Our deepest fear

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." Marianne Williamson wrote that in 1992 in A Return to Love. It's been quoted so often that people think a president said it. She did.

Williamson took A Course in Miracles, which can be dense, and taught it as a daily practice anyone could do. Her book became one of the best-selling spiritual books of its decade, and her lectures filled halls for thirty years. The teaching is a single word: love, chosen over fear, in each moment, as a discipline rather than a feeling.

Here's the part of her I use most. She says that a miracle, in the Course's meaning, isn't a sea parting. It's a shift in perception, from fear to love, and that's available in any moment to anyone willing to ask for it. The room doesn't change. You do, and then the room seems to.

It belongs in the month of Awareness because that shift begins with noticing. You cannot choose love over fear if you haven't noticed you're in fear. Most of our anger, our bracing, our hurry is fear we haven't caught. Williamson's practice is to catch it, name it, and ask, out loud if you need to, for a different way to see.

Sixty days in. Two months of walking and logging and lifting have given you a body that's calm enough to notice. This month we use that calm to look.

And the fear in her famous line is worth sitting with. Most of us are more afraid of our own light than our darkness. We play small because it's safer, and we call it humility. She says it isn't. Humility is being exactly as big as you are.