EP95 Marianne Williamson Interview – Tears to Triumph release

BOL 95

Transcript

Episode 95

[INTERVIEW] 

[0:00:13.0] KC: Okay, Marianne Williamson, welcome to the show.

[0:00:16.6] MW: Oh thank you so much for having me.

[0:00:19.9] KC: When we first jumped on, once we finally got on Skype to connect, I shared with you that I wanted to, if you were willing, that I could hijack the first couple of minutes of the podcast. So if that’s okay, I’m going to do that and then I will get right into the book and everything that’s going on with that.

[0:00:39.9] MW: Well I don’t see that as hijacking so I’m looking forward to hearing your story.

[0:00:46.2] KC: So sitting here talking to you right now is a vision and a prayer that came to me 12 years ago. 12 years ago I started following a Native American spiritual path and we have a bunch of different ceremonies, sweat lodge and vision quest and one of the highest ceremonies that we have is called Sun Dance and Sun Dance, we go out to south Dakota to the Rosebud reservation at Chief Leonard Crowdog’s land.

12 years ago I went out there for the first time and it was really, I grew up without ever experiencing and knowing what a real man was and I went out there and for the first time, I got to see what a real man was and I saw these physical warrior man who were out doing this very physical, intense ceremony and then they would be out there for the entire day then I would see them come back and hold their children and just be completely present and love their children and I would see them reflect on an elder who may have passed and watched them cry in front of the entire community without any shame or anything.

So that was one of the — like it was the first time I got to see what a fully evolved man really expressing himself from his heart and just living from that place. The piece that I really wanted to share — so this was at a point of my life where it was like, the coming out of the dark night of the soul and doing a lot of work and really dedicating my entire life to that path. Throughout my time on that path, there’s been a few times where you get those clear, clear messages from god.

I don’t remember what day it was on but we had been there for a while and we were deep into the ceremony and I was walking back from — I was watching the ceremony and then walking back to our camp and all of a sudden I got this quiet whisper that said, “Continue to follow this path and then do the works of the likes of Marianne Williamson.” I hadn’t even known who you were, I must have heard your name somewhere prior to that.

So now 12 years later — and I walked with that. So I followed that path for the last 11 years and then over the last year, that’s really how this podcast has come to life, it’s just been that second half of it and talking to amazing like yourself and yeah. I’m still, that second piece is still unfolding but I just want to say thank you. Here we are today talking to you.

[0:03:47.6] MW: I guess with all that concentration on knowing what a real man is, something came up in you that said, “Now know what a real woman is.” Enough of “a man is this and a man is that and a man is this, okay, a woman is this and a woman is that”. Thank you, I’m honored to hear that story.

[0:04:06.7] KC: It was beautiful and now it’s sort of a, while we’re talking it’s with your book, Tears to Triumph and for me, I had read A Return to Love and I sort of poked at a bunch of different times over the last 10 years A Course in Miracles and yeah, it still calls me a little bit here and there but the book that you just wrote spoke to me in a way that it’s just something that hit me so powerful and it was just the simplicity of the message in it, of the beauty and the blessing in hitting rock bottom or in getting to those points that we have no choice but to turn to god, but to ask for help and drop to our knees and pray.

That’s the blessing because that’s where that, if I’m interpreting it correctly, that’s sort of the deeper message that is in the book, is that right? That that’s what the blessing is?

[0:05:10.0] MW: Yes, absolutely and you spoke it very eloquently, thank you. That is exactly what the book is about, the fact that we need to give ourselves permission to go to that place. Because it’s just like when they talk about bottoming out in the 12 steps, you have to get to the bottom before you’re ready to face the things that need to be faced in order to get back up to the top.

That’s true, in a lot of situations in our lives where we sabotage ourselves by undercutting our ability to cry as many tears as we really have. Sometimes if you have 45 tears to cry, if a situation is very sad, you lost someone you love, you went through a heartbreak, a bitter divorce, financial ruin, professional failure, these things are very sad and yet it’s in the sadness that often we learn the lessons that we need to learn, we reflect on the things we need to reflect on.

What was our part in the breakup with the relationship? What was our part in the professional failure, what was our part in mismanaging our money or whatever? So that we have to atone for our own mistakes and of course often forgiving other people for their, even when it’s something like the grief we feel over the loss of a loved one, well, what we get from that one is a visceral understanding that this mortal life does not go on forever. So suck the juice out of it while you have it and love the people who are here.

So we infantilize ourselves, we stunt our growth, you were talking earlier your story about “this is what a man looks like”, you want American men, we didn’t know, we have a crisis of adulthood in our society and that crisis of adulthood, there are too many men who don’t really understand what it is to be a man and there are too many women who don’t understand what it is to be a woman who are still stuck in this infantilized construct of boys and girls and one of the things you talked about in your story was how you saw these men who are these powerful warriors one day.

Then reflecting on the passage of an elder and crying and allowing themselves to have their emotions. I think whether it’s men or women, our society has turned into this story, we’ve taken this cheap yellow smiley face, lord it over everything, “Be happy, be happy.” Like you said about those Native American warriors, there are times when it was appropriate for them to be sad, that was part of the fullness of their manhood, it was part of the fullness of their strength.

Regardless of gender, I think that’s true all of us. There is a kind of prejudice in our society today against, not only against it but this medicalization of it, this medicalization of situational despair. So that people who are going through difficult experiences, yes. Experiences within the normal spectrum of human suffering are too often treated like and made to believe and even given pharmaceuticals for what is deemed a disease, a bitter divorce is painful but it’s not a mental illness and grieving a lost loved one is painful but it’s not a mental illness and falling on your face professional, losing money, all those things, these are painful but they’re not mental illnesses. Treating them like they are, turning it into a pharmaceutical issue I think is a very dysfunctional reaction for an individual and for a society.

[0:08:23.0] KC: Yeah and I think that for everybody listening and it would be great if you could elaborate on this. When I first started, let’s go back like 15 years now, I had started intense therapy and I was having all kinds of anxiety and depression and anxiety attacks and panic attacks and I was in my mind, it was hereditary because every one of my family experienced the same thing.

I’m so grateful I had an amazing therapist and she looked me in the eye and she said, that’s just something that you’ve been holding on to, that’s not something that’s hereditary, it’s thought patterns that you’ve been working with and had I not had a therapist that spoke truth into my life and then, she was great, we did all this work and then she actually kicked me out, told me, “You need to go find a spiritual path now because you can’t do it all mentally.”

But I feel like that was one of the things that you really dove in to in the book was the, I think that as a society, we actually believe that that’s the only solution that we have these — we’re diagnosed as clinically depressed or we have an anxiety disorder where it’s really, it’s not true.

[0:09:36.7] MW: Well, first of all, I so agree with you about your therapist, she was the greatest, absolutely, the fact that it was hereditary just means that the thought forms of one generation had been handed down to the next. We can’t just fight depression, we have to proactively create and cultivate happiness.

If you are holding onto yourself as a victim, you can’t be happy. If you are withholding forgiveness, you can’t be happy. If you are grasping for things outside yourself as the source of your happiness rather than love given and received, you can’t be happy. There are so many thoughts that dominate our culture that repudiate love and therefore repudiate our capacity to be happy that the depression and the anxiety is an inevitable result, the depression and the anxiety is simply a symptom of the fact that we are not using our minds the way that the mind was intended to be used. The way the mind was created to be used.

That’s why your therapist, everything you said is brilliant, you know? She said, “Now you have to move into what that area is,” and that is the spiritual journey where you work on shifting your self-perception, your self-identification from your worldly self to your spiritual self and from a sense that you were here as an isolated creature who just needs to get whatever you think would make you happy to a sense of your oneness with the universe here to serve the love that is common to us all.

That is the spiritual journey and like I talked about in the books, speaking of Buddha and speaking of the story of the Exodus and the old testament speaking of Jesus, all the great spiritual and religious transmissions speak to the reality of human suffering, that is a natural consequence of a world that has forgotten its heart, has forgotten its soul. Once again, if we just treat the pain of that — that is just trying to eradicate or suppress a symptom. We need to go to the causal route and that is to close the gap between the truth and our hearts and the experiences that we too often manufacture.

That is the only antidote, love is the only antidote to fear just as light is the only thing that casts out darkness. That means not only as I talk about in the book, not only our own individual issues but our societal issues. Who among us isn’t depressed about Orlando? Some of these things that are upsetting, like climate change. The modern psychotherapeutic tradition has emphasized and focused in on individual suffering and sometimes that obscures the most significant issues, we’re so focused on the trees, we don’t see the forest.

The forest is so many of the constructs in our society. For instance, Buddha said that the things of this world can only bring temporary happiness at best. Well we live in a society which argues that we need to decide what would make us happy and go for it. You can get this degree or whatever you can make your dreams happen, you can go out there and make it happen.

Well, the only problem with that is that any time this goal you have or this thing you think would make you happy is the material thing, something outside yourself, then even once you get it, so you spend all that time grasping and struggling to get it, then once you get it, the fairy dust will begin to rub off because it was a projection, it was ideology to everything that was the source of your happiness. So then the rest of the time you’re in despair over the fact that you’re not happy even having gotten the things that would make you happy.

So we have to rethink all this. If you have broken leg, you can’t just take morphine, you have to reset the leg. If we have psychic paint, psychic pain conveys a message just like physical pain does, we have to heed what the message is and with psychic pain, we can’t just numb it, we have to reset our thinking.

[0:13:47.9] KC: It’s so great, everything that you’re going through too is exactly what you talked about in the book and I feel like everybody listening, they’re going to go, they’re going to grab the book and I feel blessed. I found an amazing therapist and I found an amazing spiritual path and it gave me a foundation because to be honest, I’m going through a little one of those crisis in my life right now but with the foundation I have, it doesn’t feel like I’m free falling, it just feels like I’m processing.

[0:14:24.4] MW: Exactly, exactly. One of the things doing this work, going through the journey as a sacred context, as a spiritual crisis rather than some disease that you have or disorder that you have is that you do develop the attitudinal emotional musculature that enables you to endure that enables you to have patience with the process, that enables you to give yourself permission to go through it. That is what ultimately transforms it and enables you to emotionally transcend the pain.

[0:14:58.1] KC: So someone reads the book and they get it, right? But then their next question, so a hypothetical situation: one of our listeners reads the book, she gets it, her experience up to this point with either therapy or a spiritual path has really been maybe Yoga or something to that extent like a power yoga class where we find some relief. What would you recommend for somebody like that? What do you do next when you’re like, “Okay, I get this, this makes sense but I have no idea how to do this.”

[0:15:32.3] MW: Well, in today’s world, the great religious and spiritual traditions and meditative practices we’re all like living in a candy store, they’re everywhere. So no one in today’s modern world has an excuse for not — “I don’t know where to go to find a meditation class.” There’s transcendental meditation, there’s the workbook of A Course In Miracles, there’s Buddhism, there’s Kabala, there’s Christian meditation. Prayer and meditation, enough of us, most of us would be even thinking about this now. The issue isn’t that we don’t’ know our path, it’s that we kind of do but we haven’t been walking it.

People who don’t, anybody who just makes a little prayer in your heart, “Dear God I want to walk to you but I don’t know where to go or what to do,” books will fall at your feet just like you got that message, you got the message in your life, I got the messages in my life. As soon as we call to God and we ask, “How do I get closer to you?” The teachings will be there.

The second thing is like I write a chapter in the book on forgiveness, a chapter in the book on relationships. You might finish this book or any book like this and be convinced that I can’t be happy if I’m holding onto grievances, the course of miracle says, “You can have a grievance or you can have a miracle. You cannot have both.” Well I might know that, I might understand it if I withhold forgiveness on deflecting love and therefore deflecting my own happiness. Now I have to sit down and think about all the people I’m withholding forgiveness from.” And then you say, “Dear God, I am willing to see this differently.”

Sometimes it’s difficult if you give somebody if they’ve ‘really hurt us but when we express to god even a little willingness, “I am willing to see this differently. I am willing to see where they at least try to get it right or the times that they got it right.” Or with the Course of Miracles teaches is, if I accord reality to the thing you did to hurt me, then it will be inevitable that I experience myself at the effect of what you did to hurt me. Really, it’s a self-organizing universe, anything you did to me, the universe is already set to correct it but if I hold on to bitterness and blame, I am delaying the time it will take for me to heal.

So after you read this principles in this book or where ever you read them, then the issue is to sit down and the holy spirit of god, whatever name you call it will guide you in the process and you will see things that maybe you did not even want to look at. Once you do look at them and expand your consciousness, “Yup, this is where I made a mistake, this is where I need to atone, this is where I was responsible, this is where I need to practice mercy, this is where I need to let go of the past.” All those actions, they’re literally mental actions, spiritual actions that we take in our minds, create breakthroughs and opens up possibilities that would not otherwise exist.

[0:18:29.2] KC: With a lot of that, I think there can be a lot of fear around it and I know that I’m using my words here but I know that you speak to the same principle that God’s not going to give you more than you can handle at any given time. Is that something that you agree with? So a lot of people don’t want to go there because we don’t think we can handle it, right?

[0:18:52.1] MW: Well I don’t even know what that means. When you think of most of the things that make us suffer, most of the things were not God’s doing. They were our doing or somebody else’s doing. Sometimes of course is the death of a loved one, but when you look at relationship breakdown, professional failure and so forth, it’s not that — God didn’t give this to you, you messed up or somebody, “What are we talking about here? God won’t give you?” You know what I’m saying? It’s like, “Let’s be clear about what’s our responsibility.”

It’s like, “How does God lets children starve?” God doesn’t let children starve, we let children starve. And, “I’m afraid to go there,” that’s just kind of immature language, we need to just move beyond all that. You have two choices in life. You can either take on the sharp pain of a genuine path of self-actualization and self-discovery or you can live with this dull lake that just is in the background and you live with for the rest of your life, that’s what you should be afraid of.

People say to me, “Oh well people are afraid of change.” What I’m afraid of is not changing. What we should be afraid of is stay stuck in our neurotic pattern. So when people say, “I’m afraid to go there,” where you should be afraid to go, is into the place where you’ve been living already, that’s what we should be afraid of.

[0:20:05.3] KC: I love that we should be afraid to go where we’ve already been going.

[0:20:08.9] MW: How’s it working out for you?

[0:20:12.6] KC: It’s also like, on different levels, there’s a constant sharpening of the wheel and constant realigning because we do go back to those comfort places over and over and it’s just realigning, realigning, realigning. That’s again, something that you eluded to in this new book, that’s what our emotional system is, it’s that notification that it’s time to realign and time to get back into the heart.

[0:20:43.0] MW: Exactly, that’s why the psychic pain is there. Just like physical pain, it’s conveying a message and we need to heed it. Human despair didn’t just begin. That’s the arrogance of the modern mind that we’ve discovered a disease. No actually, go back few thousand years and there were philosophers talking about it.

Humanity would not have evolved over thousands of years without being imbued with the capacity both psychically and physically, to take a hit. You have an immune system in your body that allows you to absorb quite a large amount of injury and disease. Psychically where we’ve got an immune system as well, that’s what grief is, we can absorb a lot, we can absorb the death of loved ones, we can absorb the presence of disappointment.

Otherwise, humanity would not have survived if people didn’t have survival mechanisms both psychologically and emotionally as well as physically. Look at what people have endured and kept on keeping on. That was not just physical strength but psychological strength and emotional strength and spiritual strength.We endure things a fraction of what certain people in history have endured, we’re calling it a disease, they call it a reason to pitch a tent somewhere else. I mean it’s just unbelievable.

You know, this will not serve us to be so soft. Like you have a disorder, you have a disease. I’m not being glib about mental suffering. It’s important not to minimize mental disease like bipolar or schizophrenia, but many of the things that today are just within the spectrum of normal human despair. Doctors hear about it, you had a rough patch, the doctor throws a prescription in your hands. Some people are taking anti-depressants like candy. This is making pharmaceutical industry, well by the year 2020, it’s going to be a trillion dollar industry.

But when you think about it, the idea of treating the symptoms of deep suffering when that suffering does emerge from the normal spectrum of human suffering, it’s not a functional reaction. The FDA warns, for people 25 years old and younger, anti-depressant use actually increases rather than decreases suicidal ideation. So this has been particularly disturbing when I think about it because the 20’s are hard.

Who among us hasn’t had, you know, you had your first failure, your first heartbreak, all that stuff, the 20’s are hard but they’re not a mental illness. All this people in their 20’s being put on pharmaceuticals and by the way, told to expect to be on them for the rest of their life. This is a very loud ringing bell and flashing red light in my mind.

[0:23:32.1] KC: So elaborating on the topics and the points that you brought up in the book. I feel like one of the things that you as an empowered woman, as someone that’s standing up saying — you’re standing up for what you believe in but I feel like there’s also a call to action for anyone else who, like you may have your stuff together, now it’s time to bring yourself out into the world and start helping the world. I felt like that in this book, you had more of a call to action to that as well.

[0:24:04.9] MW: I don’t think that any of us can ever know that we will not have a dark night of the soul again. You don’t evolved beyond them, things happen in life and I, a couple of years ago, went through something quite devastating in my life. This is not about “now I have it all together and I never have a sad day, I want to help people who do”. That’s not where I’m coming from at all, it’s rather the realization that we all have sad days and that one of the ways we can live in a way that minimizes how many sad days we have as well as helps us to endure and transform the sad days we have is being therefore each other.

A lot of the depression that people feel is from isolation and from loneliness and from solitude because we are not trained in the ways to reach beyond the barriers that we ourselves construct in front of our hearts. That’s what a spiritual journey gives you. Once you embrace the idea that your primary function on this earth to be a vessel of love then you live from a different attitudinal place, you stand on different attitudinal ground.

By definition, you attract people because people feel good in your presence. People want to work with you, people love you, these kids who come out of college right and they want to have these fantastic resumes and degrees and all that, which is fantastic. One day you realize that ultimately, people are not going to hire you because of your resume, because there’s always going to be someone who has as good a resume as you do. They’re going to hire you because they like you.

That added personal element and if you don’t know how to cultivate human relationships, you’re going to have a difficult time being happy in life. You might achieve the house and you achieve the money and you achieve all that. If you don’t know how to build good human relationships, if you don’t know how to forgive, if you don’t know how to lighten up, if you don’t know how to live in the present, if you don’t’ know how to be available to people, if you don’t know how to be standing in any given moment, to the best of your ability, a place of a greater availability to love, you will not be happy. That is the proactive cultivation of happiness without which depression is just an inevitable result.

[0:26:25.9] KC: So taking a little bit of turn, how does, with your writing process, what is your writing process look like? Is this an idea that it’s there and nobody else is out there saying it and that’s when you put it on paper? How does your process work when you actually go to write a book?

[0:26:46.3] MW: Well I think of it in terms of pregnancy. I’m pregnant with a book, I’m pregnant with something I want to say it lives inside you, it gestates within you and then when it’s time to become manifest, when it’s time to be born, you go into labor and labor is difficult, it’s hard to write a book.

I can’t even imagine trying to figure out if other people have said it because that will just drive you nuts and when it comes to the most important things to say in life, of course there’s somebody else who is saying it. They’re saying it in their way and they’re saying it through the lens of their experience. They’re saying it through the perspective of their own expertise.

You know, this issue of pushing back against this pharmaceuticalization of the American mind, this is happening, Kelly Brogan who is a psychiatrist, other books, so people are speaking at it from a medical perspective, I’m speaking out of the spiritual perspective. A lot of people are beginning to push back. We can’t have too many voices out there saying, “Hey, what is going on? We have a psychotherapeutic pharmacological industrial complex that is making a profit center out of human despair.”

And people have told me stories about not only some really horror stories about their experiences there but also people have told me, since reading the book, people have talked about how yes, that was my experience too, the year of my divorce although it was very difficult, I now see it as having been very, very important and I have a much better life now because of it.

I do want to say Keith though, that if anybody is listening to your podcast and is on anti-depressants, the last thing anybody should do who is on them is just go throw them in the trash. If anybody’s even considering getting off them, that must be done under medical supervision, that’s extremely important.

[0:28:31.9] KC: So you have the idea, then what is the actual — how does it formulate into a book? What is the nitty gritty look like, because it starts with a rough idea inside you, right?

[0:28:43.4] MW: You just start writing. You just start writing, and as Hemingway said, “When the pencil stops,” — What does it say? “When the story stops writing itself, put down your pencil.” You can feel when you’re in the flow of something. When I know that I’m not in the flow of something and it would be forced, I try not to write right then. And then other times, it’s just gushing out of you. But there’s no point in having any romance around writing a book, it’s hard. We idealize, “Oh I want to write a book.” Then just sit down at your computer or your yellow legal pad and start writing.

[0:29:18.7] KC: A couple of quick questions that some of our listeners had asked and I was wondering if I could fire those at you and if we can talk about where to find the book and a little bit about the live stream and everything else you have going on.

[0:29:34.3] MW: Thank you.

[0:29:36.8] KC: So do you have a process or a go to thing to center yourself? If you get in a situation and your mind starts going a little kooky and you just need to get yourself centered and get yourself in that love and heart space and operate from there. Do you have a process on how you do that?

[0:29:55.4] MW: Well, the point is, to prepare yourself every day so that you don’t get so close to that cliff. If you wake up in the morning and you go directly to the computer or to radio or TV and immediately download when your mind is most open in the morning, if you immediately download the barrage of meaningless information that’s bombarding all of us all the time then don’t be surprised that you’ll be in that crazy place that you just described, probably before noon. And then you can ask, “How do I get myself out of this crazy place?” We all really need to mature beyond that conversation.

You take a shower in the morning because you don’t want to take yesterday’s dirt on your body and you meditate a brand in the morning so that you don’t take yesterday’s stress into the day. You say in your own way, to love, to god, your understanding, “Use me today. Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say and to whom?”

You blast the people that you know, you’re going to see today with love, you send your love before you, you send your love before you to the people you don’t even know you’re going to be with today, you sit with that for five minutes and you meditate. I personally, I’m a student of A Course in Miracles, I also do transcendental meditation. I’m not saying that if I do those things in the morning or if any of us do those things in the morning, we’re going to be an enlightened master throughout the day.

[0:31:17.8] KC: Yup.

[0:31:18.6] MW: At that point, most of us aren’t. It does drastically reduce the possibility, drastically. We’re going to really get close to the cliff today, send the email that we will regret for the rest of our lives, say something we will regret for years, send a text that ruins the relationship, throws a bomb on a situation or whatever. So just to say, “Oh, what’s a technique to do when I’m upset?” That’s a child’s conversation. It’s got to be, “How am I going to ground myself each and every day?”

Just like physical exercise, if you do it, it works. You never get to stop. You do physical exercise to hone and strengthen your physical muscles and you do spiritual exercise to hone and strengthen your attitudinal muscles so that you can be non-reactive. You exercise physically so you can move. I see this picture of you with your bike, you want to move, you spiritually, your musculature is, “I can remain calm through this. I can remain nonreactive through this”.

[0:31:18.6] KC: Is there you mentioned TM, do you do like 20 minutes in the afternoon as well?

[0:32:30.2] MW: With the A Course in Miracles, I make sure I do it every day. TM, I do not do every day religiously. TM calls for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes later in the day. I would say, three or four times a week.

[0:32:45.7] KC: Then do you have a wind down ritual or practice?

[0:32:50.1] MW: I think the main wind down is going over mentally the landscape of your day and asking how’d I do? Where could I have been better? Where could I have been more loving? Where did I display an aspect of my character that makes me cringe? Is there anybody I should write and write an apology to or where do I just have to atone in my mind, I was on a panel not too long ago and I think I got nervous and I talked too much and I think I talked too loud, you know?

I think I embarrassed myself a little bit and there’s no one I can call and apologize to. The apology belongs to myself. But I have atoned in my heart and really spent some time thinking about it and there is one thing I know I wanted to be really present in the room and hear the other panels and someone had said, “Come out and talk to me.”

And I should have stayed with my knowing that I needed to get myself into sort of alignment on the same frequency with the room and I didn’t. You know, I had to think about that and I know that that will serve me in good stay because next time something like that happens, I’m pretty confident I’ll do better but I needed that ouch, cringe.

[0:34:02.0] KC: I love how real you are.

[0:34:03.9] MW: Well I think it’s the only way to be with each other. I think that’s how we learn from each other. I think honesty with ourselves and with others, it’s how all of us learn.

[0:34:14.1] KC: So one final question and this is a question that I wanted to ask specifically for our audience because it’s — this is something that I see a lot of people struggle with and it’s people that are sort of caught up in one of two patterns and the patterns are that it’s been 10 years of trying out different spiritual practices and never committing to follow through with something and kind of scratching the surface with each one or people that just — they’re jumping, they’re like the seminar junkies where they’re spending all this money and they’re never — so in both situations, they’re kind of scratching the surface with things from the way that I see it, and I was wondering if you could just share what your thoughts are on that about finding something and committing to it. Again, not with chains but really having that spiritual fortitude and discipline?

[0:35:14.1] MW: The word discipline and the word disciple come from the same root. When you make yourself a disciple, when you make yourself a servant of God in your mind, whatever your language is, that this is about you being in service to love and that becomes your mental construct then that attitude of discipleship gives you discipline.

Until then you will hang out on the periphery as long as you want to hang out on the periphery, it’s not for me to judge that. I remember once many years ago, I was very, very sad and some friends of mine was having a family meeting, “What are we going to do so Marianne will feel better?” I had a friend named Jim and Jim was very silent throughout the meeting.

It’s not a meeting that was called but it was a gathering, a few of us were sitting while I’m talking and Jim was quiet and at the end, finally he chimed up and he said something that totally was a brick to my forehead, this is what he said, “I think Marianne will get happier again when she decides to be happier again.” That means when I would do the work to make myself happy. Someone in my life once said to me, “Marianne, you’re very hard on yourself but the reason you’re so hard on yourself is because you’re so easy on yourself.” I’ve never forgotten that.

We’re very self-indulgent sometimes, the Course of Miracle says to you, far too tolerant of mind wondering. The mind finds it very convenient to monitor other people’s process but we need to monitor our own. Who am I not forgiving, where am I not showing up? Am I the employer? Am I the employee, I should be, am I the lover? I should be, am I the husband or the wife that I should be? Am I the friend that I should be? The child of the parent that I should be? Am I the parent I should be? Am I the citizen I should be?

There’s a lot to work on in our own lives. We get what we put out, it’s a law of cause and effect. You write whatever situation you rise to the occasion, miracles happen. Any situation where you slack off with any of this stuff, you get back the effects of that. So at this point, a lot of us have read the books, a lot of us have listened to the same tapes and I think my work is about, “Okay guys, the era of data collection is over.”

I always say, “My life works pretty well when I practice what I preach.” At a certain point it’s not enough to know the principles, we need to, to the best of our ability, embody them, practice them and not spend our time deciding whether or not other people are doing it the way we think they should. But just doing the best we can and asking for God’s help in doing so.

[0:37:59.6] KC: So I want to thank you and I also want to direct people to a few different things. Your website is Marianne.com right?

[0:38:09.0] MW: Right.

[0:38:10.9] KC: One of the things that I recently started doing when I have the time, I don’t know if I mentioned this to you or not? I have four kids under six, it’s a little crazy in my house. But when I have the time, so it’s sort of every other week or I’ll catch the recording, I’ve been watching your live streams from New York, in the church and they’re powerful and to me it’s almost like sitting here like this.

I love listening to somebody when they’re in their environment and they’re not getting interviewed by the big news channel or something like that where it’s like this candy glazed cookie cutter type things. That’s what that is, it’s an opportunity for people to get more doses of you and you’re always talking about what’s going on in the world at the current time. I’ll sort of stop there, is that a good description of the live streams?

[0:39:08.5] MW: Well yes, first of all, thank you for your comments. Sometimes, as in this last week after the Orlando shootings, definitely it was about a worldly event but sometimes it’s about forgiveness or relationships or something that is not a worldly event but is an internal issue. Because ultimately on the spiritual path, there’s no difference between the two. The Course of Miracles says, “Ultimately you realize there is nothing outside yourself.”

So yes, it makes me happy the live streams and also knowing that you’re participating in something with people all over the world. There really is a global mind and we have such an ascension of darkness on the planet that anything that we can do to be part of the revolution of love, of consciousness, of forgiveness, of mercy, of light is something I think rather desperately needed in the world today. So there’s live streams and they’re free. People can just go on to Marianne.com and register and see it. The link remains there for 72 hours.

[0:40:11.3] KC: Awesome, then so that’s on your website, you book is also on the website, Tears to Triumph. It’s also on Amazon now as well right?

[0:40:21.7] MW: Right, Amazon.com, and yes.

[0:40:24.8] KC: Thank you so much Marianne and thank you from my heart to yours, this book really spoke to me and it really, it just spoke to a huge need for, it’s not candy coated, it’s the real deal, this is what’s going on and if you’re looking to move from fear and rosy and everything else into freedom and love then that’s sort of my endorsement for the book, that’s what this is, it’s a direction and a roadmap to that and then we have to do the work.

[0:40:56.9] MW: Well, I’m honored by your words Keith and I really thank you and I wish you the very best with your work and with your fatherhood, oh my goodness! Thank you very much for having me on and I appreciate the conversation.

[0:41:10.2] KC: Thank you.

[0:41:11.5] MW: All my best to you, thank you sir.

[FINAL MESSAGE]

[0:41:13.2] KC: Hey, Keith here, and today I have a free gift for you. Listen this free gift is a list of the 12 most influential books that I’ve ever read. These are the books that have helped me to create the mindset, learn the philosophies, learn the skills to really create this big, beautiful, life that we’re living now.

I read a crazy amount of books, I really do. I’ve probably read thousands of books and these are the top 12 books that – they’re the ones that I go to, they’re the ones that I work with over, and over, and over again. They are highlighted, outlined, dog-eared. And I put this list together for you because I want it to be a shortcut.

I don’t want you to have to – you don’t have to go out and read the thousands and thousands of books. These are the 12 that I highly recommend. I have a detailed review for each book, explaining why I recommend them, why I like them, when I worked with them in my life, what part of my life they helped me to improve.

So I put this together for you, and made it super each for you to get this list. All you have to do is send a text to the number 33444 and then in the body of that text, type in “12books” with no space. So that’s the number “12books”. Again, send the text message to the number, address it to 33444 and then type in “12books” as the message and just send that. And that’ll get you setup to receive those top 12 most influential books that have had the biggest impact on my life.

[SPONSOR MESSAGE]

[00:43:16] KC: Today’s episode is brought to you by our sister podcast, All About Beachbody Coaching. So All About Beachbody Coaching really allows us to do this podcast without having all those annoying commercials in the beginning for you. So All About Beachbody Coaching, the Beachbody business that Amy and I run, actually funds this podcast.

So yes, it does cost money to run this podcast, we do not charge you anything, we don’t throw in commercials or anything like that, it really is, it’s funded by our business and by our other podcast, All About Beachbody Coaching. And for me, I’m just eternally grateful for this opportunity because it’s allowed me to really create the life that I love to live.

It’s given me the opportunity to do what I want, when I want, with who I want, and even deeper than that, it’s allowed me to help others to create the same for themselves. It’s allowed me to help hundreds of other people become part time or full time Beachbody coaches, to leave that corporate 9 to 5 job and create passive income in their lives.

And really there’s nothing like that. It’s cool when you have success, it’s so much more rewarding when you help others. So I mention this or a few reasons, the first reason is, that’s actually the way that I work with people and mentor people. I don’t do anything outside of Beachbody coaching because I know that it’s such a powerful life changing tool.

So if you’re curious about working with me, interested in working one-on-one, interested in creating the type of life that you wanna live, I suggest swinging over there. The other reason is, even if somebody’s just curious, like you’ve heard about Beachbody, you know there’s a lot of Beachbody coaches out there. Maybe some of them you get a little annoyed with.

It really dives into what this business is really about, which is life transformation. So if you’re just curious, swing over there. And then the other piece is, if you’re really considering becoming a Beachbody coach, I highly, highly recommend you listen to that first.

Alright, much love guys. Again, that is the All About Beachbody Coaching Podcast, our sister podcast.

[00:45:43] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Business of Life Podcast. Apply what you learn today and you’ll be one step closer to creating the life you love to live.

[END]

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