Opening 2025 with Eckhart and Kim

Back in October 2024, in the middle of my mental health practicum, seeing residential clients, many demonstrating acute states of “unconscious” behavior presentation, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. My energy was running low. Balancing my regular IOP Float Counselor job and the more complex mental health psychotherapist internship while finishing my last two classes in the University of Minnesota CCAPS-IBH Master’s degree program was a lot to handle. I was expending a lot of my daily energy meeting the moment with clients and learning how to transition from the counselor to the therapist role.

Those who have traversed this journey, many of them who might end up reading this at some point, know the truth. This time is often the trial-by-fire for the dual-licensed clinician. Establishing a work-life-school balance is crucial in this academic and clinical development stage. It is the time to focus on learning to get things right, to meet clients in a balanced and calm state, and to meet them where they are on their complex journeys experiencing very early sobriety. Often, it comes with very big emotions, sometimes mental health crises, and a tightrope experience of trying to stay on the recovery line.

So when I received the email from Eckhart Tolle and Kim Eng, through their partner SoundsTrue, about an upcoming retreat coming in January 2025, I had to pause. It was a precisely timed marketing message for ET’s students and associates who have read The Power of Now and A New Earth; that part was clear. However, I read a little more deeply into the timing and message of the email. The message was a little different than previous invitations to conferences and retreats I have been invited to over the years. The message was focused on developing the inner light of presence during challenging times. There was an underlying message of collective support within turbulence. Little did anyone know at the time how turbulent things would become. The US election had not yet happened. The hurricane that moved inland and decimated the Southeast US had not happened yet. The Israel-Gaza cease fire had noot yet been announced. Notably, the event was being held in the second week of January 2025, right after graduation from the IBH program…a perfect time to go on a sabbatical.

So, I started a three-week presence and family sabbatical by attending the four-day Inner Light retreat at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, AZ. I loaded up the dog, packed my camping gear, and left Minnesota to time my departure to miss a major snow storm passing through the center of the country. Three days and tons of snow, traffic, and scenery later, we checked into our VRBO, and I headed off to the opening session with Eckhart Tolle.

Rather than write in detail about the specific content that Eckhart and Kim shared in the retreat — it would be way too much for a simple written post — allow me to share the impact it had on my frame of mind, my practice of presence and self-love, and how I am using it to carry forward. The core message of the conference was that humans cause much of our suffering through the processes of the mind. It isn’t the events that happen to us, the situations we experience, or the people we interact with that cause us the most suffering. Those are serious, yes, and they do affect us. Rather, the meaning that our minds put on those events, indeed, takes over our minds with emotionally driven pain, which does the most damage to our beingness.

Over the past 7 1/2 years since I started a personal recovery journey to heal from substance use and mental health challenges, one thing that a lot of meditation, living in presence, and trauma therapy have taught me is that the above concept is 100% true. Much of the pain that I had been experiencing that caused me mental harm and thus caused me to use substances were the traumas that I was using at. Much of my active use and related behavioral struggles were directly tied to my self-worth after experiencing heavy bullying from classmates as an adolescent and teen, relationship struggles as I wrestled with my sexuality and concepts of self-love, and a sense of needing to prove my value in a cruel world. Living in the recovery world and working hard on treating my beingness in a whole-person sense has meant looking at these meanings and breaking them down into events that I work to process, put behind me, and turn around as fuel to practice self-love, self-compassion, build my beingness, not from the physical world around me, but from the higher source energy flowing through me as part of the larger consciousness.

A second central theme that resonated throughout the retreat was that we are all “of God” or “of larger cosmic consciousness.” Thus, we are part of that higher energy source that created and operates the universal cosmos. Eckhart and Kim went to great lengths to demonstrate tools of presence and practice where students were challenged to get in touch deeply with this inner source energy and develop a deepened connection to higher source consciousness, not just periodically, but as a daily practice in everyday life. Living a life of presence, indeed doing the work to gradually reduce the ego down to a level where every moment is spent connected to presence, in background connection with source, and then carrying through daily life in that state, was a fairly radical suggestion. How is someone supposed to maintain presence and stay that way in the face of a person screaming at you while changing lanes on a six-lane highway? How is someone supposed to remain present in a relationship when the other person constantly unconsciously complains about this, that, and the other?

For me, this meant a radical shift in perspective from “trying to stay in presence” to a place of “integrating presence in all moments,” moving forward from the conference. It was HARD, but now that I have been working at it for a couple of weeks, I find the mental noise is beginning to downshift. By consistently noticing when my mind is creating noise — when my thoughts are creating chaos that I have the power to cut off just by labeling it as noise, I start the first step toward changing that pattern. As I gradually practice returning to presence in the face of noise from my thoughts as reactions to external stimuli and instead shift towards the “observing presence” perspective, gradually but fairly rapidly, I am changing my own patterns. The result is a much higher level of awareness of my beingness inside my body. I also see external events, situations, and living states as things I do not necessarily have to react or respond to. I only need to observe, slow down to return to a state of neutrality, and then choose whether I respond (not react) in a state of presence or keep moving on.

A third central theme that Eckhart Tolle and Kim Eng focused their teachings on during the retreat is that the students, the attendees who flew in and logged on from all over the world, are the carriers of the light of presence into the world. They challenged students to understand that the consciousness of Earth is indeed shifting into greater levels of awakening and awareness amongst the general population. People walking in unconsciousness are by far the more significant majority of people living on the planet, true. However, ET and KE discussed evidence that the messages shared in The Power of NOW and A New Earth are accelerating the engagement of higher consciousness in people’s lives. At distinct points in the retreat, when Eckhart was speaking, he specifically noted how therapists, counselors, spiritual teachers, yoga instructors, and others present in the room who practice in the helping professions and healing arts are positioned to be the most impactful carriers of consciousness into the world, by integrating presence into these practices, both clinical and non-clinical.

My internal reaction to this specific challenge by the master and mistress of practicing presence and healing the pain body was muted in the moment as I processed the statements. As I walked away, however, I realized that what was happening was a torch-passing moment where the teachers were challenging their students to step into their authenticity of practice, engage in integrating conscious awareness into their teachings, and indeed assume the position of being the subsequent “masters” in sharing with others in a learning-teaching framework. We were being directly called out as the next generation of practitioners to carry the message to the masses and enable a global shift towards a greater awakening of consciousness across all humans on Earth.

Undoubtedly, I am still working to take on this challenge personally and professionally, and I am not 100% there yet. One of the benefits of having taken in this retreat experience in the first week of my three-week sabbatical from practice is that I got to go out into the gorgeous Saguaro National Forest and camp out in the desert for several days to truly get present under the canopy of bright stars, with the dog next to me, listening to the coyotes howl at the full moon the following weekend. Fortunately, thanks to Master Eckhart Tolle and Mistress Kim Eng, I have plenty of new tools and techniques to continue to deepen my practice of living in daily integrated conscious presence in the world. Namaste. -SF