A simple way to feel calm, quiet, and more aware

based on the best seller: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment is a book by Eckhart Tolle. It is a discussion about how people interact with themselves and others. The concept of self-reflection and presence in the moment are presented along with simple exercises for the achievement of its principles. Published in 1997, the book was recommended by Oprah Winfrey^[and has been translated into 33 languages. As of 2025, the book has sold 16 million copies worldwide.

Sometimes it starts with a small feeling in your body. You may notice a soft buzz in your arms or a gentle pulse in your legs. It can feel like your body is full of life. Many people notice this but do not know what to do next. The best way is not to force anything. Just slow down and gently pay attention.

A short meditation can help. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough. First, put away distractions. Silence your phone, close the door, and sit in a way that feels both relaxed and awake. A chair is fine if you sit up straight. Then close your eyes, take a few slow breaths, and notice your belly move in and out.

Next, pay attention to how your body feels on the inside. Do not just think about your body. Try to feel it. If it helps, you can imagine light inside you, but feeling is more important than imagining. After a while, your body may feel less like separate parts and more like one quiet, living space.

As you keep going, the practice may feel different. You are not just noticing from far away anymore. You are fully in the experience. For a few moments, you may feel still, calm, and simply present. When you are done, come back slowly. Notice your breath, your body, and the room around you again.

Try to notice things just as they are, without naming or judging them. At the same time, keep feeling the life inside your body.

Being able to reach this quiet inner place can feel freeing. It can help you stop clinging so hard to labels, roles, and outside things. Some people call this deeper place the Source. You might think of it as the quiet life inside everything. It is a place of deep peace, joy, and aliveness.

When you are fully present, you may feel more open to this quiet inner life. You may also begin to see that it is not separate from you. It is part of who you are.

Where Energy Comes From

Is this quiet inner place the same thing as chi, the life energy people talk about in the East?

Not exactly. The Source is deeper than chi. Chi is the life energy you can feel in your body. It connects your body to something deeper and quieter. You can think of chi like a river that flows from a hidden spring.

Chi is movement. The Source is stillness. If you follow that inner feeling very deeply, you may reach a place that feels very still but also full of life.

When your attention goes inward, you may feel connected to that deeper place. When your attention comes back outward, you return to daily life. You still have your name, your story, and your plans, but you may feel different inside because you touched something deeper.

You may realize there is something true in you that is bigger than your usual thoughts and worries, but it is still part of your life, not separate from it.

You can make this part of everyday life. While you walk, work, talk, or spend time in nature, keep a little attention inside. Notice the quiet feeling in your body. This can help you stay calm and connected, even when life is busy.

It can feel like a peaceful background inside you that stays there no matter what is happening around you. Some people call this enlightenment, or being deeply connected to life.

This deeper place is not separate from the world. It is the life inside everything.

It is present in all things, even if we do not always notice it.

Dreamless Sleep

Each night, during deep, dreamless sleep, you return to a very quiet state. In that state, you rest deeply and draw on a kind of life energy that helps sustain you when you wake up again. This rest reaches deeper than ordinary mental activity. But during dreamless sleep, you do not enter that state with full awareness. Your body keeps functioning, but your usual sense of self is not active in the same way.

This deeper reality becomes freeing only when it is known directly and consciously. It is not just an idea to think about. It is something to experience. Still, trying to stay fully aware during dreamless sleep is usually not realistic. At most, a person may stay aware during dreaming, which is often called lucid dreaming. That can be interesting, but it is not the same as deep inner freedom.

So use awareness of your inner body as a doorway to this deeper stillness, and try to keep that doorway open in daily life. It does not matter whether your outer body is young or old, strong or weak. The inner body is beyond time. If you cannot feel it clearly yet, there are other doorways too, and they all lead toward the same deeper presence.

Other Portals

The Now can be seen as the main portal. It is an essential aspect of every other portal, including the inner body. You cannot be in your body without being intensely present in the Now.

Time and the physical world are closely connected, just as the present moment and deeper stillness are connected. When you let go of mental time by becoming fully present, you may become aware of something deeper. You may feel it directly as clear, steady presence without needing words or ideas. You may also sense it through the world around you, as a quiet life within all things.

In other words, you may begin to sense something sacred in every living thing, every flower, every stone, and every person. This is the feeling that life is connected at a deep level.

Another doorway opens when thinking becomes quiet. This can begin with something very simple, like taking one slow, conscious breath or looking closely at a flower without adding a stream of thoughts. Meditation helps create this quiet space. Constant thinking can keep you trapped in surface-level experience and make it harder to notice the stillness underneath.

When you are fully present, the mind often becomes quiet on its own. That is why the present moment matters so much. It is part of every doorway into deeper awareness.

Another doorway is surrender, which means letting go of inner resistance to what is happening right now. Resistance can make you feel cut off from yourself, from other people, and from the world around you. It strengthens the feeling of separateness. When that feeling grows, it becomes harder to sense depth, peace, or connection.

In a state of surrender, that hard sense of separation softens. You become more open, and deeper stillness can shine through more easily.

It is up to you to open a doorway in your own life. You can feel the inner body, become deeply present, step back from constant thinking, or practice surrender. Any one of these can help you connect with that deeper stillness.

Surely love must also be one of those portals?

Love is not really the doorway itself. Love is what flows in when the doorway is open. When you are no longer trapped in a tight sense of separation, love can move through you more freely.

Silence

Are there any other portals apart from those you just mentioned?

Yes, there are. The Unmanifested is not separate from the manifested. It pervades this world, but it is so well disguised that almost everybody misses it completely. If you know where to look, you’ll find it everywhere. A portal opens up every moment.

Listen carefully to a distant dog bark or to a car passing by. Then notice the silence around the sound, the quiet space out of which the sound comes and into which it fades. When you pay attention to silence, your mind often becomes quieter too. That quiet can become a doorway.

Every sound begins in silence and returns to silence. Silence makes sound possible. In the same way, stillness is present even when life seems busy or noisy. If you start noticing the quiet gaps between sounds and words, you may also notice more stillness inside yourself.

Space

Just as sound needs silence, physical things need space. Every object exists within space. Even things that seem solid are made up mostly of empty space at a very small scale. Many spiritual traditions use this idea to point toward a deeper truth: what looks solid and separate may not be the whole story.

This deeper reality is present not only as silence, but also as space. People often pay attention to the things in a room, but not to the space that allows the room to exist in the first place.

You seem to be implying that “emptiness” or “nothing” is not just nothing, that there is some mysterious quality to it. What is this nothing?

The mind wants to turn empty space into a thing it can explain. But the moment you treat it like an object, you may miss its meaning. Space is not something you hold onto. It is something you notice.

Ideas and theories can be useful, but they do not replace direct experience. This kind of understanding comes more from awareness than from analysis.

Empty space becomes a doorway only when you stop trying to grasp it and simply become aware of it.

Isn’t that what we are doing here ?

No. I am not trying to define it completely. I am only pointing toward an experience you can notice for yourself.

This is not mainly about understanding ideas. It is about becoming aware in a new way.

Space does not stand out as an object, but it allows everything else to appear. In the same way, silence and stillness may seem invisible, yet they make deeper awareness possible.

Think of a room. The furniture is in the room, but it is not the room itself. The walls define it, but they are not its essence. What makes it a room is the open space inside it.

So try noticing the space around you. Do not just think about it. Sense it directly. Pay attention to what is usually overlooked.

As you do this, your awareness may begin to shift. The outer objects around you have an inner match in your thoughts, feelings, and sense experiences. The inner form of space is consciousness itself, the open awareness in which these experiences appear.

When you stop focusing only on objects, you may also stop focusing only on thoughts. In that quiet, you may notice a more open kind of awareness. This is how attention to space can become a doorway.

Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same nothing. They are an externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence. Most humans are completely unconscious of this dimension. There is no inner space, no stillness. They are out of balance. In other words, they know the world, or think they do, but they dont know God. They identify exclusively with their own

physical and psychological form, unconscious of essence. And because every form is highly unstable, they live in fear. This fear causes a deep misperception of themselves and of other humans, a distortion in their vision of the world.

If some cosmic convulsion brought about the end of our world, the Unmanifested would remain totally unaffected by this. A Course in Miracles expresses this truth poignantly. “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”

If you remain in conscious connection with the Unmanifested, you value, love, and deeply respect the manifested and every life form in it as an expression of the One Life beyond form. You also know that every form is destined to dissolve again and that ultimately nothing out here matters all that much. You have “overcome the world,” in the words of Jesus, or, as the Buddha put it, you have “crossed over to the other shore.”