As Marianne Williamson put it so beauti-
fully,
Our deepest fear is not that we are
inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are
powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.
We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
Thereʼs nothing enlightened
about shrinking
So that other people wonʼt feel
insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.
Itʼs not just in some of us;
Itʼs in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As weʼre liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates
others.
Maslow makes this very clear in his writ-
ings. In his seminal book, Motivation and
Personality, Maslow has a chapter on “Love
in Self-Actualizing People,” in which he
outlines what love looks like in those who
are most self-actualized. Iʼll leave the last
word to Maslow:“As we have seen, the tendencies
to detachment and to need identifica-
tion and to profound interrelationships
with another person can coexist in
healthy people. The fact is that self-ac-
tualizing people are simultaneously
the most individualistic and the most
altruistic and social and loving of all
human beings. The fact that we have in
our culture put these qualities at oppo-site ends of a single continuum is ap-
parently a mistake that must now be
corrected. These qualities go together
and the dichotomy is resolved in
self-actualizing people.
We find in our subjects a healthy
selfishness, a great self-respect, a dis-
inclination to make sacrifices without
good reason.
What we see in the love relation-
ship is a fusion of great ability to love and
at the same time great respect for the
other and great respect for oneself. This
shows itself in the fact that these people
cannot be said in the ordinary sense of
the word to need each other as do ordi-
nary lovers. They can be extremely close
together and yet go apart when neces-
sary without collapsing. They do not cling
to each other or have hooks or anchors ofWe find in our subjects a healthy selfishness,
a great self-respect, a disinclination to make
sacrifices without good reason.