Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle was born Ulrich Leonard Tölle on February 16, 1948 in Lünen, a small industrial town in post-war Germany. His childhood was shaped by the ruins of the war his parents had survived and by chronic depression and anxiety he could neither explain nor shake. He was bullied at school, withdrew from his peers, and by his early twenties was, in his own words, “constantly on the verge of suicide.”

He left Germany at thirteen to live with his father in Spain, then moved to London in his early twenties where he worked as a language tutor while studying at the University of London. He earned a first-class degree, entered Cambridge University as a research scholar, and by outside appearances was thriving. Inside, he was barely surviving.

One night in 1977, at age twenty-nine, lying awake in his London apartment in the grip of what he called unbearable inner turmoil, a thought came to him: I cannot live with myself any longer. He then noticed something strange about that sentence — Who is the “I” that cannot live with the “self”? If there are two of me, which one is real?

The question dissolved him. He describes what happened next as his ordinary consciousness being pulled like a vacuum into a vast inner stillness. When he came back to himself the next morning, everything looked different. The depression was gone. The anxiety was gone. A quiet, luminous presence had taken their place and it did not leave.

He spent the next two years, as he tells it, sitting on park benches in a state of quiet bliss, homeless by choice, with no interest in anything. Friends thought he had broken. He understood it as an awakening. He spent the next decade trying to integrate it, translate it, and eventually teach it.

In 1995 he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1997 a small New World Library published his manuscript The Power of Now to almost no fanfare. Word-of-mouth carried it. Oprah read it in 2000, called it life-changing, and in 2002 featured it on her “Favorite Things” show. The book has since sold more than 15 million copies and been translated into 33 languages.

In 2005 Tolle published A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Oprah selected it for her book club in 2008 and hosted a 10-week webinar series with Tolle that was watched by more than 35 million people — at the time, the largest online classroom in history. In January 2025, Oprah did something she had never done before or since: she selected the same book for her book club a second time, calling it the book that had most changed how she understood her connection to the world.

Tolle’s teaching is almost deliberately narrow. He does not promise success, wealth, manifestation, or healing. He points — repeatedly, in different words, from different angles — at a single claim: most of human suffering comes from identification with the thinking mind, and that identification can be noticed, loosened, and ultimately released. What remains when it is released he calls presence, Being, awareness, or simply the Now.

He lives quietly in Vancouver with his partner Kim Eng and continues to teach through Eckhart Tolle Now, his online teaching platform. He rarely grants interviews, does not do a podcast tour, and has no social media presence of his own. His books and recorded talks do the speaking.