Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.

My negativity was as destructive to me as alcohol is to the alcoholic. I was an artist at finding my own jugular. It was as though I was addicted to my own pain. Could I ask God to help me with that? It occurred to me that, just as with any other addictive behavior, maybe a power greater than myself could turn things around.

This didn’t turn me off to God so much as it made me respect His intelligence. It implied He understood the situation better than I would have expected. If I was God, I’d have busted me too. I felt more grateful than resentful. I was desperate for help.

For one thing, I was profoundly humbled. I saw very clearly that, ‘of myself, I am nothing.’ Until this happens, 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 anymore, you consider the possibility that there might be a better way. That’s when your head cracks open and God comes in.

I had never realized that depending on God meant depending on love. I had heard it said that God was love, but it had never kicked in for me exactly what that meant.

We have made up a God in our image. But God remains who He is and always has been: the energy, the thought of unconditional love. He cannot think with anger or judgment; He is mercy and compassion and total acceptance.

Without love, our actions are hysterical. Without love, we have no wisdom.

Although we may not realize it, most of us are violent people—not necessarily physically, but emotionally. We have been brought up in a world that does not put love first, and where love is absent, fear sets in. Fear is to love as darkness is to light. It’s a terrible absence of what we need in order to survive. It’s a place we go where all hell breaks loose.

His correction of our perception is called the Atonement.

The only thing lacking in any situation is our own awareness of love.

Faith is a psychological awareness of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions.

What we’re trying to control is much better off without us, and what we’re trying to fix can’t be fixed by us anyway. Without faith, we’re wasting time.

looking to anything other than love to complete us and to be the source of our happiness—is the meaning of idolatry. Money, sex, power, or any other worldly satisfaction offers just temporary relief for minor existential pain.

It amuses me to think how angry I used to get when people wouldn’t sign my peace petitions. Forgiveness is a full time job, and sometimes very difficult. Few of us always succeed, yet making the effort is our most noble calling. It is the world’s only real chance to begin again.

As we demonstrate love towards others, we learn that we are lovable and we learn how to love more deeply.

If I choose to bless another person, I will always end up feeling more blessed. If I project guilt onto another person, I will always end up feeling more guilty.

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

Holding grievances is an attack on God’s plan for salvation.”

Projection makes perception.”

is angry, they are afraid. When someone is rude, they are afraid. When someone is manipulative, they are afraid. When someone is cruel, they are afraid. There is no fear that love does not dissolve. There is no negativity that forgiveness does not transform.

Darkness is merely the absence of light, and fear is merely the absence of love.

The choice to love is not always easy.

Peace stems from forgiveness.

The ego says that we can project our anger onto another person and not feel it ourselves, but since all minds are continuous, whatever we project onto another we continue to feel. Getting angry at someone else might make us feel better for a while, but ultimately all the fear and guilt comes back at us. If we judge another person, then they’ll judge us back—and even if they don’t, we’ll feel like they did!

That was the miracle: Her behavior hadn’t changed, but I had.

Just because someone has a lot to teach us, doesn’t mean we like them.

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

Although we’re seeking love, we’re actually fostering our own self-hatred and lack of self-esteem.

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.

The holy relationship is a context where we feel safe enough to be ourselves, knowing that our darkness will not be judged but forgiven.

We idealize one another, and when someone doesn’t live up to the ideal, we’re disappointed.

Love is a participatory emotion.

Love is to people what water is to plants.

Salvation is only found in the present. Every moment we have a chance to change our past and our future by reprogramming the present.

Anger is often a result of a series of uncommunicated feelings building up inside of us and ultimately exploding.

The unhealthiest thing you can do with anger is to deny you have it.

I see my error or dysfunctional pattern. 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 won’t 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.

Service does not mean self-sacrifice. It means giving the needs of another person the same priority as our own.

The married couple is not to think only in terms of what’s good for him or her, but rather what is good for them.

Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and abilities were used in a way that served others.

God does not demand sacrifice. The life of sacrifice is the life we live before we find a higher sense of identity and purpose: the sacrifice of the memory of how magnificent we really are, and what an important job we came here to do.

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.

No matter what we do, we can make it our ministry. No matter what form our job or activity takes, the content is the same as everyone else’s: we are here to minister to human hearts.

The only thing we have to give to the world is our own grasp on it.

A tulip doesn’t strive to impress anyone. It doesn’t struggle to be different than a rose. It doesn’t have to. It is different.

Grandiosity is always a cover for despair.”

What we mentally refuse to permit others, we refuse ourselves. What we bless in others, we draw to us.

We are poor because we do not work with love.