Poker Strategy The Non-Poker Book That Will Increase Your Bottom Line: The Untethered Soul URL has been copied successfully! If you’re desperate for a practical way to stop tilt and regain control over your emotions, Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul might just offer the answers you’ve been looking for.Having cycled between academia and eastern philosophy, Singer turned life as a barefoot hippie into an empire of goodness, building and selling multiple multi-million dollar businesses while continuing to host weekly meditation sessions at Temple Of The Universe, the mindfulness center he founded in 1975.The story of his success, which he attributes to his early-life decision to surrender fully to whatever task the universe chose to bring him, is outlined in his second book – the equally fantastic The Surrender Experiment. But it’s The Untethered Soul that will likely have the greatest impact on your bottom line.In The Untethered Soul, Singer breaks down his perspective on consciousness and outlines how our relationship with our thoughts and feelings dramatically affect our everyday lives. Singer argues that the path to success lies first in understanding the mechanism by which our mind and emotions operate, particularly in times of high stress, and then learning to let go of our habitual reactions to them.As poker players who have likely all had a bankroll blowout or two (or 20) over the years, the practical techniques offered in The Untethered Soul for achieving a state of presence and detachment (the non-doomscrolling kind) are vital. These techniques can act as a lifeline in those moments of extreme inner turmoil that threaten to overwhelm our emotional control following a bad beat or long string of losses. Singer discusses how the goal in those moments isn’t to suppress our emotions, but to recognize that the voice we hear inside our head telling us to move up in limits or turn our aggression factor up to 11 billion, is predictable, impersonal and, with a bit of practice, relatively easy to manage. “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.” This concept – that I am not the voice I hear inside my head, but rather the one with the ability to observe it – acts as a superpower at the poker table, where even the most stoic players will sometimes face an avalanche of inner chatter when facing a triggering opponent or a particularly bad run of cards. Singer’s teachings allow us to disconnect from the emotional charge of that chatter and connect to our innate and ever-present sense of inner calm. When we do so, we are able to not play in response to our fears and frustrations, but from a place of centered stillness where our decisions remain unclouded by the heat of the moment.Most productively, The Untethered Soul showcases how we can use each triggering experience as an opportunity for “spiritual practice.” By assessing and analyzing each event as we would a hand history – particularly in those bankroll-busting moments that cause us to lose our self-control – we effectively siphon value from an otherwise negative experience and turn our worst moments into vehicles for oversized growth.Meaning that although we won’t completely eliminate the sting of a loss or the sometimes-maddening frustration of a prolonged downswing, as we gain the tools to recognize these feelings for what they are – transient emotions that do not define us or dictate our actions – we not only improve our emotional control at the table, but turn the voice inside our head from an opponent to an ally.