Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on.

And if you worry that not finishing the food on your plate is a slap in the face of all the hungry people everywhere, you are not living in reality. The truth is that you either throw the food out or you throw it in, but either way it turns to waste. World hunger will not be solved by finishing the garlic mashed potatoes on your plate.

I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they're hungry and to feel what they feel when they're not.

. . . hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else . . . . Wanting life to be different from what it is. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first.

Be fully present for five minutes every day.

Women look at their bodies, and they're never thin enough. The financial advisors that I've talked to say they ask their clients, "How much money do you need in order to feel secure?" "X amount." Then, as soon as the client got the amount, it would double automatically.

I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child's hair, the silence of a forest, their lover's crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace it's perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.