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1 This is a ʻtext onlyʼ version of Cultivate Life! Magazine For the full Cultivate Life! Magazine experience in html format go to

2 Cultivate Life! magazine The opinions expressed in any articles in this publication are those of the individual authors and may not necessarily by shared by the publishers of Cultivate Life! magazine. Any financial or health advice given in Cultivate Life! Magazine may not be right for your particular case and you should seek your own profession opinion before acting on said advice. Copyright The publisher, authors and contributors reserve full copyright of their work as featured in Cultivate Life! magazine. No part of this publication may be copied or otherwise reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Cultivate Life! magazine is published every week Editors: Greg Willson of No Limits for Me and Peter Shepherd of Trans4mind CONTENTS: Heart to Heart Coaching: Coach Doris Jeanette, replies to the question: I am suffering from an inferiority complex since childhood days. How can I find a life partner who truly loves me? Features: Eckhart Tolle, The Present Moment and the End of Suffering Download and keep the Eckhart Tolle feature article as a stand-alone ebook in PDF format CLICK HERE Amanda Gore, How to Be a Great Speaker Cultivate Life Weekly Writers: Guy Finley, Never Feel Sorry for Yourself including free MP3 audio download, 7 Words to Turn Painful States Into Healing Powers CLICK HERE Chuck Gallozzi, Why We Criticize and What to Do about It Beca Lewis, Did I Understand What You Said? Steve Wickham, Resisting Feelings of Uselessness and Worthlessness Cultivate Health: Rudy Silva, Learn How to Shower To Keep Your Skin Healthy Roseanna Leaton, Don't Be Fooled By Your Symptoms Cultivate The Law of Attraction: Sean McView, The Facts Behind Law Of Attraction Sophie Jones, Using The Law Of Attraction And Manifesting Abundance Cultivate Life Extras: Leo Babauta, The Spiral of Successful Habits Rob McBride, A Little Magic Natalie Kimbrough, Council of N: "Lava and you" Linda Sapadin, Dreamer Personalities From The Shelf, The Power of Less Cultivate Life Partworks: Pam Garcy, Part 15 Your Word A Course In Miracles, Lesson 31 plus Commentary by Allen Watson

3 Heart to Heart Coaching: Coach Doris Jeanette, replies to the question: I am suffering from an inferiority complex since childhood days. How can I find a life partner who truly loves me? Link: question265.html Philosophy: Hindu Hopes and aspirations: First quit my inferiority complex and searching for a best person for my life (my life partner). Question: I am suffering with inferiority problem since my childhood days. First I want to remove it from my mind. I want to improve courage, positive thinking, self-confidence, and self-esteem. I am average person, not that much beautiful. I want a life partner who loves me, not my beauty. So please help me. And also I want to improve my spiritual power. ANSWER: Thank you for your question on self-esteem and beauty. The outside world, media, and sexist culture we live in today do not help average people feel their beauty. Let me tell you a secret that might help you begin to feel more attractive and self-confident. Even the most beautiful women in the world do not have solid self-esteem. Take Marylyn Monroe. She was the most famous beauty in the USA movie scene when I was growing up. At one point in her life, she was married to the famous intellectual playwright, Arthur Miller. Yet, Marilyn committed suicide. She was never able to relax and be self confident about her body and brains. Self-esteem has nothing to do with beauty or brains because Marilyn Monroe had plenty of both. It does not matter how beautiful or smart you are, possessing these qualities do not improve your self-esteem. Since you are in a post-doctorate program you certainly have brains. But your intelligence does not help you feel emotionally secure. The majority of people are average looking and you may or may not be average. Many times attractive people under estimate their beauty. Even the most beautiful, do not feel beautiful. So stay open to accepting the reality of your beauty wherever it may be. In an earlier column I mentioned that every human being on the planet suffers from low self-esteem. More and more movie stars and world leaders admit they have psychological problems such as anxiety and low self-esteem. So please remember: from terrorists to movie stars, humans have trouble valuing their beauty and magnificence. Low self-esteem is learned at a very early age. This means "the way you see yourself" will not change unless you actively engage in personal growth. However, if you want to improve your self-esteem, you can do so by leaps and bounds! You do not have to live with your faulty, unhealthy conditioning. You have the ability to unlearn your false beliefs, redefine your misinterpretations and cease the magical thinking of your younger years. When you feel good about yourself, everything is wonderful. When you feel bad about yourself, nothing is wonderful. This is why self-esteem is so important. Your relationship to yourself is the most important relationship in the whole world. If you have a good relationship with yourself you will be happy and healthy. If you do not have a good relationship with yourself, you will be physically sick, emotionally insecure, mentally unstable and perhaps suicidal. Feeling Good About Yourself Can Make You Beautiful Did you know that if you felt good about yourself you could actually become more beautiful and attractive? How could this be? Easily. When you are self-confident, you are more relaxed. When your face and body are relaxed, all of the natural beauty you possess becomes more

4 obvious and visible. A relaxed face is a pretty face. A tight, worried face is not a pretty face. A relaxed body is attractive and inviting. A tight body is hard and cold. Also, if you find, accept and love your emotional self, your energy will be affected in a most delightful manner. If you allow your vital, emotional energy to flow freely throughout your body, you will glow. When you glow you are radiating out positive energy to the world around you. Other people can feel your glowing, flowing energy and they are attracted to you. This is called magnetic energy. Energy is the reason people move closer to people who are relaxed and open. Glowing, flowing energy will attract a life partner. Energy is the reason people move away from people who are closed and judgmental. Closed, controlled energy will repel a potential life partner. So if you want to become more beautiful you need to focus on learning how to relax. If you want to attract a life partner, you need to develop yourself emotionally and you will be more magnetic and attract a soul mate. Do Not Compare Yourself With Others First, let me advise you not to fall prey to mass consciousness and its definition of beauty. You do not have to accept or agree with the definition of beauty you see in the magazines, movies or on TV. You see half naked women "made up" and unnatural in glamour, staged ads. These ads are selling cars, beer and junk to the masses. Bollywood and Hollywood movies usually portray phony images, not real people. So, please give up chasing unrealistic images of self-confident. Even if you compare yourself to real people and not images, you will still fall short. You are sure to be miserable if you compare yourself to others who are more beautiful, more successful, richer, smarter and so on. Your ego is very sneaky and loves to compare you to others to make you feel bad about yourself. Your ego is famous for putting you in a loselose situation. Lose-lose means the energy is irrational and there is no way you can win. You will always fall short. This is the reason it is extremely important to evaluate yourself based on your own achievements and progress. Put yourself in a win-win situation. Set up a step-by-step self-improvement program where you are sure to win. If you compare yourself to yourself, you can become a better person this year than you were last year. Then you can feel good about your progress. You have done enough and you are enough. You can feel proud of yourself for your real improvement. This is solid self-esteem. Develop Yourself If you focus on what you have, instead of what you do not have, you will get better results. You were born with many innate abilities and amazing natural talents. If you focus on your human potential you can become an interesting, exciting, fun, playful person to be around. Put your energy into finding and developing your attractive qualities. Being beautiful is not the only quality that makes you attractive. I have many friends in my life and each one supplies a need I have. For example, I need to be around creative people. I don't even think of how beautiful they are. I love their creative energy. I love my creative friends because they are creative and they feed my creativity. Therefore you can become more: Creative Loving Open Kind Relaxed Assertive Powerful Effective Productive

5 All of these qualities will make you more attractive and desirable as a friend and partner. The simple act of developing yourself and your spiritual powers will automatically improve your self-confidence. Accept your low self-esteem as a reality and begin to improve how you think of yourself. You are very judgmental of yourself. You find fault with your beauty. You do not like who you are. This needs to shift if you want to improve your self-esteem. You need to shift into self-love and self-acceptance. To help you achieve this goal, you need a heart to heart connection between the adult you and your emotional self. You also need a loving relationship between you and your body. At this point you are rejecting both your emotional self and body. Please realize that you cannot pretend to like yourself. Your emotional self can feel the difference between pretending and loving. You have to really begin to like yourself. Give yourself the best Valentine's Day gift in the world. Improve your relationship with yourself by increasing the love you give to your emotional self and your body. Just a little bit each day will result in more solid self-esteem. Action Steps to Improve Self Esteem Stop comparing yourself to unrealistic images and other people. Focus only on your own improvement and movements forward. Set up realistic goals you can reach each week to move forward. Start out with an easy goal so you have immediate success. Stop judging yourself. Stop finding fault with your face, body and emotional self. Notice how many negative thoughts about yourself you have each day. Then shift out of self-judgments into self-acceptance. The online course, Overcome Anxiety Naturally, leads you step by step out of self-judgments into self-acceptance and includes many other self-esteem boosting body exercises. (Cultivate Life readers can get a bonus off the regular price if ordered by Feb. 7, put LIFE! in the coupon box.) Develop a heart to heart connection with your emotional self. You are currently rejecting your emotional self. Find, accept and love your emotional self. Meeting her or his needs results in an increase of magnetic energy in your body and energy field. This flowing, glowing energy attracts people to you. To find, accept and love your emotional self, use the emotional guide, "Opening the Heart," (Cultivate Life! readers can get a bonus off the regular price if ordered by Feb. 7 - put LIFE! in the coupon box.) Develop a loving relationship with your body. Start by loving any physical part of your body that you sincerely like. Notice how much the loved part responses to your love. Give it more love and expand your love to other parts of your body. To help you listen to your body, accept its wisdom and love it, I recommend, " H e a r Yo u r B o d y Ta l k i n g " s e l f h e l p a u d i o : h ttp:// If you live in a country, such as India, where the exchange rate is extremely low you can contact Dr. Jeanette for deeper discounts via her contact information at Doris Jeanette, Psy.D, knows the pain of low self-esteem and the joys of self-love and self-acceptance. She loves to show women and men how to increase self-love during experiential, emotional-energy sessions both in-person and on the phone. She is currently in Glenwood Springs, CO where she is accepting a few in-person energy sessions. Contact information and the sign up form for her free newsletter, "The Vibrant Moment" is at

6 The Present Moment and the End of Suffering Eckhart Tolle speaks with Sounds True For two years, a small man sits quietly on a park bench. People walk by, lost in their thoughts. One day someone asks him a question. In the weeks that follow there are more people and more questions. Word spreads that the man is a mystic, and has discovered something that brings peace and meaning into our lives. It sounds like fiction, but today that man, Eckhart Tolle, is known world wide for his teachings on spiritual enlightenment through the power of the present moment. His first book, The Power of Now, is an international bestseller, and has been translated into 17 languages. More than 20 years have passed since Eckhart Tolle answered his first question on that park bench. While his audience has grown, his message remains the same: that it is possible to stop struggling in your life, and find joy and fulfillment in this moment, and no other. Sounds True: Can you describe to us your own experience of spiritual awakening (and of course, can you define spiritual awakening as well)? Was there a singular event that occurred or has it been a gradual process? Eckhart Tolle: Since ancient times the term awakening has been used as a kind of metaphor that points to the transformation of human consciousness. There are parables in the New Testament that speak of the importance of being awake, of not falling back to sleep. The word Buddha comes from the Sanskrit word Budh, meaning, to be awake. So Buddha is not a name and ultimately not a person, but a state of consciousness. All this implies that humans are potentially capable of living in a state of consciousness compared to which normal wakefulness is like sleeping or dreaming. This is why some spiritual teachings use terms like shared hallucination or universal hypnotism to describe normal human existence. Pick up any history book, and I suggest you begin with studying the 20th century, and you will find that a large part of the history of our species has all the characteristics we would normally associate with a nightmare or an insane hallucination. The nature of spiritual awakening is frequently misunderstood. The adoption of spiritual beliefs, seeing visions of God or celestial beings, the ability to channel, to heal, to foretell the future, or other paranormal powers all such phenomena are of value and are not to be dismissed, but none of them is in itself indicative of spiritual awakening in a person who experiences them. They may occur in a person who has not awakened spiritually and they may or may not accompany the awakened state. Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state. So what is it that we awaken from when spiritual awakening occurs? We awaken from identification with our thoughts. Everybody who is not awake spiritually is totally identified with and run by their thinking mind the incessant voice in the head. Thinking is compulsive: you can t stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don t even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable. In the unawakened state you don t use thought, but thought uses you. You are, one could almost say, possessed by thought, which is the collective conditioning of the human mind that goes back many thousands of years. You don t see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns. Your sense of identity, of self, is reduced to a story you keep telling yourself in your head. Me and my story : this what your life is reduced to in the unawakened state. And when your life is thus reduced, you can never be happy for long, because you are not yourself. Does that mean you don t think anymore when you awaken spiritually? No, of course not. In fact, you can use thought much more effectively than before, but you realize there is a depth to your Being, a vibrantly alive stillness that is much vaster than thought. It is consciousness itself, of which the thinking mind is only a tiny aspect. For many people, the first indication of a spiritual awakening is that they suddenly become aware of their thoughts. They become a witness to

7 their thoughts, so to speak. They are not completely identified with their mind anymore and so they begin to sense that there is a depth to them that they had never known before. For most people, spiritual awakening is a gradual process. Rarely does it happen all at once. When it does, though, it is usually brought about by intense suffering. That was certainly true in my case. For years my life alternated between depression and acute anxiety. One night I woke up in a state of dread and intense fear, more intense than I had ever experienced before. Life seemed meaningless, barren, hostile. It became so unbearable that suddenly the thought came into my mind, I cannot live with myself any longer. The thought kept repeating itself several times. Suddenly, I stepped back from the thought, and looked at it, as it were, and I became aware of the strangeness of that thought: If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me the I and the self that I cannot live with. And the question arose, Who is the I ; and who is the self that I cannot live with? There was no answer to that question, and all thinking stopped. For a moment, there was complete inner silence. Suddenly I felt myself drawn into a whirlpool or a vortex of energy. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words, Resist nothing, as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. Suddenly, all fear disappeared, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that. The next morning I awoke as if I had just been born into this world. Everything seemed fresh and pristine and intensely alive. A vibrant stillness filled my entire being. As I walked around the city that day, the world looked as if it had just come into existence, completely devoid of the past. I was in a state of amazement at the peace I felt within and the beauty I saw without, even in the midst of the traffic. I was no longer labeling and interpreting my sense perceptions an almost complete absence of mental commentary. To this day, I perceive and interact with the world in this way: through stillness, not through mental noise. The peace that I felt that day, more than 20 years ago, has never left me, although it has varying degrees of intensity. At the time, I had no conceptual framework to help me understand what had happened to me. Years later, I realized that the acute suffering I felt that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from identification with the unhappy self, the suffering little me, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind. This withdrawal must have been so complete that the suffering self collapsed as if the plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy. What was left was my true nature as the ever present I AM: consciousness in its pure state prior to identification with form. You may also call it pure awareness or presence. Sounds True: In your own life story there seems to have been a relationship between intense personal suffering and a breakthrough spiritual experience. Do you believe that for all people there is some connection between personal suffering and the intensity that is needed for a spiritual breakthrough? Eckhart Tolle: Yes, that seems to be true in most cases. When you are trapped in a nightmare, your motivation to awaken will be so much greater than that of someone caught up in a relatively pleasant dream. On all levels, evolution occurs in response to a crisis situation, not infrequently a life-threatening one, when the old structures, inner or outer, are breaking down or are not working anymore. On a personal level, this often means the experience of loss of one kind or another: the death of a loved one, the end of a close relationship, loss of possessions, your home, status, or a breakdown of the external structures of your life that provided a sense of security. For many people, illness loss of health represents the crisis situation that triggers an awakening. With serious illness comes awareness of your own mortality, the greatest loss of all. For many people alive at this time, loss is experienced as loss of meaning. In other words, life seems to lack purpose and doesn t make sense anymore. Loss of meaning is often part of the suffering that comes with physical loss, but it can also happen to people who have gained everything the world has to offer who have made it in the eyes of the world and suddenly find that their success or possessions are empty and unfulfilling. What the world and the surrounding culture tells them is important and of value turns out to be

8 empty and this leaves a kind of painful inner void, often accompanied by great mental confusion. Now the question arises: What exactly is the connection between suffering and spiritual awakening? How does one lead to the other? When you look closely at the nature of human suffering you will find that an essential ingredient in most kinds of suffering is a diminishment of one s sense of self. Take illness, for example. Illness makes you feel smaller, no longer in control, helpless. You seem to lose your autonomy, perhaps become dependent on others. You become reduced in size, figuratively speaking. Any major loss has a similar effect: some form that was an important part of your sense of who you are a person, a possession, a social role dissolves or leaves you and you suffer because you had become identified with it and it seems you are losing yourself or a part of yourself. In reality, of course, what feels like a diminishment or loss of your sense of self is the crumbling of an image of who you are held in the mind. What dissolves is identification with thought forms that had given you your sense of self. But that sense of self is ultimately false, is ultimately a mental fiction. It is the egoic mind or the little me as I sometimes call it. To be identified with a mental image of who you are is to be unconscious, to be unawakened spiritually. This unawakened state creates suffering, but suffering creates the possibility of awakening. When you no longer resist the diminishment of self that comes with suffering, all role-playing, which is normal in the unawakened state, comes to an end. You become humble, simple, real. And, paradoxically, when you say yes to that death, because that s what it is, you realize that the mind-made sense of self had obscured the truth of who you are not as defined by your past, but timelessly. And when who you think you are dissolves, you connect with a vast power which is the essence of your very being. Jesus called it eternal life. In Buddhism, it is sometimes called the deathless realm. Now, does this mean that if you haven t experienced intense suffering in your life, there is no possibility of awakening? Firstly, the fact that you are drawn to a spiritual teaching or teacher means you must have had your share of suffering already, and the awakening process has probably already begun. A teacher or teaching is not even essential for spiritual awakening, but they save time. Secondly, humanity as a whole has already gone through unimaginable suffering, mostly selfinflicted, the culmination of which was the 20th century with its unspeakable horrors. This collective suffering has brought upon a readiness in many human beings for the evolutionary leap that is spiritual awakening. For many individuals alive now, this means: they have suffered enough. No further suffering is necessary. The end of suffering: that is also the essence of every true spiritual teaching. Be grateful that your suffering has taken you to this realization: I don t need to suffer anymore. Sounds True: Your teaching about the power of now seems so simple. Is that really our primary spiritual task to fully engage the present moment? Eckhart Tolle: Identification with thoughts and the emotions that go with those thoughts creates a false mind-made sense of self, conditioned by the past: the little me and its story. This false self is never happy or fulfilled for long. Its normal state is one of unease, fear, insufficiency, and nonfulfillment. It says it looks for happiness, and yet it continuously creates conflict and unhappiness. In fact, it needs conflict and enemies to sustain the sense of separateness that ensures its continued survival. Look at all the conflict between tribes, nations, and religions. They need their enemies, because they provide the sense of separateness on which their collective egoic identity depends. The false self lives mainly through memory and anticipation. Past and future are its main preoccupation. The present moment, at best, is a means to an end, a stepping stone to the future, because the future promises fulfillment, the future promises salvation in one form or another. The only problem is the future never comes. Life is always now. Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do it s always now. It s all there is. And if you continuously miss the now resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your

9 life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be yourself. And so you are disconnected from the fullness of life that is the suchness of this moment. When you are out of alignment with what is, you are out of alignment with life. You are struggling to reach a point in the future where there is greater security, aliveness, abundance, love, joy... unaware that those things make up the essence of who you are already. All that is required of you to have access to that essence is to make the present moment into your friend. And you may realize that most of your life you made the present moment into an enemy. You didn t say yes to it, didn t embrace it. You were out of alignment with the now, and so life became a struggle. It seemed so normal, because everyone around you lived in the same way. The amazing thing is: Life, the great intelligence that pervades the entire cosmos, becomes supportive when you say yes to it. Where is life? Here. Now. The isness of this moment. The now seems so small at first, a little segment between past and future, and yet all of life s power is concealed within it. When there is spiritual awakening, you awaken into the fullness, the aliveness, and also the sacredness of now. You were absent, asleep, and now you are present, awake. The secret of awakening is to unconditionally accept this moment as it is. Some people do it because they can no longer stand the suffering that comes with nonacceptance of the isness of this moment. They are almost forced into awakening. Others have suffered enough and are ready to voluntarily embrace the now. When you become present in this way, the judgments, labels, and concepts of your mind are no longer all that important, as a greater intelligence is now operating in and through you. And yet the mind can then be used very effectively and creatively when needed. Now the question may arise: Would there be anything left to strive for when you are so present in the now? Wouldn t you become passive in that state? Many meaningless activities may fall away, but the state of presence is the only state in which creative energy is available to you. When your fulfillment and sense of self are no longer dependent on the future outcome, joy flows into whatever you do. You do what you do because the action itself is fulfilling. Whatever you do or create in that state is of high quality. This is because it is not a means to and end, and so a loving care flows into your doing. Sounds True: Being in the present sounds so obvious, and yet is quite hard to sustain. Do you have any practical tips for people for maintaining awareness of the present moment? Eckhart Tolle: Although the old consciousness or rather unconsciousness still has considerable momentum and to a large extent still runs this world, the new awakened consciousness presence has already began to emerge in many human beings. In my book The Power of Now, I mention ways in which you can maintain present moment awareness, but the main thing is to allow this new state of consciousness to emerge rather then believe that you have to try hard to make it happen. How do you allow it to emerge? Simply by allowing this moment to be as it is. This means to relinquish inner resistance to what is the suchness of now. This allows life to unfold beautifully. There is no greater spiritual practice than this. Sounds True: On your video The Flowering of Human Consciousness, you talk about a new consciousness that is emerging in our time. What do you mean? Hasn t the present moment always been available to genuine seekers? What s new about our current time in history? Are you pointing to a certain evolutionary process an acceleration in human spiritual development? Eckhart Tolle: Yes, the present moment has always been available to spiritual seekers, but as long as you are seeking you are not available to the present moment. Seeking implies that you are looking to the future for some answer, or for some achievement, spiritual or otherwise. Everybody is in the seeking mode, seeking to add something to who they are, whether it be money, relationships, possessions, knowledge, status or spiritual attainment. Seeking means you need more time, more future, more of this or that. And there is nothing wrong with it. All that has its place in this world. To

10 make money, to gather knowledge, to learn a new skill, to explore new territory, even to get from A to B for all these things you need time. For almost everything you need time, except for one thing: to embrace the present moment. You need no time to open yourself to the power of now and so awaken to who you are beyond name and form and realize that in the depth of your being, you are already complete, whole, one with the timeless essence of all life. For that you not only need no time, but time is the obstacle to that realization, seeking is the obstacle, needing to add something to who you are is the obstacle. The story of your life, how it all unfolds, whether you succeed or fail in this world...yes, it matters, yes, it s important relatively, not absolutely. Only one thing is of absolute importance and this is it. If you miss it, you miss the deeper purpose of your life, which I call the flowering of human consciousness. And ultimately nothing else will satisfy you. Some of the first human beings in whom the new consciousness emerged fully became the great teachers of humanity, such as Buddha, Lao Tzu, or Jesus, although their teachings were greatly misunderstood, especially when they turned into organized religion. They were the first manifestations of the flowering of human consciousness. Later others appeared, some of whom became famous and respected teachers, whereas others probably remained relatively unknown or perhaps even completely unrecognized. On the periphery of the established religions, from time to time certain movements appeared through which the new consciousness manifested. This enabled a number of individuals within those movements to awaken spiritually. Such movements, in Christianity, were Gnosticism and medieval mysticism; in Buddhism, Zen; in Islam, the Sufi movement; in Hinduism, the teachings called Advaita Vedanta. But those men and women who awakened fully were always few and far between rare flowerings of consciousness. Until fairly recently, there was not yet a need for large numbers of human beings to awaken. For the first time in human history, a large-scale transformation of consciousness has now become a necessity if humanity is to survive. Science and technology have amplified the effects of the dysfunction of the human mind in its unawakened state to such a degree that humanity, and probably the planet, would not survive for another hundred years if human consciousness remains unchanged. As I said earlier, evolution usually occurs in response to a crisis situation, and we now are faced with such a crisis situation. This is why there is indeed an enormous acceleration in the awakening process of our species. This new large-scale spiritual awakening is occurring primarily not within the confines of the established religions, but outside of those structures. Some of it, however, is also happening within the existing churches and religious institutions wherever the members of those congregations do not identify with rigid and exclusive belief systems whose unconscious purpose is to foster a sense of separation on which the egoic mind structures depend for their survival. Sounds True: How much time and effort is required to realize the power of now? Can this really occur in an instant or is this the work of a lifetime? Eckhart Tolle: The power of now can only be realized now. It requires no time and effort. Effort means you re trying hard to get somewhere, and so you are not present, welcoming this moment as it is. Whereas it requires no time to awaken you can only awaken now it does take time before you can stay awake in all situations. Often you may find yourself being pulled back into old conditioned reactive patterns, particularly when faced with the challenges of daily living and of relationships. You lose the witnessing presence and become identified again with the voice in the head, the continuous stream of thoughts, with its labels, judgments and opinions. You no longer know that they are only labels, judgments, and mental positions (opinions) but completely believe in them. And so you create conflict. And then you suffer. And that suffering wakes you up again. Until presence becomes your predominant state, you may find yourself moving back and forth for a while between the old consciousness and the new, between mind identification and presence. How long is it going to take? is not a good question to ask. It makes you lose the now.

11 Sounds True: How would you recommend that people listen and watch The Power of Now teaching series in order to get the most out of the teachings? In your opinion, why are audio and video teaching tapes such a powerful way for people to learn? Eckhart Tolle: If at all possible, you should not be engaged in other activity while you are listening or watching so that you can give your complete attention not only to the words but also to the silent spaces between the words. You will most likely learn many helpful facts about the emerging state of presence as well as the obstacles you are most likely to encounter. But this is only the secondary function of these tapes. Their primary purpose is not to convey information, but to help you access the state of presence as you listen. As in all true spiritual teachings, the significance of the words that are being spoken goes far beyond their informational content. Words that arise spontaneously out of the state of presence are charged with spiritual power: the power to awaken. All that is required of you is to be in a state of attentive listening. Don t just listen with the head. Listen with your entire body, so to speak. Feel the aliveness, the animating presence, throughout the body as you listen. I recommend that you listen and/or watch these tapes over and over. Each time you listen, it will feel as if you were listening for the first time. Each time you listen, you will grow in presence. But do not listen compulsively. Allow a gap of at least two or three days, and ideally more, before you listen to the same tape again. Each time after you finish listening, just sit in silence for a few minutes. Enjoy the greatest adventure a human being can be engaged in: to be part of the emergence of a new consciousness. ### About Eckhart Tolle Spiritual teacher and author Eckhart Tolle was born in Germany and educated at the Universities of London and Cambridge. At the age of twenty-nine, a profound inner transformation radically changed the course of his life. The next few years were devoted to understanding, integrating, and deepening that transformation, which marked the beginning of an intense inward journey. Later, he began to work in London with individuals and small groups as a counselor and spiritual teacher. Since 1995 he has lived in Vancouver, Canada. Eckhart Tolle is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Power of Now (translated into 33 languages) and the highly acclaimed follow-up A New Earth, which are widely regarded as two of the most influential spiritual books of our time. Eckhart s profound yet simple teachings have already helped countless people throughout the world find inner peace and greater fulfillment in their lives. At the core of the teachings lies the transformation of consciousness, a spiritual awakening that he sees as the next step in human evolution. An essential aspect of this awakening includes transcending our ego-based state of consciousness. This is a prerequisite not only for personal happiness but also for the ending of violent conflict endemic on our planet. Eckhart is a sought-after public speaker and teaches and travels extensively throughout the world. Many of his talks, intensives, and retreats are published on CD and DVD. Most of the teachings are given in English, but occasionally Eckhart also gives talks in German and Spanish. In addition to The Power of Now and A New Earth, Eckhart has written a book designed for meditative reading entitled Stillness Speaks. A book consisting of selections from The Power of Now entitled Practicing the Power of Now is also available. For more information on Eckhart Tolle, please visit his website. Download and keep the Eckhart Tolle feature article as a standalone ebook in PDF format CLICK HERE

12 Sounds True was founded in 1985 by Tami Simon with a clear mission: to disseminate spiritual wisdom. Since starting out as a project with one woman and her tape recorder, we have grown into a multimedia publishing company with more than 80 employees, a library of more than 600 titles featuring some of the leading teachers and visionaries of our time, and an ever-expanding family of customers from across the world. In more than two decades of growth, change, and evolution, Sounds True has maintained its focus on its overriding purpose, as summed up in our Vision Statement: Sounds True exists to inspire, support, and serve personal transformation and spiritual awakening. How to Be a Great Speaker by Amanda Gore I became a speaker after meeting Ron Tacchi at the first conference I ever presented. He listened as the MC and when I had finished said "you should be a speaker" and I said "what's a speaker?"! Needless to say he had a lot of coaching to do and bless him - he did! For the next 5 years he taught me so many things I rarely hear now. On top of that I have been studying with Michael Grinder who is an 'educators educator'; a master of non verbal communication and the process of delivering content so it's memorable and effective. ( He is a must to study with if you are serious about being a great speaker. So here we go with the 'rules'! 1. You must have fun! Ron drilled into me that if I have fun, they will have fun. No matter how serious your content or how professional you need to be, you can always have fun. Even at a funeral - people love to laugh or have a good time and there are very few occasions where a bit of levity and humour is inappropriate. Find ways to inject a bit of fun into each few minutes of your conversation with the group. 2. It's a conversation NOT a speech or a keynote. The purpose is to connect! You to them and them to each other. Think about the best speakers you have ever seen. They are the ones who seem to be talking directly to you - that's a conversation - not a speech. Too many times, we focus on our 'speech' and practice it and rehearse and re-craft it so the words are just right. Although the words must be relevant, they are only one side of the equation! Think about how you have a conversation with another person or a small group. It's interactive - you speak, they listen, they speak, you listen etc. So it is with you on stage.

13 Think of it as a conversation - you are listening to their non verbals and watching them carefully to make sure they are engaged and listening to your side of the conversation. If they seem distracted - or unconscious! - then you need to do something to re engage them. Probably something like stop speaking! And get them to do something active - so they are part of the conversation. Some people have such a powerful story (like Charlie Plumb an ex Vietnam prisoner of war) and the story is so compelling that he doesn't need to have a conversation - you are spellbound from the beginning! But few of us have a story so dramatic - Li Cunxin, the Chinese ballet dancer who escaped Mao's China is another amazing spellbinding story - so we have to use conversations! 3. People will remember how you made them feel. This is truly the key - remember this and do all you can to make sure people feel great when you have finished speaking - and if you are delivering bad news make sure they feel that you have compassion for them and care! People do not remember facts and figures nor does that make them change their behaviour or thinking. We need to touch their hearts with stories and experiences or memories that will make them feel some positive emotion. Ron was a master at taking his audiences on an emotional roller coaster - he would take them emotionally up and down and then finish them up a big high - so they left feeling fabulous - and changed. 4. You are an experience creator! We need to be creating experiences for people - not delivering a 'speech'. If you can create an environment in which people can feel safe; they are given permission to do things they have never done before; they join in and interact (even if they are reluctant); in which they can learn and remember information that is packaged in a way that is memorable; in which they have fun and laugh, where they have an AH HA moment which inspires them to change - then you will be a successful speaker! Experiences are living, interactive emotion filled events which inspire people in some way. We are all in the experience together, 5. It's never about you! Too many people are so focused on what they are saying and where they are in the 'speech' sequence. If they are distracted in any way, they go blank cos they can't remember where they were in the 'speech'. This sort of internal focus means that we are totally disconnected from the audience who will feel it; AND we forget that people are never thinking about us. They are too busy wondering what you are thinking about them to be thinking about you!! So forget about how you look and how stupid you sound or if you just made a mistake or if you forgot something - just be real! The more authentic you are in this conversation, the more they will relate to you. Our work is to serve others and be useful to them; to give them what they need. 6. Have your focus on the audience or group - always! Prepare yourself before you get on stage or in front so that when you stand up in front of a group, you can focus totally on the audience. Watch them carefully to monitor how engaged they are, what topics and issues they relate to most, to how fidgety they are, to what makes them laugh the most and do something to re engage them. That 'doing something' may be inserting an interactive exercise as simple as 'turn to the person next to you and tell them one thing you have learned so far'; or creating an opportunity to laugh or asking a question or having them stand up and move to a different seat - anything that shakes their state and gets them listening again! 7. Be original. Too many speakers take jokes or content from other people and make it their own material. This is a no no - you may find something on the internet you wish to use in which case, try to find the source and acknowledge them or say you could not find the source. Taking a joke

14 and adapting it as if it's a real life story of yours is also fraught with danger if someone has heard the joke before! Life is full of funny incidences and events; look at your life for the humour or lessons. Everything that happens to me is potential material to change a mindset. Walking down a hotel corridor in Opryland, lost and frustrated, I ran into a family of Mum, Dad and 2 little girls. While all the adults were grumpy and lost, the little girls were excited and jumping up and down with joy! This became the basis of a story I use to introduce the idea of how as adults we lose our sense of awe and wonder and reverence. People relate to it immediately and then I give them symbols to remember the content. 8. Tell stories to deliver your messages Lou Gerstner said 'facts and figures will not change peoples behaviours", I added touching their hearts will. You can change someones behaviour in a heartbeat if you give them an "ah ha' moment or touch their hearts. Steven Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People tells a story of one time he was catching a train at the end of a long day. Tired and wanting to relax, he was frustrated with a young man who had boarded with his 3 small chlldren. After a period of time when the children were running all over the carriage disrupting people, Covey leans over and asks the man to control his children. The man is startled and comes out of a daze and apologises saying ' we have just come from the hospital where their mother died.' In a heartbeat, Covey changes. He becomes full of compassion rather than irritation and plays with the children rather than glaring angrily at them. That's the power of a story. Tell stories to illustrate all your main points. Or give people an experience around them. Create characters and act out skits on the stage to make a point or tell a story. By the way, what stories do you tell your self about your presenting? Are you telling yourself you are terrible at this stuff? That you are probably going to make a fool of yourself? That your mind will go blank? There are all going into your subconscious mind and you will program that behaviour in! Is that what you want? Do you judge yourself along the way as you are speaking? Which of course immediately disconnects you from the group and you disengage from them which makes them disengage from you! They have no choice. 9. Internalise your message and come from your heart. I have heard so many young speakers talking about 'rehearsing' their 'keynote' in front of the mirror or other people and while this may be something useful to do a couple of times, it is not the best way to be a great speaker! Ron used to tell me to 'internalise' my messages - to find a way to have the concept resonate within me, to make sense to me and then I could deliver it to others without notes and with heart. In the early days of my career, I would wake up the morning of a presentation and MENTALLY rehearse. I would imagine me delivering the content and the audience interacting, and see and hear and feel the positive outcome. I would picture the sequence of the content and them remember it- looking at my notes if I forgot the next point I was going to make in my imagination. I would do this for an hour and then get up and exercise to integrate what I had memorized. Here is the key though. I would LET GO of that as soon as I went on stage! I had faith that what emerged from my mouth was in the right sequence for what this group needed - if I didn't follow my 'script' then it would be ok! I would pray before I went on stage for God to give these people - through me - what they needed and that allowed me to be in my heart connecting with them, trusting that He would put the right words in my mouth! If you go on stage with a spirit of serving - a desire to help these people in some way, to give them what they needed, they will notice! Remember - it's not about you - not even a tiny, weeny little bit!!

15 10. Preparation does not equal rehearsal! Rehearsing in front of a mirror or others, crafting the perfectly worded keynote or attending a course on speaking does not constitute preparation! In my opinion to prepare for a presentation you need to: consider the objectives/outcomes for the meeting put yourself inside the minds of the people you will be addressing and imagine how life is for them so you can frame the information in a way that is relevant for them find out all about their current situation, stresses and challenges learn the right language and phrases used in this company - eg IBM lives on acronyms and if you don't know a few of them, you are not part of the group! Some people talk about customers; some, clients. in other words, know your audience and how they think and feel right now ask yourself what information would help them and how can I deliver it so it's relevant to them and their situation and needs. find stories and exercises that will illustrate the points in the best way for this group sit in on any previous presentations of meetings before you on the day so you can relate to what has been said and modify what you say based on what they have already heard make sure you know your content before you are on stage and then let go of it from the minute you walk on stage pray to give them what they need before you go on stage 11. Room preparation Where you can, have people sitting theatre style - it makes them connect much more. If you sit people at round tables, you split them into clumps or separate groups of 8 or 10 and the group dynamics is very different. If you are trying to make people become more of a team - separate tables is the worst thing you can do - you will split them into teams of 10 or how many tables you have! If you must have a table then have them sit classroom style rather than rounds. In my opinion, it's best to have them sit theatre style and give them clip boards and gather their chairs into circles if you really want people to connect! Always have bright music playing fairly loudly as they walk in - if you play relaxing soothing music they will be in a coma before you start!! Van Morrison or disco music is always a good way to lift the mood! It sounds bad but it really works well! People will talk much more to each other when there is music playing at a reasonable volume in the background. The lighting is critical as well - the brighter the lights they more the connect. Make sure you are well lit on the stage - it's very difficult to watch and listen to someone who is in the dark! Do not stand on the stage in a dark patch - this is where checking the room out at least an hour before you speak is an important first step! And at that time check out the microphone and how it sounds - set up an audio visual check with the AV people during a break where there is plenty of time. 12. Always start with an activity, icebreaker or questions. I think the most boring way to start a presentation is to say ' thank you' or 'I am glad to be here' or it's great to be here' etc. Anything in that genre is so ordinary!! Instead change the energy of the group from the minute you start by engaging them. Ask them a question - or better still - 3 questions with the third one something that makes them laugh - for example, I sometimes start with this series of questions: How many people wake up every morning full of energy and vitality? (raise your hand as you ask the question indicating to them that they need to raise their hand - if you don't do it, they won't either!) How many people go home every night full of energy and vitality? Pause - laugh at how few people put their hands up and then ask