Tiago Forte's Blog, page 15

Why Every Coach Needs to Build a Second Brain. Now | Propane Fitness Podcast

I was interviewed on the Propane Fitness podcast which helps coaches and trainers build their online fitness business.

We covered: 

What is personal knowledge management?My journey from a content creator to coach and thought leaderThe biggest mistakes coaches make when moving onlineWhy cohort-based courses are a great fit for coaches and trainersShould you mourn unneeded knowledge?Why forgetting is the most important skill we haveAnd much more

This is not only relevant for the fitness niche but any coach in any niche. 

Listen to the podcast here: 

Propane FitnessSpotifyAmazon

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The post Why Every Coach Needs to Build a Second Brain. Now | Propane Fitness Podcast appeared first on Forte Labs.

12 Steps to Build a Second Brain

How do you establish the habits of personal knowledge management in your life?

Here are twelve practical steps you can take right now to get your Second Brain started:

1. Decide what you want to capture

Think about your Second Brain as an intimate commonplace book or journal. What do you most want to capture, learn, explore, or share? Identify two to three kinds of content you already value to get started with.

For an extended intro to capturing and taking digital notes, check out this workshop covering how to capture and save the best information you consume each week.

2. Choose your notes app

If you don’t use a digital notes app, get started with one now. But I know that choosing your notes app can feel overwhelming and paralyzing. 

My recommendation is to choose an app based on your notetaking style since notetaking is a highly personal process based on intuition and feeling.

In this video, I introduce you to 4 notetaking styles and the best apps for each.

3. Choose a capture tool

I recommend starting with a read later app such as Instapaper or Pocket to begin saving any article or other piece of online content you’re interested in for later consumption. 

Believe me, this one step will change the way you think about consuming content forever.

4. Get set up with PARA

Set up the four folders of PARA (Projects; Areas; Resources; Archives) and, with a focus on actionability, create a dedicated folder (or tag) for each of your currently active projects. 

Focus on capturing notes related to those projects from this point forward.

Check out this blog post for an intro to the PARA system.

5. Get inspired by identifying your twelve favorite problems

Make a list of some of your favorite problems, save the list as a note, and revisit it any time you need ideas for what to capture. Use these open-ended questions as a filter to decide which content is worth keeping.

6. Automatically capture your ebook highlights

Set up an integration to automatically send highlights from your reading apps (such as a read later or ebook app) to your digital notes. Tools like Readwise or IFTTT make this easy.

7. Practice Progressive Summarization

Summarize a group of notes related to a project you’re currently working on using multiple layers of highlighting to see how it affects the way you interact with those notes.

Click here for an intro to Progressive Summarization. 

8. Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet

Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on—an Intermediate Packet. Maybe it is a business proposal, a chart, a run of show for an event, or key topics for a meeting with your boss. (Check this blog post for more examples of Intermediate Packets.)

Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback.

9. Make progress on one deliverable

Choose a project deliverable you’re responsible for and use any of the workflow and express techniques outlined here. See if you can make decisive progress on it using only the notes in your Second Brain.

These techniques are designed to help you execute your projects more effectively. They are standardized procedures to move faster, save your progress, and produce work of higher quality.

10. Schedule a Weekly Review

Put a weekly recurring meeting with yourself on your calendar to begin establishing the habit of conducting a Weekly Review. 

To start, just clear your notes inbox and decide on your priorities for the week. From there, you can add other steps as your confidence grows.

Click here to access my One-Touch Guide to doing a Weekly Review. 

11. Assess your notetaking proficiency

Evaluate your current notetaking practices and areas for potential improvement using our free Productivity Potential Quiz.

12. Join the PKM community

On Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, or your platform(s) of choice, follow and subscribe to thought leaders and join communities who are creating content related to personal knowledge management (#PKM), #SecondBrain, #BASB, or #toolsforthought. 

I invite you to join our free Facebook and Slack communities. 

Share your journey as you’re building your Second Brain. There’s nothing more effective for adopting new behaviors than surrounding yourself with people who already have them.

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The post 12 Steps to Build a Second Brain appeared first on Forte Labs.

Why I’m Becoming an Official Advisor to Maven

A year ago I announced my investment in Maven, the first platform to enable creators to deliver live, online, community-driven educational programs to learners all over the world. 

Today I’m officially announcing that I am becoming an advisor to the company. Whether you are creating your very first online course or making the shift to live instruction, Maven is my official recommendation for where to start building. 

Maven is enabling a new generation of educational programs known as CBCs – or Cohort-Based Courses. These represent a new kind of online course in which a group of learners (known as a “cohort”) come together and move through a curriculum at the same pace. The instructor provides guidance and feedback over video calls and other communication platforms, while students share what they’re discovering in real time and give each other feedback and encouragement.

CBCs skyrocketed to prominence over the last couple years as people moved online for education, connection, and community. As I wrote in The Future of Education is Community, this new wave isn’t replacing what came before. Each successive wave of online education over the last 15 years has built upon previous ones, and this one is no exception.

Cohort-based courses take a university-style education and make it vastly more affordable and accessible to people regardless of where they live or their formal qualifications. They add powerful accountability and feedback not only from instructors, but peers and previous graduates as well. This is a fundamentally community-centric, social approach to learning. 

I created my own CBC, Building a Second Brain, in late 2016. Since then, I’ve taught over 5,000 people how to create a system of knowledge management (a “Second Brain”) for themselves. And how to use that system to capitalize on the full potential of their knowledge through the practice of digital notetaking.

The growth and impact of our course has far surpassed anything I ever expected when I first started out. In a couple months, my book by the same name will be released in 10 countries and languages. Everything written inside has been developed, tested, and refined within the community that has formed around our alumni.

As proud as I am of what my team and I have built, it’s clear that our industry is entering a new phase. We’re leaving the era of solo teachers managing everything on their own – from growing their audience, to driving sales, to troubleshooting tech problems, to creating original content, to delivering live instruction. There are far too many roles to play and hats to wear for one person to do it on their own. Especially as competition heats up and large companies start pouring money into the space, there are now two viable paths: You can either hire a team, or leverage your efforts with an all-in-one platform like Maven.

I’m seeing more and more demand for CBC-related content from teachers who want to jump into the field. But my focus is the subject matter of Personal Knowledge Management and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Working with Maven not only as an advisor, but as a guest instructor in their accelerator will allow me and my team to pour our knowledge into an organization that is perfectly equipped to share it further. That way we can share the most valuable insights we are learning in real time without distracting from our main priority of helping people everywhere create a Second Brain. 

I’ve never been an official advisor to any company or platform before. But something has changed: the path I’ve followed to creating my course is no longer the best one. I had to hack together different platforms, customize and tweak them endlessly, and hire a full staff to run it all. These are major endeavors that many course creators don’t want to take on or can’t afford, and they shouldn’t have to.

Maven is changing all that – finally we have a single, unified platform specifically designed to enable live, cohort-based programs. For anyone getting started today, I recommend skipping the mess of trying to hack together your own solution, and using Maven instead.

Case Study: A New Wave of Course Creators

Until now, most CBCs have been taught by big-name influencers with massive existing followings. They’ve often had teams of people working under them to manage marketing, operations, customer service, and instructional design.

But I believe we’re about to witness a sea change in the kinds of people who create these courses. As an example, take Angelica Tonatzin, the creator and instructor of Sacred Birth Energy: A 5-Week Online Pregnancy Circle. 

In early 2020, my wife Lauren signed up for Angelica’s program, where she became part of a group of 6 women at various stages of pregnancy. They met every Sunday for 90 minutes, and Angelica would lead them through a series of prompts and self-reflection exercises designed to bring them into closer connection with their bodies and their intuition. Lauren describes it as “the best course I’ve ever taken,” and two years later she still keeps in touch with her fellow participants as they share pictures of their growing kids.

From Angelica’s perspective, this format allowed her unique knowledge and skills to shine: her patience, empathy, curiosity, and ability to hold space for other women. She says, “I was more the facilitator, which made it easier. One of my strengths is tuning into the energy of the room to help them tune into their own wisdom and their own answers.”

She didn’t need a huge following or online presence – 4 of the women found her through prior experience with her coaching or word of mouth, while a fifth came through her Instagram following of 2,600 people. She shared with me, “You don’t need a huge following if you’re able to touch the right niche and the people who want what you have.”

She didn’t need complex operations – the course was simply a weekly Zoom call and an email sharing some reflection prompts. 

She didn’t need a lot of polished pre-recorded content – in her words, “They can go and get information anywhere, but there’s not too many spaces where they can tune into their own answers. And that’s a big part of pregnancy, learning to trust yourself.”

She didn’t need to do a lot of market research – her starting point was her own pregnancy experience and creating something she herself would have wanted. 

Each of the participants paid $597 for a 6-week program. This represented an incredible value for a reasonable price, and on Angelica’s side, amounted to $3,000 in revenue, a substantial amount for someone with no team and little overhead. As a new mother herself, this arrangement allows her to offer what she knows on her timeline and schedule. Teaching a live course allows Angelica to earn a living with her knowledge by teaching a small group, versus having to find a babysitter and schedule individual coaching calls with each person. 

Angelica’s biggest challenges are the marketing and operations needed to sustain her business. And this is where the importance of a platform like Maven comes in. On the backend, it provides a consistent interface specifically designed to support a live program, such as a customer relationship management system so you can track your students from interested to purchased to course completed, a content management system so all of your course materials can be in one place, and a community platform where students can interact and engage each other. On the frontend, it provides exposure to an audience already familiar with such programs who are looking for an expert to learn from.

If we’re going to unlock the potential of CBCs, we need to open the doors to talented teachers with valuable expertise who don’t necessarily have technical skills or unlimited amounts of free time. We need to automate the more mechanical, rote tasks of course management so that the instructor’s human skills can shine more brightly. Angelica’s story shows how CBCs could enable an entirely new kind of career path for teachers: autonomous, flexible, sustainable, and with some dedication, well paying.

By doing so, we will unleash the power of community-driven learning to make a transformative impact on students’ lives. Maven is supplying the tools that will make it possible to teach online without the hassle and headache that was required in the past. They are democratizing the opportunity to reach anyone, anywhere with the knowledge and expertise you have to offer.

The Maven team runs a free 3-week accelerator to help qualified instructors build their first Cohort-Based Course. I am joining as a guest instructor and will be sharing behind-the-scenes details of how we built our own course (and education business in general) that I’ve never made public before.  

If you want to jump into this new wave with both feet, apply here to be a part of the next cohort (the application takes about 10 minutes to complete):

Apply for the Maven Course Accelerator

They are also hiring for a range of early roles, which you can find details on here.

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The post Why I’m Becoming an Official Advisor to Maven appeared first on Forte Labs.

Build A Second Brain To Maximize Productivity and Creativity | The Louis & Kyle Show

I recently was interviewed on the Louis & Kyle Show about…you guessed it…Building a Second Brain. Here’s what we covered: 

Why we’re all content creators The downside of becoming too organized The underlying process of any creative endeavor What we can learn from kids about learning The ultimate purpose of productivity and what it means to me

Listen or watch our interesting and insightful chat here: 

Youtube Apple PodcastSpotify The Louis & Kyle Show

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The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth – Part 4

Michael Singer’s thinking and writing have provoked four fundamental mindset shifts in my life. 

First, I began to view everything as information. 

I was already biased toward this view with my work, but reading The Untethered Soul helped me apply it not just to quotes from books or academic papers, but to all the data streaming in from the world through my senses.

Seeing everything as mere information is powerful because it depersonalizes life experiences. I gradually learned to stop taking everything personally, as if I was the center of the universe and everything negative that happened in the world was a direct affront to me. It’s not about me – it’s just data.

If I run out of money and can’t pay the rent this month – that’s data. If I receive a threatening legal letter – useful data. If I can’t get out of bed in the morning because I’m dreading my work today – valuable data. The separation from self that I was learning on a somatic level through meditation began to seep into my intellectual life as well.

Once an experience could be broken down into information, I could capture it and get it off my mind so I could sleep at night. I could organize and distill it into observations, lessons, theories, and frameworks so that no failure or mistake went to waste. And most meaningfully of all, I could share my life experiences with other people so they didn’t have to go through the same pain as I had.

The ability to tell my story and share my truth has changed everything for me. It means that there is a reason for the ways I’ve suffered. There is a higher purpose at work in the seeming randomness of my life. My purpose is to be a channel for the data flowing through my life, and to extract from it as much meaning, fulfillment, and joy as I can before the information that makes up who I am returns to the primordial entropy of the universe.

If everything around me is made of information, then I must be too. All the time, the boundaries of the self are being tested and renegotiated, torn apart and reconstituted, by the flux of events small and large, at all levels. The “self” that I feel inside is an informational construct that has been built piece by piece. 

Which means it is invincible – information cannot be destroyed, only transformed. It means I am fluid – the information that makes up “me” is constantly shifting, with modules of code getting swapped in and out. And most of all, it means I can direct my own evolution – every book I read, course I take, and interview I listen to shapes the body of information that constitutes my identity.

Second, as a consequence of the first shift, I began to see everything that limits me as an opportunity for growth. 

As Singer writes, “Your views, your opinions, your preferences, your concepts, your goals, and your beliefs are all ways of bringing the infinite universe down to the finite where you can feel a sense of control.” Which means that if your reality feels threatening, that doesn’t say anything about reality. It says something about your limited mental model of reality.

When we confuse our mental model with reality itself, we struggle day and night to make the world fit our model. Anything that doesn’t fit, we call wrong, bad, or unfair. But to go beyond the limits of our mental model, we have to take the risk of not believing it. Our choice is to either resist reality, or change our model of it. 

There is a point when you begin to accept that your mental model of the world is limited, and it’s time to change it. And then there is a point where you can actually start to enjoy your model being challenged. Every pain, every loss, every conflict, every unmet expectation, and every crisis can become an intervention in your own addiction to control. 

Singer proposes an experiment to help you find the limits of your mental model. If you want to know where your walls are, just start walking toward them. Maybe you have a fear of speaking in public. In third grade you raised your hand to answer the teacher’s question, and everyone laughed at you. They forgot about it within seconds, but not you. That impression stayed with you. It is one of your walls.

If you don’t believe it is a wall, try walking through it. Let’s say something happens that activates the old fear. Your manager asks you to deliver a presentation at the upcoming all-hands meeting. The closer you get to that wall, the more you will have the urge to pull back. That’s what we do with walls – we avoid running into them. But because we avoid them, they lock us inside their perimeter. They become a prison. Since we are not willing to approach them, we cannot see what is beyond them.

Life is a constant spiritual battle, and life in the modern world is no exception. There are so few pockets of certainty and stability left anywhere. Technology and the Internet have upended all our institutions, all our plans, all our sacred and protected realities. There is no authority shielding you from the storms of change anymore. 

There is a way for us to meet the moment and transform some of this change into a change for good. You can think of yourself as a great athlete, training yourself to immediately relax through your edges every time they are hit. 

Once you learn how to do this, then it’s all over. You know you will always be free, because the worst that life can do to you is push you to your edges. You’ve already decided you want to go past them. You end up loving your edges and your limits because they always point the way to your freedom. All you have to do is relax and lean into them.

 

Third, and most profoundly, I am learning to trust life to bring me what I need.

Time and again, the natural flow of life collides with my walls and tries to tear them down. Not because there is a will or intention behind it, but simply because my flawed mental model is constantly bumping up against the reality it is trying to describe. Instead of defending that reality, I try to allow reality to correct and improve it. I do this because I know that every time I defend myself, I am really defending my walls. When I decide that I am going to face reality, just as it is, no matter what it takes, I am free. 

Singer closes with an observation that I’ve adopted as my own: that the only thing we really want from life is to feel enthusiasm, joy, and love. If we can feel those things all the time, then who cares what happens outside? If you can always feel excited about the experience of each moment, then it doesn’t make any difference what the next moment brings.

There is tremendous, almost indescribable joy, beauty, love, and peace living within us already. Sometimes I get a small glimpse of it and it is breathtaking. The worst that life can throw at me is welcome, because the worst that life can throw at me is the best means to unlock those forces inside me. 

And fourth, I’ve embraced the idea implicit in Singer’s work, though he never states it directly, that reality is enough.

This physical universe is enough. It is meaningful enough, vivid enough, interesting enough, varied enough. There is more than enough of everything we want and need available in just the concrete reality we can see, hear, touch, and feel.

One of the most inspiring implications of Singer’s work for me is that it dispenses with the need for religion, while retaining the meaningfulness and sense of purpose that religion used to have a monopoly on. We don’t need to invent authoritarian mythological beings or alternate worlds of heaven or hell. We don’t need stories to reassure us of what happens to us after we die. We don’t need systems of judgment or penance or sin or redemption. We don’t need to personify the universe through the lens of our human drama for it to make sense. 

The universe we have is enough. It has no mind of its own, no personality, no goals or purpose, no standards of truth or morality. It has a relationship with each of us, because we are part of it, but it doesn’t care about us. All these possibilities feel incredibly threatening to the religious worldview, but they don’t have to be. We could decide that there is enough information in this universe already, and that we’re going to spend our time working with the data that we’re sure exists, rather than creating more.

I’m not sure why that possibility – of a strictly secular, materialist worldview that is still imbued with meaning – is so inspiring to me. It feels more egalitarian – it’s no longer about who was born into the right beliefs, or who curried the most favor with the right divine entity. It is about who pays the most attention, and is the most willing to change, and is fundamentally the most open to discovering something about the reality they emerged into. 

A secular, materialist universe would demand much more of us as humans. We wouldn’t be able to outsource our ethical reasoning to a moralistic framework created thousands of years ago. Or at least, we’d understand that all moral frameworks are circumstantial and temporary, made for one era but not others. It can be terrifying to embrace a relativist mindset when all you’ve known is the One True Path.

On the individual level, we would have the privilege and the responsibility of developing our own beliefs, instead of adopting wholesale the beliefs of others. We would be able to run experiments about what it means to live a good life, and to test whether they really work, and assemble a mix of beliefs from different sources. Each person would be free to craft their own belief system as a singular creative act. 

More practically, this worldview helps me to accept the flow of life’s momentum. There are no secret underlying forces at work, no narrative that explains why things happen the way they do. There is no purpose to the universe, much less a purpose for my life. Which means there’s no point in stressing out about “finding” it. 

Singer writes:

There is so much evidence that life does quite well on its own. The planets stay in orbit, tiny seeds grow into giant trees, weather patterns have kept forests across the globe watered for millions of years, and a single fertilized cell grows into a beautiful baby. We are not doing any of these things as conscious acts of will; they are all being done by the incomprehensible perfection of life itself. All these amazing events, and countless more, are being carried out by forces of life that have been around for billions of years—the very same forces of life that we are consciously pitting our will against on a daily basis. If the natural unfolding of the process of life can create and take care of the entire universe, is it really reasonable for us to assume that nothing good will happen unless we force it to?

He continues elsewhere:

What would happen if we respected the flow of life and used our free will to participate in what’s unfolding, instead of fighting it? What would be the quality of the life that unfolds? Would it just be random events with no order or meaning, or would the same perfection of order and meaning that manifests in the rest of the universe manifest in the everyday life around us?

There is no way to prove that the universe we see is all that exists. No more than any religion can prove its version of events. Thus it lies beyond faith, but also beyond science. It is a choice about one’s orientation toward life. 

I’m trying on this perspective for now, knowing that not only can I change my mind in the future, but that is the whole point. 

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The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth – Part 3

Imagine that one day you notice a thorn in your side. 

You may not even know how it got there. But it hurts quite a bit every time something touches it. You decide to build a “pain protection machine” to mitigate the pain. It is a metal exoskeleton that wraps your torso in titanium so nothing can get close to it.

This exoskeleton is quite heavy though. So you create hydraulic legs that extend down to the ground, with wheels to allow you to easily roll the device anywhere. Now that you have this structure, you make it more comfortable, with a built-in LCD display for watching your favorite shows, a headrest in case you get tired, and a dozen cupholders and electrical outlets. 

You’ve made it so sophisticated and comfortable that you never have to leave it!

Your protective device might become so fancy that you begin to receive recognition and respect for it. People praise how thoughtful and diligent you’ve been to construct it, and even begin asking for your help in building one for themselves. You might build a whole reputation and career around how impressive and sophisticated your mechanism of self-protection is.

You tell yourself, “I have solved my thorn problem. I am a free being, and can go anywhere and do whatever I want. This thorn used to run my life, and now it doesn’t run anything.”

The truth is, the thorn completely runs your entire life. It affects all your decisions, including where you go, whom you interact with, and what actions you take. It determines where you’re allowed to work, what house you live in, and what kind of bed you sleep in at night. You may feel that because you’ve minimized the pain of the problem, you’ve solved the problem. But it is not solved. All you did was devote your life to it.

The thorn is a trauma or wound – a “samskara.” And as humans we have a lot more than one thorn. We have sensitivities about loneliness, about rejection, about failure, about our physical appearance, about our mental abilities. We are walking around with many sharp thorns pushed right up against the most sensitive parts of our heart.

People will do anything to not feel those thorns. They will turn to drugs and alcohol, video games and porn, social media and Netflix. They will enter relationships to lessen the pain of their thorns, and work at jobs that promise them they will never have to confront those painful parts of themselves.

But there is always another choice for what to do about these thorns: you can pull them out. 

You can look deep within yourself and decide you don’t want the most fearful parts of yourself running your life. And you must, because any behavior based upon avoiding pain ultimately becomes a doorway back to the pain itself. It will keep getting worse and worse until you face it.

You want to talk to people because you find them interesting, not because you’re lonely. You want to have relationships with people because you genuinely like them, not because you need them to like you. You want to love because you truly love, not because you need a distraction from your inner problems.

To free yourself from your thorns, you simply stop protecting them. As long as you’re doing something to avoid feeling them, they aren’t given the chance to work themselves out. Everyday life experiences that confront you are the very ones that will eventually push your thorns out. 

All you have to do is keep your heart open and permit the pain to come up and pass through. This is the beginning and end of the entire path – you surrender yourself to emptying yourself. When your baggage gets hit, let go right then and there. It won’t be easier if you explore it or play with it, hoping to take the edge off.

The real transformation begins when you use your problems as agents for growth, instead of avoiding them. Then you’ll realize that life is actually trying to help you. Life is surrounding you with people and situations that stimulate growth.

A walkway between work and life

The most surprising thing I learned while reading The Surrender Experiment was that Singer wasn’t just the author of a string of books about spirituality. He had also founded a software company called the Medical Manager Corporation, which eventually became a $300 million a year business with twenty-three hundred employees.

In his book, he tells the story of strolling into a Radio Shack one day in the early 1980s, and stumbling upon one of the first personal computers widely available for consumers, the TRS-80. It came with just 16k of memory, a twelve-inch monitor, and a standard cassette recorder for storage. The computer instantly called out to him, and he took it home with barely a notion of how he would use it.

From the very beginning, Singer described his relationship to the machine as a deeply spiritual one:

My mind became very quiet the moment I sat down at the machine. It was very much like entering meditation. The energy would rise up and focus beautifully at the point between my eyebrows, and a peace would come over me.

Singer’s life philosophy is to surrender himself to whatever life throws at him, and in this case, life presented a request from a local doctor’s office to create a software program to manage their patient records. 

He said yes, and he and a colleague began teaching themselves how to build software. Seeing the project as a gift that life had given them, they committed to the highest level of craftsmanship without worrying about monetization or a business model:

From the very beginning of my programming career, my heart demanded that every line of code had to be the absolute best I could do. It didn’t matter what I was being paid; everything had to be perfect…My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself—because it was.

The product they created, known as the Medical Manager, would be acquired years later by WebMD for $5 billion dollars. At one point, the product was used by 25% of all private medical practices in the U.S. In 2000, the software was added to the permanent collection on information technology at the Smithsonian Museum of American History for its role in shaping the medical software industry.

Throughout this incredible trajectory, Singer managed his company as CEO without leaving the woods of Alachua or putting aside his spiritual pursuits. 

I was moved by Singer’s account of how running his business was just as much a part of his spiritual journey as anything else. This was the middle way between the “worldly” and the “spiritual” that I had unknowingly been seeking:

It was around that time when I noticed that my mental concepts separating worldly and spiritual had finally dissolved. Everything began to appear as the miraculous perfection of the flow of life…life experiences, including running a business at this level, were doing as much to free me spiritually as my years of solitary meditation.

As I was reading The Surrender Experiment, I came upon a photograph of a wooden walkway that Singer and his team had built through the marshlands. It connected his home on the grounds of the Temple with the corporate headquarters they had built nearby, allowing him to walk within minutes between his home and office.

This photo captivated me instantly. I couldn’t look away from it. It was so preposterous – a spiritual temple connected directly to a tech company office – that it seemed like some sort of cosmic joke. It challenged something inside me, and after some reflection I understood what it was.

I always saw the domain of business and work as completely separate from anything personal or metaphysical. Business was supposed to be about concrete, practical problem-solving performed by serious professionals who never allowed their personal thoughts or feelings to intrude on their work. This simple walkway represented the opposite: a bridge between the worlds.

On my second day on the grounds of the Temple, I made a point to visit the wooden walkway. It was utterly unremarkable, a simple three-way bridge connecting Singer’s home, the Temple, and a building that had been the company’s first office. 

I sat at the intersection for a good hour, meditating and thinking. What would such a bridge look like in my own life? Could I also create a business that aligned with my personal growth? Could I even use the business as a means to producing more of the transcendent experiences I was seeking? Could work be a way of freeing myself, not just making a living?

The psyche in fear

Our minds and bodies evolved in an environment full of constant mortal threats. But over the centuries the march of civilization has eliminated most of those threats from our everyday lives.

In response, the protective instincts that once shielded our bodies have adapted toward defending us psychologically. Our major struggles are now with our inner fears, insecurities, and self-destructive behavior patterns. We defend our self-concept as if our lives depended on it. 

Since it’s not socially acceptable to run into the woods and hide like a deer, we hide inside. We withdraw, close down, and pull back behind a protective shield. You protect your ego – the part that feels it needs protection even though no physical attack is taking place.

But if you continue to protect yourself, you will never be free. It’s that simple. Because you’re scared, you’ve locked yourself in a fortress and sealed all the doors and windows. Now it’s dark and you want to feel the sunlight, but you can’t. It’s impossible.

All your habits and idiosyncrasies will stay the same. You won’t grow or change. This is how life becomes stagnant and colorless. People will say things like, “You know we don’t talk about that subject around your father.” There are all these rules about things that can’t happen, because if they did, it would cause disturbance inside. Living this way allows very little joy, spontaneity, or excitement for life.

If you really want to grow, you have to do the opposite. Real spiritual growth happens when there is only one of you inside. There’s not a part that’s scared and another part that’s protecting the part that’s scared. All parts are unified and whole. When there is no part of yourself you’re unwilling to see, the mind is no longer divided against itself. Everything you feel inside is just something you feel inside. It’s not you; it’s what you feel.

In order to experience this state of awareness, you must let your entire psyche surface. Right now, your psyche is fragmented into tiny pieces that are frozen within you. Your psyche fragmented itself to keep the parts from feeling each other. But you’ve decided you are ready to feel the pain – you are willing to pay that price for your freedom. Every little fragmented piece must come into the light of your awareness and be permitted to pass through. 

Everywhere you go there’s something or someone trying to disturb you. Why not let them have it? If you don’t want the part of you that’s disturbed, then don’t protect it. 

The reward for not protecting your psyche is liberation – you are free to walk through this world without a problem on your mind. You are just having fun experiencing whatever happens next.

Addicted to control

As I walked away from the Temple for the last time, got in my car, and drove away, I felt an intense disturbance inside me.

I was face to face with the core of my psyche: the need for certainty and control. It was like facing the final boss on the last level of a video game. Looming before me out of the dark mist was the addiction, the thorn, that I could see was running my life.

I had left my consulting job because I wanted to feel in control of my time, my priorities, and my future. That initially gave me a rush of freedom, but before I knew it, I was saddled with the even more burdensome expectations of demanding clients. My need for financial security led me to create a new product without feedback or collaboration with anyone. It failed, and soon my finances were in freefall. My desperate search for control had led me to a place where I felt completely out of control.

I had turned to more profitable corporate training in response, but that was exactly the environment of conformity I’d fled from in the first place. I felt like an addict returning for a fix again and again, no amount of the substance ever truly satisfying my endless appetite. The more I worked to control my environment and shield myself from the demands of others, the more out of control and subject to their demands I felt.

Sitting in my rental car pondering all of this, I opened my worn copy of The Untethered Soul sitting on the passenger seat next to me, turned to a random page, and read these words as if written for me:

Your mind has very little control over this world. It is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It cannot control the weather and other natural forces. Nor can it control all people, places, and things around you…Just relieve your mind of the job of making sure that everyone and everything will be the way you need them to be so that you can feel better inside…The truth is, everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything. And that’s the only time everything will be okay.

I had been meditating regularly for a couple years at this point, but reading these words awoke something in me. I felt a sense of separation within, and suddenly I could see the “human” I was watching as separate from “me” to a new degree. It was like looking through a camera over my own shoulder, as though I was playing a character in a video game. 

With that shift in perspective, I suddenly felt a tremendous wave of compassion for my own mind. It was smart and capable, but not at all up to the task I had given it: fixing every problem, controlling every situation, predicting every event. I could sense its tiredness and its weariness.

My past had taught me that I must control my environment or it would hurt me. It was either control things, or be controlled. But now I saw that trying to control what happened to me was not my mind’s highest calling. The mind can solve problems, but it is meant for so much more.

I decided I wasn’t going to live this way anymore. I decided to trust that life was inherently good, inherently full of opportunity and luck, inherently in my favor. I decided that I would allow reality to teach me what it had to teach me, no matter how painful it was or how much I wanted to resist. 

And that choice has made all the difference.

To be continued…

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The post The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth – Part 3 appeared first on Forte Labs.

Book Update #7: Reflections on a New Season

My book Building a Second Brain comes out in 60 days. Cohort 14 of our course started a week ago with over 1,300 students enrolled. Our team of over 30 staff and collaborators is humming along like a well-oiled productivity machine. 

On every front, we’re seeing unbelievable momentum and excitement for our work. Yet I find myself in the garage studio tonight unable to sleep. 

It started this morning, the moment I woke and noticed something seemed…different. It felt like a tide had turned, like a season had passed. I somehow woke up a different person than when I went to bed. 

The difference crystallized for me when I turned to my writing projects later in the day. I’d set them aside for many months as I focused on getting the manuscript finished and course launched. Now, I saw them in a new light. To my surprise, all my half-written drafts seemed so pointless. They were all fussy, pedantic explorations of obscure questions that my past self thought were so important. From my current vantage point, they looked trivial.

I realized in a flash that I am now in a new chapter of my life. I’m not sure when the page turned exactly, but the old chapter is finished. I feel a surge of remorse at all the unrealized goals and dreams I left behind there. But I know that what’s being asked of me now is to rise to a new level of self-expression and to step out onto a new stage – the world stage. 

 

Even after all this time, there are still ways I’m hiding. There are ways I’m holding back who I am out of fear. I avoid speaking hard truths to people I know need to hear them out of fear they’ll be offended. I avoid meeting influential leaders out of fear I’ll say something stupid, look foolish, and lose my chance to make an impression. I avoid delivering my message in plain language because I’m afraid someone will point out some missed nuance. After all these years of working in public, I find there are still levels upon levels of self-expression beyond what I currently know. 

I can see clearly that “details” are my security blanket. Finding them, recording them, organizing them, tracking them, using them to protect me from uncertainty. Like a pig wallowing in mud, I’ve long wallowed in my precious details. Part of what this next season is asking of me is to let go of details. To not worry about them so much. To not try to control them so tightly. To ignore them sometimes and go right to the heart of the matter before I’ve figured it out perfectly. 

Perfection – that old friend and enemy. It’s the name of the station flashing by the train window as I pull away. It’s time to let go of my last finger grip on any illusion of perfection that still remains. Soon there will be people all over the world reading my book, in languages I didn’t write in and countries I will never visit. Many of them won’t finish it, many won’t understand it, and many won’t find value in it. And there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I am trusting my life’s work to a vast network that doesn’t care about me and that I can’t influence. At the peak of my success I am most out of control – a perfectionist’s nightmare. 

It strikes me that the ultimate trajectory of this book is now out of my hands. Don’t get me wrong – there’s still TONS of interviews to record, events to speak at, and promotions to run. The marketing campaign has barely begun and will unfold over many months. But most of that is already pre-determined. The manuscript is finished, the talking points outlined. Once a baby is born, it’s halfway to being grown up, its essential nature already set. I am merely at the service of a second brain meme that has already gone beyond me and taken on a life of its own. 

I feel like I am standing at the precipice of the unknown, staring into the darkness. For more than 3 years, this book has defined my waking moments. It was a pre-defined commitment I had locked into place, and thrown away the key. For several years before that, developing the course was the driving force. But now, the degrees of freedom are opening up. The variables are unknown and at play. The relentless convergence of the last 5 years is finally giving way to divergence, like a narrow mountain pass giving way to a verdant valley. 

For the first time in a long time, I have the chance to ask myself the ancient questions: Who do I want to be? How do I want to live? What activities do I want to fill my days? Who do I want to spend those days with? What matters enough to devote my one precious life to, given that every day is a devotion? This much freedom is almost overwhelming. The muscle of obligation has grown a bit too strong, has been exercised a bit too much. It’s time to give up some of that raw strength in favor of fluidity once more.

I know who I am in the face of adversity, but how about in the face of abundance? Will I rise to the occasion of not having to struggle for survival? Will I be able to let go of the compromises I’ve had to make to get this far? The compromises to my health, my hobbies, my close friendships, and my carefree enjoyment of days with nothing on my mind? Who is the self that will emerge from this experience, and will I like them?

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The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth – Part 2

 As I approached the town of Alachua, I started looking for the site of the Temple.

I half expected a towering spire to appear along the highway, but there wasn’t one. Then I expected to see a billboard along the two-lane highway threading its way through the backcountry, but there was nothing. As I turned off the main road onto a dirt track, I was sure I would encounter at least a sign telling me I’d arrived.

But there was no formal entrance, and before I knew it I was parked in an ordinary parking lot at the edge of a sprawling plot of land. I glanced Singer driving by in an old beat-up pickup truck. “What is going on here?” I wondered. Could it be that this famed guru had nothing in the way of ceremony or fanfare?

I parked the car and started strolling around the lot. There wasn’t a person in sight, and I walked all around the property until I ended up back at my car. I encountered only a small handful of unremarkable buildings spread around the land. It was getting late, and I decided to head out and find a place to stay the night.

My mind was still racing, trying to come up with an explanation for what I was doing here in case someone confronted me. But I also trusted my intuition that it was important for me to be here. I felt a sense of peace and quiet descend on me; the kind that arrives when you literally follow your heart.

I made my way to the local Motel 6 and settled in for the night, with a plan to return the next morning.

Samskaras: Impressions from the past

What is it about the heart center that allows it to open and close? Let’s look at the mechanics.

The heart closes when it is blocked, like any valve. It gets blocked by unfinished energy patterns from the past, which are stored in the heart for later processing. The Hindus call such a pattern a “samskara.” Samskara is a Sanskrit word meaning “impression,” like an impression of a shape upon the sand. 

Think of it like a little energy loop that keeps a bit of information trapped and cycling in place. This packet of cycling energy is quite stable, and can remain there indefinitely. All the samskaras you’ve collected over your lifetime are stored there in your heart center.

If these samskaras build up enough, they can block the flow of energy flowing through you. Like plaques building up in your veins, they can choke off the flow. When this happens, your view of life becomes dark because every emotion has to pass through that dark energy.

Every samskara is programmed with the specific details of the event that created it. 

For example, if you caught your boyfriend cheating on you, very detailed data about that trauma is embedded within. The emotions of the event, the circumstances surrounding the event, the people and places associated with the event – you will have enhanced sensitivity toward any of these details. 

Your entire being wants to process this information and be free of it. At first, it will try to express itself through the mind. You’ll think about it constantly, for days, your mind filling with chatter.

Anything that reminds you of this traumatic event – a similar location, the same time of year, the people who were there, or even the color of a shirt that reminds you of your ex – any element in common will trigger a cascade of frenzied thoughts as your inner voice tries to explain, rationalize, and justify what happened.

Samskaras are not a metaphor. They are real. They don’t just disappear on their own with time. 

Long term, the ones that aren’t processed via the mind will be forced into the heart, where they will express themselves through emotional upheaval. Any experience connected to the original trauma will bring all that data rushing back into your awareness, imploring you to feel it fully this time. If you still resist it, all that unprocessed energy gets forced into deep storage in the heart.

We generally don’t like any reminder of uncomfortable memories from the past. We call it “being triggered” and do everything possible to avoid it.

But there is another way to treat the experience of being triggered. An experience is just a pattern of energy flowing through your senses. It isn’t the experience itself that creates a samskara. It is when we block it, and close around it, and prevent it from passing through us, that the pattern gets trapped within.

These patterns are flowing through us constantly, all day every day. You’ll see that they are awakening and touching you on a deep level all the time. Moment after moment, experiences are rushing in and you are growing as your heart and mind expand. 

Every moment can be a stimulating, moving experience if you are completely open to it.

The service begins

I returned to the Temple of the Universe the next day, completely unsure of what to expect.

I wandered back onto the temple grounds, and soon found myself drawn to a central building, made from dark wood with a sloping roof. It was the main meeting hall. Coincidentally, a weekly service was about to begin.

The sanctuary had an open floor plan, without chairs or benches. Like a yoga studio, a slightly raised platform marked the front of the room, with the rest of the seating area arranged in a semi-circle around it. 

Pictures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary hung next to Hindu gods and a smiling statue of Buddha. It was like a spiritual United Nations, all faiths and traditions welcome. I noticed a portrait of Yogananda, an influential guru who had been one of the first Eastern teachers to visit the U.S. and had famously inspired Steve Jobs.

There were about 25 people in the room. I could tell most of them were here for the first time. I would later find out they were from all over the country, and most of them had simply driven here out of curiosity after reading The Untethered Soul or Singer’s other books. 

I spoke with one young couple, teenagers from a couple states away, who huddled together on the floor with a blanket wrapped around them, eager to hear more about what this philosophy entailed. I was moved by the sight of so many curious seekers, meeting here in the middle of the woods for no reason other than a thirst for knowledge. It had been a long time since I found myself in such a congregation.

The service was unlike any I had ever been to. Singer came in from the back and sat on a cushion at one edge of the raised platform. He exuded a humble, yet expansive presence. His remarks seemed unplanned, but purposeful. His subject that night: a history of the universe.

That’s right. Singer chose this evening to tell us the (abbreviated) history of the entire universe. 

He started with the Big Bang, describing the unfathomable amounts of energy unleashed in an instant of primordial time, and how it expanded from there at close to the speed of light. He recounted the formation of galaxy clusters, waving his hands in the air like a conductor leading a celestial orchestra. He breathlessly narrated how entire star systems spun out as the newborn universe cooled. It was all scientifically accurate, as far as I could tell. The birth of a purely physical universe, unfolding according to natural laws.

Singer went on with his story for more than 30 minutes, every one of us spellbound by the play by play of an infant universe in the throes of cataclysmic formation. He slowed down as he approached geological time, narrating how our solar system began to take shape, and how the Earth and other rocky planets coalesced out of the cooling debris. He moved on to how the molten core of our planet came to be, the mysterious emergence of life from bubbling wetlands, and finished with the punctuation mark of humankind’s origins on the plains of East Africa.

It was a sermon, but not one with a single takeaway or lesson. As Singer finished, we were all struck with a profound sense of our insignificance. The realization that we are all just miniscule specks of dust in a vast universe whose existence has nothing to do with us.

Next we moved on to music. Instruments were passed around, and everyone joined in with an eclectic mix of percussion instruments, chanting, a melodic chorus, and occasional raucous cries. There was no clear object of worship, and no worship leader. 

I was taken aback, amused, but most of all, moved by this spontaneous outpouring of emotion. Free of dogma and theology, we were just people brought together by our search for something beyond ourselves. I was allowing myself to reconnect with the world of the spirit after years spent denying it.

I spoke with Singer after the service as he stood by the exit and greeted people. His eyes were so crinked by smiling that I couldn’t tell if they were open. He looked down at the ground and wouldn’t meet my eye, and kept bowing with his hands folded together in front of his chest as I thanked him for what he had written. He seemed introverted, almost shy in the presence of so many guests. I had the sense that this kind of encounter was a frequent occurrence for him.

As I shook Singer’s hand, I felt an electric prickle moving up my forearm as if he was plugged into a wall socket. In his book, he had described waves of energy flowing through his body and washing over his limbs, and I couldn’t help but imagine them flowing up through my arms as we touched.

The mechanics of healing

When a samskara is stimulated, it begins to open like a flower and release its stored energy. 

You’ll experience this as flashes of memory from the original event rushing into your mind – the thoughts you had at the time, the feelings you experienced, even smells and bodily sensations. The samskara stores a complete snapshot of the event down to the tiniest details.

If old memories come up because you were unable to process them before, their reemergence is another chance to let them go. Do what you have to do to process them – cry, laugh, scream, relax your heart, forgive. Just don’t push them back down. 

Of course it hurts when they come up. What was stored with pain is going to be released with pain. You get to decide if you want to continue walking around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life. It only hurts for a minute and then it’s over.

In the end, we all have a choice: do we want to try and change the world so it doesn’t disturb our samskaras, or are we willing to go through the process of letting them go?

You can reach a point where you become centered and aware enough that you just sit back and watch this stuff come up. It will arise like a torrent and pass right through and out of you. The samskaras will come up during the mundane events of your day and even in your dreams. Your heart will become accustomed to the process of releasing and cleansing. Don’t process them one by one; that’s too slow. Just stay centered behind the flow and let go. 

As you go through life, things will happen that trigger the stored energies within you. 

Someone disagrees with you harshly in a meeting. Your ego and pride are hurt, and you feel a tightening. That is your cue that it’s time to grow. The minute you sense the energy within you starting to get strange, just stop. Stop mid-sentence, because you know where that road will lead. You can actually feel a sense of anticipation and excitement when this happens. It’s time to let go of the part of yourself you’re defending. 

Every time you feel the energy get activated inside, relax behind it. Don’t fight with it. Don’t try to change it. Don’t judge it. Don’t tell yourself, “Oh I can’t believe I’m feeling this.” Then you’re just going with the guilt thoughts instead of the wounded pride thoughts. Relax the area around your heart, and play with letting go of the feeling of being bothered.

This isn’t about fighting or struggling with the emotions you feel inside. Being free is not about the absence of emotions. There is nothing wrong with feeling anger, jealousy, or attraction. It’s not your fault those energies exist. Just remember that all those thoughts and feelings don’t make any difference. They don’t make you pure or impure. They are not you. They belong to the human you are watching. 

What I am describing here is a spiritual path in which you use life itself to free yourself. 

A walk with Rose

The service ended, Singer and his crew left, and a few of us were left in the meeting hall speaking amongst ourselves.

I felt awkward. I’m not very good at making small talk with strangers. But across the room I saw a middle-aged woman, and felt compelled to speak to her. I learned that her name was Rose. She was here for the same reasons I was – out of curiosity, hope, and a search for an answer to a question.

We began to walk around the grounds together, and I discovered that she was also dealing with a debilitating health condition. At this point I had spent years trying to diagnose and fix an unexplained pain in my throat, which I’ve written about previously. She’d also tried every kind of doctor and treatment to no avail. I felt a strong sense of kinship with her, as if we were destined to meet.

I had walked around the grounds of the Temple the day before, but hadn’t known about any of the trails leading into the wilderness. She led me to one, and we spent a couple hours exploring the most beautiful, untouched trail in the fading twilight. We spoke of our journeys, of what it was like to hope against hope. We talked about our families, the impact our condition had had on us, and what we had learned from Singer’s work.

For so long I had kept my own chronic pain hidden from almost everyone. It wasn’t supposed to exist, and so I didn’t speak of it, as if not speaking its name would make it cease to exist. I had built up a structure of shame around my pain, as if it was my fault somehow. That whole aspect of my life had become like a forbidden secret, a corner of my psyche kept hidden under lock and key. But the longer I refused to share it with anyone, the more it dominated my thoughts.

Speaking with Rose I felt a newfound freedom inside me. Seeing my own experience reflected in hers, I could see for the first time that my pain had a purpose – that it was a necessary and important part of my life journey. I hadn’t expected it, and hadn’t wanted it, but that was exactly why it was so valuable. It was teaching me who I was and who I could become in the face of adversity.

In his autobiography, Singer writes of the moment the spiritual flow that he had spent years cultivating began to overflow into his intellect and creativity. 

He was still pursuing a doctorate in economics, but had all but dropped out in order to meditate for as many hours per day as possible. But his professor insisted that he finish his final paper, and he decided to surrender to the request like so many others. He tells the story:

Notepad after notepad became filled with a totally logical presentation that began with a premise, laid out its argument, and ended with a conclusion. Along the way, there were graphs to present logical relationships, and there were references to facts I had previously read or heard in class. These facts would need to be polished and footnoted later, so I simply left space for them and kept on writing what was created in my mind. I stopped for nothing. There was no worrying or judgment of good or bad; I just allowed the process to unfold. When artists create a work, they first get the inspiration, and then they bring it down to the physical plane. That process is exactly what happened to me that night alone in my van. The inspiration for the entire paper came all at once, and then my mind digested it and gave it form. Instead of a sculpture, a painting, or a symphony, my work of art was an economic treatise. It came from where art comes from, but the medium of expression was logical thinking instead of marble or paint. I had no idea where that spark of inspiration came from. I only knew that in the flash of a moment, I had all the material I needed to write a doctoral-level paper.

As the parts of my life began to connect and make sense to me, I was starting to experience this kind of integration in my own life. All the flows started coming together – the flow of life, the flow of meditation, the flow of creativity, and the flow of the intellect. 

I began to understand that these are not separate flows, each requiring their own dedicated effort. They are interconnected, the flow of emotions driving the surge of ideas which is channeled through the flow of focused writing. 

I was one being, with information flowing through me as fast as I would allow it. I could label that information in different ways, but in the end it was all the same – the essence of who I am manifesting itself into the physical reality around me. 

Like a great engine starting, I began to experience inside of myself the quickening pace of a heart and mind unblocked and uninhibited by the traumas of my past. Not that they were all gone. Far from it! But after several years of seeking and meditation, it was as if a critical threshold had been reached. It now took as much energy to hold back the flow as it did to let it rip. 

I decided to stand aside and see what would happen if I removed my “self” – my ego, my pride, my fear, my past – as the bottleneck to my creative expression. I would perform my own version of a surrender experiment. 

It would be a grand experiment to find out for myself just how many good things life would bring my way if I expressed who I was without reservation.

To be continued…

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The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth – Part 1

One book has impacted me more than any other over the past 10 years: The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer.

I first read it in 2014 about a year after becoming self-employed. The first rush of excitement at my newfound freedom had waned, and I was beginning to feel the turbulence of the uncertain freelance world.

When I think back to the young man I was at this time, in my 20s, I see someone who felt threatened by life. 

I wasn’t able to simply be with many of my emotions. Fear, anxiety, disappointment, helplessness, and rage were my enemies, and I arranged my life to avoid them as much as possible. I thought that if somehow I could just not feel those feelings, I would be happy.

But my desire to start my own business had plunged me into a world of tremendous uncertainty and turmoil. I constantly found myself in uncomfortable situations – with disappointed clients, or marketing my services, or expressing my ideas with confidence – that I felt completely unprepared to handle.

I wish I could say I sought out personal growth on purpose. I wish I could say I was a naturally spiritual person courageously seeking out answers to the big questions of human existence. The truth is that life demanded it of me in order to survive.

I felt like I was at the center of a slowly constricting circle, the emotional borders of my life closing in on me inexorably.

Late one night, I was browsing Quora, searching for practical answers to my existential questions. Someone recommended the book, and I ordered it. I needed some wisdom on the intense worries and fears beginning to rage within me: Would I succeed? Would I fail? Was I making a terrible mistake that would end my career before it had even started?

I read it once, and then I kept reading it year after year. I was astonished to read Singer describe in precise detail what I was experiencing inside in a way no one ever had before. I used the book like a roadmap for my personal growth, guiding me on a journey of self-understanding that I was only dimly aware I had embarked on. 

In 2015, I went on to read Singer’s autobiography, The Surrender Experiment, which tells the story of his journey from young man to successful entrepreneur to spiritual guru over the course of several decades.

Hearing about the life experiences that led to his awakening made his writing all the more compelling, and I felt a deep desire to know more.

Singer told the story of how he conducted a “surrender experiment,” which involved continuously surrendering to the flow of life’s events, rather than trying to change or control them. He made “yes” his default response to whatever request life seemed to be asking of him, even if it required giving up his own plans and goals. 

I remember reaching the end of Singer’s autobiography, closing my eyes, and trying to sense what life was asking of me. I was shocked to hear the answer that arose within me: “Go for a visit.”

“What?!” I thought. I was supposed to go visit Michael Singer in person? What an absurd idea. Still, I googled his meditation and retreat center, called the Temple of the Universe, and discovered it was located in a small town called Alachua, in Northern Florida outside of Gainesville.

When would I ever find myself in Florida? I couldn’t afford to make such a trip on a whim.

Then with a start I realized I was due to visit Florida for a friend’s wedding the very next month.

With goosebumps on my arms, and after counting every last dollar in my checking account, I made the decision to extend my trip by a few days. Somehow I knew I needed to meet the man behind the writing that had affected me so much.

I’ve waited years to tell this story because it’s taken this long for me to understand what has changed for me through reading and practicing Singer’s work. These ideas have provoked a series of mindset shifts that have radically transformed how I approach business, relationships, emotions, and life itself. 

This is the story of the transformational journey I made to the Temple of the Universe, the most powerful ideas I’ve drawn from Singer’s writing, and my own insights into the nature of the human psyche I’ve discovered along the way.

The wisdom of direct experience

I was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian church in Southern California. 

As I’ve written about previously, every aspect of that belief system points to outside sources of authority: God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, angels and other heavenly beings, apostles and prophets of the past, church elders and parents, in approximately that order.

Not only are you not supposed to trust your inner intuitions and feelings, you should be actively suspicious of them. The devil speaks in the quiet of your idle mind, so it’s best to follow the guidance of your elders.

The Untethered Soul starts with a premise that couldn’t be further from that view. You are the sole authority over your soul. Only you and your personal experiences can point you toward truth. Experimentation is not only allowed – it is essential. You must go on your own journey of self-transformation to discover the nature of that truth for yourself.

This is an empirical philosophy based on direct experience. Singer asks us to apply the scientific lens of skepticism and questioning to our spiritual life, and to be open to whatever answers arise.

What are you directly experiencing exactly? The self – the structure of beliefs, opinions, wounds, narratives, aversions, cravings, and thoughts that we call the “human psyche.”

Every experience we have in the material world is a reflection of our psyche. The experiences that hurt are pointing to the parts of ourselves that are hurt, or incomplete, or in need of protection. The experiences that give us joy are pointing to the parts of ourselves that are fluid and alive.

Singer’s message is simple: we can use the everyday experiences of life to heal our psyche of the wounds of the past. The answer lies not in theological texts or abstract theories, but in the moment to moment experience of being alive.

Learning to hear the inner voice

Singer tells the story of the day his spiritual path began.

At the time, he was working on a Phd in economics at the University of Florida, with hopes of eventually becoming a college professor. He had no preexisting interest in spirituality or metaphysics. In his own words:

I was a ’60s-groomed, college-intellectual hippie. It is worth mentioning just how analytically oriented I was at the time. I had never even taken a philosophy, psychology, or religion course while in college. My electives at school were symbolic logic, advanced calculus, and theoretical statistics. This makes what happened to me all the more amazing.

Out of the blue, for no apparent reason, as he was sitting on the couch in his living room and hanging out with his brother-in-law, Singer noticed for the very first time a voice inside his head:

There was a complete sense of separation between my anxious mind, which was spewing out possible topics to talk about, and me, the one who was simply aware that my mind was doing this. It was like I was suddenly able to remain above my mind and quietly watch the thoughts being created. Believe it or not, that subtle shift in my seat of awareness became a tornado that rearranged my entire life.

He noticed that the voice never admitted it was wrong, and that he would continue believing the voice even after it had been wrong a hundred times before. Every moment he was awake, he was tormented by the mad ravings of what he began to call his “inner monologue.”

Critiquing, narrating, judging, wondering, inventing stories, asking questions, answering them – we all have this voice, and it never stops. Noticing it leads to the natural next step – realizing that you are not the voice. You are the one hearing it. How could a voice notice itself? Clearly there have to be two entities in there – the voice that speaks, and the one who hears it speak.

Which soon leads to the next realization – that our problems in life don’t come from events in our lives. There is no pain, fear, anxiety, or depression anywhere out there in the natural world. Our problems come from the chaos and commotion that that voice in our heads makes about what is happening.

We don’t really experience the world itself. We experience a mental model of the world we are running in our heads. And the voice is the hidden narrator of everything going on in that little fake world we’ve created for ourselves. 

The purpose of the voice is to protect you from the uncertainty of reality. To filter the raw stream of sensory data into a nice story where you can feel in control. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel in control. But true personal growth is about transcending the part of yourself that thinks it needs to be in control in order to be okay.

You are not a human; you just happen to be watching one. The thoughts of the human you are inhabiting are not your thoughts. The feelings of the human you are watching are not your feelings. There is something about you that exists apart from all the experiences and memories of the human you happen to be monitoring.

Singer’s story gave my meditation – and through it, my spiritual life – a goal and a direction: I wanted to learn how to separate my sense of “me” from the inner storm of thoughts and feelings that never let me rest. I had learned the “how” of meditation at this point, but now I had the “why.”

So much of spiritual language speaks of “oneness” and wholeness, but paradoxically, before I could appreciate oneness, I first had to experience a sense of separation – between myself and the voice inside that never stops speaking.

A monument to late-stage capitalism

I touched down in Florida on a winter afternoon in early 2015.

This was a Florida winter – blazing sun, with everyone dressed in t-shirts and shorts. As I picked up my rental car, a white Jeep Grand Cherokee, that voice started speaking up inside me.

What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy? What do you think you’re doing driving out here uninvited? Who do you think you are? You have no plan and no justification! What a weirdo. What will everyone think of you when you show up there unannounced? You’ll probably be arrested for trespassing.

As these thoughts raced through my mind, I decided to take a break from driving and reconsider my plan. I saw a sign on the side of the freeway for the annual Florida State Fair, and thought this might be a fun diversion from my worries.

The only picture I took on this trip, at the Florida State Fair

I parked the car and began walking the grounds, amazed at this monument to late-stage American capitalism. Hot tubs, huge televisions, putting machines, tires, drones, and every kind of junk food imaginable – it felt like a cornucopia of everything modern consumer culture had to offer. 

It was all so clearly unnecessary. Like a caricature, all this excess and materialism only served to highlight how meaningless it all was. I was looking for something different, something deeper and more timeless. 

My resolve strengthened, I got back into the car and exited back onto the freeway, determined to find what I had come here for as the voice raged louder and louder. I didn’t know why I was going to the Temple of the Universe, or who or what I expected to find there. I only knew that there was something there I needed to see.

Opening and closing the valve of the heart

Think of a time when you were in the presence of someone you loved. 

You trusted them, so you lowered the walls protecting your heart. This allowed energy to rush into you, filling you with a sense of exhilaration and joy.

Now let’s say that person does something to offend you. Now you feel a tightness in your chest. A closing and restriction of the heart’s energies.

The next time you see them, you don’t feel so high. You feel guarded and wary. There doesn’t seem to be anything to talk about. This happened because you closed your heart. The energy flowing in and through your heart center was choked off.

Now imagine that person apologizes and makes it right. Your heart opens again, doesn’t it? With this opening you are once again filled with energy, and the love starts flowing again.

Singer asks us to closely examine what is really happening here. Clearly there is energy involved. A mere exchange of words can open up or close down vast amounts of energy within us. This source of energy is distinct from the calories we consume. It isn’t biochemical in nature. It is a kind of energy governed by the emotions flowing through our heart.

Every great faith tradition speaks of this spiritual energy. In ancient Chinese medicine, it is called chi. In yoga, it is called Shakti. In Christianity, it is called spirit. It goes by many names.

The important thing to understand is that this kind of energy is your birthright. You can call upon it any time you want. When this energy fills you, you feel like you can take on anything. It gushes up spontaneously from within and washes over you in waves, restoring and replenishing you. 

Which raises the question: What causes us to stop feeling this energy?

There are various energy centers in the human body, which the yogis call “chakras.” The one we are most familiar with is the heart. Singer asserts that when something happens to us that we believe shouldn’t have happened, we decide to close our heart center and cut ourselves off from this energy source.

The first time I read this, I thought it was outrageous. Of course no one simply decides to close their heart! I couldn’t see that that was a choice, much less a choice anyone would make consciously.

But as time passed, and through a lot of meditation, I began to see that there is indeed a brief moment when a choice exists. Someone cuts me off in traffic, and for a split second I get to decide: Do I let this experience pass through me, or do I cling to it and allow it to shut me down?

I’ve come to deeply appreciate Singer’s advice on the matter: “Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it.”

At first this feels unnatural, because we have been trained to close down in a wide variety of situations: when someone criticizes us, or disagrees with us, or takes something from us, or accuses us of something. We are conditioned to close down at the first sign of any uncomfortable emotion – anger, fear, grief, injustice, shame, sadness.

If you really look, you’ll notice that we create long lists of conditions for when we will remain open, and when we will close. We decide that we will remain open as long as things go our way, and people are nice to us, and life is predictable, and our plans come to fruition. 

But by defining what we need in order to keep our heart open, we are defining our limits. We are allowing the mind to create triggers that open and close us.

We are taught as children that we must close down to protect ourselves. But closing our hearts doesn’t really protect us from anything. It only shuts us off from the infinite energy source that is accessed through the valve of the heart. This is how the world becomes frightening: when any one of a vast number of events has the ability to close us off from the energy source that sustains us.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can actually train ourselves to do the opposite. When someone disappoints us, or a conversation upsets us, we can teach ourselves to open our hearts in response. The disappointment and upset isn’t coming from the outside anyway – it’s coming from a wounded part of ourselves that is being aggravated.

There is a very simple method for staying open. You stay open by never closing. It’s really that simple. All you have to do is decide that you are going to stay open no matter what happens.

To be continued…

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The post The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth – Part 1 appeared first on Forte Labs.

Creator to Company: How to Make the Shift from Solo Creator to a Team

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The post Creator to Company: How to Make the Shift from Solo Creator to a Team appeared first on Forte Labs.