My greatest beauty secret is being happy with myself. I don't use special creams or treatments – I'll use a little bit of everything. It's a mistake to think you are what you put on yourself. I believe that a lot of how you look is to do with how you feel about yourself and your life.

On an even deeper level, the reason I happily and gratefully accept everything I went through in the past is because I believe every detail of my life is both my karma and my mission. We are all born with a mission, a purpose, that only we can fulfill. When you live with a joyful sense of purpose, when you infuse your life with a greater purpose beyond your individual self, every aspect of your karma can become a brilliant facet of your mission. You can transform sorrow and adversity of any sort into joy, stability, health, and prosperity. By changing poison into medicine and accomplishing your inner revolution, you can use every experience of karma to encourage others who suffer from the same problems that you overcame. You can become an ambassador of hope, an essential and radiant treasure of humanity, in which you recognize that all who have ever lived are members of your extended family. As you continue to spread light in this way, actively doing good in the world, that energy will come back to you in abundant positivity. When you refuse to perpetuate any bad that has been done to you, you can free yourself from the chains of negativity.

You have to be someone large on stage, not who you are in your everyday life. When I was performing, I believed that every song told a story, which I expressed through singing and movement. My audience wanted theater, and that's what we gave them. You start out not knowing who they are, or how active they will be, but you want to impress them. If they were quiet and they didn't move, then we had to work together, me, the girls, and the band, to pull them in and show them how to have a good time.

Imagination, visualizing, and dreaming big, combined with hard work, determination, and faith, are what got me where I wanted to go, and they can do the same for you. If you ever find your resolve melting away, tell yourself, “This time I’ll do it! This time I’ll win!” As long as you keep moving forward, despite any disappointments and setbacks, you will be on the path to victory. I’ve observed people who veered from the path of self-improvement, having been swayed by short-term outlooks, failures, or by the opinions of others. In every case, their life condition suffered. Thankfully, I’ve known many more people who strived to improve themselves and work for the greater good. Invariably, their lives became more fulfilling. It boils down to a matter of choices—making thoughtful decisions toward improvement, for yourself and for others—and the intention behind those choices. At every moment, we always have a choice, even if it feels as if we don’t. Sometimes that choice may simply be to think a more positive thought. Remember that cultivating the deepest dimension of yourself, your inward journey, is always the most direct path to happiness. So, let’s rev up our humanity, and rev up our lives. Think of the rev in the word revolution as meaning you have the opportunity to accelerate the speed of your human revolution and rev it up. I know you’ll be happy you did.

Let me say this carefully, because I don't want anyone to take it the wrong way, but after working so hard for so many years, I was ready to stop. This was the moment to do it because I wanted to finish with my fans remembering me at my best.

Each of us is born, I believe, with a unique mission, a purpose in life that only we can fulfill. We are linked by a shared responsibility: to help our human family grow kinder and happier. I first learned about the workings of the universe from my daily experiences growing up in Nutbush, Tennessee, a small rural town. I loved spending time outside, running through the fields, looking up at the heavenly bodies in the sky, spending time with animals—domestic and wild ones—and listening to the sounds of nature. Even as a little girl, I sensed an unseen universal force as I walked through the wide-open pastures each day. Communing with nature taught me to trust my intuition, which always seemed to know the way home when I was lost, the best branch on a tree for swinging, or where a treacherous rock was hidden in a stream. I learned to listen to my heart, which taught me that you and I are connected to each other and everything else on this planet. We are joined together by the mysterious nature of life itself, the fundamental creative energy of the universe. In this complicated world of ours, where contradictions abound, we find breathtaking beauty in the most unlikely places. The brightest rainbows appear after the heaviest of storm clouds. Magnificent butterflies emerge from the drabbest cocoons. And the most beautiful lotus flowers bloom from the deepest and thickest mud. Why do you suppose life works this way? Perhaps those rainbows, butterflies, and lotus flowers are meant to remind us that our world is a mystical work of art—a universal canvas upon which we all paint our stories, day by day, through the brushstrokes of our thoughts, words, and deeds.

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I had witnessed the circle of life and death in nature, where plants and animals came and went in their own time. And I had heard about deaths in our community, young and old people, dying in all sorts of circumstances. But this time it was very personal. After Margaret died, there was a lot of talk about God's will. Our community was deeply Baptist, after all, and that was a natural response to the sudden tragedy that killed her and a few other young people, including my half sister Evelyn (my mother's child from a previous relationship). Thinking about the mysteries of life and death, I didn’t have a problem with the concept of an underlying universal force. But the idea of a bearded old white man in space, monitoring activities here on Earth, felt unrelatable and just plain unreal. I couldn't verbalize my own vision of God then, as the vocabulary hadn't come to me yet. But from the youngest age I can recall, I knew I could experience "Godliness" in Mother Nature. Something told me I had a piece of God in my heart, even if the traditional beliefs of my family and the way they practiced religion weren't right for me. I wished they practiced what they preached and lived more positive lives.