There's an African proverb: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' Alive means living your own damned life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.

While you had the chance to live, did you become your true self?

The gift within the gift involved the opening of an inner eye that changed how I looked at life.

Emotions are the natural substances of the soul ... and when we think we can't handle the emotions, we lose the natural substances of the soul and begin looking for substances to replace the flow.

Everyone gets wounded in this world and everyone has within them some golden qualities that can serve to heal the wounds of time and the traumatic effects of human tragedy.

Trouble is another word for fate; what troubles us the most is what we are fated to one day face. What troubles us in youth will return at each crossroad in life because it secretly seeks to provoke a deep awakening to the unique way that we are intended to live.

As a culture, we turn away from people just when they are in times of change. That's when most communities used to embrace people, so the individual and the culture both benefited.