My mother would put on the coat, look at herself in the mirror, and smile. "You see, when it is good quality, it lasts," she would say.
In LA, many people work in the media industry and do yoga, but few connect the two passions. Kayoko Mitsumatsu, founder of Yoga Gives Back, married her two interests in film and yoga with a powerful vision to empower the women of India through micro-loan and education financing.
Every morning the dead greet me before the caffeine gives me a chance to focus their reality. I post their stories to a Facebook wall. Why?
Authentic people commit themselves to excellence in everything they do. They are constantly pushing the envelope and raising their standards. And they have the wisdom to know the difference between excellence and perfection.
There's no question that regular exercise is essential to health. For the vast majority of our evolutionary history, we've had to exert ourselves -- often quite strenuously -- to get food, find shelter and simply survive.
If you can pay attention, and let yourself hurt, it will open you up to living life more meaningfully. By knowing we don't have forever here or with someone, we can learn to appreciate the people in our lives more, to love more, and to be more open with what people mean to us.
Pick a "project" -- a room, a closet, your wardrobe, your food habits -- and give it some serious focus. What can you do to bring change into your life?
I, myself, have become affected by stereotypes of the members of my profession, along with the rest of humanity. Being fortunate to have become one of those members of an often misunderstood group, there has been ample opportunity to compare the actualities with the fantasies.
One of the main objections we have as women is that we think we can't step into our dreams and desires until everyone around us is OK and taken care of.
When was the last time you gathered a group of your various close friends together? Just stopped the madness and everyday stuff and took a step back to enjoy the people in your life that you forget to make time for so you can rekindle that spark, a conversation, the interest and the escape.
"Where has the time gone?" "There aren't enough hours in the day." These are statements that we struggle with daily. We are so caught up in achieving that we forget to savor, breathe and recognize the present moment.
My heart and brain remember all the emotions. I no longer fight it. I express it, share it with people close to me and then choose to live. I hope you do the same.
I won't pretend to sit here and know exactly how you should go about seizing the day and loving your sparkling, precious life. Only you know what thrills and depresses you, and so much of this comes from tapping the seriously-wise voice inside.
How do you plan to approach the New Year? With all the good intentions of reinventing some part of your life and a huge commitment that in the back of your mind you just know you'll have a hard time sticking with?
We have no guarantee of numbers. We think our days are infinite but they are not. One will be the last. And this not the hardest part. The hardest is knowing those we cherish will share our fate; we can make no deal to change that.
We had arrived in America with nothing but rags in our backpacks and a few ounces of gold that my mother had tucked into her money belt. An impoverished aunt took us all in. Soon there were 10 people crowding together in Auntie Lisa's tiny two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
Whatever we choose as our sanctuary, we should retreat into it often enough to do a little soul-searching and make sure that we're checking in with ourselves and our happiness.
What is life? It's a deceptively simple question. Philosophers and scientists have pondered it for millennia, and they have yet to settle on a satisfa...
More and more the phrase "Am I losing my grip?" comes to mind, and sometimes the answer is, "Yes, literally, you are!"
We've all heard the clichés -- life is fleeting. Time flies. As I write this, the year is already two-thirds over and it feels like it just started. Some years are like that, and 2012 is one.
With greater frequency I've recently wondered why I'm being shown the splendor and richness of the world that I've been fortunate enough to experience and can only conclude there must be a greater purpose -- a grander design to it -- than my own personal fulfillment.
Sometimes, the hardest thing is to figure out what we like and what interests us. Right? Here are some ideas for your journey.
Look at your life and think about just one part that you'd love to reinvent and go for it.
Alone on a hilltop somewhere over the coastal town of Lerici, I prayed that the insanity I felt wouldn't prove permanent. Although I'd never believed in it before, the little bit of Catholic that was left in me was given real consideration to the notion of purgatory.
We all have a rich currency of authenticity that is found in our energy, heart, soul and spirit. When you get to the point that your life ahead is more important than the life you've already had, then it may be time to spend your currency to go where you want to be.
