Wallace, Eckhart, Disappointment and Opening to Love

Tonight I listened to some really juicy chapters of The Power of Now on my mp3 player while I walked, gratefully, in my neighborhood. I heard something very important to the world of this blog, and I remembered that living in The Certain Way will always overlap for me with teachings of Eckhart Tolle. Eckhart is a voice of ancient, primordial teaching, and his absolute presence makes a deep difference for me.

This morning when I woke up, I was feeling disappointed. One of the areas that is interesting to me to apply Mr. Wattles' principles is that of intimate relationships. This morning I was feeling disappointed because it seemed to my mind that I was experiencing a loss. I felt disappointed that a man I'd recently been dating seemed to have exited my life. And I'd liked the guy! Imagine that! My mind was dragging its heels, futilely, against the change.

On top of this disappointment, I was applying pressure. I kept thinking, Wallace Wattles says never be disappointed. He writes hopefully:

"Never allow yourself to feel disappointed. You may expect to have a certain thing at a certain time and not get it at that time. This will seem to be a failure. But, if you hold to your faith, you will find that the failure is only apparent.

"Go on in the certain way, and if you do not receive that thing, you will receive something so much better that you will see that the seeming failure was a prelude to a great success."

And to that, I say, "Tell that to my thinking mind." In other words, this concept, for me, is typically applied in hindsight. It's very hard for me to logic my way into it when I'm experiencing some emotional interpretation. And that's what I was experiencing this morning. Sort of grieving that I didn't seem to have my friend anymore. (I liked him, I said!) And, still, the pressure I was applying on myself, thinking that I shouldn't be feeling disappointed.

And then the miraculous began to happen.

I surrendered to the feeling and dropped my friend a message, expressing his lacking to me and my wondering about how he is in the world. Funny that I would deny myself such communication out of wrong-making. Any opportunity the thinking mind can come up with to make something wrong, it'll take. It loves a good rejection of the Now.

My next stop was to see, gratefully, my healer, Francis. I entered the anteroom and greeted my friend who serves as sort of a clerk for Francis. I told her that I was contemplating this state of disappointment and at the same time looking at Wattles' teaching and was curious how to reconcile the two. In that moment, I simply acknowledged what I was feeling. And I knew, also, that I am committed to practicing The Science of Getting Rich principles and instructions as closely as possible.

That moment was a turning point. I'm so clear that asking produces heavenly results.

I see now that in that moment, I was open and welcoming to both worlds: both the world of sadness or disappointment and the world of liberation and full faith. I closed my eyes and put my hands on my lap and felt love pour out of me from the inside. I saw the contrast to the misguided and oh-so-human belief that love or comfort actually comes from outside of us. I relished the moment. It carried on for hours.

I contemplated my friend - the one whose lack of company I'd been lamenting - and felt absolute love toward him. What a gift.

What I see made that possible was the transmutation of emotion into love, into the joy of being. And it happened because I stopped resisting, and, in fact, leaned in to my experience, feeling it, rather than trying to shift it with logic. Fighting disappointment simply won't work. This is work of love and spaciousness.

The other allowing factor seems to be my willingness and request to see from another point of view: to live in The Certain Way and experience the joy and freedom that comes from there. From a place of trusting a universe much greater than my pea brain which thinks it knows how things should be.

So all of this is to say that I'm reminded of the beautiful overlap of combining the works of my two biggest teachers these days, my rabbi: Eckhart Tolle, and my lifestyle guru, Wallace D. Wattles.

I'm deeply grateful to both of them and to the access we have to teachings that are 100 - 2500 years old.

There will be more on this. I'm quite certain.