Emotional Release · “Die to Be Reborn”
Removing the Thorn
To make the deliberate choice to remove an inner emotional ‘thorn’ (a sensitive wound) by willingly facing and releasing the disturbance when it’s touched — rather than organising life to avoid ever touching it.
Removing the thorn in 5 lines: A painful inner wound is like a thorn on a nerve — you can spend life protecting it (avoiding everything that touches it) or remove it (feel the pain once and be free). Most of us secretly arrange our whole life around protecting the thorn. Choose removal: when a trigger touches the wound, don’t defend — turn toward it, relax, feel it, and let it pass through. Each time, the thorn works its way out. (Go gently; for trauma, do this with a therapist — and never confuse feeling a wound with tolerating real harm.)
What it is
A decision-level practice from Michael A. Singer’s The Untethered Soul. He uses a vivid analogy: imagine you have a thorn embedded in your arm, pressing on a nerve — agonising whenever anything touches it.
You now face two, and only two, real choices. Option one: protect the thorn — rearrange your whole life so nothing ever touches it (special sleeves, avoidance, devices, careful rules).
Option two: remove the thorn — endure the sharp pain of pulling it out, after which nothing can ever disturb that spot again. Singer’s point: our emotional wounds work exactly like thorns. A core loneliness, a fear of rejection, a shame — we usually build an elaborate life of avoidance and control to keep it from being touched.
The practice is the conscious choice to remove the thorn instead of protecting it: when life presses on the wound, you choose to face the disturbance, feel it, and let it release rather than defend against it.
The reward is genuine freedom — the wound that no longer runs your choices. It operationalizes non-resistance (The Inner Creates the Outer), the witness (Life Is a Dream), surrender/flow (The Inner Creates the Outer), and feeling-through (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
- Name the dynamic honestly. Recognise that some inner sensitivity — loneliness, fear of not being good enough, fear of abandonment — is a “thorn,” and that much of your behaviour is secretly organised to keep it from being touched (who you avoid, what you won’t try, how you control situations and people).
- See the two choices clearly. Singer makes you confront them: (a) protect it — keep adjusting outer life forever so it’s never triggered, which makes the thorn the boss of your life; or (b) remove it — be willing to feel the pain when it’s touched, so it can finally come out. There is no third option where it just painlessly disappears.
- Make the decision to remove it. Consciously choose freedom over protection: “I would rather feel this and be free of it than spend my life avoiding it.” This is the pivotal, deliberate commitment.
- When something touches the thorn, do NOT defend. In the live moment a trigger hits and the wound flares, resist the automatic moves — blaming, controlling, withdrawing, fixing the outside. Instead turn toward the disturbance. 5. Feel it and let it pass through. Stay seated as the witness, relax around the pain, and let the stored energy rise and release rather than re-burying it (this is Singer’s relax-and-release move applied to the wound). Each time you let it be touched and pass through without defending, the thorn works its way out. → 6. Stop protecting it in advance. Over time, deliberately stop building your life around avoiding the trigger — let situations arise that would normally be off-limits, and meet them. Freedom comes precisely from no longer needing the world to be arranged around the wound. (Sourcing note: the thorn analogy, the “two choices — protect vs. remove,” and “let it be touched and release it” are Singer’s documented teaching from Ch. 9 of The Untethered Soul, attributed and faithfully paraphrased — not reproduced.)
Source & Lineage
Michael A. Singer (b. 1947) frames inner growth as emptying stored disturbances (samskaras). The thorn is his most memorable image for why avoidance keeps us imprisoned and why willingly feeling is the path out.
It draws on yoga/Vedanta (releasing held energies) and converges with the psychology of exposure and acceptance. It is the same family as Hawkins’ Letting Go and the Sedona Method (allow-and-release), and the inverse of experiential avoidance described in ACT. → (Singer; non-dual teachers).
The Traditions' versions
Exposure therapy (CBT) — deliberately, gradually facing the feared trigger so the conditioned alarm extinguishes (the clinical cousin of “let the thorn be touched”).
- Acceptance / reduced experiential avoidance (ACT) — willingness to feel difficult internal experience rather than organise life to avoid it.
- Letting Go (Hawkins) / Sedona Method (Levenson) — allowing a feeling’s charge to run out without resistance.,
- Yogic burning of samskaras — letting stored impressions surface and dissolve.
- “The only way out is through” — the broad therapeutic and contemplative principle of feeling rather than avoiding.
Common refinements
Forcing/flooding. “Remove the thorn” is not “blast yourself with maximum pain.” Titrate — face triggers at a tolerable intensity and let them release in layers. Heroic flooding can backfire.
- Confusing it with self-harm or staying in harmful situations. Choosing to feel an inner wound is not choosing to endure abuse, danger, or mistreatment to “remove the thorn.” The thorn is the inner reaction; you still protect yourself from real external harm (see safety).
- Suppressing instead of releasing. Gritting your teeth through the trigger (“I won’t react”) is just a new protection. The move is to relax, feel, and let it pass.
- Skipping the decision. Without the conscious choice (step 3), you default to protection. The deliberate commitment is what changes behaviour in the live moment.
- Refinement: lean on the relax-and-release method as the how of step 5, and the witness seat (the “hello” exercise) as the stable place to feel from.