Oprah Winfrey is a big fan of Eckhart Tolle and she’s doing a series of live web seminars based around the book A New Earth. You can sign up for the seminar for free on Oprah’s web-site or you can watch the videos on YouTube.

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I had noticed Eckhart’s books in the shops long before I started reading them. To be honest the covers and titles always turned me off as they seemed really cheesy. I thought the Power of Now was all about ’seizing the day and living for the moment man’ and A New Earth is sub-titled ‘Finding Your Life’s Purpose’. To be honest they seemed like a lot of other generic self-help books.

But I eventually read his books and found them really useful. In a very basic sense Eckhart’s writings are about being aware of your internal dialogue and turning it off, and with being present in the moment. The ideas are similar to Eastern meditation practices, and Eckhart comes at it from a similar spiritual angle. Now I don’t know what people mean by being ’spiritual’, at this point I haven’t had any experience that I would class as spiritual.

But I don’t need to interpret Eckhart’s ideas in a spiritual way for them to be useful to me. I haven’t watched all of these videos, I just don’t have the time right now. But I’ve heard from people that they’ve found these useful and has helped them put some of the more difficult ideas in to practice.