I think we need to teach pleasure. What beautiful touch means. What reciprocity means. What being connected and what intimacy means. Boys get out there at a young age and the performance posturing is so great and ends up being hard and aggressive.

But my body was telling its story. I have read a lot of stuff about cancer. I needed this book. I wish I'd had this book when I had cancer. I wanted someone to be talking to me about "fart floors." I wanted somebody telling me what it was like to have a colostomy bag. I felt so alone. And if you're a person who's been traumatized by past abuse, it's so potentially re-traumatizing. You slip right into "oh my god, this is the only person this has happened to before" mentality: "I'm especially bad and I have especially bad cancer..."

Geography does not define you - love does.

I want to touch you in real time not find you on YouTube, I want to walk next to you in the mountains not friend you on Facebook.

What I would argue is that real spirituality is the ability to keep encountering two opposite thoughts at the same time and still maintain some kind of morality and perspective in the world. It is not the elimination of one side of the equation or the elimination of what you don't like; it is the investigation of everything.

I think culture is where things change in us deeply. But right now, I think that people are very traumatised. They are very scared. Having grown up in a house with a perpetrator who was violent every day and terrorising every day, I feel like that this country is suddenly very much like the house and the family I grew up in. Every day we are glued to our phones, glued to our television; "What is this psychopath going to do next? How will he embarrass us? Who will he bully or hurt or humiliate today? It's so easy to get locked into a syndrome where the perpetrator is ruling your life.

You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.