There is Only One Teaching (Eckhart Tolle essay)
In 2013, Eckhart Tolle’s website put out a call for essays about how his teachings. I spent the next year writing and revising this essay, which was published on his site in January 2016. The page no longer exists, so I decided to share it here.
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An Update on the Freelance Feast or Famine Cycle
Every freelancer goes through feast or famine, but I have to say that I think I’ve hit some extremes on both ends. After two years of significant financial challenges, last year I earned twice the highest amount I’ve ever earned in a calendar year…thanks to a single contract.
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The Requisite Year in Review Post (2015)
I’m not all that keen on New Year’s as a “fresh start,” since pretty much any moment is a fresh start. But there’s something about the collective energy of a fresh start (i.e., everyone else’s New Year’s posts), and also… I wrote about the challenging times last year, so now it’s time to write…
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Navigating the Long Darkness of Winter in the Pacific Northwest
Confession: I’m not a huge fan of winter. I live in a temperate rainforest, which is gorgeous and lush and one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen on this planet. It also, by definition, requires abundant rain. Like, six months of rain. Yes, I know rain is healing, nourishing and all of that—and I…
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How Gratitude Changes the Brain
Gratitude—the concept and the word—is an important part of my life. It’s not a moral thing for me. I rarely do things because I’m supposed to. It’s an emotional thing, a practice of meaning rather than morality. It genuinely makes me feel better to focus on what’s good, even—especially—when other things are challenging.
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How Doing Less Leads to More
What continually astonishes me is how much more I can accomplish when I keep my life simple, my mind free from clutter (admittedly, it stacks up pretty quickly) and take the time to get centred before I do any work…
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Why I Stopped Searching for Enlightenment (and Learned to Love Washing Dishes)
In the summer of 2013, when I was in the midst of two years of financial hardship, someone asked me: “If you could ask for one wish, and know it would come true, what would it be?”
My immediate answer was “Enlightenment.” The questioner was surprised I didn’t say money, but from the times I’ve felt most connected to the universe, I believed that if I “had” or “achieved” enlightenment, nothing else would matter, because I’d be so perfectly serenely accepting and peaceful and understanding.
And maybe that’s true.
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How I Found Freedom by Facing My Biggest Secret
Owing back taxes was my deepest, darkest secret for a long time. It held me back from pursuing writing that could be successful, for fear I’d be caught (I didn’t know exactly how much I owed, but I knew it was more than I could pay). I hadn’t intentionally avoided taxes–I did file and pay some years; I’d just kind of flaked out here and there. But still, I felt horrible about it.
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What Does it Mean to ‘Wake Up’ Spiritually?
To paraphrase Ken Wilber in his interview, spiritual awakening isn’t the same as emotional maturity, and those two are distinct from looking at what lies beneath the conscious, our repressed feelings and shadow selves. Awakening doesn’t heal everything or make us perfect — if we were “perfect” (as many teachers say), we wouldn’t be here any more…
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When Thoughts Become Torture
If you’ve never had an intrusive thought, it’s hard to imagine. These are thoughts that appear, unbidden and undesired, and that (in my experience) are immune to the techniques I usually use to stop thinking. I guess the best way to describe it is the example of “Don’t think about a pink elephant.”
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The Core Dilemma: Everyone Believes They are Right
This is a topic I’ve been percolating for a long time, and it comes from a teaching by Tara Brach in which she says, “The world is divided into people who think they’re right.” Nothing illustrates this better than our collective reaction to The Dress. It’s the perfect example that shows people have not only radically different perceptions but different *realities*…
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How to Find Calm Through Fierce Presence
Different teachers define presence in different ways–Dr. Dan Siegel says it’s “being aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it.” Eckhart Tolle calls it “rising above thought.” To me, it means being present in my body for all the sensations in and around whatever experience I’m having.
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Gifts of Giving: Kindness as a Wellness Practice
I’ve discovered the secret to living in a world filled with kindness, generosity and compassion: It starts with me.
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How to Get from Resistance to Acceptance
Resistance, the opposite of acceptance, is a blockage of energy. Think about how we experience tension, anger and worry on a physical level: the stomach feels like it’s in knots; our throats clench; there’s a heaviness in the chest. All of those are blocked energy. Often, we don’t even realize we’re resisting. Our minds believe that whatever negativity we’re feeling will make a difference, the same way we think that pressing an elevator button numerous times will make it come faster.
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How to Accept Just This Moment
If I could have a superpower, I would choose acceptance. Whether you call it surrender, alignment, The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle), “loving what is” (Byron Katie), Radical Acceptance (Tara Brach), non-resistance or getting in the Vortex (Abraham-Hicks), all the teachings I’ve encountered point to the same bedrock principle: Surrender to what exists in this moment, exactly as it is.
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Why It’s Important to Acknowledge Anger
When I write out why I’m angry in my journal, one of three things happens: 1) I discover that what I need is compassion for the person, not anger (that happens a lot), 2) I see that the trait that’s angering me in someone else is really glaringly obvious in me, too, and/or 3) The anger passes through my hand into the journal, and I feel cleansed.
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How to Become Present Through Physical Sensations
My mind, when left to its own devices, tends to cause me more pain than joy. It’s a great tool, effective for analyzing data or strategizing, but it has the capacity to bully me, too. The creativity that’s so useful professionally can also create wild stories and vivid dramas that have no root in reality,…
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