Eckhart Tolle describes overthinking as dysfunctional mental activity that traps us in suffering. His method: redirect attention from thoughts to your breath and inner body, feeling the subtle energy in your abdomen. Thought and conscious awareness cannot coexist fully, so this practice quiets the mind and reconnects you with a deeper presence beyond ego.
What you need to do is take attention away from the stream of useless thinking. Completely useless thinking. No great solution to any problem has ever been found by anybody who was worrying about something. You realize that you're in a dysfunctional state because you begin to suffer one way or another. And that's already a gain in consciousness to realize that you're suffering. Let's use a generic term. You're unhappy about something. It's a very generic. Unhappy unhappiness comes in many degrees. Slight form of unhappiness, even a slight irritation, is a beginning form of unhappiness. And then stronger forms of unhappiness from despondency and guilt and all kinds of unpleasant emotions. And then you notice it. Or you wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety and you worry about your life. Oh, very unpleasant. It's 2:30 in the morning. The mind is racing about problems that probably will arise tomorrow or next week. What if that happens? Or yesterday? Why did I had this discussion? But what I should have said is, this is what I should have said. Then the. That would have shut him up. Why didn't I say that? Why can't. Why can't I never think of the right thing to say? And then the entire conversation replays in your mind again. And then the next. The future comes in again. And at some point you realize you're trapped in a dysfunctional state. And then how do you get out of it? Okay, the great gain in consciousness is already you have realized that you are in a dysfunctional state and it's not pleasant. And you also realize that it serves. This kind of thinking serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen the fictitious ego image of me as a problematic person. It serves no purpose and it makes you unhappy. That's a wonderful record. But even then, how do I get out of it? Because even after realizing it has no purpose except to make me unhappy, the next moment it pulls you back in. But once you realize it, okay, there are a few things you can do, so to speak. Or it's not so much a doing, it's just redirecting attention. What you need to do is take attention away from the stream of useless thinking. Completely useless thinking. No great solution to any problem has ever been found by anybody who was worrying about something. True solutions arise out of a different state of consciousness. Worry does not worry, creates fictitious problems, but no solutions. And again, the mind is deceptive. It tries to convince you that you need to worry about this because otherwise we are not taking responsibility for your life. The opposite Is true. So you realize the futility of worry. But how do you get out of it? Because the next moment you may be drawn back in and you're completely lost again. Easy thing to do is. First of all, I recommend ask yourself, am I breathing? Most likely you are breathing, but of course it's an unconscious process. You don't know you're breathing, but now you make it conscious. Am I breathing? Let me check. And in order to check whether you're breathing or not, you. You need to take some attention or consciousness away from thinking. And then it moves into the attention, moves into the influence. The breath flows in and so to speak, you follow the breath with your attention. This of as you probably know, it's a very ancient meditation method, but you don't. You can use it as a formal meditation or in a more casual way like prescribing. Now you just take attention away from thinking and you become aware of your breath moving into the body. And the attention follows it into. This is very beautiful. It follows it into as low as the abdomen. The abdomen is a place of power. You can feel an energy there suddenly and certain in the first, very subtle. Then you follow the breast back out and follow the breast back in. You don't even need to regulate your breath for this particular practice. You just observe by the simple fact of observing. Usually the breath becomes a little longer just right by itself. You're observing as the breath and he moves out again. And each time the breath reaches, well, the breath doesn't, but your tension reaches the abdomen, which rises slightly at the end of the in breath you feel an energy there. The Japanese call it the hara. And then you can see that energy spreading out into your limbs, arms and legs. And it's quite beautiful. And then because you notice the benefit of it, because suddenly life feels good. Whereas two minutes ago life was awful because you were trapped in your mind. Suddenly energy flows, breathing in abdomen rises and you feel certain energy here. Then it. You can also feel the energy in your legs and arms. And I call that the inner body awareness. Now, you're not aware of the physical body. You're aware of that which animates the physical body is an organizing energy that coordinates the countless functions of all the organs in your body. Unbelievably complex. So there's a vast intelligence that inhabits your body, that animates your body. But usually humans are not aware of that because they live in the upper story only. You live in the loft of your house, but you have never visited the other floors of your House. So inner body awareness. So the breathing and the inner body awareness come together and then you feel, and I hope I'm not just talking about it, because as I'm speaking about it, I'm directing your attention also as you sit there into feeling this inner body awareness. Every cell, in a very subtle way, every cell of the body is alive. You feel the body is coming to life. Now, what has it done to your thinking? Your thinking has been reduced to almost nothing because you cannot boast, think and be aware of your breath and your inner bodies, either one or the other. And so you rest in this beautiful. If you're in bed at night, I recommend that you lie on your back, not on the side, on your back, your arms there. And you continue the breathing and feeling the inner body. And now you may notice while you are sensing the inner body, you are not thinking. Occasionally a fragment of thought may drift in and out, but very little, because you can't. Both cannot happen at the same time. So what has happened? You have taken a consciousness away from the thoughts, thought processes. Because in the unconscious state, your entire consciousness is continuously being absorbed by the thought making mechanism of the mind. It takes consciousness, which ultimately is the essence of who or what you are. It takes consciousness and transforms it into thought. Thought forms continuously. So you as the underlying consciousness are basically in that state. You're asleep or unconscious. You're not even there. There's just your mind. The conditioned mind continuously absorbs your consciousness and transforms it into thought. It does not mean that thought and consciousness are separate. Thought is consciousness that has taken on a form, whereas there's a vast consciousness beyond that that is connected. And it's not your consciousness. Once you connect, you sense that vastness beyond thought. You're connecting with something far deeper than who or what you are as a person. There is a vastness that we connect to, which is. It emanates from the source of all life, which we may call God. It emanates just as light emanates from the sun. The consciousness emanates from the source that you cannot name, that you cannot understand, that is not part of this dimension. It's in the transcendent realm. But it emanates consciousness into this dimension, so to speak. And that. That you then you liberate consciousness from where it had been trapped. What was in useless thinking, thought form. Sa.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
