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Holding Space; open up, fear less, love more

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by Tiger Singleton

5.0(1 reviews)

132 episodes

Updated Monthly

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Podcast Overview

This podcast is a simple, honest look at what gets in the way of a peaceful human life. We explore the mechanics of the ego—not as an enemy to fight, but as the mind’s noisy misunderstanding—so we can see what’s actually here beyond all that tension. The conversation points back to the deeper clarity that’s always present when we’re not caught in fear, projection, or performance. No superstition, no spiritual posturing. Just a sincere curiosity about what it means to be human, to open the heart a little more, and to live with a grounded sense of love and play. Many episodes come from live sessions inside the Deep Divers Group, where these insights are explored in real time with real people, in a way that stays practical, intimate, and deeply human. <a href="https://tigmonk.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">tigmonk.substack.com</a>

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Publishing Since

12/12/2021

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Recent Episodes

May 16, 2026

Insight Meditation: Waking Up From The Painful Dream of Everyday Life

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit <a href="https://tigmonk.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7">tigmonk.substack.com</a> Most of us are walking around inside a dream we don’t know we’re dreaming — a story the mind has constructed about what’s wrong, what’s missing, what we need to fix before we can be okay. This session is an invitation to wake up from that dream. Not through force or discipline, but through honest looking.In this insight meditation, Tiger moves slowly through some of the most universal human experiences: the fear of not being enough, the compulsion to control, the exhaustion of resisting what simply is. What emerges isn’t a technique — it’s a shift in how you see. The chapter guide below is here to help you navigate the recording, or to stand alone if you’re reading instead of watching.Chapter 1 — The Reverence That Has No Words 0:00Tiger opens not with a lesson but with a feeling. He describes a state that many meditators recognize: a deep, wordless gratitude where the only honest response is to bow. No agenda, no teaching — just presence.From this place, he introduces the session’s central question: What is it we are actually remembering?He offers several ways to point at it — “all is well,” “God is,” “we are whole,” “there is nothing to fear” — while acknowledging that words can only gesture toward what the heart already knows. The key insight here is what remembering actually means in a spiritual context. It isn’t learning something new. It’s waking up. The mind spins stories — many of them destructive, most of them cataloguing fears that aren’t really there. We get captured by those stories. We exhaust ourselves inside them. And remembering is simply the moment we see through them again.This opening chapter functions as the container for everything that follows. Tiger isn’t presenting a philosophy to understand — he’s pointing to an experience that’s available right now.Chapter 2 — The Partner Story: What It Looks Like to Hold Space 4:19Tiger shares something personal from earlier that morning. His partner is in a low mood — disappointed about something she wants that simply isn’t possible. And he notices himself learning, again, how to be okay with that.This is where the teaching gets grounded. He uses the image of a parent and child: a child who can’t have ice cream for dinner and concludes, from inside that story, that it means they aren’t loved. The story feels completely real to the child. But the parent sees something different — not that the child is wrong to feel it, but that the child is momentarily lost in a narrative that isn’t the whole truth.He then extends this into our relationship with God. What if we relate to God the way a child relates to an uncooperative parent — crying out, “You don’t love me, you’re not giving me what I want”? The assumption underneath that relationship is that I should be in charge. That life should conform to my preferences. That God is essentially a vending machine.This framing — God, parent, partner — leads somewhere important: it’s ultimately a mirror for how we relate to ourselves when we’re in confusion. Can you hold space for yourself the way a wise parent holds space for a frightened child? Can you see that underneath the story, there’s a person who’s simply forgotten something?Chapter 3 — What Is the Deeper Fear? 11:04Tiger turns toward the structure of fear itself.When we’re suffering, we have stories about why we’re suffering. We think we’re afraid of what might happen, of what people will think, of things not working out. But these are surface-level fears. They’re the ice cream.He invites a more honest question: What are you really afraid of?As you follow the thread down beneath the specific stories, something universal starts to appear. Nearly every human fear, when you trace it far enough, arrives at the same place: I’m afraid I’m not enough. I’m afraid I’m not loved. I’m afraid I’m separate from God.This is one of the most striking observations in the session. People come from completely different lives, different stories, different surface-level problems — but the root is strikingly consistent. And in the stillness, as the mind quiets and the imagined world fades a little, something else becomes available: the sense that the love we thought was missing isn’t actually missing. It never was.The invitation isn’t to convince yourself of this intellectually. It’s to actually get quiet enough to notice it.Chapter 4 — The Trap Disguised as Spirituality 15:20This chapter addresses something subtle and important — a trap that tends to catch people who are genuinely on a spiritual path.Once you understand the mechanism (fear comes from false stories, there’s really nothing to fear), it’s tempting to conclude: therefore, I should never be afraid. And then being afraid becomes evidence that you’re doing it wrong. You start using the teaching against yourself.Tiger is clear: this misses the point entirely.Because there’s nothing to really be afraid of, it’s completely okay that you are afraid. That understanding doesn’t eliminate the human experience — it makes room for it. You can be scared without being wrong for being scared.He illustrates this in the relational context again. True spiritual maturity isn’t saying to your partner, “You’re getting it wrong — there’s nothing to be afraid of.” That’s using spiritual language to avoid being present. Real presence looks like: It’s okay that you’re afraid. It’s understandable. I love you.This is also the doorway the session has been building toward: the way out is the way through. Fear isn’t the problem to eliminate — it’s the doorway to walk through. And you can only walk through it if you stop running. If you can just be with yourself, without needing to fix or flee, that’s when the waking up actually happens.Chapter 5 — Letting God Be God 20:22Tiger pulls back to look at something he observes in the world and in himself: the relentless human compulsion to control.The ego, as he describes it, is essentially trying to be God. Trying to make people see you a certain way. Trying to make life about you. Managing what others think, resisting what’s actually happening, white-knuckling outcomes. And the suffering this creates isn’t a punishment — it’s simply the natural result of fighting against what is true.He offers a quieter alternative: letting God be God. Not as resignation or passivity, but as a willingness to align with reality rather than argue with it. Honesty about not knowing. Honesty about being scared when you’re scared. Not pretending to certainty you don’t have.There’s a line here that lands with particular weight: we are only afraid of the truth. The unknown is real — and here you still are. Inadequacy is real — but who you think you are was never the whole story. The invitation isn’t to conquer these things. It’s to be at peace with them. Not taking the ego quite so seriously.Chapter 6 — The Balcony View: From Chaos to Symphony 25:10Tiger closes with an image that ties the entire session together.He describes sitting on his balcony, looking down at the town below — cars, motorcycles, roosters, dogs, ocean, clouds. From street level, it looks like chaos. From above, it’s a symphony. Everything doing what it’s supposed to do. The ocean tide flowing in and out. The clouds coming and going. Even what looks like conflict — when you zoom out — is just one thing dancing.The low tide and the high tide aren’t fighting each other. It’s the ocean moving.The mind, though, can turn all of this into an epic battle and conclude that life is making a mistake.He ends where he began — with surrender. Not defeat, but something more honest: releasing the project of controlling what was never ours to control. And he notes, with some humor, what’s underneath so many of the things we want in the world: protection of an image, hiding from our own humanity, all of it driven by a judgment of that humanity.The paradox he leaves with is this: the more you can see the beauty in your own humanity — the fear, the confusion, the not-knowing — the less you need the world to be a particular way. The less you need people to see you a certain way. You can just love them as they are.Which is also how you start to love yourself.

April 12, 2026

Emotional Wellness & Life's Conscious Design

Tiger sat with the phrase “emotional wellness” for over an hour — and spent most of that time dismantling the fantasy we’ve built around it. What follows is a written companion to the session above: the arc of his exploration, the moments that land hardest, and the quiet truth he keeps circling back to.What If Your Emotions Were Never the Problem?We spend a lot of energy trying to feel differently. Chasing wellness like it’s a finish line — a state where we’ll finally stop hurting, stop worrying, stop taking things so personally.Tiger opens by naming the pattern. He tells the story of being seventeen, fantasizing about turning eighteen — how freedom was always just around the corner. And then the corner came and went. Nothing changed. It was just another day. He’s watched that same pattern repeat across his entire life: the relationship that would complete him, the circumstance that would finally let him relax.The same pattern lives inside the concept of emotional wellness. “As soon as I never feel insecure again, I’ll finally be healed.” It’s a fantasy. And recognizing that is where the real exploration begins — not in fixing the emotions, but in questioning what we think they mean.The Fantasy Always Breaks [00:01]Tiger doesn’t rush past the opening. He lingers with the turning-eighteen story because the pattern is the point. We create fantasies of outcome — then watch them gently or abruptly destroyed. Every single time.What makes this dangerous isn’t the disappointment. It’s the assumption underneath: that something is going terribly wrong with us. That our emotional struggles are evidence of failure.“It invites me to see what I might call an inherent rejection of our humanity, where we look at ourselves and the emotional struggles that we have, and we automatically assume that something’s going terribly wrong.”Tiger punctures the spiritual version of this too. People create fantasies of what his life must be like. His answer is disarming: hang out with him for a week and you’d realize he’s just a dude. The perfection isn’t in escaping your humanity. It’s already inside of it.Your Emotions Aren’t Responding to What’s Happening [10:32]This is the hinge of the entire session. Tiger names what he calls a fundamental misunderstanding — the assumption that our feelings are caused by what happens to us. Someone says something irritating, and the automatic conclusion is: I feel irritated because of what they said.He doesn’t argue against it. He just asks you to look.“What is infinitely more accurate is that my emotions are responding to how I perceive experience. My emotions are responding to the stories that I’m telling about what I see.”If the outside creates your inner world, you’re a prisoner. You need a savior. You’re afraid of reality itself. But if your emotions are responding to perception — to the story, not the event — then nothing out there has to change for the healing to begin.None of It Is Personal [15:29]Tiger asks a question that lands harder than it sounds: how much of your emotional disturbance is the result of taking something personally?He walks the reader through the mechanics. Taking it personally means interpreting an experience as evidence that you’re not enough. And the fast-forward answer, the one he admits sounds radical, is that all emotional disturbance comes from this. Every bit of it.“The conclusion is that none of it is personal, even when it deeply seems personal.”Then he shows the healing cycle we’ve all lived through. You took something personally, got scared, reacted badly — then later saw it clearly. “Oh. That’s not what that means.” And in that moment of seeing, the suffering dissolved. Not because anything changed. Because you stopped creating something that wasn’t there.Emotional Pain Is on Your Side [37:06]Tiger introduces the hot stove. Physical pain exists to protect you. Touch something that burns and the pain says that’s not how things work around here. Nobody resents physical pain for doing its job.But we resent emotional pain. We numb it, distract from it, mask it, run.“We’re not listening to it. We’re not allowing it to help us heal how we see.”He extends the stove metaphor. Imagine numbing the pain with pills so you can keep holding the hot thing you want. The pain goes quiet — but the damage doesn’t stop. It multiplies. And when the numbing wears off, the wave hits all at once. That’s what happens when we spend years running from emotional pain. The wave that returns isn’t punishment. It’s a healing opportunity that’s been waiting for you to listen.The Beautiful Mess [42:22]Something shifts here. Tiger gets quieter. He talks about his own arrogance — how sure he was about what he knew, what he wanted, what other people should be. And then the humbling. Seeing that he already had what he wanted. That it was never about him at all.“In contrast to the past where there wasn’t clarity, it’s a beautiful mess now rather than a frightful mess.”This isn’t a promise of transcendence. It’s the opposite. Tiger points toward a humility that can hold the insanity of being human without flinching. Not because the mess disappears, but because you stop judging it. The question isn’t whether you’re a mess. The question is whether you’re condemning the mess or holding it with the same tenderness you’d offer a frightened friend.How Do You See Your Humanity? [51:05]Tiger closes with the most intimate question of the session. Not what should you do about your emotions — but how are you looking at yourself right now?He offers an image. You see a friend struggling over something that clearly isn’t true. You can see they’re scared, caught in an innocent misunderstanding. And what you feel toward them isn’t judgment. It’s something closer to tenderness.“Are you not the same?”That lands. Because we can extend that seeing to everyone else and withhold it from ourselves. Tiger holds the mirror steady. “How does it feel to look at yourself and say, ‘I will love you if‘ — which is to say, ‘I don’t love you right now’?” The alternative is simpler and harder: I see that you are doing the best you can. Let’s try again. Seek first the truth. Let everything else be what it is.Seek First the Truth [59:02]Tiger doesn’t end with a prescription. He ends with a correction.We chase emotional wellness like it’s a trophy — something to earn, to finally possess. But the whole session has been quietly dismantling that chase. The truth doesn’t deliver the emotional experience you ordered. It moves you toward center. Not from sadness to happiness. Maybe from fearfully sad to lovingly sad. From blind rage to something humbler.“Seek first the truth, and then everything else you want — which was an emotional experience — will be given to you.”Don’t worship the feeling. Don’t make peace into another fantasy. The whole hour has been building to this single, almost embarrassingly simple instruction: give yourself to what’s true, and let everything else be what it is.That’s the session. Not a system. Not a fix. A willingness to look — and to keep looking — even when what you see is just a human being, doing their best, still a mess, and somehow already whole. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://tigmonk.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">tigmonk.substack.com/subscribe</a>

April 9, 2026

Letting Go of the Need to Fix Everyone Around You

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit <a href="https://tigmonk.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7">tigmonk.substack.com</a> Tiger pulled a thread in this clip that most of us would rather leave alone — the one about how much energy we spend trying to fix the people around us, and what it actually says about us when we do. What follows is a written companion to the audio above: the turning points, the uncomfortable honesty, and the metaphor that makes the whole thing land.Why Your Frustration with Other People Is Always About YouThere’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from caring too much about what everyone else is doing wrong. Not the physical kind — the kind that lives in your chest. The constant low-grade tension of watching people around you make choices you’d never make, and feeling like you need to do something about it.Tiger doesn’t soften this. He names it for what it is: ego hiding behind good intentions. The part of you that’s convinced the world would work better if everyone would just listen — that’s not wisdom. That’s your own unresolved noise, dressed up as helpfulness.And the moment you see it clearly, something lets go. Not the world. You.Why Your Frustration with Other People Is Always About YouThere’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from caring too much about what everyone else is doing wrong. Not the physical kind — the kind that lives in your chest. The constant low-grade tension of watching people around you make choices you’d never make, and feeling like you need to do something about it.Tiger doesn’t soften this. He names it for what it is: ego hiding behind good intentions. The part of you that’s convinced the world would work better if everyone would just listen — that’s not wisdom. That’s your own unresolved noise, dressed up as helpfulness.And the moment you see it clearly, something lets go. Not the world. You.The Mirror You Didn’t Ask For [0:00]Tiger opens with something that sounds generous but cuts deep. When he sees someone drowning in their ego, he doesn’t see an obstacle. He sees himself.“The fact that the world is lost in this and that others are drowning in their egos is simply the perfect mirror for me to see my own insanity.”That word — mirror — changes everything. Because if someone else’s ego is bothering you, the question isn’t “how do I fix them?” The question is “what in me is being triggered?” And the answer is almost always the same: something you’re holding onto. Something you think the world owes you. Something your own ego won’t let go of.Who’s Got the Ego Problem? [0:53]Tiger asks the question plainly, and it’s the kind that sits in your stomach for a while. If you think someone else has an ego problem — who’s actually running the show?“If I think somebody else has an ego problem, that’s only something my ego would say.”It’s the perfect hiding spot. Your ego gets to feel righteous, evolved, above it all — because look at them and their ego. Meanwhile, your own ego is running the whole operation, completely undetected. Convenient.Tiger doesn’t say this to make you feel guilty. He says it because the recognition itself is freedom. The moment you catch your ego pointing at someone else’s ego, the game is over. You’re seeing the trick in real time.The Best Way to Wake Anyone Up [1:37]If the answer isn’t fixing people, what is it? Tiger lands somewhere simple and hard to argue with.“The best way for me to help to wake up egos in the world is to wake up from my own ego and love on them.”No obligation to enlighten anyone. No mission to save the world from itself. Just the quiet, unglamorous work of seeing your own patterns — and then showing up with more love because you’re no longer carrying the weight of everyone else’s problems.The irony is that this has more impact than any intervention ever could. People don’t change because you pointed out their flaws. They change because something in your presence made them feel safe enough to look at themselves.The Forest That Doesn’t Need Organizing [2:04]This is where the metaphor lands. Tiger paints a picture of walking into a forest and being frustrated that it’s chaotic. The bugs are fighting. The branches are tangled. If only the forest would get organized, then you could finally relax.“The problem is not the forest. The problem is not the apparent chaos.”The comedy of it is obvious once you hear it — but we do this every single day. We walk into our families, our workplaces, our relationships, and we think: if everyone would just behave the way I think they should, I could finally be at peace.The forest was never the problem. The forest doesn’t need your help. The only thing standing between you and peace is the belief that you know how everything should be.The Only Problem Is the One You Put There [3:21]More in the post...

132 total episodes available

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What is Holding Space; open up, fear less, love more?: This podcast is a simple, honest look at what gets in the way of a peaceful human life. We explore the mechanics of the ego—not as an enemy to fight, but as the mind’s noisy misunderstanding—so we can see what’s actually here beyond all that tension.

The conversation points back to the deeper clarity that’s always present when we’re not caught in fear, projection, or performance. No superstition, no spiritual posturing. Just a sincere curiosity about what it means to be human, to open the heart a little more, and to live with a grounded sense of love and play.

Many episodes come from live sessions inside the Deep Divers Group, where these insights are explored in real time with real people, in a way that stays practical, intimate, and deeply human. <a href="https://tigmonk.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">tigmonk.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates monthly.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 10 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.

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