Bookeroo

Now Is What You Need

By Joy ⋅ February 28, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment..” - Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

I’m still reading the book and I have to say I haven’t read at this slow pace in a long time. I’m relishing the words like I’m savoring a rich chocolate bar. I’ve signed up for the class and have started on the workbook. I’m on page 75 and I am immensely grateful that I found this at the right time. You know when you get something at just the right time?

I told myself that if there is something I want to accomplish by the time I turn 30, it needs to be some sort of self-actualization. Nothing material. Nothing that would give me happiness externally, but within me. I’ve promised this to myself when I turned twenty, and saw it was “shedding”. In my mind then, my 30’s will be another a new phase just like 20, and in order for me to move on I need something…to be self-fulfilled, independent, and happy…Something encompassing all that. I feel that for each decade that I live, something comes to full circle, like a peeled onion getting back its layers one by one. I’m shedding, and yet I’m un-shedding.

It’s true what the quote says — whatever experience you are having at this moment is whatever it is that you need. I found Tolle’s book at just the right time. I’m turning 30 in a few months and although I feel very much that my cup is full, the experience of reading this book will be that cherry top to this good life, as I segue into my third decade on earth. [Third! Holy cow.] Last week, I turned on the TV, just as Oprah’s show was ending and she promoted that book. Curious, I checked it out at the bookstore, and ended up buying it. It’s those things that just happens one after the other, as if going through a connect-a-dot puzzle. There is order in the chaos.

When I look back at all the experiences I’ve had in my life, whether they are good or bad, they happened at the right time. There were moments of utter bliss, and complete misery. Coming back to the quote, it’s important to remember through all our experiences that they are happening, because it is very easy to resent moments of difficulties, and be bitter, and angry. It is very easy to be lost in the whirlwind of happiness and not remember a bit of later. We must remember that the moment is there because it is there for you to experience. I had moments of utter rage in my twenties because instead of accepting the present, I was continually battling with it. The more I battled with it, the more it pushed me down. When I learned to take the ‘beating’, allow myself to take part in the present, learn however difficult the lessons…that’s when I truly grew. I hated it when my mother said, “Everything happens for a reason.” I’m stubborn and refused to accept hardships. I will try to wrestle with it as much as I can. The bitter truth is that you will never grow if you don’t go through all these experiences.

It’s almost like being given a ball of clay and a sculptor was assigned to make a masterpiece of it. You are that ball of clay. Sometimes you will not like the position you’re in, but there’s not getting around to it. The needs to be molded, contorted, dismantled, poked, rolled, flattened, and refined…until it is a masterpiece.

If you’re looking for a book to read this spring, make it this book. It’s a great “spring-cleaning” book for the soul.