The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
4.7 | 43,753 ratings
Price: 15.13
Last update: 02-02-2026
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- Cody Allenget in touch with your inner self!This book is the modern day guide to getting in touch with your inner self. While reading it, I came to recognize two different entities inside of myself. One does the talking and one does the listening. The talker (my ego) talks a big game. He is unabashedly bold and thinks his shit don’t stink. The listener (what I have come to understand as my true self) is bad at pushing back against my ego when it goes too far. Reading this book brought the relationship between these two aspects of my inner self into a realm of greater personal understanding.
This book also really made me appreciate the tremendous power of the mind. Singer uses the allegory of a house in a beautiful field to describe how many of us live our mental lives. The house is “all your past experiences; all your thoughts and emotions; all the concepts, views, opinions, beliefs, hopes, and dreams that you have collected around yourself.” We stay inside our houses because they are safe. But, if we manage to open a window, or break down a wall, we would be faced with the beauty of the outside world. This of course goes hand in hand with change. Breaking down the walls of our conceived houses is equivalent to embracing change and facing our fears. In practice, it is very difficult to do because fear is scary. If we can manage to get to the other side of it, however, and see our fears in a different way and change our thoughts and perceptions that surround it, the field of view is truly breathtaking.
The theme of succumbing to our fears comes up a few times, as Singer notes that “if you have a lot of fear, you won’t like change. You’ll try to create a world around you that is predictable, controllable, and definable.” He goes on to say how in reality, “fear is the cause of every problem. It’s the root of all prejudices and the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, and possessiveness.” Anybody familiar with Star Wars should be hearing Yoda in their heads right now telling young Anakin Skywalker how “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering” (and ultimately to the dark side.) Singer and Yoda are saying the same thing: If you let fear be in the drivers seat, you will spend your life perpetually unhappy, always trying to shape external events to fit your internal narrative and soothe your psyche. The way through this is to embrace change and recognize that “if you really want to break through, you have to be willing to just watch the fear without protecting yourself from it. You must be willing to see that this need to protect yourself is where the entire personality comes from.” Fear is what builds the allegorical house. If you want to step outside and feel the warm sunshine on your skin, you must accept that life is full of scary things and you can realistically do very little (oftentimes nothing) about it.
I have noticed this in my dating life. When I’m dating somebody who I really like a lot, and I get scared of losing out on a potentially great relationship with them, I act in ways that often encourage that very outcome. When I date with an ‘I’m going to be my best self and let the chips fall where they may’ attitude, I am always comfortable with the result, regardless of whether it is successful or it doesn’t pan out. I have noticed it in my professional life as well. When I was a younger artist, I used to have tremendous fear that people would never listen to my music or read my writing, and so I sat on it. Eventually I couldn’t anymore and I started putting my creative self our there into the world and the results have been inspiring and encouraging. I now have no fears about how my art will be received because I create it for myself first and foremost. I have also noticed fear in the political actions of friends and relatives. A lot of my family members are Democrats and support the Democratic Party here in the United States. The media uses fear to make them scared of the big bad Republicans and what they might do if they gain too much power. It leads them to hate members of the other political party. My own sister thinks all Republicans are racist, sexist, and homophobic. How many Republicans does she actually know in real life? Not many, most likely none at all. Republicans are the same way, stoking fears of Socialism in order to strengthen their party, which, although effective, also causes their constituents to hate liberals. Everybody is building houses in order to protect themselves from things they are scared of, when it seems to me that we should be breaking the walls down and embracing change.
This book taught me to take notice of my internal energy and gave me confidence that dealing with it is always the better route to take instead of hiding it and letting it fester. Last year, when I turned 30, I booked a flight to Atlanta, Georgia, to visit an old friend from childhood. He turns 30 about two weeks after me and we hadn’t seen each other in years. Sadly, our relationship wasn’t quite what I expected, and we were not as emotionally available with each other as I had hoped. He said some things and acted in some ways that didn’t sit right with me and instead of talking about it, I buried it in an effort to make the short trip as fun as possible. When I got home, I told myself I would wait a week or two and then call him up to talk about it. I ended up waiting 8 months! We communicated many times over those 8 months and I never brought it up. It chewed at my psyche for the entirety of that time, and now that the experience is in my past, I feel downright stupid for letting it sit within me for so long. This man was my best friend for the first 18 years of my life (before college sent us in different directions) and even though we were not as close as we once had been, I was scared to talk openly and honestly with him about my feelings. Because of this, my inner monologue kept me up late on many occasions and bothered me constantly. Once I got the courage to speak with him he was open and receptive to my thoughts and we shared a lovely two hour conversation about the birthday trip and moved past it. I came to this book much later, but the ideas Singer proposes struck this chord with fervor. If you harbor energy that you know is making you emotionally unhappy or unstable, the best strategy is to find a way to release it. Usually this means sharing it with a loved one and finding strength in empathy. It also means finding empathy for yourself. I now make a practice of approaching uncomfortable topics as soon as I recognize them within myself because “stress only happens when you resist life’s events.” My life is infinitely better because of it.
The way forward for me in overcoming my external fears and soothing my internal stressors has been about recognizing when my ego is talking and when my listener isn’t talking back enough. This, I believe, is the essence of this book. Getting in touch with yourself is the pathway forward through the trials of life because life will be stormy no matter what you do. Who you are in relation to the storm is what counts. - CURIOUSinsightful, feel good readDepending on how many books one has read on the subject, you may find this one as an excellent choice learning to let go of negative thoughts and patterns of the past and worries of the future
- Doug BellOne of those rare, truly transformative books that can change your life permanentlyThe gist of the book is that you want to mindfully maintain the mental perspective of "the observer". The perspective of the observer is the one observing what your senses are sensing while also observing the continuous commentary in your mind regarding what is happening around you, what you are doing, what you are worried about, etc. The observer is *not* the one doing the incessant mental gymnastics, talking to yourself, worrying and second guessing. The observer is the true you, but most of us spend the majority of our waking hours with the perspective of the voice inside our heads. Once you can adopt the perspective of the observer, you can begin to let go. Letting go is where the book gets truly transformative.
Letting go starts when you realize that we hold on to things that happen to us--good things, bad things, and everything in between. Holding on to all of these things is what weighs us down--what prevents you from fully living in the moment. These are the things that tether your soul.
The message in the book is startlingly simple. So simple that most people will fail to actually grasp the profound significance of it. I feel fortunate that the time and manner whereby I came to read this book put me in the right state of mind to really hear the message. I was coming out of a low period in my life. My cousin, with whom I have an incredibly deep relationship, spent months secretly searching for the right book to reach me. She then gave it to me in a very touching and meaningful manner that opened me enough to accept the message in the book. Under other circumstances, I could have easily read this book and gotten nothing transformative out of it.
This book allowed me to see that it was only a low period of my life because I had decided to make it that. Starting almost immediately, I started making a practice of mindfully maintaining the perspective of the observer. At first it is not easy--it is much more natural and comfortable to immerse yourself in the incessant internal dialogue you have become accustomed to. It doesn't matter how often you fall back to that perspective--all you have to do is pull back to the perspective of the observer when you notice that you have stopped observing. The real transformation starts when you start letting go. At first it is small things...letting go of the waiter getting your order wrong, letting go of the person that cut you off in traffic, letting go of "the small s***" in everyday life. Then you move on to larger things--letting go of the traffic ticket you just got, letting go of the missed or canceled flight, letting go of getting fired. As you master these easier things, then you start to let go of old baggage--as events of the past are triggered and come to the forefront, you let those go also. Pretty soon (or after a long time, it doesn't matter), you are letting go of everything. It is truly that simple. The simplicity of it is what makes it so easy to miss, but if you just keep practicing it is impossible to not get it. The only way to not get it is to stop trying.
It's not that you don't experience these things--you experience them more completely. It's that they cease to have a hold on you. They cease to dictate how you feel. They cease to tie you down.
Once you can perpetually sit in the seat of the observer and experience life fully while holding on to none of it, your soul is untethered. You live life on your terms, regardless of external circumstances. - Love My Bookish LifeOverall, this is a very worthwhile read!Do you feel like you're being held back? Are you looking for more? More inner peace, more balance, more mindfulness. Do you want to soar? What if the only thing holding you back is yourself? This is a short book that is worth the deep dive into exploring slowly. Read and process, read more, process more. Simple yet profound. To be fair and honest, there were parts that just didn't resonate with me, and I felt I just had to slog through. But I also highlighted many passages, marked many pages. I feel like this is a book you will go back to and maybe the next time some of those slow parts will resonate differently with me. Overall, this is a very worthwhile read!