, or if someone died, or if something else went wrong.  You cannot spend your life avoiding things that are not actually happening, or everything will become negative.  All you will end up seeing is how much can potentially go wrong.  Do you have any idea how many things can cause inner pain and disturbance?  Probably more than there are stars in the sky.  If you want to grow and be free to explore life, you cannot spend your life avoiding the myriad things that might hurt your heart or mind.  You must look inside yourself and determine that from now on pain is not a problem…

If you fee insecurity, it’s just a feeling.  You can handle a feeling.  If you feel embarrassed, it’s just a feeling.  It’s just a part of creation.  If you feel jealousy and your heart burns, just look at it objectiv ely, like your would a mild bruise…it cannot touch you unless you touch it [by being afraid].

When something painful touches your body, you tend to pull away instinctively.  The fact is, your psyche does the same

thing.  If something disturbing touches it, its tendency is to withdraw, to pull back and to protect itself…In essence, you “cloce,” which is simply an attempt to put a shield around your inner energy.  You can feel the effects of this as the sensation of contracting within your heart.  Somebody says something displeasing, and you feel some distrubance in your heart.  Then your mind start talking:  “I don’t have to put up with this.  I’ll just walk away and never talk to them again.  They’ll be sorry.”  Your heart is attempting to pull back from what it’s experiencing and protect itself…Once you close, your mind will build an entire psychological structure around your closed energy.  Your thoughts will try to rationalize why you’re right, why the other person’s wrong, and what you should do about it.

Sound familiar?  Yes, he goes on to give you a how to counteract this by relaxing and releasing.  Of course nothing feels that simple, but what have you got to lose trying to see if it really is that simple?!  Simplicity doesn’t mean it will happen tomorrow, it just means the action is easy – so repeat, repeat, repeat!

Here’s another of my favorite bloggers, The Indigo Vat.  Today she shares an amazing poem.  Here’s a piece of it (go read the rest, you won’t be sorry):

At the end of the world there was a woman