How to Find Peace in Daily Challenges | Eckhart Tolle

In my everyday life I find peace and connection to the universe here at this retreat with birds in cages, noise, junk food, blah blah, blah, something like that. I am finding it hard to connect to that peace. How would you cope if you had to live in a disco for a week?

Let's just address. There are two parts to this. One is the part of here not living in these unusual surroundings, not your usual, perhaps more sedate and peaceful surroundings. How would you cope? Okay, that's a hypothetical situation that's very unlikely to ever happen to me.

But if it did.

There are two possibilities, of course. One is you open the door and go out and leave, and then you're at peace. If you can't be at peace in the disco, my choice would be to open the door and step outside and leave. But if the doors are locked, I suppose that's what you're talking about.

The doors are locked and I can't get out.

What's left is surrender. So I would probably start dancing.

And the same here there's a clash between what makes you feel comfortable. You perhaps live in a quiet place and you're not usually surrounded by.

Sunbathing tourists.

And birds in cages. I haven't seen them, but they must be around. And junk food. Of course you don't have to eat it, but.

It's quite good for retreats to be. I haven't yet, by the way, found an ideal retreat setting.

One would have thought that going to an ashram in India would be more conducive to inner peace than being in a big hotel in Hawaii.

But there too you'll find things that disturb your peace.

For example.

My first night in an ashram in India.

You are on this bed and I was given a deluxe room, as they call it.

They said the Queen of Spain had also spent some time in that room.

So you're under the.

Lying on your bed, the temperature is just one degree less than at midday. Extreme extremely hot under a mosquito net. And then.

Sleep doesn't come. At 1:30 in the morning, the need to go to the toilet arises. But there are several huge mosquitoes sitting on the outside of the net.

Waiting for you to emerge.

And then you just wait a little longer and finally you have to get out. Being pursued by the mosquitoes, you run to the bathroom.

And in the bathroom.

Suddenly flutter arises and there's a big bat flying around the ceiling.

And finally you manage to get back under your mosquito net and there's a little bit of sleep. And then.

At 4:30 there's a knock on the door. Oh no, that's not all forgot. At 2:30 there's, in the street there's a loudspeaker of very low sound quality with some lovely religious chanting going on. Why are they chanting in the street to a loudspeaker at 2:30 in the morning? I don't know, but it's ram, ram, ram.

In a way it's lovely because they're chanting about God and they don't, it doesn't matter if they wake people up, it's.

And then after 20 minutes that subsides and then there's a little bit of sleep. And at 4:30, at 4:30 there's a knock on the door and a man, I get up, open the door, of course it's still dark. And a man comes with a bucket with hot water and said, the hot water you ordered, it's 5:30, it's 4:30, I ordered it for 5:30.

Of course there's no point in saying oh no, come back. No, you surrender. You have to surrender every moment so that you become one with whatever is in that moment. So you immediately adjust to that. You adjust to the mosquitoes not being able to sleep or you become unhappy. And so you accept that the hot water comes at 4:30 instead of 5:30.

And so it goes on.

And then finally you go for breakfast in the big hall. You sit on the floor, there's a banana leaf on the floor and a man comes with a huge bucket. What's in it? I don't know. And then a ladle and he goes on your banana leaf flop.

It's wonderful, continuous one becoming one with what is.

And here you have the tourists.

And the paraked baths in cages and junk food.

Probably the food on the banana leaf is more healthy in some ways it's not junk food. On the other hand, there may be certain things in there that the western body is not used to.

Which then results in very frequent visits to the bathroom.

Wherever you go, there will be an opportunity for surrender rather than want to. And that's part of the retreat and it's part of really life. Because wherever you go you will find you'll get challenged by life. There'll be something that you need to surrender to or you walk out.

But very often you need to go with it. Rather than having expectations how things should be, you go with the how things are, the isness, I call it the isness of things in the present moment. And if you can be one with the isness, whether it's.

The bat in the bathroom or Whether it's the tourists here, then wherever you go, you can find peace. That really is the purpose for realizing that. And without saying conditions need to be in a certain way to be conducive. And if you could find the absolutely ideal place for a retreat where everything works and everything is absolutely immaculate and perfect, the food is exquisite, the temperature is just right, the.

You get massages every day in addition to the.

Pampered in every. Every need is immediately met. You just have to say something and somebody comes. Yes, now you're totally undisturbed for meditation. Absolutely perfect. Is that the ideal retreat? Not really.

The imperfections are actually more helpful than the perfect conditions.

In the ideal retreat or the ideal life, which doesn't exist. The life without challenges would be very similar to going to a movie in which there is no conflict.

Everybody is peaceful, nothing really happens because there's no drama.

The characters in the movie are not challenged by anything.

And so the movie viewers would go.

Titanic without the accident.

A perfect crossing.

Two and a half hours of that.

But this is how people want their lives to be. They have this inner expectation that's how it should be or can be.

But it's not like that.

And then you begin to welcome the challenges. It's actually fine. You don't demand that conditions should be perfect. They never are perfect. And if they are, you go to sleep. Or if they are, they are not perfect for very long or you get so bored. Oh, there's a question here about what is boredom? So that's the next question.