Hello! I recently spoke at Unity of NEPA as part of a series they were holding based on the book The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer. As I prepared the lesson, I had a number of insights and thought it might be useful to share the content of the talk with you all. You can see the recorded version here. If you have never read this book and are interested in the spiritual nature of our human journey, I highly recommend it. It isn’t a “how to” by any means but does offer a great deal of food for thought and fuel for further exploration. With Love & Light, Tawnia
What does it mean to be free? The freedom that we are exploring today is an inner freedom, an ability to meet life as it unfolds and to be unwaveringly aligned with Love in the process. As the book’s author puts it ~ “The truth is that everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything.” This might sound like a big ask, after all there is injustice and suffering and there are wrongs to be righted all around us! But that is exactly the point ~ we mistakenly look outside of ourselves to explain the suffering we hold within ourselves. We know that the outer world is a reflection of our inner landscape so all wrongs to be righted and suffering to be eased starts right here within ourselves. The path to inner freedom travels through ever-increasing layers of self-awareness and self-honesty ~ it may well be a never-ending journey, I don’t yet know.
Are you aware that you’re caged? To claim our freedom, we must first acknowledge that we are caged. The book offers the useful analogy of a thorn ~ if you had one in your physical body that was causing you pain every time it was touched, would you go to elaborate lengths to learn how to protect it or would you figure out how to remove it? The answer may seem obvious ~ you would remove the thorn. Now imagine discovering a thorn in your energetic body ~ like a tender spot in your heart ~ that causes you great pain every time it is touched. You have the same choices ~ do you go to elaborate lengths to learn how to protect it or do you figure out how to remove it? While you might still say “remove it, of course” the truth is that many of us make the first choice ~ again and again and again ~ when it comes to inner pains ~ we go to incredibly elaborate lengths to learn how to protect them ~ including looking outside ourselves for the cause of our pain. We become so accustomed to the thorn and invested in protecting it at all costs that we forget that the touching it was never the true source of the pain at all; it is the thorn itself ~ no thorn, no pain.
Who’s your captor? The moment we remember the thorn and that it is the true source of our pain ~ not the life circumstances or relationships or outer occurrences that happen to touch it ~ and decide to invest our energy in learning how to remove it ~ rather than in protecting it at all costs ~ we are on the path to true inner freedom. This is when we realize that the captor and the oppressor we’ve been protecting ourselves from has always been us. This can be a challenging realization to come to at first ~ “I am my own captor” ~ but it is ultimately incredibly freeing because that also means that you have always held the keys and still do. And once you’ve learned how to remove one thorn, every caged thorn within that you encounter from that point on is an opportunity to free yourself further.
Were you ever really caged at all? Each of these “thorns” represents a real thing to us ~ a hurt, a betrayal, a shame, a mistake, an embarrassment ~ that we try to hide away to prevent having to experience it ever again. But the act of hiding them away, actually pulls them closer and keeps them near. The author says this ~ “If you want to be free of these energies, you must allow them to pass through you instead of hiding them inside of you.” Imagine that the perceptions associated with these experiences were messengers ~ they arrived at your door to deliver a message but instead of receiving the message, you invited them in and made them a houseguest. All the messengers have ever wanted to do is deliver the message and leave; it is you who invites them in and keeps them close ~ maybe going so far as to lock the doors to make sure that they don’t escape. When we come into honest relationship with these messengers ~ our emotions and perceptions ~ we are free to receive their message and send them on their way ~ to let them flow as they were always intended and to realize that we were never really caged at all. The real key to freeing ourselves is to come to the awareness that we are already free and to invest our energy and inner resources into remembering that truth.
Interested in learning more about what we do? Sign-up for our community library of practices! It’s free, open to everyone and features a number of recorded meditation and yoga practices that rotate each month. It’s a great way to get to know us and to explore these practices for yourself, at your convenience.