Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

We come now to a third question: Where am I now?

Michael says of this question:

This is a question we seldom ask because we assume we know where we are, just as we tend to mistakenly assume we are the conceptual and behavioral personality we have manufactured—the outer identity everyone in our life interacts with.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

The hold many of us have on our life is a stranglehold, and it’s slowly killing us.

Our difficulty is, we know we are strangling ourselves but we don’t know how to release our stranglehold.

The only way we know how to be in our life is the way we learned in childhood, the way we grew up—or, alternatively, a reaction to how we grew up.

Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

The first step to changing a miserable situation we are going through seemingly because of the actions of another person is to alter how we view it.

If we view whatever is happening to us through the woe-is-me victim story our thoughts automatically generate, we lock ourselves into misery.

We simply feed what Eckhart calls our pain-body.

Daily Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

If we want to maintain a solid sense of who we are when we are around people with strong personalities, it helps to be grounded in the inner stillness that’s the hallmark of our essential being.

As long as we are locked into mental activity and emotional reactivity, we are going to feel like we are losing ourselves in our relationships, our work, our world.

Daily Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks    

Writes Eckhart Tolle, “When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.”

One of the most difficult issues any of us has to face concerns what people commonly refer to as “losing yourself in relationships.”

The feeling we are losing ourselves to another person happens not just in romantic relationships but also in families, the workplace, and social settings.

Many are afraid to let go of their ego. They are afraid that if they don’t have an ego, they will lose their identity.

But which identity is lost when the ego diminishes?

Only the false self we all learned to be while growing up because our authentic self wasn’t acceptable to society.

When the ego steps aside, what comes through in its place is pure being. Though not just being per se, but our unique manifestation of it.

Being is the only reality there ultimately is.

Yesterday we began exploring what it means to have an "ego."

If we say that someone has a “huge ego,” are we saying they have a truly grounded, solid sense of self?

In fact we are saying just the opposite. We are saying they have an inflated sense of themselves that isn’t grounded in reality.

They have to pump themselves up precisely because they don't feel solid, powerful, confident in themselves.

“I believe those who are teaching that the ego should be overcome are misleading people into dead ends,” a reader writes.

This reader goes on to explain why she feels this way: “Presence is important, especially to become aware of the power within us. But after that we have to give our life direction, focus, and purpose. That's where the ego comes in to help us shape our life.”

How are you feeling right now? I’m not talking about how you are feeling about something that may be happening in your life.

I’m talking about the basic feeling of you.

What does it feel like to be you? Is it a good feeling, or not so good?

Of course, if something is taking place in your life such as a death in the family, the death or illness of a friend or beloved pet, a divorce, an issue with your work, or some form of drama with your children, you are not going to feel good about that.

Most change that we accomplish in our life comes about because we are forced into it.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but usually it is—until we reach a certain point in our development, when we begin to actively invite growth.

Usually it’s a growth crisis that gets us moving.

When such a crisis occurs, we don’t go through the crisis and come out transformed unless the crisis seems to swallow us up.