I wanted to share the experience of how yoga and meditation have transformed my life, how they have enabled me to observe who I am, first in my body, and then emotionally, and on to a kind of spiritual path.

I wanted out of my pain and that silliness, but I wanted an easy out. That`s before realizing that there is no easy out. Before accepting that you just have to do the work.

Yoga teaches you how to listen to your body.

It`s not that I don`t believe in miracles, but I never quite trust that they`re real.

My problems aren`t so different from anybody else.

I began by doing physical yoga, initially just for the workout, as exercise. I would get peaceful and calm at the end of it, and I was curious about that.

Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.

I enjoyed doing Lipstick, but it scared me. I was very nervous. I couldn`t wait for it to be over. It was very real, and I was just a kid.

The experience of getting my Kriya, which is the meditation process that I do, was very powerful for me - though, as I explain in the book, I was really suspect of that kind of thing.

Starting out in a beginner class and really understanding the fundamentals of yoga is really important.

I enjoy making things that are different. It makes for a better career. I don`t want to do the same thing twice. I love the different roles I`ve played. I don`t ever want to be pigeonholed! That`s the great thing about acting -- all these different people I can play, as long as audiences are willing to see them. The more different roles I do, the more different roles I will get.

I don`t take myself terribly seriously. It`s why I can be incredibly honest about my life.

The other thing is surrounding yourself with people that care for you. These are simple things, but they`re powerful, and they`ve completely transformed who I am and how I perceive myself.

I thought my book was done, then we went to Hawaii and the whole last chapter happened.

Basically, I came to yoga and meditation so I could undo some of my past, and I believe that you can do that through a combination of things.

I got back into the position of taking care of my husband, which is what I`d learned that I couldn`t really do: you can love and make things okay to a certain extent, but you can`t fix. I didn`t quite learn that until the kayaking incident. It became so clear then.

I think that growth and spiritual awareness come in slow increments. Sometimes you don`t know it`s happening.

Cancer came back into my life twice in order for me to understand something, and I guess I still wasn`t getting it. And my husband wasn`t getting it, either.

I think we should be passionately curious about what we do.

What I wasn`t prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn`t prepared for the initial feeling of I don`t want to have to do that again. I was scared.

When child actors act well they`re just reacting to situations, and they`re acting very real because their life experience is so short; there`s no history to fall back on.

Everybody needs a way out of that pain. Many people choose drugs and alcohol. Some people obsessively exercise or develop strange dietary habits, which is what I did. At least it got me toward a path of healthier living.

What they were giving me seemed incredibly real to me, so I`d react to it in a very real way. That was frightening for me, especially because of the subject.

A lot of exercise is mindless; you can have music or the radio on and not be aware. But if you`re aware in anything you do - and it doesn`t have to be yoga - it changes you. Being present changes you.

I felt I had to share Idaho with my friend from New York because he`d shared New York with me, so I was going to share the beauty of nature with a man who went to museums and clubs late at night. But there was nothing to do where I lived at night.

I don`t have to go to church. The church is within me and the experience is my own. It`s my life experience.

I`ve known for years that you`re supposed to be present. I know that thinking about what`s happened or thinking about what I want is not going to get me anywhere, but until I quit doing it I`m not present.

Finding some quiet time in your life, I think, is hugely important.

I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction.

Manhattan, though, was an entirely different ballgame in a whole different kind of world, with a man who was brilliant and at the same time terribly charismatic.

I did Star 80, which was a magnificent experience as well, but still, I was at the height of my career at the beginning. Then I had to jump down the ladder and climb back up again, which I didn`t understand. That was very hard.

Self-Realization Fellowship seemed like training. It was the training ground for finding a sense of peace in myself. Because that`s my job. It`s no one else`s.

For me, first, it`s finding quiet in my life - and I do that through yoga and meditation. It`s also been a matter of changing the way I eat, because I think what we eat can inform who we are; food is a chemical and a drug to a certain extent.

I`ve certainly made bad decisions about food in the past; I thought I was healthy when my diet was actually causing tremendous damage to my body.

I loved acting when I was doing it, but getting the jobs I didn`t understand because I`d never had to do it. That was a difficult lesson for me. It was very humbling and very bizarre.

But the experience that I had, which was basically just feeling loved and taken care of in a room full of thousands of people I didn`t know, seemed to be a pretty strong sign that what I was doing was a good thing.

I`m not that old, and I haven`t lived a life so far from the ordinary, really.

We`re taught to take care of people we love, but sometimes you can`t.

I was taken by the romanticism of being thought of as an adult and living in a world that was completely new to me. I fell in love with acting then.