Book Review: The Untethered Soul
Years ago, about a dozen, I received Eckhart Tolle’s The Power Of Now on audiobook. This was before I understood the power of plant medicine, well before I understood how psychedelics worked but just after I started to understand cannabis was more useful than for just getting high — mostly thanks to me using it to reduce nausea associated with painkiller use during a nine-week recovery from a cyst surgery.
I had wanted to read the book for a while, but my recovery at the time forbade from laying on my back for any extended period of time, and I did not want to hold a sideways twist for the hours it would take to get through the book. But I knew it was time. I had heard a good friend rave about it, but the copy of his I saw on a shelf made me question if the thick book was worth the effort in my current state. Enter that audiobook.
Listen to it, I did. In and our of consciousness from a combination of painkillers, cannabis, and boredom, I listened to it once. Then again. Then a third time, each time picking up more than the previous time. But no matter how many times I hear Tolle’s deeply soothing voice, there is one phrase that’s stuck with me to this day: you are not your mind.
This concept felt weird at first. What do you mean, I am not my mind? My mind stores my memories and consciousness and control’s nearly all my bodily functions, especially the voluntary ones. Surely this kind of separation was only something “crazy” people considered!
But the more I thought of it, the more Tolle kept talking about the only real power we have is in the eternal now, and never in the past or future, it started to click. I wasn’t my mind, I was the being listening to it. My mind wasn’t leading me, it was reacting to what I experienced. It wasn’t helping me by bringing up memories or worrying about future happenings, it was in a constant state of freaking out. And, for all of my life until that point except for moments “in the zone” while playing sports, I was letting this reactionary organ control me.
Intellectually, I felt free. No longer was I completely controlled by something that wasn’t even me. But that was only the very beginning of my journey, as nine years later, I began an emotional journey started by cannabis and nearly completed by ayahuasca, bufo, and mushrooms. It wasn’t until I was three years deep in my emotional healing that I was recommended The Untethered Soul by the same applied kinesiologist who’d recommended Power versus Force.
The Untethered Soul seemed, at first, like a pointless self help book that repeated in different ways how simply changing your thinking could change your life. And it is that…but not in the simplistic way I nearly dismissed it to be.
First opened by me at a clothing-optional hot spring near A.Y.A.’s Ukiah ceremony location, I had a hard time understanding why I needed to read this book. I was quite aware of my emotional state, thank you very much. I was definitely in tune with my non-intellectual side, I knew I wasn’t my mind, and I understood that I needed to feel my emotions instead of re-directing or bottling them up. Besides, I was in Mendocino County during a beautiful California summer, surely the lessons learned from this book would have come to me during ceremony or the week in between, right? I read the first chapter and then handed it off to my partner, telling her it would be really helpful that she NEEDED to read it.
Weeks later, I realized I’d really been talking to myself. It was me that needed to read the entire book, it was me whose spiritual ego had blinded me to new discovery, it was me who thought my healing was over and that all I needed to do next was to help others with their journeys. But as summer faded into fall, I still hadn’t read it.
Finally, after deciding to take a long break from the medicine (I’d been going about every other month for a year, to great success, but hadn’t ever fully completed my integration process), I opened it back up. The first chapter came flooding back and I realized what I’d known to be true but hadn’t wanted to admit all along: I’d labeled myself as so sensitive that I had been ignoring my inner emotional turmoil by choosing to take on others’ pain in an effort to feel useful by helping them. While I do not regret this, as helping others along their path is rewarding, I finally understood that I wasn’t only doing it because I knew others needed help — I was doing it to ignore my own emotional pain, essentially repeating the same mistakes as previously but with far less damage this time.
I had been in limbo for too long, I was too focused on “healing” and not living with the person I’d become. I’d neglected to really get to know this new version of me and I’d been ignoring emotional danger signs because I just wanted to feel useful in helping other people.
Finally, I understood AND felt what I needed to do. Finally, my intellectual and emotional journeys sort of caught up to each other, no longer was I neglecting one for the other or over relying on either. But the most important lesson it taught me was that I can’t heal myself by healing others, but I can heal myself my treating myself like I do those I want to heal.
This feels like true freedom.
