I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side.

All relationships are a learning experience, even ones you continue to be in. If you don't see them as that, then that's a problem.

Boston is actually the capital of the world. You didn't know that? We breed smart-ass, quippy, funny people. Not that I'm one of them. I just sorta sneaked in under the radar.

You can't do anything to be funny. That's cringeworthy. If your humor comes out of a place of love every time, you don't make the joke bigger than you. The funniest comedians are in touch with their emotional level.

The negative is just as important as the positive.

I'm constantly investigating nature - nature, meaning everything.

I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.

Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.

We can learn the art of fierce compassion - redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking - while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations.

As we hone the ability to let go of distraction, to begin again without rancor or judgment, we are deepening forgiveness and compassion for ourselves. And in life, we find we might make a mistake, and more easily begin again, or stray from our chosen course and begin again.

If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you'll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness.

Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us - in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.

Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see.

From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters.

Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. It's important not to blame yourself.

Sometimes people don't trust the force of kindness. They think love or compassion or kindness will make you weak and kind of stupid and people will take advantage of you; you won't stand up for other people.

If we have a very strong commitment, so that we can trust ourselves and be beacons of trust for others no matter what the circumstance, then we're protected from suffering the consequences of many actions. We can be protected from that pain.

Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it's insight. Protection is seeing and knowing deeply that all things in our experience arise due to causes, due to conditions coming together in a certain way.

As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others.

I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher.

I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.

Things don't just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don't live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain seed gets planted, so will that fruit be.

The moment that we realize our attention has wandered is the magic moment of the practice, because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. Instead of judging ourselves, and berating ourselves, and condemning ourselves, we can be gentle with ourselves.

We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.

I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what's going to happen next. In fact we don't. To recognize that we don't know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward - that's one meaning of faith.

If I just do everything the opposite of what my dad did, I think that will make things pretty easy. I can joke about it now because I'm past that stage where it used to hurt. By having a kid, it's gone. I could take all that negative energy that I had and put it in a positive way.

It's tough growing up where I grew up. My family is very small and really tight. Just being around the neighborhood, my brothers were always around. I didn't want to be in any trouble because I knew my mom or brothers would find out. I didn't want to hurt their feelings. I just tried to do everything right.

My mom is real passionate and a family-first woman. She always told me that just because I can shoot a basketball better than someone else, I shouldn't think that I'm better than them. I know if I change, my friends and family would lay me down. She just wants to see her kids do right.

On Halloween, don't you know back when you were little, your mom tells you don't eat any candy until she checks it? I used to be so tempted to eat my candy on the way to other people's houses. That used to be such a tease.

My whole life has been nothing but trying to find a way to take care of my mom and take care of my family as quickly as possible.

As long as I have my faith in God, I'm good. I know everything else is going to come.

I love eating it - grilled chicken, pasta, rice, and other foods that give me long term energy. Every once in a while, my sweet tooth gets the best of me and I have to snack on some candy. Beverage wise, I stick to sports drinks, water, milk, and juice.

Winning is fun, but those moments that you can touch someone's life in a very positive way are better.

Every old goalkeeper loses a step at some point, but you can gain that back through experience.

My mom broke the mold. She put my brother and I first, always, and worked her fingers to the bone trying to provide for us. She taught us right from wrong and gave us very strong morals and values and belief in family, things that have stayed with me.

Today, I am blessed to be living a dream. And yet, if it all went away tomorrow, I know I would still have peace.

I'm positive and I smile a lot, and I'm kind of a banana, but serious work just seems to find me, so I'm not going to argue with it.

Everything that's bad for you catches on too quickly in America, because that's the easiest thing to get people to invest in, the pursuits that are easy and destructive, the ones that bring out the least positive aspects of people.

Every once in a while, you live long enough to get the respect that people didn't want to give while you were trying to become a senior citizen.

Music has the power to make me feel good like nothing else does. It gives me some peace for a while. Takes me back to who I really am.

I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside.

You have to learn and keep learning.

I have a novel that I can write. It's about three soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all three, and they have a chance in the afterlife to do something they should have done when they were alive.

You know what has made me the happiest I've ever been? Seeing my son and daughter graduate from college. More than wanting them to be educated, I wanted them to be nice people. To see that they have become both is just a wonderful thing.

I begin each day with prayer and meditation. Throughout the day, I use affirmations and positive intentions to move through blocks, and each evening, I close the day with self-reflection and an inventory of my growth throughout the day.

Fear is often our immediate response to uncertainty. There's nothing wrong with experiencing fear. They key is not to get stuck in it.

The way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of the world within us.

The word 'guru' is very loaded, so I would never refer to myself that way. I see myself as a teacher.

One of the biggest ways we don't support ourselves is by not asking for support. Asking can take courage, but the reward is immense.

I'm not a fanatic about my diet. I just believe the more aware you become of your spiritual being, the more you want to respect your physical being. It's a spiritual diet: You love yourself too much to eat crap!