Overcoming Overwhelm: Eckhart Tolle's Guide to Staying Grounded

So presence, practicing of presence is a good preparation should life present you with an enormous challenge, an immediate, an emergency that needs to be dealt with immediately so that the emergency does not overwhelm you. You can face it, that's one thing, but there's another form of overwhelm that's to do with the thinking mind. So you have some problems in your life, or maybe a succession of problems. That's why you become overwhelmed. You have several problems. Not emergent, absolute emergencies, but difficulties in your life. Somebody close to you dies and you lose your job the next day, and then you get home the following day and your wife has left you or your husband left you or whatever, many things. Suddenly, I can't take it anymore. I'm so over. Well, okay, so here we're talking. This is a somewhat different situation from the actual immediate emergency. This overwhelm is produced by the thinking mind trying to find some kind of coping with impossible, seemingly impossible situations that you cannot actually do anything about right now. At some point you can take action to solve situations, but right now, because it's not an emergency. So right now you just have all these problems arising in your life. But here's your My investments have collapsed, if you had any. My bank account is empty, I can't pay my rent, can't stand it. All these things are. Could lead to overwhelm. But what is the overwhelm? Is the thinking mind creating havoc in your mind. Oh my God, you do it. I can't take anymore. What can I do? My life has come to an end, I can't cope with it, etc. And there you need to take action. And here again, a preparation for that, should it happen that in your life you are faced with several problems occurring in a short space of time. To practice presence in your daily life again is a wonderful preparation for coping with a series of problems that may arise in a short space of time in your life. So that's why it's very important to practice presence when things are going relatively okay. So that what I call presence power grows in you. And as presence, power grows in you, when these situations happen, you are able to take your attention out of the chaotic thinking mind and bring your attention into the present moment in whatever way, through your breathing or your awareness. But don't believe your mind when it tells you, I can't do it now, I can't, I've got. I need to think about my problems. I can't. I can't do presence now. It's impossible. This, this thought is a Lie. If you have been practicing presence and then you have this thought that says, I can't do it. No, there's no point in. Don't believe in every thought that comes into your mind. That's another great practice. Don't believe in every thought that comes into your mind. Your thought says, I can't do it now. There's no point. Of course you can take a conscious breath. There's nobody who cannot take a conscious breath. If you decide to take a conscious breath and if you don't believe your mind that tells you you can't do it, then you take a conscious breath. On a practical level, physical movement helps. If you feel overwhelmed, go out into nature and breathe consciously there and take in your surroundings. Nature is a very healing thing. When your life is. Especially when your life is becoming chaotic, go into nature. Even if you live in a city, there will be nature somewhere. Maybe you have a backyard, maybe you have this big park where you can go. There will be nature somewhere. You can get out of a city even better. So you go into nature and nature can help you become present. It's more easy. It's easier to be present in nature than to be present in a city. Once presence power grows in you, it makes hardly any difference. Or you may still have a preference for nature, but you can be as present in the city too. But in the early stages of presence arising in you, nature is very helpful. So when life becomes a burden to you, then go into nature and bring your attention to your sense perceptions and your breathing. Be there fully and it can liberate you to some extent. It liberates you from this mental overwhelm. This was perhaps the interesting story from my early life. When I was a child, I was. I didn't have a happy childhood. Well, there were some happy moments, yes. In fact, this is what I'm going to talk about now. On the whole, my life, my whole life was not happy because my family environment was chaotic and a lot of screaming and anger and horrible. My parents meant well, but they were in the grip of their own unconscious conditioning. They couldn't help it. So I was not happy there. Very unhappy at school too. So I carried this unhappiness and at some. I don't know how old I was, maybe 10. I got a bicycle for Christmas so I was able to get out of the city. It was a medium sized city. So I got. Took like 15 minute bike ride. When I would be out, it wasn't grand nature like just corn fields and hedges and trees and little groves but it was nature. So I got out of the city many times on my bike and the moment I reached nature, I felt so much better. And there was one thought that repeated itself every time I did this. It repeated itself in my mind in that thought set. I didn't fully understand what it meant, but I just thought that this will always be here, this will always be here, this will always be here. And this referred to nature. So I had this intuitive realization. There's a human made world, which was the world of unhappiness for me. And there was the natural world which represented the liberation from unhappiness. And it represented well being and harmony. So that's. And my first. But that was my first spiritual experience in life was that occurred many, many times. So nature is wonderful in a way you could. People may not realize the world that you inhabit consists primarily of human made things and natural things. You can divide all your sensory perceptions into human made things that surround you. All the things, furniture, cars, buildings, utensils, everything human made. And then you have nature. Even as I sit here in my room, I can see all the human made things. And then there's nature. Here's. Look out of the window, there's trees, there's nature. And I've got some plants here, potted plants. There's a Jordan made world and there's. There's a plant and there's another one behind me. It's a rubber plant that is. And that's natural. And it's interesting to see that you have these two dimensions, the human made things and the natural things. And then of course there's always the sky, skies all. Even if you're in the middle of a huge city, you can't see a single tree. The sky is still there. And the sky is a beautiful thing that actually can represent the inner consciousness. This is why Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven, which in my translation is the dimension of spaciousness, which is an inner dimension, which is presence. So Jesus talking about the kingdom of Heaven dimension. Kingdom of heaven, vast spaciousness is the inner spaciousness of presence. Buddha talked about sunyata, usually translated as emptiness. But a better translation is spaciousness again as an inner state, a realization of this inner dimension, all pointing to that it all comes together. It's all. There's only one truth, one true teaching comes in just different forms. So overwhelm this actual emergencies. And then there's the overwhelmed by your mind and that you can do something about and get ready for it. Because we all get challenged and we're living in a time when collectively, humanity is going to be challenged more and more. So there will be challenges that affect every one of us. There have already been some, and there are some now collective challenges. So you're either prepared for them or you're not. If you're not prepared, you become very unhappy, and you won't be able to cope. But if you're prepared, the challenges that humanity is facing will be an inseparable part of the awakening of humanity. Humans don't awaken. Even other life forms don't awaken unless they are challenged deeply. That is part of the evolution of consciousness. So it's all good. What looks bad on the surface from a deeper, higher perspective is all good, and it all makes sense. Be ready for the challenges in life. It's incredibly important to grow in presence, so to speak, so that presence power can manifest itself more fully through you. Presence itself is timeless, of course, but your ability to become a vessel for presence, a conduit for presence that grows in time. Because here we inhabit the dimension of time, and yet presence is the transcendent dimension that is timeless.