The Viable Alternative

If you’ve been on the path of personal growth and/or spiritual enlightenment, one of the books that come highly recommended to read is a book by the name of “The Power of Now,” by Eckart Tolle.

I’ve seen it on many reading lists. In fact, I’ve personally listed it on my own list of recommended reading on this site because it actually helped give me a big breakthrough several years back.

If you haven’t read or heard of the book, it basically talks about being present, i.e. in the moment. It also tells you that you’re not your thoughts or the mind that produces them, rather, you’re the consciousness behind it.

When I first heard this, it came as a huge relief because it meant to me that I didn’t have to identify with all the crazy thoughts that came up in my head. Up until that point, when all these negative thoughts came up in my head, I thought they were me and subsequently would try to fix and disprove each and every one of them. As you can imagine, it made life a living hell.

The problem with Eckart Tolle and people like him, is that they go into all this elaborate detail about being present, the importance of being present, blah, blah, blah, but they never show you how to connect to this consciousness behind your thoughts.

As a result, you wind up reading the book like I did, being subsequently armed with the new logical understanding that you’re not your thoughts but the consciousness behind them, but when your mind would go into one of these storms where it bombards you with a barrage of negative thoughts, you still can’t help getting caught up in their drama.

It’s like being in the middle of the ocean during a storm, and being at the mercy of the tumultuous waves to carry you wherever you want to go because you have no anchor to keep you in place.

In order to be present, you have to be connected to your consciousness, and in order to be connected to your consciousness you have to be grounded in your body. To be grounded in your body you have to be willing to feel yourself in your body, this includes experiencing the feelings, emotions and sensations going on in it, even if it feels “painful” or uncomfortable.

This goes into the whole process of learning to reconnect with your suppressed emotions that are trapped in our bodies, including your pain because you can’t become present while running from something….but I’ll leave that alone for now. 🙂

Most people are numb to what’s going on in their bodies because they’re stuck up in their heads, hence the reason why they’re such at the mercy of their thoughts and have such a difficulty being present.

I wish Eckart Tolle and his cohorts went more into the how to be present rather than simply focusing on the romantic concept of being present which resulted in millions of people parroting the same thing without having any idea of how to get there themselves.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love