Shirley MacLaine became not only an actress. I became a researcher. From “Harry’s Trouble” to “Some Came Running” to “The Apartment” to “Irma La Douce” to “Terms of Endearment” to “Steel Magnolias.”
She has been involved in some of the most iconic and enduring films in Hollywood history. She won an Oscar. She has been nominated for a Golden Globe Award several times. She did comedy. She did drama. I’ve done musicals. You have danced on the greatest stages in the world. But alongside her entire brilliant career, she has always been engaged in a parallel and equally serious inward journey.
In spirituality. In consciousness. In the radical idea that the most important work any human being can do is the work he does on himself. From that lifelong inner journey came the truth that I wrote down on paper with complete conviction. Thus, she once wrote: “Every day is a lesson in the old adage that transforming the world we see begins with changing the way we see ourselves.”
Today’s quote is from Shirley McLean
“Every day is a lesson in the old adage that transforming the world we see begins with changing the way we see ourselves.”
Shirley MacLaine wrote these words in her 1989 book Going Inward: A Guide to Inner Transformation, a practical and deeply personal guide in which she explored techniques including meditation, chakra balancing, and visualization as tools for knowing one’s true self. The full passage from which this quote is drawn gives it greater weight. “Every day is a lesson in the old adage that transforming the world we see begins with changing the way we see ourselves,” she wrote.
It all starts at home and the choices we make within ourselves. I would hear these words and secretly feel that this was just selfishness or even a dangerous selfish fantasy. no longer. For me, this concept has become a great reality. Know yourself—and everything else follows.” She was not writing as a detached philosopher. She was writing as someone who had honestly wrestled with this idea, resisted it, rejected it, and then been slowly and completely transformed by living it.
What does it actually mean?
Shirley MacLaine espouses one of the most persistent and damaging assumptions that most of us carry without even realizing it. The assumption is that changing the world is an external project. The problems we see around us are separate from the way we see them. That we can fix what is broken on the outside without examining what has not been examined on the inside first.She openly admits that she once found this idea suspicious.
Selfish, even. This reaction is understandable, because at first glance, instructions to look inward may seem like an excuse for disengagement. Like allowing indifference to real suffering by retreating to personal growth as a convenient alternative to work. But McLean makes a much more complex argument than that. It’s not saying ignore the world.
It says that the quality of everything you give to the world, every relationship, every decision, every act of care or creativity or courage, is determined by the quality of your relationship with yourself.A person who has not examined his own fears will project these fears onto everything he encounters. A person who does not take responsibility for his own energy will unconsciously drain the energy of everyone around him. A person who has not done the uncomfortable work of knowing himself will continue to repeat the same patterns in different places, with different people, and call it bad luck or a hard world when the common factor is always the same.This is in fact what the ancient instruction “Know Thyself” requires. Uncomfortable with self-reflection. Self-narrative is not flattering. But self-examination is honest, rigorous, and sometimes painful. The kind that McLean has followed through decades of spiritual inquiry and which she brings to the pages of Going Inward not as an abstract theory but as a lived practice.Then comes the second half of her argument. That once you do that work, everything else follows.
This does not mean that the world magically gets better. But your ability to see it clearly, respond wisely, and contribute meaningfully increases in direct proportion to how well you understand yourself.
Who is Shirley MacLaine?
Shirley MacLaine was born Shirley MacLaine Beatty on April 24, 1934 in Richmond, Virginia, and from an early age she demonstrated the restless energy and fierce individualism that would define her career and life.
Trained as a dancer and making her Broadway debut as an understudy, she famously stepped in as a dancer and was discovered by a producer who changed the course of her life overnight.Her film career began in the mid-1950s and quickly developed into something extraordinary. She received Academy Award nominations for Some Came Running, The Apartment, Irma la Douce, and The Turning Point before finally winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1984’s Terms of Endearment.
She appeared in “Steel Magnolias,” “Postcards from the Edge” and “In Her Shoes,” giving performances over the decades that never lost their verve or edge.But MacLaine was always equally serious about her inner life. She has written extensively about her spiritual experiences and explorations in books including Out on a Limb, Dancing in the Light, and Going Inside, becoming one of the most prominent public figures to speak frankly about consciousness, past lives, and the relationship between inner work and outer reality. She approached these topics with the same candor and unapologetics that she has brought to every role she has ever played.She remains one of the most recognizable figures in American entertainment history. An actress of the highest order who has always insisted that the most important performance is what happens on the inside, every day, whether the cameras are rolling or not.