Explore the sacred discovery of self with Robert Boldman, author of The Alchemy of Love. Whether through challenge or success, we can find our truth if we ask deeply enough. Beginning with a near-death experience in his early childhood, Robert found himself at a loss to relate to his life circumstance as a normal child of five.Kundalini was awakened in his subtle nervous system and sometime afterward he also had a vision of the Virgin Mary. Both experiences left him with a deeper awareness of consciousness. Many years after suppressing his childhood past, he spontaneously began to regularly experience states of formless consciousness bliss. To stabilize himself, he studied meditation techniques to quiet the mind, yet when he tried to sit quietly all this energy would begin to emerge and manifest.Students in his Zen class began to follow him because of his natural transmission and so he became a kundalini yoga teacher. He realized at one point that even though he had these powers, he was still very egoic about it, and there was no real love in his practice. So he left. In his soul searching, he met an old priest, Father Thomas, at a quiet sanctuary who privately helped him understand real spiritual experience as helping someone in need, and not just about having energy experiences.He learned how true spirituality is becoming transparent to God. We habitually narrow our consciousness around experiences, identities, or siddhis (supernatural powers), yet God is an inner surrender and opening, a realization of your true identity, an interior integration and embodiment rather than a surface or partial experiential reflection. Robert later learned from the nuns at the sanctuary that the only priest by the name of Father Thomas that had ever served there had died a hundred years before.