BetterListen!

Excerpt 2 from Marianne Williamson's "A Return to Love Workshop"

In this transcribed excerpt from her wonderful "A Return to Love Workshop", Marianne Williamson explains that there are, for all of us, essentially only two emotions:  love and fear.  And when we live in one or the other, we quite simply manifest "heaven" or "hell" in our lives.   

The Course in Miracles says love is to fear as light is to darkness. So when I shut my heart and I do not allow the love of God that is in me to stream through me, in that moment I deflect love and my mind flips over like a breaker switch and I move into fear. The Course in Miracles says there are only two emotions: love and fear. All what you and I would think of as negative emotion derives from fear. But as I said, love is to fear as light is to darkness. How do you get rid of darkness? You turn on the light. How do you get rid of fear? You turn on the love.

A Spiritual Perspective on The Holiday Season - Monday Free MP3 with Marianne Williamson

A timely message about the holidays with Marianne Williamson. Recorded live in LA just after Thanksgiving 2010, this inspiring talk will help you put the holiday season into spiritual perspective.

Download this free mp3 through Wednesday Evening. Happy Holidays

Excerpt 1 from Marianne Williamson's "A Return to Love Workshop"

In summer of 2011, Marianne Williamson held a popular weekend workshop in Los Angeles on "A Return to Love" -- a weekend about miracles -- shifts in thinking from fear to love -- deeply impact how we live and feel.  In this transcribed excerpt from the workshop, Williamson talks about how she came across A Course in Miracles, and the essence of what it's all about.

The reason reading Volume 1 and Volume 2 simultaneously was great for me personally was because the theoretical foundation of Volume 1 was explaining to me what I was doing in Volume 2. Because what Volume 2 does, the Course (in Miracles) says, is it trains the mind to think along the lines that the text sets forth. So the text is this marvelous philosophy about how we should live but Volume 2, the workbook, is actually a training of our mental musculature, as it were, because our process here has to do with taking the abstract intellectual understanding of Volume 1 and making that, what the Course in Miracles calls “journey without distance from here to here”. It’s one thing to know that I should be forgiving. It is another thing to be able to forgive.
 
The practical goal in the Course in Miracles, as I already said, is the attainment of inner peace and the way we attain inner peace, according to the Course in Miracles, is through the process of forgiveness. So you could say that the Course in Miracles is a rather radical study and practice of forgiveness.
 
Now in the introduction to Volume 1… I saw the book on somebody’s coffee table back in the 1970s in New York City. I picked it up, I looked at the introduction, and I found the introduction very compelling. I think I had already noticed that there is no author mentioned on the cover or in the beginning of the book. This is a Course in Miracles. It is a required course. That right there. What book says of itself that it is a required course?
 
Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. The Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim however at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite. This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.

Click Here for Free Previews and to Purchase

Marianne Williamson Bio and Links

 

Excerpt from Marianne Williamson's Lecture "4th of July, A Mindful Celebration"

Recorded live in Los Angeles on Independence Day 2011, Marianne Williamson talks about the ideals set forth by our Founding Fathers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and other of our country's visionaries, and how these ideals apply to our world today.  Following is a transcribed excerpt from this fascinating lecture.

I’d like to begin by reading a quote to you, and I wonder if anybody is going to guess who wrote these words.
 
“We are witnessing in our day the birth of a new age with a new structure of freedom and justice. Now as we face the fact of this new emerging world, we must face the responsibilities that come along with it. A new age brings with it new challenges. First, we are challenged to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Excerpt from Marianne Williamson's Workshop - "The Sacred Self"

At Marianne Williamson's workshop on The Sacred Self, held at the reknowned Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Williamson challenged attendees to become the sacred enlightened self which exists in each of us.  The following transcribed excerpt from the workshop captures the essence of the inspiring audio program distilled from Williamsons' powerful work that weekend.

…That the species, which will come out of all this on the other side of all this, will be as different from you and I today as you and I are, from the cavemen. But you and I could be radically different from who we are right now if we just chose to be. Each and every one of us are playing small on the most incredible level. Now if there is someone in this room who is, in fact, an enlightened master and you are playing small, then my humble apologies. My assumption is that at least most people in this room are like me and everyone else I know.
 
And we are not playing at 100%.

Excerpt from Marianne Williamson's Lecture "The Altar Within"

In this transcribed excerpt from her lecture recorded live in Los Angeles this past June titled "The Altar Within", Williamson stresses the importance of looking at our own ways of thinking and being in any given situation, particularly the uncomfortable ones and the ones we'd like to change.

Now normally when we think in terms of asking God to guide our lives, we would most usually think in terms of “guide my acts”. But remember, knowing that in asking God to change our lives, what we are asking is for a shift in our thinking because our acts emerge from our thoughts. So we’re not just asking God to guide our steps, our footsteps; we are asking God to guide our thoughts, because until we look at the world differently, our experience of the world will not change. I know I have seen in my life and the lives of those around me where we want a radically new life but aren’t yet necessarily willing or ready to think in radical new ways, and that is what the Course in Miracles is about. It’s about a radical shift in the way we see the world.

Excerpt from Marianne Williamson's Lecture "The True Self"

In this transcribed excerpt from Marianne Williamson's lecture "The True Self", Williamson shares a broader view of forgiveness with us -- how true forgiveness is connected to us receiving everything that we want. There is no one to blame, nothing to point to. Only we can keep ourselves from our heart's desires.  Recorded live in Los Angeles as part of Williamson's weekly lecture series this past July 11.

Forgiveness offers everything I want because whatever it is that I think I want in life but perceive that I do not have, the gap between what I think I want and having it, whatever gap exists, exists because of some unforgiveness, some lack of love on my part.