Eckhart Tolle on Being Where You Are: Be Total

Quote

"Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally."

— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (1997)

Meaning

The first sentence is an instruction; the rest is a framework. "Be there totally" means bring the full weight of your attention to whatever you are doing — not half-listening while planning dinner, not half-working while replaying yesterday's argument. This is the same quality that Thich Nhat Hanh called for when he said to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes. The ordinariness of the activity is not the point; the quality of presence is.

The threefold framework is what makes the teaching practical rather than inspirational. Tolle acknowledges that some situations are genuinely intolerable. He does not ask anyone to suffer passively. But he insists that the options are limited and clear: leave, change, or accept. What is not an option — and what most people actually do — is stay while mentally resisting, which produces the worst of all worlds: neither action nor peace.

The Stoic parallel is striking. Epictetus taught that suffering comes from wanting things to be other than they are. His solution was to distinguish between what is in your power (your responses, judgments, and actions) and what is not (external events). Tolle's threefold structure maps onto this: removing yourself and changing the situation are actions within your power; accepting it totally is the inner work of aligning your response with what is. The common thread is that resistance — the mental "no" to what is happening — is always optional, always costly, and always available to be dropped.

Sources

1. Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now. Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 1997.
2. Epictetus. Enchiridion. Trans. Robin Hard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.