Communications Manager, Kyla Merwin, recommends Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament by Michael A. Singer.
One of the great gifts bestowed on us as sentient beings – which we learn to access at some point (hopefully) in our lives – is personal agency:
Will. Free will. Choice.
We cannot control most of what happens around us—hot tempers and cold people, the length of the line in the grocery store or the width of the feet we were born with, the too-slow traffic or too-quickly changing technology, the time the sun sets or the rising of the tides, the opinions of your mother-in-law and other forces of nature.
In his two best-selling books, The Untethered Soul and Living Untethered, Michael A. Singer reminds us of this aggravating powerlessness with stark, unrelenting clarity. Thankfully, he also maps for us a path to exercise personal agency – awareness, intention, and choice – over matters that we can control: Our own thoughts, feelings, and actions.
He gives us powerful tools to “relax and release” our samskaras—the wounds, the anger, the hurt, the fears that, left to their own devices, wreak havoc on our lives.
These samskaras, says Singer, often hold sway over our better judgement, undermining our best intentions, our relationships, our careers, our dreams. Most importantly, these stored narratives from our past will inevitably distort our peace of mind, our stillness of heart, and our ability to move through life with ease and grace.
By dint of being born human on this “spinning ball of dirt in the middle of the vast space of the universe,” as Singer puts it, you have the ability, through choice, to live a life full of joy, happiness, and deep meaning.
I’ll be the first to admit I have pesky samskaras inserting themselves into my daily life. So if you see me walking around the streets of my own little universe – typically between the Library, the Gold Mine Stores, the Wood River Museum, the grocery store, and home – with AirPods in my ears and my head in the clouds, I might be pondering the words of the great Taoist philosopher, Lao Tzu:
Watch your thoughts, they become your words;
Watch your words, they become your actions;
Watch your actions, they become your habits;
Watch your habits, they become your character;
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Or I just may just be thinking…
…relax and release.
Find Living Untethered in Overdrive eaudiobook here. (Print copies coming soon!)
Living Untethered is the December 6, 2023 selection for the Community Library Book Club. Learn more/sign up here. Note: You do not have to read Singer’s first book, The Untethered Soul, in order to get the full benefit of the tools in Living Untethered.
