Lessons from The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer

I'm excited to talk this week about The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, a book that was recommended to me by my coach, Michelle Humphrey. I'm really glad that I took it up and read it when I did. It is a great book that encapsulates many of the ideas that I've been talking about over the last several months. Spoiler alert: I'm going to provide an outline of the book for you here to make some points. So, if you want to read it, I may give some of it away here, but it's still a great read when you get into the details.

Michael Singer, as a young man in graduate school, was sitting on a couch one day talking to his brother-in-law, and he was noticing the voice inside of his head talking to him. If you don't know what I'm talking about, get in tune with yourself, because we all have a voice inside our head that says things to us all day long if we're honest.

He said to his brother-in-law, "Have you ever noticed the voice inside your head talking to you?" Michael thought this was a rather unique thing that only he was experiencing, and so he started asking people about it. Some people would look at him sideways, and some people didn't understand at all. Michael went on a search to discover the nature of this voice inside of his head and how can he get it to stop.

One day during a camping trip, he decided to sit down under a tree and not get up until he was able to silence the voice inside his head, or at least understand it. He started to meditate, or at least what he thought was meditation at the time. Under the tree, Michael had a transformative experience where he was finally able to connect to source through meditation and get the voice to stop inside of his head.

The camping meditation was such a powerful experience he decided to dedicate himself to meditation. He learned different forms of meditation, but eventually settled on a specific form of meditation from the yoga practices in India. Since that time in his 20s, Michael has spent two hours every day meditating. He is now, as you can see from the picture of him in this post, an older gentleman. He was born in the 1940s.

Through his process of meditation, here's the key, he realizes that the divine, or the source of all that is, can make better decisions for his life than he actually can. So, he decides in his early 20s to surrender to what life presents to him and follow it. Instead of letting his ego lead him, he looks at what he's presented with on a daily basis and follows what's being presented to him.

The majority of the book is about his process of listening to what is being presented to him and surrendering to what is being asked of him and actually doing it. When he does what he's being called to do, he's 100% committed to excellence in whatever it is that he ends up doing.

He goes through a process of initially just being committed to meditating. But then he buys some property, and with some friends, builds a house. He wasn't promoting his meditation, be he attracted other people to meditate with him. So, he starts doing group meditations every Sunday. To this day, 40 years later, he still has a group that comes over to his place on Sundays and meditates.

He then felt a calling to build. He started a construction company called "Built with Love" to build houses. As part of that process of building houses, one day he had to go Radio Shack. He was enamored by the first computers that he saw at Radio Shack back in the 70s. He decides that he's going to buy one and learn how to program because that's what he felt like he was being called to do.

He kept getting presented with opportunities to write custom software. A long story short, he gets into writing custom software for some medical practices to handle all their insurance claims. That software package gets noticed by some people in the industry. It blows up around him and ultimately becomes a billion dollar company over the course of a couple decades with him at the helm and letting the divine guide him every day through meditations as to what is the next best step for him to take.

Michael's story is a great real world example of what happens when you surrender to source, listen for guidance, and then actually follow that guidance as opposed to letting your ego rule you and get you all wrapped around all kinds of issues on a daily basis.

I highly recommend that you pick up The Surrender Experiment either in written form, or as I like to do on Audible, and go through it. I think you'll learn some things about what I've been talking about in terms of the seven step process for manifesting your life. Certainly, Michael has a lot of gratitude and is connected to source in a big way on a daily basis. He listens to what he's being called to do and then takes action from that space of calling. Michael has created incredible things in his lifetime.

One thing I failed to mention so far in this blog is that Michael was asked by a friend to go to prison and meet with a friend of his. He fulfilled that request, and out of that one request, Michael started a ministry for teaching prisoners, in some cases maximum security prisoners, how to meditate and bring divine source energy into their life and transform their experience of jail and incarceration. 

Just an incredible story! Again, I highly recommend The Surrender Experiment for its relevance to this blog and all that I have been sharing. I trust that you will enjoy it as much as I did! If you have a chance to read it, send me your thoughts. I'm interested in what you pick up from Michael's story and how it applies to everything we've been talking about here. Have a great week, and we'll talk to you soon.