Remove The Thorn: The Untethered Soul Lesson That Changed My Life

In this episode, I'm sharing one of the most powerful mindset lessons I've ever come across, inspired by The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer. If you've ever felt stuck in the same patterns, triggered by the same situations, or found yourself building your life around avoiding discomfort, this episode is for you.

I dive into the  "thorn" story from The Untethered Soul a simple but profound metaphor that perfectly explains why inner work is so important. We often spend years creating strategies, excuses, and coping mechanisms to avoid pain, when the real solution is to face the root cause head on. The more we protect the thorn, the more it shapes our decisions, relationships, confidence, and ultimately, our lives.

This episode is a reminder that the answers you're searching for aren't outside of you. They're within you. The freedom, confidence, and peace you're craving often sit on the other side of doing the hard work and addressing what's really holding you back.

So I have a question for you: what thorn are you protecting right now? And what would your life look like if you finally removed it?

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why avoiding discomfort can quietly control your life
• The powerful lesson behind The Untethered Soul
• How unresolved triggers shape your behaviours and decisions
• My personal journey overcoming my own thorn
• Why mindset work is the key to lasting transformation
• Practical ways to identify and address the root cause of your struggles
• How to create more freedom, confidence, and joy in your life

Follow me for more on Instagram @mindyourownbeeswaxpodcast & TikTok: @mindyourownbeeswaxpod

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Mind your own beeswax.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome

Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:09

to Mind Your Own Beeswax. My name is Grace, and this is the podcast where together we are working on ourselves, changing our mindset, and becoming the best version of you. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I have a really exciting episode. I feel like I'm always talking

Why mindset work is so Important

SPEAKER_00 0:29

about working on mindset, bettering ourselves, and I have the perfect story that is the best example of why this is so important. So, if you have followed me on Instagram or TikTok, you will know that I bloody love the book The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer. This is an incredible book. It's a great read, and there's a really good story in it. I say story, you could probably say like a parable, maybe, or I don't know what the other word for it is. You know, it's like a little story that like teaches you a lesson. That's what it is. It's a story that teaches you a lesson. We'll go with that one. But I want to read you this story because I think it is the perfect explanation of why it is so important for whatever you're going through in life, whatever emotions you're feeling, whatever things you're going through, the answer is always within you. There is no external answer, even if it's a person, a person that's causing you drama. The answer is only ever within you. Those feelings, those emotions towards that situation, they live inside of you. And the only way to overcome is to work through that yourself and get to the root of why and how. Why are you so triggered? And how can you overcome this? So let's get into this little story. Tell me what you think, but it is an incredible one. Imagine

A story from the Untethered Soul

SPEAKER_00 2:04

that you have a thorn in your arm that is directly touching a nerve. When the thorn is touched, it is so painful. Because it hurts so much, the thorn is a serious problem for you. It's difficult to sleep because you can't roll over on it, it's hard to get close to people because they might touch it, and it makes your daily life so difficult. So you've got two choices here. You can either learn to live with this thorn and build your life around managing the pain, or you can make the tough and painful decision to remove the thorn. And believe it or not, whichever of these two options you take is going to change your life. Let's begin with the first choice and explore how it's going to affect your life. If you decide you have to keep things from touching the thorn, then that will become the work of a lifetime. If you want to go for a walk in the woods, you'll have to thin out the branches in front of you to make sure none of them brush against your thorn. You often roll over in the night, and that causes you a lot of pain. So you're going to have to find a solution for how to sleep with this thorn. Perhaps you could design an apparatus that acts as a protective device. If you really put a lot of time and energy into it, your solution, it actually seems to work. You now have this device that protects your thorn, and you feel like you've solved your problem. You think I can sleep now, and guess what? I'm going to go on TV and give a testimony. Anybody who has this thorn problem can get a device like mine and it will protect their thorn, and I'm even going to make some money off it. So now you've got this whole life built around a thorn, and you're really proud of it. You keep the woods thinned out, you wear your apparatus at bed at night so you can sleep, but now you have a new problem. You fell in love. This is a problem because in your situation, it's really hard to hug someone. Nobody can even touch you because they might touch your thorn. So you design another kind of device that allows you to get closer to people without even touching. Eventually, you decide you want total mobility without having to worry about your thorn anymore. So you make a full-time device that doesn't have to be unstrapped at night or changed over to hug someone. You can wear it all day long. But it's really heavy, so you put wheels on it, you control its hydraulics, you install sensors. It's actually quite an impressive device. Of course, you've now had to change the doors in your house so that the protective apparatus can get through, but at least you can live your life, right? You can go to work, you can go to sleep, you can get close to people. So you tell everyone, I've solved my problem. I'm a free being. I can go anywhere I want, I can do anything I want. This thorn used to ruin my life. Now it doesn't ruin anything. But the truth here is that the thorn has completely ruined your life. It affects all your decisions, including where you go, who you're comfortable with, and who's comfortable with you. It determines where you're allowed to work, what house you can live in, what kind of bed you can sleep in. When it's all said and done, that thorn is ruining every aspect of your life. It turns out that the life of protecting yourself from the problem becomes the perfect reflection of the problem itself. You never solved anything. If you don't solve the root cause of the problem, but instead you attempt to protect yourself from the problem, it will end up ruining your life. You end up so psychologically fixated on the problem that you can't even see the rest of your life. You actually feel that because you've minimalized the pain of the problem, you've solved it. But it is not solved. All you did was devote your life to avoiding it. It is now the center of your universe. Isn't this a great story?

Lesson from the Untethered Soul

SPEAKER_00 6:06

I read this and I was like, god damn. That is why I am so passionate about mindset and inner work. Because even though this is a story, it's a great example of when you have a problem in your life. If you have a problem, a feeling, a person that's frustrating you, it is so easy to mask that. But the more and the more and more we layer onto that, it's just becoming our whole lives. It's becoming another layer, it's becoming another problem, and then you need to layer on something else to solve that problem, and then layer on something else to solve that problem. And you never fix the root cause. And it can end up becoming your whole personality or changing the whole trajectory of your life. So that is why you have to get to the root cause of why something upsets you, why something triggers you. And that can be so hard. But if you want to live a life of freedom, of joy, and as the untethered soul calls it, of enlightenment, you've got to work through those feelings so that you can create yourself ultimate freedom in this lifetime. And it is hard, you've got to do the work, but it is so worth it. An example

Example of a time I had to 'remove the thorn'

SPEAKER_00 7:44

that I could give here is that I think about social anxiety. That's something that years and years ago I really struggled with social anxiety. And I think about my first ever full-time job, and I was invited to go to like drinks on a Friday afternoon, and that just riddled me with anxiety. I was like, oh my god, what do I wear? What am I going to talk to these people about? I don't know what to say, where am I going to stand? How embarrassing. Like, I just was in this state of anxiety, panic, and I mean it that's one example. But throughout that sort of like couple of years in my life, I was so riddled with social anxiety. I had to do the work. Why did I feel this way? But I had to do the work. I had to unpack why I felt that way because it was ruining my life. And I found myself, you know, I would get invited to things and like, oh no, I can't go because of this. And I would make up an excuse, and then someone would follow up and be like, oh, how was that thing that you had to do? You know, that's why you couldn't come to the work drinks. And then I'm like, oh my God, I'm like caught myself in a lie. And that's that layering on of a band-aid of a new problem of a band-aid of a new problem. You know, it's like protecting your thorn and adding on layers and layers. It's not a good place to be. We don't want to be feeling like that. And I had to do the work, and I realized I didn't know how to talk to people. I wasn't good at making conversation. And so I worked on it. I worked on making conversation. I worked on connecting with people. And I just started by observing other people. I had a few friends that were really, really like social butterflies, honestly. And I think I just observed them and then I would practice. I'd practice making conversation and I got better and better and better and better at it. And eventually, I mean, I feel like now I'm someone I'm quite social and I love talking to people. I love speaking to new people. I'm like, yes, let's get a coffee, let's get a wine together. I feel like I really it fills up my cup to have conversations with people. And I have such a sense of FOMO. If I'm invited to something, I'm like, yes, oh my God, I'm dying to come. Please, I want to come. I don't want to miss out. And it's because I did that work and now I'm okay. I can get through it. I don't need to layer on the protection for this thorn that I once had. I removed the thorn. Yeah, it was hard and I had to do the work. And, you know, making conversation with people, sometimes it can be tough, sometimes it can be awkward. It's that feeling of ripping out that thorn, but it is so worth it. And now I don't have to live this life that's built on having anxiety and being worried about it and telling lies as to why I can't go to things and do to things. Because I've worked on it. I'm over it. I accepted the challenge. I got through it, and it's no longer a thorn in my

What 'thorn' do you need to remove?

SPEAKER_00 10:48

side. So I ask, what in your life is a thorn in your side? And are you protecting that thorn? What is it that you need to do to pull that thorn out, to remove it, and to feel freedom from that thorn? Think about it now and create a plan for yourself. Think what are the steps you can do to take to experience freedom from this? Because if you don't put in the hard work now, you're gonna dedicate your whole life to protecting that thorn. It'll become your whole personality, it'll become all you think about, it'll change the shape of your life. So do the work now, remove the thorn. I hope that this episode was interesting and I trust that it finds you at a time that you need it the most. So take this as your sign that you've got that little thorn, might be a prickle, it might be a big thorn. Do the work and remove it. And I promise you, my friend, it's gonna change your life. Thank you for hitting play on this episode today. As always, I love you. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Mind your own beeswax. Hey, counting out lean back. Yeah, touchy with you.