You make a mistake. You know you messed it all up, and you know it’s your fault. You don’t even know how to fix it. You just know you feel like you must. But you are still here – in the present moment.
This is where your journey begins.
“The past has no power over the present moment” – writes Eckhart Tolle.
Through pain and sadness, sweat and tears, packing suitcases and moving out, running away, leaving it all in the past – the life where you never truly lived hiding behind the stories your parents created, stoned behind the lies you buried yourself under as the only way to be accepted and loved.
Today, in the present you have experienced the unconditional love. For the first time in your ‘house of cards’ there was a light and it came from within you.
You suddenly realized that life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Well, because this is the one you are having at the moment.
You learn to sit with yourself. Your imperfect, bruised and overwhelmed self. And you accept yourself just the way you are, becoming everything but lost.
“Give up defining yourself – to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are” – shares Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.
Congrats, you are free now. You realized deeply that the present moment is all you have. You don’t defend or hang on things and humans anymore. You learnt how to let it go. Whatever the present moment contains, you accept it as if you had chosen it.
Now you understand that to love is to recognize yourself in another. Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
You found peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
“A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever” – Eckhart Tolle.
Your will never build ‘tracing paper relationships’ again. There is no place for negativity and lies in your life. No place for unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry, and all forms of fear. No place for guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness. You don’t live in the past anymore. You dream but are not lost in the future.
“Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not” – Eckhart Tolle.
In constant pursuit of happiness, you found inner peace.