My mother is a professional storyteller. She makes her listeners laugh and fall in love and cry. She accomplishes it all by sharing anecdotes. Carefully crafted ones, to be sure, but that's what they are.

So it's probably in response to my mother's example that I ended up writing my own book, soon to be published. I wrote it to give back some of the vast inner treasure that has come as a result of my spiritual adventuring in yoga and meditation.

I also wrote the book because I believed if I shared certain long-held secrets of my inner life, others might join in. I hoped in time we all might stop holding our cards quite so close to our chests, and begin sharing a bit more freely and often about the mysteries going on inside us. It's also my personal plot to find myself in constant good company. More later, so stay tuned!

Try it for yourself! Think of something that happened recently that touched you. Maybe you were in the grocery store piling up vegetables on the conveyor belt, and you caught a glimpse of a woman's warm eyes and genuine smile as she spoke to the clerk adding up her bill. Go back to that moment fully. Let it expand, and collect the details as you go. Remember other smiles, other eyes you've peered into in other places and times in your life. Enjoy describing. You won't have to make connections. They'll simply be there, and you'll be listening.