I once did what is called a perfection argument. I argued against my perfection. Three teachers argued for it. It was billed as “4 hours and we always win.”

I fought hard. I lost. My fight was exhausted. I had to admit that I was perfect.

I frequently come across content with titles like “11 ways to spot ADHD in women” and I’m always moved to re-diagnose this view as those with the creative impulse alive in them, rather than any pathology.

The rational mind 
carves the world into lines—clean, rigid, absolute. It splits time into past and future, reality into good and evil, bodies into us and them.

You can convert destruction into calling and suffering into creativity, offering them an alternative reality, teaching them surrender and experiential humility.

To know love is to be a medium, to draw in and receive the often difficult, often rejected and conflicted of life, and reveal with your body as instrument, as the beauty and value of the otherwise overlooked or discarded.

I have witnessed women being labeled them all: crazy, hysterical, dangerous. 
More often than not, it was other women who cast the labels.

It does not escape me that women who fit this bill are the most powerful women in the room.

The Buddha diagnosed it as suffering, the tendency to identify with a self, a group, or the world of appearances. The solution was deceptively simple: disidentify.

Trauma is frequently cast as pathology, which produces a cycle of shame. I think of trauma as value-neutral congestion and cast it as potential.

In my mind, we’re all trying to get the same thing. All craving, all desire, all sickness, is longing for the mystical.