We’ve all been taught it’s important to know who we are. How can we ever amount to anything if we don’t discover our identity?

So, who are you as a person? Are you sure you really know? Have you pinned your identity down?

It’s commonly said by those who are on a spiritual journey, “Look inside for answers.” There’s certainly a truth to the idea that our answers come from within.

The divine presence works through all the circumstances of our lives—all the people and events—to open our eyes to the beautiful people we really are.

How could we be otherwise, when we have come entirely from the divine?

The only thing missing is our ability to see this, which is a function of having sufficient consciousness.

Consciousness is an evolving, emerging state of being.

It isn’t a given, and it isn’t something God can wave a magic wand to instantaneously create.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

It's quite surprising to discover how many adults experience a feeling of abandonment in their adult lives. It's a common occurrence.

Dr David Schnarch is his outstanding book for therapists Constructing the Sexual Crucible: An Integration of Sexual and Marital Therapy, likens an adult feeling abandoned to a six-foot man imagining he's going to drown in three feet of water as the waves wash over him, when all he needs to do is stand up.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

When we grow up restricting our enjoyment, we end up plodding through our days with a kind of deadness.

Yet probably very few of us, if any, grow up without doing this.

As we join an adult world, which majors largely in the mediocre, life becomes mundane.

To speak of life as mundane doesn't mean we don't achieve what people generally consider "success," such as making money, acquiring material possessions, and climbing the social ladder.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

Do you find yourself repeating negative patterns of behavior? Not just in the present, but over a period of years.

You find yourself attracted to the wrong kind of person. You get yourself into jobs that aren't really you. Or you keep repeating a pattern of financial problems.

And all of this despite your best efforts to change your life for the better.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

How in charge are you of your life?

Asked differently, to what degree does your life run you instead of you running it?

It really doesn't matter how well intentioned we are, how strong our will, or how positive our thoughts.

If there are unresolved emotions beneath all of this effort, the effect will be like termites in the basement.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

During the first twenty-one years of our life, we are in process of "growing up." At twenty-one, we celebrate our "coming of age."

We have by now passed through three cycles of seven years, totaling twenty-one years.

In our first seven-year cycle, we developed emotionally.

In the second set of seven years, we developed mentally—the period when we entered into serious schooling.

In his teaching of The Presence Process and Alchemy of the Heart, Michael Brown exhorts us from time to time, “Don’t push the river.”

What might not be immediately apparent is that there’s more than one way to push the river.

It isn’t only by getting involved in doing that doesn’t come from being that we can push the river.

We can also push it in the opposite direction by doing things that are harmful to ourselves or to others—or by resisting the call to engage in emotional integration.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

Our journey in life begins in the womb, which Michael on page 36 of Alchemy refers to as “a vibrational state of being."

As he explains, “We can do nothing in the womb aside from be.”

He then adds, “Our exit from the womb marks a transition point from being to doing.”

After we have been born, there follow seven years in which our focus is emotional development. For most of us, this doesn’t happen too successfully.

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

The movie Made in Dagenham, about Ford Motor Corporation in England—and ultimately affecting the company worldwide—is an inspiring, uplifting story of how what Eckhart Tolle calls “the collective” affects us, and how we can affect the collective.

We are not worlds unto ourselves. We are part of the collective whole. There’s really no such thing as an “independent” person, it’s just an illusion.