Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

When I wrote those words in my book A Return to Love, I was thinking about all of us. Each of us has an instinctive calling to be more than we are now... to stretch...to grow...to bend toward the infinite the way a flower bends toward sunlight.

Every cell in the body is coded to contribute its own uniqueness to the healthy functioning of the organ it belongs to. It has a natural tendency to collaborate with other cells in a venture way greater than its own individual life.

And so it is with human beings. We too are here to contribute to a great creative effort, each of us becoming whom we are capable of being, then collaborating with others in supporting something larger than ourselves. Each of us has a unique part to play, and a natural guidance system that reveals not only what our part is but also how to accomplish it.

No one’s function is any more or less important, or special, than anyone else’s. We are all here, like cells in the body, to do what is needed to support the whole. And who among us isn’t feeling today the call of greatness – not a personal greatness, but the greatness of the times in which we live – that we ourselves might participate in the healing of the world? We are the individual immune cells in the body of human civilization. Where there is sickness, we are called to be healers. And we heal by being healed ourselves.

My own call this year is to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. I don’t feel that politics is more important than any other area, but neither do I feel that it is less important. And we cannot be “selectively conscious.” How can we say we wish to be conscious about our food, our bodies, our relationships – but not politics? Are we really then still conscious? Can we be awake in some areas, but not in others? I think not.

Rather, I feel that those of us who have been involved for years in the larger enlightened conversation – personal growth, spirituality, recovery and so forth – are the last people who should be sitting out in coversations about the great social and political questions of our day. For if you know what transforms one life, you’re the one with a clue as to what transforms the world. A nation, after all, is simply a collection of individuals. Just as with one person, the only thing that can ever be fundamentally wrong with a nation is if it strays too far from its heart.

I am running for Congress because I want to extend the transformational conversation on which I have based my career into a wider domain, speaking of love and brotherhood as they relate not only to personal healing but also to the state of our country. I hope my campaign will serve not only as a vessel for my own electoral win, but as something much bigger than that: the possibility for a politics of conscience, a new national conversation, and a return to the democratic principles that make freedom the vessel for self-actualization that it was originally intended to be.

May our hearts awaken. May our citizenship awaken. May our country awaken. And may we all take part. I hope you will support  my campaign, you can visit my website here: http://www.marianneforcongress.com