Soul’s Code

An urban mystic, psychotherapist and star student of the late, great Milton Erickson does a deep-dive on love, relationships and the real way to heal from a break-up

THE TAO OF A WOMAN: AN EXCERPT FROM THE NEW BOOK BY MICHELE RITTERMAN — After a therapy session, I hand my client a post-it note that highlights what we have accomplished. These mysterious hypnotic mantras find their way to a wallet, an iPhone, or a fridge door . . . I know you will discover something more than I can know:

Relationships

We are social creatures, yet in our competitive, aggressive and nano-second-centric world, it is not easy to relate to each other, much less to sustain our bonds.

Good love stays close to our bones and whispers to us the secrets about who we are. Good love has synchronicity and a rhythm.

A meditation and affirmation for the weekend on how to live the meta-high life

PHYLLIS KING — So much of living a practical metaphysical life has to do with practicing principles, and living them.

The process of flowing with life is often one of remembering. We will always meet with hardship and struggle when we hold an expectation that life must accommodate our timetable, and our perspective of what life should look like.

The game is always to shift our perspective to one of expansion. We are called to expand our point of view to see the greater objective at play. It is our job to understand  . . . call it life, call it the universe, call it whatever you want.

A seer’s advice on how to move through gagged emotions

PHYLLIS KING — Success is driven by making choices. The most important aspect, however, are not the choices themselves, but how we feel about those choices: how we feel about what we are doing and why.

Our love, thoughts, and intentions are created by how we feel, our creative soup, if you will. And Source responds to these feelings.

We must train ourselves to be present with our feelings, have the courage to own what they are, know where they came from, and understand why we are having them.

And we say “thank you” for the opportunity to expand.

Love is the answer for transforming all pain into unconditional love

SMADAR DE LANGE — I meditate on this day on the worth of life. 9/11 is an exhibit of the way some in the body of humanity do not believe in the worth of individual human life.

It’s easy to call people like this “terrorists.” But let’s drill deeper into the thing in their value system that devalues. They believe that human lives do not have a meaning in their individuality, but only as a collective.

Belonging to a certain ethnicity, religion, nationality, geographical location is all that a human presence is to this group-think mentality.

In these times, it seems that we are on a pendulum between being a spark of dust to being it all  . . .

Soul’s Code invites you to enjoy two excerpts from our contributor, CARI LAGRANGE MURPHY’s book

Inner Yearnings Require Outward Expression

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot

Don’t leave this life with all of the precious music of your heart still inside you! You have been given a sense of passion that is unique. What is it that drives your personal feeling of inspiration from the inside out? What activities generate enthusiasm, spiritual pleasure, and undeniable bliss within you?

Pay attention to the purposeful inner yearnings that desire outward expression. Your life is meant to be embraced and lived as fully and completely as possible.

Recognize that you are worthy of taking the time for yourself that allows you to engage in the manifestation of your passions and dreams.

Even something as materialistic as an MP3 player can help us connect and communicate with the universe

GUEST COLUMN: AMY LEASK — When I bought my iPod, it was with great chagrin. I was teaching at the time, and I competed with the little electronic beasts for my students’ attention on a daily basis. I did the “pull out your earphones” gesture about as often as I turned a page.

I wanted one to keep myself alert, as well as relaxed, while slogging through my very large pile of grading. It worked; within weeks I was so smitten with my new toy I purchased a colorful sticker to disguise its bland, silver exterior and hungrily downloaded anything funky enough to capture my interest.

Watching our thoughts from a place of awareness, before they become action, is the path to peace — and highest way to honor fallen service men and women

DATELINE: Memorial Day service at the Presidio Interfaith Chapel, San Francisco. A sermon by Fr. DAVID RICKEY — On this Memorial Day 2009, we gather again to honor and remember those who have served and sacrificed for freedom in this country and around the world. Here and at national cemeteries throughout this land, row upon row of white markers pay silent but eloquent testimony to the thousands upon thousands of women and men who have lost their lives so that others may live in peace.

But they have not lost their lives so much as they have spent their lives, spent for a cause that was much deeper than themselves. It is not because they were killed or served in battle that we honor them, but because they lived in distinction. Not only did these heroic individuals fight for freedom and justice. So many of them lived in witness to the values they held with such deep respect.

The Indian poet Nachi Ma’s view of a child’s wisdom isn’t the street-smarts in Slumdog Millionaire.  It’s a theory of consciousness

SPECIAL TO SOUL’S CODE: NACHI MA — I feel that there is lot of wisdom rooted in childhood that is ignored, or not recognized because we never assume or look that way.

When a child is probing us with open, transparent eyes perhaps he is not looking at us from mere innocence — perhaps there is something more there.

Maybe we need to look at it — not in relation of being an adult to child but with an inquisitive mind — to let the beauty and truth inside a child be revealed to us.

This poem is about the child in us all . . . the inner child that we carry . . . no matter what our age.

This poetic affirmation is beautiful for those moments when you are feeling down about yourself, or whatever . . .We ALL have days like that!

SPECIAL TO SOUL’S CODE, ROB BREZSNY —I first wrote these in a book called, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Since then, they’ve become an online viral hit and we’re blessed to share them with the Soul’s Code community.

This text is a sacrament with a spiritual spin: it invites you to make a contract to “marry yourself” — that is, allow a complete intimacy with your day-to-day experience, and essence:

ADVANCE BOOK EXCERPT: VAISHALI

The following is taken from Vaishali’s second book, Wisdom Rising.

It was the great spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti who once said, “If you think that meditation is sitting in a corner of your room for fifteen to twenty minutes, and then getting up and paying no attention to the rest of your day, you are NOT meditating. You are fooling yourself!”

What does he mean by this? Meditation is the process of watching the mind, paying attention to where it wanders, and then bringing it back to a place or point of focus. The point of focus can be watching the breath; it can be holding a mantra or a specifically-designed intention or thought.