I have to admit, I had so much resistance to reading this book for years. I mean YEARS. This couldn’t have come at a better time in my life than now. There were a ton of great insights from this book. If you were to look at all the annotations I added, you would see a lot of “WHATT??” “WOW!” or “WHOA!” the good ones had “Called TF out right now!” hahaha so here are the main 3 concepts that stuck and will be forever the ideas I will turn back to again and again when I need it. *not in any particular order, just the way I remembered it*
- Your Forever Inner Roommate
- The author Michael A. Singer did a beautiful job of suggesting that if we were to pretend and pull out our monkey chatter mind (i.e. our ego), give it a name and act as if it were its own separate identity, its own personality, then we’d be better to manage the emotions that come with it’s comments. I named my ego “Serenity” because she’s anything but serene (no offense to anyone named Serenity or Serene; it’s still a very lovely name to me :)) She always has something to judge. It’s that annoying incessant thought patterning that almost immediately comes up in EVERY interaction with the world. Once you give her the space to share what she will always share, then you can still stay seated “right beside her on the couch” and enjoy the movie that is your life without any significance to anything she says as truth. You life is a movie and how she AUTOMATICALLY interprets it have nothing to do with your truth. Yeah? I hope that makes sense. It clicked for me once I started separating her voice and my voice. It actually got a lot easier to be more chill and less dramatic about whats going on around me when I create that safe space for my inner roomie to express how she feels. So cool.
- Open Heart – The moment does not belong to you!
- Ok now this one shocked me, even thinking about my yoga background and all of my Self-studying it shouldn’t be much of a shock but it indeed was. So consider: your heart is the portal to experiencing life fully. But as our ego/our inner roomie has a lot of the control, we tend to block our hearts by not letting anything pass THROUGH it. Good or Bad. If good things happen to us, we try to recreate that exact instance to keep having good moments like that happen again only to find out it’s not as palpable and vibrant as the first occurance. If we’re hit with bad experiences, we attach those moments/stories to our whole identity and do all the things we need to do to shield ourselves from ever letting anything like that happen again. You see how our hearts can get all blocked, clogged, deemed unworthy after years and years of good and bad moments that we choose to hang onto until it gets too comfortably stagnant? yeah. I know that’s a tough one to swallow. However, from that piece of wisdom and applying i with a new phrase I like to repeat “through, through, through” I am reminding myself to let go and I’ve gained so much more space in my field and in my energy. Non-attachment is practicing on having an open heart. This I feel only works for those who are WILLING to entertain more adventure and less certainty tho. And sometimes life leaves you no choice but to deal with life as it hands it to you. I feel you do have the opportunity always to step through, through and through it so that you can go on the other side of that being able to tell an incredible story. 🙂
- Just Stop it! haha, this one always has a funny way of entering my world again and again.
- The author talks about how our brains/psyche are already at a loss for it does not know any better than to always be in a fight for what knows to be good in the world. There’s just so much conviction there. You simply do not win if you let your mind take over anything. Singer’s solution is to disengage and don’t fight it and he’s right. We’ll never win with our minds. Our minds simply won’t let us. He gives an example of trying to quit smoking. We all know what to do, you just stop putting the cigarettes in your mouth, that’s how you stop. But our minds like to trick us and gives us all the explanations on how this method is better and all that. It just would rather fuck us over again and again. So to remember that, we simply just don’t entertain them and we just stop and move on. Yeah?
I know just these 3 aren’t enough but it’ll get you started to actually read the book. You got a good thing ahead of ya if you so choose to be willing to change your life. I hope you found this to be helpful~ I am such a huge advocate of reading all sorts of books and I like to think that books are the missing puzzle pieces of insight that I needed that came at a perfect time. I also understand that not everyone will be crazy like me to have more books than friends ahaha so I’ll be happy to share all the golden nuggets with anyone who’s willing to give me some of their time. Thank you so much if you made it all this way. I appreciate you choosing to spend it here with me! Until the next blog, big love + Sparkles!
