I finished this book last week, thinking I was the last person to have read it, and I want to remember it. It feels like the lessons in it are worth remembering, and rereading, and coming back to when I feel like I've lost my way.
I thought it might be some overly religious nonsense, but what it actually was was a different way to look at meditation and the experience of who we are as not a collection of our ideas or the places we've been, but the way that we sit in awareness as the person whose thoughts and ideas come to them.
Every memory is an imprint on your heart
This is the one that stopped me.
Singer's argument is that every experience – every joy, every hurt, every moment that landed hard – leaves a mark. Not metaphorically. Functionally. Those imprints shape how you move through the world, what you reach for, what you flinch away from.
The problem isn't the imprints. It's what we do with them.
Most of us build a life designed to protect the ones that hurt. We arrange our relationships, our routines, our entire personalities around making sure nothing touches those tender spots again. We think we're being smart. We think we're protecting ourselves.
We're not. We're just building smaller and smaller rooms.
The thorn
Here's the analogy I can't stop thinking about.
Imagine you have a thorn lodged in your arm. It hurts. So you build a protective layer around it – you keep your arm close to your body, you flinch when anyone gets near, you engineer your whole life around making sure nobody bumps it.
This works, technically. The thorn never gets touched. You never feel that specific pain.
But you've also given the thorn your whole life.
The other option – the obvious option, the one that somehow never occurs to us – is to just take out the thorn. Feel the brief sharp sting of removing it. And then move freely.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
We choose the armor because we're afraid of the moment of removal. We forget that the armor costs more, every single day, than the sting ever would.
Open the windows
The other image that stayed with me: a house with all its windows shut.
You can control the temperature that way. Nothing gets in that you didn't invite. It feels safe.
But nothing gets in. No light. No air. No surprise warmth from an unexpected direction.
Singer talks about the heart the same way – it opens and closes. And the practice, if you can call it that, is to notice when you're closing and choose to stay open instead. Not because the thing that scared you doesn't matter. But because a closed heart can't actually protect you. It just cuts you off from your own life.
Open the windows. Let in the light.
It sounds easy. It's maybe the hardest thing I know how to do.
What I tell my kids
When my kids get upset – really upset, the kind where you can see them contracting around something – I tell them to open their heart.
It's hard, Mommy, they say.
I know. It is hard.
But every time I manage it, I feel warm inside. Not fixed, not resolved – warm. Like something that was clenched finally let go.
That's what I'm after. That's what the book gave me a language for.
The door is there, even when I forget to walk through it.