Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

There is more to life than focusing on personal growth. Don’t make changing your life your reason for being.

Indeed, it’s easy to become obsessed with trying to grow—and when we are addicted to our "growth," the point of life is missed.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Many people are wanting to improve the quality of their thought. They have perhaps heard that if they have the right kind of thoughts and the correct feelings to go along with those thoughts, their life will become what they want it to be.

Eckhart Tolle in his book Stillness Speaks points us in a different direction:

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Many people are seeking the power to change their life. There’s even a new book out called The Power, a follow-up to The Secret.

What you find when you talk to people who identify themselves as “seekers” is that they are looking for the next thing, which they desperately hope will be “different” from where they find themselves right now.

Why does criticism bother us? 

And, the flip side of the coin—and possibly the most important question of all—why do we let what others say bother us to the point that we in turn criticize them? 

Have you ever considered that the two might actually be proportional?

In other words, we are upset by criticism to the degree we ourselves are critical of ourselves, and often in turn of others.

Why, from continent to continent, do literally billions see spirituality in terms of a “discipline”?

Why is spirituality associated with strictness?

Why is it portrayed as hard work, difficult, a struggle?

Why do vast numbers all across the planet see spirituality as something restrictive of an unbridled joie de vivre?

A line from a movie: “They are strictly chapel, dull people, won’t even allow strong tea in the house.”

When you think of growing—whether growing up, or personal growth now that you've grown up—do you think of it as adding new things to who you are, sort of like building a house one brick upon another?

My guess is that this is how most see growth. For me, just to think of it in these terms sounds like a lot of hard work. And what if we get it wrong, the walls fall down, and the building collapses?