GUEST COLUMN: JOANNE EHRICH

I’d always had this thing about Australia’s exotic creatures (When I was a girl, I had a pet cockatiel and parakeet, butterflies with scintillating blue wings and lime-green Aussie beetles in my insect collection). But it would be a couple of decades before I made my ultimate discovery in the animal kingdom, and was utterly transfixed by yet another creature from Down Under — the koala.

A friend passed on a news story that a baby koala had been born at San Francisco’s metro zoo (Fewer than 10 zoos in the United States have koalas. Even fewer have koala births; so it made the local paper).

I was mesmerized the moment I saw this living and breathing koala mother with her baby at the Zoo. Little did I know how this experience would change my life forever. Continue Reading »

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GUEST COLUMN: VAISHALI

Vaishali intimately understands the journey of moving the mind from imprisonment to liberation. She was born into an abusive, alcoholic family and knows first-hand the impact of being raised in a hostile environment. Twice, she has been diagnosed “terminal”.

Happiness. It is something we all want. The constitution of the United States ensures our protected right to pursue it. But what exactly is it? Someone once told me they found happiness. Gee, I didn’t even know it was lost.

Is happiness attainable by discovery? Is it at a geographic location? I know you can get 2 tickets to paradise, but I haven’t seen Travelocity booking vacations to the happiness destination…at least not as an Internet special. Maybe it is a state. Continue Reading »

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We’ve expanded our slide show, Transcendental Movies, from 9 favorites to 12. Our new additions: Fur, Being John Malkovich (a natural) and Last Year at Marienbad (a 1961 classic by the French “new wave” director, Alain Resnais). We love that last one, which is set in an upper class Grand Tour-like spa in Germany, because of its parallels with an ABC TV series that came along four decades later — Lost! Continue Reading »

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DAVID RICKEY

I have always thought of “AHA” moments as those times when suddenly we “catch on” to a deeper reality, when we suddenly “get it” – the “it” being a deeper truth, or a clearer insight into “ultimate reality”. These experiences are sometimes caricatured by a light-bulb turning on. Suddenly we see something that had been invisible, or un-graspable before.

On a personal level, the “A-Ha” may be an answer to a problem or question that has been plaguing us; a sudden awareness of a solution or a new perspective that hits us, seemingly from nowhere, or “out of the blue”. From a deeper level, however, “A-Ha” moments, I believe, are breakthroughs in consciousness where an old, more limited, perspective gives way to an expanded awareness of what is really going on, our part in it, and then a summons to change our choices, behaviors, intentions to align better with this new awareness. Spiritual teachers speak of “waking up”, indicating that what came before was a state of “sleep-walking”, behaving and choosing without awareness. Continue Reading »

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To this petition and appeal by DEBBY DERNBERGER of Menlo Park, CA, WE ADD OUR PRAYERS:

“I am in search of a long lost relative, my brother. His name is Michael Jay Dernberger and he was a vagrant and homeless alcoholic living on skid row in Washington State. It is tragic what happened to him, and he is not the only one. I just want to find my brother.

“Is he alive or dead? Is he in jail, or is he OK? No one has heard from him since 1990. By posting this, it would help get the word out.” Continue Reading »

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We’ve had our fun with Oprah!, the be-all-things-to-all-people TV filter. Her May issue of O! is 348 pages — rivalling the page-count of In Style and the luxury New York fashion magazines. Her roof line: “BEAUTIFUL BOTTOMS: At last! Pants that really friggin’ fit.”

The cover line is what got our attention: Have Your Own AHA Moment! A practical guide to the spiritual side of life (it’s time to wake up and smell the roses!)

The notion of having — and sharing — psychological realizations and mind-body breakthroughs is kinda the whole point of Soul’s Code. It’s one reason we’re called to have fun with Oprah’s “Aha! Moment” franchise — a cliche lifted from a long-dead German psychiatrist named Karl Buhler. Continue Reading »

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GUEST COLUMN: MARLENE SATTER, Reiki Master

Anyone who’s ever sat in a doctor’s office and steamed, waiting sometimes for hours to be seen — only to be given the bum’s rush once inside the doctor’s office — ought to consider Reiki as a self-help technique for your mind-body toolkit. Also, if you have children or animals and have ever felt helpless when they were ill or hurt, think of Reiki as something you can add to your home’s First Aid kit, while you wait for medical help (or simply lessen the side-effects of allopathic treatments). Sometimes you might find that Reiki is all that was needed!

In 2002, I discovered the power of Reiki first-hand (pun unavoidable Continue Reading »

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GUEST COLUMN: DAVID RICKEY

Whereas millions of spiritual seekers see the *mystical* in PADRE PIO, the mainstream media sees — well, the mawkish

Padre Pio died in 1968, was canonized in 2002, and more than a million people will visit Puglia in the coming months to view the remains of this remarkable holy man, which have been exhumed for veneration. Under the headline, Italian Saint Stirs Up a Mix of Faith and Commerce, today’s New York Times treats Pio as a tourism gimmick: The miracles he performed are relegated to a throw-away line for snickers, and a string of paragraphs citing contemporary critics who claimed Pio was a fake.

To the “post-enlightenment” (and now, pretty much “post-Christian”) mind, the idea of a saint performing miracles — like evidencing stigmata, or bi-locating — isn’t even worthy of consideration. But the fact that so many seek to believe — enough so, that critics spend commensurate amounts of energy debunking the object of their faith — points to a deeper thirst in the human psyche. Continue Reading »

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Narendra Patel is an architect who was born in the Indian province of Gujarat, did his post-grad in Canada — and made his name in Rancho Mirage, CA, the better-half of Palm Springs. He radiates an out-sized aura in proportion to his bantam-physique, and walks around with a stillness and slight smile that makes you wonder if he knows something that the rest of us haven’t quite figured out.

One thing we know Patel *has* figured out is design — homes like the one above (photographed by Arthur Coleman), commercial buildings, furniture, materials, whatever. Patel weaves together classical geometry and undulating forms that call to mind sand dunes or ocean waves. Continue Reading »

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As this site has morphed from its original incarnation of 9Choirs to Soul’s Code we’ve been stepping up to the brand — and adding more exhibits to the slide shows you see in the column on your right. Instead of *nine* spiritual resorts on the West Coast, we now have a new Top 10 list — and extend our geography way down the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Before, our north pole of mystical destinations was the Wickaninnish Inn on Vancouver Island — and the south, The Chopra Center near San Diego.

We add the Present Moment Retreat, a half-hour north of Zihuatanejo, and for our research interviewed founder, Tom Morisette.

Continue Reading »

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John McCain argued that Barack Obama’s reading of blue-collar voters in Pennsylvannia is “elitist,” and represents a “fundamental contradiction of what I believe America’s all about.”

At the umpteenth Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said Obama is “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”

In the argot of public relations firms, those were killer ‘key messages’ to put Obama in a reactive mode for his candor at a San Francisco fundraiser on April 6 (listen to the recording). But if you pull the camera back for a moment, Obama’s take on Reagan Democrats who go right-wing on social issues exquisitely mirrors the received wisdom among leading figures in transpersonal psychology and the spiritual self-help movement. Continue Reading »

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Last year, Vanity Fair magazine called him “the grand master of yoga.”

B.K.S. Iyengar, still alive and well at 88, is the 20th century’s premiere popularizer and translator of Indian yoga. As a sickly teen, Iyengar developed a highly-accessible type of hatha yoga that millions of people around the world now practice.

But unlike Hot Yoga’s Bikram Choudhury, or Rodney Yee of Gaiam’s Yoga Now franchise, Iyengar never trademarked, commercialized or branded the yoga that bears his name.

The hundreds of Iyengar studios around the world are a loose-knit federation of free-standing, non-profit enterprises. They need to raise money on their own — and came up with yoga’s equivalent of the walk-a-thon. Next weekend, our very own Renee Tavares, a San Francisco adept, plans to execute 108 tissue-testing poses on behalf of her sponsors, and this Iyengar Yoga Institute. In her owns words: Continue Reading »

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On Sunday, April 13, The New York Times Magazine threw 5,000 words at the subject of the kabbalah, which its freelancer labels “an esoteric occult offshoot of Judaism dating at least to the 13th century.”

It’s actually a hit-piece on The Kabbalah Centre: The World’s Leader in Kabbalah Education, which has more than two dozen locations on four continents and its flagship in Beverly Hills, CA:

They have succeeded in boiling down an attenuated, arcane and often tedious system . . . into an accessible lifestyle philosophy offering succor to the unaffiliated and disheartened of whatever racial or ethnic origin. Theirs is a canny reading of the infectious malaise of secular life and the widespread yearning for a transcendent context as well as an up-to-the-microsecond sense of branding.

Sounds good to us It’s true that the Kabbalah Centre has branded itself by jumping into bed with self-serving and stridently-secular celebs like Madonna. But that critique was articulated by the LA comedian Sarah Silverman months ago — and with a far funnier voice:

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GUEST REVIEW: CYNDI INGLE

Are you now, or have you ever been, in the realm of the hungry ghosts? It’s one of the six realms in the Buddhist Wheel of Life — the not-so-fun one where people are constantly searching for something outside of themselves to bring about fulfillment and relief.

Dr. Gabor Maté, the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (Knopf Canada) has an intimate connection with that species of “ghost,” having worked with drug-addicted patients in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for the last decade or so. Continue Reading »

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Carl and Pat Turner are elderly and ailing. They require, at turns, the help of siblings, their three children,  neighbors — or hospital inpatient care. This request comes from their daughter . . . Continue Reading »

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