Written by Alexa Erickson
I come from a small town in Maine. I have had anxiety my entire life, but it wasn’t until a series of panic attacks when I was 19 that I finally went to my doctor to discuss a solution. I remember feeling so comforted and supported by my doctor. He didn’t try to push pills on me. Everything was a suggestion, and he spoke with me like a friend. Fast forward three years. I had moved to California and was utterly disheartened by the lack of time my doctor had for me. I felt alone and confused. Five years later (to present day), anxiety concerns arose for me once again. I was skeptical about going to a doctor because of my experience with utter disconnect between patient and medical professional. But I’ve found in my life that when you manifest what you want and need, somehow things simply fall into place. I walked into my new doctor’s office, told him about my issues, and his first question was not what medications I have tried. He asked me in a calm voice, “Have you read Eckhardt Tolle’s The Power of Now?”
Years ago, such a recommendation wouldn’t seem strange. But in a day and world where Big Pharma seems to have such a firm grasp on our lives, it felt more comforting than I had ever imagined. To think someone, seeing me shake and cry in confusion and worry in his office believed words could be a powerful medicine was inspiring and comforting.
There is a reason mantras are medicine. In the yogic tradition, they are thought to transform mind, body, and spirit. During anxious times, I have used mantras incessantly. “Breathe in peace, exhale all worries.” In this doctor’s office, being suggested to use words to transform my mental state felt so close to home.
Whether it be quotes, mantras, passages, or more, there is something undeniably powerful about words that works like medicine.
Here are 15 quotes from Eckhart Tolle to heal:
1) The past has no power over the present moment.
2) Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
3) Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.
4) The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
5) To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.
6) Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
7) Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.
8) The only thing you ever have is now.
9) Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
10) You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.
11) As soon as you honour the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love – even the most simple action.
12) The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.
13) Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.
14) When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.
15) What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. ‘Who am I, then?’ The one who sees that.
Originally posted @ Collective Evolution
