“No matter what did or did not happen in your past, the present remains the endless fount of miraculous opportunities.”

— Marianne Williamson

When she was 13 years old, Marianne Williamson took a trip to Saigon with her father. This was back in the mid-sixties during the Vietnam War. Her dad wanted to show Marianne what war was. And he wanted to make sure that if she saw the devastation and the bullet holes firsthand, she would be convinced that war was “not okay.”

But for Marianne, the first two decades of her life were still a battlefield—even if it was an emotional one. She was always looking for some sense of identity or purpose. She wanted to do something with her life, but she wasn’t sure what.

Marianne says that by her mid-twenties she was a total mess. “I often felt as though life was a private club and everybody had received the password except me,” she recounts in her first book A Return to Love. “I felt other people knew a secret that I didn’t know. I believed other people were dying inside, too, just like me. But they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it.”

Then one day in 1977 somewhere in the middle of New York City, Marianne noticed a set of books with gold lettering on them on someone’s coffee table. Being a voracious reader and well-versed in many subjects by then, her innate curiosity led her to read the introduction. This is a course in miracles.

Marianne was intrigued, but then some of the religious terminology made her a little apprehensive. She put the book back on the table.

The Divine hand of the Universe, however, would place the book in her path again. It was another year before Marianne picked it up again. This time, she read it. “It sounds a bit cliché to say this, but I felt like I had come home.”

Marianne studied the course so passionately, her mother once commented, “She read it like a menu.” Soon, Marianne couldn’t keep her newfound inner transformation to herself. She began sharing what she learned with small gatherings, which turned into larger and larger groups. 

Marianne wrote about how A Course in Miracles became her personal teacher and her “path out of hell” in her first book A Return to Love. It spent 39 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold in excess of three million copies. It is evident that Marianne wasn’t alone in her search for meaning and purpose in life and for a path beyond emotional turmoil.

During her earlier life struggling to find this purpose, Marianne also struggled with her weight. She was a compulsive overeater and often found herself starving one moment and bingeing the next. For Marianne, the lessons she learned in A Course in Miracles helped the weight fall off.

After listening to an increasing number of stories and questions about weight issues from participants at her lectures and reading startling statistics in the media, Marianne spent the last year taking the powering spiritual lessons she has learned and applying them specifically to the task of losing weight.

Marianne’s groundbreaking discovery is now available in her latest book, A Course in Weight Loss—21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever.

In it, Marianne shows you how to retrain your consciousness and address the root causes of your weight gain and suffering. “Getting back to the truth of who you really are, you will get to a place where all your problems with weight have disappeared.”

We can release the weight of unprocessed pain and embrace the lightheartedness of a wiser and more humble heart. Whomever it is you were born to be, whatever your soul was coded to accomplish, whatever lessons you were born to learn, now is the time to get serious and get going.

Is there a book with gold lettering on it sitting on someone’s coffee table that can change your life? Why wait?