I really love doing nothing. I really love just being at home and taking a couple of days, you know, doing nothing. You know what I mean? Just getting up, being around the house, going outside the back yard, coming back in; I really like to do nothing because I travel a lot. There's a lot of travelling. There's a lot of on the phone all the time. There's a lot of looking at papers and reading things and so you don't want to read magazines and you don't want to do anything; you don't want to read books, you just want to just kind of shut down a little bit.

Sometimes you have to explore the darkness to get to the light and get back to who you are.

I don't get anything for free. I pay for all my beauty treatments.

I felt about life and the way I felt about my children was so deep and profound. It was the first time I'd felt anything like that. I knew as an artist that it was going to make a huge difference in everything that I did.

We had our moment [with Marc Anthony] in the third or fourth year that we were married, when we did everything together: We did "El Cantante," we did the tour, we made all the music together, he produced my album [2007's Spanish-language "Como Ama una Mujer"]. That was a really beautiful time for us.

I really love doing nothing. I really love just being at home and taking a couple of days, you know, doing nothing. You know what I mean? Just getting up, being around the house, going outside the back yard, coming back in; I really like to do nothing because I travel a lot. There's a lot of travelling. There's a lot of on the phone all the time. There's a lot of looking at papers and reading things and so you don't want to read magazines and you don't want to do anything; you don't want to read books, you just want to just kind of shut down a little bit.

It was easy to blame other people for treating me in ways I didn't like, but now I was seeing that I was the one at fault. The only way you can be mistreated is by allowing yourself to be mistreated, and that was something I did over and over again. Somehow, I needed to find that glimmer of self-respect, buried deep inside, that would allow me to say: I am never going to let that happen to me again. I needed to learn how to stand up for myself in a different way, but I didn't know how.