Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

everyone we meet will either be our crucifier or our savior, depending on what we choose to be to them.

Since ‘no thoughts are neutral,’ every relationship takes us deeper into Heaven or deeper into Hell.

The places in our personality where we tend to deviate from love are not our faults, but our wounds. God doesn’t want to punish us, but to heal us. And that is how He wishes us to view the wounds in other people.

Forgiveness is “selective remembering”—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go.

The miracle worker consciously invites the Holy Spirit to enter into every relationship and deliver us from the temptation to judge and find fault. We ask Him to save us from our tendency to condemn. We ask Him to reveal to us the innocence within others, that we might see it within ourselves.

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.

God doesn’t need us to police the universe.

If a person behaves unlovingly, then, that means that, regardless of their negativity—anger or whatever—their behavior was derived from fear and doesn’t actually exist.

The sword, however, doesn’t fall on them but on us. Since all thought is thought about ourselves, then to condemn another is to condemn ourselves.

How do we escape judgment? Largely through a reinterpretation of what we’re judging.

If someone treats us with love, then of course love is the appropriate response. If they treat us with fear, we are to see their behavior as a call for love.

Our power lies in remaining nonreactive. Forgiveness works in the same way. When we attack back, and defense is a form of attack, we initiate a war that no one can win. Since lovelessness is not real, we’re not at the effect of it in ourselves or others.

The ego always emphasizes what someone has done wrong. The Holy Spirit always emphasizes what they’ve done right.

The spiritual path involves taking conscious responsibility for what we choose to perceive—our brother’s guilt or innocence. We see a brother’s innocence when it’s all we want to see. People are not perfect—that is, they do not yet express externally their internal perfection. Whether we choose to focus on the guilt in their personality, or the innocence in their soul, is up to us.

It’s not our job to change our own perceptions, but to remember to ask Him to change them for us.

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.

someone else’s closed heart has tempted us to close our own, and it is our own denial of love that hurts us. 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.

A miracle is always available in any situation, because no one can decide for us how to interpret our own experience.

We give someone a break so we can stay in peace ourselves.

If we judge another person, then they’ll judge us back—and even if they don’t, we’ll feel like they did!

We don’t deny we’re upset, but at the same time we own up to the fact that all our feelings stem from our own loveless thinking, and we’re willing to have that lovelessness healed.

Growth is never about focusing on someone else’s lessons, but only on our own. We aren’t victims of the world outside us. As hard as it is to believe sometimes, we’re always responsible for how we see things.

“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.

No meetings are accidental. “Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship.”

It is mostly in casual encounters that we are given a chance to practice the fine art of chiseling away the hard edges of our personalities. Whatever personal weaknesses are evident in our casual interactions will inevitably appear magnified in more intense relationships.

Relationships are eternal. They are of the mind, not the body, since people are energy, not physical substance.

if both people learned what they were meant to learn, then that relationship was a success. Now it may be time for physical separation so that more can be learned in other ways. That not only means learning elsewhere, from other people; it also means learning the lessons of pure love that come from having to release the form of an existing relationship.

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.

This is why so much anger is often aroused in our closest relationships. We’re projecting onto someone else the rage we feel against ourselves for cutting off our own love.

The ego seeks to use other people to fulfill our needs as we define them.

Under the ego’s guidance we’re always looking for something, yet always sabotaging what we’ve found.

A special relationship perpetuates the self-punishing masquerade in which we all seek desperately to attract love through being someone we’re not.

In the special relationship, we are always trying to hide our weaknesses. 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. We don’t try to hide our weaknesses, but rather we understand that the relationship is a context for healing through mutual forgiveness.

relationship exists to support our growth, then in many ways it exists to do just those things; force us out of our limited tolerance and inability to love unconditionally. We’re not aligned with the Holy Spirit until people can behave in any way they choose to, and our own inner peace isn’t shaken.

Support for the belief in guilt is extremely easy to find. But real support is when we help one another see beyond someone’s errors, to drop our judgments and see the love that lies beyond.

We love purely when we release other people to be who they are. The ego seeks intimacy through control and guilt. The Holy Spirit seeks intimacy through acceptance and release.

It is our failure to accept people exactly as they are that gives us pain in a relationship.

Our ego is merely our fear. We all have egos, that doesn’t make us bad people. Our egos are not where we are bad but where we are wounded.

The holy relationship is a context where we feel safe enough to be ourselves, knowing that our darkness will not be judged but forgiven. In this way we are healed, and freed to move on into the light of our true being.

A holy relationship is this: “a common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction, that both may happily be healed as one.”

It isn’t the absence of other people in our lives that causes us the pain, but rather what we do with them when they’re there.

The disappearance of romantic fervor doesn’t necessarily spell the end of a wonderful relationship, except to the ego. The Spirit can see the seeds of rebirth in any pattern of decline.

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.

If your heart’s desire is for an intimate partner, the Holy Spirit might send someone who isn’t the ultimate intimate partner for you, but rather something better: someone with whom you are given the opportunity to work through the places in yourself that need to be healed before you’re ready for the deepest intimacy.

How a person seems to show up for us is intimately connected to how we choose to show up for them.

Part of working on ourselves, in order to be ready for a profound relationship, is learning how to support another person in being the best that they can be. Partners are meant to have a priestly role in each other’s lives. They are meant to help each other access the highest parts within themselves.

What the ego doesn’t want us to see is that our pain doesn’t come from the love we weren’t given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren’t giving in the present. Salvation is only found in the present. Every moment we have a chance to change our past and our future by reprogramming the present.

I understand why I haven’t developed the habit of saying it to others. I can develop the habit now. The choice to give what I haven’t received is always an available option.”

We help another person access their highest by accessing our own. Growth comes from focus on our own lessons, not on someone else’s.

“only what you have not given can be lacking in any situation.”