“I think it's really important for, you know, people to realize that you can totally be an absolutely excellent parent of a traumatized child and the trauma had nothing to do with you and you couldn't possibly have prevented it. So I think, you know, assuming that there is trauma in somebody's addiction history, which is not always the case, but if there is, you should not immediately assume that it was bad parenting because sure, that could be the case sometimes, but again, there's so many different ways that people can be traumatized by so many different people. And it's also the case that so much of addiction has to do with people's temperament that will set them up for things. So, if you are incredibly sensitive to stimuli, something that wouldn't traumatize someone else might traumatize you. And again, that's not your parents fault. That's just how you were born.”

“As you grow older, your brain is able to keep rewiring all the time. And so we have this impression that the flexibility of the brain decreases as you get older. But in fact, it's just because your brain's job is just to figure out how to get by in the world and do a good job in the world. And once you've figured most things out, like, oh, these are different kinds of personalities, and this is how I need to do something at work, and this is how I use email and phone and whatever, then your brain does less changing only because it has successfully done its job, and it doesn't need to keep changing. The brain changes when there's surprise, when there's something that happened that it wasn't expecting, then it changes up. So, you still have plenty of plasticity even when you're 90 years old. It's just that most people aren't using it at that point because they say, Oh, I got it. I know how things work.”

“I want to say that it's not just some idea about suffering, it's also a function of social and economic systems that are deliberately weaponizing an individualized view of suffering as a technique, as a strategy. I found across eras and eras and eras in the book is that addiction supply industries, which is what one scholar calls them, like the alcohol industry, the tobacco industry, they constantly come back to this hyper individualization in saying, you know, like, the problem is not in the bottle, the problems in the person. If so many people can drink, quote unquote normally, that means the problem is really with these sick people over here. And that happened with tobacco. And then very directly and deliberately, things like the processed food industry and other modern addiction supply industries have used the same language.”

“I think what one of the things that's interesting to me is like when we think about what causes distress and a life that goes awry, there's so much attention to different causes, but the way that the story, or the diagnosis, or the treatment interacts with our identity, I think, is not thought about as much. Like, the way that the very intervention itself changes our sense of who we are feels like it gets neglected. There's this sense that, you know, the diagnosis is describing something that is always solid and real and less thought given to like, well, how does that diagnosis interact with a mind? And how does the mind change knowing that the mind has been characterized this way?”

“For years, I was asking myself whether or not I was an alcoholic versus really asking myself whether or not alcohol was actually providing any benefit to me. And for me, it was just like, This realization when I stopped drinking that I had been asking the wrong question for my whole drinking career and like, why are we not asking the question? We're just like, we're drinking, it's compulsory in our society. It's exceptional if you don't drink. And then it's also this very addictive drug that's marketed to us in a way that totally overrides our ability to like make rational choices around it. It's like the most socially accepted drug that you can use and like, we just don't have meaningful conversations or informed consent or any, you know, so for me, a huge part of me quitting drinking, which I did in 2013, it was this realization of Intellectually understanding I had been asking the wrong question which for me was a huge empowerment and part of the reason I was able to quit.”

“If there is this part of you that you think is inferior, the weak spot, something you're ashamed of, etc., it's one of these things where if you believe it's true, there's a part of the human soul, we call it part X. It doesn't want you to have any kind of forward motion, doesn't like it, it wants to render your life a failure. It wants you to never re-change your potential. And it wants you to hate yourself, which is the biggest thing. So, the genesis of the tools came from the idea, we have to be active about dealing with this.”

“I'm grateful for seasons. I'm so happy that there can be a winter and there can be a spring and there can be a summer, that it can't always be summer, can't always be bright and happy. And, you know, my book is a bit about that. In winter, the stone fruit loses its leaves and it falls down and it saves its energy for spring. It's okay to sleep. I feel like when life served me a winter and I dropped my leaves for a bit, I came back stronger in spring. I'm just grateful for that idea of that constant change, not just in the world, but in ourselves, and how exciting that has been. And that's given me a whole new fresh perspective. I keep saying a lot, I want to ripen like a peach. I'm okay for my skin to get wrinkled and my flesh to get soft. I really just want to get really sweet and juicy on the inside and and enjoy that process.”

“Well, the interesting thing is, I guess some of this came from writing the book too, but all of those versions of me live inside of me, right? Even the kid that was, you know, forced to kind of navigate the world as a boy and all of these different things, like that kid is still inside of me, right? The teenager slash young adult who was gay, just like regular gay, boring gay, boring gay now, it wasn't boring gay then, lives inside of me. That trans woman, at the start of my adulthood who felt like she had to live up to so many of these ideals of womanhood, you know, she lives inside of me too.”

“The human design chart is basically a match to your unique particular frequency, whether it's partially ancestral, whether it's partly what you've come to live out consciously in this lifetime. But it's there. It's all on a page. It's all on a chart. And you start recognizing how this chart works and you start going along with your type and your authority and you recognize your profile and who you naturally attract and get along with so easily and how other people see you. And all these things just can't start getting more and more distilled in your life. Describing it as a karma chart, things that have to be resolved, you start living true to your design, then all of these things just go click, click, click. You start attracting the situations or the people the opportunities to resolve those things. And you're not in resistance. You're in acceptance to life.”

“Nature, the universe, speaks in metaphor, and one of its truest things is paradox, is holding two things that are both true at once. I remember laying in bed, I was probably 12 and before I go to bed, I'm thinking about the universe because my brain suddenly works and I'm like, how can space be infinite? Infinity makes no sense to my mind. So then I'm imagining space expand, expand, expand. And then I hit a wall, which is the edge of space. And then I go, okay, so let's say if space isn't infinite, well, if you get to the edge of space to the wall, what's on the other side of the wall? There has to be something on the other side of the wall. There can't be nothing. And so I remember thinking in that moment, those two scenarios are both impossible, but then also finiteness is impossible because there must be something on the other side of the wall. And I remember laying there being like, oh, I actually think the computer brain that we have is not designed to understand the wholeness of reality. We're stuck in a partial understanding.”

“One of the things that we do on Yom Kippur is we read the story of Jonah, the prophet who ran away saying, no, no, I don't want to do this job, find somebody else to do it. And I connect this to the card, the king of cups, because in the distance behind the king, you can see the seas are in the middle of a storm and there's a storm tossed ship. And there's also a great fish that has come out of the sea which reminds me of the whale that swallows Jonah, or as they say in the Bible, a great fish, and then you see the king who is on a platform in the middle of this roiling sea, and he is like a surfer. He is not being tossed and turned. He knows how to ride the wave. And I talk about the way in which we run from our destiny or what we think is our destiny, what we're afraid of in the future. We see storms coming and we try and run from them when really what we need is the knowledge to surf them and how to learn how to use the energy of the challenges in our lives to move us forward rather than to crash us into the sand.”

“I mean, I do think that I have an abiding interest in women's bodies. In how our bodies can be determinative, how they can suggest certain identities, how they can preclude certain identities, how our bodies can, you know, hold lots of possibilities. Like, I noticed I just said the negative parts first, I think because it took me until I was in my mid forties when I finished this book and published it, to understand the possibilities of a body, the transformative possibilities of living in and living from a body and taking pleasure in my body in a way that it's not that I had never taken pleasure in it. There were certainly things I did that gave me pleasure, but there was a lot of self loathing directed at my form. So, I think that we have a lot of stories about living in these bodies as women.”

“The more we let go of, the more we receive. I feel that I live in that light. I believe that consciously. I'm not trying to control what the universe brings to me. I believe it knows exactly what's right for me. I'm an astrologer, so I believe in the cosmos. I believe it's a conscious, not an unconscious entity, which I believe a lot of new age thinking is treating the universe like it's unconscious and doesn't really know what it's doing. I think we're still dealing with fear then. We're still collectively, I want to control things because I'm afraid of what's going on. So I view a lot of new age beliefs as being clout in that fear.”

“That's just like the human struggle, is how is it that our interiority and the way that we're perceived externally, how do we live with that? How does it act? Like, how do those things influence each other? That's maybe the human problem. And so academia puts another layer on that, disability puts another layer on that, being an artist puts another layer on that because there is this expectation I think in those spaces to both use your identity to flag something socially to the world, but also, if you do that, then you take on all the trappings, the preconceived notions, the stereotypes of that.”

“Part of what happens when human beings experience difficulty is the same difficulty, the same fact pattern, can resonate very differently for different human beings. And so, part of what happens when a human being encounters a challenge is not just, oh, you hurt me, but it's how do I make meaning of the fact that you hurt me. Is it that there's something wrong with you? Is it that there's something wrong with me? Is it we should never have been involved in the first place? Is it that I need to fight and stand up for myself so that never happens again? Is it I need to make myself really small so that never happens again? So type is about how I made meaning of a challenge that happened to me early in life and because of the way I made meaning of it, that's how my adaptive strategies arose.”

“You cannot differentiate when you never fight. Fighting is also a tool for differentiation, for having two people be able to breed and grow inside a relationship. If all you try to do is avoid any friction, any conflict, and merge into one, then there is a relationship of two halves, not of two holes, basically, to put it in simple terms. So some people find it very scary. Some people find it scary because there was uncontrolled fighting where they came from. And nobody could disagree without the whole thing going on fire. So there is good reasons for why people have learned not to fight or not to stand up for themselves or not to argue or not to say no, for some people simply saying no is experienced as a declaration of war. It's a continuum for those who are avoiding fighting and who are scared of it and reluctant to engage with it are basically said to themselves, I will never be like that person, my mother, my father, my grandparents, whoever it was, and then hold it in and hold it in.”

“I just think that never being the one to say no to yourself is so powerful for so many reasons. One, the amount of yeses that you get will shock and surprise you. The idea behind the philosophy is that somebody else can absolutely say no to you. Like, you can go try to get a literary agent, you can get a million rejections, you can go try to get a job, you can ask for a raise, you can get a million rejections. But the amount of people, especially since I've shared this online, who write to me and say that they got yeses is so cool. Like yeses they never dreamed of. There's so many people I know who've gotten raises, who've gotten their dream homes, who've gotten their dream jobs, who've moved across the country, who've asked out people that they're now married to, which is so cool. And it's because they went out in search of the no.”