Elements of Community Podcast
Unpacking The Magic of Community
How Opening Your Heart to Common Heart Can Transform Your Connections
Discover a profound transformation in your connections as Dr. Kimberly Marooney reveals the power of embracing the common heart shared with others on Elements of Community. Dr. Marooney passionately discusses the incredible impact of prayer within her Gateway University community, radiating positivity throughout the world. Her unique style of collaborative leadership, guided by
Show Notes
Dr. Kimberly Marooney passionately shared how opening one’s heart to the common heart shared among all beings can profoundly transform connections with others. In our enlightening conversation, she emphasized the immense power of this practice.
Dr. Marooney vividly described the strong sense of familiarity and connection present within Gateway University‘s community. Despite its modest size, the community thrived due to the shared purpose and unwavering support among its members, creating a tight-knit group united by a common heart. According to Dr. Marooney, even brief moments of vulnerability and openness to others can amplify joy through heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul connections.
Her profound insights served as a poignant reminder to recognize the true value of the common heart. By embracing vulnerability and dropping barriers, individuals can experience the boundless joy and deep connections that emanate from such openness. Dr. Marooney’s wisdom resonated deeply with the listeners, inspiring them to seek profound transformations within their own connections and relationships through the power of the common heart.
Other subjects we covered on the show:
- The positive impact prayer can have on communities and situations.
- Dr. Kimberly’s journey from Reverend to Doctor and President of Gateway University.
- The distinction between a manager and a leader.
- The concepts of free will and destiny.
- The question “What else is possible in this moment?” helps Dr. Kimberly expand her vision beyond fears or limitations to see more immense possibilities.
AND MORE TOPICS COVERED IN THE FULL INTERVIEW!!! You can check that out and subscribe at https://pbp.li/eoc51.
If you want to know more about Dr. Kimberly Marooney, you may reach out to her at:
- Email: Kimberly@KimberlyMarooney.com
- Websites: http://gatewayuniversity.org/
- Websites: https://kimberlymarooney.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kimberly.marooney.7
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kimberlymarooney
[00:00:00] Welcome back everyone and welcome to the show Dr. Kimberly Marooney. Thank you very much for joining us now. You and I have gotten to know each other really well over the last let’s call it year and a half, maybe two years and I’m really excited that we finally managed to get this on the books because we tried a few times.
And finally here we are. So thank you for joining us would you like to tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
Oh, I’d be delighted. So for the last 30 years, I’ve been known primarily as Reverend Kimberly Marooney, the godmother of the modern angel world. And in that life, I have published a dozen books, I founded the angel ministry, and I’ve contributed to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Wow.[00:01:00]
So from my young life, from my early 20s, actually, I started working with a woman named Dr. Judith Larkin Reno, who started as my therapist, but she became my friend, we were business partners for a while, and she also encouraged me to continue my education. So, through her and her Gateway University, I got a Master of Arts Degree in Angelology, the first one I believe in the world, and I also got a Doctorate in Spiritual Psychology.
And Judith kept telling me, well, you’re going to need this later in your life. She was an amazing clairvoyant. She had an such clear and present vision. So, through my work with her, when she told me, you’re going to need to be Dr. Kimberly in the future.
I believed her and I said yes, and got [00:02:00] dragged kicking and screaming through the dissertation process to become Dr. Kimberly and promptly put it away, never told anybody for about 10 years. Well, 10 years later, Judith was quite ill, excuse me, and she asked me, sometimes I have a little trouble with my voice.
We all do.
She asked me if I would become the next president of Gateway University, and at the time that had me pretty choked up. So, could be I’m reliving past experience of no.
It could be.
It could be, but I eventually came to the place where I was able to say yes, took me five years to say yes.
So she dragged you kicking and screaming to that too, huh?
Dragged me kicking and screaming to [00:03:00] that too. I had no idea who I was becoming, what my life would be following that. And I had no idea of the immense pleasure and joy that was waiting for me. So I said, yes, she began my very short training to become Dr. Kimberly, president of Gateway University, a school for the study of higher consciousness.
Now you had already earned your doctorate at that point.
Already Dr. Kimberly, but I hadn’t used it. I hadn’t told anybody I hadn’t used it. Right? So I had to.
You are adjusting, who you were.
I had to shift my perceptions of who I am, why I’m here, what is my life purpose, who am I really? I had the opportunity to expand who I thought I was radically.
Hmm.
Step into these shoes as president of a university. And what I discovered really shocked me because [00:04:00] I’m really good at it. And I enjoy it. So here I am, Dr. Kimberly, president of Gateway University, mentoring doctoral candidates in fields of higher consciousness through radically expanding their concepts of who they think they are. And what a pleasure it is. to be the midwife on that journey.
Oh, cool. Wow.
So I’m now in the process of, and I have been for several years, how do I blend my love of angels and the angel spiritual community with the delight and joy of the academic world, which is also spiritually focused.
We’re a school for the study of higher [00:05:00] consciousness, which has to do with spirituality, transpersonal psychology, things like that. How do I now blend those two communities into a common, a much larger common vision?
That’s the work now, huh?
It is, and what joy and fun and ecstasy is here.
Yeah. Wow. Thank you. So Gateway must have a community of sorts. Do you want to tell us about the community of Gateway?
The community of Gateway is fairly small at this point, because while Judith Larkin Reno had a beautiful local community in the San Diego area of California, she was not very technically adept. And she was not able to provide me with a list of these beautiful people that I’d actually known since the [00:06:00] 1980s. And so a few of them I did have contact information for, but because Gateway was not internet based.
Modernized?
Modernized, right, while I received the legal and the intellectual property of Gateway, I had to begin anew with community building and that is.
Is it that wonderful gift?
That is a wonderful gift. And so it’s something that I’ve been pondering and meditating about and contemplating and experimenting with in just exactly how I do that.
And so now seven years later, while I’m still in the process of wondering that I haven’t built much of a gateway community so far, it’s our current students and our alumni. But it’s also our ministers because through Gateway University, Gateway Community, Gateway is a 501c3 [00:07:00] nonprofit with a mission of teaching and counseling, which means we’re a church.
Essentially, we’re a church. We ordain, I ordain and train ministers. I’ve ordained and trained about 100 ministers in the last 20 years, 15 years, 12 years. In the last 12 years, I’ve ordained and trained about 100 ministers, which I think is pretty awesome. So that is part of our Gateway community is those ministers and our current students. So probably, oh, we probably have 250 in our Gateway community. Which to me, that’s a small community.
Small and tight.
And tight and beautiful.
Yeah.
It’s actually a community as opposed to a group.
Tell me about that. What does that mean?
We work, we have a common vision and we work together. We have a common purpose and we [00:08:00] work together.
Yeah.
We help each other. We receive help, we help each other.
That’s lovely. What is the purpose?
Our purpose is to. First of all, learn to personally embody the divine love that is the essence of our true being. So that we become the living, breathing ambassadors or emissaries of light that our souls are truly yearning for. And secondly, as we embrace and emanate that light ourselves to share it generously.
So to share it with our family, our friends, our communities, our workplace the world. So most of our ministers engage in. Very important and very deep and powerful personal prayer. [00:09:00] So, we often feel like we’re just alone sitting here in my little house praying about some situation out there in the world.
But our prayers connect with the millions of other prayers that are being spoken at any given moment. All around the world and that contribution to the life of prayer, the presence of love, the presence of compassion, the vision for a better turnout than what we might imagine could happen. Those prayers are powerful and in that united expression of divine love, miracles happen over and over and over. So we pray for each other. We pray for situations around the world that matters. We get together and we pray when something is happening, like we have three ministers in [00:10:00] Lithuania and NATO just finished a meeting in Lithuania and one of our, two of our ministers live in Vilnius and they, where the NATO summit just happened.
They both chose to leave the city while that was happening and go out into the country to be in a more peaceful place to pray about peaceful resolution. And so we joined with them in prayer supporting them, helping them to feel our strength. And that’s one of the things we practice often at Gateway, is connecting through the power of prayer, so that we know that we’re not alone.
We’re giving and receiving this power of love and prayer through our common heart, through our common desires to see a vision of peace, and compassion, and collaboration and cooperation in our world. So, that’s an important part of our vision and our purpose and what we do. We pray a lot.
I love that. Now we humans, we [00:11:00] have a problem. And our problem results in a branding problem for prayer. Our problem is that we don’t actually get to see the two timelines side by side. We don’t get to see that. And so, it’s hard for us to really put our fingers on the notion of what would have happened if.
What would have happened if I had prayed? In this situation or rather what would have happened if I had not prayed in this situation because we don’t get to see the other side we can imagine it sort of sometimes in small ways, we don’t see it happening this is how it would have happened if you had prayed or and if we had not prayed and the result of that is that the best that we can do in terms of telling that story is looking at data.
So I’ll look at the data of cancer survivors. What happens if, what’s the survivability of a cancer survivor who’s a member of a community that’s [00:12:00] actively supporting each other versus the survivability of a cancer patient? Who is not a member of a community actively supporting each other. And what’s the difference between those two? And we have a lot of data on things like that.
And all of our data agrees that the community that actively supports each other has a much higher survivability rate. But it’s hard for us to put our finger on the fact that it was nothing more than the energetic support. In a very real sense, the prayers of that community that made that difference. Because we don’t see both timelines.
Well, I’m glad that you mentioned studies because, you know, that’s part of my academic side is enjoying the power of academic studies, scientific studies. The Maharishi University. Has been doing studies for years, and one of the things that they have discovered in studies that in a local [00:13:00] community, 4000 is a magic number.
So, and they’ve tested this. They have studies verifying that if you get 4000 people in a city. Well, specifically for them doing transcendental meditation together at the same time, they can affect several things that can be measured and monitored. So when 4000 people come together in a city. and do transcendental meditation for a specific period of time.
And then you watch the statistics of the city, a couple of things happen. First of all, the crime rate goes down in the surrounding area quite dramatically for a period of time. Secondly, car accidents go down quite dramatically. For a period of time, and I think I’m just going to stick with those two, because those are the two that I can remember specifically. There are a [00:14:00] few other benefits that also happen.
That’s amazing. We’re definitely going to need those links to share with people.
I think emergency room admits goes down too, but I’m not certain if that was connected with this study or something else, because I haven’t looked at it.
If car accidents and crime go down, it stands to reason that emergency room admits would go down.
It would also go down. So they can monitor that, they can do their meditation, they can monitor the time period following that, and then after a particular period of time, everything returns to kind of its normal. So that’s fairly a substantial response, that you could say.
That is substantial.
Yeah. I think those two things, I think that action is connected with that result.
Yeah. Amazing.
And so another example that happened just recently is when the Wagner team went into Russia on its way to Moscow [00:15:00] very quickly. You can bet that there was a massive amount of prayer that happened for that. And one of the groups that I’m aware of brought some just massive prayer power to it. And within six hours, an agreement was reached and the Wagner troops stopped.
Yeah, they were unstoppable. There was no way they weren’t getting into Moscow.
Six hours, an agreement was reached. And they stopped with a very little violence or bloodshed. Personally, I see that as the power of prayer.
It’s an interesting one because again. While we don’t actually see both timelines, the progression of that timeline without prayer seemed pretty clear. They were unstoppable. They had a mission, and they were going to succeed.
So, as far as that power of prayer is [00:16:00] concerned, one of the things that we like to do in the angel ministry is we received a beautiful rosary for the children of light for Mother Mary through intuitive or channeled dialogue, I’ll call it. This rosary is quite beautiful.
And so there’s an, in it asks us to pray every day for one full month, 31 days to be exact, and listen carefully as our plan unfolds for you. So for those of us who are in a time where we need some additional guidance in life, where we need some clarity and focus on how to make decisions, what directions to choose, how to navigate our life going forward. This invitation to pray every day for 31 days and listen carefully daily as the plan unfolds is a very tasty morsel.
[00:17:00] And so we like to do that every fall between September 8th, which is Mother Mary’s one of the Mother Mary feast days in the Catholic calendar. I’m not Catholic. So, you know, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s a time when millions of Catholics are praying with Mother Mary. And we end it 31 days later, just following a second Mary feast day, which is October 7th.
One is the celebration of her birth. And I don’t know, they’ve got a bunch of them for her. So maybe it’s Our Lady of the Rosary. I don’t remember. But it’s a really lovely time in the fall when it’s like, kind of like back to school when we’re all re imagining, you know, we’re trying to re-imagine back to school.
Who am I this year? Who am I going to be? What’s up next for me? We like to do this 31 day daily summit. Last year, we did it as a summit and the fun part was I called back as many ministers who were interested to play a part in helping us gather together and [00:18:00] prepare for 31 days. We did interviews every day. We did the rosary reading every day. So we came together in this huge, massive project. I think in the 31 days, I interviewed 40 people.
Including me.
Including you, you were in that. So it was a very fun project and we had at this point, I think 10,000 people have viewed that page.
Wow.
Which is pretty amazing. We had 600 people live while we were doing it. But people have been finding it and watching the interviews and yeah, benefiting from that goodness that we did.
Now, let’s tie this back to the Gateway Community.
Okay.
One of the Elements of Community is value. And hearing about the positive impact of prayer is enticing. So my question here is, how do you use the [00:19:00] positive impact of prayer inside that community, that gateway community of 250 or so? Or prayer like conscious focus, right?
Transcendental meditation is prayer like conscious focus. How do you use the positive impact of prayer like prayer? Conscious focus to level up your gateway graduates.
Well, I benefit personally from it all the time because our prayer ministers are you know, they watch me if they see I’m looking a little tired, man, they are on it. They’ll send me prayer and they’ll send me a text or an email and they’re saying, you know, I noticed you’re looking a little tired. Are you taking care of yourself? I’m praying for you.
Or when we’re having when we’re working on something, you know, when we’re considering a big project or we’re in some kind of change, or we have a group going or we’re training new ministers. Like we just had a new training of ministers and we had a trip to France to anoint them in [00:20:00] April. That was so much fun.
And all of the other ministers we’re praying and sending energy and love and blessings to us there in France, to the ministers, you know, to help them raise money or arrange for whatever kind of care they needed for their families to be able to come. So there was a massive amount of prayer support going on to help us come together.
And that’s one of the things we’ve done from the beginning is pray for each other. And you know, it’s a giving and receiving. I receive just as much as I give, I’m happy to say. And likewise, when our ministers are having challenges in life, like our Reverend Velma, her uncle was, just went through a very difficult health challenge and was in the hospital for over a month, I think.
And so I was, you know, on the prayer team for him daily, sending prayers, sending angels, you know, doing what I do. And she would give me a report almost daily saying. Well he’s better, he’s down from 15 liters of [00:21:00] oxygen to 12. Today it’s 10 liters. Oh, they’re moving him out of ICU onto the regular floor. Oh, you know, now he’s down to a regular normal kind of a six liters.
They can transfer him now over to out of the hospital and into a care facility. And, you know, and yeah, like that. So we love and support and pray for each other along all of our life journeys, regardless of what they are.
Yeah.
And that also extends into the ministry or into the rather Gateway University students. Like our ministers pray for our students when they’re preparing to graduate, you know, I’ll send them out a notice and I’ll say, yeah. Jan’s getting ready to graduate, and she’s got a little way to go in a very short period of time. Please pray for her.
And they do, you know, they do, they’re on it. Jan finished in time. We did her graduation ceremony a couple of weeks ago in [00:22:00] Olympia, Washington, which was really fun. On over the Fourth of July weekend, all our kids were there. It was really sweet. And so, yeah. There is tremendous purpose in our prayer for one another, tremendous value.
What about after graduation?
We’re working on our alumni program, you know, both for our ministers and for our degree graduates. And so that’s something that I’m very excited to bring forward as we go. We’re building a new platform for Gateway University right now. And when that platform is done, we’ll have a lot more capacity to be able to offer services to our ministers and our graduates that we haven’t up to this point.
And so that expansion has been really something that I’ve been praying about and visioning for 15 years actually. When Judith first asked me to become [00:23:00] her successor, I immediately started, I’m a visionary, I’m a mystic. I cop to it, I’m a visionary, I’m a mystic. And a lot of things happen through that mystical awareness.
And so 15 years ago, I started getting these visions for the direction that the divine wished gateway to expand. And now, mainly through Lucas’s wisdom and help, we’re moving in that direction. So Lucas has helped us at Gateway get over some big hurdles.
And so I’m very excited that we’re expanding now into being able to embrace. And support our alumni and our ministers in a much larger participatory way as they bring value to Gateway and Gateway brings value to them. So I’m very excited about that.
Yeah. And thank you.
Thank you.
It’s [00:24:00] been a joy. So you’ve created a vision and you’ve held on to that vision with both hands so hard that your knuckles are turning white. And that vision is it’s important to you. It’s important to how you want the world to be as you grow up. And to bring that kind of value and vision to other people, that is a version of what leadership might look like. does leadership mean to you?
To me, leadership is the capacity to inspire others, to blend our visions together. To blend our missions. Together to collaborate to cooperate so that in my form [00:25:00] of leadership, I’m supporting you to fulfill your mission as simultaneously. We’re collaborating and you’re supporting me to fulfill my mission.
So you know, I’ve heard terms of servant leadership. Collaborative leadership. I think probably my style is a blend of servant and collaborative leadership. I see us coming together for a common purpose that brings a more peaceful and loving and cooperative environment to humanity.
You know, I’ve got some pretty big visions. And I see Gateway as being an important hub for our new thought leaders or our conscious leaders or heart focused entrepreneurs or whatever you want to call yourself.
I see us as an important hub for bringing together the leaders [00:26:00] of our future that will help humanity come into that place of peace and cooperation that we need to survive as a species.
Cooperation. The place that we need to survive as species.
So I’m here to support the people who want to save the world.
Wow. And the way that you support them is by bringing them into your community.
By bringing them into our Gateway Community, by helping them expand beyond who they think they can be to fulfill their mission. And many of our students, or our doctoral candidates, have huge visions of helping millions of people, of bringing more love and compassion and connection. [00:27:00] And peace, peacefulness to millions of people, greater health, mental health, spiritual health, inner awareness to millions of people.
Yeah.
I know you have a pretty big vision.
I do kind of have a big vision, don’t I?
You do, you do. And I’m absolutely delighted to be a part of that vision.
Yeah, yeah. I’m delighted to have you along to share the road with you for some of it. Yeah. How does leadership change inside your community and how do you support the growth of a new version of leadership as it changes?
Wow. What a great question. That’s actually one that I’m working on right now.[00:28:00] As gateway expands, I’m in a bigger pool. My feet don’t touch the bottom. Right now I’m treading water. I’m doing the backstroke. I’m floating. And I’m you know, coming back to prayer. I pray daily about who am I becoming? Who do I need to become to embrace the vision that is asked of me?
So I see myself more as a director. That I’m receiving direction from a greater source and how do I now embody that myself and then pass it along in such a way to allow our community to embrace it. And find their parts.
Yeah.[00:29:00]
And along the way, I’m also expanding our paid team. And that’s been pretty exciting because in the last two months I’ve hired a bunch of people and I’ve never hired people before. Well, I have for, you know, little projects, but not on this scale. And there’s a part of me that says I’m supposed to be a leader here and I’m failing miserably to manage these people.
But somehow they’re managing on their own. So groovy. I’ve managed to find people who are really good at just figuring it out since I haven’t had the time to spend with them to do the training I think they should have. So it’s been an opportunity for me to let go of you mentioned white knuckles, to let go of those white knuckles and to trust that the people have who’ve been divinely sent my way, and I’ve got to say every single one of them has been divinely sent my way, to trust that [00:30:00] they’ve got it now.
I can just let go. I don’t have to micromanage. I don’t have to tell them every little thing, like, because my normal style, because that’s just me. But to push away from the shore and let the water carry me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You’re stumbling around not as a leader. You’re not stumbling as a leader. You’re stumbling around with the commentary of the difference between a manager and a leader.
And your experience is doing the same. It’s stumbling around this commentary of the difference between a manager and a leader. Which I love. So let’s put some light on that instead of stumble around it.
Oh, cool. Oh, cool. Cause somehow it’s managing to work.
Yeah. I’ve heard said, and I like this story, I’ve heard said that a manager tells people what to do and makes sure they do it. And a leader shows [00:31:00] people a vision and empowers them to chase it.
Yeah, that one. That’s the one.
Yeah. And it sounds to me like the expectation that you stepped into was an expectation of management. And you said you’re failing miserably as a manager, but it’s succeeding because you’re a good leader.
One of the skills that I do have is managing to find people whose vision connects with our vision. And it’s through that shared vision through that collaborative environment. That extend we’re succeeding.
That’s great. Yeah, despite your best efforts. No, I’m joking. Your best efforts are helping significantly. Amazing. Thank you, so [00:32:00] you’ve got a budding community of 250, which is not as small as you think. But it’s not 4000. And they’re interacting in ways that share value.
We, before we got on, and of course, everyone who’s listening to this has heard all of the six elements of community, but would you like to pick one of those six elements and how it shows up in your community? And maybe we can have a conversation about that.
I think common heart is one of the most important for us. Because we wouldn’t have found each other if it wasn’t through our common heart. Through what moves us, through what motivates us. Through feeling. And it’s really lovely because when we meet each other, for the most part, there’s an immediate recognition. [00:33:00] That I know you, there’s something familiar about you. I’ve known you before.
Yeah.
And it’s more like a reunion. It’s like coming together with a long lost friend.
Yeah, so you introduced me to one of your students, Benjamin Masters, lovely man. We had never met before. We went out for a coffee date and, you know, everybody knows coffee dates are 20 ish minutes, maybe a half an hour, and that particular day, I only had a couple meetings in the afternoon, so I wasn’t really thinking about time.
We sat down for coffee and we started [00:34:00] chatting and an hour later, we decided we were going to order some food because the conversation was going really well. So we had some food. It was this little cafe, cute little cafe and we ate and, you know, an hour later, we decided to have some more coffee because we still were sitting there and the cafe needs to make some money from us sitting there too.
And you know, our throats were getting dry because we’re chatting and we’re having a good time. This 20 minute coffee date ended up lasting over 4 hours. And resulted in me going to meet his wife and his horses.
I never heard all this story. I am delighted.
Yeah, it was amazing. And inside the context of common heart, meeting somebody and saying, you know, I know you, this isn’t a first meeting. This is a reconnection. You don’t have a four hour coffee date with somebody you’ve never met before. Like, that’s not the way it works.
And I had not ever met him in this life, right? And I’m not [00:35:00] suggesting that maybe we knew each other in a past life, but rather, you have it right, Dr. Kimberly, that we had common heart. The energy was aligned. And even if we’d never met before, and we had not. Because the energy was aligned, it was a reconnection. It was something different than a first meeting.
It’s like that with most of the people who are interested in a degree program at Gateway and all of the people who are interested in the angel ministry. There is a destiny that’s at work here.
And somehow we are, I’m going to call it magically guided to find one another. There’s a magnetism at work that is really beautiful. And it, I like to think that it comes through [00:36:00] that, the attraction of that common heart.
This is interesting because it’s going to tie back to something we’ve mentioned. We humans have a problem. Because we don’t see the two paths, we have this notion of a dichotomy between free will and destiny. Because we don’t see the two paths. Because we can’t see the impact of a choice made differently.
Now I have commentary on that and out with it, Lucas. The notion of dichotomy anywhere in the universe is a little bit silly to me. We don’t have dichotomies. There is no light without darkness. But light and darkness are not dichotomy. They aren’t two ends of a spectrum. They’re actually just two sides of one whole.
Right? You cannot appreciate the light without the shadows, and you can’t appreciate the shadows without the light. There isn’t art [00:37:00] unless you can see relief, contrast. Free will and destiny are two sides of the same hole. And what’s interesting is that when you take something that has two sides and turn it on its edge, you still see the whole, even if you don’t see the two sides.
Because they’re not separate. It is not a dichotomy. They work together to achieve whatever it is that we can’t see, because we can’t see the alternate timelines. It is the free will that actually makes destiny possible, and the reverse. Destiny makes free will useful.
And if you like to think of this in the non local version, if this is my local world. And my Kimberly self is the local world. In the non local [00:38:00] world, the wholeness of my being chose the destiny that’s coming to me in this life.
And so that gives the local me, the Kimberly part, the opportunity to use free will to choose it back. That’s kind of how I see it. I set myself up for this opportunity and now am I going to say yes to it or am I going to allow fear or something else to distract me or subvert that larger vision that is an option for me, an opportunity or a possibility.
Yeah.
I like to thanks to one of our ministers. Reverend Pamela, she introduced me to a couple of questions. What else is possible? I can’t remember the other one, but what else is possible in this moment?
And I love that question because when I find myself kind of stuck in some small-minded thinking or some fear or some anxiety of some sort. When I [00:39:00] ask that question, what else is possible, it helps me to raise my vision to something that’s much expanded from wherever it was I was circling the drain and to allow a larger possibility to present itself and then to choose to head in that direction.
One of my clients called me last night. A very close friend of hers effectively broke up with her. I’m not sure if there’s a better word, but terminated their friendship, so broke up. And she called distraught. And I said, I commiserate. I hear you. You’re going through a tough time.
Would you like to see, this is funny because it’s exactly this, would you like to see what else is possible in this moment? She said yes, and I said, how about we look at the gift of the pain that you have right now? And we had a conversation about how that pain was a [00:40:00] gift. And I said, how about we look at the gift of the love that you gave to him and the gift of the love that he gave to you.
And in this case it was entirely non sexual, they were friends. But there was still love there, as witnessed in a very real sense by the tears and the pain. And you’re gonna go through right now a process of disentangling yourself from that relationship, so let’s come up with a way to honor the challenge that you’re going through right now, and in so doing, honor the love that you gave and received, and honor the learnings and the lessons that this right now can be for you.
And she was distraught when we started the conversation, and still feeling the pain, but full of academic anticipation. She was in a very real sense excited to [00:41:00] experience this in its fullest as we got off the phone. What else is possible?
I remembered that other question because it fits this situation. And that other question is, how could it get any better than this? So we often use that in a sarcastic framework that when something goes terribly wrong, we say, how could it get any better than this? And what we’re meaning is, how could it get worse?
Right.
And well, how could it actually get better than this? And well, what’s good to start with? So again, back to what’s the opportunity here? What’s the possibility? And there’s so much else that’s possible.
Yeah, I love it. Thank you. I like to wrap up my interviews with three questions.
Okay.
The first one is, what is the one best way for people who’ve been inspired by you to reach [00:42:00] out to you?
The one best way. Wow. I’m not good at looking at my social media, by the way.
So that’s not it.
If you send me a message on social media, it might be a while before I look at it. And I don’t have anything fun prepared, you know. I didn’t do any preparation for this. I don’t have any cool landing pages ready for you.
Is there a contact me page on Gateway University?
I’m just going to do something that’s just completely foolish. Send me an email at Kimberly at KimberlyMarooney.Com
Kimberly at KimberlyMarooney.Com
And tell me, Hey, I saw you on Lucas’s podcast and share your story with me. I would actually really love that.
Yeah.
And please don’t spam me or put me on any lists, please.[00:43:00]
Yeah.
Generously offering you this Sacred trust.
Yeah, you like me probably are deleting several hundred emails every morning.
Ah. Yes.
Yeah. Next question. This is where the fun really gets going.
Okay?
If there was one thing you wish I had asked, what would it be?
Oh. Ah. You know, I’m gonna compliment you and say that we talked about everything that’s really in my heart right now and there is nothing that’s dangling loose.
That’s lovely. That’s amazing. How do you know?[00:44:00]
I feel complete.
That’s great.
I feel, let me say that differently. I feel satisfied. You can get satisfaction.
The song was wrong.
Wrong, wrong. Yep.
I love it. I wonder what other songs we could brew wrong today. The day is still young. I mean, you know thank you. And then finally, do you have any final thoughts for us?
If I could give you a gift today, [00:45:00] that gift would be to recognize the value of your common heart. To notice how your heart connects with the hearts of those in your life. With your family, with your friends, with the people wherever you work, in your community, with whatever you do. To allow yourself a breath, a moment of peace to feel your own heart, then to allow some vulnerability. To open your heart to others, of course in a safe context, I’m not asking you to jeopardize your safety.
But to open your heart to someone else who can receive it and who can share their heart with you in an exchange of love, of compassion, of joy, of [00:46:00] peacefulness, of kindness. Of fun, of whatever is up in the moment, but just to allow yourself that feeling of connection, heart to heart, soul to soul connection. If even just for a brief moment, give yourself that gift and it is amplified in the other person.
Let the joy of that connection light up the two of you in that common heart so that you can also get satisfaction.
What lovely parting words. Thank you very much, Dr. Kimberly.
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Lucas Root
Lucas is the host of Elements of Community. He is a community growth strategist and works with mega companies like The Pokemon Company to help build and foster community. This podcast is Lucas' way of giving back what he has learned about the magic of building and growing community.
Join Our Inner Circle
Like what you hear on the podcast? We have more secret recordings from every guest. We keep the microphone rolling after the podcast is done and get our guest to spill the beans on the best tactics for growing their communities profitably. You don't wanna miss this.