Soul's Code

A meditation to de-stress for the post-2012 era

BY DAVID RICKEY — January in northern California is usually a time of rain, cold, and a psychic hangover from the double-barreled Christmas and New Year holidays, which can tend to be anything but Holy days. After getting swept up in the maelstrom, let’s step back a bit a get some perspective. Thanksgiving is a good place to begin as both a word and place in time.

Being grateful for what we have, for what we experience — even for who we are — has a major effect on our daily life.

Gratitude comes from an awareness that this is not all just an accident. This morning, as I left for work, at about 5:30am . . .

When the temperature grows colder, these simple DIY treatments can warm you, body and soul.

BY ALEX ANZALONE –  The retreat to a warmer, safer place in winter is more than a physical phenomenon. When it’s cold out, not only our bodies but our energy and attention start to head inward.

Part of staying balanced involves being aware of this shift and adjusting our habits to reflect it. Because we are all inseparable from the rhythms of nature, life is easier when we go with the flow rather than work against it. Self-care, stress reduction, nutrition and touch are all essential to staying balanced, healthy, and happy.

I call the following my Five Hot Winter Health Tips because they warm both the body and the soul. Try whichever ones you like to coax your energy out of hibernation:

One of the most profound new spiritual teachers in Europe shares an excerpt from his newest book

BY TONY SAMARA — Meditation is not just a repetition of your characteristics that you put into practice in everyday motion and life. Meditation is being a revolutionary. It is being a rebel and breaking free from what is holding the space in this negative little world that we believe to be the truth. To be different takes a little bit of courage.

Pamela Wilson asks: When you worry, or feel fear, can you say this to the anxious voice in your head? “You are welcome here!”

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Pamela Wilson has many moving parts — part spiritual muse, part Gestalt Therapist and part post-modern mystic, in the sense that she can induct an audience into an expansive state using voice and anchors the same way that the late great Milton Erickson did with patients in hypnosis.

Featured in the Soul’s Code slide show, Female Mystics, Wilson comes as advertised: I and 60 others were moved by the power of her presence the other night in a simple hall in Berkeley, CA. She held an over-educated and highly-experienced audience in her sway, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones.

Wilson is fond of revealing the ways in which the mind acts as a blunt instrument.

Lessons learned from L.A., Johannesburg, Sao Paolo and other metros where road rage is a danger to your body — and soul

BY RICK LEED — When stuck in your car in painful, frustrating, unimaginable traffic, already late for an appointment, who hasn’t felt like a Looney Tunes cartoon character, with steam coming out of their ears, fists pounding the steering wheel, and eyes turning red and bulging out of their head?

Road rage is usually directed at someone else who has done something heinous — or at the least, rude, like cut you off, changed lanes unexpectedly, or flipped you the finger.  But the inward-focused rage and fury that has no specific personal target is so often worse, creating more stress, more anger, more intense negative energy:  ‘Why the hell isn’t this traffic moving?’

Meditation doesn’t require much time — you can do it while you’re thinking

DAVID RICKEY: I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to say that Meditation is important for spiritual growth. Ken Wilbur claims that it is the quickest way to advance spiritual evolution. But it might come as a surprise that I don’t meditate, at least not in any classic way. I could say “I don’t have the time.” But the truth is I have never had much discipline. So, I have a form of meditation that takes no real time and requires only a bit of discipline.

Haiti advocate Sean Penn will send Charlie Sheen to help raise spirits; We sent an Episcopal priest and psychotherapist

BY DAVID RICKEY – Haiti is a fascinating place in its own right, but for me it serves as a kind of microcosm of issues that are evolving around the planet. I just returned from my fourth visit to Port au Prince. Each time I go, I accomplish a little but learn a lot.

I can report that there is progress there. The streets, although still terrible and crowded with the chaotic traffic of trucks, SUVs and motorcycles weaving around each other, are cleaner and brighter. There is an renewed energy and purposefulness.

Soul’s Code exclusive: One of today’s leading spiritual teachers shares her prescription for feeling great

A companion piece to Pamela Wilson’s first column for Soul’s Code, Age of Sorrow, Age of Wakefulness, this meditation invites you into restorative rest and gratitude for every granule of your being. Invite someone close to you to close their eyes, and try reading these words to them sotto voce.

BY PAMELA WILSON — Sit quietly and look inside, feel the sensations in your chest.

Author Tony Samara insists that anyone, anywhere, anytime – in a cancer hospice, or on Afghan battlefields – can be in bliss. A new excerpt from his book, From the Heart.

BY TONY SAMARA — Whether your suffering is a low-grade depression or a paralyzing fear, you can rise above it. From the Heart is a collection of satsangs (Sanskrit for “association with truth”) from live workshops with spiritual seekers from around the globe. In this excerpt, a uniquely-simple way of overcoming one particular source of pain in our lives: the mundane.

Hey gurus and motivators: Let’s take a page from Twitter and T-shirts. Why all the complex philosophies?

BY VAISHALI – Ever notice how so many of the bumper sticker messages out there are simple yet profound? I saw a great one recently that said Life is the Classroom. Love is the Lesson. That pretty much says it all.

How is it that all the great spiritual sayings can fit on a bumper sticker or T-shirt?