This Michael Singer Teaching is All We Need to Practice to Achieve Spiritual Growth

And it’s only four words.

Photo by Aedrian Salazar on Unsplash

As many of you know, Michael Singer is my guy. And for one main reason: His teachings make more sense to me than all the others.

What are those teachings? For this article to work, I’m going to have to give a quick summary of them. Because they all lead to a practice that is the be-all, end-all.

It comes down to two steps. One, understand what’s going on inside us. Two, once we understand that, do this one practice.

That’s it, folks.

You’ve probably heard some or all of what follows before, but what finally hit me recently is something Mickey has said many times. It’s those four words, which we’ll get to, that crystallize and simplify the work of our lives better than anything I’ve ever heard or read.

The condensed teachings of Mickey

So here’s a majorly condensed version of step one, understanding what’s going on inside us.

We’re born into this wacky world and, sooner or later, we start building an ego in response to our life experiences. All in furtherance of defending ourselves.

Over 99 percent of the experiences we have pass right through us. We buy a candy bar at the store, see trees out the window as we drive to work, brush our teeth in the morning, and never think twice about it again for the rest of our lives.

Experiences we hold onto

But a tiny fraction of experiences don’t pass through us. They’re the ones we held onto because we either didn’t like them (resistance) or because we really liked them (clinging).

And because we held onto them and didn’t let them pass through, they remained trapped inside us in the form of stuck energy. That stuck energy is called a Samskara in the ancient Indian Sanskrit language.

These Samskaras run and, unfortunately, ruin our lives unless we release them.

Two illustrative examples

Here are two quick examples of this, one small, one big.

The small. At age nine, you hear a song several times on the radio called “When Will I See You Again?” when your parents go out of town on a weeklong business trip. It makes you sad because you really miss your mom.

Forty years later, when that song plays on the radio, those sad feelings arise. Sound farfetched? It’s not. This happened to me.

Scars your dad left you

The big. Your dad was a serial philanderer which eventually led to a painful, messy divorce. Your mom impressed upon you early on that men were not to be trusted, that they were all scoundrels.

This led to decades of never letting your guard down in relationships because of your deep-seated mistrust of men.

Fine. I’ve written much of the above in past articles.

Releasing Samskaras is job one

What it boils down to is: We all have a bunch of trapped energy inside that inhibits our lives, so releasing that energy is job number one on the spiritual path.

Which invites the inevitable question: How do we release that energy?

That brings us, finally, to Singer’s wise, four-word teaching. Which is this:

Relax through the disturbance.

Let’s back up. What disturbance?

Let’s define a disturbance as when one of our Samskaras is poked. Like when “When Will I See You Again?” comes onto the radio.

Or when the women with the philandering dad texts her boyfriend on a Saturday night and he doesn’t respond within a few minutes. Her mistrust Samskara arises in the form of anxious dread.

View painful feelings as opportunities

The stirring of these often painful packets of emotional baggage offers us the invaluable opportunity of releasing these Samskaras from the prison we have held them in, often for decades.

What do most people do when this happens? They react to the Samskara. In the case of the mistrustful girlfriend, that manifests by her shutting down emotionally and, if it’s happened too many times, leaving the relationship.

Bad move. All that does is push the Samskara back down where it will continue to plague her.

Suppression is the worst choice

Some people will choose to suppress the Samskara by saying, “Oh, it’s fine. He’s probably just talking on the phone with a friend.” Here, she is denying the Samskara, which also pushes it back down and makes it even stronger. Worse move.

The best move is, as Mickey teaches, to relax through the disturbance. Why do those four words best capture the process of letting go?

In my case, I used to think the optimum course was to just relax. Simple. Just one word.

But that leaves me floating and unmoored. Relax? Why? And for how long?

The why is that a disturbance has arisen.

How long should I relax?

More important for me is the ‘for how long?’ The answer: Through the disturbance. Meaning, we relax around and with the disturbance until it passes.

We don’t give into it by telling our boyfriend that if he can’t respond more quickly to her texts then she’s going to break up with him. And we don’t try to shove it back down by making excuses for him.

We just relax through it.

According to Singer, that is the only way that these pockets of emotional energy can be released from the bondage of our lower selves.

And ridding ourselves of that inner baggage/energy is job number one on our road to liberation.

That’s why I’m drilling deep on the subtle use of words that I believe best help us achieve that.

The sum up

Let’s not make this too complicated.

The next time your ego gets poked, have these four words front and center in your consciousness:

Relax through the disturbance.