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With Apt Partners Give People Holiday Experiences They Love to Share
One Christmas you could step inside the historic Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and be swept into a sumptuous holiday scene that includes a towering Christmas tree and a two-story-high Victorian gingerbread house. Yet sadly, like most other businesses that want to delight and engage people at Christmas, they are missing some big opportunities. What […] -
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How Stoicism Can Help You Now
Five Ways to Create Greater Success With Others Attract and serve unexpected allies with different talents and life and work experiences and you are more likely to gain insights that lead to your greater success – and theirs. Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration,” Collaboration author, Morten T. Hansen emphatically concluded, yet you already […] -
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Blog: September 13, 2018
Some of my most difficult experiences have led to my greatest growth. It wasn’t until I had to face serious challenges that I began a deep exploration of my inner life. Until then I was pretty blithe. Young. Charming. Foolish. With age comes the things that simply make you grow up. And that is how I see America now. From 9/11 yesterday to Hurricane Florence today to the ubiquitous toxicity of our current political environment and more, America has a heavy heart these days. But we will grow from this time. I don’t think we will ever again be quite as cocky a nation as we used to be, but that’s not really a bad thing. There comes a time, whether you’re an individual or a country, when it’s simply time to mature. To own your mistakes, to admit your own frailty, to humble yourself and try to be better in the future. When it’s pathetic not to. I know about those things because they have been a part of my life. But I realize they’re not the things that have destroyed me, they are the things that have saved me. And they are the things that will save America too. We will in time be so much greater as a country, when we admit the ways we’re not.
Dear God,
Please bless our country
as we move move through
this difficult time.
Free us from the chains that bind us and deliver us to our better selves.
Remind us of the things
that truly make us great
And show us how to embody them. Thank you, God.
AmenThe post Blog: September 13, 2018 appeared first on Marianne Williamson.
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Blog: September 9, 2018
There are millions of people in America ready for a new conversation, a new vocabulary about American politics. The one we have now is rife with corruption. But it’s not just the financial corruption of our political system that’s a problem, it’s also the spiritual corruption in our hearts. We’re both outwardly and inwardly in trouble, and we have to address both if we’re going to rise up from the crisis into which we’ve descended.
We’re a nation that has become more concerned with being rich than with being good, more concerned with getting more than with being more, more concerned with what happens on the outside than on what happens on the inside, and it is killing us.
Human beings were created to love each other, not to hate each other; we were created as brothers and sisters, not as enemies; and we were created to be reverent, not to be too cool to care. Those issues are at the root of our humanity, and unless we water those roots then the plant will continue to wither no matter how much we water the leaves. A state of low-level anxiety now infuses the very air we breathe, so disconnected have we become from a sense of what’s really important and what we need to survive.
Deep democratic and universal values have been handed down to us; it’s not that they’re absent from the ethers, they’re simply absent from our hearts today. And until we retrieve them, we will continue to spiral down. Love, not hate, make America great. Until we reclaim justice, and mercy, and brotherhood, and forgiveness, and charity, and compassion as the foundations of our humanity, then our political system will continue to reflect this spiritual corruption, the way it does now.
We didn’t get off track because of Donald Trump; we got Donald Trump because we got off track. He is merely a reflection of the cravenness, the moral compromise, the legitimized whoredom that we had already allowed to corrupt our society. And that hyrdra has many heads. Just defeating Donald Trump will not fundamentally fix the problem; we must defeat it in our hearts. We must ask ourselves what democracy is, and why it matters. We must ask ourselves what it means to us personally, existentially, to consider that all people are created equal. To ask ourselves what it means that God gave all people the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To consider what it means that government was instituted among us to secure those rights. To resist the temptation to intellectual and emotional shallowness that define our popular culture today. To deepen. To mature. To stop playing victim all the time. To heal ourselves of the epidemic of immaturity, the chronic silliness that has us playing at life like children rather than tending to life as genuine, powerful, responsible men and women.
We need reverence and devotion toward each other, toward the children of the world, and toward the planet itself. We need reconciliation with the God of our understanding, and radical forgiveness towards each other. We need to look at ourselves and ask how we can do better, devote ourselves to our country and to our children’s children, and rise up from the ashes of our self-pre-occupation. We need desperately to evolve from “me” to “we” now. Only then will our nation rise: when we rise first.
America has gone off track, but it’s our job to self-correct it. Democracy gives us rights but it also gives us responsibilities, not just to receive the blessings of liberty but to tend to them in our time and bequeath them to our children.
This is not about someone else. It’s about each of us. We, the people, are the only true guardians of democracy. We have a much purpose on this earth than just to “get what we want.” That has always been America’s greatness: that we stood for something higher, and strove for something higher.
Until we retrieve that greatness, we will continue to go down. But as soon as we do retrieve it, we will begin to miraculously rise up again. First we need to purify our hearts; then and only then will we have the power to save our country.
The post Blog: September 9, 2018 appeared first on Marianne Williamson.
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For Aretha Franklin
August 14, 2018
This has turned out to be a sacred night, as millions of souls are saying to others, “Did you hear that Aretha is dying?” There’s the quiet hush of a collective deathwatch, as we throw our prayers to God that they might be roses on her path. I once read that no matter how old you are, the music of your youth is the music of your soul. To say Aretha Franklin’s is the music of my soul is to vastly understate her effect upon my life. Hers was more than the music of my soul; she was in many ways the opener of my soul, a light on my path, a goddess who chanted what I could not chant and cooed what I could not coo and howled from the depths that I had not yet reached. How I remember, as a woman in my 20s, the sacred rite of opening a new Aretha album, putting it on the turntable and sitting for hours just listening. To this day, I know her phrases and notes, I have lived inside them, I remember the tears of both joy and sorrow for which they have been the soundtrack of my life. She opened me and guided me, she uplifted me and soothed me, she accompanied me and spoke for me. While I never met her, she was one of the loves of my life. To have even lived at a time when she was singing to us – for what more could anyone ask? And while I cry as I write this, it is not for her. Such preparations must be happening now, such trumpets and harps must be tuning up, such angels even now must be singing her home. How does one say thank you to such a soul as she?Dear God,
Please bless your phenomenal daughter.
And thank you for lending her genius to us.
May she know the joy of a million smiles,
for such joy she gave to us.
AmenThe post For Aretha Franklin appeared first on Marianne Williamson.
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How Our First Instincts Can Hamper Our Capacity To Act Wisely And Innovate
While many of us have read about the ways we are wired to react rather than wisely choose how to act, it sometimes takes a practical book, offering actionable insights to enable us to see exactly how to actually think and act smarter, for ourselves and for those around us. The down-to-earth ways co-authors of […] -
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5 Explicit Ways to Be More Valued and Visible With and for Others
Rather than asking for a favor how can you offer obvious ways that others can benefit by responding to what you specifically suggest? To prime the pump of your “us-oriented” approach to life, here are five,real-life examples of successful and satisfying ways that others have generated more value, visibility and support, with and for others: […] -
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One Way to Have a More Adventuresome Life With Others
Unexpected and sometimes enlightening things can happen when sharing a new experience with those who don’t act right, like you. I got unexpected insights when, with two friends, I walked through the Steins Collection of paintings by Matissse, Picasso and other avant-garde painters in bohemian Paris. In most every gallery room one friend would sit […] -
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Love Letter to the People of Hawaii
May 18, 2018
Dear People of Hawaii,
I know it must be frightening to live in Hawaii right now. I think of you constantly looking at the sky, checking the Internet for environmental updates, talking anxiously to friends and loved ones, telling tales and comforting your children.
I hope you realize how many of us, many miles away from you, are thinking of you as you do .
So many forces coming up to the surface from the bottom of things, life shaking at its core, exploding with the fierce intentionality of nature. I know many of you realize Hawaii is taking a hit for all of us.
Why Hawaii? I think because Hawaii can take it.
Unknown perhaps by the media and unnoticed perhaps by many, I have no doubt how many Hawaiians are treating this occasion with reverence, weaving around it an invisible, sacred container. Honoring the Mother, respecting her as she screams, feeling the deep and archetypal messages that erupt from the soul of humanity as they erupt from the center of the earth.
Beyond the level of material science, so many ancient powers are being summoned now: through dance, through song, through prayers, through ceremony, through individual and group meditations. I see the Islands of Hawaii surrounded by extraordinary powers both unleashed and summoned by the volcanic eruptions. And every soul either native to Hawaii, or called to Hawaii, is feeling the multi-dimensional forces at work as the earth transforms itself and humanity is carried up in its thrall.
Hawaii, they say, is the heart chakra of the earth. Hers is the heartbeat not only of earth’s Mother but of all her children. She is speaking, and those with ears to hear are listening.
Dear Hawaiian brothers and sisters, those of you holding the space for Kona to do what Kona needs to do through prayers and ritual and love, please know how many of us know that you are doing it for all of us. And we thank you.
We stand in attention and we bear witness, as you endure and navigate this stupendous hour. We know how much more is going on than is visible on our TV screens.
We salute you.
We pray for you.
We love you.
We are with you.
Carry us in your hearts with us,
as we are carrying you in ours.May God walk with you.
May He bless you and protect you
And the earth on which you live.
Amenxo
MarianneThe post Love Letter to the People of Hawaii appeared first on Marianne Williamson.
