Marisa Renee Lee: Making A Stubborn Commitment to Hope
Hope isn’t a feeling that arrives and stays—it’s a commitment you make, over and over, even when you’re in bed crying, even when you can’t stand up long enough to take a shower.
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Marisa Renée Lee—award-winning author, Harvard graduate, former Obama White House deputy director, and CEO of Beacon Advisors—about her new book, Waiting for Dawn: Living with Uncertainty. Drawing on her own two-year journey through long COVID and the lessons she has gathered as an advocate for grief and social healing, Marisa offers a clear-eyed, deeply personal guide to enduring the unwanted seasons of life.
Join Tami and Marisa to explore:
- Why uncertainty isn’t a crisis to be solved but a season to be navigated—with honesty, self-compassion, and the courage to ask for help
- How long COVID stripped away Marisa’s surface-level identity and forced her to discover what was truly immutable in her
- The science and spirituality of hope—and why a ruthless commitment to it requires both trust and action
- “Inherited hope”: drawing on the courage of ancestors and those who came before us
- Why meaning-making isn’t required—and the harm in pressuring people to turn their worst pain into a lesson
- The role of endurance, humility, and impermanence (from the 23rd Psalm to Buddhist teaching) in waiting for dawn
- How to identify your own “arbiters of hope” when doubt and hope are running neck and neck
Whether you’re in the thick of a hard season right now or supporting someone who is, Marisa’s wisdom—earned the hard way—will help you find your footing.
Listen now and make your commitment to hope. →
This conversation offers genuine transmission—not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together. Originally aired on Sounds True One.
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