Let’s see…how do we begin this? I didn’t just “pick up” The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, I ordered it from Amazon on my phone while I was still out. I’d heard it mentioned on the podcast I was listening to, which now I can’t remember the title of. I found it in my mailbox two days later, a miracle in my neighborhood, and added ten minutes of reading it into my morning routine, just after my meditation time.
Did I love it? Not really and I feel a little bad about that. If I had not impulse bought it, if I had come home and researched it a little, I probably would have moved on to something a little less…spiritual. What did I expect from a book with the subtitle A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment? But then again, if I had, I would have lost the gems I did find in it.
“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”
Who is this person that I can’t live with anymore? It’s my mind! Around the same time I started reading this is when I also started talking to her in kinder tones. We’ve been getting along much better lately.
“Emotion literally means “disturbance.” The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning “to disturb.”
Think about that for a second. You’re a spider on a web, and there’s a disturbance. You turn in that direction, wait, see if there’s anything there that needs your attention. And then move on.
“Don’t get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It’s an abstraction.”
We could be trying to express the same emotion but using different words and actions. What if we try to get understanding instead of attacking each other over semantics?
“The inner equivalent to objects in space such as furniture, walls, and so on are your mind objects: thoughts emotions, and the objects of the senses. And the inner equivalent of space is the consciousness that enables your mind objects to be, just as space allows all things to be.”
I wrote this one on a post-it and keep it close to my desk. “Pay attention to that space between things.” Silence is the space between thought. When we’re paying attention to the space, we allow more peace in, and we tend to relax and see the bigger picture.
“Most people pursue physical pleasures or various forms of psychological gratification because they believe that those things will make them happy or free them from a feeling of fear or lack.”
This one hit me like a brick. I’m the one that says, “If you just texted me…” “If you just did the dishes…” “If you…” That’s not what makes anyone happy. The happy comes when you accept the world around you as it is, without conditions. That doesn’t mean you take all the crap that comes and live miserable. There’s more about that in this book.
“A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self.”
The world just is. What are you going to do now? I refuse to call myself a victim of anything.
“When a condition or situation that the mind has attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.”
When I’m sad about how something is going, I can feel it in my body like I’m having a heart attack. It really sucks and causes panic, which I respond to and then create more drama. I recently tried NOT doing that, sitting with the pain, knowing it was my mind, feeling it all over, and then…it left me. More magic. Emotions aren’t real. They are primal warnings to things that may or may not be there.
“Don’t look for peace. Don’t look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.”
This last one was my favorite. It sounds totally nuts, but it works. I tried it myself. One morning I woke up grumpy. I had a bad dream, didn’t sleep well, felt like an ogre. In the past I would have begun a downward spiral. “This isn’t what I want! I should do better than this! All this practice is for nothing!” Angrier and angrier until someone in the house said or did something that irked me even more, and then BOOM. Michelle is on a rampage and hating herself for it.
What I tried this time was to say to myself, “Yeah, that night sucked. I’m tired and grumpy. I’m human!” And then I altered my day a bit, chilled more, read more, watched my favorite show and had some popcorn and a cola. When my husband asked me how my day was going, I said, “I am feeling grumpy and tired, so I took the day off. Let’s go get tacos!” I surrendered and accepted my feelings instead of fighting with them.
There were so many little sparks to capture in this book. I wrote many more down but tried to distill it to only my favorites here. I wasn’t a fan of the spiritual bend this author takes. I felt like he was trying to pull in several different religions to explain things instead of letting them be based in psychology or human nature. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone just getting started with meditation, but it does have a lot to teach if you have the patience to wade through. But if the spiritual speaks to you, it might be right up your alley!
