The Surrender Experiment

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Untethered Soul comes the astonishing true-life story about what happens when you just let go. • A thriving spiritual community on over six hundred acres of pristine forest and meadows in Florida • A cutting-edge software package that transformed the medical practice management industry • A billion-dollar public company whose achievements are archived in the Smithsonian Institution • A book that became a New York Times bestseller and an Oprah favorite • A massive raid by the FBI that would lead to unfounded accusations by the U.S. government How could all of this spring from a man who had decided to live alone in the middle of the woods, let go of himself, and embrace a life of solitude? Michael A. Singer, author of The Untethered Soul, tells the extraordinary story of what happened when, after a deep spiritual awakening, he decided to let go of his personal preferences and simply let life call the shots. As Singer takes you on this great experiment and journey into life’s perfection, the events that transpire will both challenge your deepest assumptions about life and inspire you to look at your own life in a radically different way.

"A lone voice in the modern wilderness calling for surrender instead of striving, Singer shows how surrendering to life does not mean giving up our dreams."  —*Shawn Achor, happiness researcher and NYTimes bestselling author of *The Happiness Advantage
 
“Only the rarest of books has the power to clearly explain the difference between a human being and a human doing, and why that distinction is so important. The Surrender Experiment is such a book. Inspiring, authentic, and intensely compelling.” –Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe
 
“Michael Singer writes a beautiful, touching memoir on the amazing power of surrender in his life. With courage, spunk, and thoughtfulness, he has reached beyond the status quo to dare to trust life and surrender to its ultimate perfection.” —Judith Orloff MD, author, The Ecstasy of Surrender

“With his hallmark precision and clarity Michael Singer reveals in his latest masterpiece, *The Surrender Experiment, *how everyday life, doing business in the world and spiritual practice can be synchronized to carry us into the heart of life's unimaginable perfection. This is exactly the kind of practical mastery needed for a world in chaos.” —Jack Canfield, Coauthor of The Success Principles and the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series

Auteur

Michael A. Singer

Résumé
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Untethered Soul and Living Untethered comes the astonishing true-life story about the spiritual harmony and personal happiness he found when he just let go.

“With his hallmark precision and clarity Michael Singer reveals how everyday life, doing business in the world, and spiritual practice can be synchronized to carry us into the heart of life’s unimaginable perfection.”—Jack Canfield, co-author of The Success Principles and co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series
 
In The Surrender Experiment, Michael A. Singer tells the extraordinary story of what happened when, after a deep spiritual awakening, he decided to relinquish his personal fears and desires and simply let life unfold before him. Singer shares how this pivotal decision to embrace the flow of life led him to extraordinary success, sustained him through times of crisis, and allowed him to cultivate profound inner peace—whether as a young man pursuing a life of solitude in the woods, the founder of a thriving spiritual community in Florida, or the CEO of a billion-dollar medical software company.
 
As he takes you through his grand experiment, Singer demonstrates how surrender is the key to a peaceful and harmonious life. His remarkable and unexpected personal experiences will challenge your deepest assumptions, teaching you how to stop making the outside world conform to your desires, let go of the need to control everything, and place your trust in life’s perfection.
 
Thought-provoking and moving, The Surrender Experiment will inspire you to seek the calm and freedom that comes from letting go.

Échantillon de lecture

1.

Not with a Shout—But with a Whisper

 

M

y given name is Michael Alan Singer. From as far back as I can remember, everyone has called me Mickey. I was born May 6, 1947, and lived a fairly ordinary life until the winter of 1970. Then something happened to me that was so profound that it forever changed the direction of my life.

Life-changing events can be very dramatic and, by their very nature, disruptive. Your whole being is headed in one direction physically, emotionally, and mentally; and that direction has all the momentum of your past and all the dreams of your future. Then suddenly, there’s a major earthquake, a terrible sickness, or a chance encounter that totally sweeps you off your feet. If the event is powerful enough to change the focus of your heart and mind, the rest of your life will change in due course. You are literally not the same person on both sides of a truly life-changing event. Your interests change, your goals change, in fact, the underlying purpose of your life changes. It usually takes a very powerful event to turn your head around so far that you never look back.

But not always.

In the winter of 1970, no such event happened to me. What happened was so subtle, so faint, that it could easily have passed by without being noticed. It was not with a shout but with a whisper that my life was thrown into utter turmoil and transformation. It has been more than forty years now since that life-changing moment, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.

I was sitting on the living room couch in my home in Gainesville, Florida. I was twenty-two years old and married at the time to a beautiful soul named Shelly. We were both students at the University of Florida where I was doing my graduate work in economics. I was a very astute student, and I was being groomed by the chairman of the economics department to become a college professor. Shelly had a brother, Ronnie, who was a very successful attorney in Chicago. Ronnie and I became close friends even though we were from totally different worlds. He was a powerful, wealth-driven, big-city attorney, and I was a ’60s-groomed, college-intellectual hippie. It is worth mentioning just how analytically oriented I was at the time. I had never even taken a philosophy, psychology, or religion course while in college. My electives at school were symbolic logic, advanced calculus, and theoretical statistics. This makes what happened to me all the more amazing.

Ronnie would come down once in a while to visit, and we would often just hang out together. As it turns out, Ronnie was sitting on that couch with me on that fateful day in 1970. I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but there had been a lull in our leisurely conversation. I noticed I was uncomfortable with the silence and found myself thinking of what to say next. I had been in similar situations many times before, but something was quite different about this experience. Instead of simply being uncomfortable and trying to find something to say, I noticed that I was uncomfortable and trying to find something to say. For the first time in my life, my mind and emotions were something I was watching instead of being.

I know that it is difficult to put into words, but there was a complete sense of separation between my anxious mind, which was spewing out pos…