Controlling Your Reactivity | Q&A Eckhart Tolle

So when I'm not here in the greenhouse and I go back home and there's storms and chaos and I get tired and overwhelmed, the thing that I keep tripping on and struggling with is reaction. So when there's just pain, body comes. Your teachings have helped a lot with that. But when the anger reaction, particularly when there's stress and I've got three boy children, so when there's stress and there's demands and I'm tired, then I notice the reaction happens before I can. And I've heard you answer the question, but somewhere I keep.

Yes.

Even as the presence sort of, I suppose, is growing, it is probably less.

Yeah.

It's hard to determine because I'm not in a relationship. Which is another trigger.

Yes.

It's just me, kids, life, things that happen that are annoying or stressful. So there's that. Can you give some.

Yeah, yeah. And then after the reaction, then you suddenly know, oh, there was the reaction again. Right. Afterward, presence comes back, but in the moment, the reaction arises so quickly that it takes you over. I call that reactivity.

Yes. And sometimes it. What happens, particularly when it's with my children, I feel guilty, and so then I react more.

Yes. The human. The human mind is complicated. Now, in most. Most people's lives, there are certain situations that are more likely to provoke you into reactivity. In your case, it's perhaps to do with children doing things that they shouldn't be doing or whatever they do.

Some form of relationship or relationships also. Yeah, things that. Relationships and children. But demands from less outside. But then when there's a demand that I get overwhelmed by.

Yes. And what form. What's the. What are the usual forms that the reaction take? Anger, irritation.

Anger. Well, the anger is the one that I have the most trouble with.

Okay.

It comes quite fast.

Yes, the. There are situations where, you know, you can almost see it coming. You have to be very alert. When you see people behaving in a certain way, like the children or somebody close to you starting to talk about something, you see it coming. For some people, there are certain but particular areas that provoke reaction. And they can be people who are already conscious in most areas of their life, but there are still pockets. There are areas where they lose consciousness and go into reactivity. For some people, it's to do with intimate relationships. They can lose it there quickly or money matters. Whenever I talk about money, they go. They get talked over by fear and reacting. So if you are alert, you can look at a situation and you can see it's developing very quickly. Into the usual situation that makes me reactive. It's happening now. It's coming. It's like a train coming at you. And just before it happens, you can see a minute before it's building up. And that's the moment of practice where you realize, the most important thing here is my state of consciousness. And am I able to use this situation as part of my spiritual eliminating situations. But by using situations to incorporate them into your spiritual practice, they become. Whatever situation arises becomes part of your spiritual practice. And don't believe when the mind tells you, if I had a more peaceful life and peaceful surroundings, I would. It would be so much easier for me to awaken spiritually. It wouldn't. Superficially, you might fool yourself that you're awakening spiritually, but it wouldn't be very deep. It would just be a superficial awake. So these children and other annoying people around you, they force you to go deeper. And there aren't great opportunity for you to go deeper. But how do you take advantage of that opportunity? So knowing that is already helpful. So when the situation begins to build up, you know an opportunity is coming right at you, and then you can see what it is. Suddenly the usual behavior of the children or whoever else it is. You saw it coming a few seconds before, but there was an alertness now that says it's coming. And when it comes, you have. Suddenly, when the awareness is there, an element of choice comes in. And the element of choice is you can react or you can allow the situation to be as it is. And people sometimes learn that when they do meditation practice. When you sit in meditation, of course, you want everything to be quiet around you. You don't want to be disturbed. The ideal situation, people think, for meditation is to be in a very quiet room and completely undisturbed. You certainly don't want to have children screaming outside. You don't want to have noisy drill suddenly starting up, they're breaking up the road just outside your window while you're meditating. And the drill goes. And your usual thing would be you would react. You would say, I can't meditate under these conditions. Why can't I live in a more quiet place? I need to. This is not the right way to do your meditation. So when you do your meditation, whatever happens, you incorporate into your meditation and you surrender to it. So the children screaming outside, the drill going up on side. What is the most annoying thing about this drill? Is it the noise or is it your reaction? It's your reaction. If you let go of your reaction, there's just the noise and you kind of the egoic self kind of dissolves and the noise goes right through you. That's called surrender. So you people can start practicing that when they meditate. There is nothing that does not become part of your meditation. Then you are real meditator when you are complaining that things are not quiet enough around you. You don't know what meditation is yet you're trying to. So sometimes people learn when they meditate how to incorporate seemingly annoying things into their practice of not offering any resistance to the present moment in whatever form, whatever form the present moment takes. So in your case, it can be children are screaming, demanding this or that. Are you able to accept that? They are screaming and demanding? Because that's what children do without opposing or fighting internally. That's your practice. But if you lose it, you find you've lost it, and suddenly you know you lost it, because in the moment of losing it, you don't know it. If you knew it, you wouldn't lose it. I'm using this expression, I'm losing it, which real people sometimes use. But what are they talking about? What are they losing? I'm losing it. I'm going to lose it. What, what they are, what they are meaning by that is I'm going to get very angry. Usually that's meaning, but it's a good expression because what they're really saying, I'm going to lose consciousness completely. They don't know that that's what they're saying, but that's what is implied in that. I'm going to go completely unconscious in a minute. So you better. You better stop talking now or run away from me now. So when you lose it at that moment, you don't know it, you just lose it because you've gone quite unconscious. Then the moment comes after losing it that some consciousness comes back in. And suddenly you know that you lost it. And the next thing is, guilt comes in. As you mentioned in your case, guilt comes in, I lost it, but I shouldn't have lost it. You get angry with yourself, you're angry with the children. Now you're angry with yourself. And that gives even more fuel to the anger towards the children. So that's the mechanism. So at what point does consciousness come in? So when you lose it, you're gone. Nothing you can do. Then moments later, perhaps minute, I don't know how long, two minutes, you suddenly, oops, I lost it. And then immediately comes a reaction to losing it, which is another reaction which adds another layer of reactivity to the original layer of Reactivity. That's how complicated humans are. So one thing you can do if you do lose it, and you will again lose it, despite our talk here, it will still happen, but less so. There is a shift that's happening, but the old unconsciousness can and probably will from time to time, reassert itself, but less frequently. And so if you do, the moment you do notice that you lost it, surrender means you haven't surrendered at first. You offered resistance to the present moment, and then you wrote it, you lost it. Then you accept that you lost it, you can practice there too. Surrender. Okay, I lost it. You are human. Nothing personal in it. You are an aspect of a universal shift in consciousness. And it's a monumental thing that the unconsciousness that has been prevalent on the planet for thousands of years, something is happening to it, and it's awakening. The consciousness is awakening through humans. You are part of that. So don't get angry with yourself because you are part of the awakening process, because what's happening to you is part of the awakening process. If it were not part of the awakening process, you wouldn't be standing here talking about it. You would simply continuously be acting out your unconsciousness day after day after day. And you would pass it on to your children, and you wouldn't. And they would pass it on to their children, and you wouldn't even know what you're doing. You would have no idea that you are unconscious. You would just be totally in the grip of the conditioning which is inherited from our parents, inherit from their parents, goes back generation and generation, generation, and is passed on to the next generation until somebody like you awakens, begins to awaken. So don't be. There's no need to be guilty or angry because the moment you know that you lost it, there's an awareness. Otherwise you wouldn't know it. So that's your awareness and you, oh, great, I lost it. But I know that I lost it. So you surrender to having lost it. And there is awareness. But if you're, if losing it means you're immediately going to reactivity to onset, you become unconscious again, which means there's been. There's been a flash of awareness, I lost it. Which immediately turns mentally into a judgment about yourself, which means you lost it again. So again, you need to be alert in your daily life. You watch a situation develop in such a way that you feel, okay, it's happening, happening, I'm about to get triggered. And then you see you have a choice. Suddenly, you can accept this moment as it is, and the children do what they do. It doesn't mean that you become incapable, by the way, of telling the children they're doing something wrong or they must stop that. I don't know how chaotic your home life is. Some children are totally out there, so that's a different subject. But here we just talk about yourself. Be alert when you feel a situation developing into what usually would provoke a reaction. And then stay alert. And then you may find the reaction doesn't come. If it does come and you lose it, the moment you realize it, awareness is back. And then you welcome say, oh, I lost it, but I know that I lost it, that's fine. And then you haven't lost. And then you remain present there. It's a very subtle practice, but being here. Although I said that the old pattern will most likely still come up from time to time, but you can deal with it in a different way. It doesn't have to turn into guilt or anger towards yourself. No, you accept because you've noticed. And so that's your practice. I wish you well. That's your spiritual practice. Much better than living in a monastery for three years. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. Sa.