Marianne Williamson not only talks the talk, but she certainly walks the walk.

Before this week’s appearances on Oahu and Maui, the best-selling self-help author and lecturer will leave her home in Los Angeles to fly east to see the Occupy Wall Street movement firsthand.

"I think Occupy Wall Street is an important conversation that has emerged organically from the deepest yearnings of American democracy," she said. "I’m grateful for the chance to contribute my voice in whatever way possible to a deepening of the conversation, including an emphasis on the historical, philosophical and spiritual dimensions of the movement."

Williamson teaches a weekly class in L.A., "A Course in Miracles," and has a weekly national radio show, "Living Miraculously." Her first book, 1996’s "A Return to Love," is considered a cornerstone of the "new spirituality" movement.

Her latest best-seller, "A Course in Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever," was selected by Oprah Winfrey as one of her favorite things of 2010.

In her 2000 book, "Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens," the author called upon the country to turn its native tenets for compassion into a force for social good. Williamson has said that the main challenge is to change economic principles to humanitarian ones.

Does she feel that the Occupy movement is a step in the right direction?

"I think it can be a step in the right direction, but the jury isn’t in yet as to whether or not it will be," she said in an email. "Is the basic impulse of the movement a correction to the ethical straying of American capitalism over the last few decades? Absolutely. But will the participants in the movement hold to their own nonviolent intelligence enough to truly embody that impulse and make it triumphant? That remains to be seen.

"No matter what happens, however, (Occupy Wall Street) has already begun the process of awakening a sleeping giant. I far prefer the messiness and scrappiness of a movement like this to the collective complacency of the last few years."

AFTER NEW YORK, Williamson will travel to Hawaii for an already sold-out reception and book signing at the East-West Center, followed by an evening talk titled "Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the World." She will follow that with several events on Maui.

A key description of her talk is exploring "a healing of the world from the inside out."

"Mahatma Gandhi said that ‘the end is inherent in the means.’ Everything we do is infused with the consciousness with which we do it. So, for instance, an angry generation can’t ultimately produce peace in the world, and that’s why he said we must ‘be’ the change we wish to see happen in the world, because otherwise the change won’t happen," she said.

"People are beginning now to understand the interface between personal and global transformation. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘We need a quantitative shift in our circumstances as well as qualitative shift in our souls.’"

Williamson’s strengths are her ability to appeal to a general audience in search of spiritual guidance, although she said that’s not what drives her.

"I don’t think in terms of a wider audience so much, I think in terms of a deeper conversation. I pretty much talk and write about whatever I feel passionate about at the time, and so far that’s worked out pretty well," she said.

"Author Arnold Patent once wrote that ‘if you genuinely have something to say, then there’s someone out there who genuinely needs to hear it.’ From a spiritual perspective, human suffering is what matters. So whether someone is ill, hungry, addicted or dealing with economic hardship, that’s the conversation where I usually feel led."