Personal Growth: Staying in the present moment April 23, 2019
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Living in the Now.Tags: Eckhart Tolle, focussing, life, negative thinking, personal growth, philosophy, self-actualization, The Power of Now, the present moment, writing
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Most of us won’t admit it, but we often spend a large proportion of our mind-time on revisiting the past and particular in visiting the future by anticipating and visualizing how our life situation is likely to unfold; and in so looking, we tend not to foresee options but rather make assumptions on probabilities, often negatively.
In trying to be in two places at once, we miss opportunities in the most important third place…the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle sums up this paradox nicely in his book The Power of Now:
“To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time; the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation…This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future.
The Now is the most precious thing there is. The eternal present is the space in which your whole life unfolds.
Life is now.”
Personal development: The implications of acceptance August 31, 2017
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development Potential.Tags: acceptance, controlling ego, Eckhart Tolle, life, philosophy, resistance, surrender, The Power of Now, writing
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In much of the literature of personal growth theory there is a repeating theme of the need to bring the practice of acceptance into our lives.
We are told that without adhering to the principle of acceptance, we will be frozen into the judgemental world we are trying so hard to escape through programs directed at reaching our full personal development potential.
Eckhart Tolle, in his book, Practicing the Power of Now, views acceptance as a form of surrender, and compares it with its opposite, resistance: “Bondage or inner freedom from external conditions. Suffering or inner peace.”
Non-surrender ultimately means expending significant intellectual and moral energy on the act and implications of resistance:
“If you can never accept what is, by implication you will not be able to accept anybody the way they are. You will judge, criticize, label, reject, or attempt to change people.”
— Dennis Mellersh
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