Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

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

Fear manufactures a kind of parallel universe where the unreal seems real, and the real seems unreal.

If you don’t like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.

Focus on the light brings us into the light.

When in pain, we pray, “Dear God, I am willing to see this differently.” Surrendering a situation to God means surrendering to Him our thoughts about it.

Any situation that pushes our buttons is a situation where we don’t yet have the capacity to be unconditionally loving.

All that is real in our past is the love we gave and the love we received. Everything else is an illusion. The past is merely a thought we have. It is literally all in our minds.

If we’re frantic, life will be frantic. If we’re peaceful, life will be peaceful. And

so our goal in any situation becomes inner peace.

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.

All negativity derives from fear. When someone 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.

“I’m angry but I’m willing not to be. I’m willing to see this situation differently.”

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.

Our defenses reflect our wounds. But no person can heal those wounds. They can give us love, innocently and sincerely, but if we’re already convinced that people can’t be trusted—if that’s the decision we’ve already made—then our mind will construe whatever someone’s behavior is, as evidence that our previously drawn conclusion was correct. The Course tells us we decide what we want to see before we see it. If we want to focus on someone’s lack of respect for our feelings, we can certainly find it,

The process of miraculous change is twofold: I see my error or dysfunctional pattern. I ask God to take it from me.

When we physically separate from someone we’ve been involved with, that doesn’t mean the relationship is over. Relationships are eternal. The “separation” is another chapter in the relationship. Often, letting go of the old form of the relationship becomes a lesson in pure love much deeper than any that would have been learned had the couple stayed together. At the so-called end of relationships, I have sometimes felt like I was falling in love with the person more deeply than I had been before.

because it takes all the love we’re capable of to let a person go. “I love you so much that I can release you to be where you need to be, to go where you need to go.” This moment in a relationship is not about an ending. It’s about the ultimate fulfillment of the purpose in any relationship: that we find the meaning of pure

My judgmental attitude, masquerading as political consciousness, was actually my ego’s way of trying to make sure that I would never have any money. What we mentally refuse to permit others, we refuse ourselves. What we bless in others, we draw to us.