Eckhart Tolle study meetup: Awakening Through Loss
The Stillness Within February Meetup explored shared experiences with loss – and possible links to personal and spiritual deepening. There were four of us who enjoyed a recently released Eckhart Tolle recorded talk on sudden change – of a job, a relationship, personal status or other forms (often leading to a sense of self diminishment). Eckhart showed that for many of us, the egoic sense of self can be resistant to any change which challenges its sense of identity. When we experience a major loss however, it can offer an opportunity to question the concepts we have about ourselves and also our attachments to them.
The group discussed experiences with sudden job changes, shaken sense of security and even lost dreams or expectations. Some of the strategies that people found helped them were – being with others or seeing with new perspective of a friend, surrender/prayer, allowing time for healing/recalibration and finding ways to be of service to others… And if not yet able to love the new conditions, it may be possible to begin to accept the perceived loss (i.e. to be ‘ok with what is’, including feelings of not being OK with what is!)
Eckhart emphasised the inherent impermanence of our life circumstances, the people and situations that pass through – he suggested that deeply attuning to that impermanence can support a sense of ease with change, and a growing awareness of that which is unchanging, the source of inner beingness – emphasizing that this underlying spaciousness cannot be diminished by external change.
Krishnamurti also has explored impermanence, using somewhat different language but nudging us towards a similar discovery:
“So there is nothing whatsoever permanent…. To realise that may be very depressing, melancholic, but it’s not. When you see the fact that there is nothing enduring, that very seeing is intelligence. And in that intelligence there is complete security. There is not your intelligence or my intelligence, it is intelligence…. that intelligence, not being yours or another’s, it is the intelligence of something infinite.” J. Krishnamurti, Third Public Talk in Colombo, Sri Lanka, November 1980
Thanks to the group for wonderful contributions to this inquiry… And thanks to KECC for hosting us this month.