Mental health and mental balance is critical to leading a healthy life.

You have to have a little faith in people.

Living a simpler life has turned out to be one of the keys to being more awake and healthy.

What I wasn't prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn't prepared for the initial feeling of I don't want to have to do that again. I was scared.

I got back into the position of taking care of my husband, which is what I'd learned that I couldn't really do: you can love and make things okay to a certain extent, but you can't fix. I didn't quite learn that until the kayaking incident. It became so clear then.

Having been through a tremendous amount of emotional pain, to process it properly, to be able to have it make sense and then move it through your body, your mind, your spirit, and be done with it, you really have to address it head-on. Being able to really have the courage enough to truly face it, to truly look at it, to truly feel it.

We live in a society that is afraid of ways of being it doesn't understand.