The Untethered Soul - Separating Yourself from your Concept of Self.

 Untethered Soul: Journey Beyond Yourself reads like a guided meditation that carries you gently into a paradigm shift that will rock your whole world if you let it. The author first will help you distinguish between you at your core, and the little voice inside your head that is not actually you. Then he will show you how giving that little voice attention and energy makes it louder, and that advice and critical analysis coming from that voice is often biased, wrong, or just plain unhelpful. 

By allowing yourself to experience things that cause you distress and make the voice louder, you can eliminate the control that fear and anxiety have over your life. Simply take in a deep breath, focus on the core you instead of the superficial, insecure shield you've built to ward off pain, and let the experience pass right through you. Positive and negative experiences are subjective - they're only negative if we label them that way and focus on how they hurt us. It's surprisingly easy with the help of this book to begin labeling all experiences as positive and useful and, accept that the universe unfolding exactly as it should.

On loneliness

What is this feeling we can all experience, isolated in the dark hours of early morning or walking invisibly through a dense crowd, called loneliness? What is this intense motivation to connect with others? Evolutionary psychologists would say that connectedness reduces risk of fatality and increases opportunity to reproduce, and they would be right. Humans, from nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes to religious organizations to family units in all their modern forms, have formed kinship groups since the beginning of their existence. Western technological advancement has worked against this principle desire, separating people into smaller groups, emphasizing individuality over the good of the whole, encouraging relocation multiple times over the lifespan.

We've severed our own limb and its leaving us desperately wanting. We seek the comfort and safety of built-in community anywhere we can find it: university fraternities & sororities, neighborhood homeowners associations, mega-churches. And still loneliness seeps into our lives when we are surrounded by people.

More recently I've noticed people seeking it in music. I've spent the last couple years in the modern 'rave scene.' You can clearly see the purpose this scene exists to fulfill by looking at their motto - PLUR or peace, love, unity, respect. They want to gather together in masses, united by rather trivial characteristics like music preference, age bracket, economic standing, clothing choices, drug preferences, etc. in order to find the same feeling hunter-gatherers experienced simply from traveling together. What do they hope to get out from this sense of unity and connectedness? Peace, love and respect. Are they actually getting it there? No, probably not.

When you take a step back, how strange is it actually that 1-4 people get together and invent a complex sound pattern, then hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of fans over time create this subculture that revolves around a complex sound pattern. The sound then becomes an abstract identifier that you are part of this collective whole that enjoys and understands that particular pattern and the subculture that emerged from it.

How it feels to climb out of the river that's been knocking you down

The ebb and flow

In the sky

What just happened?

The further I get from our breakup the more I see how lost I was with you. And the more I ponder why on earth I let that happen. And how is it possible that the time I was happiest in my life was also the time I was most untrue to myself?

These last few months have been a reintroduction to myself. Sometimes painful, sometimes wonderful, but all times strange and unfamiliar. Like I'm both meeting myself and catching up at the same time. My inspiration came back today - my creativity, insight, motivation, opinions. It truly feels like I stopped having opinions for the last 6-9 months of our relationship. Why?

Its no wonder you didn't love me because I wasn't even a person anymore by the time we broke up. I was a blob of play-dough that I'd given you to form, except you didn't, you just let it harden and dry out and crumble. Why did I do that?

I put my lifelong dream on hold for you. I sacrificed my body for you, my spirituality and my sexuality. Why??? You didn't even ask me to. What was I thinking?

The further in time I get away from February 11th, the less I understand about what even happened in my life for the last two years. Its all a blur. A big nonsensical blur of incredible highs separated by long, dull lows and the desire to get back up.

Did I even love you? I know now that you didn't love me. That's not what love looks like. Giving nothing, taking everything. That's not love. But I don't think giving everything and taking nothing is love either. So what was that?

We connected on some level I'd never felt before. I know I wasn't lying when I said I'd never loved someone so much. Except that it wasn't love. I just didn't know it? We had nothing in common besides the things I changed about myself so we could share them. We had no business being together, and yet we were, and it was an experience I would never take back (and I doubt you would either), but what experience was it?

Why did we become so tightly intertwined for such a brief moment in time? We're both so different now, and we'll never be the same again. The chasm will only keep growing. Its likely our paths will never cross again. What happened to us?

So I did it. I moved. By myself. All the way across the country from one hipster culture hub to the other. Threw out almost everything I own. Kind of wish I'd thrown out more.

It looks like Seattle. It smells like Seattle. The rain is falling outside and I'm staying in a house with a dock on a lake. But I didn't get to say goodbye to my lake. My place. I bet you've got one too. That place you go when you just want to be alone and think. That place you go when you need a magical moment of insight. That place is several thousand miles away now and I didn't get to go before I left.