QUOTE
If you surrender to what you are feeling (and not feed the feeling with your thoughts, with stories), grief will burn up the ego and then show you its other face, which is peace or even joy. Joy is the dynamic aspect of peace. But don’t expect to obtain anything through surrender.
You say, “even surrender doesn’t seem to help”. As long as surrender is a means to an end (help, relief etc.), it is not complete surrender. There is an expectation. In true surrender, you ask for nothing, expect nothing. You simply embrace what is. Another way of putting it: you suffer consciously.
I remember reading most of these Tolle teachings at some point, and had also begun reading/rereading his last 2 books last spring, trying to glean some answers for my own pain. (don't really like his description of the "pain-body" as an actual entity, though; gives me the creeps and increases my fear!
) Never finished them, as I find his writing quite 'dry' and I also keep wondering if he'd say anything different if HE lost a child himself.....waiting on
that book, by ANY of these teachers. I also remember intuitively doing this, at least to some degree, when I was grieving about Sabin years ago, before I even knew about any such teachings. And it did help some.....watching myself from within, sitting in my grief feelings, and allowing them to be as they were. That process came about from my anger and frustration with society's non-acceptance of my grief. I got fed up with their resistance and decided to allow myself to feel whatever the heck I was gonna feel, darn it, for as LONG as I was going to feel it, and to heck with everyone else! This is also why I say it's NOT "selfish" to grieve. It is simply necessary (and healthier) to go through the process.
However, I still find it awfully difficult many times to not marry
thoughts/thinking with the feelings, as they're so intertwined with each other, and that's where I'd get stuck or lost with his teachings. But I also think what Tolle says is likely pretty much the same thing that Dyer promotes, i.e. about letting life play you, or 'going with the flow' of what is.
On the other hand, a heck of a lot of people DO find relief, and usually permanent relief, in such practices as EFT, TAT, SRT, etc., where you, granted, DO allow acceptance of yourself and your feelings and even sit in them a bit,
but the AIM of these therapies
is still to find relief, so they
are still a means to an end. They seem to work well,
too, even though in that sense they fly in the face of that one part of Tolle's teachings. For example, EFT uses the "acceptance" statement of "Even though....(whatever the problem is).....I deeply and completely love and accept myself," but you still KNOW that its aim is to relieve the 'problem'.
And as I'm sure you're aware of, this is a rather opposite approach to the human condition than, say, the Abraham/Hicks, Hathors, Kryon, etc. approaches/advice.
Another approach that many healers are now taking is to work from within the BODY instead, where you end up being able to sort of circu*mnavigate within yet around your "stories" and get more directly to the feelings (or the physical maladies), the reason they're there, and therefore beyond them and into healing on a cellular level (which of course encompasses your wholeness - mind, body, spirit).
And another thing I puzzle over with Tolle's approach is that many other teachers believe that the mind, and even the ego, are NOT our 'enemies', per se, to peace, as some seem to espouse, but are also, inclusively and equally as God-given as anything else we're endowed with, and serve specific purposes - we're just using them wrongly, erroneously or...hmmm...whatever term you could possibly apply if there is zero "judgment" about anything!
Then my head starts to hurt from all the puzzling over which one to practice with!
However, these kinds of teachings are also why I often say it's productive to just allow your feelings of grief, even IF you're ultimately or eventually wanting to find some relief from them.
Another way to enter into something closer to real surrender is to try asking yourself......can I accept or give myself permission to allow, for now, the possibility that I'll ALWAYS feel as I do right now? That way, even if you
are, deep down, wanting to keep the pain on some level, at the same time you're also accepting that you're wanting that, instead of continually fighting yourself.
As always and with anything, there are many paths, all of which can lead to fullness or wholeness or whatever you want to call it, but we each have to find the one, or ones, that work for US at any given time. And ironically, sometimes, when I'm even fatigued with searching and sifting through the whole morass of approaches, that's when I find some nuggets of healing, or just being.
But I always find it terribly ironic that in order to get beyond using the mind alone or too much, we have to use our minds to think about and collate all these ideas FIRST! (another reason I don't see the mind as something to totally 'get over' or reject out of hand)
I sure hope you're keeping warm. 
)
