The Multidimensional Wisdom of Marianne Williamson
SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT
Marianne Williamson is a luminous voice in spiritual thought, conscious politics, and transformative healing. For more than four decades, she’s been a leader in spiritually progressive circles. She’s the author of 16 books, four of which have been #1 New York Times best sellers. A quote from the mega-bestseller A Return to Love, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…” is considered an anthem for a contemporary generation of seekers.
Williamson founded Project Angel Food, a non-profit organization that has delivered more than 19 million meals to ill and dying homebound patients in the Los Angeles area since 1989. She has also worked throughout her career on poverty, anti-hunger and racial reconciliation issues. In 2004, she co-founded The Peace Alliance and supported the creation of a U.S. Department of Peace. She’s run for president twice, to add the voice of love into the political conversation. Her most recent book is The Mystic Jesus, and she has an upcoming course that we are excited about, Tye Magnificent Crone.
In this deeply personal episode, we cover:
The Evolution of Love in Action
What’s Changed in the Structural Economics of America
How Clergy and Spiritual Counselors Are Increasingly Playing Cleanup on Broken Systems
The Hippies Were Right
The Inseparability of Personal Awareness and Structural Change
On Turning 70
Grandmothering
Intergenerational Conversations
The Magnificent Crone
Mothering the World: All the Children, The Planet as Home
The More Compassionate and Just Society.
The Importance of Community and Connection
Activating the Inner Sisterhood
Helpful links:
Marianne Williamson - For updates, follow her on IG @mariannewilliamson
NEW Course by Marianne: The Magnificent Crone: Spiritual Emergence for Women: in Our 50s, 60s, 70s & Beyond
NEW book by Marianne:The Mystic Jesus: The Mind of Love
A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles”
Subscribe: MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com
24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week by Tiffany Shlain
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Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation: Listen, Like, Share & Subscribe on Apple Podcast | Google Podcasts | Spotify
NEW BOOK: The Nine Lives of Woman: Sensual, Sexual and Reproductive Stages from Birth to 100, Order in Print or on Kindle
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Marianne Williamson 0:01
A few years ago, I was at a talk, and some young man stood up and he said, Miss Williamson, you know, you're just an aging hippie. You guys were just about sex, drugs and rock and roll. And I looked at him, and I said, Excuse me, that was just part of the day. I said, the rest of the day we stopped a war. What have you done, young man,
Christine Mason 0:24
hello, hello. It's Christine Marie Mason, your host for the rose woman podcast today, I have the delight and joy of welcoming Marianne Williamson, a luminous voice in spiritual thought, conscious politics and transformative healing. For over 40 years, she has shaped conversations about love and justice and social renewal in ways that no one else in the culture has. She has had four. Count them, four, number one, New York Times bestselling books, including The groundbreaking writing in a return to love, which introduced millions of people to the spiritual teachings of A Course in Miracles. You're probably familiar with the saying Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure, which is sometimes attributed to Nelson Mandela, but actually comes out of that book, and she is consistently a person who encourages people to find that light within, to find their strength, their resilience, their truth and their knowing. Marianne has founded and led many nonprofits devoted to reducing suffering, resolving hunger or illness or the suffering of those who are ill, to reducing violence and amplifying peace at the structural and state level. And her courageous runs for the US presidency in 2020 and 2024, were an outgrowth of seeing structural change that has led to a society in which many are suffering and struggling and can't seem to get ahead. So when she ran for president, it was really to bring a fresh perspective on political leadership and merge spiritual wisdom with kind of policies that had the potential to create a more compassionate and just society today, we have a look at the changes in structural economics over the last 50 years. We talk about how the hippies were right about everything, how personal spiritual wisdom can become a catalyst for social change. Must become a catalyst for social change. How we see each other basically informs the policies we create. And we also talk about her insights on mothering a better world. One of my favorite moments is when she controversially says a woman's job is to take care of the children in the home, but then cleverly adds the caveat that the children are all the children of our future, and the earth is our home, so that implies a necessity to step into public life and and really claim the future we want to see. So she also speaks today about embracing the fierce wisdom of the magnificent crone at 70, she is embodying that certainty and depth of a lifetime of learning while staying open to receiving new information from people in younger generations and also her elders. It's a very beautiful way of weaving between the generations that she expresses. So get ready for an inspiring dialog that may challenge your understanding of politics and spirituality and also maybe drop into your own sense of the incredible potential inside of each person's insights wisdom, particularly those of elder women in fashioning and inviting in the world we want to see so. Marianne Williamson, you've been carrying the banner of love in action as a political force. Love is a political force for decades now. What has it been 30 some years since return to love was published,
Marianne Williamson 3:43
yes, but in the earlier days of my career, until I ran for office, I wasn't thinking in terms of love and action, except in so far as it meant showing up for the sufferer, such as work With the AIDS community, it has become something more political, in the sense that we're all challenged by political circumstances to take our love into that world in order to make some of the differences that need to be made now. But there were decades where I didn't, well, I mean, I guess I did think in terms of action, because I was thinking in terms of starting nonprofits, starting, you know, whether it had to with AIDS or peace work or racial reconciliation. So you're right. I was always about love in action, but I wasn't about love in politics until the last couple of decades.
Christine Mason 4:36
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting evolution, actually, like if we work on the self and then you're working in the nonprofit world, but slowly you start to see how these dominant structures block these questions of poverty and and all of these things from getting solved like you leave it onto the fringe of people's philanthropy or something, but all of those collective resources don't go in there. So what was it that. Invited you to cross over from the idea of an NGO or nonprofit into politics.
Marianne Williamson 5:05
Well, when my career began, it didn't feel like we did. I mean, when my career began, I thought of politics as something where, okay, just make sure you vote for the Democrat, you know. But I thought that the basic structures were strong enough, democratic enough, just enough that if we were to add to that nonprofit activism, that we could hold together the basics of a just society. As time went on, it wasn't just my realization. It was changes in America so that by the end of the 1990s I had seen such a shift from when my career had begun 20 years before, I began to see a level of almost ubiquitous despair that had not been there 20 years before. At that time, I realized that no amount of private charity could compensate for a basic lack of social justice when my career began in the 1980s even though I was working with people whose lives were in terrible trouble, most of the people I met in the first 20 years of my career, if their lives were in trouble, the crisis was the exception and not the rule. They lived a basically okay life, and then something terrible happened, but the basic okayness could usually ultimately absorb the crisis. By the end of the end of the 1990s I began to see something different, and that was how many people I saw for whom the crisis was the rule and not the exception. So the problem wasn't just that you had been diagnosed with cancer. I was used to talking to people those with cancer. By the end of the 1990s I met so many people for whom they were diagnosed with cancer and did not have the health care to cover their treatment, I began to meet more people for whom the issue was not just I need a job, but that even if they had a job that did not pay the expenses for their family. So I began to realize that something had shifted on such a level. I also realized how much bad public policy was at least indirectly responsible for so much of this. Why? For instance, in the richest country in the world, we, among all advanced democracies, were the only one that doesn't have universal health care. How much of the suffering that I'm seeing on a daily basis has to do at least indirectly with that $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1% so and I began to realize all the ways, given the work I do, that people like myself, whether you know you're talking about clergy or spiritual counseling or psychotherapy, the system does what it does, and then says To people like us. We hope you can make people feel better. And when I really went like nuts with when people started talking about resilience, help people be resilient, I'm saying to myself, why in the richest country in the world, do so many people have to be resilient? Something is really wrong that life is such an economic struggle, chronically for so many people in the richest country in the world, why, in a society like ours, for instance, to over 60% of people live paycheck to paycheck, and I began to realize how much of those inherent inequities had become built into the system. They were baked into the cake by the year 2000 or so. And I realized this wasn't going to change unless people started shouting about it. Yeah,
Christine Mason 8:50
this idea that the clergy are sort of doing the cleanup work from a broken structure is very interesting. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. So did something fundamental shift in the way people saw each other, like, there seems to be, in order to craft policy that is fundamentally selfish and not good for all, you must have some dehumanizing of the other. Like, did you see a shift in sort of how we saw each other as citizens? Well, once
Marianne Williamson 9:16
again, this is why I realized that I had to step outside a certain box I had been in. You can't have a meaningful conversation around what you just asked without talking about economics. It's easy to be generous when you have cash. It's easy to talk to your neighbors and reach your kids at night and be there for your lover or for your spouse at the end of the day, when you're not living in this chronic stress, and you have time and you have bandwidth. You know, back in the 1970s the average American couple could afford a house, could afford a car, could afford a yearly vacation, could afford to send their kids to college, and they could afford for one parent to stay home with the kids if, in fact, they wanted that. Now that was a. Life where people could afford to dwell in community easily enough, and so, on one hand, so much of the economic stress made time and bandwidth for community more difficult. And at the same time, without community, it became even harder to withstand the difficulties of the time. And then, of course, we know, you know, it's not like people don't know at that point, starting in the 80s, starting with Reagan, starting with trickle down economics, unfettered capitalism sort of ate us alive. The things
Christine Mason 10:36
you're naming could be discussed as a structural economics, but I feel you uniquely also speak to it as a spiritual economics, sort of what informs those structural choices. I
Marianne Williamson 10:48
think the same principles that should dominate how we structure our personal lives should dominate how we structure our society. Is this an ethical thing to do? Is my personal behavior ethical? I think we should ask that about public policy. Is it generous? Is it merciful? Is it gracious? Is it fair? Is it just all in a nation? Is this group of people so the same psychological principles that dominate within the experience of one life dominate within the experience of the collective, including cause and effect, which put out coming right back at you. You know Adam Smith. I remember reading years ago, it was like a brick to my forehead. Adam Smith, who was the primary architect of free market economy, said it cannot work outside an ethical context. So what they did was they took the basic economic structuralism of Adam Smith, and they left out the ethics part. I see that with people like Elon Musk, who's so enamored of Milton Friedman, yeah, well, even Milton Friedman said, Well, none of this could work without a UBI, yeah,
Christine Mason 12:02
they also took away proximity, like Adam Smith. It worked because you could see who was getting the house on the hill. You know now it's quite invisible where all the rewards are accruing, literally and figuratively. Yeah, you do a really nice job of moving between this intimate language of things like grace and generosity into the structural, so maybe the sacred and the structural. And it seems to me that healing of the split between the material reality and the life within is has been sort of one of your long arc gifts over the course of your career.
Marianne Williamson 12:37
Well, thank you. I think it's simply a byproduct of a certain worldview. If you believe that, in an ultimate sense, there's only one of us here, that there's that, on a spiritual level, there's no place where our eyes stop and you start, then it really doesn't matter whether you're talking about one person or 1000 people, the same dynamics or a play. When you see a great performer, let's say Bruce Springsteen, since he's sort of in the news, he's certainly an example of it. You can be at a Bruce Springsteen concert, and he's got 1000s of people in the room, and it feels like an intimate space. You know people hear you at the level you speak to them from and if you are speaking to the deepest part of people, then the conversation is the same, whether it's one person or 20,000 there's
Christine Mason 13:32
a story of Patanjali when he's teacher Patanjali from the Indian sutras. And there's a story where he's, you know, he's a man. He comes into his human body as a snake, and when he teaches, they he says, I can only teach from behind a curtain. And one time, a child goes behind the curtain and he peeks, and the snake has 10,000 heads, and each head of the snake is talking to one of the 10,000 people in the audience. They're each hearing exactly what they want to hear.
Marianne Williamson 14:00
Oh, that's so amazing. Oh, my God, that's really brilliant. Yeah, that's very beautiful. And I think that is the goal, actually, that is the goal of any creative artist or teacher or philosopher, is that everybody feels you're talking to them. People used to say that to me all the time, God, I felt like you were just talking to me. Because if you're talking to the deepest truth of what it means to be human, then everybody feels that she's talking to me. That's a great story. Thank you. I've never heard that.
Christine Mason 14:29
So you do this really well. You're translating between worlds. You're speaking directly to people. When you were up there doing the big media show around the election, you know, I remember that first debate, and you were like the most Googled person after that debate in 49 states because of the things you were saying. And I feel that uniquely, you've tapped into this baseline that so many are feeling around despair and cynicism that it's not going to ever work for them. And yet, you know the most the more recent work. Work, you keep coming back to things like the mystic Jesus return to love, this new work on the magnificent crone that we're going to talk about. So how are you speaking currently to those who do want to live and believe in love and justice, but they're sort of caught up in this like it feels to me like a hijacking of fear or just general fatigue. Where's the hope being sourced from now?
Marianne Williamson 15:23
Well, first of all, let's remember these are artificial categories. We're multi dimensional people. I mean, on any given day, in any given hour, you're thinking about your feelings, you're thinking about the appointment you have, the next hour, you're thinking about external issues, you're thinking about internal issues. That's how human life works, and that's how society works. You know, when I was in college, we used to read Ram Dass and Alan Watts in the morning and go to Vietnam anti war protests in the afternoon. No one was thinking in terms of different lanes, and you had to pick your lane and stay in your lane. It was an it was a cult. It was a cultural explosion, a counter cultural revolution. It was all things. It was spiritual, it was political, it was sexual, it was musical. And I sort of never got the memo that you're supposed to, you know, as people would try to say to me, you know, stay in your lane. No citizenship is at its most meaningful, a standing forth of the fullness of yourself, all of who you are. And there is a political system that has been hijacked by those who, for their own purposes, would like you to think that unless you're part of that particular perspective around politics, then you shouldn't even have an opinion. So when people would say about the way I talk, for instance, she's Woo, woo, or she's French, actually, they're Woo, woo, they're French, because that's not the way people talk in 2025 Well, it's a whole we're we're now in an in a new century. There's a new paradigm we're leaving behind, the mechanistic, rationalistic, Newtonian paradigm by which we just saw the world as a machine. That was a 20th century, and now it's a 21st and what's seeking to emerge, and what is emerging in most areas, is this more holistic, whole person perspective, where it's the emotions, it's the psychology, it's the spirituality as well as the physicality, and they all work at their best in harmony. Yeah, everything all at once, integral, right? Everything exactly, integral. Unfortunately, the only area where or major sector of society where they haven't seemed to have gotten the memo yet. Is this institutional, political, what do you even call it machine
Christine Mason 17:49
and the financing mechanisms for that? Well,
Marianne Williamson 17:52
that's part of that machine. That's what fuels that machine. I had a friend
Christine Mason 17:55
who wrote a piece on the hippies were right about everything, including the manifest quantum space in between. Thank
Marianne Williamson 18:02
you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know I was,
I remember being a few years ago. I was at a I was at a talk, and some young man stood up and he said, Miss Williamson, you know, you're just an aging hippie. You guys were just about sex, drugs and rock and roll. And I looked at him, and I said, Excuse me, that was just part of the day. I said, the rest of the day we stopped a war. What have you done, young man? So
Christine Mason 18:31
solar on the lawns, all the things, bagging and protecting the soil like really having alt realistic food, tuning into love as the driving force. So that got shut down. And some people say it got shut down because of the political machine who had too much to lose. But it kept it stayed alive in the underground. And I see like my kids are in their 30s, and I see this whole new emergence, like they've lived that way. They have no truck with the intermediate stages that you know, that are represented in the political screen. Couple of 80 year old men and all of their cronies up there for election this term. And my kids were all saying, No, except remember
Marianne Williamson 19:12
some of those 80 year old men? In all fairness, some of those 80 men, 80 year old men were hippies at the time. Were they? Well, think about it, so if the in the 1960s right? So that was 40 years ago. That was 40 years now. There's been another 25 so, yeah, people who are older now were the people who hippies then,
Christine Mason 19:30
well, yeah, I mean, some, some people were in the hippie category, and some people were in the, you know, that's all I'm saying.
Marianne Williamson 19:37
Is age of itself does not determine consciousness Exactly.
Christine Mason 19:41
And you know what? I want to apologize for that, because I've been really, really looking at this question of zero transcendence, the respect and the last stage of life. And I sort of like trip my own self up there with my bias.
Marianne Williamson 19:54
Thank you. Yeah, well, no, you were talking about the real All I'm saying is that there are two different realities. One has. To do with how many people in their 80s are holding on to political power and keeping a younger generation from coming up about that you're right, but what's not right, obviously or righteous, is ageism. And there's a lot of pure ageism that's going on. The truth of the matter is, I always think of I look at it this way, the older you are, the more you know certain things, and the younger you are, the more you know certain other things. What you know, if you're younger, is what's happening. Now, you said you have kids in the 30s, my daughter's in her 30s. They just know some things about what's going on. Now, I can't know, but I know about some things that do not change, about cycles that play out over and over again, about patterns, and I think that the intergenerational conversation is the one that matters most. We need each other. We need the wisdom that emerges from whomever we are. I think it's important to honor our incarnation, and that includes what age we are. You know, there's an old Talmudic line that every generation has its
Christine Mason 20:58
own wisdom, and they're engaging in a completely different context in many ways, like I look at what they're having in their field around technology, all the decisions that they're confronted with, like, particularly in the motherhood sphere, I know we're going to talk about your upcoming course in the motherhood sphere, like the decision whether to have a child or not to have a child, to have it alone or with A partner, to have a technologically assisted all of those are unique questions to this era that none of us that I certainly didn't have to consider. And it's the same for aging, like the last 30 years of life are utterly enabled by new technologies and new medicines, in addition to the old models of ancient wisdom. So yeah, I think we're at it. We're also contextually unique, in addition to each stage of life, unique, well, absolutely,
Marianne Williamson 21:46
my mother, my aging process, is very different than my mother's and my grandmother's, and at the same time, there's some precious things that we have lost, because what my mother and my grandmother had was they knew where they belonged. As wives and as grandmothers, there was a an accepted place. And also in certain cultures, there was an acceptance of the wisdom that can accumulate with age. And so there was a level of respect in not all cultures, but in those that were truly at one, I mean, with with the natural harmony of things. When I look back at, you know, my mother, my grandmother, as you said, it's very different, but I also realize that my own aging process will be greatly enhanced by embracing some of the things that my mother and my grandmother knew and that my mother and grandmother thought were important that I have I now see far too easily. Poo
Christine Mason 22:45
pooed. Interesting. Joanna, what is your lineage? Who are these women who brought you in and nurtured you? What would you like to reclaim from them? Well,
Marianne Williamson 22:54
first of all, for me, in an immediate sense, the importance of being a grandmother. You know, I think so much about how my mother and my aunts, and my great aunts, particularly, and my grandmother, my great grandmother, my great aunt, how they showed up like, you know, you grow up, and that's your family, so you don't even think about it. You think, Well, this is just what life is. Because you're young, you don't know anything else, and then you go out into the world, and then the world, and then the world changes. And you realize, I think about how, like, if it was Sunday night and we're going to have dinner at roses, my grandmother, everybody came dressed up. Now that didn't occur to me at the time that it. Didn't even think about it. You would never see them slumping. They came dressed, they came hair down and jewelry, right? Because, in that society, going to roses for dinner with the brothers and the sisters and the kids and the grandkids, what was important and so I saw the grandeur, the grandeur of women who saw their importance in a system, and that sense of importance was accorded them. It was unquestioned. I've
Christine Mason 24:16
never considered that. My father also took me every Sunday to my grandmother's for dinner, and it was a very predictable menu, and also something that, yes, utterly loved, that's right, you know, I would love to see a little meditation book called Dinner at roses, right, right? Stories that were learned in this environment. Oh, I love that. Well, I think what was learned
Marianne Williamson 24:37
was women showing up with self respect. There was respect, you know, I went several years ago. I was visiting, I was in Florida, and I was visiting an Orthodox Jewish family, and I was going there for the weekend. I hadn't thought through in my mind what that meant, through a very modern family. Yeah, and very wire, the houses wire, teenagers, younger kids, a lot of electronics and stuff. And I began to to realize, Oh my God, that's right, this is where I am. Sundown is coming, right? All the electronics go off. It's Friday night. All electronics went off. I'm thinking of myself even, oh, my god, how am I going to do the next 24 hours without any without my computer, without my right and I watch what happens in a family? I was thinking, Oh, how are these kids? Aren't these kids going to resist that? But they had grown up with it all their lives. Okay? All electronics are going off. We will not use the phone unless your grandmother is calling. We have to pick her up. Nobody's going to use a car unless it's to pick up the grandmothers or whatever. Right now, once again, the kids didn't. No kids rebelled. It's what they've grown up with. And what I saw in that family for 24 hours, oh my god, I got the point of a Sabbath. The grandparents talking to their kids, the teenagers talking to the five year old. I saw it just like when I was younger, and my parents generation, like they would have date night and go ballroom dancing. Well, I look back now and I realize, sure, because, you know, ballroom dancing reconnects the harmony. Sex isn't the only activity that does that, right? And I saw during that 24 hours, which is really the meaning of Sabbath, reconnecting to what's important. And that was such a lesson for me and to see it. And then 24 hours later, you know, sundown, okay, lights back on. Everybody's back to life, but everything had been reset. But everything had been reset during that time. It was very profound to to observe and to be part of I felt very blessed by that, and it really impressed me and changed things for me. Do you think
Christine Mason 26:59
Tiffany schlain wrote a book called 24 six, which was basically encouraging everyone, regardless of religious background, to take a digital Sabbath with their family for exactly these reasons.
Marianne Williamson 27:11
Well, of course, the notion of Sabbath is not unique to Judaism. I mean, all the great religious systems have their version of that.
Christine Mason 27:18
So, so I love these stories of of your grandmother and this, all this environment, you're a mom also. So how are you how are you seeing the the lineage, passing the wisdom of your mothers and grandmothers, your own deep wisdom, into your daughter's life? And how is that transmission happening?
Marianne Williamson 27:35
You know, it's interesting. When I was growing up, my grandmother was we called a Mimi, and then my mother was called MeeMaw by her grandkids, and I always thought meema was kind of like, Where'd they pick that up? I figured it came from my mother. I wasn't around when they decided that with my brother and my sister, but so I always thought, when I had grandchildren, they call me Mimi, and then I started realizing that if they call me MIMO, it's like I'm bringing my mother into the experience. You know, my sister had three girls, and my father was so into those girls, was so so connected to those girls, particularly her oldest daughter. And I remember being jealous of her daughter, thinking if my father had been as emotionally available to me when I was growing up as he is to his granddaughters, I'd be a different woman. And then as I got older, I realized, okay, Mary, now let's look at this. Look at the age your father was and where he was in his career when you were little. And now look at the age he is and where he is with your with them, and I knew that intellectually, but it didn't fix it really now I'm seeing the same thing I'm seeing with my granddaughters. I don't know, I almost feel like I landed on a plane here where they live, and the word I got in my mind was redemption, like you have an opportunity to be present here, and to not just be present, like, Oh, it's so adorable. I love to be around them. I mean, really present, like, make a life decision, where you live, how you how you're going to play this. You're going to be just the grandmother who, you know, visits every two or three years. Or are you going to, you know, it's where you're going to do Sunday dinner. Well, Sunday dinner, the Sunday dinners in my family were within a context where there was deep relationship all through the week, because we all lived in the same city, and my mother was very close to her mother.
Christine Mason 29:30
Are you going to are you thinking about moving? Well,
Marianne Williamson 29:33
it's part of the big decision to be made, but the very fact that I'm considering it, not that it would be easy in some ways. You know, immigrating here isn't any easier than immigrating home. And how can you, you know a lot of things, but the very fact that I'm making it as important as I should be, speak some growth within myself. I
Christine Mason 29:54
love, I love that story, my grandfather, my dad, also, he became a fantastic grandfather. Other, and he was completely absent when I was younger. And I love that, that that role. And there's even, like, you know, because there's scholarship on everything, right? There's like, the grandmother hypothesis, like, that's why women live to a certain age, is so that they can go through the phase where there's not the biological imperative or the daily task imperative, and they can be the voice of deep presence, right? So do you want to talk a little bit about the upcoming class? Marianne,
Marianne Williamson 30:25
oh, the magnificent Crone. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the magnificent crone fits into everything else we're talking about here. When I was 40, I wrote a book called A woman's worth, which for me was, okay, I'm 40, and this is what I've learned, which is funny, because that book now has a kind of cult following among women in their 20s, because women in their 20s now are learning what we were talking about, you know, when we got in our 40s, because every you know, things speed up. Then when I turned 50, I wrote a book called The Age of Miracles. And I found turning 50 very hard, really hard, actually. And I was, I was struck by how hard it was. I didn't expect that to be my reality or my reaction. And I remember friends saying to me, 50 is the age past which you don't care what they think anymore. And I thought, wow, that's really amazing. And so I, I did have a difficult time with the idea that your youth is irrevocably over at 50 like until the last day of 49 you can still say to yourself, Well, I'm still young. Not anymore. You just can't so I moved through that, as people said. I asked a friend of mine before when I was about to turn 50, and she was already in her early or mid 50s. I said, Did you find it hard that birthday? And she said, yeah, it's very hard. And then all of a sudden, in a moment, it's all okay. And it's so weird, because that's exactly what happened for me on my 50th birthday. It was like all of a sudden, something broke. Then when I turned 60, I felt the power of it like, whoa, but turning 70 takes you into your you're in a different it's like you're a different world when you know, sometimes when you look at a photograph, right, let's say about 100 year old photograph, and you see a picture of a woman in a Bucha, maybe 150 years like, just when photography began, and you see a Woman in a Bucha, and she's, her face is deeply lined. And then you think about it, and you go, she was probably 45 years old, given the life she was living. So what we experience is the menopausal years. What are the menopausal years? Of course, if it were more than a century ago, that's when people died. I mean, that's that was a lifespan for many, many people. So now it's like there's a woman who wrote a book I quoted her, and I'm sorry I can't remember her name now, she said, we've added 30 years onto life, but not at the end, it's in the middle. So once a woman passes her menopausal years, you get into a phase where nature isn't going to support you in the way it used to. For instance, a younger woman, her skin is voluptuous, her butt is high, her breasts are perky. Why? Because nature wants men to be attracted to her in order to propagate his feces. Once a woman's been through menopause, Nature doesn't care if you ever get laid again. So all of this now is your blank slate. It will be what you create. It will be a conscious creation or an unconscious creation. And I see the ways in myself, and I see the ways in people that I know if you just allow yourself to go with the the negative flow, it is filled with ageism. It is filled with misogyny, it is filled with invisibility. You know, my friend Francis, he said, don't use the word Crone. I hate it. Well, I kind of think of it as, let's recreate and reclaim the word for the badass, amazing, kick ass woman we could be. I did an interview not long ago, and I was reading the comments, which you should never do online under my interview, and somebody said some must have been a young man. He said, the last thing we need is angry old woman energy. And I thought to myself, actually, yeah, you do not angry. I didn't see myself as angry in that interview, but I saw fierceness. I saw not only as you get into your 60s and your 70s, not only do you not care as much, but other people think you have to say it. You know, younger women. We need younger women to continue to have children in order for the species to survive. But we need women and men of all ages to mother a better world, or none of our children will survive. So what does it mean to to be our most magnificent and I think you know sometimes when I remember when my daughter. A little girl. She was just in love with women with girls who were like 10 years older. And I've noticed that throughout my life, how I'm always attracted to women who are like 10 years older, as my as my friends. I I've seen that how often my girlfriends are people who are a little bit older than me. Right now, I have two women friends who I'm close with. One is in her mid 80s, and this woman is amazing. Another one in her late 70s, she's amazing. And I'm constantly observing, and I'm constantly asking questions, and I'm constantly recognizing, so that's inquiry I'm making in my own mind. I think that, like I said, the older you are, the more you know certain things, just like the more you you know, the younger people know other things. It's no I think every generation has its wisdom, every generation has its deep, cellular knowledge, and I just think that older women now have a major part to play in owning our truth and saying what we have always known, which is, we're all going to die here if we don't start you know, as my mother used to say, the main job of a woman is to take care of her children and to take care of her home. So I thought when I was younger that my mother was so retro, and I didn't want to do that. I just wanted to go out into the world. Well, if you become astute enough, you know there is no world outside you. It's all in your head, whether you're in a house or in a nation, right? And I realize our job is to take care of the children and to take care of the home. It's just that the love that will save the world can't just be for your children. It's got to be for children on the other side of town. It's got to be for every mother's child, yeah, defining
Christine Mason 36:42
the child and the world as a broader frame, not just inside your four walls,
Marianne Williamson 36:48
right? And the home we have to take care of is a home we share, which is Earth itself. And that's what I feel like, is part and purpose. You know? You know the Golden Girls, the television show, yeah, I remember that. There's the myth, right, the fairy tale of the old women, right? And the old women are on the they live in a house on the on the edge of town, and they have this huge cauldron, right? And there's this old crone, and she's got this huge cauldron, and she's got this big stick, and she's stirring the cauldron. And then there's this young traveler, and he comes by the house, and she takes a cup of of the liquid in the cauldron, and she gives it to him. And I realize, Oh my God, that Cauldron is all your life experience, and you're stirring it, you were finally at a point of what, you know we talk about looking at our childhood once you get old enough, it's not about just looking at your child. It's looking at everything that's happened from 20 on, what just happened in these last 3040, 50 years. And you stir it, and then younger people come and you give them a gift, the medicine, the soul medicine, right? This is what I've learned. Perhaps it could be of use to you. Perhaps you won't make the same mistakes I made. Perhaps, you know, it's incredible so myths and fairy tales and all those things which are embodied Well,
Christine Mason 38:16
you know you're talking about like the crone as the truth teller and the seer. Yes is across traditions. But I also love that you have your own Crohn's, your own personal women that you're looking up to and taking the drink from. You're always willing to take the drink and to offer the drink and be in this beautiful exchange at the right moments. Yes,
Marianne Williamson 38:35
yes, yes. That's so good. Christine, thank you to take the drink and offer they're doing that is so true. That is so true to always be learning and know that in every situation you were demonstrating that's beautiful. Thank you. So let's,
Christine Mason 38:49
let's blend these two. If the crone were a political force, not a person, but sort of a current, what would she be asking of us, you said, the earth and taking care of the children. But what other things she would
Marianne Williamson 39:01
say it is intolerable and it is unacceptable that there are hungry children in America. It is intolerable. It is unacceptable, and we will not have it. You know, when anybody that's or in the world, 12,000 children who still die every starve every day, I think it's a little bit less now, yes, improvements have been made. But the fact that even one child, given the fact that there's not actually a dearth of food, you know, we've just gotten used to, you know, the patriarchal tapping us on the head, like, don't you worry your little head about it. We're handling it. No, you're not handling it. You got us to where we are. And when a woman is older, she's not worrying so much about, will they approve of me? Will they like me? And I think for myself, because I did that, and I got the slings and arrows, and I got the witch burning and I got that, but I'm still here.
Christine Mason 39:55
You are still here. And can I say for 70 you are still also very hot?
Marianne Williamson 39:59
Oh, thank you. Thank you. My clothes are
Christine Mason 40:03
on, no, it's really on that, on that note of the radiant inner life and what makes a person an attractive being. You were talking about, not sliding into the negative current. And I just want to double click on that a little bit that the thing that I'm finding is now that the outside part is not as relevant. The people who are drawn to me are coming at soul energy, and that the in that while there's like an initial loss of power for people who are or like attraction for people who are screening on the physical, like they're not my people anyway, but the richness of the people who can see through that veil. It's actually getting to be a much more interwoven and deeper set of friendships and allies in creating the world we want to see. So yeah, there was grief around the sagging butt, but I don't I also want to put that out there, that there's a message, that there's something about the light, that's the attractive force, anyway, which you are embodying. Well, thank you. Ralph
Marianne Williamson 41:03
Waldo Emerson said, as I age, my beauty steals inward, but as you just just said yourself, there's a grief. It's a journey of grief to realize what is no longer yours, because it's fun to have men look at us a certain way, and it's fun to have, you know, all that going on. I mean, it is but, but I think it's also, there's a time when it becomes pathetic if we don't let go. There's a way in which, until I'm willing to grieve what is no longer mine, I cannot fully embrace and accept that which is mine. Now,
Christine Mason 41:40
oh, that is so rich. Let's, let's just go deeper into that, grieve what is no longer mine, and step into what is mine now, let's, let's just scratch at that.
Marianne Williamson 41:49
Well, you have to do the former before you can have the latter, and it's difficult. I think that's what a lot of like. You know, 55 to 60, because you still in today's world. And this is a generality. So, you know, this is just my experience. There's a certain something in today's world you can kind of hold on to till well into the 60s, and then, particularly as you approach the end of your 60s and into the 70s, I'm missing something magical here, if I don't get over the fact that I'm not young anymore, Ryan, and you're willing things drop away. It's like a snake shedding its skin. And when a snake sheds its skin, it's because it's outgrowing it. And you you move into acceptance, but you move into acceptance of what is yours anymore. You know, I was at a restaurant the other day, right? And there's a table of women in front of me, and they're the next table, and they're four women, and they look to be, I don't know, they look 40 ish, and they're all very well dressed, and they're all They're having a good time. They're out to lunch together, and I was just looking at them, and I didn't have any judgment on them. I was curious about them, who's married, has children, partner, you know? I was just kind of thinking about their lives, and just watching a little bit. And then those four women, and their lunch was over, and they ended their lunch, and I looked over to the right, and there was another table of four women, and the table of four women on the right side looked to be about the age of those girls' mothers. And I was aware that's a table I'd like to sit down and be with. There wasn't anything. I mean, it wasn't that I had any judgment of the conversation going on with among the young women. It's, I've been there, done that kind of, sort of, I mean, I recognized myself like, oh, the girls are at table high. What's going on, you know? But the the older women, you know? I remember many, many years ago, I was in Los Angeles. I remember this night, for whatever reason, I'm in a table of my friends. I must have been in my 30s, probably in my 30s, maybe in my early 40s, or 40s, I don't know, but not, not thinking age yet at all. And there are about six of us and webbing fun, and I'm looking over, I look I glanced over the table near us, of what looked older people probably like my age now, and I had a moment where I felt sorry for them, and I thought that I assumed that they were looking at us with envy. And I remember when I got old enough to realize they probably were not looking at you with envy. They were probably looking at you thinking, God, how boring. Thank God, because you don't see it externally. There's so much going on, but you don't see it externally. So you're in a land that is hidden. That's that's what it means. Archetypally, you're in a land on the edge of town. People don't see it externally, where your house is. Your house is hidden away. Also, I want
Christine Mason 44:56
to say I was, you know, I just put a book out on nine stages of a woman. Life would includes a lot on these you
Marianne Williamson 45:01
did. I did. Oh, well, I feel stupid sitting talking to
Christine Mason 45:04
you. No, no, no. And this later stage, when I was doing the research, there are so few narratives about what you're calling the land at the edge of town that the women who are in their 70s and 80s and 90s, they're not writing about that stuff. There's a few Diana Athill, for example, but, but I interviewed a woman, Beatrix OST for the show, and she's in her 80s, and she just had a solo show of new artwork at a major museum in her 80s, new work, not like a retrospective. And I was like, who are, who are
Marianne Williamson 45:33
my friend, Valerie von Sobel. You should look at her assemblages. Look them up. You should have, I mean, Valerie's amazing, and she's this fashionista, right?
Christine Mason 45:41
And they're out there, and messages from this land at the edge of town are rare. So I love that you're naming that that that you have no idea what's over there until you cross the threshold, and there, if you're willing to cross the threshold, that there's genius. That's such a beautiful vision.
Marianne Williamson 45:59
And also in those archetypes, in those fairy tales and those myths, they're always, it's a collection of women always, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that that that speaks to something about relationships, a sisterhood, that has a whole new meaning. I don't think any of this is possible without other women holding it up with you. You know, I
Christine Mason 46:19
just met this woman, Maya Jaguar. She renamed herself in her 50s, and she's like, Yeah, I feel that alliance of this and the integral that you're saying, like women who are turned on, inner lights on, spiritual life is on. Devotion is on. They have children, they have grandchildren, but they're also in the social impact sphere, in a way that is the most exciting place. That's what's going on.
Marianne Williamson 46:41
That's what's going on right now. It's an amazing it's a moment. It's, it's, it's very profound. And like you said earlier, this is new. This is different than my grandmother, my mother's aging or my grandmother's aging. It includes, I think, a re embrace, actually, of some of the foundational natural harmonies of human relationship, but there's so much more. So that's what I am doing with that particular seminar, but I think it's what I've seen in my career. And you know, if you're downloading it, millions of other people are downloading it too, just in different ways,
Christine Mason 47:19
that's right. So I want to everybody who wants to go deeper, you can see the gentility and the inquiry and the breadth of this topic, like we could talk about mothering, grandmothering. How do you act in the world as a true, essential mother, a MA in all realms, if you want to have more time, they can come to this day long course with you, which is coming up in a couple of weeks. I think, June 8, right?
Marianne Williamson 47:42
Yeah, June 8, I think, and people can find out about that@maryann.com There's something I want to say about that. Also, when you were asking, you know, what's the political force field? I think anybody who has ever had a teenager, maybe you didn't, but your brother or your sister had, or, you know, you had friends who did or whatever, there's this thing that happens, right? Usually it's around sex or drugs or alcohol, and this fierce, fierce thing comes up for you, and you find yourself saying that will not be happening in this house. Do you understand me, right?
I said now at the time,
I'm kind of laughing inside, because you don't know what you would even do if they challenge you at that moment, but you're so fierce, they're not going to we have to become that about the planet. We have to become that about the planet that will not be happening here. There's
Christine Mason 48:35
something in what you're saying that requires a deep clarity on what you stand for like the inner alignment is so clear that there's no mincing words. How would you tell people to access that strength? Well,
Marianne Williamson 48:49
I can only speak from my own experience. It's very important not to wake up and go directly to your tablet. I can tell you that it's very important not to go directly to social media or to the news. When every religious system that I've ever read about talks about the importance of the morning, whatever you take in in the morning, your consciousness, it's setting something that's going to be very difficult to break out of. You know, it's going to take work to break out of. If you just download the consciousness of the world, it's going to be hard. We take a shower, we take a bath, we brush our teeth. You don't want to take yesterday's dirt on your body, and yet, we consistently take yesterday's stress out into the world with us. Clear it for me, it's Course in Miracles. It could be Transcendental Meditation. It could be Buddhist meditation, Kabbalistic meditation. It could be secular mindfulness. It doesn't matter. It could be your meditations. You offer a daily meditation. It could be mine. I'm one of millions of people who have them. Absolutely align yourself with that, which is first of all, your commitment to enjoy, your commitment to serve a purpose. Higher than yourself and a commitment to the best of your ability share love and be a space where other people can feel that they are invited to be who they are capable of being. And I think that's an interesting thing Christine, because that relates a lot to getting older. There's a lot of temptation in the world, as we get older to say, why bother? Nobody cares what I think I don't look at anymore. Blah, blah, blah. And no matter where we are consciously, these are these unconscious undertones, and that's what we need to bring up and to release so that a tremendous light can come
Christine Mason 50:39
forth. Beautiful. I adore you. Thank you for all the work. It's lovely to talk to you, and I want to read that book about the nine stages, please. Yeah, I'll send you a copy. It was three years in the making, and it's very integral, as you're saying, but it was also born of this architecture of major and Crone, not quite capturing those last 30 years or even the first 15 adequately, but it turned into something unexpected. I'll send it to you. Thank you. How? How can we support you in your evolutionary edge? What is it the people who have gained so much from your work and your insight? How can we turn and support you?
Marianne Williamson 51:19
I think the best way to support me is that the next time somebody tries to do what I try to do, show up standing on everything you say you believe in, but she's made radioactive, and you're afraid to just stand up and say, learn, you know, you and I were talking about archetypes, and there's no archetype like witch burning when I was growing up. You know, in the 1970s feminism, in the 1970s it was understood that none of us will get anywhere unless all of us got anywhere. Sisterhood was such a part of it, we've forgotten the power of sisterhood, and that means when they come after any sister, they're coming after you. So you don't have to agree with her, you don't have to vote for her. But when you see a sister burned at the stake, cry, foul. I soul, I
Christine Mason 52:23
do want to add something onto that around digital discernment and media manipulation in this sort of age of social media and AI, one thing we can all learn is how to recognize when information and comments is being manipulated. There's something in our individual psychology which doesn't want to be isolated, and therefore, if we see a whole bunch of people jumping on the bandwagon of hatred or snarkiness or disrespect, then we're like, Wow, maybe I, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe, maybe this is a crazy situation or a crazy person. I'm not going to get involved here, rather than trusting our own instinct and saying, no, actually, there's some really deep beauty in this. I love what she's saying, and that do not be afraid and know that if the comments are really hyper, charged and manipulated, it's probably a bot farm. Don't believe it. Step in with your truth
Marianne Williamson 53:16
on such a level. And I think that also, I would have liked to have thought that I had earned enough benefit of the doubt from the last 20 or 3040, years of work that I had done. I feel the
Christine Mason 53:29
sadness in that. I feel the deep sadness. I also we were, like, outraged at, I don't want to go down the Democratic Party, that whole thing, the idea that you weren't even at the convention. We were so outraged in our circle.
Marianne Williamson 53:42
No, they wouldn't even let me go. I mean, that's like a joke. I
Christine Mason 53:45
mean, you got 3% of the population, at least in some states, almost half a million votes, just so disrespectful at the deepest level. And and you see where it got us. And stupid, by the way, stupid and stupid, stupid in court, like the deep like you're coming with this depth of wisdom and insight about what's really happening in the hearts of men and women. And they're basically saying, we don't want to hear it. We've got this agenda over here. And this agenda over here is what it's exactly what you said, that the only thing that can be the politics of hate and division is a politics of love. And you know, we couldn't, we couldn't really quite harness that, because the system wouldn't even leave the space for it to be incorporated. So I want you to know that we see all the work and that we see how it's been woven, and to trust the long arc of its impact. It wasn't lost on people. It's going to have an incredible long term impact. Marianne, we love you so much. Thank
Marianne Williamson 54:42
you. Oh, lovely to be with you.
Christine Mason 54:46
There's a story in the Christian Bible, the parable of the talents, where a master goes on a long voyage and he gives a sum of money to each of three of his workers, and one takes the money and really. Aggressively invested and experiments with it and returns a great sum. Another is cautious, but invests it and returns a smaller sum. And the third person buries it in the ground to keep it safe. And the net of the story is that the third worker that isn't a careless or malicious person, but rather an afraid person, where he buries the coin in the ground because he's worried about disappointing the master, or losing the gift or failing altogether. So fear is central to the story. So instead of acting, he freezes, hoping that doing nothing will keep him safe. But the story gently points out that avoiding risk because of fear can lead to an even greater loss, the loss of possibility itself. The Parable of the Talents reminds us that even though fear is normal and it arises naturally, when we face uncertainty or the possibility of failure, we can't allow it to control us. Otherwise we'll become stuck or unable to grow or realize our full potential. So we acknowledge the fear and we move forward anyway, allowing courage to open a door for us that fear would rather have us keep closed in that time, the talents were coins, but it could be any talent that the burying of your talent is actually a lack of faithfulness in life. There's a gospel song that goes with that. You probably all know. It This little light of mine, This little light of mine, gonna let it shine, This little light of mine. Don't hide your light under a bushel. And I have a sense that that's also what is being invited through this story of getting to know the depths of your own truth, and in the tantric traditions, dropping in and accessing what you know to be true, feeling it in your body, connecting to source, really checking in, and then running that through A distortion removal filter, what you what is true, then making sure that you're not putting it through your shadow, your unconscious, your warpings of family and culture, to really tap into what needs to be said and what wants to be born, and then speaking from that attuned wisdom out into the world, Expressing strongly it's the same idea you are uniquely positioned to know what you know. No one else will ever know what you directly know. So continuing to trust oneself, developing that inner clarity, that inner resource, if you were moving from love, what kind of a world would you want to see? What kind of a world would you want to build, and how can we become nodes on a global network of light? The more we can have our own direct experience, not filtered or manipulated, the more we can feel our feelings and let them move through us, the more we can cultivate a lens of unconditional love and a deep view of how we want to see the world unfold, preferably with harmony with all of the rest of nature, preferably much fewer incidents of state sponsored violence, with much more peace between the genders, with much more economic justice for all beings that we might thrive in this beautiful, incredible ecosystem that we've been granted. May all beings wake up to our interconnectedness, to the fact that we are built of one energy and one consciousness, and that this beautiful world that we've been given is ours to live into and protect and celebrate. May you live into the story of truth and beauty and love and the one great grace of being alive in a body. Alright. In practical news, please check out Mary Ann's course. June 8. Please come and visit my site. Christinemariemason.com for upcoming events and programs and Rosebud woman is there for you, for all of your needs, for creating a lifestyle of reverence and beauty. Rosewoman.com sending you much, much love today and always you.
