A Return to Love (Marianne Williamson)

Growth can be messy.
Go to work to spread joy.
And NEVER do it for the money,
Do what makes your heart sing.
Our power lies in remaining nonreactive.
The shift from fear to love is a miracle.
Grandiosity is always a cover for despair.
Love is to people what water is to plants.
He teaches us to see love as our only function.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Hatred is the spiritual malignancy of our species
The ego is our self-love turned into self-hatred.
Only infinite patience produces immediate results.
the Holy Spirit is within us to do the impossible.
To surrender to God means to let go and just love.
Our deepest fears is not that we are inadequate, . . .
May my heart be your shelter, and my arms be your home.
Very few of us were taught that we’re essentially good.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
if the train doesn’t stop at your station, it’s not your train.
Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don’t know it.
Love merely becomes clouded over, or surrounded by mental mists.
In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.
Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right.
The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.
I am a glorious child of God. I am joyful, serene, positive, and loving.
Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.
If they treat us with fear, we are to see their behavior as a call for love.
Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of heaven.
Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven.
A certain amount of desperation is usually necessary before we’re ready for God.
You The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky.
An ancient memory of this love haunts all of us all the time, and beckons us to return.
What’s dying is the frightened mind, so the love inside us can get a chance to breathe.
But remember, there’s only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves.
Similarly, if we want to be rid of fear, we cannot fight it but must replace it with love.
We think we’re powerful because of what we’ve achieved rather than because of what we are.
People are not perfect—that is, they do not yet express externally their internal perfection.
How a person seems to show up for us is intimately connected to how we choose to show up for them.
In order to escape the illusion and find inner peace, remember that only love in a situation is real.
Your job is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self,
Everyone we meet will either be our crucifier or our savior, depending on what we choose to be to them.
Whether we choose to focus on the guilt in their personality, or the innocence in their soul, is up to us.
The ego seeks intimacy through control and guilt. The Holy Spirit seeks intimacy through acceptance and release.
We are not here to fix, change or belittle another person. We are here to support, forgive and heal one another.
The future is programmed in the present. To let the past go is to remember that in the present, my brother is innocent.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?
anymore, you consider the possibility that there might be a better way. That’s when your head cracks open and God comes in.
We were taught that things like grades, being good enough, money, and doing things the right way, are more important than love.
He reminds us that, in every situation, the love you’ve given is real, and the love you have received is real. Nothing else exists.
Thought is Cause; experience is Effect. If you don’t like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.
If you dig deep enough into your mind, and deep enough into mine, the picture is the same: at the bottom of it all, what we are is love.
Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth.
when we think we have things already figured out, we’re not teachable. Genuine insight can’t dawn on a mind that’s not open to receive it.
That’s why the miracle is a shift in our own thinking: the willingness to keep our own heart open, regardless of what’s going on outside us.
In the holy relationship, it’s understood that we all have unhealed places, and that healing is the purpose of our being with another person.
There is no Mr. Right because there is no Mr. Wrong. There is whoever is in front of us, and the perfect lessons to be learned from that person.
Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.
Enlightened people don’t have anything we don’t have. They have perfect love inside, and so do we. The difference is that they don’t have anything else.
The cultivation of mental rest, or surrender, is like eating healthy food. It doesn’t give us an immediate rush, but over time it provides a lot more energy.
you keep trying all your old tricks, the ones that never did work but that you keep thinking might work this time. Once you’ve had enough and you can’t do it
I didn’t know, until reading A Course in Miracles, that a miracle is a reasonable thing to ask for. I didn’t know that a miracle is just a shift in perception.
It takes courage…to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.
We came here to co-create with God by extending love. Life spent with any other purpose in mind is meaningless, contrary to our nature, and ultimately painful.
It takes courage…to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.
To ask for another relationship, or another job, is not particularly helpful if we’re going to show up in the new situation exactly as we showed up in the last one.
love requires a different kind of seeing than we’re used to—a different kind of knowing or thinking. Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts. It’s a world beyond
The wicked stepmother, which is the ego, can put the Sleeping Beauty or Christ within us to sleep, but she can never destroy it. What is created by God is indestructible.
It is an act of gracious generosity to accept a person based on what we know to be the truth about them, regardless of whether or not they are in touch with that truth themselves.
We aren’t bodies at all; who we are is the love inside us, and it is that love alone that determines our value. When our minds are filled with light, there is no room for darkness.
But peace isn’t determined by circumstances outside us. Peace stems from forgiveness. Pain doesn’t stem from the love we’re denied by others, but rather from the love that we deny them.
The only real problem is a lack of love. To address the world’s problems on any other level is a temporary palliative—a fix but not a healing, a treatment of the symptom but not a cure.
To become a miracle worker means to take part in a spiritual underground that’s revitalizing the world, participating in a revolution of the world’s values at the deepest possible level.
When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.
Forgiveness is selective remembering—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless—it is capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.
When we think with love, we are literally co-creating with God. And when we’re not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we’re actually not thinking at all. We’re hallucinating.
Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.
It’s easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness.
We’re hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.
But the Holy Spirit is a force of consciousness within us that delivers us from Hell, or fear, whenever we consciously ask Him to, working with us on the Causal level, transforming our thoughts from fear to love.
Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.
In asking for miracles, we are seeking a practical goal: a return to inner peace. We’re not asking for something outside us to change, but for something inside us to change. We’re looking for a softer orientation to life.
Dear God, I surrender this situation to you. May it be used for your purposes. I ask only that my heart be open to give love and to receive love. May all the results unfold according to your will. Amen. Whatever you do, do it for God.
A relationship is not meant to be the joining at the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God.
Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.
You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think. The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think.
Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Elly Kleinman’s Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes.
Dear God, I surrender this relationship to you, means, Dear God, let me see this person through your eyes. In accepting the Atonement, we are asking to see as God sees, think as God thinks, love as God loves. We are asking for help in seeing someone’s innocence.
The concept of a divine, or Christ mind, is the idea that, at our core, we are not just identical, but actually the same being. There is only one begotten Son doesn’t mean that someone else was it, and we’re not. It means we’re all it. There’s only one of us here.
When infants aren’t held, they can become sick, even die. It’s universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all.
When infants aren’t held, they can become sick, even die. It’s universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?
The love in one of us is the love in all of us. ‘There’s actually no place where God stops and you start,’ and no place where you stop and I start. Love is energy, an infinite continuum. Your mind extends into mine and into everyone else’s. It doesn’t stay enclosed within your body.
But when we ask Him to change them, He will. When we’re angry, or upset for any reason, we’re asked to say, I’m angry but I’m willing not to be. I’m willing to see this situation differently. We ask the Holy Spirit to enter into the situation and show it to us from a different perspective.
The resurrection is our awakening from the dream, our return to right-mindedness, and thus our deliverance from hell. … We recognized how avidly we drill the nails into our own hands and feet holding on to earthly interpretation of things when a choice to do otherwise would release us and make us happy.
So it is with you. The perfect you isn’t something you need to create, because God already created it. The perfect you is the love within you. Your job is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounded Michelangelo’s perfect statue.
You’d think we’d have some compassion for ourselves, bound up in emotional chains the way were are, but we don’t. We’re just disgusted with ourselves because we think we should be better by now. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking other people don’t have as much fear as we do, which only makes us more afraid.
The Course teaches that the Holy Spirit was created in the moment when the first fearful thought was thought. As perfect love, God corrects all mistakes the moment they occur. He couldn’t force us back to love, because love doesn’t force. It does, however, create alternatives. The Holy Spirit is God’s alternative to fear.
When physical proximity no longer supports the highest level of teaching and learning between them, the assignment will call for physical separation. What then appears to be the end of the relationship however, is not really an end. Relationships are eternal. They are of the mind, not the body, since people are energy, not
Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and our abilities were used in a way that served people. We’re compensated by grateful looks in other people’s eyes, whatever material abundance supports us in performing joyfully and at high energy, and the magnificent feeling that we did our bit today to help save the world.
Emotional energy has got to go somewhere, and self-loathing is a powerful emotion. Turned inwards, it becomes our personal hells: addiction, obsession, compulsion, depression, violent relationships, illness. Projected outward it becomes our collective hells: violence, war, crime, oppression. But it’s all the same thing. Hell has many mansions too.
If I’m convinced that I’m not good enough, I will have a difficult time accepting someone into my life who thinks I am. It’s the Groucho Marx syndrome of not wanting to like anyone who would want me in their club. The only way that I can accept someone’s finding me wonderful, is if I find myself wonderful. But to the ego, self-acceptance is death.
We’re all assigned a piece of the garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform. Our corner of the universe is our own life — our relationships, our homes, our work, our current circumstances —exactly as they are. Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity, perfectly planned by the Holy Spirit, to teach love instead of fear.
A spiritual relationship is not necessarily one in which two people are smiling all the time. Spiritual means to be above all else, authentic. Real work can only occur in the presence of rigorous honesty We all long for that, but we’re afraid of communicating honestly with another person because we think they’ll leave us if they see who we really are.
Before the Prince can save the damsel in distress, he has to slay the dragons that surround her castle. So do we all. Those dragons are our demons, our wounds, our egos, our brilliant ways of denying love to ourselves and others. The ego’s patterns have to be rooted out, detoxed from our system, before the pure love within us can have a chance to come forth.
The ego doesn’t come up to us and say, Hi, I’m your self-loathing. It’s not stupid, because we’re not. Rather, it says things like, Hi, I’m your adult, mature, rational self. I’ll help you look out for number one. Then it proceeds to counsel us to look out for ourselves, at the expense of others. It teaches us selfishness, greed, judgment, and small-mindedness.
Course in Miracles says that everyone we meet will either be our crucifier or our savior, depending on what we choose to be to them. Focusing on their guilt drives the nails of self-loathing more deeply into our own skin. Focusing on their innocence sets us free. Since ‘no thoughts are neutral,’ every relationship takes us deeper into Heaven or deeper into Hell.
Meaning doesn’t lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re nothing.
Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the relinquishment—or unlearning—of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts. Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
The term crucifixion means the energy pattern of fear. It represents the limited, negative thinking of the ego, and how it always seeks to limit, contradict or invalidate love. The term resurrection means the energy pattern of love, which transcends fear by replacing it. A miracle worker’s function is forgiveness. In performing our function, we become channels for resurrection.
There’s a biblical story where Jesus says we can build our house on sand or we can build it on rock. Our house is our emotional stability. When it is built on sand, then the winds and rain can tear it down. One disappointing phone call and we crumble; one storm and the house falls down. When our house is built on rock, then it is sturdy and strong and the storms can’t destroy it.
In business as well as in everything else, you’re in business to spread love. Your agency should spread love, your screenplay should spread love, your store should spread love, your life should spread love. The key to a successful career is realizing that it s not separate from the rest of your life, but is rather an extension of your most basic self and your most basic self is love.
It’s as though my life was a house, and I thought God would give it a wonderful paint job—new shutters perhaps, a pretty portico, new roof. Instead, it felt as though, as soon as I gave the House to God , He hit it with a giant wrecking ball. ‘Sorry honey,’ he seemed to say, ‘There were cracks in the foundation, not to mention the rats in the bedroom. I thought we better just start all over.‘
Our self-perception determines our behavior. If we think we’re small, limited, inadequate creatures, then we tend to behave that way, and the energy we radiate reflects those thoughts no matter what we do. If we think we’re magnificent creatures with an infinite abundance of love and power to give, then we tend to behave that way. Once again, the energy around us reflects our state of awareness.
When two people come together in God, the walls that appear to separate us disappear. The beloved doesn’t seem to be a mere mortal. They seem for a while to be something else, something more. The truth is, they are something more. No one is anything less than the perfect Son of God, and when we fall in love, we have an instant when we see the total truth about someone. They are perfect. That’s not just our imagination.
And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined. That is not to say they don’t exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground.
I give this day to you, the fruit of my labor and the desires of my heart. In your hands I place all questions, on your shoulders I place all burdens. I pray for my brothers and for myself. May we return to love. May our minds be healed. May we all be blessed. May we find our way home from pain to peace, from fear to love, from hell to heaven. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and forever. Amen.
Relationships are assignments. They are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth. He appraises who can learn most from whom at any given time, and then assigns them to each other. Like
That’s the greatest miracle, and ultimately the only one: that you awaken from the dream of separation and become a different kind of person. People are constantly concerning themselves with what they do: have I achieved enough, written the greatest screenplay, formed the most powerful company? But the world will not be saved by another great novel, great movie, or great business venture. It will only be saved by the appearance of great people.
Healing occurs in the present, not the past. We’re not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’e not giving in the present. There’s a lot of talk today about people growing up in dysfunctional homes, but who didn’t grow up in a dysfunctional home? This world is a dysfunction. However, there’s nothing we’ve been through or seen or done that cannot be used to make our lives more valuable now. We can grow from any experience, and we can transcend any experience.
When Michelangelo was asked how he created a piece of sculpture, he answered that the statue already existed within the marble. God Himself had created the Pieta, David, Moses. Michelangelo’s job, as he saw it, was to get rid of the excess marble that surrounded God’s creation. So it is with you. The perfect you isn’t something you need to create, because God already created it. The perfect you is the love within you. Your job is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounded Michelangelo’s perfect statue.
I remember spending years of my life so upset about all of the life choices I felt I had available that I never moved. I was paralyzed by all the possibilities. I couldn’t figure out which road would lead me to the fulfillment of my potential, this glorious, neurotic myth that lay always just in front of whatever I could manifest now. So I was always too scared to move, and fear of course is the great betrayer of self. The difference between those people living their potential and those who don’t is not the amount of potential itself, but the amount of permission they give themselves to live in the present.
Sometimes people think that calling on God means inviting a force into our lives that will make everything rosy. The truth is, it means inviting everything into our lives that will force us to grow—and growth can be messy. The purpose of life is to grow into our perfection. Once we call on God, everything that could anger us is on the way. Why? Because the place where we go into anger instead of love, is our wall. Any situation that pushes our buttons is a situation where we don’t yet have the capacity to be unconditionally loving. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to draw our attention to that, and help us move beyond that point.
We’re all assigned a piece of the garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform. Our corner of the universe is our own life—our relationships, our homes, our work, our current circumstances—exactly as they are. Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity, perfectly planned by the Holy Spirit, to teach love instead of fear. Whatever energy system we find ourselves a part of, it’s our job to heal it—to purify the thought forms by purifying our own. It’s never really a circumstance that needs to change—it’s we who need to change. The prayer isn’t for God to change our lives, but rather for Him to change us.
To remember that you are part of God, that you are loved and lovable, is not arrogant. It’s humble. To think you are anything else is arrogant, because it implies you’re something other than a creation of God. Love is changeless and therefore so are you. Nothing that you have ever done or will ever do can mar your perfection in the eyes of God. You’re deserving in His eyes because of what you are, not because of what you do. What you do or don’t do is not what determines your essential value—your growth perhaps, but not your value. That’s why God is totally approving and accepting of you, exactly as you are. What’s not to like? You were not created in sin; you were created in love.
It’s easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness. Holding grievances is an attack on God’s plan for salvation. The decision to let go our grievances against other people is the decision to see ourselves as we truly are, because any darkness we let blind us to another’s perfection also blinds us to our own. It can be very hard to let go of your perception of someone’s guilt when you know that by every standard of ethics, morality, or integrity, you’re right to find fault with them. But the Course asks, Do you prefer that you be right or happy?
Relationships are assignments. They are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth. He appraises who can learn most from whom at any given time, and then assigns them to each other. Like a giant universal computer, He knows exactly what combination of energies, in exactly what context, would do the most to further God’s plan for salvation. No meetings are accidental. Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship.
The process of miraculous change is twofold. One: I see my error or dysfunctional pattern. Two: I ask God to take it from me. The first principle without the second is impotent. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, your best thinking got you here. You’re the problem but you’re not the answer. The second principle isn’t enough to change us either. The Holy Spirit can’t take from us what we will not release to him. He won’t work without our consent. He cannot remove our character defects without our willingness, because that would be violating our free will. We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and he will not force us to give them up. In asking God to heal us, we’re committing to the choice to be healed.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
There’s a myth that some people are more faithful than others. A truer statement is that in some areas, some of us are more surrendered than others. We surrender to God first, of course, the things we don’t really care that much about anyway. Some of us don’t mind giving up our attachment to career goals, but there’s no way we’re going to surrender our romantic relationships, or vice versa. Everything we don’t care that much about—fine—God can have it. But if it’s really, really important, we think we better handle it ourselves. The truth is, of course, that the more important it is to us, the more important it is to surrender. That which is surrendered is taken care of best. To place something in the hands of God is to give it over, mentally, to the protection and care of the beneficence of the universe. To keep it ourselves means to constantly grab and clutch and manipulate. We keep opening the oven to see if the bread is baking, which only ensures that it never gets a chance to.
In the eyes of God, we’re all perfect and we all have unlimited capacity to express brilliantly. I say unlimited capacity rather than unlimited potential because potential can be a dangerous concept. We can use it to tyrannize ourselves, to live in the future instead of the present, to set ourselves up for despair. We’re constantly measuring ourselves against what we think we could be, rather than what we are. Potential is a concept which can bind us to personal powerlessness Focus on human potential becomes impotent without a focus on human capacity. Capacity is expressed in the present, it is immediate, the key to it lies not in what we have inside of us, but rather in what we are willing to own that we have inside of us. There’s no point in waiting until we’re perfect at what we do, or enlightened masters, or PhDs in life, before opening ourselves to what we’re capable of doing now. Of course we’re not as good today as we’ll be tomorrow, but how will we ever get tomorrow’s promise without making some sort of move today?
Achievement doesn’t come from what we do, but from who we are. Our worldly power results from our personal power. Our career is an extension of our personality. People who profoundly achieve aren’t necessarily people who do so much, they’re people around whom things get done. Mahatma Gandhi and JFK were great examples of this. Their great achievements lay in all the energy they stirred in other people, the invisible forces they unleashed around them. By touching their own depths, they touched the depths within others. That kind of charisma, the power to affect what happens on the earth, from an invisible realm within is the natural right and function of the son of god. New frontiers are internal ones, the real stretch is always within us. Instead of expanding our ability or willingness to go out and get anything, we expand our ability to receive what is already here for us. Personal power emanates from someone who takes life seriously. The universe takes us as seriously as we take it. There is no greater seriousness than the full appreciation of the power and importance of love. Miracles flow from the recognition that love is the purpose of our career.
Third-level, life-long relationships are generally few because their existence implies that those involved have reached a stage simultaneously in which the teaching-learning balance is actually perfect. That doesn’t mean, however, that we necessarily recognize our third-level assignments; in fact, generally we don’t. We may even feel hostility toward these particular people. Someone with whom we have a lifetime’s worth of lessons to learn is someone whose presence in our lives forces us to grow. Sometimes it represents someone with whom we participate lovingly all our lives, and sometimes it represents someone who we experience as a thorn in our side for years, or even forever. Just because someone has a lot to teach us, doesn’t mean we like them. People who have the most to teach us are often the ones who reflect back to us the limits to our own capacity to love, those who consciously or unconsciously challenge our fearful positions. They show us our walls. Our walls are our wounds—the places where we feel we can’t love any more, can’t connect any more deeply, can’t forgive past a certain point. We are in each other’s lives in order to help us see where we most need healing, and in order to help us heal.

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A Return to Love (Marianne Williamson)

A Return to Love (Marianne Williamson)

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