The wisdom of surrender

There are lots of wisdom imparted by Eckhart Tolle in his book Practising the Power of Now. One of the most important kinds is the wisdom of surrender. According to Eckhart Tolle,

"Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is."

It is that "inner resistance" to things not going our way that brings us pain and misery, and in life things do not go our way quite often. Eckhart Tolle says that "it is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practised if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life".

He says: "To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad."

And he puts it quite poetically here: "Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.Let it teach you Being.Let it teach you integrity - which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem."

Maybe life then becomes poetic when you are able to take it by the scruff of the neck like that.