Ok The power of now by Eckhart Tolle was the most interesting self help book I’ve ever read. I was reading classmates responses to this book and someone said this book was like a bible. I agree with that person because in the beginning Tolle mentions god a lot and also by the title “The Power of Now, A guide to spiritual Enlightenment”. In the introduction of this book Tolle explains his experiences that leads to how he wrote this book. He also talks about his past experience with continuous anxiety of suicidal depression. A quote he says catches my eyes. He says,” I heard the words “revisit nothing” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void”. This quote shows that he simply feels ‘nothing’. He is empty and mindless to everything around him. I can connect to this quote because sometimes I feel a empty void. When my grandmother passed I felt a empty void, like something was missing. It was like a big gap missing from my life that needed to be filled in.
In chapter one the author is saying it that if you allow your ego to take over then you will have more pain. Two quotes caught my attention because I can really relate to them. One quote is when he said,”You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don’t even know that you are it’s slave. It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself(Tolle,4)”. In this quote Tolle is saying that our minds got its mind of its own. Our heads are like machines who control how we behave or move. I can connect to this quote because I feel my mind is possessed sometimes. I overthink about so many different things, I even ask myself the ”what if’s?”. In class we have been meditating and that’s been helping me cope with my stress and it’s been working for me. It relaxes my brain and relieves my stress. It also clears my thoughts and I enjoy it. Another quote that interested me was when Tolle says, “You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud(Tolle,17)”. In this quote Tolle is saying that people who aren’t normal talks to themselves out loud as if someone was there responding to them. But they think someone is there because they be having a whole conversation. Unlike abnormal people, us normal people just has this voice in our head that’s telling us what to do and what not to do. Sometimes when someone is talking to me my mind is saying “leave” a bunch a times like a broken record. Tolle says that we need to start listening to the voice in our head as often as we can. I feel if we do that certain things won’t turn out good because as I said before we have a mind of our own.

In chapter two Tolle introduces the concept of the emotional Pain-Body. Tolle says, “ As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merged with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body.(Tolle,36)”.When Tolle says this he means that emotional scars we carry truly are negative energy created by our ego. I have experienced emotional aspects in my past and I can never forget about it. It’s like it’s stuck in my head forever and it can’t go away. We have to be aware of our emotional pain, while also being a watcher. If we can do that without identifying pain then we can be free.