Mayim Bialik started crying the moment she saw Michael Singer’s face on the screen. The author of ‘The Untethered Soul’ has a way of doing that, not through sentimentality, but through a kind of blunt clarity that makes the thing you have been running from feel suddenly very small and very close. Singer, calling in from a studio in Gainesville, Florida, had been teaching for nearly five decades, and yet the conversation that followed felt less like a lecture and more like a slow, careful dismantling of everything Bialik and her co-host Jonathan Cohen assumed they already understood about themselves.
The moment on a couch that changed everything
Singer’s awakening in 1971 did not arrive with ceremony. He was sitting with a friend, the two of them quiet, and his mind would not stop generating things to say. ‘The weather, and that sounds stupid. What about food, we could eat something, and that sounded stupid.’ He had heard this kind of mental noise his entire life. But that afternoon, for a reason he has never tried to explain or locate, he was not inside the noise. He was watching it. The witness woke up, as he put it, and from that moment forward he was simply never the same. No drugs. No ritual. Just an ordinary afternoon in which consciousness stopped confusing itself with the anxiety running through the mind.
He went to the graduate library at the University of Florida, where he had been pursuing a doctorate in economics, and pulled every book Freud had written, scanning for any mention of the voice inside the head. Freud analyzed the mind brilliantly, Singer said, but never stepped outside it. A fellow economics student eventually handed him ‘Three Pillars of Zen’ by Philip Kapleau, and there it was: an entire tradition organized around that voice and what happens when it goes quiet. Singer taught himself to meditate alone, built a cabin on ten acres of land outside Gainesville with two friends, and went into seclusion. He later founded the Temple of the Universe in 1975, a yoga and meditation center that welcomes people of any religion.
Why your memories keep coming back up
The part of the conversation that visibly stopped Bialik mid-breath was Singer’s explanation of stored disturbance. Every single thing that ever bothered a person, down to the smallest slight, gets pushed away rather than released, and in being pushed away, it stays. ‘You’ve made a collection of everything that ever bothered you inside of you,’ he said. ‘I think you’re going to be bothered. It’s that simple.’ The solution he offered was not willpower or analysis but something closer to the opposite: when a stored feeling begins to rise, relax. Relax the shoulders, relax the stomach, relax the heart. Let it come up and pass through rather than forcing it back down. ‘As it comes up, let it go. As it comes up, let it go.’
Bialik pressed him on whether this kind of awareness requires abandoning a public life, disappearing, building something with your hands in the woods. Singer was direct: ‘Do not do that. Oprah asked me that once.’ He ran a software company with roughly 2,300 employees, sat on earnings calls with Wall Street analysts, and held the same inner practice throughout. Every time his secretary buzzed him before a call, he paused for one second and let go. The practice did not require isolation. It required willingness.
Cohen, who had been sending Bialik screenshots from Singer’s newest book ‘Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament,’ put the core idea plainly: most people are sandwiched together with whatever feeling is moving through them, waiting for the roller coaster to end, when simply stepping back as a witness creates enough space for the emotion to shift on its own.
Singer affirmed it without ceremony. ‘You’re the spiritual teacher now,’ he said.
A moment Singer still tells
He taught meditation classes inside a maximum security prison in Florida for thirty years, not because he planned to, but because someone asked him to visit someone, and the next thing he knew he had a class. One day a man walked in who could not sit cross-legged on the floor because of his size, the kind of build Singer described as a serious NFL lineman. At the end of class the man approached and said: ‘Hi, my name’s Creature and I’m an outlaw.’ Singer stuck out his hand and said he was Mickey. That man eventually held meditation sessions in his own cell block and, decades later, someone wrote to Singer that Creature was running a meditation center in another facility and working in the chapel.
The extension cord on the floor
Singer described a woman he built a house for in the 1980s, a bank manager named Penny Dollar, who told him she could not sleep at night from fear. He asked what she was afraid of. She told him she was afraid she would finish the house, go to plug in a lamp, and the cord would not reach the outlet.
Bialik went quiet for a moment after Singer closed out the call, her eyeliner still intact, which she noted was remarkable under the circumstances.
