THE CAFE PRACTICE • Eckhart Tolle
You can do this anywhere: in the city, in the countryside, in a cafe… Let’s take a cafe as an example. You’re having coffee in a cafe. Instead of going to your phone, use this as a spiritual practice, a ‘cafe practice’.
You’re in a public place, just look around at everything happening around you: all the people and what they are doing… most of them will be on their phones, but you are not.
As you sit there, you get in touch with your presence.
Feel the inner body.
Feel your presence as consciousness.
You look and listen.
Your practice is not to label your sense perceptions mentally.
You’re just looking.
As you look, feel the presence of yourself,
and then look around in thoughtless awareness.
You will love what you see.
Because every human is an expression of the love, the One Life in their own way.
Every human is quite lovely and lovable.
But you don’t have to say that in your mind.
It’s the realization of the aliveness of every human.
But you can’t sense that aliveness if you can’t sense your own aliveness.
So your own presence and aliveness is the basis for sensing the aliveness of other humans.
And by doing that, you love them, in a way.
Not the clinging love ‘I want you’.
You’re quite happy with them doing what they do.
You don’t need or want to interact necessarily.
Just be there, love them.
They’re all manifestations of the One Life.
They’re all so different, it’s amazing.
Not a single human is the same.
Out of the billions, they’re all so different, how wonderful.
And yet the essence within each one is the same essence as you.
You can sense that if you don’t label them.
That’s a lovely practice to enjoy the aliveness of things in a limited space, a relatively passive situation in a cafe.
You’re just being there as the presence.
You can also this in other places, like in nature.
You perceive in that alert awareness the miraculous life forms around you that have no name if you don’t give them names.
If you don’t obscure things with names, you can sense their inherent aliveness. They speak to you.
So there’s another dimension that reveals itself to you that is everywhere in nature that you don’t know when you’re stuck in your mind and label things.
That’s a beautiful way of practicing presence.
Be there in that moment not as a person but as conscious presence. The practice is sense perception without mentally labelling them. It requires alertness, a choice. You make that choice.
That’s a shift in consciousness.