A dark cloud fell over my eyes and a monster emerged. It thrashed me around on the floor and darkness emerged, time passing unconsciously. Drumming on my temples it woke me from my sleep.

If you do not have a good relationship with yourself, you will most likely not be happy with any person you are with.

That moment that you realize you are okay and will be just fine. That ah-ha moment and appreciation hits dead on your heart target. A part of you drops to your knees in a little disbelief and the other part gives thanks. That moment that opens you up to that Truth.

Wild is the strange pull and whispering wisdom. It's the gentle nudge and the forceful ache. It is your truth, passed down from the ancients, and the very stream of life in your blood. Wild is the soul where passion and creativity reside, and the quickening of your heart. Wild is what is real, and wild is your home.

Why is darkness the enemy? Why is it associated with misery, destruction, sadness, death?

In the past, I had clung to my girlhood with a crocodile-like resolve because I was afraid I would lose the little girl within if I claimed my role as a woman. But surprisingly, I have found that by working with, and not against, my inner child, my role as a woman has only been strengthened. I truly feel the world will be a better place when we all start to blend our child-like wonder with the power and compassion of our womanhood.

"There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community."

First I trust – then I'm guided. First I lean – then I'm carried.

“I think I’m in a quarter-life crisis,” she explains.“But, really, I’m fine,” she lies.

Continually swimming in an endless sea of sensation can at times be exhausting, regardless if it's beautifully terrible or terribly beautiful, and this is why your deep rooted need for peace and self care is essential for support your superb sensitivity.

Love freely and you will be loved freely. Give freely and you will receive freely. Cry freely with joy and wild abandon and watch the wealth of emotional freedom rain down upon you.

We all have things to grumble about, and we are all legitimately and honestly free to experience them, but the perspective of weeds is this---most things are not as bad as they may appear.

Why being your authentic self is not only a revolutionary, but an evolutionary act.

we were like siamese twins but split and night after night, i handed her the toothpaste just before she looked at me, make-up removed, absently running the electric toothbrush before it’d been primed.

Lately, I’ve come to realize that positive living is not all rainbows and bunnies.

Caution guiding my steps, head bowed to watch where I go, I have walked in the wrong direction.

Passion is a choice to live by as compassion is the sight to see others.

The root of the word courage is 'cor' - the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant 'to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.' Over time, this definition has changed...

My wings can’t expand inside and so my shoulders ache like muscles never fully lengthened. But wings are here for a purpose -- to take us into the ether.

I have discovered the gift of fear – it is the motivator that gets me off my butt and into action.

Haven’t you carried the weight of regret long enough? Can’t you see the gift that experience contains? Aren’t you ready to lay that mismatched luggage down?

No longer because of human surface reasons. No longer was it about the day. Or the time of year. Or the joy and the heartbreak of past Thanksgivings.

In the worst of winter you recall a child; a simple creature who did not rush, but digested the life; one thought with one action.

When you do not acknowledge and accept the message in your pain, it retreats into the shadows and starts expressing itself in dysfunctional ways.

A prison doesn’t have to be steel bars and a cell; it can be the structure of the human skull. Inside is a vast tool that will create and destroy with equal enjoyment.

Perhaps our hardships are actually signs and signals that it's time to shift perspective. Not powerless, but situationally disempowered.

Choose to do what inspires you. Go be an artist and participate in creating your own life.

But even through detours into despair I kept going one bit at a time. And I changed. My body changed. My mind changed. And I realized I had the right to change. I had the right to be me.

What about the real wrongs? What about all that is violent and hurtful and unfair? What about the worst parts, the memories that act as fertilizer for the demons that wait for our vulnerable moments as well-adjusted adults to remind us that, in fact, we still have a lot of work to do?

We live to break free of the stories that define us.

After hours of preparing I had to ask myself where did my real life begin? I admit some of those things I still do but they are now a supplement to my life and not "my life"

We are clay pots upturned in the desert, waiting for rain.

What if he saw this blemish on my chin, or these lines on my forehead?...Three months. That is how long I could sustain this persona I had created for myself.

Awareness wells up inside especially when I listen to my silence. It’s when I’m quiet there is a deep universal message that seeps in. It’s generational, like a slow trickle from a glacier.

accept your catalogue of regret, gather close your imperfect history, this life can be violent, crucible grace doesn’t always look pretty, grief is a complicated ghost and we are all in some way haunted.

Many years ago, a man told me, “It’s all a point of view” – the magic it being life.

“Every girl is expected to have caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama and doll tits. This is why everyone is struggling.” ~ Tina Fey

I’m ready to feel, and let loose so that I can feel, a fire within my chest. One that burns from the inside out, smoking ribs, charring flesh, bursting forth into the night as my head peels back with a shout of too-long-imprisoned self escaping from my lips.

And after experiencing a string of brutal broken hearts, travel became not only lonely, but sad, as I would find myself thinking of my lost loves, everywhere I would go, thinking of the 'what-ifs' and the missed opportunities.

People think of time as standing still. These people spend too much time thinking.

There is an aching beauty inside all of us, trapped in the dark, begging to be set free. We have to fight every day to stay beautiful, or else the world will tear us down, lock us up. Our beauty will hide deeper and deeper in a dark space that light cannot reach unless we have the courage to rescue it and set it free and coat the entire universe with our magic.

"Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist persists."

30 years ago, I took a political stand before an injured dairy cow. There I stood at the gate, looking in at the poor large animal, as our dairy tour guide told us of how the cow was going to make a lot of burgers.

Kindness is responsible for releasing serotonin in the brain of the giver, receiver and of those people watching the Act of Kindness.

“It is important that we grow” echo the scents through the air. “We should all be as close to the sky as we can..."

This means that the core of your mission — of everyone’s mission — is to pour love into the world. How do you do that?

You will find the soft heart covered in thistles.

With all that is going on around me, sometimes it's hard to stop, breathe and have a moment to myself. But when I do, I realise it's awesome. And I'm filled with a humble awareness that all will be ok.

Once I was born. Once I will die. And once in that small window of time there will have been a life lived by a person named: me. And perhaps it could be asked once: Did she allow all of life? Did she leave it just a little better than she found it?

Happily, both for you and for me, the processes for ending self-cherishing do exist if you have had enough of your confused pain and are willing to try something radically different.