When I wrote ‘The Good Body,’ I turned 40 and suddenly had this stomach. It seemed like the end of the world. Because I didn’t value my body. I was constantly judging it, but I also didn’t live in it.
I’m in good shape. My cancer means I have lost a lot of organs and I’m a lot lighter. I have devoted myself to yoga and I’m doing handstands.
I bet you’re worried. I was worried. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them.
What happens when someone throws you against a wall or tells you you’re a jackass or puts you down or calls you bad names? It goes into your body. We hold it in our body. If we don’t have a way to let that go and release that, it becomes sickness eventually.
Geography does not define you – love does.
Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.
Unless men are active allies, we’ll never end violence against women and girls.
The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place.
Between the combination of Judeo-Christian religious ‘be good be good be good’ and Capitalist ‘something’s wrong with you, buy this’ and the parental upbringing, which is ‘you’re wrong, you’re not thin enough, you’re not smart enough’ I mean, hello! We don’t have a shot.
Each time I had five hours of the poison going into me, I just pictured everything that needed to be burned away. I pictured wars, I pictured the things my father had done to me, I pictured brutality, and when it was over, I am light.
We must stop being polite and behaved, and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority.
Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn’t killed our hearts. It’s killed men’s hearts. It’s silenced them; it’s cut them off.
I got to a nine-hour surgery, I lost lots of body parts and rearranged, I got really months of infection that I lost 30 pounds. But the idea of pumping poison into my bloodstream just – I couldn’t, I couldn’t.
I have been a depressed person most of m life. I was always in the throes of self-hatred.
Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn’t exist.
Money doesn’t make you special, it makes you lucky. Be generous, be crazy, be outrageous.
I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it’s that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it.
Women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them. They are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If we can figure out how to make women feel safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself.
My commitment originated in my own story and my own relationship to violence.
The only point of having power it seems to me is to empower others. The only point of leadership is to inspire.