Top 10 Rules That Fix 95% Of Your STRESS (Never Worry) | Eckhart Tolle

Be grateful for whatever your experience of this moment is, and if you cannot be grateful, at least allow it to be, because it already is. You might as well. Now, if you did this little thing— it sounds very little and it is very little— allowing your experience of this moment to be the way it is, just this little thing would remove— oh, well, it's hard to put it in percentage terms. Let's say 95% of the suffering from your life. I don't know about the rest, the 5%. We'll get to that sometime. Would already remove a gigantic chunk of unhappiness in whatever form.

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Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you. Try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days, and let's find out together if they help you do great things too. If you're in, leave a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you. So today, let's learn from one of the best, Eckhart Tolle, and our take on his top 10 rules of success.

Believe.

Rule number 2 is accept difficulties.

Life is difficult, but when you, when you know that life is difficult and you fully come to terms with the fact that life is difficult, it's it's not difficult anymore because the greatest difficulty is the mental resistance to things that arise and the underlying assumption that they should not. So once you end, you have then a surrendered relationship with the present moment because everything arises in the present moment, then it's not really that difficult anymore and you can even in the midst of turmoil, still be connected with the realm of being within yourself. So there's always a core of stillness, if only in the background. And no matter what happens, that core of stillness is there, if we want to call it stillness. It's also, as we saw and as you know, it's also the source of satisfaction, where true satisfaction or a true sense of well-being that goes beyond physical well-being, a true sense of well-being comes from, it's the transcendent dimension. So life will challenge you with its difficulties, small and big. Small happen probably every day in some form. So you don't get upset anymore when things don't go according to plan. You don't get upset and complain or irritated or angry when people don't behave the way they should behave. And that makes it so much easier when you no longer demand that these things should not be the way they are. Nobody should— they shouldn't cancel flights. Weather shouldn't be such a way they can't fly anymore. The body shouldn't get old. Nobody should have catch an illness. Now, a lot of illnesses are produced, or you are much more prone to have an illness if your mind is very dysfunctional, because that lowers the physical resistance. It affects the body. What the mind does obviously affects the body. Even mainstream medicine is beginning to recognize your mental-emotional state affects your physical state. So if your mental-emotional state is very dysfunctional, your body's resistance to illness decreases. The likelihood increases that you catch something. There are other causes of illness, so nobody can be totally free and say, I'm never going to be ill. The body is a physical vehicle with a certain lifespan, and as it approaches the later stages of its lifespan, it's just like an old car. Things start to go wrong with it. It's another, it's another form, and the older your car gets, the more things need to be replaced, and the time comes when it's just not working anymore. So it will be easier for you to deal with the challenges of life if you actually realize that challenges are good. They force you to awaken.

Rule number 3 is eliminate negative thoughts.

Most of the time there is a voice in your head that comments and has opinions and viewpoints and interpretations about what's going on in your life. I call that the voice in the head. For most humans, that is completely involuntary. They don't even know that they have a voice in the head that never stops talking. Most of the time silently in your head. At other times, it may even shout something out. So it wants to be heard. And so if you walk in the street, you will find most people look fairly sane. They're not talking to themselves, it seems, because they're not talking out loud. But if you listened into everybody's head, You would be amazed of how noisy the inside of every human is. It's like a radio, you know, these radio stations where the people talk in an excited voice. They go on and on. If you go to a foreign country and you don't know what they're talking about, you might think this must be extremely important. But if you can understand what they are saying, you realize it's is completely meaningless. It's just noise. So a significant part of what happens in your mind, the larger part, is actually just superfluous noise. This thinking is a wonderful ability, a wonderful tool if used rightly. It is an instrument that causes disfunction and misery for millions on the planet, unhappiness for millions on the planet if thinking is not used, but if you are used by thought. So when humans say, "I think," in most cases, that's actually not true because they have no control over their thinking. It's a compulsive and involuntary And they are so identified with these thought processes, they don't even know that they are in the grip of their thought processes because they are so identified, they become their thought processes. So whatever comes into your head, you completely believe in it. And then you, yeah, that's how it is. Whenever you feel unhappiness, this is a generic term, unhappiness in whatever form, unhappiness can arise as Irritation can arise as anger, can arise as even boredom is a form of unhappiness, sadness, all kinds of states that they don't feel pleasant, they do unhappiness. And usually they are attributed to a life situation, something that's going on in your life. So for example, waiting at the airline counter and of course how Often things don't go well there. Let's hope they don't drag you out of the plane, but that could happen too. Whenever you feel irritation arising, anger arising, upset in whatever form, ask yourself, is this caused by the situation, or is it caused by what my mind is telling me about the situation? And in 95% of cases, you will find that the mental commentary that argues and complains about something that's going on, but should not be going on, but it is, but shouldn't be, and the gap between what is and what the mind says should be or should not be, that gap is the arising of unhappiness. And misery, or as the Buddha called suffering.

Rule number 4 is live in the present.

What you are looking for is something deeper. What every human is looking for is something deeper than the world can give you. The world can only challenge you, give you challenges and adversity so that you awaken. The world cannot, as I said, it cannot make you happy, because it's not here to make you happy, but it has another purpose. It is here to make you conscious. That's how it operates. Also, that means whatever arises in the present moment is just right for this moment, for you at this moment. But if you are stuck in the mind, the egoic mind, then you will completely ignore or even continuously dislike the present moment. And that is an amazing way to live. It is dreadful, but millions still live like that without knowing it unconsciously. They live for the next moment until they get very old. Then they know there's not much time left. Then the past becomes more and more important. The heaviness of the past.

Oh, oh.

So living for the next moment is, for most people, unconscious and quite normal. They live hoping that at some point they are going to achieve fulfillment.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. Rule number 5 is love yourself.

Many people don't— are uncomfortable with themselves. They dislike who they are. Perhaps they dislike their body, how they look. Perhaps they dislike who they are as a person, don't feel they are good enough or are self-critical a lot. Many people live with a negative self-image, which of course all consists of certain types of mind activity, and that's not pleasant. And it may be for some of those people, once they realize that they live with a, mind pattern that continually criticizes them and says negative things about them, they begin to realize that it's a mind pattern, this self-hatred is a mind pattern, and that it's harmful, it's not pleasant, and they can go beyond it and begin to replace it with more negative thoughts about— more positive thoughts about themselves. And having positive thoughts about yourself, that kind of thing, would perhaps usually be called beginning to love yourself, to feel good about yourself. But it's not easy, that shift from feeling bad about yourself to feeling good about yourself. Requires a lot of convincing. I would regard loving yourself as perhaps an intermediate stage in one's awakening, but the essence of the awakened consciousness is that you go beyond having a particular idea in your mind that represents yourself as a mental self-image that you relate to. Because basically it's ego, a mental self-image of who you think this is, 'What I am, this is who I am.' If you want to learn about not having a mental self-image, watch your dog or your cat. They don't have an opinion about who they are. They just are who they are. So that removes an enormous amount of problems from their lives. Of course, they don't have the mind activity that creates a self-image in their head. They are pre-mind, and therefore their life is far less problematic than human life. You can see how wonderful it is not to have a self-image. You can even, you can look at an ugly dog or an ugly cat, they don't have a problem. With that. Even an overweight dog or cat, they're okay. No self-image.

Rule number 6 is adapt the conscious states.

Every human acts, speaks in the way that corresponds to their state of consciousness at that moment. Sometimes you encounter humans— it's very common for humans to fluctuate between being relatively more conscious and quite unconscious. So you might meet the same person that you know well, a family member, in 2 or 3 or more different modalities of consciousness, as you might know. And when you're having breakfast in the morning and the family member or your roommate is coming down the stairs, you never know who is coming down the stairs that morning. It could be a very cheerful and lovely person. Isn't it great to be alive? And the next morning comes a completely different entity down the stairs and starts complaining, and, "Why didn't you do this? You should have told me long ago. I've been thinking about that all night. It's just awful. You always do that, don't you?" Who is that? Well, that was the person that was light and cheerful yesterday morning, and who knows who's coming down the next day. So with people who are fairly unconscious, they are subject to enormous fluctuations, and you also, to the extent that you could call them virtually certain, different personalities emerging at different times. So you're not dealing with one human being, people, and I'm talking about people who have not yet enough presence to bring about a more continuous state of identity. So you have all these people and then you might talk to one person and he says, okay, I'm now very clear in my mind what I want and I promise you 'Oh, those things that I did yesterday, two days ago, this will never happen again. I've really become very clear now. It's all sorted out in my mind.' And this person is genuinely believing that he's at a relatively, relatively slightly higher state of consciousness. And a few days or weeks pass and then he or she does exactly the same thing as before or worse, and then you say, he's dishonest, he lied to me, he said he wouldn't do that again, he betrayed my trust, I trusted him, we had a long talk, I started to trust him again, and then what did he do? Turned around and did the same thing and worse. Not realizing these are, because the person is relatively unconscious, different sub-personalities take that person over, which are just mental patterns, mental-emotional patterns. They could be called sub-personalities. They take over that person and then there's somebody else there virtually. And so it's not if you draw certain conclusions that this person now can never be trusted again. No, it wasn't the same person. It's several different people there. If you draw some conclusion and even draw some universal conclusion, then you yourself become deluded if you say, 'You see, now I know people can't be trusted. They do lie all the time, don't they?' So suddenly the one subpersonality becomes everybody. And well, it may— it does apply to the majority of people still. They— you need to remember the majority of people are often completely possessed by mental, emotional forms of conditioning. And sometimes certain forms of conditioning arise very strongly and take over that person, and then that subsides. There's a little bit of, perhaps occasionally a little bit of awareness there before the next wave of conditioning comes and takes that person over. Once you see that, It's easier also to be with people because whatever behavior a person manifests towards you is the same as whatever the present moment presents. It cannot be otherwise at this present moment. Nobody can act beyond their state of consciousness at this moment. But you should be more conscious More conscious? What are you talking about? You talk about consciousness? Let me tell you what you did. Start arguing with an ego, you can never win. So, dealing with your mind— life is difficult, yes. People are difficult, yes. Situations are often difficult, yes. But they are much less difficult if your mind does not amplify the problems that you encounter and the people that you encounter in your life. That already takes away a huge burden so that your mind no longer complains and has those patterns that deny what is and that weaves huge stories around people and events And about the past and about the future, the worry, the regret, the anxiety, these are all mental events that do not, these do not have to be part of the difficulty of life.

Rule number 7 is know yourself.

The hardest knowledge obviously is self-knowledge. That's why the ancient Greeks like Plato, Socrates, because Socrates, the main one, said his main dictum is know thyself. Know thyself, that is the most important thing in life, Socrates said. By the way, he lived about the same time as the Buddha. He said the most important thing is know thyself and that was inscribed at the Temple of Delphi in ancient Greece: "Know thyself." Another strange inscription, and that takes us now to where we are going, on the same temple inscribed was another saying that for a long time people couldn't interpret. They thought something was missing. The other words on the temple was, so on the other side of the temple, "you are" in Greek, "you are." And so the archaeologists looked and said, "There's something missing here." "You are," and they tried, "Is there another word that you are?" But there was no other word. "You are." "Know thyself." 'You are.' Hmm. At some point, somebody understood what it probably meant. It was pointing to a deeper dimension of who you are. But the real knowing yourself is not just knowing the personality. That's only one level. It's not the deepest level of knowing yourself. It's important too, to know all the stuff that runs you, that operates in you as a conditioning of your mind. This kind of thing people go to a psychoanalyst for. They want to find— know thyself. What the psychoanalyst or psychiatrist— no, psychiatrist I don't know— psychoanalyst can do for you is he can show you all kinds of things from your past. And if you go to a psychoanalyst, you can go for many years. Some people go for 20 years 20, 30 years to a psychotherapist, once or twice a week. Okay, and then the story goes on and on and discover more and more intricate things about your childhood. And then what happened and how did you feel about them? And then what did your mother say when you— and then up to a point it's helpful, but then it goes on and on and you get trapped in that level. And it becomes more and more complex. One level of knowing yourself is knowing how your ego operates, being able to witness it. For example, as I mentioned, in an argument, you become emotional and you witness it. Oh, so another faculty is there behind the conditioned mind that can observe what you're doing and say, oh, you're becoming very angry. About nothing. So you're maybe shouting, but in the back there's something, there's a resonance, an awareness that says you're shouting about nothing. You're witnessing what the ego is doing. This means that the beginning of the end of the ego, the witnessing faculty is the awareness. You are. So if you translate it into you, you'd have to say, I am. Okay, I am. And what am I? So let's investigate now this level of deeper identity. I call it the deep I as opposed to the surface I. The deep I to find that which is underneath the person. And in order to find that, the stream of thinking that sustains that personal sense of self needs momentarily come to a cessation. And that's why I started this evening with observing your breath, because that can bring about a brief sensation in the stream of thinking. And in that moment, awareness remains, consciousness remains, but it doesn't become thought. And this is a very strange thing to realize from the egoic point of view. So what, says the ego. It doesn't realize that that is of extraordinary importance to find that, to discover that dimension that is deeper than the egoic self. That is a dimension of consciousness prior to— before it becomes thought. So the most vital realization for you is to realize that there are spaces in your mind that you just need to discover. Really, ultimately, only one space you discover that there is a space in you where you can be conscious without needing to think, but you're very alert, you're completely here. Another word for it— some words can be helpful as pointers— another word for it is stillness. You discover a dimension of stillness. Within you. Stillness means consciousness without the movement of thought. Wow. And you can still perceive everything. In fact, you perceive it more acutely, more deeply, when you are not labeling mentally thought. When you are not labeling mentally what you are perceiving, you can look around— flower, room, sky— everything is there. You know what you're looking at without calling it anything, without concept. And you haven't gone to sleep because normally humans becoming free of thinking, the only way they can do that when they haven't awakened, they have to go to sleep or they have to take some kind of drug that puts up, slows down your mind. There may be a place for drugs in certain cases, the sacred surroundings. Don't need to go there, it takes too long. The discovery that that stillness, which is unconditioned consciousness, which is deeper than the person, is always there, but it's covered up by the noise of the mind, and you are completely identified with this surface movement. So you can't find the deeper self where there is enormous peace and a deep sense of aliveness that could— that gives you everything that you had been looking for as a surface egoic entity in this realm of this physical realm or this even psychological realm. You were looking for that, never finding this ultimate sense of being home, having arrived, you feeling at home in the universe rather than being alienated. Alienation is a very common mental illness for millions of humans, especially modern-day humans. So the most important discovery for you is discover There's something deeper in you than you, the person. They are not separate in the same way that the ripple on the surface of the ocean is not separate from the ocean.

Rule number 8 is cultivate awareness.

Free will ultimately does not come in until there's some awareness in you. That's where free will comes from. Until you have some awareness, you are run by the conditioning of your mind, and so you have no choice. The element of choice comes in when you become aware, for example, of the thoughts that go through your head, and you might realize suddenly, and for some people that's the first time they awaken spiritually, when they realize that for years they've had a voice in their head talking to them, which could be a monologue, it could be a dialogue, you could have a conversation with yourself, you can beat yourself up and say, "Why, you're no good enough, aren't you?" And then the other part of yourself says, "Well, I'm doing my best. I can't do it. I'm not good enough." The voice in the head, for some people, the spiritual awakening comes when they become aware that there's a voice in the head, and there's the awareness. The moment there's the awareness, you might even be able to choose to let go of a certain thought, a repetitive thought that you don't need anymore, that you don't want anymore, and then you surrender it, or you breathe it out. You don't need it. An emotion, sometimes people are in the grip of strong emotions, but if there's a little bit of awareness there, let's say it's anger, You're suddenly— anger arises, but in the background you're aware that this emotion of anger— so there's a small element of choices come in. Do you want to then attack this person? If there's awareness, you can observe the anger, but may no longer need to act it out. I'm not talking about suppressing, but recognizing. The more awareness awareness you have, or presence, the more choice there is in your life. And then, it's only then that you actually become truly intelligent, because this awareness is not an IQ thing. You can have— I've met highly intelligent people with 1 or 2 or 3 PhDs, academics and others, who are completely unconscious, completely unaware. Still just completely in their minds, and people in their personal lives, often very dysfunctional personal lives. So, it's not to be equated with intelligence, this awareness.

Rule number 9 is stop worrying.

This is all important. Give me your fullest attention. This really matters. It may matter, but as I put it, all those things matter relatively. They may be relatively important whether or not you miss your plane, whether or not you find that great job, or you lose that great job. Or whatever happens, it's all relatively important. But only one thing is of absolute importance, and that is your connectedness with being, so that that dimension is with you as you in your daily life. That's the challenge. A few things will be helpful in this. One is letting go of the unconscious assumption that there should be no problems and difficulties And if they are, that they are undesirable obstacles that really shouldn't be there in the form of events or people or situations. But if you look back on your life, and I look back on my life, it's always been challenging. There are brief moments when it's not challenging, and that's Great. But you know very well that life won't leave you alone. It'll challenge you one way or another.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is stop pleasing everyone.

Your happiness or fulfillment does not depend on any other human's acceptance of who you are. That would be a deluded thought. If you think you can only be happy if these people accept and understand you. Some people have that with their parents. So they say, my dad, my father, they don't understand me at all. It's terrible, terrible. I'm trying to explain what I'm at. Of course they cannot understand you. It's beyond their comprehension. If you have awakened spiritually and they haven't, so compassionately accept that they cannot understand you instead of trying to explain yourself to them. Just be there in a loving way with them when you meet for Christmas or Thanksgiving and you hear all the judgments coming at you from them. You should have— why don't you look where it's taken you? 'Look at your sister, she married a millionaire and you are into that weird kind of meditation stuff that's not getting you anywhere.' Whatever judgments come, say, 'Okay, I know that this is what you think and feel, and I think and feel differently, that's all.' So you don't need to justify accepting people's limitations and suddenly realizing Whether or not your father, your mother, your sister, your brother, or anybody else close to you accepts you for who you are is really not— you become free of the need to be accepted, but you can nevertheless have a deeper connection, keep that deeper connection and connectedness with them.

I often say, say yes to the present moment, or I say, make the present moment your friend, not your enemy. So to say yes to the present moment is a powerful teaching, but it can be misunderstood and has been misunderstood sometimes, and it needs to be explained what that actually means. It means— oh, by the way, there's a funny movie made a few— some years ago with Jim Carrey. It's called The Yes Man. And this is a person in the movie, a character, the character he plays, he works at a bank, I think, in the mortgage department, and he's very He's very bitter and he likes to say no to people who apply for mortgages. No, you can't have it, he loves saying, and he's very negative about everything. No, his life is uneventful, boring, everything is negative. Then he goes to a New Age, a friend invites him to a strange New Age event with a New Age teacher. And the teacher says, you have to say yes, yes to everything, say yes to everything. And he kind of becomes convinced that, well, I might as well try that, I've got nothing to lose. And from then on, whatever people ask him, every mortgage he approves. And whatever people ask him, can you lend me money? Sure, yes. Can you do this? Yes, yes, yes. And then his life becomes very interesting, but also very chaotic. He gets into most chaotic situations and he kind of all gets out of hand. And in the end, he kind of seems to realize that this wasn't quite working, that is not the true way. Meaning. So to say yes to the present moment does not mean that you accept everything that people ask of you. In some cases, you have to use the no, but not in an angry way that denies the present moment. I call that a high-quality no. So let's say, in your case, can you look after my children? Or let's speak in, because I need you, you're so good with children. She'll flatter you, you feel obliged. You're such a wonderful person, I so love you, can you do it again, please? And at some point, you say, dear, I'm sorry, I can't do it anymore. But without any negativity, a simple statement. It is not a reactive statement. You don't make her into a bad person who, "You want to take advantage of me. I'm not doing it anymore." That is a low quality, no. Even if perhaps she did try to, perhaps she was trying to take advantage of you, but that is not, that may be then a dysfunction in her egoic self. Many humans do that. The world is full of people who perhaps are trying to take advantage of you. That's what the egos do. And so it is not who she truly is. But you speak to— you do not speak to the ego in her. You simply say, I love your children, they're just wonderful, and I enjoyed my time, but I can't do it anymore. I'm sorry about that. High quality, no, no, no, I can't do that. A person says, can you lend me another $1,000? And you say, well, I've already lent you $2,000 3 months ago, and last year I lent you $5,000. I haven't got anything back yet. And then he says, I'm sorry, I have to say no. But you don't say, 'You're just trying to use me, and I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to be used anymore by you. This is it. That's it. No more.' That's another kind of no, but it's a low-quality no. The high-quality no is, 'No, I'm sorry. That's it. I can't do that anymore.' It implies there's a presence behind what you say. It's not reactive. And with the same, the person who asks you to write something, you say, I've seen the background, I'm not in agreement with that, therefore I'm sorry, I need to say no to this, I can't do this, thank you. High quality, no, it's beautiful and it works quite often. You may have to use that, make sure that it's not reactive and then becomes low quality.

For 10 more amazing rules from Bruce Lipton, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Almost everybody in our audience has taken that red pill at one time, changed their life. Yes, when was that? It turns out science has recognized that when you fall in love, you stop playing the programs and you start creating from your conscious mind.