![]() I just allowed whatever thoughts needed to arise, to arise, and simply tried to relax instead of engaging with them. That created some quiet, but it didn’t last, and it was a struggle to get into a really quiet state.Īs I matured in my spiritual practices, I began to surrender inside, just like I was doing in my outer life. So I took the time each day to sit by myself in a meditation posture and use my will to either push away the thoughts or struggle to turn my attention onto something else - like a mantra or visualization. I just wanted to shut up that incessant chatter in my head. Singer: When I first started to meditate, I didn’t really know what I was doing. YJ: How did meditation quiet the voice for you? ![]() Yoga has not played a role in my journey - my entire journey has been yoga.” My every breath is yoga the very beat of my heart is yoga. “I never took my eye off of the spiritual path, not even for a moment. But discovering who you are, the consciousness that notices that voice, this falls into the category of mindfulness, witness consciousness, and self-realization. Over 40 years ago, I began referring to this as “the voice in my head.” Finding out about that voice - why it talks all the time, and why it says what it says - is a fascinating topic. Who’s in there? Who is hearing the thoughts? And you must be separate from the thoughts if you hear them. Believe it or not, that answer is the basis for all of yoga: I’m in here, and I hear the thoughts. But how do you know that these thoughts are going on in your head? The obvious answer is because you are in there, and you hear them. All day, all the time, our mind creates thoughts: “I hope she’s there already because I don’t like waiting,” “Why did he say that? I would never say something like that.” And on and on it goes. Singer: This “voice in your head” was the main topic of my last book, The Untethered Soul, and it forms one of the most important aspects of spirituality. YJ: In the book, you talk a lot about “the voice in your head.” Please explain what you mean by this voice. That is the surrender experiment, and my new book is about what ended up happening as I aligned myself with life instead of struggling to align life to me. ![]() Specifically, when something appears in front of me, I try to honor and respect the enormity of its origins, rather than immediately judging whether I like it or not. That being the case, I decided to experiment with surrendering to that perfection instead of listening to what my preference-driven mind had to say about it. All that is happening each moment is that I’m seeing the result of 13.8 billion years of forces that interacted together to create exactly what is in front of me. They have nothing to do with me they belong to the forces that created them. When I was in my early twenties, I took one look at this and realized that all the moments of creation are part of the same interrelated perfection. If the forces of creation can create and maintain the entire universe, every moment, are not the moments unfolding in front of me part of this same universal perfection? We are not controlling any of this, yet it has been unfolding in perfect harmony for billions of years. Likewise, the planets stay in orbit, and the entire rest of the universe unfolds on its own. Our hearts beat, our food digests, and our cells divide - all without any intervention of our own. We are all intelligent enough to realize that we are not in control of 99.9 percent of what goes on around us. Singer: The surrender experiment is a challenge I gave myself to try to allow life to unfold around me without struggling with it. Yoga Journal: What is “The Surrender Experiment”? We asked Singer how yoga and meditation helped him “surrender,” both internally and externally, and open himself up to life’s gifts. ![]() Singer tells his incredible story in the The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life’s Perfection Paperback (Harmony Books, June 2, 2015). He wound up going from a penniless yogi in the woods to the founding CEO of a billion-dollar public company, almost against his own will. 1 New York Times best-seller The Untethered Soul, attempted to find out. What would happen if you stopped trying to force your destiny-and just let life be in charge? Michael A. For exclusive access to all our stories, including sequences, teacher tips, video classes, and more,
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