On the Untethered Soul

I quite liked this book. It’s often mentioned in the same breath as Eckhart Tolle’s, but it’s the better read. There are a few perennial lessons here, the meeting ground of a range of religious traditions and of psychotherapy. For one: you are not your thoughts; you’re the observer of them. Sometimes my mind won’t shut up and I take those thoughts for me, and I fall into a recursive rumination that’s exhausting — one thing the book offers that I find useful is to imagine it’s someone else talking to me; I still can’t turn it off, but I can take it less seriously. There’s an important section on trauma, though it isn’t called that: we always think of trauma as something severe, but it’s just emotion trapped in the body. The author falls back on the language of chakras and blocked energy, which I’m naturally suspicious of, but it’s an illuminating visual metaphor — when there’s enough negative energy it “clogs up” everything else and it gets hard to see the good, and no positive feeling comes in. I’ve felt that a lot lately.

The book’s main argument is simply to let go. Holding onto good emotions and bad ones alike keeps us from living the full depth of experience, and the way forward is to let what comes up in a given moment arise without resisting it; to “unclog” the bad energy from the past, we have to sit with it and feel it without rationalizing or explaining or fighting back. It’s the only way to be honest with ourselves, and it will pass in time. This isn’t a process that happens all at once, especially if you’ve let the debris of the past accumulate, as I have. I’m glad I read it; it’s what I needed to hear at the moment — though my reading it was probably itself a distraction from sitting with the emotions, which is the thing to avoid. I tend to cognify (cognitize?) everything, and that’s part of the larger problem. So: just let go.