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.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

When we embark on relationships, whether romantic in nature or a friendship, we are usually seeking an experience that will make life more enjoyable.

So it comes as a bit of a shock when we find ourselves having difficulties in our relationships. It can feel like things are going all wrong.

In reality, nothing is going wrong.

The only “mistake” here is to imagine that the role of relationships is to make us happy.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

It’s possible to make trying to grow as a person an end in itself, and then it becomes self-defeating.

It can actually become narcissism, to the point we are completely turned in on ourselves, which serves no one, isn’t enjoyable, and brings enjoyment to no one.

Life presses us into situations that invite us to know ourselves at greater depths than we have so far experienced.

Simultaneously, our increasing self-awareness invites a deeper awareness of those to whom we are close.

A young London woman, expected by her family to marry well so that they don’t have to support her for years to come, takes up the opportunity to become the wife of a research MD and move to Shanghai, China, during the period of the decline of British imperialism.

When there’s infidelity in a committed relationship, especially a marriage, people generally don’t get over it too well.

The finger is pointed, and it’s awful hard in such a situation, emotionally laden as it is, to see the fingers that are pointing back.

There are people who go on to have rewarding relationships that are stronger than ever. But most either split or, if they stay together, never quite trust again.

The thing we most resist turns out to be the thing we most want—to be able to connect deeply with the people in our life.

We want to be able to be real around others and to have them be real around us, so that we can each be just who we are without having either to playact or keep a distance between us.

What this amounts to us that on the one hand people can very easily “get under our skin,” while on the other hand we want them to get under our skin—and we want to get under theirs.