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I want to thank all my fans, teammates, coaches and supporters for the strength they've given me to overcome so much.
It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.
I think Ricky Williams had his time in the limelight. And I think it was good for what it was worth, and that was that.
Texas was such a welcoming place, and with its unbelievable history and tradition, it's extra special to be a part of that.
I am an honest, God-fearing man who is intensely dedicated to being the best person I can be on and off the football field.
If you identify yourself as a great football player, anytime anyone challenges that, you're going to have some kind of problem.
I had this notion that everyone was staring at me and judging everything about me, from my appearance to the way I talk and everything.
What I would tell young players is that as you get older, the best thing you can do is try to have other interests and have opportunities.
Maybe I'm stupid or whatever, but to me if I got a concussion, if I could see straight and I could carry a football then I'm not telling anybody.
I think sometimes when it comes to sports, and especially relationships between players and coaches, that people lose track, lose a sense of reality.
There's more to life than success, and if you can try to be more well-rounded, you'll be able to enjoy your success more. It won't own you or control you.
I've let a lot of things go, and obviously football is one of them. I think the hardest thing to let go is your self-image. That's what I'm working on now.
I want to really start focusing on what I want to accomplish and what it is I want to achieve, but not micromanaging this or that and focusing on the little things.
I realized a while back that I have an innate ability to be compassionate, and I saw that the strength of compassion is something that healers have and healers use.'
There's nothing I miss about anything in the whole wide world. The idea of missing something means you're not living in the moment. Every moment is good for something.
As an athlete, you figure you work your whole life to have what you have, and to be able to show the world what you have and how proud you are of it, that's always fun.
I'm nice because, when I was growing up, so many people weren't nice to me, and I remember how that felt. And I don't want to make anyone else feel like that. I value nice.
The NFL has been an amazing page in this chapter of my life. I pray that all successive adventures offer me the same potential for growth, success and most importantly fun.
If you want to surf, move to Hawaii. If you like to shop, move to New York. If you like acting and Hollywood, move to California. But if you like college football, move to Texas.
I've had a lot of clouds in my life since I got into pro football -- too many -- but now I feel like I can see really clearly for the first time. And I can see the Super Bowl from here.
After I won the Heisman Trophy, it just was OK, I’m supposed to go to the NFL and so that’s what I did. I didn’t really have any expectations and I didn’t really understand how things worked.
Coaches want so many things from a back. It's hard to find someone like Edgerrin James or Marshall Faulk, someone you can trust to block, catch and be physical. But I can do all those things.
I look very foolish. To a lot of people I look foolish in what I'm doing and I understand that. The only thing that matters is how I feel and if I let how they feel affect me it'll change how I feel.
When you make that crossover from life to real life, when you're not treated as a child anymore but as a man, and you are no longer given the benefit of the doubt, it takes some courage to face that.
Everywhere I go, I hear 'Welcome back.' But everywhere I have been, I have always been with myself. I'm with myself now more than ever. It's funny people say 'Welcome back' when I haven't gone anywhere.
I would drive home and see people wearing my No. 34 jersey and wonder why, because I didn't feel worthy of that. And all the time I just knew people were staring at me, talking about me everywhere I went.
I allowed myself to think if I could be doing anything in the world, what would I be doing? And what came to mind is I'd be traveling a little bit, I'd be going to classes and I'd be going back to school.
I stepped away to find out more about myself, which I was having difficulty doing as a football player. I got a chance to travel the world. I studied Eastern philosophy, and I've grown as a person so much.
As human beings we have a tendency when we like something to tie it up and make sure it's there for a long time. I've been working on being able to let things go. I don't think I ever want to buy property again.
I love myself. Because I'm all that I have and if I don't love myself, no one else will. Whenever I feel myself starting to dislike something I tell myself, "This is who I am," so what's the point in disliking it?
And I think if you look at any relationship, for the relationship to be productive and to move forward and to grow, sometimes things have to be said that one person or the other person is not going to like to hear.
I don't think people change. I think they definitely mature. But I think the essence of what I am today is the same as when I was five years old. It's just maturity. I've become a healthier, fuller expression of that essence.
I definitely have come out of my shell a lot more. When you question who you are, you can't be proud of who you are. Now that I'm trying to peel off those layers and really understand who I am, I don't have anything to be shy about.
And any time you feed your ego, it's a one-way street. ... There were so many things I had to deal with that erased the positives I got from playing the game that it wasn't worth it. It's like eating a Big Mac and drinking a Diet Coke.
Playing in the National Football League, you're told, you know, where to be, when to be there, what to wear, how to be there. Being able to step away from that, I have an opportunity to look deeper into myself and look for what's real.
I've followed freedom for a long time and I finally feel I've got more of it. People talk about the money that I've given up and the money that I've lost. But the knowledge and the wisdom that I've gotten from this experience is priceless.
The more I pay attention to what's going on inside, the more I realize that how I feel, and how I react to what I feel, really creates my reality. And the more in touch I can be, the better chance I have to control what's happening in my life.
I think if I were a college professor, no one would say I was uncomfortable about being shy because that might be expected. But I think because of people's stereotypes, they think of a football player as someone who is very outgoing and I'm not.
I've always been shy, but in New Orleans there were times my shyness would cause me actual physical pain. I'd get so claustrophobic around people that I'd bend over from the sickness in my stomach. That's not a good way to be when you're famous, obviously.
It used to be irritating just because someone can meet you and before they would get a chance to get to know you, they’ll go find someone else’s story about who I am. For me personally, I just always think it’s more interesting to get to know the person myself.
I'm closer to being happy. I'm doing things that make me happy. In football I loved to practice and I loved to play, but I hated to be in meetings, hated to talk to the media, hated to have cameras in my face, hated to sign autographs. I hated to do all those things.
I started practicing yoga. I started learning some hands-on healing stuff. And I found really good chiropractors, really good massage therapists, and what I found is I've been able to actually peel off layers of trauma on my body and actually move better now than I did.
To talk about balance, it's easier to talk about what's out of balance. And I think anytime that you have any disease, and disease meaning lack of ease, lack of flow... dis-ease. So any time there's disease, you're out of balance, whether it's jealousy, anger, greed, anxiety, fear.
I can look back at it now as definitely like an initiation into adulthood. Almost overnight in the NFL, I was put on a pedestal and I was supposed to be this icon or this image of what a professional athlete was supposed to be. I felt like I just got stuck trying to be someone else and I forgot who I actually was.
My whole thing in life is I just want freedom. I thought that money would give me that freedom. I was wrong. It bound me more than it freed me, because now I had more things to worry about, more people asking for money, I thought I had to buy a house and nice cars and different things that people with money are supposed to do.
One of the biggest things I've done is learn how to love myself, flaws and all. Even the things I don't like about myself, I accept. People have made fun of me and made me self-conscious about talking so softly, for example, but I accept that as who I am and I'm not changing it for anybody. I'm at peace with who I am now, and once you've achieved that, all the other stuff disappears.
Depending on their fondest memory of you, most people hold on so tightly to their fondest memory they don’t usually let you be anything greater than that. And that’s one of the things I think I allowed myself to be a victim of earlier in my career. What I learned as I got older is I decide. I decide what it’s like for me, not other people. You can be whatever you’d like to be. You just have to choose it.
I led the NFL in attempts the past two years and they really didn’t go out and get a quarterback to help me so I knew it’s going to be all on me again. I could see my mortality as a football player, that I’m not going to be able to do this much longer. It just became obvious to me that playing football for me is not going to be fun, not something I’m going to enjoy and it’s time for me to do something different.