Lesson 2: Any pain you feel results from resisting the things you can’t change. If your task is to hand in a research paper in 14 days, neither regretting all this time you procrastinated nor worrying about the big workload that’s to come will actually help get you there.īut if you just start solving the first tiny problem and come up with an outline, it’s all downhill from there. Therefore, living in any other moment than the present is useless. When you think about it, the past is nothing more than all present moments that have gone by, and the future is just the collection of present moments waiting to arrive. Everything you feel and sense takes place in the present. The reason only the present matters is that everything happens here. Tolle says that the only important time is the one we think about the least: the present. When you wake up 10 minutes too late in the morning, what’s the first thing you think? “Shit, I overslept, I wish I hadn’t hit the snooze button.” closely followed by “Oh no, now I’ll be late for work, I’m sure my boss will yell at me!” – and voilà, you’ve ruined at least the first half of your day. The constant stream of consciousness and thoughts in our head, which plays 24/7 in our heads, is mostly preoccupied with 2 things: the past and the future. The reason we regret and worry about a lot of things lies in the way our minds work.

If I asked 100 people to name the two most common bad feelings they can think of, 99 of them would probably respond with regret and anxiety. If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: All life is is a series of present moments. Ready for a trip to this beautiful place called the present? Let’s go! The Power of Now Summary You can free yourself from pain by constantly observing your mind and not judging your thoughts.All pain is a result of resistance to the things you cannot change.

Life is just a series of present moments.Here are 3 lessons from it to help you worry and regret less: Eckhart started teaching and published The Power of Now in 1997, which eventually went on to become a New York Times bestseller in 2000 after Oprah Winfrey fell in love with it and recommended it. The next morning he woke up and felt very much at peace because he’d somehow managed to lose his worrier-self and live entirely in the now, the present moment.Īfter spending several years doing nothing but enjoying his new-found peace, eventually people started asking him questions – so he answered. Plagued by depressing late-night thoughts, he started questioning what it is that made his life so unbearable and found the answer in his “I” – the self-generated from the power of his thoughts in his mind. Leading a very troubled and problematic life, coined by many periods of serious depression, Eckhart Tolle found peace overnight, quite literally.

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