Eckhart Tolle's Gratitude Insights (ep. 944)

So what are the five ideas I found that Eckhart Tolle shares about gratitude? Let's find out. Stay connected to Gratitude. Hit the follow button right now and join thousands of listeners tuning in each week. We're the Gratitude Seekers. Come join us. Foreign hi there gratitude seeker and welcome to a new episode based on the words of people you know that are big believers in the power of gratitude. You can hear words of wisdom from Tony Robbins, Bob Proctor, Brene Brown, Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield, Jennifer Lopez, Maya Angelou, Denzel Washington, and now Eckhart Tolle. The purpose of this kind of episode is to learn from the best, from those people that we admire and that inspire us to explore their perspective on gratitude and see how we can implement it in our life as well. Please hit the follow button right now to make sure you're going to get all of these amazing nuggets of wisdom as soon as they come out. Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Dole on February 16, 1948, is a German born spiritual teacher and self help author who resides in Canada. He is best known as the author of the Power of Now and the New Earth. After being recommended by Oprah, his first book, the Power of A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment reached the New York Times bestseller list in 2000. The same happened in 2005 with his book A New Awakening to your Life's Purpose. He grew up in post war Germany where he played in bummed out buildings feeling afraid and anxious. He later stated that pain was in the energy field of the country. At the age of 13 he moved to Spain to live with his father who did not insist that he attend high school. So Tolle is elected to study literature, astronomy and languages at home. At 15 he was heavily influenced by A Gift of the Five Spiritual Books by the German mystic Josep Anton Schneider Franken. When he was 19, Tolle moved to England and taught German and Spanish for three years at the London Language School. After graduating from the University of London, he completed a postgraduate course and the University of Cambridge in 1977. That year, at age 29, after long periods of depression, Tully says he experienced an inner transformation and came to peace with everything. He began to feel an underlying sense of peace in any situation. He stopped studying for his doctorate and for a period of about two years he spent much of his time in a state of deep bliss on park benches in Russell Square, central London, watching the world go by. He stayed with friends in a Buddhist monastery or slept in a wild park in London. His family thought of him as being Irresponsible and even insane. He changed his first name from Ulrich to Eckhart as homage to the German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart. But without further ado, I want to share with you my favorite quote from Eckhart Tolle. When you go deeply into the present, gratitude arises spontaneously. Even if it's just gratitude for breathing, gratitude for the aliveness that you feel in your body. Gratitude is there when you acknowledge the aliveness of the present moment. And this connects beautifully with something that he shared. In one of his lectures.

Jesus used that term. He said, I want you to have abundant life. I want you to have the fullness of life. Jesus promises the fullness of life or abundant life, then this is the. Perhaps the very core of gratitude, is to feel the aliveness of life within yourself.

What I find really interesting is that in my interview with Brother David Steindl Rast, he also mentions this idea of the great fullness of life. And whenever two wise people say the same thing or something really similar, even though they are quite different as teachers, for me this means that there's something deep and really meaningful in that idea. I also share this perspective that gratitude connects us to the great fullness of life, to the abundance of life. And Eckhart Tolle continues in his lecture to talk about the fact that abundance is within us and it's the feeling of the fullness of life. So if you're experiencing this, it means that you're abundant, regardless of what's happening on the outside, how many things you have or how many things you might wish for. And since we're talking about wishing and manifesting new things, better things, here's the second idea that I found that I wanted to share with you.

Gratitude is a very powerful transformational tool and also one of the most powerful tools for manifesting better things in your life now. What does that mean? The gratitude is to acknowledge the good in your life now.

So basically what he's saying is that by acknowledging the good that we have right now in our life, we're taking the first step towards manifesting something better. So if you want a better job, better pay, better experiences in different parts of your life, the first step is to acknowledge the good that you have right now in your life in those areas. And it's somehow challenging because we want better things, because at times we are unsatisfied with what we already have, right? So even if it sounds counterintuitive, we firstly have to see the good so that we can attract more of it.

And appreciating the little things in your life creates a receptive state of consciousness for good things to come to you. In that sense, the New Age teachings are right. If you see the good that is already in your life, there is a tendency for more good things to come into your life. But you have to start now.

You don't need to wait for something big to happen. There are already so many simple things that we can be grateful for that you can be grateful for, that can open you to new and better things that you wish for right now or you might have wished for in the past. In my own gratitude practice, I've seen this quite a lot. Many of the things that I wished for at one point that just didn't happen by a certain time just manifested themselves out of the blue. And again, thanks to gratitude, I was able to be aware of it. Because many times the things that we wished for actually become a reality. But if we don't have a practice of appreciating them, we just pass by them without actually being aware of it. There's a big chance that the life that you're living right now was just a dream five years or ten years ago. You got used to it. It's normality right now. But that doesn't mean that we can't treat it as something out of the ordinary. See that we are actually quite lucky, and that many of the wishes that we had are now a reality. And this brings us to the next idea, giving attention.

That's really what grateful is. A Buddhist asked me, I don't believe in a God, so who am I grateful to? If I'm grateful, all it means is appreciation, giving attention, acknowledging the presence of another life form, another form, and feeling the goodness there. That's gratitude.

This is another reason why I love gratitude. Whether you believe in God or in the universe, or you don't believe in anything in particular, you can still practice gratitude. You can still enjoy the benefits you can still enjoy. Use it to make your life better, happier, more fulfilling, and it can be as simple or as complicated as we want. There is no one way of practicing gratitude. As you might have heard in the many interviews that I did, people are practicing gratitude in all kinds of ways. And if you haven't done so already, listen to the interviews, get inspired by them, and choose the way that works best for you. For your style, for your way of being, for your talents. And here's another example of a gratitude practice that's very easy to do. And it's the kind of practice that I really love. Because you can incorporate it into your day to day living. You just need to be more aware. And for me, this one is even more interesting because I actually recommend a similar practice in the gratitude course on abundance, the one that I told you about in other episodes as well. And I really love the examples that Eckhart Tolle is sharing on how we can do this exercise.

Abundance doesn't mean that you need to buy many things you can buy or not buy. You see the abundance of water, rain falling from the sky. There's an abundance of aliveness, there's an abundance of joy in the dog that's going past you there to see the abundance that surrounds it. Even if you're very poor in the eyes of the world, the abundance is always there around you. But you need to recognize it, acknowledge it. And another word for that is gratitude. I know, I was going to say that's why I've kept a gratitude journal for years.

It's no secret that Oprah is a big proponent of gratitude and that she writes in her gratitude journal and attributes a lot of our success to gratitude and practicing gratitude. But I wanted to share with you the ideas that Eckhart Tolle is sharing about this gratitude exercise. The fact that we can find abundance, even happy dog, even in the rain. I think that's a really wonderful perspective. The example that I give in the gratitude course is the abundance of leaves. And I love this example because an abundance of greens can also mean an abundance of money. And in nature we can see a lot of abundance of greens. So next time you go for a walk, whether that's in the city or in nature, look for the abundance, seek the abundance, seek the gratitude. It's always there in the simplest things and it's a great way for us to connect with abundance. Thank you for listening and thank you seeking gratitude from the UK for the wonderful review. I hope you don't mind me sharing this Apple Podcast review with the rest of the gratitude seekers, but here it goes. Thank you Gratitude Podcast. I really want to thank you Georgian, for letting me know of the importance of expressing gratitude on a daily basis. I start to feel much more positive and happier by appreciating simple things that have happened to me. The podcast has made a huge difference to my life. Thank you. I really wanted to share with all of you this wonderful review because because it's the proof that this works and it can work for you as well.