But Are You Thriving? Episode 8 Recap: Living the Life You’re Meant For With Marianne Williamson 

When Marianne Williamson talks about “centering yourself in spirit,” it feels like the cornerstone of her various avenues of work. The author, speaker, and political candidate approaches each of her endeavors from a place of promoting peace and finding purpose, something that we can all find value in. 

In this episode of “But Are You Thriving?”, Thrive Market co-founder Gunnar Lovelace talks to Williamson about grounding yourself in an ever-changing world, balancing the nervous system through daily meditation, and Williamson’s unique take on spirituality that fuses a few different modalities. Their conversation is full of hope and optimism, as well as a closer look at one of the country’s next presidential candidates. 

Full transcription below. Subscribe, download, and listen to this and every episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

But Are You Thriving? | Episode 8: Living the Life You’re Meant For With Marianne Williamson 

GL: Hello everybody. My name is Gunnar Lovelace. I’m the co-host of But Are You Thriving and one of the co-founders of Thrive Market. It is such an honor and pleasure here to have Marianne Williamson, bestselling author, political activist, and spiritual thought leader, with so many other adjectives that I could say about her incredible life. I’m so grateful to be here with you, Marianne.

MW: Oh, I’m always grateful to be with you and talk to you, so thank you for having me.

GL: Yeah, I’ve been such a beneficiary of your work through my life. And for those of our audience who don’t know you, since it’s grown so much since the last time we shared some content with them years ago, I just wanted to ask you, what would you want listeners to know about you and your work these days? What would feel relevant to you?

MW: That’s so interesting the way you language the question. I never think in terms of what I would want people to know. I always say I’m never trying to get a message out. I’m trying to get a message in. I try to disconnect from what I think other people want to hear or what I want them to know. I just think in terms of what I might say that would contribute in some way. I think that we’re having a podcast about how to thrive. I think that we’re living at a time when the only conversation of value … Martin Luther King said, “Your life begins to end on the day you stop talking about things that matter most.”

So I would just hope that we talk about things that matter most. And I think that if the listener … I once went to a retreat led by Catholic nuns. And at the end of the retreat, the sister said, “I want to thank all of you for participating. Both those of you who participated verbally and those of you who participated silently.” So I think of this conversation as something we’re having with the so-called audience, the listener. We’re all participating verbally or silently, and I just hope we get to talk and think and listen to things that matter most.

GL: Beautiful. I really appreciate that frame. And maybe it’s just because I’m really stubborn, but I find that the greatest learnings of my life have come through the periods of intense suffering, whether it’s confronting my fears or survival trauma or sexual abuse or things that happened to me in my life. And I’m curious for you what you feel like were critical moments in your life journey, that there was specific points that really caused you to really awaken to your potential?

MW: Well, and A Course in Miracles, it says, “It’s not up to you what you learn. It’s merely up to you whether you learn through joy or through pain.” So like you and I assume most people, I have probably learned mainly through pain. But I don’t want to glorify that because I think it’s important to realize that I didn’t have to. I could have chosen wisely and if I had known how to, I would have. So I think we learn as much through joy as we learn through pain, because when we’re learning through joy, we’re learning from doing it right. So my moments of greatest joy I think have taught me as much as my moments of greatest pain. Moments when I’ve been in love, moments when I had my child.

We sometimes underestimate the value of living righteously. Right use. Righteous means right use. There’s a quiet joy that comes from living a life that works. Saying the things, thinking the things, behaving in a way that contributes to harmony, makes people want to work with you, be with you. Makes situations just fall in place. That brings a peace and a quiet joy that is not adrenaline based, but I think it’s the greatest teaching because it’s exercising the muscles of right living what Buddha called right living. And the more you exercise those muscles, the more your life unfolds accordingly. Like everybody else, I’ve had the disasters in my life and I have lived long enough to realize that the vast majority of my disasters were created by me.

I used to think of my life as something in which I was just thrown against the rocks, these big cliffs and these big rocks, and the wind was just pushing me against the rocks all the time. Why was this always happening? And I came to understand you were the wind. You were the one who made that decision without peripheral reflection and so did something stupid. You were the one who didn’t have control of your emotions in that situation. You were the one who just didn’t behave wisely. So those were the situations in which I crashed and burned. The form that they took were the same as there were garden variety, relationships that crashed and burned, professional opportunities that crashed and burned. But what matters is not the form of the crash. What matters is what led to them. Where was I out of my center? Where was I not there for the right reason? Where was I not centered in love? Where was I indulging my own character defects? Where was I not forgiving other people for theirs?

So I think that once again, you learn from those situations because you were motivated to get it right once you’ve hurt yourself enough getting it wrong. But I also love the idea that we can learn through joy and from getting it right. And you go to sleep at night thinking it wasn’t so bad today. I did okay. That’s an important learning as well.

GL: Yeah, I really appreciate that frame as well. And it definitely is something that I aspire more and more to have a more gentle, graceful learning process that isn’t informed by suffering. And when I look back at my own life where I’ve had the greatest suffering and challenges, they were immediately preceded by thinking I knew what was going on and the rigidity that comes from that where I’m not listening to the messages that I’m getting and then the collision course that happens in those dynamics.

MW: Well, that’s it right there, isn’t it? A Course in Miracles says that the ego speaks first and the ego speaks loudest. I can look at every big mistake I’ve made in my life. And like you just said, at the time, I thought it was a good idea. At the time I thought I really had it going on. I knew what I was doing. Well, obviously not. And living in today’s world, if you’re not practicing meditation, if you’re not praying about your decisions, then you are very likely to make a mistake that you look at in retrospect and say, “What was I thinking?” But at the time, man, it seemed like a good idea at the time. There was a French philosopher named Blaise Pascal. And Blaise Pascal said, “Every problem in the world derives from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” And that’s why meditation in the morning matters, why prayerfulness matters, because we’re all spun out.

Modernity is an assault. We’re all being assaulted today. It’s in the ethers. Everybody’s spun out. Nobody has any impulse control. How many of us have spent hours, nights, months crying because of some stupid text we wrote? Something we said that we wish we hadn’t said? A decision that we make that we so regret? Look at all the people who’ve ruined their careers because of a tweet. So I think people are realizing that we’ve got to get back to the center of things. That’s what it means to get back to the garden, and find that gentle place that you were talking about. The ego mind would have us think there’s nothing there, but that’s where everything is that’s good and holy and beautiful.

GL: Yeah, that’s really beautiful. And it’s so funny because whenever I talk to you, I always have all these things that I want to ask you and then you just always have such piercing responses that I find I lose track of the things that I want to ask you, because the way you respond to the questions is so beautiful and piercing. One of the things that relates to what you were just sharing about the adrenalized lifestyle and you just think about how everything’s going faster all the time. And 20, 25 years ago, there weren’t even cell phones, so it just took a day or two to get back to people on a phone call.

And now, there’s an expectation that we’re on all the time. And not only we on all the time via text message, but we’re on all the time via 10 different platforms, whether it’s WhatsApp or Facebook or any of these scenarios. And I really feel like that piece of cultivating those rituals that bring us back to our center point is so essential. And Michael Pollen, in a book of his, he talks about how caffeine has radically changed human civilization and just those rituals that you’re speaking to. And I’m curious, I would imagine given how dynamic your life is, I wonder what are your rituals? How do you create a healthy life? What habits have you stuck with that have been a game changer for your spiritual and physical health?

MW: Well, first of all, I think it’s significant that people have come to realize what you’re talking about. People are realizing this whole thing is crazy now. Somebody has your cell phone, it’s like they own you. And people, places, let’s say a hotel or some destination point, used to brag about the fact that you can be on the grid if you come here. Today, those same places brag that you will be off the grid if you come here. People do understand that we’re killing ourselves, that our adrenals are shot, that our nervous systems are shot and that these things are addictive, particularly the social media. So the good thing about that is that … The good news about the bad news is I think people are beginning to realize a lot of that. But I think you can’t just do a ritual here or a ritual there in order to fix it. There has to be fundamental change.

And fundamental change for me begins, as is emphasized in every great religious and spiritual  system that I know of, in the morning, because when you wake up in the morning is when your mind is most open to new impressions. So if you wake up in the morning and you go directly to Twitter or Snapchat or WhatsApp or whatever it is, you’re just downloading the stress of the world. And then there’s no mystery while you’re depressed by noon. So if you begin in the morning, that’s the most important thing to me. But once again, I don’t think of it as a ritual, because I like to think of it as a foundation of my life that day. For me, it’s the workbook of A Course In Miracles. It doesn’t matter the particular form that your meditation or prayer or yoga, whatever it is takes.

But grounding your nervous system in the piece that is not of this world, in those beginning hours or even those beginning minutes, makes so much difference. If you do that, there’s a line in A Course in Miracles where it says, “Five minutes in the morning spent with the Holy Spirit will guarantee that he will be in charge of your thought forms throughout the day.” We wake up, we take a shower, we take a bath because you don’t want to take yesterday’s dirt on your body into the day.

But if you don’t meditate, pray, do whatever it is to center yourself in spirit in the morning, then no matter what’s going on your physical skin, within yourself, you’re carrying the stress of yesterday into today and today’s world. You’re not only carrying your stress, you’re carrying the stress of everybody who’s in Colorado Springs. Everybody’s in Chesapeake, Virginia where there were mass shootings. We’re just a bundle of nerves. We’re a bundle of chaos. So you have to counter that. So it’s ritual, but it’s something beyond ritual. It’s a conversion. It’s an emotional and psychological conversion. Otherwise, this world and the chaos of the world today will eat you alive. And there are many people suffering in ways that prove that this is true.

GL: Yeah, it’s so interesting because I just love the simplicity and power of that. How can we thrive in life if our nervous systems aren’t regulated, if we’re constantly in a fight or flight cortisol response cycle of survival trauma or fight. And I know that I still find myself compulsively looking at the news earlier in the morning, for example. And it’s just such a… Just in this moment I’m going to recommit to extricating that pattern and just really creating more space for my nervous system.

MW: The word disciple and the word discipline come from the same root. You discipline your attitudinal muscles just like you discipline your physical muscles. So, you do yoga or you do weight training in order to develop your muscles, in order to create anti-gravity because if you’re not working at keeping the muscles up, they’re headed down, and so that you can move powerfully in the world. Spiritual exercise is the exact flip of that. You were developing the muscles and the musculature of stillness and non-reactivity in order to develop emotional and psychological anti-gravity because the gravity of this world will pull you into anger, and cynicism, and despair, and victimization, and all of those things. So, you have to do the work, just like you go to the gym. You go into that sacred space. You just discipline yourself. If I look at that, if I go to the newspaper, if I go to the computer, if I go to all of that first thing in the morning, it’s going to be harder. It’s going to be harder to get back  onto the spiritual wagon.

And I think that that kind of thing, that spiritual work is much like our changes with food, our changes with any other aspect of lifestyle. You lean into it. You don’t just tell yourself, “I’m going to make this radical change right away.” We all know now that that’s just setting yourself up for failure. But we can start to lean in to a more righteous way of living. Righteous means right use, right use of the mind. Buddha talked about right mind, right speech, right action. And the world in which we live is dominated by a consciousness of wrong action, and wrong speech, and wrong thought. Wrong minded means non loving. We’re living in a world where love is not first, where profits are first, corporate profits are first, huge behemoth industries and their profits are first, and it has turned everything into a commodity. It’s turned everyone into a consumer.

And then, what concerns me is then, the fact that people are so anxious and depressed, living in this insanity makes them think something’s wrong with them. I have an anxiety disorder. No, no, no, no, no, no. The world you live in is insane. Sometimes, the fact that we’re upset is not a dysfunctional response. It’s a functional response. I’ve been saying for a long time, if you look at the world in which it now exists for so many billions of people and you are not depressed, what is wrong with you?

When you have a broken leg, your brain produces pain for a reason. The physical pain is a sign from the brain something’s wrong. You need that signal. If something’s wrong in your body, you feel pain. It’s a functional pain. The pain is a sign. Go to the doctor, repair that, reset the leg. So much of the psychic pain of the age in which we’re living is functional. It’s the brain saying, “Something’s really wrong. You’ve got to change the world.” Somebody was saying, I was reading about the latest mass shooting. This week, we had two major mass shootings. And they said, “Well, we have these mental health issues.” That’s a slippery thing. The system says it’s a mental health issue. No, the system is the mental health issue. And the fact that it produces this level of insanity among so many people doesn’t speak to the problem within the person. It speaks to the problem within the society that produces that kind of suffering, pain and suffering in so many people, which takes such perverted form.

GL: Yeah, there’s so much in what you just said, and I think the whole construct, just look at even the construct of the American dream and the nuclear family, the nuclear family is a marketing construct that was invented to break up large families so we could sell more product, so companies could sell more product. And just as you’re saying, the simplicity and the power of cultivating the commitment of working that spiritual muscle, it actually doesn’t even take that much time in the morning, for example, to set that table. But it really is that commitment to just work that muscle, to develop that muscle, to be honest with ourselves, to really cultivate the garden of our consciousness.

And I’ve heard you speak live many times, and one of the talks that I heard you give at one point was to a younger audience. And you were advocating in that talk about taking less depression medication. And instead of numbing ourselves, leaning into the feelings that we feel and actually using that feeling as fuel for our lives. And that has stuck with me over the decades since I heard it. And I would just love for you to share a little bit more about that for our audience.

MW: The 20s are a very difficult decade. They’re very hard. They are not a mental illness. That’s when you have your first heartbreak. That’s when you’re trying to individually figure out who you are. Who had an easy time in their 20s? But that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. You were talking about the idea that the nuclear family became an idea that was just there as a construct by which to sell. That’s what the system does. There is a mental health industrial complex in our society today. It is an $11 billion industry. Now, it’s like pain medication. Is it good that pain medication exists? Oh, absolutely, it’s good, if you’ve had surgery and so forth. I’ve had surgery, and thank God that I had those pain meds. However, we are very aware now that predatory pharmaceutical executives created a profit center where it was not necessary and led to tragedy among hundreds of thousands of people.

Why are we so naive not to recognize that they’ve done that now with antidepressants? I understand that there are psychotherapeutic, legitimate, valid, even very positive psychotherapeutic uses for psychotherapeutic drugs such as bipolar, schizophrenia, all kinds of things like that. But what has happened in the last few years is that they have made up this idea that they have some monopoly on the definition of “clinical depression.” Now, notice there’s no blood test for clinical depression. It means somebody in a clinic said it. Somebody will say, “Oh no, this is different. This is clinical depression.” Anytime somebody says that and they were prescribed antidepressants, it might be useful to ask, “Did somebody give you a blood test?” There’s no blood test. And if you say, “No, this is a chemical imbalance.” Your brain chemistry is different if you meditated. Your brain chemistry is different whether or not you ate sugar.

So, this is not to judge whether or not people are on antidepressants. I’m sure there are situations where it’s very valuable, but it’s very interesting what’s going on in the society, and I think somewhat tragic. There is a black box label on these drugs that actually say that suicidal ideation is increased among people 25 years old and younger. And whenever you ask any questions about this, they go, “You’re being irresponsible about mental health.” But the suicide rates have not gone down since this unbelievable over prescription. And the over prescription, it’s nothing radical to say that Americans are over prescribed pharmaceuticals anyway. I think it’s very concerning. And it’s so treated like so precious. Like, how dare you question my anxiety or my depression? I’m not questioning your anxiety or your depression. I’m just saying that we are anxious and depressed when we are not living the lives we are put on the earth to live.

And the society in which we live teaches us the opposite of our spiritual function. It tells us that we have to try to get ahead, tells us that we have to try to compete with one another. It tells us that we are separate from one another. All of those things lead us down a path. Spiritual health and mental health are the same thing because they have to do with the use of the mind. And also, they now admit, for a long time, they would not, but now, they do, that these things are addictive. I have known women, Gunnar, in their 40s who are trying to get off antidepressants, have a very, very difficult time doing it. They’re very difficult to get off of. And they can’t even remember. They can’t even remember why they were originally put on those drugs in their 20s.

Now, having settled that, this is a very important caveat, please. I don’t want to risk anybody listening to me talking about this and thinking I’m going to go throw my antidepressants in the waste basket. You can’t do that. That is dangerous. If you have been on them for a long time, you can’t just immediately go off because that can be very, very dangerous. If you have been on them and you have any question about it, you must wean yourself very, very carefully and under medical supervision. But this issue of, it’s like Krishnamurti’s line, “It is no sign of mental health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” The way we order our society is sick. There has been such a mass transfer of wealth over the last 45 years into the hands of 1% of people. The majority of people are living on some level of survival in the richest country in the world.

60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. And even people who are not living paycheck to paycheck are living in so often in a situation of if I don’t get it right, I could lose my job. And then, it’s all over. It’s insane. This is not a moment when we should be masking that pain or desensitizing ourselves. It’s a time when we should be facing what’s wrong in order to change it. I’ll give you an example. Sometimes, let’s say a woman gave birth to a child, and there are millions of years of evolution that have gone into every cell of her body knowing it is too soon for me to leave that baby. The baby needs to be on my skin, and I need to hold that baby in my arms. Millions of years of evolution based on cultivating all health, including the mental health of both mother and child, are involved in that woman’s internal knowing I’m not supposed to go back to work yet.

So, she goes to her therapist and she says, “I don’t want to go back to work yet. It’s too soon.” The therapist says, “Well, let’s give you something for your depression.” No, what’s wrong is that we don’t have paid family leave. But there is so much about the traditional psychotherapeutic model that has been a spectacular failure. That’s an example because it’s made everyone so self referenced that we think, oh, this is just my problem. No, it’s not just your problem. It’s a problem of millions of people like you who  are being completely, completely oppressed on a certain level by a social order that is putting its profits above your wellbeing and the wellbeing of your children. That’s not something to mask. That’s something to get together with other people who are similarly depressed and saying, “We’re depressed because something’s wrong in this world, and we’re going to change what’s wrong. And then, we will no longer feel so sad.”

GL: And I really appreciate you sharing the disclaimer caveat around not just throwing meds away, because —

MW: No, you must never do that. Never, ever do that. That is dangerous.

GL: Yeah. But the piece that really stuck out with me when I first heard you share that thought is just the ways that we numb ourselves from feeling. And I think we’re so incredible as a species, we’re so powerful, we’re so creative, we actually can feel so much, and we can create so much beauty when our hearts and our minds are aligned. And to your point, if we’re paying attention, and we allow ourselves to actually see what’s happening, and to feel what’s happening on the planet, that anger and those fears are really fuel to propel our lives, to improve our lives, and to be of service and a benefit. And I just so appreciated when I first heard that. Like everybody else, I love the idea of quickly managing and soothing myself. And as I heard that, I just recognize all the ways that I try to numb myself, whether it’s with substances or whether it’s with watching entertainment or whatever it is. And there’s nothing wrong with these things, they all have their place and in balance. But I just found that to be [00:28:30] such a salient point. And this whole question of feeling disenfranchised and maybe even enslaved by the system in certain ways. I was at this two day birthday party with some very, very wealthy humans a year ago. And two of the five wealthiest people on the planet were at this gathering.

And what was so striking to me was they were the most unhappy people I have ever interacted with in my life. They were so burdened by all the trappings and egoic expectations of themselves and the world that they were just so burdened by that. And it was actually an incredible new opportunity for me to have compassion because so often I’m like, “Oh, those that are exploiting and those that are manipulating and extracting resources.” But actually, what I saw in that interaction was that they themselves are often just trapped in very outmoded belief systems that lead them to think they need to lead the lives that they’re living.

MW: No, they’re not. No, they’re not trapped, they’re choosing it.

GL: Yeah. Well that’s a fair point.

MW: So we need to stop with the lack of accountability. When you look at people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Howard Schultz, I agree with what you were saying the first time. No, they’re not trapped, they’re choosing this. That doesn’t mean they’re not innocent children of God. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have compassion for their pain like any other human being. But they are directly or indirectly responsible in certain situations for unacceptable amounts of stress among people who are trapped.

GL: Uh-huh.

MW: That’s the thing. They’re not trapped, they trap. And I think the unmasking of the billionaire class is part of what’s going on in our society right now and it’s a good thing.

GL: Yeah, I mean I totally understand that viewpoint. And I think it’s really having the privilege to choose another way and not choosing it and then using —

MW: That’s the point. Yeah.

GL: Capitalism and technology has created so much suffering.

MW: Whereas somebody at a job where they can’t even get a minimum wage, they don’t even have sick days, they can’t even leave to be with their mother when she’s dying or with their children when their little boy has a basketball game, “Daddy, are you coming?” Those are the people who are trapped.

GL: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that as well. Zooming out a little bit, and I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I know you’re a great student of human consciousness, where we are, what’s happening? Where do you feel that we are as a species right now? What are the greatest challenges and opportunities that you think we face? And what does thriving mean to you given the state of what you see today?

MW: Well the Course of Miracle says there is a limit beyond which the son of God cannot misrecreate. So love is co-creation with God and thought and behavior that is not loving is miscreation. And we have free will, which means you can think whatever you want to think. But if you continue to move in a direction of thought or behavior that is not loving, it will stop working for you. In moderate drug use and you just might overdose, in moderate drinking, you just might die of cirrhosis of the liver. And we are now, with the way we’re treating the earth, the way we’re treating each other, how reckless and irresponsible we are with huge weapons of mass destruction, we are on the brink of it not working for us on this planet anymore. If we do not change our ways, if we do not make a U-turn, this ship is on the way to the iceberg.

We are all on the Titanic here archetypally. Now, that iceberg could take the form of biochemical disaster, it could take the form of climate disaster, it could take the form of nuclear disaster. But we’re on the way towards that iceberg right now and we must turn around. And I think a lot of what you and I have been talking about here today is we have to be awake enough, not numbed out. We’ve got to rise up and we’ve got to go, “Oh my God, of course the system wants to numb us,” because the system, it’s not a matter of some bad people who are sitting there, “How can I screw with people’s lives?” That’s not the way it works. The way it works within the system is that that which would lead us in a loveless direction is no different than what happens inside you and me. When we were talking earlier about when we made our biggest mistakes and at the time we thought it was a good idea, right?

It’s just the blindness of mind when it’s turned away from love. So where I think the species is right now, and I think people are recognizing it, is we are six inches from the cliff. Our democracies are six inches from the cliff, our ecosystem is six inches from the cliff. And what it means to thrive right now to me means to participate, rise up, participate in whatever it would do to turn things around what will it do to turn things around in the way we eat, the way we produce food, the way we govern ourselves, the way we solve conflict, the way we educate our children, the way we take care of anything? You see in every area, and you certainly in your work and I might as well, I’m sure many of people who are listening right now are already involved, I mean when you think in terms of the human race moving in a more sustainable direction, the people, the ideas, the projects already exist.

You don’t have any dearth of geniuses in this world who are already pointing to a way to move from dirty economy to clean economy, from war economy to a peace economy, to grow food differently, to treat and to repair the earth, we know what to do. The problem is that the institutional powers that govern not only our country, but so many systems around the world are so institutionally resistant to turning in a more drivable, sustainable direction because moving in a more sustainable direction at this point doesn’t necessarily produce short-term corporate profits. What it produces is the possibility that maybe the human rights could still be around in 100 years, which many of us would say, “Yeah, I’ll go with that.” So these are revolutionary times. We have to revolt within ourselves. It begins with an inner revolution. Now, JFK said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Things are going to get really terrible unless they get really good and pretty quickly because at this point, it’s a race for time. But I think if we wake up every morning and say in our own way, whatever language, whatever conceptualization works for us, “God, use me. Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say to home? Use me, use my hands, use my feet.” Then your life begins to change. You feel yourself. You feel angels pushing you from behind. You feel nature organizing every aspect of your life. And by the way, your anxiety falls away because we were born for times such as these, this is why we were born. And if you’re not participating in this divine revolution, I don’t think you can be happy right now because some part of us subconsciously knows what’s going on here. And each of us were born with a divine and unique set of talents and abilities and skills with which to participate in the change.

GL: Mm-hmm. Beautiful. One of the things that I love about your work is that it’s so non-denominational, it’s so accessible. You can be Christian, you can be Buddhist, it’s just very, very scalable. And I think that what you’re speaking to is really this fundamental crisis of consciousness. And yet, we’re so powerful. I’m fundamentally an optimist in the ability for humanity to create incredible solutions. And yet, we’re also ruled by very obsolete survival fear and greed and violence. And I just love the way that you distill that into such a powerful message. And I’m curious, a day in your life, what does that actually look like? How do you start to finish? I know you’ve talked about your morning practice, but how do you create a healthy life for yourself? What does that look like for you?

MW: Well as you said, it’s important to me that I have that Course of Miracles workbook opened on my coffee table in my living room, and my mornings are very important to me. And I believe that humanity, the world is a perfect ecosystem. And it’s much like the ecosystem of the body. Each cell is appointed, each cell is assigned. And some are assigned to the bones and some are assigned to the blood and some are assigned to the pancreas and some are assigned to the lungs and so forth. And when the cell reaches its destination, its destination is always that its highest actualization is collaboration with other cells to serve the healthy function of the organ or the organism of which they’re a part. And every once in a while, a cell disconnects from that collaborative function, goes off to do its own thing. And that’s called cancer. It’s called malignancy.

And it’s a malignancy in the body, it’s also malignancy in consciousness. So humanity has been infected by this malignant consciousness, “It’s all about me.” So what I seek to do in my life is to ask to be used by something bigger than me. That’s the problem of the world today, “It’s all about me.” That’s why the traditional psychotherapeutic paradigm has so spectacularly failed because it just turns us back on ourselves. The Course of Miracle says, “Don’t look to yourself to find yourself because you’re not there.” So what I want to do every day is number one, seek in whatever way possible to be of value to something bigger than myself and also to realize that it is built into the universe that cells are assigned to one another for a great collaborative work. In this case, you and I are doing this podcast together.

If you just say, “Whatever I am doing, it’s not about what I am doing, it’s about in whatever I’m doing, am I showing up? Am I there to give rather than get? Am I to the best of my ability seeking to spread that which is loving, beautiful, holy and good and true? Am I fully present? Am I using this experience [00:40:30] to the best of my ability to be my best?” And then there is nothing else to make your goal. Your goal isn’t the past, your goal isn’t the future because that’s just ego. That’s all you need to know. What am I doing today? I’m doing this podcast right now. Earlier today, I did another podcast. Earlier than that, I did a meeting with these people about teaching the Course of Miracles in Mexican prison interestingly  enough.

Before that, I was talking to people about the possibility of my doing something political in the future. Later on tonight, I’ll be working on editing my latest book that will come out next year. And then hopefully after that, I’ll have some fun. But it’s all in a day’s life, right? So I think the point I’m trying to make is it’s not about what we do, it’s about who we are in the space of what we do. By the way, in the Course of Miracles, it says that everybody has a highly individualized curriculum. That means you come to realize that every single thing that happens to you, every circumstance is a lesson that’s for your own good because it will either give you an opportunity to do well what you’ve done well before, or to do better what maybe you didn’t do so well before.

GL: Mm-hmm.

MW: It’s not about what happens in life, it’s about who you are in the space of what happens. So when you say, “What does my day look like?” The real question from a spiritual perspective is not what did this day look like, but what does this instant look like? Who are you in this instant? Are you judging or are you loving? Are you blessing or are you blaming? Are you living in the present, imagining infinite possibilities, or are you running a game from the past about yourself or someone else? That’s spiritual practice. Not what you do, but who you are. And who you are will then give rise to the right doing that will lead you to a happier life.

GL: I love that piece of the real encouragement towards serving something greater than our own self-interests. I find in my own life, when I’m really in a place of service, when I’m doing something… First of all, just serving myself is actually just a place of great suffering.

MW: Exactly. The point here.

GL: It’s actually this really ironic payoff that we get. When we actually serve others, we run joy and more vibrancy in our bodies. We’re more alive. Obviously, there’s a balance to that, right? We need to have space for ourselves. I have burned myself out, I’ve martyred myself, I’ve crashed and burned multiple times in my life by trying to do good.

At the same time, I think what you’re speaking to is really this really key piece. When we buy the mainstream consumer marketing propaganda that our lives are just about feeding our pleasures and desires nonstop as hungry ghosts that are never satiated, it’s a very lonely, desperate life with very [00:44:00] short term pleasure. Whereas when we are serving… When we recognize that we’re part of a matrix, and the more we give, the more we receive, and that our lives are about serving something greater than our own self-interests, we actually start to train our consciousness and our nervous system to live that way. I think it’s such a powerful message.

MW: That’s it. When you are living only for yourself, anxiety and depression are inevitable. But that’s the way we were trained to live [00:44:30] by the ego’s thought system that dominates this planet. So when we do collaborate and we do seek to live for others, we are actually serving ourselves because the real self is not just you. The Course in Miracles says you are like waves in the ocean thinking you’re separate from other waves. You’re like sunbeams to the sun thinking you’re separate from other sunbeams. There’s really no place where one wave stops and another wave starts.  You’re down in Costa Rica and I’m in DC. On a physical level, we’re separate. But on the level of mind, there is no time and space. On the level of time, there’s no place where your mind stops and my mind starts.

The Course in Miracles says enlightenment is a shift in self-perception from body identification to spirit identification. When you’re in spirit identification, you really begin to realize, there’s no place where I stop and somebody else starts. So when I’m loving the world, I am loving myself. And within that, of course, self-care becomes natural because you realize, well, if I don’t take care of my body, take care of my health, take care of my food, take care of my need to rest, spend time alone, et cetera, I can’t be of any value to others because it’s like I’m a worn out car.

GL: But knowing that we’re getting near the top of the hour here, where should people come find you? Where should people connect with your work? You’ve been bravely and courageously advancing political dialogue. Where should people find you these days?

MW: Well, they can find me on Twitter, they can find me on Facebook, they can find me on Instagram. I’ve done a little bit of TikTok. People can go to marianne.com and sign up on my mailing list. I’m pretty much out there. I’m not exactly hiding under a rock.

GL: Beautiful.

MW: Everything from YouTube to… Oh, and my Substack. I write a Substack at mariannewilliamson.substack.com. That’s where people can receive daily meditations. I also have done videos of the Course in Miracles. Lectures every day. Not lectures every day, but the workbook exercises, that’s at Mornings with Marianne, that’s at marianne.com. So if somebody’s interested, the stuff is out there.

GL: You’re really sharing your work so beautifully, and you’ve been so generous with me and Thrive Market. I remember very early on when we were just maybe a week or two out in the world, we had just launched and we were operating out of this ridiculously small warehouse in LA. You message me and you were like, “Hey, I’m looking for a place to do my live broadcast with some live audience members.” You ended up doing it at our warehouse, and it was such a beautiful blessing and honor to have you there. The ways that you share your gifts have been such an inspiration for me.

I know it’s probably boring to you, but one of your quotes which has been such a north star for me in my life, “That our deepest fear is not that we’re inadequate, but that we’re powerful beyond measure. That it is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. And we ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, talented, fabulous? And actually, who are you not to be?” That quote is so beautiful. I find that where you talk about, “There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won’t feel insecure, but that we’re all meant to shine as children do and that we’re born to manifest the glory of God.” It’s been such a beautiful reminder for me in my own life, and I’m so grateful for the unique pattern of energy that is known as Marianne Williamson, the way that you are so courageous in sharing your life with all of us. It’s really a pleasure to have you with us here.

MW: That is so sweet of you to say. Thank you. It was great being with you. I’m laughing inside that you call that building ridiculously small, because I don’t remember it being ridiculously small. But it says to me that things have gone very well for you if that was ridiculously small.

GL: Well, for me, having grown up very poor Latino immigrants with a single mom, it’s been such a dream to work with such  amazing people, such incredible dedicated humans at Thrive Market that really care deeply about making healthy living accessible for everybody. I think that, as we’ve talked about in this conversation, healthy living is such a multidimensional framework that includes the things that we put in our bodies, but also the ways that we relate to reality and consciousness and the ways that we tend the garden of our incredible capacity as human beings. And yet  one of the most fundamental challenges we face is in the way we produce, distribute, consume, and market food today. It’s at the core of so many of the challenges we face. I so appreciate the ways that you have been generous and shared your gifts with our community.

For those of you hearing Marianne Williamson for the first time, I just so deeply encourage you to go check out her work at williamsonlearningcenter.com and all of the places on the main social channels for Marianne Williamson. Just so love you, so appreciate you, and so grateful that you took some time to be with us.

MW: Well, thank you so much. It’s always nice to talk to you, Gunnar.

GL: We have these unifying questions that we like to ask people very, very simply in short form. What does thriving mean to you? We obviously spoke to that a little bit in the conversation already.

MW: I think that there is tremendous energy within the space of who we truly are, when we seek to use our minds in such a way as to love better. Who can I be today? Where am I off? Where did I judge? And where I judge, where can I atone? Where can I be  the person that I was born to be? Where can I forgive others? Where can I be more generous? Where can I live more truly? Where can I be less superficial? And energy, it’s like the blocks to the awareness of love and power just fall away. That’s what it means to me to thrive. Because then you find yourself in the right relationships and the right circumstances, you feel the angels pushing you from behind, and you know this is what it’s supposed to be like. That’s what it means to me to thrive.

GL: Beautiful. Are there any areas in your life that you would like to change to thrive more?

MW: Oh, yeah. It’s always our own personal defects, right? Our own character defects. I can be snarky, I can be reactive. It’s like this little angry tone that can come in. That’s where my main character defects are.

GL: I can relate to that one as well. I think looking at one of the most common narratives of those that have worked for me over the years is they don’t feel psychologically safe with me.

MW: Exactly. Yeah, me too.

GL: I’ve had to learn a lot about how to be more gentle in my critique and my leadership style.

MW: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m with you on that.

GL: Beautiful. All right. Thank you so much, Marianne. I so appreciate it.