Customer Reviews

A Return to Love

5 star:		(148)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Marianne Williamson takes Course In Miracles concepts and shows how they apply to her personal life. The book is honest and inspiring. I enjoyed the book. I would also highly recommend the book An Encounter With A Prophet for more honesty and inspiration derived from personal spiritual experience.

I first discovered this book 2 ½ years ago. I specifically say discovered, for it's like unearthing a treasure. I can't begin to express the impact this book made upon my life & continues to do so. Williamson explains in vivid detail how thoughts & perception can literally alter your life. Happiness isn't something we're innately in contact with, it requires cultivation, something we actively choose every moment of everyday. Anguish & suffering is a part of the human condition, but it doesn't have to consume your life. Oftentimes modern society is so consumed with success, competition, and acquiring material things, we forget the concept of joy is also a part of the human condition. We have a right to anticipate it, but it doesn't just saunter up & plop in your lap. It's labor intensive. I found concrete steps on how to redirect my energies & thoughts, and eventually my reality. What value does life hold if we can not love, permit ourselves to be loved, & be joyful? This book is the ultimate "how to" improve your consciousness book. I refer to it every time I feel a bit blue. It's really my blueprint of reaffirming or correcting my thought patterns. I've highlighted points crucial for my life & refer when necessary. Most importantly it works without fail. That is indeed the true litmus test. I also strongly recommend Williamson's various cassette lecture series. If you're weary because of some negative things you may have read about Williamson I urge the reader to disregard them. Truthfully I don't care if she has some inconsistencies in her life, don't all humans? You're not moving into her home, you just want to benefit from some profoundly wise & inspiration advice. The basic truth is, the principles she details quite simply work. I am forever grateful to her & have purchased this book for my friends. If you desire to live & not just exist, this is a great gift for yourself & loved ones. Enjoy.

Where do I even begin with this review? This book has entirely changed my life, my perspective, my attitude, my feelings about myself and others, I could go on and on. This is something that I cannot stop talking about. Anyone who is lost, confused about religion, who feels poorly about themselves or others, depressed, or just doesn't feel like life is much "fun" anymore.....read this book! I can't even tell you what a load it takes off and how wonderful it is to learn that God LOVES you, is not out to punish you, and only has your happiness in mind. I can suddenly walk into a room and feel GREAT about myself knowing that I am a BEAUTIFUL, wonderful child of God. It is the most amazing thing I have ever felt! From this book I have learned what life is about, and what it's not about. After reading it, I bought an additional 10 copies and hand them out to anyone who seems interested. My hope is that everyone can find this love that Maryanne teaches so that they may be as incredibly happy with themselves and their lives as I am today!

Thank you so much Maryanne, for changing my life!

About 4 years ago, I was in a REALLY bad car accident, and have since suffered with chronic pain. Although it has been a difficult road, one of the positive effects is that it somehow led me to start a spiritual journey - a quest to understand life in general, and myself in particular.

This is one of the first "spiritual" books I came across that piqued my interest, and I am definately glad I bought it! Marianne's style of writing made it easy for the "beginner" to grasp her insights - and I was definately a beginner to this genre at the time.

Overall, this book speaks about the importance of love - and how the ego tends to get in our way of truely feeling and expressing love. Although I have not yet read "A Course in Miracles", Marianne states that her beliefs are deeply connected to it.

At the time, although I had learned about the ego in college, I had never of thought of it in the terms she described. She shows through example how the ego, if left un-checked, can lead us to dwell on the negative (and even search for it in instances where it doesn't exist). But the overall message of this book is that only love is REAL - and that we must all learn to love ourselves, as well as others - even those we can't imagine loving. What a beautiful message!

I would recommend this book anyone interested in spirituality &/or "A Course in Miracles". Be sure to "bring" an open mind.

...not to be over dramatic, but this book and Ms. Willaimson's "A Woman's Worth" changed my life. One of my best friends turned me on to Marianne Williamson. I gave both of these books to my mother and my sister for Christmas, and have suggested them to many other friends. I believe that God has given Marianne a gift, and I am grateful that she has shared it with us. In fact, I think God blesses us all with a certain gift. That's what this book is about--finding your gift and using it--not being afraid or embarrassed--not letting your ego get in the way. This book does not preach--it just shows you that acting out of love is the best and easiest way to live your life. In our society we tend to loose sight of that, and make things way more difficult for ourselves. This book has also helped me to believe that God is a loving God. I still uphold the bible. I just believe that God speaks through Marianne, as he does all of us. So, enjoy! Thank you Marianne for sharing with us.

Marianne Williamson is, arguably, the most visible expert on the Foundation for Inner Peace's "A Course in Miracles" -- a scripture-like text that, quite simply, aims to remove "the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance." Williamson reduces & rearticulates the message(s) from the "Course" into a language that is more accessible, concise, & personable. I applaud her effort and appreciated the examples and anecdotes she provided, albeit a few seemed rather contrived. What Williamson manages to do quite well, however, is drive home the idea that love is everywhere -- love is God -- love is real -- and that living a life in the absence of love makes for an unhappy, unrewarding, & empty life. Williamson (and, by extension, the "Course") bandies around the words "Love", "God", "Atonement", "Forgiveness", and the like w/ no real obvious connection to their religious or secular definitions, so be prepared for a shifting of your vocabulary paradigm. This book is rich w/ insight, observation, and advice and, as such, you may need to re-read particular passages -- perhaps even the entire book -- if you wish to take away all that the book offers.

For the last six years of my life I have been a co-facilitator in an ongoing study group based on A Course of Miracles. A lot of the people that come to the class have not delved into the actual ACIM book but know about it due to this marvelous gem of a book. In fact, it was what brought me to studying the Course and eventually getting up the courage to start up a study group at my church.

People underestimate the Power that Love is. People think that Love is fluffy and lightweight; that there is no real strength to Love and that's because we have reduced the Power of Love to a mere sentiment expressed in a Hallmark card.

But True Love, when harnessed and consciously directed can not only change the life of the individual, it can change the world because what is the world but a collected group of individuals? And to those individuals who are willing enough and daring enough to let Love transform their minds, renew their hearts, and uplift their souls everything can and will be made possible to them.

Marianne stresses the need for forgiveness in this book. Forgiveness is not for other people as much as it is for us. Coming out of this recent holiday season a bit bruised and scraped up reminds me of the need to extend True Forgiveness to those I thought harmed me in some way. When we know that we are Love Itself, nothing can harm us. Jesus knew this of his persecutors. He knew that they could crucify the flesh but they could not destroy the Love that created the flesh in the first place. In the Course in Miracles as well as A Return to Love there is an emphasis on the resurrection rather than the crucifixion.

The future is in this moment. There really is no such thing as "the future". The future is what we are deciding to do in this new now moment. Every moment has gotten us to right here and right now and if we do not like the way our life is going we are always free to "choose again". The more we choose from a place of Love rather than from a place of fear, the more we are in agreement...in allignment with our Higher Selves...our Deeper Natures. Of course there will be some reading this review that think that God is all about fear, punishment, judgement, and condemnation but to those who have really seen the Light...figuratively as well as literally...they will know that in the Light there can never be any darkness.

May your heart be at peace.

Ignore the 11/13/02 review by the closed-minded Christian Science snob! A Return to Love will change your life if you are open minded. You need not be a student of A Course in Miracles to be transformed by this book, though if you don't consider yourself a spiritual person, this might not be the best book for you, since it deals so much with the presence of (God as) Love in our lives. I read it long before I got involved in religion and metaphysics and I was and still am very moved by it. This is a book about the healing and transforming power of Love and how to practice it in your daily life. Ms. Williamson has been-there-done-that and her intelligent and very hip writing style is far from preachy. I've read it over and over since the 1980's and it gets better every time. Can't recommend it highly enough!

Whether by coincidence or miracle, I was prompted to read Marianne Williamson's book after three different friends asked me last week if I'd ever read RETURN TO LOVE. First published ten years ago in 1992, Williamson's book integrates spiritual principles drawn from A Course in Miracles with personal growth and interpersonal relations, to teach us not only how to realize our divine nature, but how to embody that nature in human form. Her book, Williamson writes in the Preface, "is about the practice of love, as a strength and not a weakness, as a daily answer to the problems that confront us. How is love a practical solution? This book is written as a guide to the miraculous application of love as a balm on every wound. Whether our psychic pain is in the area of relationships, health, career, or elsewhere, love is a potent force, the cure, the Answer" (pp. xviii-xix). Love is the answer, she tells us, to our relationships with "money, the body, work, sex, death, ourselves, and one another" (p. 84).

Okay, so it's like the Beatles told us when they sang, "All you need is love." We were born with love, but replaced that love with fear of life. "The spiritual journey is the reliquishment--or unlearning--of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts," Williamson writes. "Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others is the meaning of life" (p. xxii). Returning to love is "the personal journey from pretense to self, from pain to inner peace" (p. 25). Williamson's message is just that simple.

Well, almost that simple. "The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery," Williamson observes, "and the only thing you need to recover from is a fractured sense of self" (p. 150). For me, this point raises one small criticism of Williamson's book--more of a concern, really. Williamson confides that she was "a total mess" (p. xv) and "a total basket case" (p. 11) when she first encountered A Course in Miracles. "I had what is commonly called a nervous breakdown," she says. "A certain amount of desperation is usually necessary before we're ready for God," (p. 11). Although she readily observes that many people in our culture turn to spirituality while suffering from psychological wounds including self-loathing, addictions, fears, obsession, compulsion, depression, and violence (p. 7), and although she immerses her reader into the relationship between personal growth and spiritual development, I wonder if there are other important issues which she has not fully explored in her book, namely, the extent to which the practice she advocates really requires its practitioners to deal with their personal and emotional wounds. Or would they also benefit from a course of psychotherapy integrated into their spiritual practice to assist them in fully recovering from their "fractured sense of self"?

To change the effects in our life, Williamson encourages us to "change our mind about the world" (p. 66), and forgive the past (p. 71). All in all, RETURN TO LOVE offers a life-affirming approach to spiritual and personal growth, and will appeal to anyone interested in becoming a mature, authentic person, while also discovering love as our true, essential human nature.

G. Merritt

It took me a long time to get around to writing this review, because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to think of enough powerful adjectives to describe this book! Not only is this book so full of love and compassion, it directs you to the plain ole common sense approach to solve problems and live your life to the fullest. And believe it or not, the common sense approach is simple, but the approach we usually try to take is complicated. This book is the "common sense, encouragement, loving direction, and compassion that your mom should have given you, but didn't". I encourage everyone to read it, even if you only read a couple of pages a day. As I read this book, I felt Marianne was the mother, teacher, guidance counselor, and friend that I never had. I love her advice! Love is the answer and love solves all problems. From the seed of love derives all positivity: self-confidence, love for others, being humble, going after dreams, being modest etc. Marianne's advice is the advice I should have received as I grew up. If we all received that advice, the world would be a better place. My world is a better place because of Marianne's loving and compassionate advice. That's why I advise everyone to read this book!