Periodically, I listen to podcasts of talks by Eckhart Tolle. He has influenced me more than any other spiritual teacher that I have come across. He joins Oprah Winfrey in a series of podcasts about his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, which they review chapter by chapter. In the talk, I am reminded of the often repeated truth, “What you resist, persists.” (Carl Jung). Tolle expounds on that statement saying, “What you fight, you strengthen.” Oprah goes on to clarify how as a society, we mistakenly believe that fighting is the answer to life’s problems. We fight drug addiction. We fight gun violence. We fight cancer. We fight racial injustice. We are fighting COVID. In reality, we are perpetuating these things. We are strengthening them, rather than eradicating them.
The constant dwelling on COVID by the news media is giving it more power in our lives (if we listen to the news) and if we continue to believe that we must wage war on this pandemic, we are in for a long battle indeed.
Our modern society is addicted to drama. We create it in our own lives. We watch it in movies. We see it 24/7 on our televisions. Some have taken this need to fight onto their social media, exchanging verbal attacks with strangers. Another person, whom we do not even know, becomes our enemy because we disagree with the words she has posted. In addition to the drama, we are also conditioned to believe that “we” are right and “they” are wrong. We feel it is our duty to bring others around to our way of thinking, instead of listening. When we believe that a person or an opinion is our enemy, we give our power to it. Until we stop resisting what has appeared in our lives and relinquish our need to create drama, release our need to be right, and let go of our need to fight every problem we face, we will never know peace. What are you fighting?
