What’s more, I believe in argument and I even love it. Argument is our most steadfast pathway toward truth, for it is the only proven arbalest against superstitious thinking, or lackadaisical axioms.

Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they’re experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the...

I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, ‘There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love...

All I could say was, “I don’t know what to do.” I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, “Tell the truth,...

I couldn’t care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.

This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that...

Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender

I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not...

That family needs casseroles,” and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes...

Ketut, why is life all crazy like this?” I asked my medicine man the next day…So what can we do about the craziness of the world?”Nothing.” Ketut laughed, but with a dose of kindness. “This...

Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just for the legal / financial complications or the massive lifestyle upheaval. (As my friend Deborah once advised me wisely: “Nobody ever died from splitting...

Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way...

Your treasure – your perfection – is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence...

I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

When I get lonely these days, I think: 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....

Because I know something that you don’t know. I know that this is the worst experience of your life, but I also know that someday you’ll move past it and you’ll be fine. And helping...

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand – through rational thought – that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world...

This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses, and THIS makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe....

There’s a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, “Let me take care of you forever,” and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I’d...

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life...

It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.

Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.

My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the...

This much I do know – I’m exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of hasty choices and chaotic passions.

You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.

I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort...

If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I...

Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.

In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, ‘I’ve always been a big fan of your work …

The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind...

Not town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens … do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.”But is it such a bad thing...

The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship – just so long as those prayers are sincere.

What would I do if you never came here?’ But I was ALWAYS coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the...

But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It’s...

So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect—only if they...

In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega–a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the...

When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll...

You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.

Your tears are my prayers.

de duelo y teniendo roto el corazón, estás en el mejor sitio posible para cambiar tu vida. En un hermoso lugar dedicado a la devoción y en un estado de gracia. Vive este momento minuto...

I was doing something I’d never done before. And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?

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...