A Quote by Dani Shapiro

When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me.
Something in my gut twisted so hard that it felt like I was being tickled by an invisible hand, and it took me a moment to realize what it was. Hope. It had been so long since I'd felt it that the sensation was like something living inside me, something wonderful waiting to break free, just like I was.
I have to say, doing theater, that's what you're trained to do. Doing film, when I first started doing it, felt like something else entirely. It felt like the difference between, I don't know, waiting tables and painting a great work of art. It's night and day. I didn't feel like it was even acting.
It was important for me as a theater artist to allow myself and my interests to evolve over time and allow my notion of what success meant to evolve over time. I've always had a day job and never been just acting. But it didn't make me feel like I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.
I engaged - started engaging in yoga as a physical practice, but very quickly found out there was something broader to it, and that it was actually helpful for my pain, and started to get into meditation, started to study the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and a lot of the scriptures associated with yoga, the Yoga Sutras, and very quickly came to this conclusion that this had a huge impact on my ability to lead, but, more importantly, the ability to control my sympathetic nervous system, which had a direct tie to the pain in my arm.
I've been meditating as part of my yoga practice for so long, I can't remember when I started.
I didn't really feel like I fit any of the parts. You either have to be this crazy beautiful supermodel lady, or you're a real character actress. I felt like I had to write things for myself, so I started doing that.
I never want to feel complacent, and I had started to, a little bit. I had started to feel like "I have this thing I can do, it's worked a few times," but not only does that get boring, but you feel stagnant and unproductive. So I was feeling a lack of creativity and motivation, so I started making a more conscious choice to grow personally. It wasn't even an image-conscious thing, like, "I don't want people to think this way about me." It was really just a way to keep myself energized and feel excited about this thing I love doing. Like I went to couples therapy or something.
I remember it made me feel better because so many of my friends at school. Were doing that stuff and doing that stuff on sleep overs. But I just didn't feel ready. It wasn't like I had any judgment of it being two women. It would have scared me as much if not more. I was like a three month period in which all the words sleep over was code for was "let's get together and touch each other's vaginas." and I was. Haunted. And I remember going home and feeling like I couldn't tell my mother even though she would've understood and probably laughed.
I have had moments where I've had mental-health issues and I've felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.
I had, like any other young novelist, started out by believing the difficult thing was to get published and that, once you managed that, well, your financial problems were over. I discovered, like any other serious novelist, that actually they had only just begun.
Yoga has been something that's always there to take with me and practice throughout any journey. There's no place I've ever been where yoga hasn't fit itself in. I currently work on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska and I am still able to find time to lay my mat on the deck and practice what makes me the best me I can be, thanks to yoga.
I have felt independent of the opinions of others in terms of whether or not I should or shouldn't be doing that. There's something that I allow to consult myself within myself rather than looking outside to see if this is right or not.
Its funny because when I did feel like I came out and I just felt like I was being truthful to myself, (it was at) that point I became very successful. So you know, it took a true kind of facing that truth of myself and being honest, that was when the real kind of fame or whatever that kind of stuff happened for me.
As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult - even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass.
I do get recognised, but if I'm in a restaurant, I'll get one person noticing me, not the whole place. It is uncomfortable when people try and sneak a picture; sometimes, I don't feel like being seen. But I don't stop myself doing stuff. I go to Barry's Bootcamp and yoga just like anyone else.
Change for me was really hard because I had built myself up to be a certain kind of man my whole life, as men are where I come from. I thought I got to handle things different that's gonna make me feel like a real pussy. For me it was hard to turn the other cheek. Even though it's a stronger choice. It was very hard to make the change, but I had to in order to survive. Otherwise they would have won.
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