“We come together as a community — in our sitting room, in sacred space or in a coffee shop. We share our joy and pain, our surprises and disappointments, successes and failures and we try to make some sense of it all. We listen to find some way to connect. We give reassurance or advice. Sometimes we say nothing because just being there is enough. Storytelling is that moment in time when we are not alone - I met my Soul in a Coffee Shop”

“The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.”

“We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God”

“Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision.”

“God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality.”

“The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.”

“Prayer makes coffee shops of our souls, places that celebrate and savor the presence and lordship of God in our lives. It must be unceasing and constant. It must become who we are.”