by Marianne Williamson: In 2007, having been reading A Course in Miracles for three decades and lecturing on it literally thousands of times, I came out of meditation one day and thought, I’ve become an advanced student of the Course! Not an advanced practitioner, mind you, but an advanced student.

And that took 30 years. What is it about spiritual knowledge that takes so long to digest? The trendy nature of much contemporary seeking would lead you to think that you spend a year or two at the ashram and voilà!—you’re at the mountaintop. But my experience argues otherwise. It takes a decade to understand the basic nature of spiritual principles, another decade while the ego tries to eat you alive, another decade while you try to wrestle it to the ground, and finally you begin to walk more or less in the light. Anyone who thinks a spiritual path is easy probably hasn’t been walking one.

What does all this mean: to embrace the light, walk in the light, and so on? What is all this light, light, light talk? In A Course in Miracles, light is defined as “understanding.” What a beautiful thought, that to see the light is to understand.

By midlife, we’re usually aware enough to understand which of our issues most need attention. We’ve learned where we’re strong, but also where we’re weak. We know what parts of ourselves to be proud of and what parts of ourselves should change. We know what our issues are this lifetime. It might not be a time when we’re learning new things about ourselves so much as understanding more deeply what we already know. And new levels of self-awareness bring new opportunities for breakthrough.

This is not the time to stop working on ourselves; it’s the time when we’ve finally accumulated enough clues to help crack the case and solve the mystery of why and how we’ve kept ourselves bound for so long.

It’s not the time to give up and say, “This is just how I am. It’s too late to change.” Quite the opposite—it’s time to take a stand, once and for all, for your own potential.

Don’t worry that it took you so long to get to this point. It takes everyone this long. We know nothing until we know all the ways that we’re not who we should be. Only then do we have a chance at becoming the people we’ve wanted to be, and God intended us to be, from the day we were born.

You can’t really build a life till you’ve pulled together all the things you’ve finally come to understand about yourself. And life would be cruel if at just about the time you’ve finally figured it out, it reached some sort of predetermined disintegration. Just as adolescents must separate from their parents, you need to separate from the person you were before this point, to whatever extent that person was not the real you.

Finding out who we actually aren’t, we begin to understand at last who we actually are.

Dear God,

Please soften my heart

where it has hardened.

Please help me reach

for higher thoughts.

Please pave the way

for a better life,

for me and all the world.

Amen