Broken bonds and other insights from Marianne Williamson

Where there is love, there is happiness.

But where the bonds of love are broken, there is pain.

* * * *

A spiritual perspective does not deny your pain, or any aspect of your human experience. It simply denies its power over you. It gives you the strength to endure when the tears are falling, and the power to invoke miracles that lie beyond.

* * * *

Sometimes it’s when we feel that all hope is lost that a better life begins to emerge. Our hearts crack open, and then our minds crack open. It’s when the ego says, “It’s all over,” that God says, “Now we can begin.”

* * * *

Difficult emotions are at times appropriate; they can be exactly what we need to experience in order to truly heal, grow, and get to the other side of our suffering with meaningful lessons learned.

* * * *

Seen through a spiritual lens, depression is the inevitable result of seeing ourselves as separate from the rest of the universe. It is a crisis of the soul.

* * * *

An overexternalized worldview separates us from our souls, thus causing us to suffer; and only by reclaiming our souls can we end our suffering.

* * * *

Learning from our sadness can bear great fruit, and avoiding it can have hidden costs. Our choice is between feeling the sharp pains of self-discovery or enduring the dull ache of unconsciousness that will last for the rest of our lives. Suppressing our pain isn’t ending our pain; it’s simply displacing it.

* * * *

Everyone is on a spiritual journey; most people just don’t know it. Spirituality refers not to some theological dynamic outside ourselves, but to how we choose to use our minds. The spiritual path is the path of the heart; at every moment, we’re either walking the path of love and creating happiness, or swerving from it and creating suffering. Every thought we think leads deeper into love or deeper into fear.

* * * *

One thing the ego will never suggest is that love is always the answer, because love is the ego’s dissolution and it knows it. It feeds on lovelessness for its survival, yet its survival is our destruction.

* * * *

The ego views forgiveness as weakness and attack as strength. But love is not weakness; it is the power of God. The problem isn’t whether or not love works miracles; the problem is how much we resist love.

Marianne Williamson