상처 받지 않는 영혼

The Untethered Soul

나에게 좋은 책은 내 삶의 방향과 행동에 변화를 주는 책이다. 작년엔 Outlive 그런 책이었다. 올해는 이 책을 기점으로 명상을 시작하게 됐고, 남은 2025년 한 달 동안 다른 엄청난 책을 만나는 게 아니라면, 아마 내 올해의 책은 이 책이 될 것이다.

https://blog.naver.com/umwelt_seb/223371649008

지난 5월, 취리히 시아버지 댁에서 여름을 보낼 때, 문득 취리히에 계시다던 학교 선배가 생각나 연락을 드렸다. 오랜만에 보낸 안부 인사 메시지는 선배님 사무실에서 티타임으로 이어졌고, 거의 2시간도 넘게 시간 가는 줄 모르고 즐거운 대화를 나눴다.

대화를 마칠 때쯤, 선배님께서 이 책을 추천해 주셨다. 삶이 힘들 때, 한 번씩이 책을 다시 펼쳐보고, 읽을 때마다 새로운 느낌으로 다가온다며. 오디오북이 아닌 종이 책으로 보길 당부하셨었다.

몇 달 전 중요한 미팅 준비로 몇 날 밤을 지셌지만 흡족하지 않았던 미팅 결과에 좌절해 기죽어있던 주말 아침, 이 책이 생각나서 읽기 시작했고, 그 이후부터 내 삶의 방향이 미세하게나마 조금 바뀌었다.

나는 내 머릿속의 목소리가 아니라, 그 목소리를 듣는 사람이다. 그러니, 목소리와 나를 동일시할 필요 없고, (특히 나의 경우 그 목소리가 부정적이니) 그 목소리를 바꾸기만 하면 된다. 그 첫 시작은, 내가 목소리가 아닌 것을 깨닫고 (awareness) 나와 그 목소리 사이의 거리를 두는 것이다. 명상을 하면 수없이 드는 생각들을 지켜보고, 들숨과 날숨에 집중하면서 다시 고요한 상태로 돌아온다. 그러다 보면 이 수없이 드는 생각들은 내가 아니고, 오직 들숨과 날숨을 쉬는 게 나인 것을 깨닫게 된다.

핵심 아이디어

1) 나는 내가 느끼는 생각이나 감정이 아니라 그걸 '보고 있는 존재’다

마음의 잡음은 객체, 나는 주체.

마음의 동요를 알아차린다면, 80%는 다 됐다. 그 순간 나는 이미 그 흔들리는 마음이 아니게 된다.

2) 고통은 외부가 아니라 내 안의 패턴(samskara)에서 온다

외부 상황이 문제가 아니라, 외부 상황에 반응하는 내면의 패턴이 문제이다.

“왜 이게 날 흔들지?”만 알아차리면 된다.

3) 자유는 ‘닫힘을 알아차리고 열어두기’에서 온다

닫힘 = 수축·저항 vs 열림 = 흐름·치유.

notice → allow → relax → open.

감정은 없애는 게 아니라 통과시키는 것이다. 삶은 나를 통과해서 흐른다. 내가 잡지 않으면 흘러간다. 내가 잡으면, 내가 영향을 받는다.

4) 삶은 나를 공격하는 게 아니라 나를 정화시키는 과정이다

트리거는 기회.

현실을 거부하지 않고 받아들일 때 스트레스가 사라진다. 나를 통과해 지나가도록.

책 중에서

You already know how to find yourself; you have just gotten distracted and disoriented. Once refocused, you will realize that you not only have the ability to find yourself, you have the ability to free yourself.

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind-you are the one who hears it.

You'll never be free of problems until you are free from the part within that has so many problems. Don't ask, "What should I do about it?", ask, "What part of me is being disturbed by this?"

밖이 아니라, 내 안에 문제가 있다.

The very fact that you can see the disturbance means that you are not it.

If you want to free yourself, you must first become conscious enough to understand your predicament. Then you must commit yourself to the inner work of freedom. You do this as though your life depended on it, because it does.

You have a subject-object relationship with your thoughts. You are the subject, and thoughts are just another object you can be aware of. You are not your thoughts. You are simply aware of your thoughts.

You are behind everything, just watching. This is your true home. Take everything else away and you're still there, aware that everything is gone.

When you are an aware being, you no longer become completely immersed in the events around you. Instead, you remain inwardly aware that you are the one who is experiencing both the events and the corresponding thoughts and emotions. When a thought is created in this state of awareness, instead of getting lost in it, you remain aware that you are the one who is thinking the thought. You are lucid.

You have an underlying pattern of thoughts that goes on around you all the time. This pattern of thoughts stays pretty much the same. You are as familiar and comfortable with your normal thought patterns as you are with the living sapce of your home.

True meditation is about contemplating the source of consciousness.

The more you are willing to just let the world be something you're aware of, the more it will let you be who you are-the awareness, the Self, the Atman, the Soul.

Closing is a habit. You could be the type of person who has an underlying fear of people and tends to close when you first meet them. You can train yourself to open every time you see a person.

The only thing you really want from life is to feel enthusiasm, joy, and love. If you can feel that all the time, then who cares what happens outside? If you can always feel up, if you can always feel excited about the experience of the moment, then it doesn't make any difference what the experience is. No matter what it is, it's beautiful when you feel that way inside. So you learn to stay open no matter what happens. If you do, you get for free what everybody else is struggling for: love, enthusiasm, excitement, and energy.

Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you're willing to close your heat over it. Honor and respect the situation, and deal with it. Deal with it with openness. Deal with it with excitement and enthusiasm. No matter what it is, just let it be the sport of the day. In time, you will find that you forget how to close. You will just embrace life with all your heart and soul. You are only limited by your ability to stay open. It's your choice. You are actually defining your limits.

When you open, you bring more energy into the system, and it can heal. Energy can heal, and that's why love can heal. As you explore your inner energy, a whole world of discovery opens up to you. The most important thing in life is your inner energy.

What it means to live life is to experience the moment that is passing through you, and then experience the next moment, and then the next. Many different experiences will come in and pass through you. It's a phenomenal system when it is working properly. If you could live in that state, you would be a fully aware being. That is how an awakened being lives in the "now." They are present, life is present, and the wholeness of life is passing through them. Imagine if you were so fully present during each experience of life that it was touching you to the depth of your being. Every moment would be a stimulating, moving experience because you would be completely open, and life would be flowing right through you.

Samskara - an unfinished energy patter that ends up running your life.

Past impressions do get stimulated, even old ones, and they affect your life. It's about everything that didn't make it through you.

When you're free from the hold the energy has on you, you will be free to experience the joy and expansiveness that exists within you. So you decide to use life to free yourself. You become willing to pay any price for the freedom of your soul. You will realize that the only price you have to pay is letting go of yourself. Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can. It doesn't matter what others do, unles you decide that it matters to you.

Instead of getting into being bothered, you get into being free. This is how you make freedom a game.

이 부분이 무슨 말인지 잘 이해가 안 가서 GPT의 도움을 받았다.

예시로 풀면

누가 “너 준비가 부족한 것 같아”라고 말하면:

“아, 지금 가슴이 확 조인다” → 닫힘 인식

조여드는 느낌을 억지로 없애지 않고 그냥 둔다

상대의 말은 정보일 뿐. 내 반응은 내가 가진 오래된 패턴.

조용히 숨을 내쉬고, 필요한 답만 한다

“어느 부분이 특히 부족해 보였는지 알려줄래?”

혹은 “그렇게 느꼈구나. 난 이런 이유로 이렇게 준비했어.”

The natural ups and downs of life can either generate personal growth or create personal fears. Which of these dominates is completely dependent upon how we view change.

If life unfolds in a way that stimulates your inner problems, then, by definition, it's not okay. It's really very simple: that which doesn't disturb you is okay, and that which does disturb you is not. We define the entire scope of our outer experience based upon our inner problems. If you want to grow spiritually, you have to change that. If you are defining creation based upon the most messed up part of your being, what do you expect creation to look like? It's going to look like a frightful mess.

Fear is the cause of every problem.

If you truly want to grow spiritually, you'll realize that keeping your stuff is keeping you trapped. Eventually you'll want out, at any cost. You will then realize that life is actually trying to help you. Life is surrounding you with people and situations that stimulate growth. You don't have to decide who's right or wrong. You don't have to worry about other people's issues. You only have to be willing to open you heart in the face of anything and everything, and permit the purification process to take place. When you do this, the first thing you'll see is that situations will unfold that hit your stuff. But, in truth, that's exactly what has been happening your entire life. The only difference is that now you see it as a good thing because it's an opportunity to let go.

다른 사람들의 문제를 내 문제로 만드는 경향이 있는데, I just need to stay open.

If you want to be free to the core of your being, you must let go right away because it will not be easier later.

고민하지 말고, 느낌이 들 때 알아차리고, acknowledge 하고, let go

If you actually tell someone how you feel about them from this state of nonclarity, you have involved that person's heart and mind in your stuff. Now both of your egos are involved. Once you externalize these energies, you will want to defend your actions and make them look appropriate. But the other person will never think they were appropriate. It's just another form of "environmental pollution" and it will affect your life. That is how negative cycles happen. You actually take a piece of your stuff, which is nothing but deeply seated disturbance from your past, and you implant it in the hearts of those around you. At some point it will come back to you. Anything you put out comes back.

Always let go as soon as you're aware that you didn't. Don't waste your time; use the energy to go up. You are a great being who has been given a tremendous opportunity to explore beyond yourself. The whole process is very exciting, and you will have good times and bad times. All sorts of things will happen.

So don't fall. Let go. No matter what it is, let it go. The bigger it is, the higher the reward of letting go and the worse the fall if you don't. You either let go or you don't So let all of your blockages and disturbances become the fuel for the journey. That which is holding you down can become a powerful force that raises you up. You just have to be willing to take the ascent.

If you don't solve the root cause of the problem, but instead, attempt to protect yourself from the problem, it ends up running your life. You end up so psychologically fixated on the problem that you can't see the forest for the trees.

How do you free yourself? In the deepest sense, you free yourself by finding yourself.

What you can do is notice that you noticed. You can notice that your consciousness was watching TV, and now it is watching your inner melodrama. All you have to do is notice who it is that feels the loneliness. The one who notices is already free. If you want to be free of these energies, you must allow them to pass through you instead of hiding them inside of you.

You're either trying to stop suffering, controlling your environment to avoid suffering, or worrying about suffering in the future. This state of affairs is so prevalent that you don't just see it, just as a fish doesn't see the water.

Begin this journey to freedom by regularly reminding yourself to watch the psyche. This will keep you from getting lost in it.

meditation

By untethering yourself from the bondage of your psyche, you actually have the ability to steal freedom from your soul. This freedom is so great it has been given a special name-liberation.

Why would there be pain in a friend saying they're going someplace else and they can't go to the movie today? How does that generate pain? It is because deep inside there is pain that you have not processed. Your attempt to avoid this pain has created layer upon layer of sensitivities that are all linked to the hidden pain.

You can simply live your life and experience what it's like to be on a planet that is spinning around in the middle of nowhere, until you die. To live at this level of freedom, you must learn not to be afraid of inner pain and disturbance.

If you want to be free, simply view inner pain as a temporary shift in your energy flow. It's a temporary experience. It's a thing in the universe that is passing through your system. Laugh at it, have fun with it, but don't be afraid of it. It cannot touch you unless you touch it.

If your mental model is bothering you, it's because it doesn't incorporate reality. Your choice is to either resist reality or go beyond the limits of your model.

Spirituality begins when you decide that you'll nver stop trying.

Nothing can ever bother you except your edges, and now you know what to do with them. You end up loving your edges because they point your way to freedom. All you have to do is constantly relax and lean into them.

That fortress would not be protecting you; it would be imprisoning you. Stop defining the disturbed mind as a negative experience; just see if you can relax behind it. When your mind is disturbed, don't ask, "What do I do about this?" Instead ask, "Who am I that notices this?"

Awareness transcends what it is aware of.

Be willing to examine the process of resistance.

If you want to understand stress, begin by realizing that you carry around with you your own set of preconceived notions of how things should be.

You simply allow life to unfold and interact with it in a natural and rational manner. When the next thing happens, you're fully present in that moment and simply enjoying the experience of life. There are no problems.

You take on the work of using your life to let go of your resistance.

You truly can reach a state in which you never have any more stress, tension, or problems for the rest of your life. You just have to realize that life is giving you a gift, and that gift is the flow of events that take place between your birth and your death. These events are exciting, challenging, and create tremendous growth. To comfortably handle this flow of life, your heart and mind must be open and expansive enough to encompass reality. The only reason they're not ins because you resist. Learn to stop resisting reality, and what used to look like stressful problems will begin to look like the stepping-stones of your spiritual journey.

Start using every day to let go of that scared part of you that won't let you live life fully. Since you know you're going to die, be willing to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done. Be willing to be fully present without being afraid of what will happen in the next moment. That's how people live when they face death. You get to do that too, because you are facing death every moment.

The wise realize that in the end, life belongs to death. Death is the one who comes in his own time to take life from you. Death is the landlord and you're just the tenant. People say things like, "He's living on borrowed time," or, "He got a new lease on life." From whom did he borrow the time? From death, of course. Death is the one who comes to claim his property because it has always belonged to him. You should have a healthy relationship with death, and it should not be one of fear. Feel grateful to death for giving you another day, another experience, and for creating scarcity that makes life so precious. If you do this, your life will no longer be yours to waste it; it will be yours to appreciate.

In the Tao of sailing, the balance point is not static; it's a dynamic equilibrium. You move from balance point to balance point, from center to center. You can't have any concepts or preferences; you have to let the forces move you. In the Way, nothing is personal. You are merely an instrument in the hands of the forces, participating in the harmony of balance.

What does it mean to drift upward? You're no longer held down to your earthly self, so you begin to feel more spaciousness inside.

Your backdrop is love. Your backdrop is openness, beauty, and appreciation.

There was only the ultimate expansiveness of their sense of Self merging into the love and light, like a single drop of water merging into the ocean.