Marianne Williamson
Marianne Williamson
Marianne Deborah Williamson is an American spiritual teacher, author and lecturer. She has published eleven books, including four New York Times number one bestsellers. She is the founder of Project Angel Food, a meals-on-wheels program that serves homebound people with AIDS in the Los Angeles area, and the co-founder of The Peace Alliance, a grassroots campaign supporting legislation to establish a United States Department of Peace. She serves on the Board of Directors of the RESULTS organization, which works to...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSelf-Help Author
Date of Birth8 July 1952
CityHouston, TX
CountryUnited States of America
Choosing joy involves spiritual surrender, and sometimes we would rather hold on to the pain than surrender our egos.
I surrender it to God, knowing that the pain itself is a product or a reflection of how I am interpreting whatever it is that is causing me pain. Some pain is simply the normal grief of human existence. That is pain that I try to make room for. I honor my grief. I try to be kinder to myself. I give myself time to move through and to process whatever is making me sad.
Often on a journey of spiritual transformation, that is ultimately what heals the pain: the veil is removed from in front of our own eyes and we see where we had been thinking thoughts that would inevitably lead to pain. Until we change those thoughts, the pain will remain.
There are other kinds of emotional pain that emerge from our own mistaken thinking. As we surrender that pain, we are inviting into our thought system a guide who will lead us to different thoughts. It's like the song "Amazing Grace": I was blind and now I see.
Think of one person who you are tempted for any reason to withhold love from, and pray for their happiness. In that moment your pain will stop.
You can't remove that layer of pain by just saying, "Okay, I'm not going to wallow in it." The only way to remove that layer of pain is to face what it says and to recognize it as the look in the mirror that it is, reflecting the things you did that you wish you hadn't done and the things you didn't do that you wish you had done.
When the heart is pierced, there is pain, yes, but also an invitation to a greater becoming.
If I'm honest with myself, I think it's probably true I have learned more in my life through pain than through joy. But hopefully that's changing.
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.
If you did something in 1975 that you deeply regret and that you now can recognize as having been profoundly irresponsible, for example, the only way to be lifted out of deep regret and the pain over it is through atonement - through the kind of remorse that leads to genuine atonement, the making of amends, and forgiveness of self and others.
Yes, whatever happened, happened; but what happens now is up to you. You can respond from ego, ensuring pain, or you can respond from spirit, ensuring a miracle.
After decades of declining influence on the affairs of the world, there is once again a widespread consideration of spritual principles as an antidote to the pain of our times.
To look to God is to look to the realm of consciousness that can deliver us from the pain of living.
Spiritual Work is not easy. It means the willingness to surrender feelings that seem, while we're in them, like our defense against a greater pain. It means that we surrender to God our perceptions of all things.