Michael Singer: How to Let Go of Everything That’s Hurting You (Transcript)

And so you’re feeling this upliftment of energy. They call that waking up. Maybe you have visions. Maybe you literally go very, very deep and have a merger. People do all kinds of things. But they all come back. That’s the problem, all right?

So my interest is to wake up and stay woken up at whatever level. I’m not interested in quick little fixes and drugs and different stuff, all right? It’s just, why are you not there now? And the answer is, because you stored stuff inside of you over the course of your life, and you know you have, right? Suppression, repression, denial, resistance, call it whatever you want.

So that when things come in from outside, and they’re not comfortable in here when they get in, you tend to push them away. You understand that? Rationalization, this, that, whatever. What you’re literally doing is saying, I can’t handle this energy. I don’t like this energy. I don’t want it coming into me. I don’t want it in me, forget coming into me. You can make it come into you with a thought, then to be experienced, right? And what we tend to do, it’s natural, but it’s not good, right, is to push it away. Anything you ever pushed away is still in there. If you did not at some point learn to let it go, say, “Ah, I don’t care, it’s fine, I forgive you,” really, right? But if you held it in there, you pushed it away, it comes back up, and you know it does. And then you push it away again. All right? So that’s what it means to not be awake. And there’s different levels, of course, all right? You’re lost in yourself. Your consciousness is lost in staring at Mayim and Jonathan. That’s where we live our lives. That’s just the reality.

So when people are waking up and people are realizing, “Wait a minute, I don’t need all this junk inside of me. I don’t need to control the whole world for me to be okay.” I can learn to work on myself, which is part of waking up. I can learn to work on my inner self, so that I can handle things. That’s what I found it boils down to, right?

Last time we did an interview with Oprah for Living Untethered, which we worked with that book, right? She said, “You know, Michael, you know what a great mantra would be for the Western mind? ‘I can handle this.’ Instead of, ‘I can’t handle this. Why’d you do that? I can’t handle this,’ right? It’s, ‘I can handle this.'”

The more you can handle what’s coming in, the less you have to push it away. The less you have to push it away, the more it actually makes through. Like white lines on the road, you drive by, they pass by. Well, the more you grow and evolve, it really is a form of evolution of the consciousness that it can handle these things, then that is what they mean by I’m waking up, by having spiritual experiences, and so on.

But remember, my teachings and what I learned is the key isn’t your experiences. Because they can — I had a great experience 2 years ago. Well then that was 2 years ago. Where are you now? Why aren’t you up there all the time? Because you haven’t learned to let go of the garbage. I’m sorry to call it that, but it is, right? Things from the past that aren’t happening now should not be bothering you. They’re not real. They’re not happening. You held them in your mind. All right. So there’s a foundation of our discussion of what it means to wake up.

The Spectrum of Resistance and Openness

MAYIM BIALIK: We’re hearing it more in kind of the cultural vernacular. There’s workshops, and yes, everybody’s doing — we live in Los Angeles — everybody’s doing psilocybin and going on ayahuasca journeys and everybody wants to get connected and all these things. So part of me wanted to ask, what do you see is happening that’s leading to that? But the other side of it is also many of us seem to be devolving in that the more that’s happening in the world, the more it also seems that people can’t handle it. Meaning with politics, with world events, you hear more and more people saying, “I need to be on medication. My doctor doesn’t know what to do with me.” Can you talk about each of these evolutions, both an elevating one and whatever evolution is happening that’s making people less resilient to being able to be in touch with that?

MICHAEL SINGER: Of course. And they’re the same, by the way. Okay? It’s like a scale. How far negative, how far positive is the same spectrum. All right?

So the reason people are — I don’t even use the word devolving — but the reason they are getting lost and getting angry and getting tense and anxious and all that kind of stuff, it’s just they’re not letting go. They’re sitting here saying, “I can’t handle this.” That’s what they’re saying. “I can’t handle this. I can’t handle the politics. I can’t handle what’s going on with racism. I can’t handle this.” Stop the world, I want to get off. Okay? Well, that’s going backwards. The more you resist, and by the way, when you say “I can’t handle it,” what you’re really saying is, unless it’s the way I want, I can’t handle it. If it’d be the way I want, I can handle it just fine. So you’re out there getting tense, manipulating, controlling, intensely, and it gets worse and worse. Because the more you shove down, the worse it is.

So it’s really the up is when you’re letting go. Not saying “I can’t handle it, I better go out there and manipulate everybody and everything to get it the way I want,” but just sitting here saying, “I can handle it.” How? By working on myself inside. When you stop working on yourself inside, you stop understanding that the reality of what’s happening is your consciousness looking at you.

I often talk about it — I don’t know if anybody gets it — how small are you? You’re a great being, very popular, we love you so much. You’re sitting on a little planet of which 1.3 million Earths fit inside the sun. Did you know that? 1.3 million Earths inside the sun. And how much of that planet do you take up? This tiny, minuscule thing. And yet you think that you matter so much that everything should be the way you want.

Waking up means, hello — that’s 1.3 million Earths inside the sun, and there’s 300 billion stars in your galaxy. So why can’t we just say, “Hey, I came down to the planet, I’m going to do a few chucks around the sun, and it’s cool, things happen, I can handle them. I can work to raise them. I can work to make them where I feel the world would be a better place if I do this,” but not starting with, “I can’t handle this.”

So that’s why the world — a lot of people are more and more getting closed. What does closed mean? “I can’t handle it. I don’t want to experience it. Push it away.” What does open mean? “Okay, fine. It’s raining. I didn’t want it to rain. I can handle it. The driver in front of me is driving 15 miles an hour below the speed limit. I’m in a rush. Okay. I’m on a little ballast in the middle of nowhere screwing around. I can handle it.” That’s the spectrum.

When the internet and all this was happening, there’s so much more exposure to everything, so much more communication. So there’s so much more for you not to be able to handle. And you just have to decide, “I can handle it. I can handle it.”

Applying Inner Peace to Real-World Injustice

MAYIM BIALIK: I want to push a little bit harder on this because, not because I don’t think that there is wisdom here, and not because I don’t think that this is not the path that I would like to go down, and I think that many would, but when the stakes are raised — many of us live in cities, I’m just going to say it — where agents are coming in, taking people from their homes, taking people from their places of work. The rights of women and people of color and trans people and LGBTQ community, they’re being challenged by the day. I keep looking around and saying why we can’t do anything to stop it. So I want you to apply this to that, because obviously you’re not saying, “Oh, people are being deported unjustly and held in prisons and we never hear from them, just let it go.” How do we apply this to that kind of scale of challenge?

MICHAEL SINGER: It’s beautiful. And I love talking about it. Okay? Do I like all the things that are going on? My personal position as a ’60s liberal? Of course not. All right? But what I have found is that resistance doesn’t fix anything.

So the starting position is, as I keep saying it — okay, is this going on? Yes. What’s my choice? Be able to handle it. If I can’t handle it, I get neurotic. I get ulcers. I get upset. I yell at the kids. You understand that? Okay. If I can handle it — which is work — okay, things happen in this world that are terrible, even worse than we just talked about, aren’t they? Go back to the Holocaust and think about how terrible things have happened. Okay, but they did happen. So you don’t get to choose they didn’t. You don’t get to rewrite history. You have to start by saying, “I am capable of accepting reality.”

You’re a brilliant scientist. I am capable of accepting reality. Is it reality, these things you said that are going on? Not should they be going on, not do I like it — is it reality they’re going on? Okay, you start by saying, “I can accept reality. I’ve learned to be open enough to accept reality.”

Now once I do that, it doesn’t mean I don’t do anything about it, but here’s the difference. If I’m not okay, I guarantee you what I’m doing is struggling to change the outside so I can be okay. “I don’t want to be disturbed. I don’t want them doing this. I don’t want that happening.” So I have this resistance and problem inside of me, and I’m acting based on the reaction to that, as opposed to — I’ve learned to be at peace, calm, open, centered, okay? And now I can come back down and say, “How can I actually help the situation?” Not “help me handle the situation.”

And I think you understand that a lot of what people are doing is dumping. Do they have the right to? Of course. There are terrible things happening in this world. But you have to be able to work on yourself to be able to handle them, then see what clarity says — how can I help? Maybe a smile will help.

We talk about people that go through terrible things. How proud do you feel if somebody’s going through a terrible thing and they’re handicapped, but they stick their hand out to shake your hand? They don’t show that it’s a problem. They handled it.

If people could handle what’s going on, we could get along. Because I start by saying, I understand — psychology says what? Man is the sum of his learned experiences. It’s not true. You’re the consciousness staring at the psyche that’s the sum of your learned experiences, the witness. Okay, fine. But if people are the sum of their learned experiences, everybody, every single person had totally different experiences, right or wrong. Look at all the experiences you’ve had. No one ever had those. They’re completely unique. So therefore, the way they think is going to be unique. And the way I think is going to be unique. Is my way right? Of course I’m right. But they say the same thing because their experiences support what they’re thinking, because they are the sum of the learned experiences.

So you get to the point where it’s not about fighting and arguing, it’s about — can I handle that everybody’s different? Can I handle everybody sees it differently? And it’s understandable if they’re the sum of the learned experiences. And so now, can you handle it or can’t you handle it? And more than that, are you trying to understand compassion? Are you trying to understand what Christ taught, what Buddha taught, what all the great teachers taught, which is, “You without sin throw the first stone. Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” All the teachings are the same, which is, if you come from a personal point of view of “this is the sum of my experiences, that’s the fishbowl I’m wearing over my head,” and it is different than yours.

I’m married 30 years. They are not going to think the same as you. They went to work one day and somebody fired them. They’re different when they come back because they had a different experience. And you respect the fact that people have had different experiences, therefore they think differently. Are they different? No, the self is the same. When you can get back there, you start understanding, oh, everybody’s looking down at their own minds. But that’s a very high state. So in the meantime, you learn to practice compassion, you learn to practice understanding.

And if you can’t do it — and you both are great beings — how can anybody do it? If you’re going to get all upset and have road rage because somebody’s not driving the way you want, okay, what do you expect of everybody else? And so what I’ve learned, it comes down to the world changes one person at a time, and that person’s you. If you can’t change and bring down something more beautiful, something with love, something with clarity and compassion, how do you expect anybody else to? And yelling at them is not going to happen.

So it comes down to, yes, there are problems out there, serious problems that need to be dealt with. But I would rather have the clear person deal with them than the angry person, the upset person. The person who’s saying, “I can’t handle this,” doesn’t have the right to handle it. You’re the wrong person. “Here, I have a job for you.” “Oh no, I can’t do that.” Okay, there’s somebody else.

Consciousness, Brain States, and the Larger Field of Possibility

JONATHAN COHEN: Well, I think you should talk a little bit about the brain states that happen — acceptance versus resistance. We know that things calm down. We know that there’s opportunity to have more openness, more clarity, more solutions. We don’t attack in the same way when we’re resisting. We’re in a state of attack. So the person is going to seem like my enemy who has a counterpoint. And that’s a lot of what’s happening right now — as we resist, the algorithms feed us opportunity to identify an enemy. And it’s that person who is making me uncomfortable because I don’t like their perspective. I don’t like the experiences that they’ve had.

We’ve had other psychologists talk about how the brain changes when we enter a space where we feel okay enough to say, “I don’t like what’s happening, but I can handle it. There’s a solution here.” And it actually leads to one of my — what you said earlier in this interview about us being connected to this larger consciousness system. I would love for you to expand on that idea because a lot of people are like, “Well, I kind of hear about consciousness and I hear about the universe, but I don’t feel it necessarily.”

If we can start to paint a picture of the possibility, maybe we’ll start to open people’s minds to have more of the experience of it and finding those solutions that are available when we calm down. Because as we calm, my experience is that our access to the larger field of information and possibility expands, and we’re actually shutting it down and tightening the valve to not be able to have that flow into us when we’re in this enraged state.

So the question, I guess, is — can you tell us a little bit more about this infinite consciousness and universe that we’re all connected to and the possibilities in there?

The Science and Spirituality Connection

MICHAEL SINGER: I have learned over my years that science and spirituality, and you guys know that, all right, are saying the same thing. They just haven’t touched yet, okay? They’re close.

JONATHAN COHEN: We’re working on it.

MICHAEL SINGER: I know. I usually do get into discussion, but let’s just do it very quickly since you guys are brilliant, right?

Here’s this world that’s coming into me, right? I often talk about, you do know you don’t look out through your eyes. You are not looking out through your eyes. Light is bouncing off of the atoms and molecules, reflecting, being picked up by your optical sensors, being sent up. You study this, right? What am I telling you? It’s sent up the optical nerves, right? Hits the brain, right? And what they don’t know, some do, is that that’s not the end of it.

The brain is the central CPU, right? But the vibrations that get emanated off the brain. Electronic vibrations are called vrittis in yoga. Vrittis. They’re just very subtle vibrations that hit what we call the mental plane. They hit where your mind is, not in your brain, right? And it causes to render exactly what came in through your eyes into your mind. And you’re looking at it in there, right?

What’s happening is light is coming in, just like you’re looking at your flat-screen TV, that San Francisco’s the ball game. You’re not in San Francisco. It’s being sent up the nervous, so to speak, wires, and then it’s rendering on the flat screen. That is literally happening inside of you right now.

So basically what happens is, when science has studied, but what’s actually out there? If I don’t really see what’s out there, I see what came in. You understand that? Your senses are I/O ports. They’re sensors. Okay, why? Because we don’t see anything. It has to come back into our consciousness.

So scientists have studied what’s out there, and I’m going to do it very quickly, because I’m not the expert anyway, believe me, right? And they found out, no, there really are no atoms. No, there really are no protons and neutrons. There’s this field. Oh my God, there’s this field, an omnipresent — use the word omnipresent — an omnipresent field of, we won’t say what it is, we don’t know what it is, or call it energy, call it whatever you want, that agitates and vibrates, and those wavelets that get created put themselves together to make neutrons, protons, electrons, atoms. So that’s really what’s down there, okay. An omnipresent field that is the cause of all forces that exist and is everywhere is getting very close to God. Omnipresent, omnipotent, okay?

Well, it’s certainly very different than what we’re looking at every day, right? But now, if you think about it, I make myself think about it every time, all the time, all right? I am not looking at people, places, buildings. I am looking at vibrations in a quantum field that is across the entire universe. Now we’re starting to become one, aren’t we? That brings us all much closer together. We’re not looking at it the way we think it is, because it isn’t, all right?

Consciousness, Yoga, and the Quantum Field

And when the great yogis, the great masters, went deep in meditation, they found this amazing thing. They found out what the quantum field is made of — consciousness. How do they know? Because they merge with it. That’s what yoga is about. That’s what the word merger means. Christ meant, “I and my Father are one.” Okay, you’re asking to talk more about that state.

When your consciousness ceases to stare at your thoughts, your emotions, your mind, what you come through your senses, it’s liberated. It’s not distracted anymore. And what they found out, the great ones have found out, that all of a sudden, all the stars and moons and galaxies are who they are. That’s one with their consciousness.

Why don’t we live there? Because we are distracted by what distracts us. And what distracts us are your thoughts. Do your emotions distract you? Oh my God, they get pulled right down. Right? The moment you have an emotion, bam, you’re really with God. That consciousness is being focused, pulled down to what you’re distracted by, and that’s what makes a human being. Distracted God.

So when you talk about, how do we talk about these higher states, the great teachings of the masters say the same thing. One, can you cease to be distracted by what’s going on outside? Not, don’t work with it, but you can be distracted by it, fixated on it. All right, then you don’t bother suppressing it, because I handled it. So all of a sudden you’re now cleaned out. You don’t have all the junk inside of you. You’re not all sensitive to everything somebody says or does, all right, because you let it go.

So now your consciousness is liberated — we use that word — to be able to hang out more in the mental plane, as opposed to what’s coming through physical and the emotional. And then you start realizing, why am I getting upset because the person is driving weird? Why am I screaming, “Oh my God, why is it raining on my birthday?” It doesn’t know it’s your freaking birthday. Right or wrong? What we do with our minds are ridiculous, right?

Well, what happens if you start cleaning that up, right? Use your mind for intellectual pursuits, right? Use your mind for deep understanding instead of all this personal garbage. “I don’t like what she said. Oh my God, look what she’s wearing.”

In the ’60s, you used to talk about expanded consciousness, right? I learned that’s so wrong. It’s non-contracted consciousness. Consciousness is already fully expanded. It’s that you’re contracting it to focus on your stuff, all right? When you cease to do that, you start to feel spare. You start to feel all this openness and beauty and expansiveness, okay?

The Surrender Experiment and the Spiritual Journey

And ultimately, I started from the top. Ultimately, you merge, and that’s very great. When I was young, I don’t know if you ever read The Surrender Experiment, but I was probably 21 years old, 22 years old, and I had this very deep experience. And it’s more beautiful than anything that could ever exist in the history of the universe, right? And therefore, you want to go back there. And so you spend your life being willing to let go of anything that’s keeping you from there. Not, how do I get there? How do I stop putting the blockages inside of me that keep me from going there? And this becomes, that’s your spiritual journey, that’s your path.

And it’s what you talk about, you know, that those experiences mean a lot to you. So did I answer your question, Jonathan? Right? That’s what’s back there. We are the same, right? Can we be the same and yet what we’re looking at have all these differences? That’s what compassion is. Compassion isn’t sympathy. Compassion is, “I understand why you’re different. I understand what you’ve gone through is totally different than me. I don’t blame you. I don’t do anything, right? Now, can we sit down and harmonize, find a way?” Come on, it’s not that big a deal, right? And the answer is yes, but not while we’re down here insisting that we’re right. “I know it has to be, and I’m going to fight and battle and do whatever.” That’s the best I can do.

All right, by the way, that drop from pure consciousness down to staring at you is what’s meant by the fall from the garden. Literally, it says once you fall from the garden, you’re in the garden, you’re one with God, experiencing creation. That’s beautiful. All right, but now I’m experiencing me, this tiny little ray of light.

And it says in the Bible — I’m a nice Jewish yogi. I read the Bible once. I shouldn’t say that. I read the Bible once in 1972 and it has never left me. All right? I think Christ’s teachings are phenomenal, right? If people understand what he’s saying, all right? The deep things he’s saying, all right?

And the Bible, the Old Testament says, when you fall from the garden, what happens? “Now you must work by the sweat of your brow to be okay.” You know anything about that? Anybody working hard and getting ulcers and neuroses to be okay? That’s it, all right? Where your natural state is, okay, “I’m fine, it’s fine, it’s all God, it’s all a quantum field, okay?”

Einstein said something very beautiful once, all right? He said, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” So you think, Jonathan, every one of those wavelets — quarks, leptons, bosons — everyone who’s waveless has to behave the same that your bedroom is there in the morning. Do you understand that? That your body is there in the morning. Wow, how brilliant is God? I mean, give me a break. And that’s happening all over the entire universe.

You need to expand your mind and your consciousness to be able to start with reality, then come on down and let’s dance. All right, let’s see what we can do on a little planet in the middle of nowhere for a few years. That’s how I want you to think. Are you not on a tiny little planet just for a handful of years? Can you handle it?

The Power of Awe and Expanding Consciousness

JONATHAN COHEN: It’s amazing, and Mayim and I recently have been talking about how powerful just having awe is, how much it can transform how we feel and what our experience is, just to stop and pause and look at the intelligence in nature, look at the intelligence all around us and how amazing it is that we even exist. The fact that the light can process and I can see my hand and all the amazing things that are around us. What you describe in terms of our consciousness is expanded already and why we don’t experience it all the time is that we are limiting it.

MICHAEL SINGER: Yes, we’re distracted.

JONATHAN COHEN: We get a lot of questions from our audience: “What do I need to do to feel more okay, more intuitive? How do I increase the synchronicity in my life?” And what I’m hearing — and sometimes it used to, I used to think, oh, you have to expand — but actually what you have to do is stop limiting.

Preferences, Suffering, and the Buddha’s Teaching

MICHAEL SINGER: Stop contracting. Very good. That’s beautiful. I always use the example of a magnifying glass. Like I live in a country, so there’s fields, all right? And the sun falls pretty evenly on the field. Take a magnifying glass and hold it in one spot, and you’re going to burn leaves that are below you, right? It took the power of the sun, right? And it limited it down to this one spot. That’s what you’ve done. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve taken the power of consciousness and limited it down to staring at my little thoughts, my little preferences, my little emotions. It’s adorable, isn’t it? And that’s the cause of all suffering.

What did Buddha say? We talked about — nice, we talked about everybody, give equal time, right? Four Noble Truths. “All of life is suffering.” It doesn’t mean you broke your arm all the time, right? I mean, he’s a negative guy, that’s pretty negative, right? It is! You make yourself suffer through your thoughts, right?

The cause of all suffering is preference. If you didn’t mind that it was raining, it wouldn’t bother you. If you didn’t mind that your wife or husband was in a bad mood when they came home and needed some space, you wouldn’t yell at them, “Don’t treat me like that.” You understand that? You would have compassion, you’d have understanding. It’s because you have preferences.

Where’d you get your preferences? Don’t you dare think you made them up. Not a single one of them, right? Based on your past experiences, books you read, experiences you had, people that dumped on you, people that were nice to you, and then you form these preferences of what I want to go on and what I don’t want to go on. And the Buddha teaches that’s the cause of all suffering. It’s very deep, isn’t it? Because it is the cause of all suffering, all right?

And somebody once said to me — I gave a talk like that, a very wealthy person came up with hearing one of my talks, and he said, “But I like my preferences. I own 6 homes in Bel Air or wherever,” all right? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he said, “I don’t want to give up my preferences.” So I thought about it a little bit and I said, okay, you know the saying from the 13th patriarch, “The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences?” I said, he gave me license, the 13th patriarch, to change what he said. Are you ready? Here’s the edit. “The great way is not difficult for those who prefer everything.” It’s deep to think about it because it’s the truth. All right? It’s just love it, man. Right? You’re having the time of your life right now.

Surrendering vs. Material Struggle

JONATHAN COHEN: It brings up an important point that we also hear a lot from our community, which is it’s easy to feel connected to the universe and everything’s great when there is a certain amount of comfort. And you can have an acceptance for the bad mood, but if the bad mood starts attacking you, then you’re like, well, now how much compassion can I have? And if you don’t have enough to eat, then — so how do we balance this idea of surrendering and experiencing this ultimate consciousness and increasing our connection to all that there is with the material struggle that people go through?

Is it only that you’ll change your perspective and that you’ll feel better about your circumstance? Or is it that doing that work can also lead to material changes in our lives whereby there is more opportunity, that the universe is trying to help us? Not everyone’s going to have 6 houses, but maybe get us our heads above water and make the struggle of everyday life easier.

The Inner Work: Acceptance, Compassion, and the Higher Self

MICHAEL SINGER: Obviously, it is true that the more you have and the more comfortable you are, and it’s funny, I really don’t want to say it, but I’ll say it, right? The more you have an opportunity to let go and do these different things. Guess what? They don’t. Wealthy people have just as much problems. They’re just as unhappy. They have just as many divorces. Do you understand that? It’s not true that having things makes you be okay.

Now, of course, there’s a limit of food, clothing, and shelter, right? That there’s a physiological problem if I don’t have those. Are there very primitive cultures that have very little and they measure their happiness and they find that the happiest people out there? You understand that, okay? They just live off the earth, they eat herbs, different things, okay?

So it’s not true that you have to have a lot, or both. Neither is you have to have a lot to be okay, or if you have a lot, come on, we got these billionaires out there. They don’t look like they’re having so much fun. I’m sorry. Do they? Okay? It’s like, why do they have to fight with everybody? Why do they have to fight with each other? Why does it have to be this constant struggle and headache? Because having things doesn’t solve the problem. The problem is how you’re doing inside. And if you’re not doing okay inside, it’s because you’re messed up in there. Straighten it up. So let’s start there.

And then you take the great examples. I always use Gandhi. He was giving a lecture, a political lecture, standing on a stage, very great being, and somebody came up and shot him, right? And so he has this terrible experience. His body’s been shot. He’s going to die. What did Gandhi do at that moment, exactly at that moment? He pranamed directly to that person as an act of forgiveness as he fell to the ground and died, right?

How would you like to be like that? How would you like to be able to do that? How would you like to be evolved enough, clear enough, to where you’re not complaining, right? You just bring Shakti, consciousness, spirit, beauty, love, compassion down to this plane and set an example. Look what that man did. He freed a country. You understand that? And you just realize it’s not about material wealth. It’s about your inner state.

Acceptance and Compassion as the Path to Freedom

MAYIM BIALIK: There’s this kind of overlap between a notion of compassion and acceptance. And I don’t think I had thought of it as so strongly overlapping until hearing you talk about it, that when we tell people to be in acceptance of something, it doesn’t mean you have to like it. It means that you have to accept that other things can exist besides what makes you uncomfortable. And what you do with that tension will literally determine your own happiness.

Meaning we are in this prison, right, that we ourselves have the key to release ourselves from. “Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.” That notion of I don’t like your political opinion, but you have a right to have it. It’s based on your own experience, your own perspectives. It doesn’t mean that we can’t connect because honestly, we’re all one anyway.

MICHAEL SINGER: It doesn’t mean that you’re clear and so on, that when you come back, you don’t protest. You have every right in the world to take the sum of your learned experiences and with love, with understanding, with compassion, say, you’re on that side of the street, hi, I’m on this side of the street, hi, right? And we at least have a chance of talking and working together. So it’s not that you do nothing, right? You have the right to express your opinions. But do it with love. Do it with, you said it perfectly, do it with the understanding why people have different opinions than you. Correct?

And there’s certain subjects that we could bring up, that it’s understandable why they have different opinions. You understand that? I feel very strongly about the right to so-and-so. I feel very strongly about this right. And you do, all right? But who’s you? Who’s you in there that’s looking at this mind that got programmed by your past experiences? Can you transcend that programming and then come down and express yourself and do it, but do it with love and beauty?

MAYIM BIALIK: That is very helpful because I think also there’s so much need for cooperation and so much of that gets lost when there’s this polarization. And I won’t talk to you because you hold this label or I won’t talk to this person because they’ve taken this as their identity, as opposed to how can we work together. There are really important implications for this on a larger scale.

Speaking to the Skeptic: Are You in There?

MAYIM BIALIK: But I wonder, these are all very comfortable things, I think, for many of us to talk about. But I wonder if you were to talk to someone who has kind of no spiritual framework and no sense of kind of connectedness with whatever this consciousness is that we’re all talking about, what do you say to a beginner? What do you say to someone who is skeptical or really just doesn’t know? How do you frame this for a beginner?

MICHAEL SINGER: What I have found, and I started this, I just woke up, if you will, back in the early ’70s, and I wanted to talk about it. I realized I’m in here watching me, right? The witness woke up. I’m in here watching me. Are you in there? Hello? Are you in there? And every person I asked, everyone, are you in there? They said, yeah. Okay, you’re in there, you know you’re in there. What does in there mean? I don’t explain it. I know I’m in here, okay? I’m in here. I’m not out here. I’m in here, okay?

What’s it like in there? Now all of a sudden, immediately, it becomes introspective. They’ve been forced to look in there, not what’s it like out here. What’s it like in there? And the truth of the matter is it’s scary, it’s jealous, it’s insecure, it’s this, it’s that, it’s all kinds of stuff, needy, right? It’s pretty weird in there, isn’t it? Right? That’s the start. No more. No religious, no this, no that, no shoving teachings, right? And they wake up.

I have people write me. I’ll tell you a quick story, all right? When I first started teaching, I’ve been meditating a whole lot. If you read my book, you’ll find out. And they asked me to teach at this college, all right? And they just gave me a class. And they said, okay, just teach whatever you want. It was very liberal. All right. And I had one lady who came, most of them were hippie kids or young kids would come in, they sit on the floor. That kind of stuff was going on in the ’70s. All right.

This one lady walked in, probably in her late 20s, early 30s, three-piece suit, sat straight up in a chair. Okay. And she didn’t like my course. She didn’t like what was being talked about at all, okay? And when the class was over, course was over, but I taught the course, they said, what about my grade? I said, you write me a paper what you got from this course and just tell the truth and I want to hear what you got and you’ll get your grade, okay?

So she was afraid to write because she hated the course and she hated the course, but she had to come, all right? It was a required course. So she went to the president of the college, because she was connected. Her husband was a great surgeon or somebody, I don’t know. All right. I’m a little hippie boy and I get called in, right? Saying you better deal with this, because she’s very upset and she’s afraid you’re going to fail her. I said, I’m not going to fail her. So we had a little talk.

I’ll never forget it. This was back in ’75, right away. I’ll never forget it. We had this talk. She says, well, I’m afraid to go. I said, just write the truth about how you did with the class. You’re going to do just fine. Don’t worry about it. Okay? So that was my interaction with this lady.

2 or 3 semesters later, I’m going to cry. I’m teaching night class and night class is all, like I had literally 60% of the people taking my class were not registered. They were from the university. They were just, it was that kind of time. All right? And I’m sitting there teaching, sitting on the desk in the Lotus, the half Lotus position, teaching this class or on the floor. Okay?

And somebody walks in. I didn’t recognize, I just, somebody walked in the middle of class in a t-shirt and jeans, sits down on the floor, comes up to me afterwards and says, “You won’t remember me, but I’m the person who complained about your class. And I said to you, I didn’t understand a word that you were talking about, but I did. But I had a terrible marriage. I was a Stepford Wife type thing, all right? And I couldn’t get out of it, and I was locked in this, and I heard every word you said, but I wouldn’t let myself think about it, because I knew I couldn’t deal with it, right?

“Well, he left me, and I got upset, and whatever, I went through my thing, and one day I was— this is a true story— one day I was walking through a bookstore in Gainesville, right? And I saw this book, Autobiography of a Yogi, and you had mentioned that in your class. And I said, well, I need help. And I picked up the book. My entire life changed. I started doing yoga. I’m the happiest person that ever lived. All right. And thank you so much for what I didn’t want to hear you say. And thank God I heard it because I brought it all back and lived the rest of my time like that.”

Okay. So when you ask, how do you deal with someone like that? Right? You just bring love and openness and compassion to the situation. You don’t push it to go too far. You understand that? You’re not trying to shove your teachings down their throat. That doesn’t work in any way, shape, or form. But that question, are you in there? She was obviously in there. She just didn’t want to admit it, right? But the moment the dam broke, bam, all that knowledge, every word I ever said to her, all the teachings came right back, and she started practicing. Okay, I told you a story, a little bedtime story.

Understanding the Higher Self and the Lower Self

MAYIM BIALIK: I wonder, kind of going along this sort of path. People hear “higher self” a lot. “Tap into your higher self,” right? And I think, again, it gets kind of thrown around. Can you explain to a beginner what is the higher self? How do you get in touch with it? And why should you get in touch with it?

MICHAEL SINGER: You have stored inside of you a lot of garbage that I wish you didn’t have to carry. You understand that? But you are carrying it. And the truth is, you put it in there and only you can let it out. You understand that? It’s down there because you are using will constantly, perpetually, to push it back down. That’s why it comes back in your dreams. That’s what all the psychology is about. The stuff you store there. If you don’t store the stuff in there, they don’t have a job. AI can’t even fix it.

So it’s because you store that stuff in there, that’s your lower self. Your lower self is those energies that you stored inside, most of which were uncomfortable, almost all of which were uncomfortable, right? Expressing themselves in your mind and your emotions. It’s all Shakti hitting beautiful energy, hitting the garbage you stored down there, and then coming up as turmoil, coming up as disturbance. That’s your lower self.

And that’s where you end up. Your consciousness is addicted. And that’s the right word, right? You’re more addicted to that part of you, to yourself, your disturbed self, than people are to drugs or alcohol. In fact, they do drugs and alcohol to get away from that stuff. Do you understand that? If you were totally blissed out inside, you wouldn’t touch them. You’re kidding. Why would I bring myself down to make myself drunk or make myself play around? Okay. So that’s your lower self.

Higher self, the one who’s looking at that, the witness. I don’t want to use words because they’re not ready, right? Do you notice that you have problems? Do you notice when anger starts to come up? Do you notice when you get depressed? All right? Who notices it? “Oh, doctor, I’m so depressed. I’ve been so depressed.” If I were a therapist, you don’t want me to be a therapist, I would say, how do you know? “Oh, they get mad at me.” How do I know what? Right? How do you know you’re depressed? “Well, I’m in here.” It’s so spiritual. Who’s in there? Who’s in there noticing you’re depressed? Who’s in there noticing you get happy? Who’s in there? That’s your higher self. The one who’s in there noticing, the consciousness, right, is looking at the lower self. That’s why it’s called higher, lower.

The Addiction to Chaos and the Flow of Energy

JONATHAN COHEN: It’s a beautiful explanation, and I think we need to really take a second and talk about how we are addicted to the chaos and turmoil of that pattern you described. Like, if I think about that for a second, all the other behavior people have is coming back to the addiction to that chaos. It’s a spike, it’s an adrenaline, it’s, I can’t handle this, and this is the problem. And then the mind goes off on all the tangents to map it, to understand it, to blame someone. And if this didn’t happen to me, I wouldn’t have this characteristics. And thousands and millions of hours and billions of dollars spent trying to extract ourselves from this pattern of chaos, but really what it is is an addiction to that spike of energy.

MICHAEL SINGER: You’re absolutely correct. But when I really get into deep description of what’s going on, it’s all what we call Shakti. It’s all spirit. It’s all Shakti. All right? And what’s supposed to be happening is it’s coming down and passing through you, and you’re having experiences, and every experience you have makes you a greater being.

If you’ve never touched a piano and you touch one note, you’re a greater being than you were before you touched that note. You now know more. Correct? Every single experience in life is teaching you. Okay? But we can’t handle it. So we resist. And the stuff you resist, you push down. Now that energy can’t flow freely. It can’t flow up. It hits all your garbage and it hits your stuff, all right? And then it tries to find a pathway, means things you like, things you’re happy with. So it kind of curves around and says, oh, I’m happy because he said he loved me. Wait a minute, he said he loved her too. Ah, okay.

So if it keeps hitting stuff and you try to find a path through life, that’s what we’re trying to do. Find a partner, a path through life, the finance, a job, right? That makes it through our stuff. We’re not trying to get rid of our stuff. Right? We’re trying to create an external environment that makes it comfortable to live with our stuff. And then we feel happy if we get what we want, and we don’t feel happy if we don’t get what we want. That is those patterns down there.

So the more you let go— I always teach this, right? Don’t put more in, any more in. Why would you do that? It’s counterproductive, right? On a daily basis, don’t put more down there, right? Don’t resist. And as you do, you learn to not, and then bigger stuff can come up, and you’ll learn to let it go. And all of a sudden, that which seemed like a big thing, you know, when you’re 10 years old and they took your Barbie away, you freaked, right? Now, I don’t care. I outgrew it. Outgrow these problems that you stored when you were younger, and younger means yesterday, and you just keep letting go.

And what happens now is the energy flows freely. And what happens, and that’s what you really want to hear, is at some point, the energy coming in from below, because it’s just like a cyclical flow from God, human, God, human, all right? What is a human being? God descended. I know it doesn’t look like it, but it is, all right? What is the ray of light that is on the field I talked about? That sun that’s 93 million miles away, it’s that descending. Its rays are coming down, all right? So this consciousness flows through and expresses itself through all these different living expressions, all right?

When you clean out, that’s a big thing, but when you clean up, it doesn’t hit as much stuff. Now it’s easier to be okay, all right? Again, they’ll quote Christ, right? “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that leaveth the mouth of the Father.” Man does not live by bread alone, the outside world, but by every word that leaveth the mouth of the Father. What does that mean? There’s Shakti in there, there’s spirit in there, there’s energy in there that’s not associated with the outside, okay? But it’s being blocked. As you let go, the two merge, right? The higher self— there is no higher self or lower self anymore. There’s just self.

Trauma, Intergenerational Patterns, and the Power to Let Go

MAYIM BIALIK: When you say that everything that’s kind of in there, we’ve put there, and so we have the power to take it out, how do we frame trauma? How do we frame intergenerational trauma? How do we frame this notion that— and it is part of the Buddhist conversation as well— what have we inherited? What is our legacy, as it were? How do we break free of that? And how much can we say, I’ve put this here, I want to take it out, versus it feels like something was handed to me that’s not mine. How do I release that?

MICHAEL SINGER: You mentioned Buddhist, okay? So if you want to talk about inherited meaning genetically or inherited meaning past lives, I’ll go both, right? So for example, when you work with yourself really deeply, you will see that there’s stuff in there that’s kind of bigger than what your consciousness can get hands around, and you have no idea why it’s in there. Like somebody who’s scared to death of heights. Let’s use that example, all right? Why? Nothing ever happened to them. Then why are you okay with height and you’re not okay with height, right? Is that a physiologically, genetically inherited trait, or is it past lives? I don’t care. I’m not selling past lives. I’m not doing anything, right? So you see, it doesn’t matter. The point is it’s in there. Okay, what do I do with it? Can it be worked out? The answer is yes.

Is it in there because you put it in there? You did in the past lives, whatever it is, all right? But basically, you are will. You are consciousness. Consciousness is the ultimate power of the universe. It created the entire universe. You understand that? Therefore, if it’s in there and it’s big, and there are big things in there that people just freak to even think about it, they can’t even— don’t talk about that. You know you don’t talk about that around your father. He can’t handle that. Right? That means there’s something in there. Why? Right? And it’s trying to come up. It gets triggered. And they can’t handle it. The answer is, learn to handle it.

Can you learn to handle it? Now, you ask me that question. Mickey, is it Michael? Mickey, whoever I am. I don’t know. All right? Basically, can anything that’s in there be let go of? Yes. Is there any super glue in there that’s holding cement in there? No, the only reason anything stays in there is because subconsciously, deeply, whatever, will, the power of will, is pushing it down. How do you know? Because when it tries to come back, I push the damn thing back down, don’t I? Correct?

That means, what if you don’t? Well, it’s traumatic. I had a traumatic experience. So don’t tell me what if I don’t. I know you can’t do it right now. But if you can handle the driver in front of you, if you can handle hitting a tennis ball into the net every time until you’re practicing it better, you can practice letting go. That’s where I’ve gotten, understand, all my teachings, right? I know it’s hard to let go. I know it hurts. It was stored with pain, coming back with pain. You know that. All right? But even old things down there are the same. But you resist them, you react to them.

Practice being okay with little things, with the weather, with what somebody said. You’re going to find out you get better at it, just like you practice the piano. All right, you practice letting go, and all of a sudden you notice, and eventually this stuff will come up. I love when people say to me, I went to work today and something happened at work, and I didn’t realize until I was driving home that would have bothered me in the past. I didn’t even notice.

The Surrender Experiment: The Original “Let Them”

MAYIM BIALIK: I want to touch on something that The Surrender Experiment, you know, highlighted quite ahead of its time in so many ways. And there’s been a lot of conversation in the last year or so about the notion of letting everything happen, right? The let them theory that Mel Robbins came on and talked about. But when Jonathan and I were preparing for talking to you again, Jonathan had a very interesting revelation and he said to me, Michael Singer’s Surrender Experiment was the original let them, meaning do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul, without regard for personal results, letting go of your needs, letting go of what you wish other people would do. That really is the original just let it be without trying to force, manage, manipulate, control, and martyr yourself over it. Can you give us a little bit of framework of how the Surrender Experiment and how really your entire journey has been one giant letting go?

MICHAEL SINGER: Letting go. Some people misunderstand surrender as meaning let anything happen outside that’s happening just let go and just accept it. And so I say to those people, so if a drug dealer comes up to you with heroin, right, and says, “Hey, you want some?” You should say yes, right? Obviously not, okay? That is not what surrender means, all right?

Surrender is something you do within yourself when you feel resistance coming up due to your stuff. You understand that? You feel it coming up in you. First, surrender. Let it go. Relax. Let it pass through you. Then come down and either have a talk with the drug dealer, don’t bother talking to them, whatever it is. Make a decent decision, like I talked before, right? Based on clarity, right?

But it’s not true that surrender means I did every single thing that ever got put in front of me, right? Whatever got put in front of me, I got clear to the best of my ability. I’m all there, right? But the best of my ability, got clear, and then tried to deal with it from a place of understanding, compassion, fairness, and so on. Not me. That— so surrender means letting go of yourself inside, and then you come back and you deal with it. All right? And yes, acceptance, again, doesn’t— it’s not an outside thing. It’s I accept reality. I accept that it happened. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to do something about it. Life is an interactive sport, right? We’re interacting. But where are you coming from? I want you to come from clarity. I want you to come from openness and love, right? And then of course you come down and deal with it.

So the misunderstanding some people have, but most don’t. They do very, very well. As you know, that book’s done amazingly well. It’s been published in 40 countries. 6 million copies have sold, right? And people write me all the time. Karen and I, it’s just two of us, all right? We get so, and almost 70% of every single email we get says, “Thank you. You changed my life.” I didn’t change anybody’s life. I told you to let go, right? And what you let go of is what’s ruining your life. And what’s left does all come together. It does unfold amazingly how the universe is perfect.

Recognizing Resistance: The First Step Toward Freedom

JONATHAN COHEN: There are two very important points and ideas in what you describe that some people might need a little bit more description about. The first is being aware of when resistance starts to come up. It’s a somatic concept that a lot of people aren’t aware of because they immediately go to either pushing it down, dealing with it, a mental process of analyzing it. They’re not even aware of what resistance is or when it starts to happen. So that’s the first part. Can you talk about the awareness of resistance as a fundamental and first principle step in this process?

Practicing Letting Go: From Small Moments to Big Challenges

MICHAEL SINGER: You are not going to be able to take the big thing, your kid’s doing drugs, your wife’s leaving you, there’s major— you’re not going to be able to just be right there right then. There’s going to be this tremendous reaction inside. You’re going to get lost and fight and struggle. Why? I understand that. Of course I understand that. Right?

But if it’s raining out and you need to get out and deliver some papers, you don’t have to get upset. You know you don’t have to, right? But you’re going to tend to. There’s going to be this resistance, even— or the driver in front of you, right? They use this nice blinker, buddy, right? These tiny little things you practice there and you actually bother to say, if I’m going to play tennis and I hit it into the net, I’m going to turn my hand a little bit, right? And get better at it. I’ll practice with a coach, right?

That’s what you’re doing with letting go. You’re practicing with the low-hanging fruit. That’s what living in tether gets you into, all right? And if you do that, you’ll get good at it. Of course I don’t have to complain that it’s raining. It’s just stupid. I just got in the habit of doing it, right? Well, I’ll use affirmation. I’ll use this, whatever it is. I’ll let go. Right? The next thing you know, you’ll be better next.

And so all of a sudden, the gap between the resistance, the energy resistance coming up, right, and you reacting to it will become greater. You start realizing, I don’t have to do this. And now all of a sudden you’re in a relationship with your spouse or a significant other, right? And you start feeling this resistance, this, ugh, coming up, right? And you realize, that’s from my bad day at work. That really has nothing to do with what conversation we’re having, right? I need to dump this stuff.

And you’ll realize you have a moment. At first, it’s just a moment of consciousness that says, I don’t want to do that. I don’t have to do that. It’s hard, right? And you take a breath, you do all the different stuff you talk about. Every time you do it, you get better at it. Just like every time you play the piano, you get better at it. Hear me? That’s how you do it. Not, how do I handle these terrible situations that I can’t handle? All right? You start by learning to handle the simple ones, and next thing you know, you graduate.

You Cannot Control Other People Any More Than You Can Control the Weather

MAYIM BIALIK: Well, and I think that’s also an important point that in the same way that you cannot control the rain, you cannot control whether it’s raining or not. The exact same way that you cannot control that, you cannot control other people. Right? So all the places that we try and insert ourselves and we think we can cure it, and what if we hide the liquor, then they won’t drink it. Or if we get our breasts done, they’ll like us more. Whatever it is that we’re trying to control, it’s literally the same thing as do you think you can control the weather?

And when people say to me, oh, I don’t know if I believe in God and I believe in science, I say, if you believe that you can control the weather, you are your own higher power. You’ve just decided that you’re God. If we all agree that we cannot control the weather, we’re all on the same plane and there has to be something larger than us that’s in charge, which is very freeing. I don’t have to control it anymore. I don’t have to spend all of my energy trying to make it not rain when it’s raining.

MICHAEL SINGER: And then if you go back to that little moment of discussion we had about the quantum field, let’s see you control the quantum field. But you just said you’re a scientist. It is all the quantum field coming up, right? Okay, I’m done. Just like that. That’s why I have people, regular people, I talk about the quantum field. Not because I want to understand it or learn about it, I want them to understand, do you really believe you’re going to go down to those wavelets, right, that the supercolliders have found are there, right, and that that’s the foundation of every single thing you’re experiencing, everything, right, and you’re going to control it? Ha ha ha. And you let go. And you’re free.

JONATHAN COHEN: We can’t control it, but we can observe it, which potentially changes it slightly.

The Law of Attraction: Are You Using It Because You’re Not Okay?

MICHAEL SINGER: That’s true. I don’t want to discuss this law of attraction stuff, right? My position on law of attraction is as follows. How did you decide what you want to attract to you? Because I know, your stuff. Because a great being doesn’t want to attract anything, they couldn’t care less. They’re already in ecstasy, everything’s beautiful, right?

But if you’re not okay, and you want a car, or a new spouse, or a new job, right? You can put out energy to attract it. And by all means do so, especially if you get depressed if it doesn’t happen, I want you to be happy, right? But I want you at some point to look and say, how did I decide I needed that? And how often did you attract to yourself and then realize you don’t need it, right?

It’s just, it’s bigger than do you have a power of attraction. The question is, why are you using it? Because I’m not okay. Do you understand that? The only reason I’m using it is I’m not okay, and I think by getting what I want, I’ll be okay. And you will, for a while. We’ll see what happens, right?

I would love for you to read my books and listen to the podcast. I have a podcast out there, the Akashic Field Podcast. It’s not like this, it’s not lectures. It’s my lectures that I give at the temple. They get put out every Tuesday and Thursday, all right? And if you listen to them, what you hear is, I can do better with myself. I can do better with this. It’s not about getting what you want. Exactly what Maya said a moment ago. It’s not about getting what you want. It’s about honoring and respecting what is and being blown away that it even is.

Where Is Consciousness? What Happens When We Die?

MAYIM BIALIK: I want to ask one question about another term that is getting thrown around a lot, but I think you have a lot of clarity about it that we would like to hear. The notion of consciousness being outside of our body, our physical body, the notion of a collective consciousness, a greater consciousness. And we’ve talked about this a lot in terms of the Akashic Records tradition and can we tap into something, right?

But we’re particularly interested since we first spoke to you, we’ve spoken to a lot of people who have had very exceptional experiences with altered consciousness, and some have been psychedelic, but others have been people like physicist Thomas Campbell. They’ve been transcendental. We’ve spoken to a lot of people with profound and documented near-death experiences where they are witnessing a consciousness separate from their physical body.

In terms of how you understand this higher self, the observing self, where is consciousness? It’s very easy for you, for example, to say, oh, well, the mind is something that we construct and it’s outside of the body. How can you help us understand where consciousness is and what happens, let’s say, when we die? Is it still there?

MICHAEL SINGER: I’m honored that you asked the question, right? Now, but be willing to listen. We talked about how science has shown that there’s this field of which everything emanates out, right? The bosons are all the forces that we know about, and the quarks, the leptons, it all just puts itself together, right? So that’s a layer of a field, not particles, just a field of energy of something. What’s it made of?

I told you, the great masters didn’t go out there and study science. They went into caves, the ancient rishis, right? And they studied consciousness. Why? Because I’m conscious. Where am I going to study consciousness? Out there? I’m not going to study consciousness out there. There’s just stuff out there, right? I am aware of being aware. I am that I am. I am going to practice letting go of the object of consciousness so I can experience the source of consciousness. Okay? And what they found was, there you’re it, right? That they are that consciousness.

So that’s one way to look at it, the quantum field up, right? The other is the Bible is just fine. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,” right? It’s not hard to think that the word is the Om, or Amen, or a vibration. In the beginning was the word. What’s the word? A vibration. Vibrating in the consciousness of the universe. The one consciousness of the universe created a vibration, and that’s your quantum field, by the way.

I don’t expect them to understand it. They’re not. It’s okay, right? But that primal vibration, the original— in the beginning there was no beginning, it’s infinite, right? But in the beginning of what you see as creation, the Big Bang, whatever you want to call it, right? When form came into being, in the beginning was a vibration, and the Word was with God. That consciousness created that vibration, and from that vibration, all of form emanated, right?

And then the consciousness looks down into the form it created. So when you ask me, where is consciousness? That’s all there is. It’s all consciousness. It’s all made of consciousness. It’s looking at consciousness. There’s nothing but consciousness. God alone is real. Okay, that’s the real answer, but that’s a lot bigger than you were asking. Okay, but that’s the real answer, right?

If all the form is made of consciousness, what is experiencing it? Consciousness. Awareness is what experiences things, right? Now you understand that consciousness is what made the things. Therefore, it’s like when you go to sleep, right? You made the buildings, you made the relationships, you made the issues, you made the fights, you made war, you made every single thing out of what? Out of one field of mind. Buddhists call it mind, people call it consciousness, I don’t care, right? But it’s all made of you, isn’t it? That’s what’s happening here, okay?

God has created the entire universe and has come down to play in himself, to come down and experience it, right? And then how come he fell from the garden? Because he got lost. He got lost in ego. He stared at himself enough to where he started to identify with what he was looking at instead of identifying with who’s looking. Listen to that, right? You identify with what you’re looking at, your thoughts, your emotions, your form, right, instead of identifying with who’s looking at it. Okay, when you awake, it doesn’t do that.

It’s funny, like I said, I read the Bible once, but I love that it keeps coming back. All right, the story about Adam in the garden, this is of course my version. All right, God’s walking around the garden. God’s everything. He’s everywhere. It’s all free. There’s nothing there but God. Okay, and he says, “Adam, where are you? You’re me.” What? I understand. Where are you? And Adam said, “I’m hiding.” Whoa, that’s pretty deep. How do you hide from God? Stare at form instead of sitting back as to who’s looking at it.

Okay, and you get lost. But real power. And they said, “Where are you?” “I’m hiding.” And Adam stands up and God says, “Whoa, what’s that fig leaf around your waist?” Did he say that? Right? And Adam said, “I was naked.” That is so deep. Every angle’s naked. Everything’s naked, right? But ego identified with form so much so that it used the word I to talk about what it was looking at. Whereas consciousness, that’s all there is. It’s just the dance of consciousness. It’s consciousness looking at consciousness, experiencing consciousness.

Christ said what? “Not a hair on your head moves that God doesn’t know.” Not a sparrow falls from the tree because he is the tree, he is the sparrow. It’s not like there’s a guy sitting back there with a beard, okay? It’s the whole universe is the expression of the divine consciousness, and we are that also, but we’re busy staring at this little, tiny little thing. Right or wrong?

MAYIM BIALIK: Yeah. One of my favorite mystical quotes that I’ve mentioned here is they say that if God stopped thinking about us for one second, we would not exist, that there’s a constant creation that is going on as we are in this. But you didn’t answer my hardest question. What happens to that consciousness when we die?

There Is No Death: Consciousness and the Divine

MICHAEL SINGER: There is no death. There is no death. My God, give me a break. Right? There’s just consciousness expressing itself. What happens to the music when the notes stop being played? It’s still there. It’s still— nothing dies. Nothing was ever born. Right? It’s just we stare at it as a separate thing. Okay? And we think we’re separate from it. Therefore, we think we die. You think your ego dies, your mind dies, your body dies. Right? Then there’s no death. There is no death. There’s just consciousness changing its vibration rate, okay, going to higher— at some point you can’t even talk about it, right? Because we’re framing it in words that can’t answer the question. You’re framing that I’m separate and I die. There is no dying.

The Gita talks about it beautifully, all right? Krishna’s talking to Arjuna, and Arjuna’s arguing, I don’t want to fight this battle. I don’t want to kill people. I don’t know what to do with this. You know the story, right? And Krishna says to Arjuna, he says, what are you doing? Right? There’s no death. Weapons can’t reach the self. It’s back there watching them, right? And waters can’t overwhelm it, and fires can’t burn it. It’s just the awareness that is looking at form. So the awareness doesn’t go anywhere.

Hopefully, but where it goes, I don’t like to talk about it. It goes to a higher plane. What does that mean? Right? Again, the Bible says, in my Father’s house there are many mansions. I never understood that before. Now I do. There’s different planes of reality, right? Okay? And fine, your soul evolves to a certain— your consciousness evolves to a certain point. It can’t merge yet. It’s not ready to merge yet. So it goes to heaven, it goes here, it goes to different places, right? Until it’s ready to merge back into the divine consciousness and become one with God. My Father and I are one. Somebody said that, didn’t they? I thought I heard those once before. It’s really actually, I looked at it, I said, I and my Father are one. I have to say it right. I and my Father are one.

Religion, Mysticism, and the Capitalist Patriarchy

MAYIM BIALIK: It’s very interesting because with many of these ancient references, right, to Judaism, to Christianity, to Islam, right, these very old religions, to Buddhism, to Hinduism, there’s a very, very strong mystical and spiritual through line. And so many of us are taught religious practice that is very dogmatic. It’s very based in obedience. It’s very much based in threat and fear. And the fact is, that’s actually not the original intention of any of these religious traditions.

It’s so significant to be able to hear. And, you know, for me, as someone who studied Old Testament text, we are taught about how much mysticism is woven through our text. But it’s so damaging to so many people to be taught the manipulation of those traditions. And that’s what so many of us are living out. It’s what so many of us are rebelling against and rallying against and saying, this isn’t for me. I’m not that person. I’m not religious. I’m spiritual. Guess what? Religion used to be spiritual before it was co-opted by, forgive me, the capitalist patriarchy.

Christ, Enlightenment, and the Last Supper

MICHAEL SINGER: Of course. That’s so beautiful that you see that. It’s true. And the epitome really is Christ, right? Did you know Christ was spiritual? The highest spiritual being that ever descended down to Earth. He was born enlightened, right? Born the King of Angels. They say it. But then they have one person, a hand on a cross somewhere, all right? No, he’s everything, he’s one with God.

But one of my favorite things, and how I remember this from 1970, I have no idea, but during the Last Supper, there was a discussion between the disciples and Jesus, all right? And at some point, Jesus said, I won’t be with you anymore, all right? This is it, all right? And one of them said, right, no, I want to go with you, we want to go with you. And he said, where I go, I’m going to cry, where I go you cannot follow. Why? He ain’t there yet, baby. You understand that? You still see yourself as a human being with your own thoughts and feelings and emotions, right? And where I am, right, is merged with the whole universe. My Father and I are one. You see why he said where I go you can’t follow? But you can. You can.

Enlightenment Is Not Just for the Mountain Top

MAYIM BIALIK: I know this is a deep cut here, but in the Narnia books, right, it’s an allegory of this notion, right? And that’s what I— when I’ve seen the movies, that is that notion of also the pain of when you experience that enlightenment, when you experience elevation, it’s very hard in many cases to be among people, right?

Also on a smaller scale, a lot of people say, well, what’s Michael Singer doing? He must just sit all by himself all day. No, you’re engaged in the world. You’ve had business experience, you’re a living person. I wonder if you’ve ever changed a tire or what happens when you go to the supermarket and they’re out of milk. But you live among people and we can as well, right? This is not enlightenment for someone sitting on top of a mountain. This is the wisdom that gets brought down from the mountain.

A Surprise Announcement: Wisdom Untethered

MICHAEL SINGER: Now, I have a surprise for you as we’re running out of time. I didn’t tell you because I’m not telling anybody. But I didn’t want to. I said I wasn’t going to, but I wrote another book. Okay. And it will be published in March. All right. And its title is Wisdom Untethered: The Time for Questions. I assure you, because I know you, you will love the book. I haven’t talked about it. The publisher has it. It’s going to be published. All right. In March, like I said, there are 3 paragraphs that I specifically want to read to you guys, and I’ve not done that before. All right, when I sent it to the publisher, I told them only you can read it until we talk about it. All right, but I’m going to read this for you.

“They say God is love. Is that true? Can I experience that directly? There are many different levels of love. The love that is experienced is need is a human emotion caused by the heart being blocked to the inner flow of Shakti. When the heart is unconditionally open, you will never feel the need for love, because your heart will remain full of love regardless of what is happening. Such an open heart is difficult for people to achieve because they’ve stored pain from the past that creates blockages to the inner energy flow. This is why people need special outcome conditions in order for the heart to open. Let’s call that human love. It’s still beautiful, especially compared to the other human emotions, but it’s conditional, and it can create dependencies and attachments.

Spiritual love is very different. Once the heart learns to remain open, even under difficult circumstances, the flow of unhampered energy through the heart feeds the indwelling soul directly. Because you are now fulfilled inside, you don’t have to constantly control the outside. You’re deeply content, experiencing an inner flow of love. Eventually, you will want to explore the source of this beautiful energy. The only way to explore the source is by falling into it. When you do so, you’ll become completely immersed in overwhelming love, joy, and bliss. This is the point where the Shakti flow changes direction. You’ll begin to feel a tremendous upward flow pulling you beyond your sense of individuality. It feels like God is calling you home, and that is exactly what is happening.

The great ones have let go completely, and their drop of consciousness has merged back into the ocean of consciousness. This is Christ’s I and my Father are one. This is Buddha’s nirvana. This is Islam Sufi’s fana, the complete dissolution of the ego self in the presence of God. This is the Jewish Kabbalah’s betul hayesh, dissolving the ego self into divine nothingness. This is enlightenment. This is the meaning of all of life.”

MAYIM BIALIK: Beautiful.

JONATHAN COHEN: I’ll just say that I’m very excited for the book. Thank you for sharing that with us. And we are extremely honored and we’re very excited for it.

MAYIM BIALIK: I have a whole Michael Singer section of my library and almost all of your books, I think, are blue. Is the new one blue as well?

MICHAEL SINGER: I haven’t seen the cover. Oh, yeah. Okay.

MAYIM BIALIK: Well, the rest of the Michael Singer section is blue, so we’ll see.

JONATHAN COHEN: Your Untethered Soul book has a very significant role in why Mayim and I are doing this podcast. And so we’ll see what the next one brings. It could spawn the next many years of this.

Letting Go and Merging Into Oneness

MICHAEL SINGER: I want to spawn the merger. Mayim told me in the last interview, she cried and she said, I want to go there. I want to experience that. Of course you do. You’re a great soul and you will experience that. And the more— the more you open and do what I talk, if you want to let go of my own, you have to let go of your career or nothing with that. But you let go of what’s holding in there, keeping it together. And all of a sudden you find out there’s nothing to keep together. It’s all one. It’s all merged.

MAYIM BIALIK: Thank you so much. Really an honor to get to speak to you again. And we’re so thrilled. We can’t wait to see all of the things that come and especially the book. We cannot wait. So thank you so much.

MICHAEL SINGER: Beautiful. What a nice conversation. I love talking to you guys. Remember the title? The title is Wisdom Untethered: The Time for Questions. And like I said, in a neat— that’s all we’ve done here is ask questions. All right. Very good.

Reflection: Resistance, Reaction, and the Body

JONATHAN COHEN: Here’s what I want to talk about from this episode. The notion of understanding when we feel resistance, because intellectually what he described totally makes sense, right? Once it gets into the intellectual process of there’s rain, okay, easy. I don’t like rain. Oh, I feel upset about something. But I think we are all processing and operating on a reactive model, right? Like you and I have talked a lot about the difference between reaction and response. When we’re reacting, there’s a somatic physical experience that is happening. Usually there’s a tightness, there’s a constriction, there could be a shortness of breath, there could be a clenching, there could be an anger, there could be— as we resist, as we have resistance, there’s a physical sensation that we get that may even precede the mental anger, annoyance, or justification for that feeling.

MAYIM BIALIK: I think that most people go through their lives not realizing what resistance even feels like in their body. I think that most people either never learn it. If you have a parent that was born between the years like 1940 and 1963, they may never learn it, and that’s okay. They’re on their own journey. But many people, A, do not know how to be in touch with their body. So we’ve talked about how I don’t know when my feet are hot, right? So that’s an example. Or you think I can’t tell when water is too hot. I’m just in survival mode, must get clean.

But beyond that, I think even before we get into the somatic, I don’t think that most people are trained to understand that any strong emotion, positive or negative, is going to move through you at a course of usually a few minutes. Meaning if it’s not perpetuated, it’s going to move through you. There’s a chemical rise that occurs, and it’s easier to think about it with negative emotions, but all of these things, they’re going to move through you.

So the reason that sometimes we feel like lashing out with our words, with our fists, or throwing something is because we’re getting a huge surge. And you can call it shame, you can call it anger. It’s actually a huge surge of a bunch of chemicals that are designed to make you fight. That’s almost always resistance. So when someone says something that hurts your feelings, that also brings up resistance for us. It doesn’t mean that you don’t defend yourself. It doesn’t mean that you have to believe them, but it means that the emotions coming up, right? Salt only hurts when there’s a wound. If something gets activated in you, there’s something that hasn’t yet been worked out, right? And I think that’s what Michael is sort of communicating kind of through all of this.

The idea is not that if someone insults you, you say, “That’s nice, thank you.” The idea is to say, “They have a perspective that comes from their entire worldview. I don’t have to take that personally because I have a strong sense of who I am.” What— like, what would that be like?

JONATHAN COHEN: Absolutely. And I want to slow it down a couple of steps. Even before that is someone insults you. You don’t even realize you’re insulted most of the time. You may just slap back or shut down. You have an immediate reaction instead of a response.

Top 3 Tools for Managing Emotional Activation

MAYIM BIALIK: Right. And this is when we talk about the book Difficult Conversations. There’s what happened. There’s what we think happened, and then there’s what actually gets activated. So if I say to you, you know, you were late and I’m really pissed off at you that you were late. So there’s the fact that you said you’d be somewhere and you weren’t. Then there’s you saying she’s hurt and now I feel attacked. But what’s actually going on is likely something that you either programmed in or was programmed into you. I’m not reliable. So that when I say you didn’t show up on time, what you hear is you’re not reliable, you’re not worthy, you’re not lovable, you don’t matter. When actually what it was was I expected you to be there at a time and it’s disappointing that you weren’t there.

So we are all operating, right? What’s that t-shirt people wear? Like, what if you don’t know what’s going on in someone’s life? We’re all operating — maybe except Michael Singer. We’re all operating at that level. And it’s that third level that can be healed, that can get some of this work done to it. When he says do the work, you don’t just magically wake up in touch with the consciousness that is divine. There’s work to be done.

That level becomes less vulnerable and it becomes less scary so that if someone says, I expected you to be there on time, you don’t hear, I’m unworthy, I’m unlovable, and I’m going to fight back and here’s why I was late. What you hear is, I understand that was disappointing. Here are the things I’m going to do so that doesn’t happen again. That must have felt really challenging.

JONATHAN COHEN: Absolutely. Everything you’re saying, I 100 — more than 100% agree.

MAYIM BIALIK: That’s what people say before they disagree with something.

JONATHAN COHEN: I just think there are a few levels and layers to this. Before we even get there, because what you described is a complicated cognitive process. What was said? How do I see it? What? And I’ve learned so much in our conversations about figuring out what did I actually think it meant? Like that third layer is, if you can spend your time unpacking that third layer, you will learn so much about the programming and the thorns that you’re holding inside. Right? Like Michael Singer’s, in our first conversation with him, talked about, you know, this time he used garbage. The first time he said thorns and that we all have these thorns and we do everything possible to avoid anyone touching the thorn because it activates. So a lot of that third layer of conversation, what we think people are saying, are actually touching the thorns that we have, that we’ve grown up with, our insecurities.

MICHAEL SINGER: Yeah.

MAYIM BIALIK: I mean, it’s like, in psychology, it’s our organizing principles, what we’re kind of programmed with. But I wasn’t trying to deny the somatic component. I just think that a lot of people are not in touch with that either.

JONATHAN COHEN: Let’s unpack it, because as you start to be more aware of it, you can calm it down faster. You don’t even have to go into this person said that the other thing. Because it’s a very — it expends a lot of energy and may take some time, and people may not be able to dive and get clarity as to what it is they think they heard.

MAYIM BIALIK: Well, yeah. And the fact is, trying to figure something out — right, which is not a slogan, as we say — trying to figure something out when you are in an activated, agitated state is the number one way to not figure it out. So what do you think people are going to tell you to do? That’s why we’re telling you to learn how to breathe. That’s why we’re trying to tell you how to stimulate your vagus nerve. These are all the things that physiologically put us in a state of emotional and psychological availability.

JONATHAN COHEN: This is where I was going and what I think he skipped over in terms of the process of how you get there. If you’re someone who is starting to say, let me bring myself back, let me stop that cycle that we’re all addicted to, right?

MAYIM BIALIK: Oh, I’ve got the top 3 things to do.

JONATHAN COHEN: Top 3 things to do when you start to become aware that you are experiencing resistance or you’re becoming activated. Mayim, tell us the top 3 and I’ll see where they land in my top 3.

Tool #1: Pause

MAYIM BIALIK: Okay. So my top 3, the most powerful tool that I’ve been taught, one of the most powerful tools I’ve been taught as an adult — pause.

MICHAEL SINGER: Pause. Yep.

JONATHAN COHEN: Ding, ding, ding.

MAYIM BIALIK: Do not open your mouth. Don’t open your mouth. Don’t open.

MICHAEL SINGER: You’re going to want to.

MAYIM BIALIK: You’re going to want to because you’re going to want to say —

JONATHAN COHEN: You’re going to want to say all the things that that person has done wrong.

MAYIM BIALIK: Correct. One of the acronyms that you can use for pause: postpone action until serenity ensues. What if the instruction was anytime that you feel agitated, hurt, scared, upset, or confused? What if the first thing you did was just to pause? Don’t ask for more information. Don’t seek more information. Don’t apologize. Don’t grovel. Don’t put your dukes up. Just pause. That’s my first.

JONATHAN COHEN: Valerie just said, I’d be waiting forever. Catch me on my deathbed.

Tool #2: Breathe

MAYIM BIALIK: So once you’re pausing, my number 2 thing to do is to tap into your breath. And you might think that’s ridiculous. My heart is beating so fast, I can’t breathe. Like, I want to just scream. This is the time to engage your parasympathetic nervous system. That’s why it was given to you. Your body has a built-in mechanism to calm yourself down. And I don’t mean like calm down. I mean the body has a built-in system to take the blood away from the parts of you that want to run, kick, and scream and put it in the parts of you that need to be quiet. And to rest and to tap into breath.

Now, Jonathan may have more insight on this. I would say the primary thing to do is to breathe into your belly. If you have one thing you do after pausing, it’s to breathe into your belly. When we’re agitated and upset, we breathe like up here, right? You’re not getting enough oxygen. You’re not releasing all the oxygen you need to. Breathe into your belly. Pretend like you’re inflating a balloon in your belly. Do that. I’m going to say 10 times when really agitated. You can sometimes tell even within 3 that your vagus nerve will start to be like, oh, they need to chill out. If you are breathing like that, you cannot be in danger. And your body knows that this breath means slow your heart down, your blood pressure comes down. You’ll stop tingling and vibrating. That’s number 2, breath.

JONATHAN COHEN: Very good. Another breath that we have actually posted an Instagram video about — when I think we actually went to the TikTok studio. We did a tour and for some reason we did a breath video. It was the double inhale breath where you do a very big inhale. You think that you’re done. Then you do an extra sip and a long exhale. And that has been shown to also help calm down. I have another one other than breath, but keep going.

Tool #3: Notice

MAYIM BIALIK: My number 3 would be — and also just want to give a shout out. I wrote a piece for Substack, From Chaos to Calm: How to Reboot Your Nervous System, where I talk a little bit more about some of these. But in this moment, my number 3 would be to notice. So once you start breathing and once your body sort of gets into a less agitated state — and also, I just want to go ahead and say, this is not convenient. The convenient thing to do when someone pisses you off is to tell them right there and then. The convenient thing to do when someone says, can we be exclusive, would be to say yes. That’s the convenient thing to do. Once any big emotion’s coming up and you’re pausing, it’s not convenient. So you may want to also learn a bunch of tools to be able to say, I need some time to think about that. I’ll get back to you.

Number 3 is to notice. So the next tool that you have been given is the ability to notice what is happening in your body. And you might think, well, I don’t know, I don’t think — that’s exactly the problem. We all have this capacity. And physiologically, when we’re tuning in to just noticing, not trying to change it, not trying to name it, just noticing sensations in your body, it moves your brain from an active, doing phase to an observing phase that is more restorative. It lets your immune system kick in. It lets all of these properties that you need to actually respond to things. It lights all of that up.

MICHAEL SINGER: Up.

MAYIM BIALIK: So noticing would look literally something like — typically you would close your eyes, so you’ve got this breath going, and you would just start noticing. Do you feel your feet on the ground? Do you feel your tush on the seat if you’re sitting? Do you feel any other sensations in your body? And the goal is not to name them and say like, ooh, this hurts. It’s just to say, what does it hurt? Oh, I’m feeling some tension in my hamstring, right? Because my hamstring sometimes acts up, right? You’re just noticing these things. That is going to encourage, again, your nervous system to start chilling out.

Now, you might be thinking, I don’t have time to do this every time something bothers me. A lot of this stuff becomes much more rapid, much more intuitive, and you can tap into it much easier with everybody’s favorite word: practice. This is not something I’m going to tell you once and you’re going to do it. You don’t get to try it and say it didn’t work. That’s like saying, I tried to read when I was 4 years old. It didn’t work. I can’t do it. This is a muscle you have to exercise. The more you do it, the more you have this kind of vocabulary in your head, the quicker it happens, and you will be able to do that. You’ll be able to do it quickly.

I’ve seen Jonathan do it where he’s really, really upset or intense about something, and he can just bring it down, and it often will take him approximately 10 seconds, 15 seconds. I still need more time because I’m not as practiced at it. I sometimes need 10 minutes. I need to say, I’m going to take a walk and think about that, or I’m not happy with what’s happening in my body right now. I’m going to take a break and I’ll be back.

JONATHAN COHEN: And if someone is going to go do that, do not encourage them to maintain whatever conversation there is going on.

MAYIM BIALIK: Oh, they’ll be like, no, we’re not done. Let’s get over — you are in charge of your body and where it is. You’re allowed to say, I understand you want to talk about this. I understand you’re not done with this conversation. I’d like to return to it when I am more capable of doing so. That’s an I statement.

Bonus Tool: Shaking It Off

JONATHAN COHEN: That’s a great line. I’m going to add one more piece in here, which is if you still need help after all of this, jumping and dead arms — like literally shaking our bodies as though an animal shakes stuff off. It feels ridiculous. Lots of people are self-conscious. Dead arms are literally like your arms, you don’t use, you don’t hold them at all. You drop them to their side and then you start shaking your torso and body and your arms just are flailing about.

MAYIM BIALIK: Jumping also.

JONATHAN COHEN: And then jumping also. Two-legged jumps if you’re able to.

MAYIM BIALIK: Yeah, this is something in Kundalini that we do. This is one of the movements. It dispels energy. It moves it from the core of the body kind of out. It’s this sort of notion. And yes, it’s one of the things that we’ve observed about animals that do not experience PTSD for the most part. Animals, when they are scared, or if you’ve ever seen a deer being chased or any prey being chased by a predator, once they are safe, they do this like weird, crazy, shaky thing. And yeah, it’s thought to be dispelling kind of that energy. Also, sometimes we shake when we’re scared. It’s also a way of kind of, we think, trying to dispel some of that energy.

JONATHAN COHEN: Archie will do that if he’s at the dog park or crosses a path with a dog and a dog will scare him or snap at him and someone’s aggressive. He’ll remove himself from the situation. And then there’s a big shake that happens.

Wrapping Up: Letting Go, Trauma Processing, and Final Reflections

MAYIM BIALIK: Someone on our team asks, does that happen after you give birth? So shivering, a shaking and a shivering is not surprising or uncommon after something like birth. Birth is very, you know, it’s a very big trauma to the system, but also I don’t really want to call it necessarily a trauma. It’s a big shock to the system. And that process has a lot of hormones. So there’s also a lot of that that can happen also during labor and also after birth.

JONATHAN COHEN: Another method, if you don’t feel like you can jump safely, your body just, you know, has been out of practice. If you don’t feel dead arms could work for you, literally just shaking your hands like this can be a starting point. And if you don’t want to jump, you can be in a seated position or a standing position and just raise on your toes and let your heels drop really heavy. So even right now I can do that just sitting down, allowing, raising my heel and letting it drop.

In one of our Substack live conversations that we had just for the Breaker community, I had a hot take and I want to revisit that hot take in light of this conversation about processing trauma and the idea of letting go, right? So we just talked about the idea of starting to become aware of the sensation as it starts to come up, and some strategies to calm the system. But so many people are in a state where they’re carrying something that is impeding their life in a way that has some significant detriment, whether it be mood, energy, fear, inability to form relationships, it’s impacting sleep.

And we talk about all the different strategies we know about — seeing a therapist, emotional processing, EMDR, medications, all of that — but from Michael’s perspective, he says, let it go. How would you begin to even talk to someone who is down the path of processing trauma, evaluating it from every perspective, and reconcile that with simply letting it go, practicing letting it go, and shifting your perspective? And then I’ll get to what I thought my hot take was after that.

MAYIM BIALIK: So I think some of this is the difference in what Michael talked about with kind of surrendering being an internal process versus still confronting the outside world. So I think there are kind of two things that are going on. I think when we talk about letting the world happen and not having resistance to it, I think that applies to our interactions. When it comes to our own personal work, there is, of course, I think, an aspect of acceptance that’s needed, self-compassion in many cases, compassion for those who’ve hurt us, which is a very complicated process and one that should be done with the help, I would say, of a licensed clinical therapist or trauma worker.

But I think the notion is, for many of us, the resistance we have in the outside world is because of the wounds that we carry in our inner world. And so we can’t disregard that there’s work to be done — processing, healing, trauma work, cord cutting, medication, whatever it is. Once that garbage, or those thorns, get sorted out a bit more, we then have the ability to let more go because our inner world doesn’t have all these places of personal resistance, so that when we encounter it in the outside world, we’re freer to bring all of ourselves to even hard situations.

The Hot Take: Tipping the Balance Toward Letting Go

JONATHAN COHEN: I like that. I like that as we’re processing it, we then have more ability to let go. Sometimes there’s so much of an overload to the system that we’re clenching, we’re holding on, we’re reacting, and maybe we’re caught in a cycle of reactivity. But starting to notice and bring our regulation more under control, we have the ability to start noticing.

The other thing — my hot take was, what if just having more positive experiences in the bank, however you define positive — things that you enjoy, appreciation for the things that you do have, having more moments of awe that we talked about and the challenge that we put forward to the community to start noticing those moments and sharing them with one another, having the appreciation, having more experiences of love — start to increase our ability to let go because we’re starting to tip the scales and the balance.

MAYIM BIALIK: It’s beautiful. And I think that that really is also the notion of tipping the balance and stacking the chips in our favor, right, for more optimal functioning and reacting.

JONATHAN COHEN: It also creates momentum, right? We know that momentum carries us. If we’re in a state where we’re attacking all the time, then we’re more prone to continue that state. Whereas as we practice calming, that starts to wire us. We start to be able to know that, oh, when I start to feel this thing, these are the activities I do, and it becomes second nature.

Final Thoughts on the Conversation with Michael Singer

MAYIM BIALIK: I feel really lucky that we got to speak to Michael Singer again. There was a lot of new stuff here and a lot of really good reminders. And I’m in such a different place than I was when we first spoke to him. So I especially appreciated hearing some of the conversation about consciousness and divinity, really with a new lens. Really, really thrilled that we got to speak with him again.

JONATHAN COHEN: Yeah, it was really a pleasure. I was so excited. I think for the Breaker community on Substack, I would love for you to dive in to some of the science and the mysticism of how we do not see with our eyes, how there is a science that explains the fundamental nature of consciousness and the fact that all the particles, atoms, neutrons are really just forming themselves and playing to create shapes. It’s a fascinating look that he sort of touched on but explained that he wasn’t the expert on. Maybe you can talk about the neuroscience on Substack for us.

MAYIM BIALIK: I would love to do that. He did a pretty good job, but I would love to talk more also about what it really means to say that what we’re seeing is actually not reality. I’d love to get into that as well. So we’ll do that over on Substack. We hope people will join us over there. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we’ll see you next time.

MICHAEL SINGER: It’s Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown. She’s going to break it down for you. She’s got a neuroscience PhD or two.

JONATHAN COHEN: Unfiction or nonfiction.

The Wrong Car Story

MAYIM BIALIK: Do you remember the story of what happened when I got into a car that was not mine?

MICHAEL SINGER: What?

MAYIM BIALIK: Back in the old days when you used to go to an office to go to therapy before everything was on Zoom. My therapist had an office at the corner of Sawtelle and Santa Monica. It’s a great intersection in Los Angeles. There’s a little Japanese part of town there, great restaurants, great sushi. It’s a wonderful part of town. Happened to be where her office was. I feel like I’ve told the story again, but we’re just going to go for it because it’s cray cray cray cray.

JONATHAN COHEN: I’ve been a part of almost every single episode we’ve done. I think I’ve missed 3 or 4. This story has never been told.

MAYIM BIALIK: So I come out of therapy. I have done the things that I do in therapy. I go to get in my car. And at this time, I had an Audi, it was an A4. So it’s a car that a lot of people definitely have, but whatever. So I go to get in my car, I unlock it — this is an important part of the story — I unlock it, I get in my car, I sit down, and the first thing I notice is, something smells different. It didn’t smell bad. But I was like, that’s a weird smell. That’s not a smell that I’m familiar with.

The next thing that happens is I look down and on the passenger seat there’s a book. It’s not important what the book was. It is a book that I know of, but I can’t remember what it was at this time. And the first thing I thought was, who put this book in my car? The second thing I thought was, did someone break into my car and leave a book on the passenger seat because I’m supposed to read this book? And the third thing I thought was, this is f*ing not my car.

I had let myself into another Audi that was parked right next to where my Audi was parked. The smell I was smelling was the smell of another human being who owned that car. The second I got in the car, my unconscious was like, this is not your car. It doesn’t smell like you. It’s not your things. But that’s how long it took my brain to say, oh, no one broke into your car and left a book. This is someone else’s vehicle.

And then I got really freaked out because the next thing I thought was, I’m going to be arrested for sitting in someone else’s car. It’s something you think you’d know how to handle. You’d be like, this isn’t my car, I’m not going to get into it. Nope. I was in the seat putting on my seat belt, ready to start. So I was panicked because I’m going to get arrested. And I’m like, I’ll be in prison and no one will bail me out. That’s where it went.

I got the f* out of that car and then I noticed that my car is right next to it. Then I unchirped it. It was probably unlocked. So apparently this had been happening that some sensors could open more than one car. I entered a totally different portal. What if I took my house key? I could be someone else’s wife. I could have different children, just walk into their house. Maybe I eat meat.

JONATHAN COHEN: You know, now that you tell this story, I do think you’ve told it before. I don’t remember what episode, because I also told the story of how when we were in like second grade, we had a garage clicker that opened the garage across the street from how we pulled out of the school.

MAYIM BIALIK: I would walk all the way around Toronto and be like, where else can I go? What can I get into? Like, where am I going to go?

JONATHAN COHEN: Well, we were horrible children and one day we were pulling out of the driveway and we were waiting to turn left. And the person of the house walked out of the house, and they had opened the garage, and then they walked out of the house and we closed the garage and they’re like watching the garage. They’re like, what?

MICHAEL SINGER: You could have closed the house.

JONATHAN COHEN: They open the garage and then we close.

MAYIM BIALIK: Oh no, that would be my full-time job. I’d be like, Mom, I can’t go to second grade because I need to sit here and do this all day.

JONATHAN COHEN: If someone has heard this and is a longtime listener and knows what episode it’s from, tag us. Maybe you’ll win a prize. We’ll send you an MBB hat.

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