I’ve read a few life changing books over quarantine, one of them being The Power of Now. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s looking for an alternative, awakened perspective, but I also must add that the first time I picked up the book (almost three years ago), I literally could not read more than a paragraph at a time. I had no idea what Eckhart Tolle was trying to say; it felt like another language. It took me three years to pick it back up, and read it cover-to-cover. This time through, I didn’t skip a beat. So, if you try to read The Power of Now, and it makes no sense, stop and come back to it later.
Eckhart Tolle is just other worldly, truly. He has the most brilliant, intellectual thoughts, and he worked hard at harvesting them (though I’m not sure he would say the same). He taught me a great deal about what I give my attention to. In other words, he taught me how to be conscious and how I am so often unconscious.
One major learning point I took away from the book was realizing that my choices are not my choices unless I make them in a state of consciousness. What does that mean in layman’s terms? No one chooses conflict or pain. No one chooses dysfunction or hysteria. If you’re making choices that fall into any of those categories, you’re making unconscious decisions. BUT don’t just take my word for this. Read his book. Read all the other books out there written by a lot more credible, experienced authors. This idea makes way more sense within the context of said books.
After reading The Power of Now, I realized that I’m really good at re-telling myself the positive narratives my ego clings to, and I suspect a lot of other people are good at that, too. We like to reiterate the “feel-good” parts of our stories— the ones that help to keep us at ease, yet we omit all the parts that our egos despise. It’s natural. It’s part of being a human, an unconscious one at that. It’s unfortunate but true that the better half of human kind is still operating on an unconscious level, myself included.
The problem with this is that we stay where we are not growing. We plant our feet into dirt and try to water the ground where we are not supposed to thrive because we say, “the sun is shining, the rain is falling, so I should be growing”. We don’t tell ourselves, “the soil isn’t rich, and only weeds are growing around me,” even when that is so clearly the case.
The thing is, no one leaves a situation because of the good things about it. You don’t look at all the amazing things your partner gives you or experiences taught you and say, “that was so good I just might have to leave”. If you do, you have a deeper rooted issue that needs to be addressed.
We need to leave a place, a person, an experience for the compilation of the bad. And maybe the reasons are not even deemed “bad”, they’re just not that good. That’s okay, too. You don’t have to wait for shit to hit the fan to walk away from something that’s no longer serving you. In fact, that’s a sign you’ve stayed too long.
So, we have to rewrite our narratives from time to time. We have to holistically look at our experiences, thank them for the good they brought, and then have the courage to walk away from what is no longer helping us blossom.
Eckhart Tolle taught me back in June that a cyclical rut is a signal you’re not in control— that you’ve passed the baton to your unconscious mind. There’s a lot of things in life we can’t control, but there are lot of things in life we can, one of them being how we view and accept situations during and after they happen.
Don’t be afraid to rewrite your chapters. The one you’re currently writing is the most important because it’s all you’re guaranteed, but it’s also okay to narrate the ones that are closed in a different tone, a more holistic one. Sometimes rewriting old chapters is the only way to prevent the weeds from infecting your future flowers.
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