I’m always vowing to read Eckhart Tolle (a useful and somewhat skeptical look at him here in the Independent) daily, doing it for a while, and then forgetting. All I can say is when I’m feeling physically trashed, not sleeping, overcome in some way by life and work, dissatisfied, or worried about my writing I can calm it in an instant by reading from ‘The Power of Now’ or ‘Stillness Speaks.‘ It works for me.
It’s perhaps not surprising therefore that my inspirational tip this week on my free newsletter (which you can sign up for in the right hand side bar and which also has details of several serious competitions and magazine submissions) is to slow down, find the space around you, walk, garden, contemplate, breathe. Sometimes we need to stop the wild internal chatter that goes on daily in our heads and when we do we often find the space to be truly creative.
I’ve also been reading some great fiction- another inspiration – but more of that later. Meanwhile Happy October…
I get those fleeting, beautiful moments of inner peace and stillness – and then the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day, I’m a human trying to make it through in this world.
Ellen DeGeneres
As in ‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare…’ W.H. Davies
GW
Indeed, as inscribed in part on your beautiful new garden bench – which has got to be a perfect place for meditating on the world.
Tolle, straight to the gulag with him. The bugger has a website where you can pay a monthly direct debit to gain from his wisdom. Let’s have a new chain of spirituality centres’ called the McTolle, available on franchise for aspiring neo-liberalist gurus.
For my ‘money’ (as the expression goes), I wish I’d read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Pied Beauty’ before I read Tolle. One page of authentic ‘seeing’ beats 300 of IKEA prose. ( Just thought of that, IKEA Prose, a neologism for disposable literature, probably what people will say about my own writing lol).
‘IKEA prose’ is good I admit but I can’t agree – the prose may be flawed at times but in no way equates with anything disposable. I agree entirely about his website which is why I didn’t link to it and why I also provided a more skeptical view from the Independent but whichever way I look at it works for me and I’m really pleased and happy about that – so please no Gulag!
It is so easy to rubbish thoughtful or inspirational advice if it’s not on your wavelength. But I remember the first time I read this book with its simple but powerful advice and sensed something relevant to me. Following that advice induced a kind of centring at a rather scattered time. I find that the wisdom of these books mostly lies in the first fifty pages. One doesn’t need to read on or sign on or anything.
Reaching for E Toller or G M Hopkins to straighten your mind can have equal benefit. Although the brilliant GMH can induce and sustain depression if you are not careful