Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

The spiritual journey only really gets underway when a person begins to question themselves.

We’re not talking about asking questions that invite an answer in the form of a mental concept about ourselves, let alone a psychological exploration of our humanity.

Those may be interesting, even helpful at times, but they aren’t transformative in the enduring and fulfilling way that Alchemy of the Heart points to.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

Does it feel like someone in your life has it in for you—that you are being victimized or abused?

Many of us sense that at work, in our social life, or in our family, someone seems to want to hurt us. Perhaps we feel put down or even bullied.

A recent Oprah quote of the day from Paul Boese: “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.”

But just how does forgiveness enlarge the future?

The answer is by redeeming the past.

That is, what happened in the past proves to be the very makings of our future.

There's a tendency for humans to view behavior that’s less than our best as a mistake we must not just forgive and move on from but also feel remorse for and deeply regret.

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?

Most of us want things in our life to change, but we ourselves don’t want to have to make the changes.

I'm not talking about changing our essential being, which doesn't require change. I'm talking about changing our experience of life.

We want change without having to cause the change by doing things differently. We want it to somehow happen "magically."

Humans live in a manner that is both untrue to themselves and far below their potential. On this pretty much all spiritual paths on every continent agree.

The question is, how do you get people to become the kind of people the various paths correctly sense they have the potential to be?

From early years, the spiritual tradition that shaped me was always cajoling me to get me to become what I was supposed to be, while constantly reinforcing how far from this I was unless God stooped down to rescue me.

Is there someone in your life who you just really don’t like? Perhaps it’s the way they treat you, or something about them that irks you.

My guess is that most of us, whether in our wider family, social or religious organizations, or in the workplace, have at least one person we don’t care for.

Of course, if we think of ourselves as “spiritual,” we are going to tell ourselves that the divine likeness is in this person too—somewhere. Isn’t this how we are “supposed” to regard those individuals we don’t prefer to be around?

Yesterday we began talking about the insights in the movie The Guitar. A woman is told she has an incurable tumor and will die within two months, likely less.

This isn’t an easy movie to watch, but it’s powerful in that it really conveys the utter aloneness of this woman, who has absolutely no support system.

As her world collapses—her health, her relationship, her job—she decides to go with the collapse instead of resisting.

The key to raising children well, as well as to being a superb teacher in a school, revolves around one simple quality—presence.

When we know how to be present in our own being, it changes completely the dynamic between ourselves and the children whose upbringing and education are entrusted to us.

Yesterday we began talking about the school system, a theme I want to pick up again by going back to a movie I enjoyed at the time it first came out, then watched again last evening—Mr. Holland’s Opus.