I would say to women, always question what you're empowering yourself for and what are you claiming power for.

But grief is also a tonic. It is a healing elixir, made of tears that lubricate the heart.

If you have fathered a child, if you have given birth, if sex is a source of healthy pleasure, thank your pelvis and your reproductive organs for allowing you to feel the creative rhythms of life.

There is no one alive who has not wanted to go back to sleep.

I pull from a place within me that has ultimate faith in the meaningfulness and beauty of human life.

One of the reasons I love prayer is that it is an antidote to guilt and blame. If we are unhappy with the way we have acted or been treated, instead of stewing in self-recrimination on the one hand, or harboring ill will toward someone else on the other, prayer gives us a way out of the circle of guilt and blame. We bring our painful feelings into the open and say, "I have done wrong," or "I have been wronged." And then we ask for a vaster view--one that contains within it all the forgiveness we need in order to move forward.

Things do fall apart. It is in their nature to do so. When we try to protect ourselves from the inevitability of change, we are not listening to the soul. We are listening to our fear of life and death, our lack of faith, our smaller ego's will to prevail. To listen to the soul is to stop fighting with life-to stop fighting when things fall apart, when they don't go our way, when we get sick, when we are betrayed or mistreated or misunderstood. To listen to the soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty, and to wait.