Ebb ± f l o w

You have been walking around this earth, carrying a weight you were never supposed to carry, arguing with a voice inside your head that you mistakenly believed was you, protecting a heart that has been barricaded so long you forgot what it felt like to be truly free. And then, somehow, Michael A. Singer sat down and wrote a book that felt like someone finally gave a name to everything you have been silently suffering. The Untethered Soul is not just a book. It is a confrontation. It is an invitation. And if you let it, it is a homecoming. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Peter Berkrot, and I want you to know that Berkrot's voice is steady and unhurried in a way that feels intentional, as if the words themselves are breathing. Singer's wisdom, delivered through that narration, does not rush you. It sits with you. It holds space for you. And you will need that, because what Singer is asking of you is genuinely the most radical thing anyone has ever asked: to stop being cozy with your suffering. This review is my love letter to this book, and my gift to you, because some of us are literally out here doomscrolling through life, looking for peace in every wrong place, and this book is the reset we did not know we needed.

1. You Are Not Your Thoughts, You Are the One Watching Them

Singer opens the entire journey with what might be the most mind bending, life altering idea you will ever encounter, and he delivers it with the calmness of someone who has lived it completely: the voice inside your head is not you. That relentless internal narrator who criticizes your outfit, replays your embarrassing moments from seven years ago, rehearses arguments that will never happen, and whispers that you are not enough, that voice is not your identity. It is just a roommate. A very loud, very dramatic, very exhausting roommate. Singer asks you to step back and simply notice the one who is watching the voice, because that witness, that observer, is who you actually are. This is where the audiobook delivers its first gut punch, because Berkrot reads this section with such gentle clarity that you find yourself pausing mid commute or mid jog, genuinely shaken, realizing that you have spent your entire life mistaking the commentary for the commentator. Reviews across platforms confirm that this teaching hit readers like a revelation, and the community agrees: once you see it, you cannot unsee it. This is the kind shift that slays quietly, the kind that rewires you without you even fully knowing it happened.

2. Your Heart Closes to Protect You, and That Closing Is the Real Prison

Singer speaks about the heart not as a metaphor but as a living, energetic center, and he says something that stopped me completely in my tracks: you have been closing your heart every time life hurt you, building walls, brick by brick, calling it strength, calling it self preservation, when in truth you have been building your own solitary confinement. Every time something scared you, every time someone betrayed you, every time the world felt unsafe, you pulled inward and locked a little more of yourself away. And Singer, in the most tender and firm way possible, tells you that the walls do not protect you from pain, they trap you inside it. The path forward is not to find perfect circumstances where you can finally feel safe enough to open. The path is to decide, radically and deliberately, to keep the heart open regardless. This section of the book had Amazon reviewers writing in all caps. People were reaching out to their therapists, calling their mothers, texting friends they had ghosted for two years. Because Singer names something we have all felt but never had language for: the exhaustion of living behind our own walls.

3. Letting Go Is Not Weakness, It Is the Most Powerful Thing You Will Ever Do

If there is one teaching in this book that the entire internet needs to hear right now, it is this one, and Singer delivers it without drama or fanfare, which somehow makes it hit even harder. He teaches that every time a painful emotion rises in you, every time anxiety grips your chest, every time shame floods your face, you have a choice: you can tighten around it and make it a permanent resident of your inner world, or you can relax and let it move through you like weather. Singer uses the image of a thorn stuck in your arm: most people, rather than removing the thorn, spend their whole lives arranging their world so nothing ever bumps against it. They change jobs, leave relationships, avoid certain conversations, all because they are organizing their entire existence around protecting a wound they refuse to heal. And Berkrot narrates this passage with such quiet authority that you almost feel the thorn being removed as you listen. Letting go, Singer insists, is not giving up. It is not weakness. It is the most spiritually courageous act available to a human being. This teaching is giving main character energy, in the most serious sense possible, because the moment you stop outsourcing your peace to circumstances, you become ungovernable by life's chaos.

4. Death Is the Greatest Teacher, and Most of Us Are Too Afraid to Let It Teach Us

Singer dedicates a profound section of the book to what he calls the seat of the soul, and he does something radical: he invites death into the conversation not as something to fear but as the most clarifying force in existence. He asks you to meditate on your mortality, not morbidly, but as a practice of liberation, because the moment you truly accept that this life is finite, that every single day is a gift that could be withdrawn without warning, you stop wasting your energy on pettiness, comparison, bitterness, and manufactured worry. Singer writes that death is always with us, and if we let it, it will show us how to live. The audiobook listeners who reviewed this chapter described sitting in their cars in parking lots, not ready to go back inside their lives until they had absorbed what Singer was saying. It is the kind of teaching that makes you want to call the person you love and say the thing you have been too proud to say. In a world where we are all caught up in the noise of who said what and who did what to whom, Singer reminds us that we are all on borrowed time, and that borrowed time is too precious to spend arguing with shadows.

5. True Freedom Comes When You Stop Organizing Your Life Around Fear

Singer saves perhaps his most breathtaking teaching for the journey toward the end of the book: the idea that most human beings are not actually living, they are managing. They are managing their fears, managing their triggers, managing their traumas, carefully sculpting a life that minimizes discomfort, a life so small and so controlled that nothing unexpected can enter. And Singer, gently but without apology, calls this what it is: a self imposed cage. Real freedom, he says, is not the absence of difficulty. Real freedom is the internal state in which you are no longer at the mercy of your reactions. When you are no longer yanked around by every person's opinion, every disappointing outcome, every fear about the future, when you can sit in the fullness of the present moment without needing it to be different, that is liberation. That is what it means to be untethered. Reviewers on both Amazon and Goodreads called this the teaching that made them ugly cry, because Singer is essentially telling us that the life we have been waiting for permission to live is already available to us, right now, today. We just have to be brave enough to let go of the version of ourselves that is addicted to suffering. And that, beloved, is the most important thing I can tell you: this book will not just inform you. It will undo you, in the most beautiful, most necessary way. And then it will gently, lovingly, put you back together as someone who is finally, finally free.

if yall will let me indulge in a mini rant real quick: I think part of the reason the internet is starting to feel so incredibly negative lately is bc the only people engaging in conversations are there to argue. Those people have pushed out anyone who doesn’t think exactly what they do. Most sane people would rather not just engage in an argument, so they leave. It’s not a debate, it’s not a discussion. The internet discourse has conditioned itself to believe that shame is an effective strategy for change. Shame creates compliance, not change. Education creates change. Yet educating the masses does not invite the level of validation (read: dopamine) people are looking for. Idk man. You’re seeing your “faves” get offline bc everything is a fight. Quiet people aren’t changed people, they’re just silent. Anyway.

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Welcome to the first day of our 2026 Season! Off to a fantastic start with wonderful folks on our doorstep and prescheduling online their readings. Www.campwonewoc.com

Join the Akron Zoo in celebrating Father's Day on Sunday, June 21! Admission is free for all dads and grandfathers. Plan a visit for the whole family: https://www.akronzoo.org/tickets

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With love,
Hannahthehuman 🪬

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