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 . . .

Exclusive: How I connected my mind and body — and got both back on track

BY DANNY DREYER  — My long run is my favorite run of the week. It’s a time when I get to do some of my favorite things: slow down, take in the beauty of nature, socialize with friends, and just enjoy being alive.

I didn’t always feel that way about long runs, though. Even after years of training, my knees always hurt after 10 miles. My  wake-up call came in 1991, when I began running ultramarathons. The pain in my joints was unbearable.

Where psychology, science and healing connect: A site tour

1. PEAK EXPERIENCES

Have you ever had a peak experience? Read honest, life-altering accounts under our category, Peak Experiences.

The term was coined by one of the founders of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow. Peak Experiences are aspirational stories about natural highs (Paul Kaihla on the shaman origins of the sauna), breakthroughs (Rick Leed on becoming a foster parent), and inspirational insights (psychotherapist David Rickey on his Aha! Moment that took a lifetime).

 

“Before she was famous, a mystical neighbor changed my life”

BY ELLEN FENNER — We all have a moment we can look back on and see divine intervention that we didn’t necessarily recognize at the time. For me it was the day an angel (see photo) sat me down at her kitchen table and fed my starving soul.

In the spring of 1984, I returned home from my second year at college completely dejected. I had lost control of everything I’d ever imagined myself to have any control over. When I decided not to go back the next year, I gave up a full-tuition scholarship and set myself adrift.

SPIRITUAL IQ QUIZ — Religions channel the fears and aspirations of our collective unconscious through archetypal images and stories. That’s why the religious enterprise has been so successful for such a long period of time.

And maybe it’s also why video games are the fastest-growing form of modern entertainment.

If you don’t think video games are also spiritual, you simply haven’t played very many. Video games are rooted in the same myths and archetypes that have shaped us for millennia.

The key difference: video games put the audience in the middle of the action, whether that means blasting armies of alien invaders in Halo Reach or fighting with crooks and your own conscience in Grand Theft Auto IV.

People on a spiritual path who aren’t into Botox still care about beauty. Soul’s Code samples new non-invasive technologies

Those who seek an inner-sense of knowing want to cleanse their tissue with yoga, organic foods and fasts — not inject it with a paralytic, neuro-toxin derived from botulism (one microgram of the stuff Botox is made from is lethal to humans). But many still want to look good, naked and otherwise.

Entrepreneurs are targeting this cross-over audience with launches of alternative skin technologies. These products haven’t hit the mainstream but are making the rounds at alternative health conferences; Soul’s Code checked out a few at the Conscious Life Expo — an annual mega-show at LAX that attracts tens of thousands of visitors:

SkinDream TITANIUM looks like a hand-held shower nozzle, and uses low-frequency sound waves (ultra-sound) to stimulate your skin — and “restore your natural beauty”Soul’s Code guinea pig: Was told that after a 10-minute glazing with the nozzle that the redness would be replaced with radiance; there was no visible change.

Don Miguel Ruiz, author of the bestselling book The Four Agreements, invites people to go to the largest pyramid in the Americas for a peak experience. Now I know why. I just had one.

PAUL KAIHLA — Like a typico gringo, I launched into a litany of questions about historical facts so that I could “know” Teotihuacan, a sacred city that was built by the Toltecs 2,000 years ago — when an Atlantic away the Romans were achieving hegemony over the Antique World and crucifying Christ.

My guide dissuaded me from such thinking — and thinking, at all.

Think of him as a modern-day Don Juan. Not the 14th-century libertine, but Don Juan as in Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.

A Soul’s Code short-list of magical, mystical tours

Where does the tallest tree in the world live? As old as Christ, a redwood called “Hyperion” went ‘undiscovered’ by humans until recently

Where do NASA and Nova research the origins of life after the Big Bang? Mono Lake, California is the most primordial place on the planet

Who is building the “Temple of Transition”? Burning men, August 29 – September 5, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert

The sauna is a Finnish, warlock thing. To prove it, I skinny-dipped through a hole in the ice of Lake Superior

BY PAUL KAIHLA — I spent the afternoon breaking trail through the great boreal forest on the north shore of Lake Superior on cross-country skis made of hickory with my host, Olli. We had a novice tagging along, who couldn’t quite get the swing of it.

A Finnish engineer who has two adult children, a happy marriage and a wry sense of humor, Olli offered our tag-along adventurer mock comfort about the learning curve she faced with nordic skiing: “Don’t worry,” he quipped, “the first 10 years are the hardest.”

Hint: It isn’t meth. Simply holding a few colored gemstones healed my mind, body and spirit. Crystals rock!

BY SUSANNA BELLINI — I once met a woman, a former geologist who after years of handling stones eventually discovered they held energetic and spiritual properties. She left geology to become a healer.

Years later, at a very low point in my life where I struggled in an unhappy relationship and was about to lose a big freelance IT contract, that woman—and my own experience with her healing stones—kept coming to mind.