Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

The ego isn’t a monster. It’s just the idea of a monster. We all have demons and dragons within us, but we also have the dashing prince.

Until we fully appreciate that the ego is the impostor within us, we often feel embarrassed to admit to ourselves, not to mention anyone else, the games we play.

We think we’re bad. ‘We think that if we, or anyone else God forbid, were to see the real truth about us, we would all recoil in horror.’ The truth, rather, is that if we, or anyone else, were to see the real truth about us, we would all be dazzled by the light.

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.

A spiritual teacher from India once pointed out that there is no such thing as a gray sky. The sky is always blue. Sometimes, however, gray clouds come and cover the blue sky. We then think the sky is gray. It is the same with our minds. We’re always perfect. We can’t not be. Our fearful patterns, our dysfunctional habits, take hold within our minds and cover our perfection. Temporarily. That is all. We are still perfect sons of God. There has never been a storm that hasn’t passed. Gray clouds never last forever. The blue sky does.

Our anger stands in front of our love. Letting it out is part of the process of relinquishing it. The last thing you want to do—ever—is to buy into the insidious delusion that spiritual lives and spiritual relationships are always quiet, or always blissful.

We can’t really give to our children what we don’t have ourselves. In that sense, my greatest gift to my daughter is that I continue to work on myself. Children learn more through imitation than through any other form of instruction. Our greatest opportunity to positively affect another person’s life is to accept God’s love into our own.

The ego will always tempt us to think that the breakdown of a relationship has to do with what they did wrong, or what they’re not seeing, or what they need to learn. The focus must remain on ourselves.

The ego knows this, which is why it tries to put the focus on the other person. The ego’s purpose is to make us continually self-destruct without knowing that we’re doing it.

Because our description of the problem still makes someone guilty, it can only lead into further darkness, not light. “I continue to choose people who can’t commit” is not a miracle-minded perception. A more enlightened question might be, “How committable am I, really?

The price you pay for not taking responsibility for your own pain is the failure to realize that you can change your conditions by changing your thoughts.

I once had a crush on a gay man. It might have been unreasonable, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I asked for a miracle, and the following thoughts occurred to me: “You know, Marianne, you’re obsessed, you’re so unreleased about this because you’re not releasing him. Accept him as he is. Release him to be where he wants to be, doing whatever he wants to do with whomever he wants to do it. It’s what you’re not giving that is lacking here. It’s what you’re doing to him that’s causing you pain. Emotionally, your ego is trying to control him, which is why you’re feeling controlled by your emotions.” I got it. I released him in my mind, and then I felt released.