Michael A. Singer

Michael A. Singer — known to many simply as "Mickey" — is the author of The Untethered Soul, one of the most beloved and widely read spiritual books of the modern era. Born in 1947, he was pursuing a doctorate in economics in 1971 when a sudden, profound inner awakening stopped him in his tracks. Rather than explain the experience away, he withdrew into seclusion to study yoga and meditation, determined to understand the nature of the voice inside his head and the awareness that watched it. In 1975 he founded Temple of the Universe, a meditation and yoga centre outside Gainesville, Florida, where people of any belief still gather to sit in silence and hear his talks.At the heart of Singer's teaching is a deceptively simple invitation: to notice that you are not your thoughts and emotions, but the consciousness that observes them — and, from that vantage point, to practise letting go. His books The Untethered Soul (2007), The Surrender Experiment (2015), Living Untethered (2022), and Wisdom Untethered (2026) map a path of release, surrender, and inner freedom drawn from decades of direct practice rather than doctrine. His writing is warm, plainspoken, and quietly transformative, which is much of why The Untethered Soul became a #1 New York Times bestseller and reached millions after his appearance on Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul Sunday.What makes Singer remarkable is that his extraordinary reach came alongside an equally remarkable outer life — he built and led a billion-dollar software company whose work is archived in the Smithsonian — all while living the very principle he teaches: that lasting peace comes not from controlling life, but from releasing our resistance to it. Through his weekly talks, now shared freely as The Michael Singer Podcast, he continues to guide people toward the liberation waiting just beneath their own mental noise.