25 Quotes by Jennifer Pastiloff

And in the way fate works, the cruel and funny asshole that it can be, my father withheld love from my mom and my mom did whatever she could to get it, a replica of the environment she had growing up.

And then there's this: no matter how many bullshit stories you have or don't have, there are no guarantees in life. Nothing is owed to us. That "not knowing" is scary, but the tools to help us--writing, breathing, yoga, connecting--are all we have. And honestly, sometimes the tools are Netflix and coffee as well as breathing and yoga and writing. But we must have tools.

It comes down to this: your pain comes in waves, it turns, leaches into things. Years of your life, for example. Your pain wraps itself around whole years like a tentacle and won’t let go until you understand that it is an organ of touch, so you reach out and touch it and then, only then, it slithers off, as if all it needed was to be noticed.

Sometimes you find yourself in the midst of life and you think, I don’t remember starting this, yet here I am, and sometimes you literally have to wake up and say, It’s time. Despite everything pointing south, I must go north.

While I was still waitressing, I went to see Wayne Dyer speak and he asked the question I’ve tried to live by: “Who would you be if nobody told you who you were?

What would I not realize until my forties was that the moon is never missing any of itself. We just can’t see it. People are like that, too.

It was as if I finally understood what being present meant. I had heard it so many times in yoga classes but I had never experienced it. It was like a protective film that someone had forgotten to take off was peeled back from my brain, and I could finally see things clearly. How I wasn’t truly stuck.

Buy your fear a cup of coffee and show it how it’s done.

They helped me understand that what lived in my body needed a way out. Writing was the way out, just as yoga had been the way in.