Michael Singer: Let Go of Yourself and Surrender to Life

But listen to me, right? That identification with your personal self, which is just your mind's thoughts, is what keeps you from waking up. But I have millions of people that know all these things about me. I have to — I just have to disappear and build a cabinet. No, do not do that. Oprah asked me that once; me and Oprah, I found out you don't need to do that. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik, and welcome to my breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. It's mine, but Alex's

breakdown — she's gonna break it down for you because, you know, she knows a thing or two. So now she's gonna break down — she's a breakdown, she's gonna break it down. This is the place where I weep openly so you don't have to. Before we introduce our incredible guest, Michael A. Singer, author of *The Untethered Soul* and *The Surrender Experiment*, I'd like to introduce — and you'll have to listen to the whole episode to understand this reference — my favorite extension cord, Jonathan Cohen. That's awesome! This is also the place where you have spiritual

awakenings so people can also have them, not so that they don't have to. I, Michael Singer, told me I don't have to have a spiritual awakening; I just need to incrementally be in spiritual awareness. This is a very, very heavy, awesome, amazing experience that we just had. He is also the author of his newest book, *Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament*, which I love because humans are in a big predicament most of the time, and he basically tells us how not to be. He had a very, very surprising awakening in 1971 while he was working

on his doctorate in economics, and he went into seclusion and founded, in 1975, the Temple of the Universe, which is a now long-established yoga and meditation center where people of any religion, any set of beliefs, come together to experience inner peace. He has nearly five decades of spiritual teaching under his belt. He also has made incredible contributions in the areas of business, education, healthcare, and environmental protection. This is a man who I just started crying the second I saw his face because this is really — *The Untethered Soul* is one of those books that I

recommend to people that really is potentially life-changing. It actually has a very interesting tie-in to Jonathan and my connection, so it's also a really special episode for us. It's kind of the reason why we're both on mics right now — it's a little bit the reason that we're both on mics right now. Yes! Let's welcome Michael Singer to the breakdown. It's really an honor to have you here. I'm very nervous and gonna cry… I'm really very excited to have you. We've been looking forward to this day for a long time. And where are we finding

you? I'm in Gainesville, Florida. Okay, is that where you live? I live in a town called Alachua, just outside of Gainesville, and I'm at a studio in Gainesville. Okay, got it. Jonathan, why are we so excited to have Michael Singer here? We have a very — maybe it's not unique; maybe this happens all the time with your first book — but we have a what we think is a unique story. That book actually was one of the ways that we reconnected after not speaking for almost eight years — she and I. We, John… Yes, Jonathan

and I. We met when our kids were young, and back in those days, people didn't keep in touch the way they do now. Like, we would email from time to time, and I thought it had been like a year since we had spoken, and apparently it had been many. I emailed him about your book because I discovered *The Untethered Soul* right around the time that I had vocal cord surgery, and I was not allowed to speak. I had three months of complete silence, and this was one of the books that I read in that time.

So it was a very specific time in my life, and I have no idea — I mean, I guess I do have an idea — but I felt like I needed to ask Jonathan Cohen, this guy that I hadn't spoken to, if he had read this book. So we've been together since. Oh, that's a true story. But I really — I feel very — I'm very nervous. I'm very excited to speak to you. I never thought you would talk to us because you're such an enlightened person, and I just felt like you might think, "Who

are these people, and why do they want to speak to me?" But I rank your book as one of the most important books that I have read in my life, and it's very deep. This is not a light, easy read; it's a book that makes you look very, very hard — not just at yourself, but as the subtitle says, beyond yourself. You have another book as well, which I think, Jonathan, you have — you have one of the physical copies. Do you have it right there? Jonathan's been sending me screenshots of *Living Untethered*. When Mayim

says it's not an easy read, what you manage to do so successfully is break things down that are very complex into very, very simple and easily digestible parts. One of the reasons that I got so excited when Mayim emailed me asking me if I had read that book is because I quote your first book as the easiest and most accessible entry point to the deepest thoughts and practices of the human experience. And right before she had messaged… Me, literally the day before, I was in a room of thirty people explaining that if we wanted to

create content, you know, any type of information on how to help human beings get beyond their state of suffering, your book was the first thing to read. Thank you! Then, she messaged me the next day. Yeah, so we have a very, very special connection to you; without you even knowing it, you have a very interesting path that led you to the person who wrote this book. Um, tell us a bit about your life before 1971. [Laughter] [Music] Is that general enough? It's general enough. My general answer to that is, it’s not worth talking about. I

lived my life, and then I woke up; and prior to that, I wish I could go back and redo it and treat everybody much nicer and be a conscious person throughout my life. But in ’70 or ’71, I had a very deep experience. I wrote that in… I don’t really see; have you ever seen "The Surrender Experiment," my second book? Yes, I shared that experience, and that's when my life started, you know? That's when I woke up. You know, and I realized, "Oh my goodness, I've been asleep. I've been sleepwalking, you know, just driven by

desires and needs and fears and so on." And then I tell the story in "The Surrender Experiment" that I was sitting on the couch with a friend, and you said you were nervous; I was nervous. We stopped talking. He was a friend, but we had stopped talking, and there was nothing to talk about. My mind kept thinking, "I need to say something; it’s not comfortable. The silence is not comfortable." All right? It’s not normal. And so my mind kept thinking, "What about the weather?" And that sounds stupid. "What about food? We could eat something," and

that sounded stupid. I’m just sitting there with my mind doing this, which it probably did lots of times throughout my life, but this time, for some reason—and I don’t want to explain or know the reason; I don’t need to know the reason—I was not being the mind; I was watching the mind. I realized, "My God, this thing is neurotic. You know, this thing can't even see her for a minute. I'm not saying anything!" All right? And that's when I woke up, and I started watching it. Just the witness woke up. I don’t know how to

say it any other way, right? The consciousness was no longer completely associated with the nervousness and the anxiety that was going on in the mind; it was seeing that that was going on, and that was the end of it. That was it. My whole life changed, period. That very moment, I was never the same, period. I'm going to ask a dumb question: were you on drugs? No. You were sober? Yes. You were just having a day? That's right. And for people who are only listening, my aim's face when Michael's describing this is contorting because she’s

fascinated with this idea of awakening, and the questions that are running through her mind right now are like, "Does it happen all at once? Is it just that you begin to realize it, but then the next day you fall back into your patterns, and then you build the muscle? Or like, is this an all-of-a-sudden transformation and now you’re only the witness and nothing phases you?" Like, how does it build from the first witnessing of the fact that you are not your mind to how you’ve embodied it now? That's a very beautiful question, and the answer

is, it's different for everybody. It’s not that there’s some scientific occurrence that happens for everybody, right? It can be any of those things you said, so I can only answer like… that’s not true, because now I’ve been teaching for fifty years—sorry! So, I’ve interacted with a lot of people and watched a lot of it, a lot of awakenings. But basically, in my particular case, it’s almost frightening. All right? I woke up, and that was that; I was never going back to sleep. I would never go back in there. I was fascinated by the fact that

that was going on. I was earning my Ph.D. in economics at the time. All right? Never finished, but basically, you know, I had my master’s, and I was going to be an economics professor. I was being groomed to be an economics professor; I was very good in school, and the chairman of the department was—I was under him. And basically, I woke up, and I went to what they call the stacks at the University of Florida, the graduate libraries, and I pulled down every single book that Freud wrote that I could possibly get my hands on.

Well, I had never taken a psychology course, a philosophy course, or a religion course. I was in symbolic logic, advanced calculus; you know, that’s who I was. All right? And I wanted to know what this voice was. I just—I mean, surely Freud had talked about it. Well, he didn’t. He didn’t! He analyzed the mind beautifully; I love Freud! In fact, I am born on his birthday; my birthday is the same as Freud's! I figured that would mean something, right? But basically, I brought it down, read the different books, and skimmed through the different books, because

it would have stood out if he started talking about that voice—talk inside your head. Sure, it did not appear that my friend Sigmund had popped out; he was analyzing other people and did… A brilliant job of analyzing access aspects of the mind, the ego, the superego. You're just analyzing the mind like a scientist, all right. But to be back there watching it, I kept looking to see if he had done that right. I didn't know anybody; my friends were all in economics and so on. One day, a friend and I started talking to everybody about

that voice. It was my life; it became my life. "Have you seen that voice? You have a voice!" It's like, I don't think it was much fun to be around in those days. A friend of mine, my fellow graduate student in economics, Mark Baldwin was his name—I remember it; I always will—he apparently had been more broadly educated than me with more broad interests. He handed me a book called *Three Pillars of Zen* by Philip Kapleau, and they were talking about that voice. They made me cry. I was like, "My God! Here it is! Zen is

talking about shutting up that voice. It's talking about that voice. It's talking about what happens when their voice is not talking. That's the whole path; that's their gig." So, I didn't know anybody, and I just took the book and I did it. Zen is not funny, all right? Seriously, zero Zen. I just made myself do it, and I started meditating and this and then the other thing. Then I did that, which I don't recommend to anybody. I was so fascinated by that that I said, "I need to take time aside in my life to focus

on this. It may never happen again. I may never have the time again, right? I'll get jobs, or this or that. But right now, I'm in graduate school, and I'm going to step aside." And I stepped aside. You went into seclusion? Is that basically... I went into seclusion. Where did you go? In 1965, when I graduated high school, I went to the University of Florida. I stayed there, and I found a piece of land, 10 acres of land that way out in the country. I bought it; I had a little money left over from my

graduate education because I was on fellowship. Basically, two friends of mine and I, who had not built things before, built a cabin. But it's not a cabin; it's a gorgeous house. One of my friends, he had a master's in architecture, and so he made a balsam model. I just wanted a little hut, but we built this thing, and it's still standing. I went into seclusion. I'll never forget them. I told Tony Robbins once; he asked me one of the most meaningful moments of my life. When the house got built, I was so sincere. All I

wanted to do was go way back in there because I had had an experience subsequent to the awakening that really was out. And basically, I stopped at the doorway to that house, and you know, like the Buddha, I sat there and said, "I was that sincere. I'm not coming out until I'm out. I'm going to do whatever I need to do to work my way outside of that crazy mind and find out what's beyond that." So, I spent a long period of time doing that. Then I realized that that wasn't going to do it. You

know, I was meditating six hours a day, killing myself, whatever it was, but I was still there doing it. That was when I woke up. I don't know why I was able to do this myself, all right? Basically, I saw that I could not do this through discipline, that I could not do this by just trying, because I was the one that was trying. That just became another neurosis; there's another reason to be upset, another reason to get it tight, another reason to be whatever. In the *Surrender Experiment*, I explained that. I don't want to

go too deep into that book. I had a realization: I need something stronger than me that I have no control over, that I surrender to, that I let go of so that I don't have to do it myself or listen to this thing. I decided that there is something like that in my life. Life doesn't ever do what I want; it just does its thing. You know, people do their thing, life does its thing, and I have always manipulated it or fought with it or cared what it was doing. I decided that the highest way

to do this for myself—I don't mean anybody else—was to let go of myself by surrendering to life. That's what *The Surrender Experiment* is about, and what happens subsequent to that leaves my mouth dry. I can't even believe it; I can hardly even talk about it. I wrote it in the book: just all these things unfolded on their own. It was just a total path unfolding that led me to write, led me to businesses, led me to money, led me to the books, led me to full interactions. Everything that ever happened happened because life did it.

That's all I can tell you. So I surrendered to that. My biotics breakdown is supported by BetterHelp. I get burnt out a lot—not just from work, but just from all the things that I do in life. I think you probably know what I'm talking about. I’ll sometimes feel a lack of motivation, or I’ll feel trapped or helpless, or I feel detached from things going on. I'm really exhausted. These are signs of burnout, and many... Of us experience them without even realizing that's what's going on. BetterHelp online therapy wants to remind you to prioritize yourself. If

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which is what I used to do to look out for your health. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/breakdown; again, athleticgreens.com/breakdown. Take ownership of your health; pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Okay, we're gonna take it back a second. I mean, there's so many things here. So one of the things that I want to ask about is, um, [Music] if you can just clarify a little bit,

because you know, I think a lot of people kind of colloquially refer to the voice in their head, you know, and we talk about, like, oh, you can hear negative things about you, and you can trace them back to like, oh, my mom said that or my dad said, you know, those kinds of voices in your head. So, um, obviously anyone who's even dabbled in simple meditation, you know, there's this notion of like clearing the mind and not attaching to the thoughts as they come, blah blah blah. But what you're talking about is literally—and this

is, you know, I mean, you really go through it in The Untethered Soul very specifically—but just for people who may not know, you're literally just talking about the consciousness that we have, that we exist, which is represented by the thoughts that we have when we're trying to think about nothing. Is that an okay way to describe it? I think the simplest way to describe it is: do you notice that sometimes your mind bothers you? Yes. Okay, you have two directions you can go from there. You can go into psychology and start understanding why the mind

does what it does, or you can step back into spirituality and say, "Who notices?" You just told me you noticed your mind bothers you. That means you're not your mind. You know, just you notice things. All right, who notices it? So that's the separation: I'm not my thoughts. You are. How do you know that? Because I'm aware of my thoughts. Okay, I'm aware of my thoughts. I like to— I don't do a lot of techniques, all right? But yet people think that the way I live is a technique, and they do it, and it works,

right? But I didn't develop it like a technique. So if I tell you both of you right now inside your mind, say "hello" over and over again. How do you know it's doing it? Because I'm aware of it. That's right, and that's where it starts. And, by the way, that's what ends—that's everything. Who are you that's aware of that? Okay? And then you work your way back, and we can talk about how I did that, and people seem to do pretty well with it. I don't consider myself a spiritual teacher, you know, as a person

who's trained as a scientist, but I'm also a very, very emotional. I happen to be a religious person, but I'm also a very spiritual person. You know, one of the things about your writing that really struck me is that it is not highly emotional. It is not, um, [Music] it is—you know, it sounds like it was written by someone who was getting a doctorate in economics, and I say that in a very— I say that in a non-judgmental way because you use the least amount of words to communicate that meaning. You use the minimally necessary

words to communicate concepts, and that is really, it's very accessible and it's very—it's what makes it also feel very heavy because there's no "there" there about it. You're not offering a warm hug to make you feel okay about existing; you simply do—you exist, you have consciousness, and you have, then, your entire life that is laid out on kind of that template. And that is—I see why you don't consider yourself, um, you know, a spiritual teacher, um, however, you know, the information here is really—it’s very, um, transformative. A deeply spiritual level, sure. I know you don't

want to talk about it, and it's okay. We recently spoke to Byron Katie, who also does not talk about what happened before her spiritual awakening. The reason that it makes me emotional is because I want to have it. I would like to have, you know, something happen that provides a sense of clarity that then determines the rest of my life. I know that that's not everyone's journey, but it's true—I want to know: Were you raised with a religion, or were you just like this dude getting your doctorate in economics? And we know what kind of

people those are; those are very by-the-books numbers guys. I want to know, like, what were you like? Were you a spiritual child? Were you an emotional kid? You were just like a dude. I can assure you it's irrelevant; it has nothing to do with the awakening, right? There's no foundation for it. But I based my whole life on what happened to me. I know, but like, that is the story. That's the only story, you know, that I have, and I love telling it. I'll tell you all of my misery. Okay, okay. So what is that?

Well, we know what that is: basically, the mind is very strong, and one of the things the mind does is develop methodologies or ways of thinking that let it interact with life, not get hurt, and be more comfortable. Then there's the ego, where we develop a self-concept and change it throughout our lives. But in general, there's a self-concept sitting under there saying, "I was the one that did this, and I was the one that went to this school, and I'm the one that went there, and the one that my father left or stayed or whatever

the hell it is." Excuse me. Basically, all of this unfolds, and you end up developing patterns of thinking based on the experiences you've had. All right? What I'm saying, at least certainly in my experience, is that that's not what makes you wake up; that's what keeps you from waking up. All right? The fact that you're identifying with these past experiences and saying that's who I am—well, it's not who you are. You are watching your ego; you see it get upset, you see it fix things, you see it have concepts and views, et cetera, et cetera.

Even though you're obviously very intelligent, you can use your intellect to support the ego, to support that and so on, right? And yes, you're a very special person, a very intelligent person, and therefore, that becomes part of your self-concept. Okay? And then you say you're a religious person as part of a self-concept. All of these things are ways you think of yourself, and there's nothing at all wrong with that. It's wonderful— you've been successful, you're happy, you're doing well. All right, I'm not happy; I'm not doing well. I just said that because I'm so stupid.

I'm also, like, weeping openly. Okay? But listen to me. Right? That identification with your personal self, which is just your mind's thoughts, is what keeps you from waking up. But I have millions of people that know all these things about me. I just have to disappear and build a cabinet. No, do not do that. Oprah asked me that once. No, I do not recommend anything. I found out you don't need to do that. Okay? I also used to fast three days a week and eat a salad the rest of the day. No, I ruined my

digestive system, right? No, I'm so glad I tried that because you don't need to do that. You don't need to do anything like that. You can be married, you can have children, you can have a career. It makes no difference—no difference—as long as you're willing to notice it's not you. As long as you're willing to notice that you have going on inside your mind thoughts that are saying, "This is okay; this is not okay; I did good; I didn't do good; oh my God, I want to get this job; and I'd rather do that." You

know, it's just deciding—it's talking based on your past experiences. Oh, that's based on your past experiences. And you know what Skinner says, right? "Man is the sum of learned experiences." No, your mind is the sum of your learned experiences. You're not. You're the one who notices that your mind is—or something, your learned experiences. So any way you can do it, by hook or by crook, whatever it is, can you step back and be willing to watch that you are doing this? I love that you said you're uncomfortable; that's wonderful. Okay, notice that she's uncomfortable. You're

not uncomfortable. You, who notices the discomfort, I promise you, is not uncomfortable. In fact, it's the most comfortable thing in the universe. But because we project our consciousness onto the part that's uncomfortable or the part that's depressed or the part that's scared, then we identify with that. So spiritual awakening really has nothing to do with that. And that's why it's not all tied to your past. Your ego is tied to your past; your self-concept is tied to your past. But at any point, no matter where you are, at any point, you can decide to step

back. I have a beautiful story; I wouldn't tell it, but I did prison work for 30 years—not because I thought it was supposed to; it just happened. Somebody asked me to go visit someone they were visiting in prison. In a bubble, the next thing I knew, I had a class that I was teaching in a maximum-security prison for 30 years. The reason I'm telling you that is one day I was teaching this class, and, uh, this really big dude came into the class. I'm on the floor, sitting down with maybe 30 students, and he walked

in and tried to sit on the floor, but he couldn't; it was like a big NFL lineman—no fat, just serious. At the end of the class, he walked up to me. Here's a beautiful story: I'm sitting on the ground and he says, "Hi, my name's Creature, and I'm an outlaw." Well, the Outlaw is a Hells Angel type gang in Florida. All right, so I stuck my hand up and said, "Hi, I'm Mickey." That guy got so awakened—unbelievable. I watched him wake up. He held meditation classes in his cell block; he eventually got transferred to some

other places, and somebody just wrote me 20, 30 years later that they were in prison with him at another place, and he was running meditation centers there and working in the chapel. My God, right? This guy was held for murders—all kinds of stuff had gone on, right? So it doesn't matter what your past is; what matters is what your present moment is. Are you ready to step back and say, "I'm not Creature. I'm not a Hells Angel," right? Yes, I have that in me; that's how I came up, right? But I'm the consciousness that's noticing

that. He was able to step back. I could—I tell there's a chapter in "The Surrender Experiment" that talks about him, all right? And it's just so powerful that someone like that could wake up and just step back. It was amazing. So that's the answer. The answer is not, "What was your past?" The answer is not, "How do you think of yourself?" Whatever it is, can you notice that you're noticing? And you're back to what they call witness consciousness or mindfulness. Can you notice that you notice? Not, "Can I try?" People try to notice—that's ridiculous. Of

course, you notice! If you look at the wall in front of you, do you have to try? Go on, both of you—look! Look what's in front of you. How hard was that? That's how hard it is to see what's going on inside of you. You know it—you know it! If you say, "I always tell everybody I can't be a therapist or a psychologist," you all would fire me instantaneously. Why? You'd come in, "Mickey, Michael, I'm telling you, I'm so depressed. Ever since my girlfriend or boyfriend left me, I've been totally depressed." I know what I'm

going to say to you. I'm going to ask you, "How do you know?" What do you mean, "How do I know?" You start getting mad at me. "How do you know you're depressed?" "How do you know you're depressed?" "Because I feel it." "Who feels it?" "How do you know you feel it?" That's always the answer! And that's how simple it is. Are you willing to, instead of getting all caught up in what you're aware of, pay attention to who's aware of this? And that will wake you up. I am the profoundness in the simplicity of

what has just been shared with me. I want to just, like, put a fence around it so that it doesn't get skipped over by the audience. If you're listening to this right now, go back and listen to the last minute and a half. The key to most suffering has just been described, and it is as easy as he says. If you have a feeling, most people—and the way I see it—is that most people are sandwiched up to that feeling. My hands are together for people who are only listening, and they're just intertwined with it. They're

waiting for that to ride out, and they're going on the roller coaster of whatever the emotion is. Simply by doing what you described, which is asking yourself to witness it, you begin to create space between the experience and you. Yes, and in that space it becomes less of a roller coaster because you're no longer—and again, I don't have any other way to describe it—but sandwiched or interlocked with it. You're able to say, "It is happening," but in saying, "It is happening," you take a step back. I see it—in my mind's eye, I see it like

a controller—like a video game controller. There's a little player way in the back of my head, right in the occipital, that has a visual big screen of everything else going on. It sounds simple, and if no one has experienced it before, you don't really understand the lightness that starts to be created. For me, first in little bits, but the further you get away from the fact that I am feeling so sad right now—instead of feeling this excruciating pain in someone's chest from sadness or depression or whatever it is—that noticing makes it feel lighter. Then that

experience has room to shift, change, and transition to whatever it is by not holding it so tightly. So you're the spiritual teacher now. I understand. That's beautiful! My umbilicus breakdown is supported by Neutrophil. Guess what? 30 million women are impacted by weakened or thinning hair. If you're among them, I know I am. Please know you're not alone, and there's a solution you can trust to deliver results. Neutrophil has two targeted... Formulas for women that are clinically shown to improve hair growth and thickness with less shedding through all stages of life. Healthier hair growth takes time,

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more you hang out in what we call the self— you gotta give us some name—who's back there? All right, not George? Okay, so we'll call it the self, Atman; call it whatever we want. It's all soul, self, it's all the same thing. It's basically Christ. I'm a nice, true Jewish boy like you; I am who I am, but I love Christ's teachings. Okay? I love Christ's teachings! He said it's so simple: The kingdom is within you. And that's what you just said, Jonathan, that it's back here, it's within you. It's within; literally, it's within you.

Like when I ask, "Are you in there?" that's the "you" Jesus is talking about, right? The soul, the essence. We make it so mystical. I don't like the word "soul" because there are so many concepts that go on with that, right? I just want to know: Are you aware? And yes, if you are willing to do the work, little by little, it doesn't have to be all at once. In fact, in the new book, you'll see I talk about low-hanging fruit. Take a step back and notice what you're doing. One of my favorite lines in

the new book is the following: "The moment in front of you is not bothering you; you're bothering yourself about the moment in front of you." Correct? So if you notice that I'm driving my car and the driver in front of me is going below the speed limit and I can't pass, and I'm doing all this stuff inside of me—why? What good is it doing? And so if you're willing to say, "Nothing," then I will work with that. I'll do a mantra, or I'll say an affirmation, or I'll sing a song. I don't care what you

do. Just don't get into the part of you that's neurotic, the part of you that causes all this trouble. And you're going to find out that you just said, Jonathan, that the distance gets greater and greater, and the next thing you know, you deal with little things. It's fun! You're right. I like you to see it as a video game. I love that! Okay? And you're back here, and you're watching, and it's not healthy. I hope you don't keep eating things that make you sick. Okay? We're doing things that—I mean, one of the big things

in the new book, because I went through business school, I get the right to talk about cost-benefit analysis. That's what we do, right? If you're brought an investment or something, an opportunity, and the cost is 100 and the benefit is zero, I don't think you're going to choose that one. Miami, you're a business person too, all right? So that's what you're doing when you're bothering yourself about stupid things—like the weather, like the driver in front of you—like I think somebody said something that maybe wasn't nice. Now, I mean, give me a break! Okay? And then

the next thing you know, you're bothering yourself. Yes or no? You bother yourself about it. Or you're doing your job and you didn't do something perfectly, and you say, "Oh my god, how about I get fired? I wonder who saw that?" What are you doing? What are you doing? You're sitting on a planet spinning in the middle of nowhere making yourself anxious, and then you're wondering why you need a therapist? You're doing it to yourself! 90% of the time, you're doing it to yourself. I mean, yes, are there situations outside that are difficult to handle?

Yes! But those aren't the low-hanging fruit, or not. You don't have to make yourself anxious about everything, but the mind will do that. And in the new book, in Living Untethered… I build the mind. I go to great detail, like you said, by them to sit there and say, "Why would my mind be causing all this trouble? Why would that happen?" I told you how I—and I do it very simply—in just the tiniest amount of sentences. Right? Is it not true that when something bothers you, you push it away? You don't want to handle it;

you don't want to think about it. So you push it away. You're storing it inside of you. It's not going away. You're like, you're resisting it, and so it stays there, and you basically have made a collection of everything that ever bothered you inside of you. You do know that, Maya, don't you? Oh, yeah? Okay. Well, if you collect everything that bothers you inside, I think you're going to be bothered. It's that simple. I swear to God, it's that simple. And so you just get to the point where you sit there and say, "Well, maybe

I should stop doing that." That's the joke: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "So don't do that!" Like, that's literally it. Well, basically, we create the mess within our own minds. Your mind—I love your mind, the fact that you went back and got your doctorate and did all that stuff while you were working. I honor that; I respect that tremendously. All right, the mind is brilliant. And you know your mind is brilliant. Okay? I think everybody's mind is brilliant. I think they're just so caught up in the personal stuff that they can't experience the

brilliance of their mind. But the mind is brilliant! Why would you take this brilliant mind and use it to make yourself neurotic? It'll do good at it! It did good at getting your doctorate; it will do good at making you neurotic. Just tell your mind to worry about something and see how good it does! It's very good; it's really—I—that's my other doctorate: it's in worrying! Okay, but, Miami, it's the same mind. It's the same intellectual, intelligent mind that's figuring out what to worry about and what to do about it and how you can't fix it

and just worries and thinks and does that. Why do that? Why not use your mind to fly to the moon or get a doctorate in neuroscience or something like that? So, all right, I've talked too much. No [Music]. Jonathan, again, I don't think it can be overstated that most people believe that this is just life and their experience, and they are caught up in this endless cycle of reactivity where they think something they think that is real. They feel something based on the fact that they think something. For example, someone said something; I'm disrespected by

the fact that someone said this thing about me. "I then," they didn't invite me to—"they didn't invite me to this thing," or "I think she looked at me wrong." I'm just listing all the things that can happen. They spend all this time analyzing it and trying to think about why they would do that. That's a huge amount of emotional and creative energy that goes into imagining all these scenarios, all the stories they're telling themselves about that experience. Then, they flood their body with anxious chemicals, and they're gearing up to fight this person—psychologically fight them. They're

engaging. You know, we can't tell the difference between real and imagined threats, so we're imagining all of these threats. It's having this very visceral physical response, and we're caught in it. We think that the only way to adjust that is to create a different external scenario. And you have an amazing example, also, just in terms of what people are striving for in the book. They want the wedding; they want the car; they want the beach house. They want all of these external things without realizing that that might not—and likely won't—give them the peace that they're

really trying to strive for in their life. Like Miami said, I try to keep things very simple because otherwise, it's a mental exercise, and that's not what I do. All right, so why do they do all that? And the answer is just: they're not okay. If they're okay, they wouldn't be doing that. If you felt love all the time and were filled with peace and joy and tremendous great energy, you wouldn't be worrying about things. I guess you already feel wonderful, but it's because you don't—because you don't feel okay inside. You're doing all this stuff

outside; you're trying to compensate. So, the question becomes, why don't you feel okay inside? I already told you. Because you have stored every single thing that ever bothered you down to the tiniest little thing that somebody said or did, or anything, inside of you. You've stored it inside. How do I know I did that? Because it keeps coming back up. You understand that? It's obviously still in there, and it doesn't want to be in there, and that's what I talk about in this book. And so, basically, because you stored every disturbance you ever had inside

of you, that's why you're disturbed inside. So the answer is not to go out there and try to worry about and compensate how to get something that makes you feel better. It's to stop storing that stuff in there. I'm telling you, if you don't store that stuff in there, it's beautiful in there. It's incomprehensibly beautiful. That's when you get to real spirituality. I mean, literally, waves of ecstasy and joy well up inside of you all the time. So, any given day, you see the sky is pretty, you get turned bliss. Right? You don't need drugs;

you don't... Need anything? Basically, you're the highest thing to walk the face of the earth. Uh, my Yogananda, whom I follow, this great master, basically said there's a river of joy flowing inside of you. Find it. Get in there. I assure you, there's a beautiful energy that is stronger than anything that can come in through your senses. So why are you playing around to keep your problems and then try to compensate for them? If something happened in your childhood that disturbed you, that was 50 years ago; it's not doing it anymore. Why is it still

disturbing you? Maya, I'm asking you, why is it still disturbing you? Because you're keeping it in there. Because you weren't willing to let it go, and you're still not willing to let it go. So the answer is, let it go. Is it easy? No, nothing that's worth achieving is easy. All right, and this is the highest thing to achieve. Why is it not easy? Because it was stored with pain. It’s going to come back with pain, correct? Are you willing to do what I teach? Because people ask me to. All right, is when it starts

to come up, and you know it's coming up, it comes up a lot of times during the day. When it starts to come up, relax. You're going to want to do something, right? I want to do something about it. That's what you do: you relax. No, that's not intuitive. I want to protect myself. Relax. Relax. Relax your shoulders. Relax your tummy. Relax your buttocks. Relax. Now relax your heart. Relax. Relax. That's all. If you will do that, you will go way beyond where you think you want to go. Because what will happen is you won't

push it back down. It will come up naturally and cleanse, and it will pass by you, and next thing you know, it will never bother you again. I mean, I'm not saying do it once; it'll never bother you, but if you're willing to do this, you will purify. You will release this stuff that's inside of you, and then you'll feel all this beautiful energy that's underneath that stuff. Something that is inherent in what you're saying that I wanted to just articulate, which is that each of us has a programming and an inherent ability to clear

this stored trauma or emotions or whatever it is. And so many of us, I mean almost all of us, have packed all of these issues in, and we're not really aware that we have a natural ability. You know, like a tree is always trying to get upright; we all are moving towards releasing it. And so when you say just relax, I think it's important for people to know that in that relaxation, there is a natural process that is unfolding, that we can allow to happen, or we can harness by doing that relaxation, and that it

is our natural state to be in this bliss, and that most of us, you know, are just disconnected from it. That's beautiful, because I think a lot of people think that this is like this, you know—there's a, at least when I started trying to do this, and I'm by no means a master, and I don't claim to be. This is a hundred percent a practice for me, anyway—that we assume that it requires some magic, or that, you know, when we don't associate that, that feeling of discomfort is actually an opportunity to release something. We think

that there's something wrong because that's our— we've been trained that, oh, I feel this thing; there is something wrong. I need to fix it. I need to distract myself. I need a pill in order to make it go away. But sometimes it literally is the rising of these stored emotions that we almost—I mean, I don't want to talk about birth because it's not an equivalent, but it is this moving through a discomfort state to know that we are not—we will not break during it. We will not be damaged by it. And actually being able to

have that experience of allowing it to move through is the opening that is required in order to feel enormous amounts of other sensation. It's like you can't feel the very big highs without allowing the negative emotions that we've stored to pass through us. It's completely true. In "Living Untethered," I explain that the natural energy—spirit, shakti, chi, call it whatever you want—the underlying energy is trying to flow up, but all this stuff you stored is in the way. So it is literally trying to push it up. That's a natural cleansing. Just like your body throws out

impurities, your mind is trying to throw out these impurities, and you keep thinking it's bad. You think, "No, it doesn't feel good." Of course it doesn't feel good, right? It doesn't feel good when you're cleansing your body, either. Okay? You go through a people fast and they feel pains all over the place. When you get a massage, you go, "Oh, oh, there, right there." Why'd you say that? Because it hurt. See? You're willing to do it. All right? This is the massage inside. It's basically saying, "I am willing." If I keep this stuff inside of

me, it's going to be there for the rest of my life and I have to do all kinds of things to be okay, and I'll be scared; I don't want it inside of me. Then as it comes up, let it go. As it comes up, let it go. Now, people—like you said, people are not used to that. They're used to, "I don't want any pain; I don't want to feel any discomfort." But you are feeling discomfort; you're carrying it around inside of you all the time. So, are you willing to do that which really works?

Which is to say, come on up, come on up. I'll do the best I can. You won't be perfect, but I'll do the best I can to relax while you're coming up, and all, if you want to. If you're into spiritual things, God and stuff, offer it to God. Right? People give flowers to God; they give all kinds of things. This is what God wants. You want your stuff, okay? If you sit there and take that and say, "I'm willing to go through anything to let this go so that I can feel real, natural spiritual

energy flowing inside of me," that is a very spiritual path. Miami, yes? No? Yeah, I mean, it's hard not to, you know, relate this to other spiritual practices that, you know, that I’ve studied. I'm not saying this to make you uncomfortable, but there's a very, very—this is a very Jewish mystical kind of set of concepts that resonate with me around this. And there's this kind of notion of, you know, um [Music]. You know, we get very, very attached to— I mean, well, you know, Christianity introduced a kind of concept of salvation and, you know, what's

waiting for us next. You know, and it's one way to approach life, and what you're talking about is a very, very grounded—like, what's here and now? What's right in front of you, and what's in here? Rabbi Soloveitchik, who was the father of kind of modern orthodoxy in the United States, like, who brought it to the United States, you know, there's a famous story that he gathered all his students, you know, one morning, and he banged on the table and he said, "I've witnessed a miracle!" You know, and everybody's like, "Oh, what happened? You know, what

did he see?" And everybody's staring at him, waiting, like, "What did he witness?" And he said, "The sun came up." You know, and just like that, you know, that's that—that notion of—I mean, that's mindfulness, right? It's present; it's that present notion. But when you were just talking about kind of like giving it over, and it's true, like, the purpose of sacrifice was—it was an olah, it was an offering that went up. It was part of you that is elevated, you know, despite everything that's here. And so I just—that notion of like turning it over, it's

also, you know, that's the imagery and the kind of concepts that 12-step programs use. I think one of the things that keeps coming up for me is, and I, you know, I love all the things that Jonathan is saying and all the things that, um, you know, are so deeply meaningful on a spiritual level, and also, you know, practically speaking, I know that a lot of people are very curious. Like, if you don't understand things the way Jonathan clearly does, right? Or the way that the two of you are able to kind of like communicate—like,

I'm kind of, you know, the first thing I think is, obviously, you don't need to go live by yourself, you know, to have this. And, you know, Henry David Thoreau had a, you know, an entire experience with that as well of a different variety, but, you know, a similar kind of concept. But I'm kind of thinking like, can you do this and still live a normal life? And, you know, I think of you; you lived in the world. I mean, you founded, um, you know, you founded a center in 1975, correct? Yeah, the Temple of

the Universe, which is, um, that's a center that you founded the year that I was born, as a matter of fact. But you, you did not stay there; you came back down from the mountain, as we say, and you lived immersed in a corporate world. You lived—you, you like did normal people things. So, you know, um, the kind of Old Testament version is like Moses went up and he had this experience, but what actually is most valuable is that he came back down and, you know, brought whatever, you know, enlightenment he experienced to people. So

what is it like to have the kind of awareness that you had, and then also still be in the regular world? Because you're—how do you maintain that, like, practically speaking? I was CEO of a public corporation, went through all kinds of stuff. I see no difference between being in the Temple of the Universe, whatever it is, and I found it kind of—people started coming out there, so it happened. That's how my whole life is, right? I never decided to do anything; I just followed the energy. Like I was saying, I'm there doing services, you know,

meditating—whoever it is—and different events unfold. The one particular one that I tell in the Surrender Experiment is a seraph who came out to the land, and I was barefoot, a hippie, you know, walking around my land. And he walked up to the temple building that we built, which I was a little concerned— you know, it has Krishna and Jewish things; it has all the different religions represented. And he's all dressed up in his officer uniform and pulls his big car up there, and I'm walking around barefoot, no shirt on, and he says, "Are you in

charge here?" And okay, yeah, I guess I am, you know. He says, "Did you build this building?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Would you build an addition on my house?" I swear to God, that’s exactly— What happened? All right. And because I was surrendering to life, nothing inside of me wanted to build clothes in the garage of this sheriff. All right, I was like, "I'm not even a builder; I built a couple of buildings on my own land, you know, rough sawn timber, et cetera." And I said yes, and that founded my first company, Built

with Love, and they ended up building custom houses and this and that. And then I got into computers, and the next thing I knew, people were asking me to write computer programs. I just—I never took a course in my life; I just started writing. I found it interesting, like you find stuff interesting, and bought a TRS-80 Model One when Radio Shack first came out with the little tiny computers. All right? And wrote an accounting program to run Built with Love, and then people wanted to buy the program. That's literally how this company started. And so

I said, "Okay, I guess," all right, and then I started surrendering, and then I got to write this and write that and do this. And eventually, somebody asked me to write a medical billing system, and I didn't even go to the doctor in those days, and I'd never seen an insurance form in my life. All right? And I took it, and I did it. I did it, and it became this major company, you know, with 2,300 employees and public and the whole ball game. And so I just had to do it—I just did it. Well,

while I was doing it, I didn't change. I didn't say, "Now this is what I'm doing; now this is a wonderful opportunity to let go of me." Like, you can bet, you know, for sure you can bet that being in that environment—I mean literally, I'm on earnings calls with Wall Street. I give you a break. All right? I can't relate to any of it, but I'm doing my best. I'm serving and working hard, doing everything as an act of letting go of myself and serving the universe. It never wasn't about business; it wasn't about this,

that, or the other thing. But you do that; you try as hard as you can to serve everybody, and you're going to do pretty well. And so we were very successful. But so it's not like I had two lives, you know—the meditative, quiet, spiritual life and this business life. No, no. They were the same thing. I was doing the same thing every day. I literally—I give a suggestion in the book that people can do that. I'm a CEO of a corporation running this stuff. Every single time my secretary buzzed in and said someone is on

the call, before I picked up that phone, I stopped. It only takes a second. I dared him to stop and let go. You know what I do? I'm sitting for 50 years; I remind myself I'm sitting on a plane that's been in the middle of an empty space. You want to know why? Because I am. All right? And it's so tiny. I love telling that story. Do you know that 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun? You know you're small, but you know that small. Okay? All right? And the sun is one of 300 billion

stars, all right, in one galaxy, and there are two trillion galaxies. Can you stop for a moment and remind yourself what is really going on? And I would do that before I picked up the phone, and when I hung it up, I did the same thing. That will wake you up so fast. So you ask, "How do you stay centered while you're doing all this?" Because you stay centered; you decide that's what my life is about, and this is really good growth. You hear me? This is good growth. And if you read The Surrender Experiment,

to the last whole section, you'll see there was serious growth. And basically, you just go through it. Why? Because you have to. Life gives it to you. Remember, I surrender to life; life's my guru; life's my teacher. And it strips you away. In the last 50 years, like, are there times when you lose it? Like, I am so far from perfect. I am better than I used to be. Okay? And I don't have the tendency now for that to happen because the consciousness is way back. It's back. It's okay? All right? But during those years

that I went through my stuff—absolutely! Okay? And you know, it was funny; there was a great saint from India called Ramakrishna. Srirama Krishna. And he was fully enlightened—a very, very high being. And they asked him once—his disciple asked him, "Does an enlightened master ever feel anger?" And they were shocked by his answer. He said yes. He said, "It's like riding on water; as it happens, it goes away." And that's Jonathan we were just talking about, right? Things happen; they come up, and you let them go. See, he was that evolved, to where if a situation

would happen that would have caused a problem with somebody, he felt it, and it passed through. And you're going to say the same thing: he said, "I'm not different than any other man; I have the same drive they have, the same things—they just go through; I just don't hang out with them. They just pass through." I'm curious how you would approach this because some people, when you say "surrender," say, "Well, I shouldn't have any wants or desires; I should just sort of give my will away to other people and just do what they say," versus,

you know, being self-directed. And so if two people are in a situation, and you... know there's a standoff: one person wants one thing, one person wants another; neither are gonna budge, but they're sort of, you know, you can't move forward without some form of agreement. What are the principles that can be applied, um, that you're, you know, that the surrender experiment would suggest that you're not sort of butting heads, but you know that you don't want to give your will over to someone else? All right, so I haven't thought of this, but you made me

think of it. I will give an example. I can recall sitting at my desk, in charge of the company, talking to, you know, Smith Klein or some large lab company because I was in medical software, and they wanted to use my software to tie their labs in. It doesn't matter what it was, but I'm talking to the head guy, you know, senior vice president, this and that, and I think that I'm having a rational conversation, okay? I'm sitting there exactly as you just described, and this guy was trained to be an, ah, right? So basically,

we're sitting there, and I say, well, we can do this, you know, if you'll do this, and so on, and first he puts down his, this is what I want; this is what I want. And I said, well, okay, we can work with that, and we'll do this and that, and he says, oh, great, that's perfect, that's perfect! I feel like I'm getting somewhere. And all of a sudden, we say, okay, what are we going to do? And he goes right back to what he said originally—just, I mean, he was trained that way, okay? Literally,

exactly what I thought. We just had a conversation, right? So I do it again. I just let go, okay? Don't get upset, don't do anything—let go. And I did it again; he did the same thing three times, just right back. He did not budge one single drop, okay? And so I sat there and looked at it, and I had to let go of the frustrated part of me that didn't understand what was going on and realized we're not going to get any worse, okay? This is the game he wants to play. I'm not going to

get upset; I won't do anything. I just said to him, if you want to do something together, when you're ready, come back and talk to me because obviously you're not ready. And that was it. And guess what happened? Somebody else came down later, and we got this big contract that was way away from anything he ever talked about. It just wasn't the right time, and you gave it the time and the space, but you didn't get upset about it and take it personally. Fair enough? That's how you deal. That's what I've learned how to deal

with things: you let go of yourself. That's what surrender means. Surrender doesn't mean surrender to him; it certainly doesn't mean not doing what you're supposed to do, okay? Surrender means there's a part of me that can't handle what's happening right now. Well, if I can't handle it, then I can't handle it. I don't have the right to handle it because I can't. I understand that I'm not the right person for the job because I just said I can't handle it. So first handle it; you have to be able to handle what's happening because it's happening.

Then decide when you're clear what's the best way to go forward. And it may be there's no way to go forward; then that's the best way to go forward. So you're not all caught up in desires or needs or fears or anger or frustration; you're clear. Does that answer you? Yeah, no, it makes total sense. And often the timing isn't right—the situation, the timing. And a lot of people have an expectation, myself included all the time. This is actually my biggest thing lately: when is the timing right? Just because I think I want something to

happen or I think I need something to happen, pushing it through or trying to exert will to make it happen won't necessarily make it happen, right? And that goes into a whole other discussion of where did you get the idea of what you want, and who says it has anything to do with what's supposed to happen? Michael, there's not enough time in all of the galaxies to uncover the answer to that question. For Jonathan, there's so many assumptions that we're all operating with, and we think that, you know, it feels real that something is urgent,

something needs to happen—but unpacking that is huge. And letting go of that changes motivations, for sure. I try to touch that in a new book. I don't know how many people are willing to open up enough to comprehend the following: at any given moment—I'm going to talk to Ma'am—at any given moment, Mom, you're having an experience. Like right now, you're having an experience, right? And you're learning from that experience; you're becoming a greater person. You've met me; you've been—think you hear Jonathan—all this stuff's going on, right? But I want to know, is at this exact

moment, how many experiences are you not happy that are going on simultaneously? Come on, you're smart; come up with a number! I mean, infinite—that's the right answer, right? Therefore, you only know the nothing of the tiny, statistically insignificant amount of experience that you're having, and that's happening every moment. So, Jonathan, you don't know anything, and all of your desires and preferences and concepts and views are based on the data you took in during those nothing moments. I am. You see that? Yeah, absolutely. So how can we know anything? If you had a… Different experience—if you'd

be different, you'd think differently, wouldn't you? Throughout your life, every moment, if your boyfriend was different in high school, every single thing, right? I think like that. I hold Michael to the point that I remember that you don't know anything. You think you do, and you think you're right because everything you picked up, which is nothing, fits perfectly in the way you think; because that's the data you have, okay? And that's one view on the right. The other view is that people work so hard to reinforce all the things that they know to justify their

knowledge base, and then try to apply that to the world instead of saying, "I know very little and I'm not sure what should happen." You start with truth. We're talking about truth. What I just said was the truth; it's a difficult truth, and people don't want to hear it, right? That really doesn't fit the ego at all—alright, that I don't know anything. But by definition, you don't, because you missed everything, and you only stored the nothing that you experienced. And a whole bunch of nothing rounds to zero. It's frighteningly true, isn't it? And then people

stand there and do what Jonathan said, and sit there and say, "I know what's right!" No, I know it feels right. I know you had that experience, but now look at all the experiences you didn't have. If a born-again Christian had gone to a Hindu temple and gotten enlightened, they would be different. They had a different experience. Alright, so that's—like I said, I really like that you're known to be very intelligent. You obviously went through neuroscience, etc. etc. Why don't we use our minds to think like this? That's a very intelligent way to think. Well,

because it's not—it doesn't have instant gratification. I mean, I mean people—you know, it feels good to blame things on other people; you don't have to look at yourself. I mean, like, honestly. But that's what a lot of interactions are, you know? And, you know, I mean one of the greatest challenges, you know, of I think the human experience is being in partnership with another. And that doesn't always have to be a romantic conversation. But there's something that Jonathan sent that I actually was going to be kind of my next set of questions. You know, I

instantly think of these principles that you're talking about and what it was like being a parent to small children, because that was an environment of extreme stress and tension. And, you know, I lost a lot of my—I mean, I gave away a lot of my sanity, you know, because of really not having this kind of grounding. But I wanted to just—if you don't mind, you wrote it, so I'm sure you don't mind humoring us for one second. So, this is from your new book: "If you're in a relationship, the other person has lots of patterns

of their own, quite different from yours. This is why relationships are so complicated." And you give a good example: "If somebody yelled at your partner at work, they're different when they come home than if someone hadn't yelled at them at work." This is something, you know, that I have a lot of feelings about because we do—we carry everything that happens; I mean, we carry it to our kids, you know, it’s with us. And what you say is, "Don't get scared; all this doesn't mean you don't have meaningful relationships. There are beautiful relationships, and they can

last forever. In fact, they can get more and more beautiful all the time." And you talk about samskara—am I pronouncing it correctly? They're not based on the world outside matching your inner patterns; they're based on unconditional love. "Once love is always flowing freely inside of you, you will be pleased to share it with another person. Such love is not based on needs or expectations; it's based on pure love wishing to express itself unconditionally." And you ask, "How do you reach such a state of unconditional love and well-being?" Instead of trying to get the world to

match your blockages, you work on letting go of the blockages, and that is the secret of real spiritual growth. That is the real paradigm shift. So, I mean, this is incredibly powerful, and I would like to know—you know, love comes up a lot. Did you choose to partner with someone in your life? Did you have a traditional relationship? Are you a dad? I am a dad and a grandfather three times over. Wow! And I've been married 45 years or something. So yes, I love that I can point to that also, okay? And our relationship from

the very beginning was founded upon the fact that we were both trying to let go of ourselves. So not everybody has that fortune, okay? So, Donna had moved out, was living a little house next to where I was, up the hill, and basically, we ended up falling in love and being together. But basically, we both very much wanted to follow this path, and we gave ourselves the room to do so. The entire foundation of our relationship is based on, "I'll try to let go of myself and you try to occur yourself about your ability." And

I think she's done better than me, but basically, she's beautiful. She's beautiful; she's radiant, just always glowing. Just filled with love and so on, right? Very, very beautiful. But she did so by letting go of herself, you know, by bothering to say, “I’m committed to the life that is in front of me, and I will do my best to let go.” And is it hard? It was hard—not necessarily the relationship aspect, but just our lives, you know? The lives are... you have to let go. If you let go of yourself, life is easy. Life is

easy! This is so silly; you’re sitting on a planet for a handful of years, and it’s a beautiful planet. I mean, God, look at this planet! All right, it’s like we’ve been... Mars has nothing; Jupiter... would you rather be on Mars or Jupiter or Saturn or Pluto or anywhere else? There’s nothing. We haven’t found... give humans a couple more years, and it might look a little more like those planets, but yes, but the net result is you just look at it and think, “I should be able to handle my few years on Earth, which is

beautiful, and have fun and be happy. I don’t need to make this mess inside myself.” But there is the tendency. Well, as I said, you don’t want to feel disturbance, and things happen in life that are disturbing, so let them go. If they’re disturbing, why do you want to keep them? That’s as silly as they were. Okay, okay, I’m super duper with you, but I want to ask—I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I want to know. I’m assuming you raised children in this emotional environment as well. Like, you didn’t then have children and

say, “Do as I say, you know, not as I do.” I’m assuming you brought this to... you can bring this to parenting, right? Of course. So what are those children like? Are they enlightened beings? First of all, I have one daughter. All right, okay. Is she an enlightened being? Did you figure out the formula for raising the perfect human? I didn’t even ever think about it. That’s not... I never thought of this as a business. I never thought about being a teacher. I don’t... it’s—you’re going to get it from your mind, right? Ram Dass said

you’re not going to think your way through life; that doesn’t do it because the only data you have is this, nothing you picked up. Your mind is going to keep telling you, “I know,” right? So the way I always looked at it is if I’m willing to let go of myself to the best of my ability—I’m not perfect, right?—but if I’m willing to let go of myself, then that which is greater than me can be the parent. Right? I wouldn’t want her to have to deal with what’s left of me. All right, so basically, keep

letting go, keep letting go, and then interact, you know? Help with school—if there’s this or has a problem, whatever it is—but don’t do it from the personal point of view. And you have to be willing to even say your children are not your children. Your children are not your children. Right? They’re beautiful; they come through you but not for you. And so, basically, if you let go of yourself... I teach people who have trouble with children; they come and talk about it. I say you’re making yourself neurotic by trying to think how to perfectly bring

up this child. Why don’t you get out of the way and let God be the parent? Because that’s what’s left when you’re out of the way. Man minus mind equals God. Okay? So if you keep letting go of yourself, you’re letting a greater part of your being be the parent. What’s wrong with that? And she turned out beautiful. She’s beautiful. She’s beautiful. Does she live in a spiritual community? No. Is she married with three children and a beautiful husband? Yes. Do they... they apparently live a normal life, and they’re very happy, and the kids are

happy, right? But I know her, right? She’s imbibed the teachings. We never made her come to the temple; we never made her meditate. I never... I don’t know if I’ve ever taught her to meditate. Okay? In fact, I remember—I shouldn’t tell this story—I remember one moment where one of the spiritual teachers, the saints, came through and gave her mala beads, right? Gave her a set of mala beads, and she was young—I don’t know, 14, 13 years old. I walked in the bedroom, and she’s sitting there, and I said, “Do you know what to do with

those?” I shouldn’t tell this story! She said, “Well, I think I do,” because they think they do. And so I showed her how to turn them, all right? And I walked out of the room, and I walked back in a little bit later... her eyes are turned up; she’s in complete peace. All right? And she says, “Is this right?” Right? “Yeah, that’s really good.” They’re natural, you know? I didn’t force anything on her, right? Period. Nor did Donna. But she grew up in a beautiful environment, right? She grew up with loving parents. She grew up

with... now, Elaine, a trip on her head, etcetera, etcetera. But she was like a hippie child—could do whatever she wanted, right? Right? You know? If you will let go of yourself, you know what to do. You can almost be sure that what you’re coming up with through your mind, because of your fears and your anxieties... however, I’m like... I literally have people tell me, "I've had a person tell me I don't want to have children because I'm afraid I'll screw them up." Man, what an attitude! All right, just use the trial to help let go

of yourself; use the business to let go of yourself; use the relation to let go of yourself. If you're willing to use all of these things to constantly relax and release your ego—your personal, silly self, right?—that thinks it knows everything, you're going to do much better. Much better, because you let go of the problem. There is trust in a larger plan; call it the universe, call it some force of nature that helps guide all of our lives, and trust in our own knowing beyond the mind. Most people are so conditioned to listen to and look

to the mind for answers, saying, "Don't do that," or saying, "Let you know." Witnessing the mind instead of being in direct relationship to it or with it means that there is another knowing that we have, that we potentially have not experienced or is unfamiliar to us, which I think can scare a lot of people. Well, I like how simple my teachings are. I'll tell you the truth, right? Because I don't ask people to believe in that or do anything like that. Okay, and when I talk about the mind, as we talk about letting it go,

I'm talking about the personal mind. There is a purely intellectual aspect, an abstract aspect of the mind, that which went out and studied neuroscience. Okay? It's brilliant! It created spacecraft; it flew to the moon; it split the atom; they found this quantum field. I mean, my God, I'm speechless! All right, I'm not talking about that mind. When I say let go of the mind, that's pure intellectual mind. It is what the mind is good at; it's what it's meant to do. When you take that pure intellectual mind and instead of saying, "Develop air conditioning and

find drugs that can fix healing," you tell it, "Find out what I can do to be happier," okay? It's like an ingrown toenail; you make your mind focus on yourself all the time. That's what builds the personal mind. Okay? That mind you need to let go of. It doesn't mean you're not left with a tremendous power that can help solve things; you do bring that in. It's just this part of you that's not what happened—that is, the mind. It stored all this stuff in your mind that's not okay, and now you're, as an intellectual mind,

figuring out what everybody else needs to do and what has to happen every day for you to be okay. That's the problem. Okay, so when you're letting go of the problem, I don't think it takes a kind of faith that there's something greater, right? You're just letting go. I know that this is a problem, so if I let it go, it's going to be greater because I let go of the problem. Let go of the anchor; how's that? So it's very, very solid, very grounded. Okay, this kind of writing takes a tremendous amount—I would imagine

a tremendous amount—of energy and work and thought and editing. Did you always think that you would keep writing? Did you write "Untethered Soul" and feel like, "All right, I'm done; I don't need to do anything else"? I guess I mean what I said to Jonathan when we were talking about your new book. I said, "If I were Michael Singer, if I had written this book, I would be like, 'I don't have to do anything else in this world because I wrote this.' I wouldn't want to write anything; I would just live in peace forever." But

do you have a feeling of, "Oh, there's more to say that I collect in a certain way," and that's what sort of drives that? Do you have other things that you think to write? I mean, I kind of want like an "Untethered Soul" for every aspect of my life, like "Untethered Soul" if you work in psychology, "Untethered Soul" if you're a chemist. You know? How does that sort of work for you when you think about what to write? I don't—I hate to say it; I feel embarrassed. I don't do that. I don't live life at

that level. I do what's put in front of me, and it unfolds, and I always know what to do. That's all. I just—uh, and, but it's not a thought process either. For money, I've never done anything for money or for pride or for this or for fame or for success or anything like that. It's just sort of like, "Give me a job, universe, and I'll do the best I can." All right? And there I can explain it; I have to do it now. But each one of those books—each one of them—unfolded in a very natural

way, and then I put my whole soul and heart into it, and then look what it did! Look what it did! Right? Oprah asked me, when we interviewed her a few weeks ago, "Did you have any idea 'The Untethered Soul' would have the impact that it did?" You know, still three million copies, all these people—of course not! I never thought of it or even thought to think of it. You understand that? Like the ultimate is, like, when I wrote the computer program, I was just sitting alone in a room by myself, taking a tiny little—

but there were no books then! Okay? Literally, you go to any store you want; you never had a computer program before. There was no such thing. All right? You just got this little manual—like one page of code. I don't talk about it for kids, all right? And I figured out, all right, I'm playing now. You fear? Did I think that this would become a billion-dollar company or something like that? It's ridiculous. I would have never thought about it. I would have gotten scared; I wouldn't have done it. All right? You just do what's in front

of you with all your heart and soul, and that's good enough. There's no thought of reward or fruits of your labor, and then you don't have to worry about anything. You're just doing what the universe gave you to do. How do you know? Because it's in front of me. And I know people get scared, but they don't understand that. But that's how my life has been lived, and look what happened. Jonathan, do you have anything else? I mean, I'm just writing down the quote: "Do what's in front of you with all of your heart and

soul." I'm like, also then my mind is like, does he have a schedule? He clearly has a schedule because he showed up here today, so he books things on his calendar. But that you're done—that becomes part of it. There's part of doing your best; there may be an assistant, there may be scheduling, you may have to hire somebody, right? It just unfolds. That's all I can say. It's funny. We were—Jonathan and I were talking yesterday; he was at a point in his life where he has a lot of decisions that he has to make, can

make, has the opportunity to make. One of them was he was thinking about purchasing a house. I'm just going to say it: he was thinking about, you know, should he, shouldn't he, and whatever. I had a little bit of a Michael Singer moment, I think, because, well, because he was very in his head about it, and he was saying, you know, he was saying things like, "I feel like I don't have enough information to even know what information I need to make the decision with the information," you know? And he was saying like, "No one

knows my story and all the intricacies of the things that I need and want but me." And, you know, you can speak to a realtor, and they know part of your story, and you can speak to a financial advisor, and they know part; you can speak to your father, and he knows part, right? And what I said to him is that at a certain point, you can sit in indecision forever. You can sit there forever and you can wait, and at another point, it's all going to be okay anyway. And what I said is, “I

wouldn't take every single dollar you have and put it into a house, but you can do something that is not the end of the world either way.” And every other decision then will roll from there. But until you take that first step in faith, right, knowing that there's a staircase even if you can't see it all, then you can sit in that place literally forever. And that's that paralysis that many people experience, you know? It's that fear of not—it's like you said, it's the fear of not raising the kid right; it's the fear of buying

the wrong house, you know? And it's funny—there are certain parts of me where I'm always like, "I don't care where I live; find me a house, I'll make it my own." Like, I literally don't, you know? So there are so many things, though, to sit in deliberation about. Anyway, I just don't want you to think that Jonathan is always this enlightened soul. I could send him to you, and you could just have a field day with this one, but he is very, very, very much a spiritual teacher of mine. So it's really special also to

get to talk to both of you because, you know, as we told you, this book is very special to us, and, yeah, it's just—it's very overwhelming to get to speak to you and, you know, to be in your presence because I just—it's—[Music] there are so many things about the way—not just that you think and the things you've experienced—but, again, the way that you communicate them that just really pierced something. It really broke something open for me, and, yeah, I can't say it was as powerful as what happened to you in 1970 or '71, but you

know—[Music] I'm only 46. So it's so beautiful because everything you go through—like Jonathan, this decision-making—what you want to do is say, "What's behind the anxiety?" So when people talk, I don't help people make decisions, but we talk about decision-making; the first thing that matters is, "What's your motive?" Not, "What should you do?" If how can you fear what to do if you don't even know your motive, right? And my—you became the spiritual teacher with every word you said about this—which is start from the point of view: "Do I want to get a house or not?"

Well, okay, yes, I'd like to have a house. All right, can I afford a house? Don't worry about what house—what's your motive? It's very simple, you know? I just want to express myself and have a house, and that's that. And then stop there. "Don't say it has to be a certain way when it's all said and done. If you're afraid of making the wrong decision, who defined it as wrong? Well then, don't. That's what Mario was saying, right? If you don't define it as wrong. I was a builder, okay? You know, before my personal programming,

before the program company, I did build. I love my company. I built this house for this beautiful lady, all right? Who happened to be the manager of the local bank, and her name was Penny Dollar. I swear to God, her name was Penny Dollar. Right? This is a long time ago, back in the 80s, and basically she once came to me and sat there and said, 'I'm so scared.' I said, 'Look, I'm going to build a beautiful house for you. We've got it; everything's fine.' So I stay up at night; I can't sleep. 'What are

you worried about? Isn't it turning out nice?' I'm afraid. Listen to this: 'I'm afraid that I will build a house and then I'll go to plug in a lamp, and the cord won't reach the outlet.' Wow. Wow, thank you. I said, 'Wow, that's why they make extension cords.' I was going to say that's why they make therapists, but yes, what I'm saying is like, that was the framework. I mean, look, I grew up in post-Holocaust neuroses; like, it literally was served to me for breakfast, you know, with the milk that I was allergic to, and

no one knew. But that kind of thinking—that's literally what I was bred in. Yes, you know. But what I'm saying to Jonathan is don't let your mind do that, right? Let your mind say, 'Wouldn't it be fun if the outlet doesn't reach and I can support the extension cord companies?' Right? Or I can get a lamp with a longer cord, right? Or whatever, don't—like a different lamp. Don't let it say that there's a way that you'll call wrong. You're the one who called it wrong. Do you understand that? You don't have to do that; otherwise,

your mind will go crazy trying to make sure you figure all your preferences and how to meet them. And who says they're the same, right? And all kinds of preferences come up, and you make your mind, and you change it. Don't do that; just sit there and say, 'Okay, I'm going to build a house. I'm allowed to build a house. I got some funny money for the house. Like my mom said, don’t spend all of it, you know, be reasonable. Just be reasonable. There's no absolute answer,' and then make it be right by working with

yourself. I love it; I love it. Well, don't you notice that the paint didn’t—I didn’t think I would like it. I love it! I just love that it doesn’t match in those bedrooms. Oh my God, every time I go in, it turns me on! You get to do that! You're the one who decided it's wrong. Just don't decide it's wrong! And some people say you don’t get to do that. Yes, you do! It's your house; it's your mind; it's your life, and you can make it beautiful by not making it ugly. You understand that? So

decisions aren't hard unless you're trying to feel that they satisfy all your desires and all your fears and all your preferences. Remember the third Zen patriarch: the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. It isn’t my own—oh, I love it! That's the greatest teacher that ever lived, the third patriarch, right? He wrote something called the Treatise on Faith Mind. That's the first line: the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. If you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose! That was Bob Dylan, the other great prophet.

Um, one final question: what is your middle name? Alan. Allen. Michael Allen? Yes. Um, really such an honor, such an honor to speak to you, and I hope we were more interesting than Oprah, and he asked beautiful, deep questions. I—I—and my mom—you don’t look for that awakening. I don’t like when people look for a spiritual experience. What matters is your spiritual state, not just for those experiences. And the only reason you're not in the highest state right now is because you're paying attention to these anchors that you're holding inside of you. All right? And if

you just daily be willing to just, okay, fine, she didn’t like that, okay, something like that. Let go. Like this practice of letting go, you're gonna find out that your spirit will soar, and that's higher than a spiritual experience. It's a spiritual state. All right, thank you. Amen! Thank you, Mr. I say things, and Michael Singer says I'm a spiritual teacher. You must be feeling cut out—that sound, bro. You must be feeling pretty good about yourself. No, I'm not. It wasn't me. Oh, oh, I see. Oh, this is got it. Okay, new Jonathan, great. I

guess we have nothing to talk about then. What we have to talk about is the fact that we don't talk about our problems anymore. We don't talk about any witness or problems. Everything's fine. I'm never going to therapy, philosophy, I'm going to throw away all my pills and see what happens. All of your stored stuff will just come up because you're not surprised. No, and I don’t mean to um, I don’t mean to belittle also, you know, kind of what his approach is and what he's talking about. And it is a process though, and the

notion is not—and, you know, we didn't specifically cover this, but the notion is not..." Like, you don't have to work on yourself. The notion is not that he can; he believes he can cure schizophrenia, or, you know, there's a very different level of conversation that applies, kind of, you know, to everyone in terms of a way to approach, um, understanding. In particular, you know, he calls them neuroses, but, um, you know, the things that this kind of consistent thinking and practice helps with are things like chronic anxiety, um, and things like depression that's not just

like feeling blue for a day or so, but, um, you know, constitutional kind of depression, major depressive disorder, things like that. Um, [Music] you know, I instantly am thinking of, like, the people I know who are, like, super anxious. Everything indicates that they're super anxious, but, you know, many people don't— they also don't want to go to therapy. They're just like, "Give me a pill; make it go away." And, also, I'm not passing judgment on that, but this is not necessarily made for those people. This is made for people who really want— I mean, he

said it's very hard work. What did he say? You know, your memories, they go in with pain; they're going to come out with pain. And sometimes people need support to understand that process because it can feel so intense. I believe everybody needs support to understand that process, and, um, you know, especially with trauma work and things like that, we are relational creatures, so it often is important to have a partner, you know, kind of witnessing that process. That being said, you know, this is a book that you do not go through in a day. Um,

the only thing I can compare this to is, um, the deepest— like, the most difficult, challenging, um, ancient Jewish texts that I have read have this kind of mental energy that it requires. Meaning, sometimes a page is enough, like, to truly read it, to truly ask yourself every sentence, "Do I understand this? Is this resonating?" It's exhausting. I mean, this isn't, again, something you do like at the end of a day, like, "I just had a [__] day; better pick up this and I'll feel better." Um, this is really— it's a life approach, and I'm

just, like, so in awe of his journey and just how— I just have a million questions. And, you know, I was very, very overcome, you know, getting to, like, see him and hear him speak. And just, like, you know, I feel like I'm in the presence of someone with tremendous wisdom— like tremendous presence. You can feel it talking to him. Not just on Zoom, the way that he just looks and just his way of being. I mean, it's hard to describe except for it feels significantly different to sit in his presence, even on Zoom, than

other people. Yeah, what do you think about this idea that we inherently have access to this unbridled joy and, you know, ecstatic feelings that we're capable of, uh, as our, you know, natural state of being? I mean, look, as someone who, you know, has struggled with a lot of things, it doesn't really feel intuitively logical to me, meaning from my experience. But, like, what's my experience? It's just my perception of the experience. Um, but yes, I will say that the moments in my life that have tapped into that— I call upon the birth of my

second child, where I, you know, was alone until pushing, and I had an incredibly intense and enormously ecstatic experience. And, like, that feeling— it's the closest that I can tell to when he describes what it feels like to not even, like, experience love. It's just you are love, and it's just, like, welling up. Like, so I'm not expecting to feel that every day, all the time, but I have experienced, you know, and people have seen me laugh till I cried and peed my pants here with you. Like, there's a source of, you know, a certain

kind of connection that you can have with other humans, you know, that makes you feel like you're outside of the realms of, like, the normal descriptions of an experience. You know, I've seen you in nature having similar experiences— where on a lake, kayaking, being in nature, being around waterfalls, where you're just, you know— I'm not saying it's your second childbirth experience, but it's a level of, um, emotional—we all have a deep capacity for that. Like, I don't think that I'm special in that way, and I think that's what, you know, what, um, what Michael would

say. I call him Mickey now, um, but yeah, we do! We have that capacity. And I think, for me, if we're talking about me personally—which you just went there—yeah, I mean, we both went there. Yeah, when you take me out of my computer, my schedule, the things that I allow to make me nuts, because I, you know, I give my serenity away on the daily, um, yeah, I can have a— but then I also feel like, but I have to go back to the real world. I can't live in this waterfall forever. And then he,

like, ran this gigantic company, and, like, look, it's amazing— he's amazing. I brought up the nature because I think it's important to reset an expectation. It's not that, like, "Oh, you have to go do mushrooms to be out in nature." Like, you can have an awe-inspiring experience simply by existing. And, right, we're capable of that. And then, in terms of his company, I just... Think that re-framing his expectations is important. It's not like I'm getting on a call to make a deal; it's getting on a call, and I don't know what to expect because I

know there's so much I don't know. That level of being humble and in awe of what I sense to be the universe beyond himself—I find that fascinating. I definitely am going to start to use little bits of this. I'm going to go back to this interview and listen for those sound bites because the words of wisdom he shared—I'm taking notes feverishly. By incorporating some of them, getting on a meeting and remembering the insignificance of what I'm about to do makes the reactions or interactions that I may find difficult so much less difficult. I change it

from "this is the most important thing in my day" to "oh, this is generally insignificant," and that everything is going to be fine. Another thing is, when you were talking about the house, I was in this constant state of trying to figure it out in my mind, and he said, "You can't figure it out in your mind." One of the things you said to me that really helped was, "It doesn't sound like it's time to make that decision if it's so fraught with all of this unknowing." I could figure out an entire plan, but that

doesn't mean that it's the time to make the plan. Totally. And also, you know, while being present is extremely important, Michael, when we were just talking about, for example, buying a house, he said, "You know, be reasonable." Being reasonable is part of the entire decision-making process. As I said to you, when you think about buying a house, it's not just about buying a house; it's all of the—it's a million things. There are many days when I think, "Gosh, I see why sometimes people don't want to be this kind of adult." I'm just being honest; sometimes

adulting is really hard, and it's frustrating. I'm not even talking about owning things or first-world problems—like, my garage door broke the other day. Yeah, that's kind of a thing that needed to get handled, right? But the other part of me wishes I could just devote my life to studying this book, and until I get it right, I don't want to re-enter the world. This is why this is an emotional episode; because, of course, my mind goes to, "I've wasted so much time." If I Byron Katie it, is that true? No, it's not true, but I

want it to be true. Can we put Byron Katie and Michael Singer in the same room? I think they're the same person; they just present in different ways. Well, I mean, we have now spoken to two human beings who have had profound—by profound, I mean transformative—spiritual awakenings, and they will not talk about what they were like before. Both of them said the same thing: "It doesn't matter." You went in, and you're like, "I really want to know!" Your mind was like, "I need to figure out what it was about his childhood." Well, it wasn't even

that. I'm just so curious! What if you were to find out that, well, he told us he's Jewish—what if he were raised super, super religious, like Orthodox, and had never met a gentile? Then that would also be interesting—if he were in college as this cloistered person, separate from other things. Because, like, he's not part of whatever. That would be interesting to me. Or maybe he was raised by total hippies. But you're right; it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he was primed for it because it's true. That's just looking for a place of comparison, and

that was the question I wanted to ask him. Then you cut me off, which made me cry. I wanted to know what other texts he studied. It’s clear that he has a strong background in Eastern philosophy. No, he's very— I mean, that's what he studied! So it wasn't just yoga and meditation. That's the thing I was worried people would take from this episode: "He had this spiritual awakening—good for him." Then he's just like this genius person who writes all these books and is amazing. No, this is a person who studied. He continued studying and reading.

He doesn't just know all these names of gurus and masters; he studied them. He read texts; he dug in deep. And it's Eastern. I don't want to say exclusively Eastern philosophy because there’s also a tinge of Jewish mysticism in there, but yeah, a lot of Eastern. He started with Zen Buddhism. Do you feel comfortable talking a little bit about when you said you wasted all this time? I kind of cut you off, but I think it's an important area because you had a really big emotional reaction at the beginning; it was like he was talking

directly to you. There were parts of... That interview felt like he was just sort of looking at you and bringing you into his—well, it felt very uncomfortable doing energy work. What felt uncomfortable, you know, is that I feel very unworthy. I was thinking, “Gosh, he has all these—like not preconceived notions, but you know it’s a big deal to get a doctorate in the science field.” He knows that because he studied, um, economics, and he was deep in a lot of similar worlds that I was in in academia. Then there’s this notion of, “Gosh, I wonder

why he thinks I did that,” or “Does he think I’m this technical person?” I’m really just, like, weeping openly, you know? I just—I'm sad; I hate that he can't be my special friend. I don't mean special like that; I just mean I’m sad that everyone doesn’t get to have more of Michael Singer conversations in their life. But I guess that’s why he writes books. I felt so stupid asking anything. I tend to feel kind of—like I get—um, I feel a little bit dumb around people like that because it’s like I ask something and it doesn’t

even matter. Like, “Oh, but you know, how do you decide to write a conversation?” He’s like, “How do you—like how do you decide to write?” I don’t decide. Oh, right, okay. Only, like, you know, corporate jerks like me think that way. I sit down and think, "I’m going to write something here; I wrote it pretty much" versus “The universe is telling me to write. I will channel that information to the best of my ability and share it with the masses. And then talk to Oprah.” I mean, us and Oprah in one week! I want to

just touch for a second on this notion of reinforcing or building the mind's paradigm around the issues in our life versus his approach. I do believe that understanding ourselves requires a level of examination that is healthy as well. We can get into an analysis paradigm where we now analyze so much that it doesn’t allow us to feel or separate from the thing that we’re analyzing. For example, when I feel an emotion, if I try to ask myself, “Why am I feeling this emotion, and where is it coming from?” I don’t feel the emotion. I go

into the mind, and I can’t process it. I was wondering if that, you know, was any part of what you were feeling at the beginning when he was talking. That was just a powerful section, and you were having—um, you were emotional. Yeah, I mean, I don’t feel like I was having a reaction to that specifically. I think, as he said, it takes all kinds, you know. There are a lot of different pathways, and he doesn’t know everyone’s particular mechanisms for why they got the way they are. And, like I said, there are certain aspects of

people’s chemical makeup, and there are a lot of other factors that influence our ability to slow down and think that way. As someone who's had depression that was so dark, there was no light coming in, I know for sure that we can get into ways of thinking that do not allow us to even contemplate thinking another way, and that’s very scary. Those are like the darkest edges of our human experience. I have a lot more experience with that than, you know, the stuff that you and he—I mean, I understand what you and he were talking

about, but it’s also like—that’s very heady, you know? And I think—have you had that experience, though? I think I’ve seen you have that experience where you’re having a reaction and an emotion, and you’re like, “Oh, wait a second. I’m kind of—like it’s almost like you’re going through the motions of an overreaction.” You even said to me, “Oh, I'm acting in a way that—” like you’re aware of the fact that you’re acting versus, I mean, I’m being so in it that it feels real. Yeah, I think—I mean, what I’ve noticed, you know, when you describe what

happens for you, I think that happens to a lot more men in our culture than women, in terms of like when the feelings start coming. I think for a lot of—and I’m not just saying just men, but you know—in a patriarchal, kind of structure like we’re in, there’s kind of an instant shutting it down to sort of analyze it because then I don’t have to feel it. Because I can solve it. You know, or I—I don’t know. I think that’s— No? You don’t think that’s what it is? It’s not that; so, well, you don’t have

differences. It’s not analyzing it; it’s not the—like it’s that I’m not going to just take a step back from being so in it that I can’t tell what’s leading me. Because it’s very important to— Not shut it down, and if I personally begin to analyze it—where's it coming from? What does it look like? All those things—then I don't feel it enough, and then it sort of doesn't pass. The only way I would describe it is instead of being, so for example, angry that the anger is motivating all of your behavior, you're able to just step

back one second and say, "Oh, I see the anger is happening." Instead of being just sandwiched together with no differentiation, you just step back a tiny bit. Sometimes there's a point of no return, which if you don't experience rage like I do, you don't know what I'm talking about. There is a point of no return where you're like—you see red. Yeah, there's the idea that would be to learn to stop it before it gets there. But if we're talking about the last time that I got upset at you, and you literally said I looked like

a cartoon carrot—like I blew my top; like I looked like anger in "Inside Out." That's what it felt like. I felt like that person witnessing in that moment. No, that moment is all being propelled by… Yeah, but that's a thing Michael Singer would say—there's probably a million opportunities before that just to witness it rising, to take a breath. That was all the stuff that I had been storing for the last eight months, you know what I mean? So for sure. Anyway, have a great day, everyone. That was really intense; it was amazing. And wow, check

out the Instagram account @appiahbreakdown for clips. We're going to get some of the best sound bites and words of wisdom. You can share them with your friends, and I'm certain Jonathan will compile some photos of me weeping openly while Michael… Oh, I actually messaged Valerie while we were doing this. I said the fact that she's slack-jawed in the first ten minutes of the interview would make a perfect GIF. What I was actually thinking is, I put on makeup today because I—whatever, I had some other stuff to film—and I don't usually wear makeup; like, the new

me doesn't really wear makeup when we record. And I was thinking, I really hope that my eyeliner doesn't run all the way down my face. But then I was like, wouldn't that be amazing if my eyeliner ran all the way down my face? It would be such a visual of, like, this is what happened when Michael Singer came to play, and I just look like Tammy Faye, just weeping. Well, next time, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we will see you next time. It's Miami's breakdown; she's gonna break it down

for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two, nonfiction, and now she's gonna break down—it's a breakdown; she's gonna break it down.