5 Life Changing Lessons Learned from "The Power of Now"

I have picked up one of my favorite books, “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, for the third time and its lessons are hitting even deeper this time around. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to live life with a higher sense of ease & flow. Here are my Top 5 Favorite Lessons from the book:

1. The most precious thing we have in our lives is the Present Moment. There is no “past” or “future” - there is only memory or anticipation. Both of which are experienced within the present “Now”. We get so caught up in our daily tasks and performing the same mental patterns over, and over, and over again that we miss the beauty that is always available to us within the present now because it is blocked by our mental illusions of the past and future.

2. “When you are washing the dishes, wash the dishes” - this is a saying one of my college professors used to start every single lecture with. I think on an intellectual level I understood it, but I didn’t totally understand what it meant on a visceral level until a few months ago. To be fully tapped into whatever your current task is means to not allow your mind to wander to anywhere else. Put your phone on DND, turn off your computer’s email notifications, keep your mind fixated on the “now” and fully embody the process of completing your task. The beauty is in the journey, not the destination. 

3. Say “Yes” to whatever the present moment is as if you have chosen it yourself. Acceptance is not defeat (as many of us have been unconsciously taught), rather it is what it means to live within peace and consciousness. Once we surrender to what “is” it stops having power over us because we have removed the energetic charge that exists within our resistance. I have began to practice this within my own life, totally allowing myself to fully embrace and feel whatever I am attempting to resist within the present moment. The results? I’ve been stunned, truly I mean it, stunned at how quickly and easily the “don’t like” situation dissolves once I fully accept it and allow it to transmute into a situation I would more prefer.

4. As cliché as this may sound…focus on the positive over the negative. It’s human nature to want to protect ourselves, so we focus more on what poses a threat than that which brings us joy and love, but overtime this unfortunately becomes our mind’s basis for looking at life and as a result we become tuned to a pretty negative frequency. This negative frequency can lead us to have anxiety, depression, sorrow, anger, despondence, and hopelessness. We have to condition our mind to think positively if we want to bring positive experiences into our lives (and just a shot in the dark here, but I’m guessing that is probably what you want). 

5. Let go. Trust me, I know how difficult it can be to release our grip on the past. The truth is there are people who haven’t treated us as lovingly as we have deserved, but babe - you have got to let that go. No matter what the condition was - you have to let it go. You deserve a beautiful future and the only way to create that is by living a beautiful “now”. Those thoughts of the past, the anger, the bitterness, the helplessness - they do not help you to create a beautiful now. It only keeps you stuck in what was. So how do we actually “let go” of the past? I began to free myself from the past when I started to really forgive myself. Through therapy, breath work, meditation, and learning about my subconscious mind I realized a lot of the anger I was holding towards others was actually my own, my own guilt and shame played out in the same pattern but with different people throughout my life. Through practicing these modalities I began to truly understand how human we all our, myself included, and if I deserved forgiveness, so did they. I have also found affirmations to be highly effective for when those pesky repetitive thoughts come up in my mind throughout the day. A favorite of mine is, “I die to the past”. It helps my mind to understand that those patterns and those negative emotions no longer live here. I encourage you to come up with a simple & short affirmation that rings true for you.

Be in the Now, friends. It's all you've got.

Xoxo,

Dani Lee, Owner/Founder Shop D. Lee