Back in 2014 I stumbled upon an Eckhart Tolle quote online while vacationing at the beach. "You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while." I just stopped. This spoke to me somehow. I started Googling him and read more, including his book The Power of Now. He's changed my life. Well... is changing my life. It's a work in progress with decades of old conditioning to overcome.

Eckhart's teaching is both deeply profound yet incredibly simple. It boils down to the power of Now, like the book says. This is the core of his teaching: the power of this moment — the only time that life is real. Our past is a thought in the head. Our future is likewise a thought in the head. Most of us spend all our lives mired in the past or the future, not in actual life now.

To quote Eckhart, "Most people treat the present moment as an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live." So true. We're always rushing to get to the next moment. Somehow, then things will be OK and then we'll be happy. But when that next moment arrives, we're looking ahead to the next one yet. On and on... until we finally die!

Another teaching is that problems and suffering are self-generated in our head. "The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it," Eckhart explains.

Think about it. We've all had days when everything went wrong. Every little thing! One after the other after the other. Of course we've had good days too. Some of those little things that upset us so badly the one day also happened on the good day. A few of them, certainly — but we had a very different reaction. One day they were intolerable. The next day we shrugged them off, if we even noticed at all. Same events. The difference was how we thought about them.

There is tremendous power in being present in the moment, unburdened by past or future. Jamie Anderson won Gold for the U.S. in snowboarding at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Interviewed by Visions in Education she was asked "How did you deal with the pressure?" "By living in the 'NOW'" she responded, citing Eckhart's book as "amazing." She went on, "Taking everything moment by moment. It’s a lot to take in and a lot of stress and pressure. I truly had to practice not getting too far ahead."

All these concepts and more are extremely simple, yet immensely powerful. Life simply doesn't need to be as hard and stressful as we make it. This doesn't mean there aren't challenges and injustices to be addressed, it just means that we don't have to suffer while dealing with them. Suffering is something we do to ourselves. It's not imposed on us from outside.