Suzanne Morrison
Suzanne Morrison’s first memoir, Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment, was published by Random House/Three Rivers Press in August 2011 and will be translated into Dutch, German, Russian, Hebrew, and Serbian. Yoga Bitch was named a must-read by the Los Angeles Times and New York Magazine, and was one of Crosscut's "Best Northwest Books of 2011." Yoga Bitch had its start as a long-running one-woman show of the same title, which played in New York, London, across the country and around the world. A 2009 and 2010 recipient of 4Culture and Artist Trust grants for solo performance, Suzanne is developing a new show, Optimism, about her adolescent fascination with Ted Bundy, who was a friend of her parents, and she’s at work on a new memoir, Your Own Personal Alcatraz, about coming of age on an island near Seattle and the perils of love. You can find Suzanne at the Huffington Post, where she blogs about the reading life, and at her own blog, where she writes about absolutely everything she’s reading, writing, and rehearsing.
“It's good to have these stories in our holy books, to remind us that they were written by humans. Filthy-minded, morally ambiguous humans.”
“I read somewhere that if you don't worship God, you'll find something else to worship, like money or power or your own reflection in the mirror.”
“If you are patient, your mind will be more settled, and what you do will be more perfect.”
“Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which lead to the distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.”
“Being detached means recognizing our emotions as what they are: clouds, sunbursts, weather. They pass. So rather than feed on my anger or sadness, rolling about in it like a pig in its own filth, I see that it is weather, and know that in time it will pass”
“The idea is to be detached from the fruits of our labors, which means that we do things simply for the act of doing them.”
“When you worry, you're praying for what you don't want.”
“Be brave, be strong, read your sacred texts, and practice death.”
“That I should just dive in and let my world fall apart and rebuild itself. That if I can embrace change, I can embrace death, and that is the secret to liberation.”
“She said to embrace each change as if it were a small death.”
“That's one of the problems with doing anything for a long time. Staying home, for instance. The longer you stay, the more you believe your identity is wrapped up in the people and things around you. You become trapped. It seems as if you fear change because you can't let go of this illusion of yourself as being what? The good granddaughter? The girlfriend who can't choose between her boyfriend and her family? Seems as if your fear of change is really just the same fear of death you mention in your first class.”
“If you love God, surrender to God, you can live in the moment, free of anxiety. Without God? You look ahead and see traps and pitfalls, you look behind and you see loss and death.”
“Maybe I don't believe in God. Maybe I only I believe in culture.Maybe he's onto something.”
“This is why we must transcend our physical bodies. Because a body is always going to piss you off”
“I think there's a secret part of me that would like to drop my entire life off a cliff and watch it break into a million pieces”
“When a person gives you a book to read, he's asking you to look into his soul.”
“GOD. Sometimes I think there might be a god out there, and that every once in a while he tunes in to see what we're up to, and have a good laugh at how we like to dress him up in various costume. Robes, thorny crowns, yarmulkes and curls, saris and butt-hugging yoga pants. Male, female, a genderless reincarnation factory; a Mother Earth or a withholding Father Christmas. I would think it would amuse the hell out of him. That we're all idolaters, worshiping figments of our own creation who bear no resemblance to him.Maybe he's sitting in some alternate dimension somewhere, saying, 'Shit, I didn't even create the world! I was just cooking my dinner, not paying attention to the heat, and suddenly here was this big band and a few hours later, a bunch of dinosaurs...”