This Sunday, October 26 at 4:00 pm ET, when the internationally known spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle conducts a free online meditation, TC graduate student Suza Scalora will be one of the behind-the-scenes forces making it all possible.

Scalora, who enrolled this past July in TC’s new Spirituality Mind-Body Summer Intensive master’s degree program, is the editor of Tolle’s new Huffington Post channel (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/eckhart-tolle/), which will be a public portal for joining the meditation. Her work with Tolle is proof that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. You just have to pick the right moment – or rather, it has to pick you.

Scalora first read Tolle’s breakout bestseller The Power of Now at a simpler moment in her own life and in a pre-9/11 world. “It didn’t resonate,” she says. “I didn’t really understand what he was talking about.” But five years ago, when she spotted it on an otherwise empty shelf while browsing in a bookstore with her husband, “The book just called to me. I said, ‘We need to get this.’”

Tolle, proclaimed “a prophet for our time” by Oprah, argues that too many of us spend our lives preoccupied with either the past (hurts from childhood, arguments with our spouses) or the future (the big promotion, that ever-lengthening things-to-do list).

“My aspiration now is to be present,” Scalora says.

She’s pursued that goal in many ways, fro s zm giving up a successful career as a beauty photographer and founding Love 365 (www.love-365.org), a life-coaching nonprofit with the motto “Inner peace and happiness are an inside job,” to blogging on spiritual matters for The Huffington Post. But she’s especially present on Tolle’s new Huffington Post channel, where she is writes and edits a constantly changing mix of stories and interviews that revolve around Eckhart Tolle’s teachings. “About six months after reading The Power of Now, I went to one of Eckhart’s retreats in upstate New York and then blogged about it,” she says. “They ran the article in his newsletter, and that was the beginning.”

Scalora makes no secret of her personal admiration for Tolle – “He personifies the awareness and stillness of which he writes,” she declares in a recent Huffington Post piece – but one of her goals in joining TC’s program is to explore the science behind the ideas of Tolle and others who teach the benefits of spirituality.

“When you connect science to spiritual teachings that people want to dismiss, they tend to listen. Dr. Lisa Miller’s groundbreaking research about the connection between depression and spirituality brought me to TC.” she says. (Watch Miller’s TED talk on this subject.)

This fall, Scalora is conducting a series of interviews with neuroscientist Andrew Newburg, Professor and Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, who was a guest faculty member in the TC Summer Intensive.

“I want to understand the negative voice we all have in our heads,” she says. “How does it impact our health, our bodies, our relationships, our lives and the world at large? I absolutely believe that peace on earth begins with peace inside of ourselves. That’s ground zero.”

Published Friday, Oct. 24, 2014