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.

“I am 25 years old and have been through The Presence Process twice,” a young man writes. “I have already had some great experiences in my life. Many relationships, especially with my parents, have become more harmonious.”

Many report what a life-changing effect The Presence Process has on their life. Especially after the third time, people experience substantial change.

Why does Eat, Pray, Love have such a passionate following? It’s even being called “a phenomenon.”

If you read the book, the movie that opened this past weekend in many ways features a quite different Liz Gilbert. She appears a lot less serious in the movie, less reflective, less intentional, more upbeat, and the focus of the movie is to a large extent on the problem of losing herself in relationships. That theme seems to have hijacked the main story of the book.

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.

When conflict arises between two people, or within a group of people, or between groups of people, the key thing that consciousness allows us to do is to hold onto ourselves.

The capacity for holding onto ourselves is something I was first introduced to by Dr David Schnarch’s work, which has more than once been featured in ABC television Dateline specials and showcased in leading magazines such as Time. You can find information about it on Dr Schnarch's website: www.passionatemarriage.com.

Eckhart Tolle, in The Power of Now, relates that he was at his rope’s end, when he suddenly realized that the self-conscious, miserable way he thought of himself was a mirage. It wasn't really him at all.

The sad, disappointed person he thought he was turned out not to be his real identity, but what he calls our "pain-body." 

When he went from thinking of himself to being himself, what erupted from deep within him was joy so ecstatic that he was in a state of utter bliss.