Your Daily Tolle: Inner Stillness

  

"When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the 'I Am' that is deeper than name and form.

When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning."

Eckhart Tolle

Your Daily Tolle

" A stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you."   Eckhart Tolle


photo by Victoria Marina-Tompkins "Heart Line Bear Stone" Navarro River

Your Daily Tolle

Be free today my friends in all that you do...

“The past has no power over the present moment.”   

― Eckhart Tolle

Your Daily Tolle

"The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I am".

Eckhart Tolle
Oneness With All Life

Your Daily Tolle

"Suffering is never caused by the situation but by your thoughts about it"   Eckhart Tolle


Artwork by Daniel Holeman www.awakenvisions.com

Your Daily Tolle

"If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it. Then out of your alertness would come a response. Who you are (consciousness), not who you think you are (a small me), would be responding. It would be powerful and effective and would make no person or situation into an enemy."

Eckhart Tolle from Oneness With All Life

Your Daily Tolle

"Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance."

Eckhart Tolle from Oneness With All Life

Perceptions

"When we perceive without interrupting or mental labeling, which means without adding thought to our perceptions, we can still sense the deeper connectedness underneath our perception of seemingly separate things."         Eckhart Tolle from The Oneness With All Life

Reactivity and Response

"If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace matters to you more than anything else and it you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people and situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it. Then out of your alertness would come a response. Who you are (consciousness), not who you think you are (a small me), would be responding. It would be powerful and effective and would make no person or situation into an enemy."


Eckhart Tolle from Oneness With All Life

Reaction to what is happening "to" us versus thoughtful response based on our active participation in life. Gut reactions as opposed to calm. Possible?  Yes. Simple?  Yes, that too. Easy? Not so much.....

At the core of this principle which is so eloquently stated by Tolle is detached awareness, the ability to maintain perspective in the midst of what might be an onslaught of challenges thrown our way by people, places, and things.

We can begin to change our old patterns of reactivity by first becoming aware of and accepting the world as it is rather than maintaining how we want it to be. Faced with a stressful situation, we become alert and aware of our essential selves which are not reactive, not fear based, but instead are responsive and peaceful.

Our essential selves do not need to be right, to be understood, to be heard, to be accepted, to be perfect, in the way our "little me" does. Rather, our essence sees the divine in everyone and knows that we are are connected and that peace and harmony exists in all moments. The mantra "I am aware" is a good starting point for redirecting your attention to essence and away from gut reactions, promoting acceptance of what is and creating more harmony in life which is all to the good.

Your Daily Tolle

"The mind is more comfortable in a landscaped park because it has been planned through thought; it has not grown organically. There is an order here that the mind can understand. In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don't try to understand or explain. Only then can you become aware of the sacredness of the forest. As soon as you sense that hidden harmony, that sacredness, you realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that, you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned with the wholeness of life."

Eckhart Tolle from "The Oneness With All Life" 

Your Daily Tolle

"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment."

Eckhart Tolle

Your Daily Tolle

"Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One with Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer and you are the dance."

Eckhart Tolle from A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Letting Go of our Stories

I just heard of a story which I would like to share today.

In “A New Earth”, Eckhart Tolle describes a story entitled "The Duck With The Human Mind". He says that when two ducks get into a fight, it never lasts too long, because the ducks will separate and float off in opposite directions. “The duck will flap its wings vigorously a few times, thus releasing the surplus energy that built up during the fight. After they flap their wings, they float on peacefully, as if nothing had ever happened. If the duck had a human mind, it would keep the fight alive by thinking, by story-making. This would probably be the duck’s story: “I don’t believe what he just did. He came to within five inches of me. He thinks he owns this pond. He has no consideration for my private space. I’ll never trust him again. Next time he’ll try something else just to annoy me. I’m sure he’s plotting something already. But I’m not going to stand for this. I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t forget.”

Tolle summarizes, “But this is how most humans live all the time. No situation or event is ever really finished. ...We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen. Our duck’s lesson is this: Flap your wings - which translates as “let go of the story” - and return to the only place of power: the present moment.”

This story illustrates how our minds get caught up in making up stories about our experiences. We may in the moment find ourselves feeling deeply;

Our dog has just died and we feel intense grief. We reunite with a lover and feel intense joy. We fly into a rage when someone crosses our boundaries.

All of these feelings are valid. However, it is our thoughts that follow the emotions that lead to the tangles I wrote about in my blog "The Life Tapestry". And, it's what we do with these thoughts that make all the difference. In the moment that we notice our thoughts going down that all too familiar pathway of "story", we can stop, take a deep breath, and return to our center. If we are still feeling the intensity of the emotions, we can "flap our wings" and release the energy just as the duck did. It is then we can return to the present moment, to our "place of power". We can return to our Pond.


Duck Dance by ViaMoi