Eckhart Tolle

If you go about your day trapped in the realm of thinking, it’s difficult if not impossible to free yourself from stress and anxiety—and the interpersonal suffering that goes along with it. But if you’re rooted in the Now, explains Eckhart Tolle, you’re already standing in a place of deep fulfillment.

Compassionate Guidance for Realizing Presence Amidst Suffering and Loss

If you really want to know how spiritually awake you are, spend time around other people. For each of our relationships—from the brief interaction with the barista to our bonds with lifelong partners or family members—reflect back to us our predominant state of consciousness.

Before there was darkness or light or the universe itself, there was stillness. Beyond time, space, and form—beyond birth and death—it continues. And this is who you are in your most essential nature.

How hypnotized are you by the content of your life? That is to say, how deeply are you identified with your ideas, opinions, labels, profession, society, culture? The first step towards finding true happiness is realizing that you have been attached to and seeking happiness through the content of your life.

Peace is possible. Eckhart Tolle discovered this firsthand during a transformational experience at the age of 29 when the continuous mental noise that made his life an unhappy story spontaneously ceased.