You learn to smile even in you liver?”Even in my lire, Ketut. Big smile in my liver.

The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would meditate on God....

Still it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated socially responsible family-centered taxpaying Little League-coaching nation-serving respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in Why...

That’s just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you’re...

I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but...

I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you...

This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift – or curse, perhaps...

Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. .. Even...

At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.

Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend...

Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch–there’s not a chance.

Nothing is so essential as dignity. Time will reveal who has it and wi has it not.” -Beatrix Whittaker

How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It’s the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt...

Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin...

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because...

You have been to hell, Ketut?”He smiled. Of course he’s been there.What’s it like in hell?” Same like in heaven,” he said.He saw my confusion and tried to explain. “Universe is a circle, Liss.”He said....

Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can’t be replaced by anything else.

The love between Uncle Dees and Roger was every bit as enduring as it had been immediate. They were never to be seen apart, man and dog, not since the moment of their introduction. Very...

The Hopi Indians thought that the world’s religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will...

When it comes to romance, I’m always behind you. I am slower. It’s like you are the lightening and I am the thunder.

I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby....

It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.

People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you’re fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for...

Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have…undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It’s because he...

The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not the be believed.

For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.

I am a better person when I have less on my plate.

Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control...

In every possible instance Saint Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves to contain their carnal yearnings to live solitary and sexless lives on earth as it is in heaven. “But if they cannot contain ”...

The other day in prayer I said to God, “Look – I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?”.

To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balancedlife.

You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.

You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

… “The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world,” says an old Buddhist teaching. In other words: Get used to it.

I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of...

But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion?...

Painting working!

Or, as Sextus, the ancient Pythagorian philosopher, said, “The wise man is always similar to himself.” –

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one’s life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater...

Looking for Truth is not some kind of spazzy free-for-all, not even during this, the great age of the spazzy free-for-all.

But doesn’t that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed… infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pictures of the eternal picture at any given time?...

At that moment of realization (that union with God is always present), that’s when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message:You may return here once you...

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my...

So this was the Ashram’s final joke on me? Once I had learned to accept my loud, chatty, social nature and fully embrace my inner Key Hostess – only then could I become The Quiet...

So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.