Michael Singer

Michael Alan Singer was born in 1947 in South Florida. He was a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Florida in 1971 when, sitting quietly during a normal conversation, he had an experience he later described as a sudden awakening to the voice in his head — the realization that there was a “me” behind the incessant mental chatter, and that the “me” was not the chatter. The experience did not go away. He dropped out of the PhD program, went to live alone in the woods, and built a small meditation hut on land in rural Alachua County, Florida.

That retreat ran for more than a decade. Small groups of seekers began finding their way to him. In 1975 he founded the Temple of the Universe — an open-to-all-faiths meditation center that continues to operate today. He gave dharma talks, led group meditations, and supported himself through a variety of work including building construction.

The unlikely second career began in 1981. Singer, who had studied computer science alongside his economics work, began writing software for the medical-billing office of a doctor acquaintance. That software became the foundation of Medical Manager Corporation — which Singer founded, grew to become one of the largest medical practice management software companies in the United States, and took public on NASDAQ in 1997. The company was acquired by WebMD in 2000 for approximately $1 billion. Singer stayed on as CEO of the WebMD subsidiary until 2003.

He wrote The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself in 2007 — a short, direct book on the witness-observer practice and the psychological mechanics of surrendering to the moment. It sat on bookshelves quietly for several years. Oprah Winfrey discovered it around 2011, featured it on her SuperSoul Sunday show, and it became a spiritual-publishing phenomenon. It has since sold more than 3.6 million copies in 30+ languages and remains a perennial bestseller.

His 2015 follow-up, The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life’s Perfection, is his spiritual-business memoir — the first-person account of how he built Medical Manager and WebMD by systematically surrendering to whatever life presented rather than pushing his own preferences. The book is unusual in modern spiritual literature for being a dollars-and-cents operational account of surrender as a practical business philosophy.

His central teaching: there is a voice in your head. You are not the voice. You are what notices the voice. The suffering of ordinary life comes from identifying with the voice and then trying to control outer conditions to quiet it. The way out is to relax the grip — to let the voice pass like weather — and to surrender to whatever the current moment actually contains, which is always more than the voice can describe.