The Untethered Soul

I scaled a business and watched it collapse.

People ask me what that teaches you. They expect some polished lesson about resilience or grit. But the real answer is messier than that.

Loss strips away the parts of you that were never really you in the first place.

I Read Untethered Soul Years Before I Actually Understood It

I picked up Michael Singer's "The Untethered Soul" years ago. Read it. Thought I got it. Nodded along to all the parts about consciousness and the voice in your head and letting go.

I didn't get it.

I couldn't. Because I hadn't lived it yet.

Singer talks about consciousness as this unchanging layer beneath everything else. The part of you that watches your thoughts instead of being your thoughts. The part that remains when everything external falls away.

When I read it the first time, I had nothing falling away. I was building. Scaling. Winning. The concepts made intellectual sense, but they didn't land in my body.

Then life happened. Loss. Rebuilding. The kind of experiences that force you to actually practice what the book talks about instead of just thinking about it.

Years later, I picked up the book again.

And it was like reading it for the first time.

The business being external? I knew that now. Felt it in my bones. The identity I built around being a successful founder? Gone. What remained was the part that could observe all of it crumbling without crumbling itself.

That's the untethered part. And you can't understand it until you've been untethered by force.

The Voice in Your Head Becomes Obvious When Everything Goes Quiet

Singer spends a lot of time on that inner roommate. The voice that never shuts up. The one that narrates everything, judges everything, worries about everything.

When I first read about it, I tried to notice it. Couldn't really separate myself from it. The voice and me felt like the same thing.

After loss, that voice got loud. Screaming, actually. About what went wrong. About what I should have done. About what everyone must be thinking.

And somewhere in that noise, I noticed something.

The part of me that could hear the voice wasn't the voice.

That's what Singer means by the seat of consciousness. The witness. The part that watches the show without being in the show.

You can't find that part when life is smooth. When everything's working, the voice sounds like wisdom. Like strategy. Like you.

When everything falls apart, you realize the voice is just commentary. Optional commentary.

Letting Go Isn't a Choice Until It's Your Only Choice

The book talks about letting go like it's a practice you can just do. Open your heart. Release the pain. Don't hold onto trauma.

When I first read that, I thought: "Sure, sounds nice."

I had no idea what I was holding onto because I'd been holding it so long it felt like part of me.

The identity built around achievement. The need to control outcomes. The fear that if I wasn't constantly managing everything, it would all collapse.

Then it collapsed anyway.

And I learned what Singer actually means. Letting go isn't about forcing yourself to release something. It's about noticing you're gripping something that's already gone.

The business was gone. The status was gone. The person I thought I was - gone.

I could keep pretending to hold onto it, or I could open my hands and see they were already empty.

That's when the practice becomes real.

The Pain Body Is Real

Singer talks about the pain body - this accumulated emotional pain that lives in you and actually wants to feed itself. It looks for situations to feel hurt. It seeks out conflict. It needs drama to survive.

First time I read that, I thought it was a bit much. Too abstract.

Then I caught myself doing it.

After the collapse, part of me wanted to stay in the story of what went wrong. Replay it. Analyze it. Feel it over and over.

That's the pain body. It doesn't want resolution. It wants to exist. And it exists by keeping you identified with pain.

The only way out is what Singer says: observe it without feeding it. Notice when you're about to dive into the story again. See it happening. Don't judge it. Just watch.

The watching creates space. And in that space, the pain body loses its grip.

Some Books You Can't Understand on the First Read

You spend the first part of your life building. Accumulating. Achieving. Creating an identity from external markers.

Then something breaks. A business fails. A relationship ends. A pandemic hits. Whatever your version is.

And you have a choice.

You can scramble to rebuild the same structure. Or you can sit in the rubble long enough to notice what remains when everything else is gone.

What remains is consciousness. The part that watches. The untethered part.

When you stop identifying with the structure and start identifying with the watcher, everything shifts.

Not because you become enlightened. Because you finally understand what Singer was saying the whole time.

The Unfiltered Truth

I teach lessons from losing it all because those lessons are the only ones worth teaching.

Not the lessons about how to scale. Those are everywhere. The lessons about what happens when scaling doesn't matter anymore.

The spiritual path isn't separate from the entrepreneurial path. They're the same path at different altitudes.

You build to learn what building teaches. Then you lose to learn what losing teaches. Then you rebuild differently because you're different.

The untethered soul isn't about detachment from life. It's about engagement without clinging to outcomes.

It's not about not caring. It's about caring deeply while knowing that you aren't your results.

You build to learn what building teaches. Then you lose to learn what losing teaches. Then you realize the part doing the learning was never at risk.

That's what the book teaches. But you can't learn it from the book.

You have to live it first. Then come back and read what you already know.

The real wealth isn't in what you build. It's in the part of you that remains when what you built disappears.

That part can't be built or lost.

That part just is.