Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Do you ever think of yourself as sacred?

A lot of people seem to think of themselves as fairly pathetic. They may cover this up with ego, projecting a positive image of themselves, but underneath they feel insecure and inadequate.

And that's just the problem: human beings have a tendency to think of themselves. It’s a trait that seems unique to our species, not replicated in the animal world.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

They joke that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. But actually, talking to ourselves is something pretty much everyone does until they become aware that they are having a conversation in their head.

A news report out of Yorkshire, northern England, spotlights the Lion Inn, a pub and restaurant that offers accommodation high on the North Yorkshire Moors where seven people were snowed in for the past eight days.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks 

When a problem arises in your life or you face some kind of crucial decision, how do you go about addressing it?

Many of us end up making decisions that are driven by our emotions. But emotions are not a safe gauge of what's right for us.

Emotions don't always represent our true feelings. We can be overwhelmed with emotion based on past experience that screams at us “don't do it!” But beneath this emotion our true feeling longs to proceed.

 Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Suppose you find yourself in circumstances that are really unbearable.

Maybe you are forced to work in extremely distasteful conditions, are wrongfully arrested and thrown in jail, find yourself kidnapped and held prisoner, or are injured in an accident not of your making and bedridden.

How do you react to what’s happening to you?

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

We tend to associate stillness with quietness, even silence. But Eckhart Tolle invites us to see a much deeper significance in stillness. He comments:

Silence is helpful, but you don’t need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. That is the space of pure awareness, consciousness itself.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

The heart doesn’t go backwards—the mind does. It’s an insight from the novel The Swan Thieves, a psychological study of a character who is a famous painter.

The heart isn’t our emotions, as it’s commonly thought to be—though the heart can generate emotion.

The heart is much deeper, our feeling center.

When people make statements such as that they “wear their heart on their sleeve,” they are really talking about their emotions.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Many of us are stressed out and long for a bit of peace and quiet. For many, a vacation is a chance to get away from things so that they can relax. It’s a chance for a break with their routine, an opportunity either for a change of pace or for relaxing and doing nothing for a change.

Given the economic situation at the moment, many are having to forgo their usual vacation. So the stress they are experiencing feels unrelenting.

“The dreaded eternity evaporated in a passing moment.”

The “dreaded eternity” was a ten-minute pause for stillness and silence. Though it felt like it was going to last forever, it flew by.

“This was a school assembly, but not as I knew it,” writes British radio documentary maker Alan Hall in a column that appears in today’s BBC online news.

Hall was onstage in front of 300 boys at St. James Independent School in Twickenham, England, which begins its day with what it calls The Pause.

It is a hot, muggy day, and because of this I am looking forward to my walk in the cooling woods even more than usual. As soon as I enter, I once again feel the weight of responsibility drop from my shoulders and the strength from Mother Earth seep into my body. 

On this particular route through the woods, I pass two benches, beautifully situated to take in the grandeur and stillness of the verdant surroundings. Usually I stop at one of them and sit in sacred silence until my body, just knowing it is time to move, gets up and moves.