A Ceremony Called Life: When Your Morning Coffee Is as Sacred as Holy Water

Sky's debut urges her millennial audience against building "spirit dams" that isolate spiritual experience from the everyday. She encourages readers instead to see duality as a gift, human incarnation as a unique expression of the Divine, and how inconspicuous moments in people's daily lives can be "a huge invitation to see what is inside" while recognizing everything in their lives as sacred. But for all of her ideas about staying grounded and her background in the music industry, Sky's teachings are focused on the head rather than the heart or body, and they lack both juiciness and practicality. She offers Zen-flavored theories of identity and self, and abundant talk about channeling divine expression and relinquishing the idea of control, but she includes only one exercise near the end of the text and no specific rituals or practices. Her few real-world examples feel generic, and her analogies are often contrived; Sky may be telling her readers to dig into the "wild scheme of emotions and feelings" that make up human experience, but she's not getting dirty with them. (July)