089: Bouncing Back from Massive Setbacks with Mary Morrissey

Hi, I'm Natalie Jill, fat loss expert turned high performance coach. When odds are stacked against us, how do we shift and create everything from nothing? How do we level up when we aren't feeling it yet or we've had a big setback? On this podcast I'll be talking to some of the most inspiring and courageous men and women on this planet who at their worst learned how to achieve success greater than they ever dreamed possible. Leveling up and creating everything from nothing. A teenage pregnancy in 1966 right before graduation, then diagnosed with a fatal kidney disease soon after. And then later in life, a marriage that crumbled from a bipolar diagnosis and betrayal. How do you bounce back from a massive setback when even your reputation is at risk? How do you surrender? And what does that actually mean? Today on Leveling Up, Meet the incredible Mary Morrissey. Today she is widely considered the world's foremost expert on dream building, which is the art and science of transforming your dreams into result. She's the author of two best selling books, one which became a PBS special. She addressed the United nations three times, was invited to co convene three different week long meetings with the Dalai Lama, and she met with President Nelson Mandela in South Africa to address some of the most significant issues that our world faces. Through her books, live events and programs, Mary has helped empower millions of people worldwide to achieve new heights in meaning, purpose, aliveness and authentic success. What you don't know yet about Mary is the incredible journey she's been on, the setbacks, failures, all she's overcome and more. Join in today for a great discussion to learn exactly how Mary Morrissey leveled up time and time again, creating everything from nothing. Today I'm leveling up. I've got Mary Morrissey and I don't even know where to start with her. I have so many questions. She has just accomplished so much. She is such a leader in the dream building, space, transformation. And I am so excited to dive in and chat with you today because I know who you are now and what you've created is not exactly where you came from. You've been through a lot and I would love to dive in. So thank you for being here today first and foremost. And I would love to dive into who you were before all of this.

Oh, I love being here today and I love your work Natalie. So thank you for having me. I want to start with how I got into transformation. I have spent the last 45 years studying transformation. I just turned 70 a few days ago. I'm going to start with my High school. Just for a moment about that. I grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, upper end suburb. Had a high school experience like most young girls dream about. I was classified as president, I was on the drill team. I had a lead in the junior play. I'm a homecoming princess. And at the over spring break of my junior year in high school, my high school boyfriend came home from college. I got pregnant and may 1st I had to tell my mom and dad I'm now pregnant. My mother wept for me as if I had died. In her mind, her dreams for me were dying. We had a very hasty May, right early May. We had a very hasty 10 person wedding. A couple weeks later the principal of the high school called me in and he said, are these rumors I'm hearing about you true? I said, well if the rumors are that I'm pregnant and married in that order, then yes, they're true. And he just put his head in his hands and he says, Mary, you have great academics and terrific. You will not be allowed to return here for your senior year. It'd be inappropriate for a pregnant girl to get mixed in with the normal girls. 1966 but we do have a place for people like you. It's a high school if you want to get a diploma rather than a ged. And I did want to get a diploma because my dream was to be a teacher. And I knew this was a detour, but I didn't want to give up on that dream. So if you want to get a diploma there's. It's high school not held during daylight hours. It's after dark, after the regular kids go home. But you could go there, it's across the river. It was in a part of Portland I hadn't been allowed to drive in after dark. And it's where the pregnant girls and the delinquent boys go to high school.

Oh my gosh. So here you are going from the perfect popular academic student to now you're being put into a group of the delinquent.

Yeah, exactly. So the messaging is you're a bad girl. I mean I picked it up very well. My best friends who I'd grown up with their mothers got together and decided their girls couldn't see me anymore. So I lost my school, my friends, the life I was headed into this next year, your whole identity really. And my little boy was born in December of that year as I'm going to high school. And I loved him. I graduated from Washington Evening High School in May of 67 and then in July of 1967, there was a real turn and that turn came in the diagnosis of fatal kidney disease. I was in intensive care. While in hospital, one kidney was totally destroyed with kidney disease, nephritis. The other had 50% destruction active nephritis. In 1967, dialysis and transplants are not on the table. This was a death sentence.

Now, were you sick? How did this even happen that you found out this diagnosis?

Well, I started having pain. I started having back pain, kidney pain. I didn't know what it was. And then it happened actually quite quickly. It was on the 4th of July when I and I ran really high fever and they took me to the emergency and from the emergency I ended up in intensive care. It was a very, it was totally destroyed with nephritis and I really have had pain from that. But then as it was actively moving into the other kidney. So they said if we could get the blood toxin level in my body reduced enough to remove the right kidney and survive it, then maybe I would have six months. So I'm 18 years old.

I can't even imagine. Yeah.

I have seven month old son at home and I might not even get to see him walk.

Wow.

And I'm terrified at losing. And the subtle message is I'm being punished. And the God of my upbringing was not a friendly place to go when you felt like you'd really screwed up. You know, later I would say, I think that God needs some anger management classes. But it was the only sense of a higher power that I knew at the time. So I just felt like I was being punished for being a bad girl. So I, you know, I'm going to have to die finally. The night before the surgery was scheduled to remove my right kidney, a woman walked in my room about 10 o' clock and identified herself as a visiting chaplain and asked me if I wanted someone. I was gonna have surgery and the next day I want someone to pray with me. And I said yes. Okay. So she came and pulled her chair next to my bed. She didn't do anything that looked like prayer to me. She talked with me. She said, would you be willing to tell me what's been going on in your life the last year or two? Now this is before we have a mind body clinic at Harvard Method center. This is 1967. Nobody's talking about mind and body connection.

Sure.

So would you be willing to tell me what's been going on in your life the last year or two? So I tell her my story, at the end of which she looks at me compassionately. And she says, mary, everything's created twice. I no idea what she's talking about. And she said, you know this, everybody knows it. Almost nobody knows the power of knowing this. And then she said, the nightgown you're wearing, the sheet covering you, the bed you're laying on, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, all the machinery you hooked up to first it had to be a thought before it could be a thing. And then she said, I hear how much you love your little boy, but I also hear how much you've been hating yourself. You feel like you shamed yourself, you shamed your school, you shamed your family. And now that you're considering how everything is created twice, could you consider the possibility that there could be a correlation between that toxic thinking and self loathing, destructive thinking and the toxicity that is rampaging your body and threatening your very life?

Wow. And Shelby, before her time with that.

Nobody I knew thought this way. Yeah, they were. You know, there are small groups of people over a long time who have thought this way. Yeah, but. So she said to me, could you believe we could say a prayer? And in the morning the doctors look at you and say, you look so much better. Let's test you. And they test you and they say, you're just fine. Get up, go home. Could you believe that could happen for you? And I told her the truth. No, there was not one part of me believed she was going to say some words and all of this was just going to evaporate. She said, all right, if you can't believe this, then could you believe? She said, I want you to think about all the possibilities today with quantum physics, we know infinite possibilities with strength we call superposition, just ready to become what we get in harmony with. So she said, could you believe there is a possibility, even one possibility, where we could do, we could say words and we could scoop, you know, energetically, pull everything that's toxic from your body, put it in that one kidney that's going to get removed. And when it gets removed, instead of you getting worse, you get better. Is it possible that that could happen? Well, she was the only person who talked to me about a possibility of getting better. Nobody else.

When you were hearing her, were you? I'm just thinking back to that time, like what might have been going through your mind? I mean, did you think she was crazy? Did you think she was woo woo at the time were taking it on what was going through your mind with this?

I thought she was weird. One hand on. One hand on the Other hand, when you are in a parched desert of no hope and somebody puts one droplet of water on you, you want to drink that?

Yeah.

And I went, well, maybe it's not probable, but maybe it's possible. And then she said, that's all we need, one corner of your mind work with this possibility. Now today we know, I mean higher frequency always dominates lower frequency. So I didn't know any of that. And she didn't, she, she didn't say prayer. She told me what to do to change my.

And what does she tell you to do?

You said, so here's what I want you to do. When you have the surgery and the kidneys removed, the first couple or so days you're going to be busy with just pain management and your mind's going to be busy on that. As that goes away, your mind is going to want to go down those well worn paths of thinking called self loathing.

Okay?

So every time you start to notice yourself thinking a self loathing thought, interrupt that thought and say no, that left with a kidney. And then immediately, Mary, because she had said to me, if you could live, what would you do with your life? So this is where we begin to understand the power of visioning. Yeah, having a goal. So what would you do with your life? I knew exactly what I would do with my life. Number one, I would raise my little boy and number two, I would become a teacher. And so she said, here's what I want you to do. No, that left with a kidney. Then immediately imagine yourself, you're walking up some stairs into an elementary school. You're a feel you've got a little five year old boy's hand in your hand, feel the warmth of his hand. Walk in, here's his kindergarten class. The teacher greets him, he's happy, you hug him and he goes into his kindergarten class and you're there. Then imagine click, click, click of your heels down the hall and around the corner and there's your classroom. Then immediately fast forward and you're sitting in a great big auditorium or stadium and all these caps and gowns down on the stage and you hear your son's name called and he holds up his diploma and you feel this thrill of pride and gratefulness for who he's become and your part in that over raising him to this moment and your teaching career is growing. Then fast forward and you're sitting in the front row of a wedding and you're the mother of the groom and it's marrying the love of his life. And how Thrilled you are to be part of his life all this time. See this and your teaching career is flourishing. And she said, just keep doing that. And she left.

My gosh.

So we had the surgery. I was, I would today we would call that being an unconscious competent. I was doing what she told me to do, but I wasn't like I, I wasn't paying attention to this is going to be. I just did it. But after about seven or eight days my numbers were stable instead of going worse, which they did nothing but go down, and my numbers stabilized. So after about two weeks I was able to go. They said, well, maybe you're going to have a little more time than we thought. So I went home in an ambulance to my parents house. I could probably get my head off the pillow. I had to go in three times a week at first to the urologist to be tested. And my numbers not only stabilized, but just subtly, slightly started to improve, improve, improve. Finally, about somewhere between the fourth and fifth month after the surgery, I'm sitting in a meeting in a doctor's office with the surgeon, the GP and the specialist and they're scratching their heads and they're saying, we have no science for what's happened of this one kidney. We saw it 50% destroyed and just riddled with nephritis. That kidney is functioning as a perfectly healthy kidney. We don't know we're going to put medical anomaly on your chart. We don't know what happened, but whatever you've been doing, keep doing it. I didn't even really know at that point what it was I'd been doing, except that what was happening was now I was living from a vision for life. Attraction.

My gosh, I love it. Not only a vision for life, but I'm hearing a lot of themes in this one. Somebody believed in you and it was interesting because the doctors were telling you you only have six months to live. This is terrible. It's doomsday. And that's all you're hearing. But then you have this woman come in and she's believing in another possibility. So I think that's super powerful. And then you're hearing for the first time about the idea of the mind, body and a vision and that you can control this. So a lot of really interesting things, so before their time. I think it's incredible what a gift she gave you.

It was a huge gift. It was a huge gift. It was a gift of life and an understanding of that.

Yeah.

I went on and got my undergraduate degree in education, my master's Degree in counseling psychology became a. And I wanted to teach transformation as I had experienced it so much in my life most days. The path to doing that was the only way I saw doing this before really the human potential movement had any grounds, any, you know, personal development was not even on the scene. Coaching hadn't been. Yeah. So I became a therapist and I opened a church and I taught transformation in that model and had a very successful career in that.

So everything was working in your life until it wasn't then.

So what happened? So my, I went on and had three more children with my. My kid's dad, my son's father. And we were married 27 years in midlife. We were, we were kids when we got married. If we five years, we said, you know, you're too nice a person, we should be together. We were so unmatched on so many different levels of life. So we released each other. I never felt that marriage was a failure. We had four great kids. We're still good friends. It felt complete. We completed that A couple years later I met and fell in love with a very dynamic CPA who I was building work. My work was really growing and expanding. We bought 100 acre property. He offered to help and first he was helping. Then we fell in love and got married. And first several years were really pretty good. And then I began to realize that the depression disorder that I knew he had probably had more depth to it and difficulty. It became a very, very challenging relationship. And after probably five more years, I opened a piece of mail one day and I mean at this point I've got selling books, I'm working with the United Nations, I've been speaking at the UN three different times. I've got PBS special. The Dalai Lama's office had called me. I helped host meetings for him and world leaders. A very wonderful, amazing congregation. 3,000 people a week coming through. And I open a piece of mail and there's a different mortgage that I didn't know about. When I can ask him about it because he ran the finances not only of my personal life, but the board. And I trusted him with things at the church. And he was involved in 11 other businesses. Let me just say that letter opening and discovering there was something that wasn't as I thought it should be led me. And then I got outside help and attorneys and CPAs and unraveled that for several years he'd been taking money out of. He was making his. What he finally got diagnosed with was a bipolar disease where he was operating in manic states, making Decisions that move money. Between all these 11 businesses, it was commingling, it was money laundering, was embezzlement, and ultimately he got into mental. We got him in a mental hospital where he got stabilized and he could tell the truth about what had been going on. I, so I lost everything I had built. We lost the work. Everything went into bankruptcy. And all those businesses, the. It was just the deepest, darkest night of my soul.

When something like that happens. What goes through your mind as far? Like, do you. Did you blame yourself? Was it, I can't trust people? Like, what was the conversation you were having when that was all unfolding?

Well, the first, first thing is you do everything you could do to keep it from happening. I mean, I was scrambling for about a year trying to save things. And when I discovered it's like denial in a way. Sure. And okay, now that I can see this, maybe there's something I can do about it. And when I couldn't do anything about it and I had to give my last message, it got broadcast all over the Northwest. And the next Sunday, there was no place to go after 23 years of always getting up at 3 in the morning and doing this work. So I just knew to get to the coast that day, the Oregon coast. So I drove down to the Oregon coast and got to a beach that isn't well traveled and just walked the beach that day. And I knew that one day on the beach was not going to do it. I didn't have any place to go anyway, so I found a place to rent for a short. I thought I would stay maybe 90 days. And during those 91st five weeks, Natalie, I was just bereft. It was. I mean, I was. I moved from being mad at him, mad at my board members who didn't were supposed to be charged with oversight. Mostly, mostly mad at me because, you know, Steve Jobs once said, you can't connect the dots going forward, but you can connect the dots looking backwards. And I could see things looking backwards where I could have. I could have noticed that. I could have noticed that. I chose. And ultimately I came to a place in myself where I realized part of my not noticing was a hidden fear in me. A fear of a second divorce as a public person.

Yeah.

And that was that fear. Letting it like a virus operated me was a very, very expensive fear, I would imagine.

When that happens, it's like. It's almost like you become inauthentic. I'm just thinking myself, like if I was going through something like that, what would come up for me is that I'd be in hiding. Like, I don't want people to really know what's going on. So it starts feeling disconnected, like you have to hold it all together. Was that coming up or what was the.

No, it was. It was. It was during those five weeks, the first five weeks of the 90 days at the beach. I didn't hide from people. I mean, if people called me or wrote me, I mean, I. But what I did do was I got to the place inside myself where I knew the truth. And I knew whether anybody ever believed it or not, I knew. The truth for me was that I had never made a decision for how we did things. And that work that I didn't believe was good for people. That was the fundamental thing I was doing, had served that. And I could stand strong in that. No matter what the world said or whatever was printed, that was what I knew. It was the truth. So there was a piece in that. It didn't change the loss. It didn't. I lost. Other than my relationships with my key ally, friends and teachers with me, Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, Les Brown and the scores of others, Michael Beck with others, you know, Bob Proctor, inviting me to their stages, it was still this huge personal loss. And so I picked up a little book called Dark Night of the Soul, written in about 1100 AD and there's a formula for anybody going through an extremely dark, difficult time in that, okay? And he says that when the dark night, it can be you lose a child or you surprise divorce in your life, when you see somebody call your money or. It's a huge loss. It's not a bee sting, It's a huge loss when the dark night comes upon you. And interestingly, he doesn't say if. He says when. It's part of the curriculum of our journey as a human spiritual being having a human experience. The hero's journey involves. So when the dark night comes upon you, he said, the first thing you do is do everything you can do to try to make it go away, okay?

Which is what you did initially.

When you discover your power is not great enough to make it go away. If you surrender to it, it's like, all right, I can't change this. Here it is. I can't change it. If you surrender to it, three things will happen, okay? The first is a feeling of release. The second is a feeling of relief. You stop fighting it. You set it down, okay, here it is. And the third feeling, he said, is a strange feeling that will come upon you. The feeling that you don't want it to end too soon.

The experience to end too soon.

You don't want it to end too soon. You actually want everything it came to give you.

I just got chills. Oh, my gosh. And I will share everything you just said I've experienced for sure, with my hardships. So that is amazing how you just laid that out. That's incredible.

So that helped me. It's like, okay, I do want everything. I don't want to go through.

Because it defines you in a new. I mean, you become a new person in a lot of ways with what.

You know now and later. I would say I. I wouldn't wish what I went through. Yeah. On anybody, but I would wish where it took me. On everybody. Yeah. Wow.

So what would you tell somebody in that spot right now? Because they don't see that yet. You know, they're just thinking, why is this happening to me? How do they get to that surrender quicker?

Well, the first. One of the first steps, of course, is you have to grieve it. You can't do a spiritual. I mean, people try to do a spiritual bypass on it, but the part of you continues to be stuck, is that you find a way to make sure that you're part of the story, that it isn't happening to you, it's happening with you.

Okay.

I'm in this scene. I mean, I picked this man. In my version, I picked this man, and I get to make meaning out of this, the meaning. And I've been a student of transformation. So you've got Viktor Frankl, you've got, I mean, all kinds of models of people who chose to make higher meaning out of very dark things. So. And I also knew that in the hero's journey, there's a. There's, you know, the moment, like, of a crucifixion is on Friday. If you look at the Christian tradition, the. On Friday, the resurrections on Sunday. And this came to me one day walking on the beach because I heard, this is a dark chapter. Mary. But it's not your whole book.

Yeah.

And that was the first time. This is after five weeks, where I went, oh, I could write a new chapter. I hadn't thought that way yet. And then I thought, you know, yeah, Friday's the crucifixion, Sunday's the resurrection. What happens on Saturday? Yeah, Saturday isn't a no time. Saturday. I'm in a Saturday. Then I went, I'm in a Saturday. There's this. Everything fell apart. The loss of everything. And then I haven't even begun to see what can come forth? So this is in 2003 and four in my life. And then I got a phone call to invite me to speak here. And I just began. I realized also in that moment that I was still in love with what I did. When seeing that light come on in somebody's eyes or an audience of eyes, that I was in love with that. And I determined to build a business where I not only could support myself and the things that mattered to me, but I could pay that money back.

Yeah. And one thing that you mentioned before we started recording today, and I want people to hear this, is you realize that your ex, while still sick, had created a $10 million debt to people. And you didn't know how you were going to pay that back. You didn't have the funds to do that, but you decided that it was happening, that you were going to make that happen. How scary.

It was very scary. But how I lived with it was, I'll either get it done or I'll spend the rest of my life efforting on it. And I decided, and here's the thinking. When you look like you have nothing, you always have a way to think about things that are empowering or disempowering. If I go, I have nothing. I have nothing. I saw there were big fires in Montecito, California, a few years ago, and the news crew was going through these, you know, multimillion dollar homes reduced to ashes. Come upon a couple sobbing, just holding each other and sobbing. And the news crew says, was this your house? It's just like, we lost everything. We lost everything. And then a little bit later, there become a con, another couple who are holding each other. And here's this burned rubble. And they said, oh, my gosh, this was your house? And they said, yes, but we are so grateful. That was tough. I mean, we loved our house, but the things that are irreplaceable, we have each other, we have our kids, animals. We are so grateful.

It's a perspective.

Same situation, very different experiences. And that had stuck with me. So I decided, okay, so I'm gonna. And I agreed to pay on every ten $99.15 and every W2 dollars. I wasn't sure how I was going to pay it back, how I was going to earn income, whether I'd work.

For somebody or let alone 10 million do dollars. That's quite a significant amount.

I would pay 25% of every 10.99$. So then I moved to California to start my work. My friends, Marianne, they were saying, get out of the Nonprofit work. Get in the profit work so you can make some money.

Yeah.

And I started thinking, well, for every dollar I earn, the first 15 cents goes. I'm going to pay my debt with then 53 cents by the time you pay federal and state taxes. So 53 and 15 to make 68. So that's like 32 cents I'm going to have left to live on. And I thought, wow, how am I going to live on 32 cents? And thought came, well, you better earn a whole lot of 32 cents then. Yeah. Anyway, this next stage of my work has been. It was really only two years later and that should be hope for anybody who's going through a dark time. Do that piece. Well, it was really literally or a little less than two years later, I thought, oh, my gosh. If that meaning where I had been, the work I had built was still. I think it would. It felt so small to what was happening in my life, what I was doing. So it took me some time. It took me 14 years. But as of November 2018, I have a zero balance.

Wow. So I also want to point out, you said you recently turned 70. So if I'm. If I'm doing the math correctly, this was happening at 50, really 55. So I want people to hear this because there's, you know, my new book is called Aging in Reverse, and I talk about this mindset around age and I think there's people listening right now that are 40 thinking it's too late to do big things. And you were 55. Just begin starting over. Not even over, like starting from underneath.

Starting with a trash reputation. Yeah. And you fully recreated Thomas Edison when he was 67. His whole laboratory burned in a huge fire and the insurance didn't cover it. And he's just looking at that rubble and his response is, hey, I'm only 67. I can start again.

Wow.

So it's a mindset. It really is.

Gosh, what a journey you have been on. My gosh. And I love how you share the stories with that, you know, that you really believe it all happened for you. That you and what you said, living in the. You didn't want it to end because this all happened for you.

Right. So you have to stay with that.

Yeah.

Victimhood is so tempting. Yeah. For any of us, you know, and you will never run out of people who will be in the ain't it awful conversation with you. It's not supportive.

Oh, my gosh, I love it. You just said that. I say I love that. I feel like how did I not talk to you about this sooner? This is like incredible. I always. I always say my slogan, I don't know if you know this, Mary, is excuses or solutions, you decide. And I always say that me validating. Excuse me, excuses and saying, you're right, that sucks, does not help anything. It doesn't.

Excuses are solutions that you decide.

Excuses or solutions, you decide.

I love that.

Yeah. And it's.

What.

Similar to what you said with the perspective. But my gosh, I'm a full fan of that. And I. I don't want friends or mentors or people in my life to validate my excuses for the same reason. It just keeps us stuck there. Because if everybody had said to you, you're right, that's stinks. Just go move to an island and, you know, forget about it all, you wouldn't be where you are right now, today, and you wouldn't have peace because that would always be. You'd be carrying that always.

And you choose who you're going to hang out with. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. So the relationships you lost and changed during that time, how do you view those now? I mean, did you. Did you fix them? Did you decide that those weren't really relationships worth having?

No. No, no. So it was. Let me say, when I got that call to go speak, it was in Bellevue, Washington. I lived in Portland, three hour drive. They wanted me to come and do four Wednesdays for them. During that time, the minister, senior minister had some health challenges. So that went on. So for 17 months, I would drive to Bellevue on Wednesdays and speak to a group of people. About the second time we did that, I had, you know, Mike, I'd worked with many of the same people. For all of those, 23 wonderful friends. And from the inside out, my board, my senior staff, everyone that was close saw what happened, that we were all still a team. It was. It was the outside world where you just, you know, this projection on this. How could. How could she not know? I mean. Well, nobody lived what I was living. I was gone a lot. I was doing. I was doing weddings and funerals and it didn't matter. You know, that took me a while to realize it didn't matter what they thought. I knew the truth.

Yes.

As we're driving home one night, I said to the two colleagues who were with me who were helping me do this piece of work, I said, you know what? I need to presence myself in Portland, Oregon. Thousands and thousands of people came through that church. All they get is what's on the front page of The Oregonian. They don't know. They need to. I need to do something where they can get with me, be mad at me, cry with me, accuse me, and just tell them my side and what it was like. And then they can still be mad or not, but I will have that. And it's called reparation work. So, you know, make a mistake, you do your best to clean it up. You can't clean up everything. Some things you can't put back together. But I knew this piece of work was important, so we started renting a place on Tuesday nights. There were five churches that rose out of the ashes of I had created. I didn't want to do anything on Sundays. I knew for sure I didn't want to start another church. So we did something on Tuesday nights, and we just called it Sabbath Tuesdays. And people would come, we put out word, and I would start this way. I'd say, we're going to do a short service, at the end of which I will stay and answer any question you want. No questions, out of bounds. And so we would do a short service. And then in the first few months, the questions were just, how did you not know you hurt? You know, it was just, oh, my gosh, Ye. And I just stood in it. And so finally they didn't. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people came to that. And then it kind of a core group kept just wanting to have the service. And so that went on for three years. By then, my life had moved to California. Two years later, I met this, who I've been married to now, thank God, for 13 years. This wonderful, wonderful man and my whole life. I remember when Marianne Williamson looked at his picture, she said, oh, Mary, he's your reward.

Did you say.

Did you.

Were you angry at your ex for putting. For creating this? And. And how has that changed? Did you forgive him? Do you look at that as a blessing now? Like, how did you even begin to manage those thoughts?

Yeah, it's a. Both. And, you know, I knew that my life will never go forward if I keep resentment and anger inside me. Buddha said resentment is like picking up a hot coal, meaning to throw it at someone else. But you are the one who gets more. That's so good.

Yeah.

So I found a place where I could find peace in myself. That was. He's diagnosed with a disease. I don't have that disease. I don't know what it's like to be inside that disease. There was no money that he had stored for himself.

Yeah.

Wasn't like he was, you Know, normal in business. Person takes that money and does something for themselves. He just would make a business decision in one business, and then it wouldn't go bad because he made it in a manic state. Then he'd go, in his mind, borrow 50,000 from this one and move this money around and lie to everybody.

Yeah.

Not everybody with my. Why I didn't stay married to him. You know, if your husband has cancer or has a disease, you know, that's. That was a struggle for me in the beginning. Like, how do you divorce somebody who's sick? But then I realized not. And I got some help with this also. Not everybody who has bipolar disease lies.

Yeah.

If. If in fact, the disease made you lie, everybody who had that disease would lie. Sure. He had a strong capacity for that.

Yeah.

It was the deception. And I couldn't. It was dangerous to me, and I couldn't live in it.

Did he own that he had done that? Did he realize that that had created.

Yes, he was able to, legally. I mean, he confessed. He pled guilty. He. And I'm grateful for that. But he always had stories about. You know, when we talk about excuses, it was because of this and it was because of that and standing in it and say, I did that. I did that. That hasn't. And the truth is, I haven't seen him now. And I. Very close. I helped raise his kids for 10 years, and their mom is wonderful, and I'm still in contact with them. Performed a wedding for boys and. But that's been almost 10 years.

Yeah. And I would imagine somebody in that. That has bipolar or somebody who's narcissist. All those personalities, they have a way of. In their mania. Like we want to believe them. Like we want to believe them. So it plays with our heads, too, that, you know, am I wrong? Are they right? You know, I would imagine that was very challenging.

Well, thank you for pointing that out. That happened when I would ask questions along the way. The ones I did ask were usually just, that's my side of the street. I'm the cpa. Don't bother. You've got plenty of stuff to put your head. Yeah. That kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow. Wow.

Let's piece on that. So I did those for three years, and then I knew it was my life. I'd moved to California. So I set off the word. This is the last of these events I'm going to do in Portland was just packed to the walls. And I said, we're going to end this the way we started it. I'll do a service at the end of which you can ask any question you want. A question's out of bounds. And I thought there would be no more questions. We finished. I said, are there any final questions? And all these hands shot up. I just thought, oh, no, I have to be a service. Okay, bring it on. And now the questions were, are you happy? Tell us about your new.

I love that.

Tell me about your kids, because the kids have all grown up in the church. So I walked out and I felt like the universe gave me a big gold star and said, mary, you're free to go now.

Well, there's so much coming up for me talking to you, but the things that are really standing out to me are one, how authentic and real you are and how you're very. You just own your truth and you share it, and you're not afraid because you're being truthful. So I would imagine where some people might hide, it's because they're not fully owning their truth. Or like you said, you kept saying, I knew my truth. So you were not afraid of anything because you.

You knew your truth.

So you were just being out there. Also, the amount of integrity you have is just incredible. Like, really. And a lot of integrity, just being willing and taking responsibility and paying those people back and being really committed to that. That's something that I wish we saw more of with people so very. A lot of integrity. And then, wow, that gift that that woman gave you in the hospital years ago, I think you truly took it on and have, you know, I think things that we learn from people when we just let it stop at us, we're not doing anything. You know, we don't add any value with it. But what you did as a true teacher, you said you wanted to be a teacher. You really are. Because you took something you learned, you were able to expand it and educate so many others. And I just think that's so incredible. And I hope you realize what. What a gift you are to people for that.

Well, thank you, Natalie. And the main point, of course, is for this to be. As we share our stories. You share your story, I'll share my story. That there are nuggets in there that someone else can benefit from and move from in their own lives. We're going to make mistakes. Not maybe. Absolutely an experience. We learned to walk by falling down. It's just that when we were a little kid, when we fell down, we didn't go, well, that's it. I'm not going to be a walker. We didn't Give up. We got. And that's an important piece of it, is we're going to make mistakes. Our best thing is to clean up as much of it as we can. Learn from it. But know that this is the. In this dimension of light and dark and up and down. Yeah, we learn by getting it right and we learn by getting it wrong. And both of which are equal teachers. I. On my bio, I put my. I have lots of degrees and honors in my life, but the two greatest ones are the two black belts I hold. One in success and one in failure.

Oh, I love that. I love that. I have. I do a final question for you before I go into some of your books and where people can find you. If somebody's listening to this right now, and they're in their own personal hardship, and we. We kind of touched on this, but I would love to know from you right now, somebody's listening. They're in their own personal. Whatever that is to them, whatever their hardship is. Maybe it's financial, maybe they've lost their business relationship, whatever it is. If you were to give them three pieces of advice right now to start shifting their mindset and leveling up and creating everything from nothing, what would you tell them?

I think, number one, is that whatever it is, the first step is to accept that this has happened, that it's not what you wanted, and do your best to keep blame out of your mind. You want understanding, but not blame. And that it's part of your life. It didn't happen to you, it happened with you. So accept that it happened and that you're part of it. If it's happening in your life at some level, even if you had no, I see it coming, including the many, many years of my work in the world and helping people who've moved through disease. Almost every person I know who's had cancer or any other kind of great difficulty, they go, I wouldn't wish this, but where it took me, what's happened in my life because of it. So use that as inspiration that you can hear from person after person who have been in very dark, difficult times, who say, this took me a place in myself, I wouldn't trade for anything and determine. So, number one, accept. Number two, determine that you're gonna. Since you can't change this experience, you're gonna use this experience to take you to a place in yourself of greater empowerment, greater truth, greater integrity, whatever it is you want, greater in your life, what this impetus can do for you. And then, number three, begin to build a vision for what the next chapter of your life is gonna be like, what you would love it to be like. And it doesn't have. You can think, oh, I can't do that because I don't have any money. No, you're free in your mind. The money to pay all those people back came because I got free. In my mind. I could start to think about things I could do instead of focusing on all the things I couldn't do.

Yes. I want everyone to really hear that because you didn't have $10 million, you didn't even know how you were going to create that.

You just knew it was going to happen. I didn't have monthly income, but you.

Knew you had the intention and you knew it was going to happen. You were going to find a way. Incredible. Wow. Where can people tell us about your books? Where can people find you? I know they're going to want more.

Well, the best thing to do is go to Mary Morrissey M O R R I s s e y.com if you want to look at what I'm doing. The other is I have a YouTube channel. You can see lots and lots of seven to nine minute videos there which will cover a multitude of topics to help you. That's free. Those are really the two amazing. Find me.

I love it. Thank you so much, Mary.

Thank you for having me and thank you for your work. Must say, all of you who come here on a regular basis and listen to Natalie, you're in a good place. Keep coming.

Oh, thank you. Thanks for leveling up with us today. Please share this episode if you found it helpful so others can join in. And don't forget to hit that subscribe so you don't miss out on future, future shows. And if you would leave me a five star review. I appreciate those so much. I read all of them and it's how I know that I'm giving you information that you find valuable. And come interact with me over on Instagram at Natalie Jill Fit. I read all the direct messages and comments over there. Make it a great day. Creating everything from nothing.

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