Last night I went to see Eckhart Tolle at the ExCeL with a friend I met on a retreat back in March. We really got on at the retreat and said we’d keep in touch, so when he mentioned Tolle was speaking in London, we decided to go together.
We went for dinner first and chatted away, and I think we both realised how natural the friendship was. It was just nice to have met someone like that.
Tolle was great. I know he just talks, but there’s a bit of performance to it, and I like that. He’s funny, and it makes it all easier to digest. It was nice to hear someone who’s spent decades writing and talking about all this telling his stories, and to see how well they fit with my own experience. It made me feel like I’m still on the right path.
It was nice to see so many people turning out too, a good few thousand of them, all on a similar path, or at least intrigued enough by it to spend a hundred pound a ticket.
But the biggest realisation of the night was how nice it was to be there with someone who’s on that path as well. Someone I could talk to about it without having to explain the whole thing first before we could even start the conversation.
I’ve been here before, just with something different. Years ago it was exercise. I’d be talking to a whole load of friends who didn’t exercise, and they didn’t get it. So you go down the gym, you make friends down the gym, and now you’ve got friends who get you, or that part of you anyway.
The retreat was the same kind of thing. When you go on a bit of a journey, you realise how difficult it can be to talk about it with people who aren’t on it. That doesn’t mean leaving your old friends behind. It just helps to have some company.
So if you’re on a new path, whatever it is, be it exercise, nutrition, or mental health, try to surround yourself with people on a similar one whenever you can. Talk about it with them. Discuss it, digest it together.
