Love includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness, and a willingness to face - rather than run from - the worst of ourselves.

Awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.

When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Unlike the diets that appear monthly in magazines or the thermal pants that sweat off pounds, unlike a lover or a friend or a car, your body is reliable. It doesn't go away, get lost, stolen. If you will listen, it will speak.

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.

It's important to focus on the good in life and appreciate it.

The real work of this life is not what we do every day from 9-5...The real work is to be passionate, be holy, be wild, be irreverent, to laugh and cry until you awaken the sleeping spirits, until the ground of your being cleaves and the universe comes flooding in.

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.