Eckhart Tolle: Who He Is, What He Teaches, Which Book First

By the Awaken Library Editorial TeamEditorial Team · Updated October 22, 2026Oct 22, 2026 · How we write

Eckhart Tolle (born 1948) is a German-born spiritual author in Vancouver. His books The Power of Now (1997) and A New Earth (2005) teach that suffering comes from identifying with the thinking mind, and that presence (attention to this moment) eases it. Most readers start with The Power of Now.

The inner body practice, step by step

The timer above follows the exercise Tolle gives in the section “Connecting with the Inner Body” (The Power of Now, chapter 6, page 93 in the 1999 New World Library edition). Beyond the timer, he suggests keeping part of your attention in the body during the day, while you talk, wait in line or listen.

A reader in the book reports agitation and some nausea when turning attention to the body; Tolle answers that this is usually an old emotion surfacing and that the first thing it needs is attention. When the mind is racing, he suggests starting with the breath (“Let the Breath Take You into the Body”, p. 104). If you feel worse after a few minutes, stop and do something ordinary.

What Eckhart Tolle teaches: five ideas

His vocabulary is small, and five terms come up on almost every page. We give each in our words, with the place in the books where it is set out.

1. You are not your mind. Most people, he says, identify completely with the voice in the head that comments, judges and worries. Watching that voice, as if you were listening to someone else, creates a gap in which you notice you are the one aware of the thinking. He puts it like this: “The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.” (The Power of Now, chapter 1)
2. The Now and “psychological time”. Clock time is fine for planning a trip. Psychological time is living in the replayed past and the imagined future, and in his account it is where worry, guilt and dissatisfaction live (chapter 3, “Letting Go of Psychological Time”, p. 46).
3. The pain-body. Old emotional pain that never fully passed builds up into what he calls a pain-body. It sleeps, wakes when something triggers it, and “feeds” on negative thinking and on drama with other people. His answer is to notice it as it rises without acting it out (The Power of Now, chapter 2, “Past Pain: Dissolving the Pain-Body”, p. 29; A New Earth, chapter 5).
4. The ego. In A New Earth the ego is the sense of self built from thoughts: possessions, roles, grievances, being right. “The ego always wants something from other people or situations. There is always a hidden agenda” (chapter 3, “The Core of Ego”). He uses the word more widely than psychologists do.
5. Presence and surrender. Presence is attention resting in the current moment, often through the body. Surrender in his sense is inner acceptance of what is happening right now, which he separates from passivity: you can still act to change a situation (The Power of Now, chapter 10, “The Meaning of Surrender”, p. 171).

How close is the pain-body to Carl Jung’s shadow? They cover nearby ground, old pain that acts on us from outside awareness, but Jung’s shadow is the disowned parts of personality, not stored hurt. Our page on shadow work explains Jung’s idea.

Eckhart Tolle’s books in order, and which to read first

His official site lists seven books. Only two are full-length new works; the rest are selections, short entries or illustrated books built on them. Audio programs and recorded talks are not counted here.

Publishers’ pages: The Power of Now, Practicing the Power of Now and Stillness Speaks at New World Library; A New Earth at Penguin Random House.

The Power of Now: what is in it

The Power of Now is about 200 pages, written as questions from an imagined reader and his answers. Namaste Publishing printed 3,000 copies in Vancouver in 1997; New World Library reissued it in 1999, and it became a bestseller after Oprah Winfrey praised it in 2000 and 2002. By 2009, Maclean’s reported North American sales of about 3 million copies for The Power of Now and 5 million for A New Earth; we found no recent figure with a checkable source. Its ten chapters, with the page each starts on in the 1999 edition:

If you want one chapter to judge the book by, read the first. If you want the practical part, chapter 6.

What research says, and where the books go further

When we searched PubMed on October 22, 2026, we found no study that mentions Eckhart Tolle or The Power of Now in its title or abstract, and none that tests his idea of the pain-body. Research on nearby questions exists:

• Mind-wandering. Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) sampled people’s thoughts by smartphone and found they were thinking about something other than what they were doing almost as often as about what they were doing, and that mind-wandering usually made them less happy. That fits his description of the mind running ahead or behind.
• Meditation programs. A 2014 review of 47 trials found moderate evidence that mindfulness programs ease anxiety, depression and pain, and no evidence that they work better than other active treatments such as medication or exercise.
• Side effects. A 2020 review of 83 studies put the overall rate of adverse events in meditation practice at 8.3%, most often anxiety and depression.

The books go further than this research in two places: they describe a lasting end to suffering (“enlightenment”), and they make claims about the body that we found no study of.

If you are struggling. Tolle himself writes that he lived with anxiety and periods of suicidal depression until he was 29 (see his life below), and some readers come to his books in a bad place. The books are not a treatment for depression or anxiety. If the practice or the reading makes things worse, or you have thoughts of ending your life, talk to someone today: our help page lists free lines. Our page on spiritual awakening symptoms covers how such experiences overlap with depression and mania.

Criticism and controversy

• Unoriginal or vague. The Observer (2008) called A New Earth “a mix of pseudo-science, New Age philosophy and teaching borrowed from established religions”. The editor of Publishers Weekly told The New York Times the same year that books of this kind “are really all the same”.
• A spiritual business. The Guardian (2009) pointed out the tension between teaching that presence is not a goal and selling calendars and quote books built on the same two titles. Tolle answered that an organization is needed, but “it must not become self-serving”. In 2009 Maclean’s reported a paid streaming channel; his site now sells courses and a subscription community.
• Claims without sources. His books cite almost no evidence. In a 2009 ABC interview he said psychologists found that “98 or 99 percent of our thinking is repetitive”; we could not trace that figure to any study.
• Health claims. Chapter 6 of The Power of Now has sections titled “Slowing Down the Aging Process” and “Strengthening the Immune System” (p. 102). As the section above notes, PubMed has no study of them.

His defenders answer that the books are instructions to check against your own attention, not arguments. The Guardian’s interviewer made a similar point in 2009: whether the writing helps you is “largely a matter of your personal taste in prose style”. Read that way, argument can neither prove nor disprove them.

His life: what is documented and what is his own account

He was born Ulrich Tolle on February 16, 1948, in Lünen, near Dortmund. At 13 he refused to keep going to school, and his mother sent him to his father in Spain, who let him read instead; he told The Guardian in 2009 that this broke his early conditioning by one culture. He later studied languages and history at the University of London, graduating with a first, and began a doctorate in Latin American literature at Cambridge, which he left.

The night at 29. In the introduction to The Power of Now he writes that until then he lived with almost continuous anxiety and periods of suicidal depression. One night the thought “I cannot live with myself any longer” stopped him: “If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” He describes falling into something like a void and waking the next morning in a deep peace that, he says, has stayed. For roughly two years he spent days on benches in Russell Square and in the British Library, slept on friends’ sofas and did temporary office work. All of this is his own account, and no one else has described the night itself.

Where sources disagree. Two things point to 1977: the book places the night soon after his 29th birthday, and a Cambridge spokesman confirmed to The New York Times (2008) that he started his doctorate there in 1977. The Guardian’s 2009 profile dates the experience to 1979, before Cambridge. The name “Eckhart” is usually explained as homage to the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart; in a 2011 interview with the Irish magazine Positive Life he told a different story, of seeing the name on a book in a dream.

Former students and acquaintances began asking him questions, and he taught small groups in London and later in Glastonbury. In 1995 he settled in Vancouver. There Constance Kellough published his first book. His partner Kim Eng teaches with him; Maclean’s wrote in 2009 that they were drawn together after one of his retreats in 1998, and called her his wife, while The Guardian the same year called her his partner.

He has said he also went through what is called a dark night of the soul, which he describes as the collapse of the meaning a life had, sometimes “very close to what is conventionally called depression”. He does not say there that it was the same as his night at 29. Our page on the dark night of the soul covers the original Christian idea and how to tell it from depression.

Where his ideas come from

He doesn’t claim the ideas are new. In an interview in John W. Parker’s book Dialogues with Emerging Spiritual Teachers (2000) he named two teachers he never met as closest to him, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi, and called his work a coming together of their “teaching stream”. In the same interview he mentioned early help from a Western-born Buddhist monk, Ajahn Sumedho, and time spent with the teacher Barry Long in London. His books quote the Buddha, Jesus, the Tao Te Ching, Rumi and Meister Eckhart, and draw on Zen, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism and Christian mysticism.

For how these older practices work as meditation, with timers for each, see meditation for spiritual awakening.

Is Eckhart Tolle Christian? Religion and Jesus

Born into a German Catholic family, he belongs to no church today, quotes the Gospels often and has a section titled “Christ: The Reality of Your Divine Presence” (The Power of Now, p. 86). Asked about God by Maclean’s in 2009, he said he does not believe in an outside creator who walks away, and spoke of an intelligence at work in every living thing.

Christians are divided on him. The theologian Andrew Ryder (All Hallows College, Dublin) praised his writing in a Christian spirituality journal, and the Franciscan Richard Rohr credits him with bringing older contemplative practice back to modern readers. Evangelical scholars are harsher: James Beverley of Tyndale Seminary told Maclean’s that his worldview “is at odds with central Christian convictions”, and John Stackhouse of Regent College called it “a sort of supreme religion” assembled from others.

What this page does not promise. The 3-minute practice is a retelling of one exercise, not his teaching in full, and it won’t make you enlightened, calmer on a schedule or healthier. We don’t take a side on whether his account of his own awakening is true. We have no link with Eckhart Tolle or his publishers, and nothing on this page earns us money.

Related: self-inquiry · meditation for spiritual awakening · spiritual awakening symptoms · dark night of the soul · shadow work · spiritual bypassing