Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

We’ve been told that all the answers we could ever need are right within us. So, as we’ve heard, the key to fulfillment is to look within.

Then why is it that many seek within for years and still don’t find the lasting fulfillment they crave?

In Alchemy of the heart, Michael Brown explains that we look within ourselves in the wrong places:

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

We began our exploration with the recognition that only an authentic life can ever be a truly fulfilling experience.

As long as someone else is writing our everyday script—as long as we are living from a script handed to us long ago in childhood by family and others who had expectations of us—we may experience times of enjoyment, but there can never be real fulfillment.

Authenticity is bedrock to experiencing fulfillment in our everyday experiences.

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

It’s likely that few humans have any real awareness of how much suffering we create for ourselves.

We do all kinds of things that generate pain, hurting ourselves in countless ways without even know we’re doing so.

Would any of us really want to cause suffering for ourselves if we knew what we were doing?

That’s the problem—not knowing.

Eckhart Tolle says of this in Stillness Speaks:

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

When you find you are aware of your world, but your mind is free of thought, you begin to appreciate each and every aspect of your everyday environment.

We’re not just talking about appreciating nature with all its wonders. We’re talking about what has been called the “whole shebang.”

Everything that’s part of your environment comes alive—the table you sit at, the chair you sit on, the pen you write with.

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Have you ever considered that the mind, with its proclivity for thought that humans tend to value so highly, actually dims our awareness?

The ability to think isn’t really all that great. In fact, it’s more of a hindrance to living a meaningful, productive, fulfilling life.

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

What does it mean to bring our awareness to something? For many, it seems to mean that they begin thinking about whatever they are focusing on.

Awareness is qualitatively different from thinking about something. In fact it’s possible to be aware and not think at all.

One could even make the case that thinking detracts from our awareness of things.

How can we learn to bring awareness to everything in our lives—awareness without thought?

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

How happy are you? Do you enjoy your life, or do you find it more challenging than enjoyable, perhaps even painful?

In the northern hemisphere, many have been experiencing long days, even weeks of cloudiness in this exceptionally cold weather. You begin to wonder whether the Sun is still up there! People in places like Queensland, Australia, have also been experiencing extremely overcast weather.

Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Awareness is empowering. But the fact that becoming conscious of something empowers us doesn’t mean we just sit back and do nothing.

The reason awareness is empowering is that it shows us we have a choice concerning how we respond to our present situation, which is something we may not have recognized until now.