Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment

I think there's a secret part of me that would like to drop my entire life off a cliff and watch it break into a million pieces

When a person gives you a book to read, he's asking you to look into his soul.

Being detached means recognizing our emotions as what they are: clouds, sunbursts, weather. They pass. So rather than feed on my anger or sadness, rolling about in it like a pig in its own filth, I see that it is weather, and know that in time it will pass

The idea is to be detached from the fruits of our labors, which means that we do things simply for the act of doing them.

That I should just dive in and let my world fall apart and rebuild itself. That if I can embrace change, I can embrace death, and that is the secret to liberation.

If you are patient, your mind will be more settled, and what you do will be more perfect.

Be brave, be strong, read your sacred texts, and practice death.

GOD. Sometimes I think there might be a god out there, and that every once in a while he tunes in to see what we're up to, and have a good laugh at how we like to dress him up in various costume. Robes, thorny crowns, yarmulkes and curls, saris and butt-hugging yoga pants. Male, female, a genderless reincarnation factory; a Mother Earth or a withholding Father Christmas. I would think it would amuse the hell out of him. That we're all idolaters, worshiping figments of our own creation who bear no resemblance to him. Maybe he's sitting in some alternate dimension somewhere, saying, 'Shit, I didn't even create the world! I was just cooking my dinner, not paying attention to the heat, and suddenly here was this big band and a few hours later, a bunch of dinosaurs...

That's one of the problems with doing anything for a long time. Staying home, for instance. The longer you stay, the more you believe your identity is wrapped up in the people and things around you. You become trapped. It seems as if you fear change because you can't let go of this illusion of yourself as being what? The good granddaughter? The girlfriend who can't choose between her boyfriend and her family? Seems as if your fear of change is really just the same fear of death you mention in your first class.

I read somewhere that if you don't worship God, you'll find something else to worship, like money or power or your own reflection in the mirror.

It's good to have these stories in our holy books, to remind us that they were written by humans. Filthy-minded, morally ambiguous humans.

Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which lead to the distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.

She said to embrace each change as if it were a small death.

If you love God, surrender to God, you can live in the moment, free of anxiety. Without God? You look ahead and see traps and pitfalls, you look behind and you see loss and death.

Penance is in my bones. So's a desire to confess, even when it isn't technically necessary. I think it stems from seeds of superstition left over from a childhood belief in an omniscient creator. I imagine this creator, this observer, as a sort of annoying sibling in the sky, forever calling me on my bullshit. When I lie or cheat, I actually feel like that annoying sibling in the sky calls down, "Bullshit, Suzie, BULLSHIT!" and that anyone nearby, if they're at all sensitive to the catcalls of the gods, can hear him. And so I behave accordingly, and try to make amends for what I have done.

When you worry, you’re praying for what you don’t want.

I have a friend who calls himself a Jewish-Buddhist, or a JewBu—he attends a synagogue where they meditate and chant Shalommmmmmmm—and when I asked how he reconciles the God of the Old Testament with the absence of a supreme god in Buddhism, he said, “Maybe I don’t believe in God. Maybe I only believe in culture.

It isn’t a refuge or a getaway; it’s just where I am.

Sometimes, I even found myself wondering: if a love like this, the kind that jackknifes you open like an oyster shell, if that isn't a myth, what else might be real?

We were sitting face to face, our knees touching. "But you know," he said, "I don't think you would be yourself if you stopped looking. And besides, last I checked, being on the hunt for something real counted as living.