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 a higher vision, serves as an empowering force for others, nurturing growth and empowerment. 

Tune in to this inspiring episode and unlock the secrets of supercharging your own community with love and profound connections.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.