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 . . . I was greeted by a clear night sky pocked with stars. Recently I read that we are “recycled stardust,” that the elements that make up our bodies had their origins in the ancient unfolding of the universe.

1,000 points of meditative light

Looking up at those stars I could feel a sense of belonging, that all that, out there, produced “me.” And you!

And probably other life forms that we don’t have the cognitive capacity to comprehend. This isn’t an accident. Scientists are discovering evidence of a directionality, a purpose that you and I participate in. Part of this purpose is consciousness.

We are here to experience this amazing universe. And what a gift that ability is!

An awareness of our emerging out of this 15-plus-billion-year evolutionary process can make us grateful for all that has gone on before our being here. And it can be the source of celebration of all that has emerged with us and supports our journey: the food we eat, the specially-blended air that we breathe, the exact temperatures and seasonal balances that support life here on Earth. It can also be the foundation of a sense that this is not so much about us, but that we are part of a process that is still unfolding, evolving now through our choices and actions.

Seeing light waves as the carrier of the cosmos’ intelligence

Christmas then becomes a celebration of the light that is the source of our life, and our wisdom.

When we speak of the “Light that shines in the darkness” we can recognize that Light is the essence of everything, the currency that transmits all intelligence and information, if you will.

The divinity that we participate in is now expressed in human form. The wisdom has incarnated. We may see this in Jesus, or in other great sages, but it is our truth as well. It is available to each of us if we will only quiet our chattering thoughts and tune into the greater wisdom that is our essence and has brought us here, and that urges us forward in responsible growth and expansion of capabilities.

The cyclical aspect of life, that gives expression in each New Year, shows us that there is forgiveness and the chance to “try anew.”

We too are evolving, and hopefully learning as we go. With gratitude for what brought us here, with a celebration and honoring of the wisdom that is available to us, and with the acceptance of both our failings and the possibilities of doing better and learning from our mistakes, we have all that we need to contribute to the future, to be an active part of the evolution of consciousness, of creating new and better life.

In this way, these holidays can indeed be Holy Days, days where we touch again the sacred truth of who we are and why we are here. This holiday can become a template for each day, living in gratitude, with wisdom, forgiveness and new resolve.

David Rickey is an Episcopal priest, Soul’s Code co-founder, and counselor in San Francisco who holds a weekly ministry at a residence for the elderly in northern California. Read David’s previous articles for Soul’s Code: Church for the 21st century: an oral and aural buffet we can all savor, and Mosques and the masks of God. Follow David on Twitter.

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:

Hot Towel Scrub

Fill your sink with hot water (I like to add a drop or two of essential oil, such as lavender or eucalyptus). Soak a medium washcloth in the hot water, wring it out, and while the towel is still hot and steamy, begin to scrub the skin gently until it becomes slightly pink or until each part becomes warm. Do one section of the body at a time. Reheat the towel often by dipping it in the hot water.

How often: Daily, morning and evening, for two to 20 minutes, depending on how much time you have.

The hot towel scrub calms the mind, relieves stress and muscle tension. It has the dual effect of re-energizing in the morning and deeply relaxing at night. Health-wise it allows excess fat, cellulite, mucus and toxins to discharge. It also it activates the lymphatic system, especially when scrubbing underarms and groin. On a spiritual level, this type of ritual helps us connect with our bodies and spreads energy through the chakras. By adding candlelight you can make this a sacred moment in your day.

Partner Massage

Touch is a form of nourishment. It is a very healing and natural part of connecting with ourselves and with others. Offer to massage someone close to you and ask that they massage you too. It can be platonic, sensual, or sexual… whatever feels comfortable. Just go with the flow, no experience required.

Light candles and play soothing music to get you into the rhythm. Heat up some massage oil by filling a sink with hot water and letting the massage oil bottle sit in it for five minutes. Before you begin, ask your partner or friend if they have any special requests or areas of tightness that need attention. Check in with them during the massage to ask how you’re doing and whether the pressure is good.

Seated Mini-Massage

This mini massage rocks. For the five minutes that it takes, the benefits are huge. Take turns. When I do this with friends, it leaves us feeling totally relaxed, loved and pampered! Have your partner or friend sit upright in a chair, and for two to five minutes (whatever you have time for), massage their shoulders and neck, give their arms a gentle squeeze, karate chop their back, and conclude by gently rubbing their back to even out the energy.

Massage relieves stress and tension, enhances immunity by increasing lymph flow, and releases chemicals in your body that promote healing and happiness. Besides simply feeling great, giving or receiving a massage is emotionally healing. It also deepens the connection between you and your friend or partner.

Hot Tea or Soup

Since fall brings cold and dry elements, we want to keep our core warm by having warmer drinks and foods to balance and nourish these effects. Hot fluids help stave off flu and colds and keep our digestion working properly. Or your next trip to the grocery store, stock up on soothing tea (such as ginger, mint, chamomile, green, chai) and soup (my faves are butternut squash, lentil and chicken).

Hearty Root Vegetables

Eating with the seasons maintains our connection with earth’s cycles and keeps us in balance. Plus, foods that are in season and locally grown have the most flavor and nutritional value, and are most affordable. Root vegetables are delicious and often overlooked. They have a grounding, relaxing effect on the body, and are nutritionally very rich.

Examples: carrots, burdock, sweet potato, yam, parsnip, rutabaga, daikon, and beet.

Time Out

Take time to slow down by doing a five-minute meditation when you wake up and before you go to sleep, or by taking a walk in nature. It doesn’t take much time to receive the benefits of these simple practices.

Meditation: Find a quiet and relaxing place. Light a candle. Put on some relaxing music. Sit upright with your legs crossed or in a chair with your feet on the ground (whatever is most comfortable). Breathe in and out deeply and slowly, focusing on your breath. When you see your mind drifting (which you will), bring it back to the breath. Notice how the air that enters is cool and the air you breathe out is warm, and notice the path of the air as it moves in and out of your lungs.

Walking: Try to be as present as possible. Make a point of noticing the trees, the snow (if you have it), cute little squirrels scurrying by, or whatever is going on in nature around you. Make sure to breathe, feel the air in your lungs, and enjoy this time you have to yourself.

Alex Anzalone is a holistic health coach and natural foods chef who has explored healthy eating and lifestyle habits for the past 18 years. After working as an attorney in New York for four years, she transitioned into a wellness career to share her enthusiasm and commitment to helping others achieve health, happiness and balance in their lives.

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.

It’s not courage by doing crazy things on the outside like some people do, ‘OK, let’s create havoc because the system doesn’t work.’ It’s actually being courageous within oneself so that you can work with what is creating the sense of fear, the sense of belittlement, and the sense of low self-esteem. This means to go down the path where that space is being created.

This is where control doesn’t want to go to because it’s afraid of this aspect. This meditation asks you to go deeper into that aspect where the part of you that feels vulnerable is and into the part of you that says, ‘Oh no, this is not the place I want to go to and explore any further. Let me just control it a bit better.’ That space is where this meditation goes to and that space is usually located in a physical part of your body.

Meditation needs to be practiced where the space is made clear. If the space is not clear, whether it be the space that you’re creating for yourself, for example, internal mechanisms such as fear, doubt, or external ones where other people begin to doubt you or to project their limitations onto you, it is the same.

Some people find it difficult because they work by always criticizing themselves, ‘Gosh, why am I so silly? Why do I do such stupid things? Why is it that this always happens to me?’ You see it in the breath, you see it in the way the person walks, you see it in the way the whole body expresses the fear of just stepping any further because that might create more disharmony. And this is a more introverted type of person and a more complex type of person because often when we do this to ourselves, it’s very vague, and it doesn’t have concrete aspects that we can work with.

You can see it with people who externalize this, such as politicians who say, ‘We have to stop people from understanding a problem because it may create more problems,’ and the politicians are usually extroverted.

Many other people who blame others do that. ‘It’s your fault. It has nothing to do with me. I’m OK, don’t you know. I’m OK. Of course I’m OK. It’s you who has the problem and you that has to be controlled. I am free.’ Those people are usually very clever because they are not people that deal only with themselves, they are usually people that deal with many other people.

They are usually people that could be termed as charismatic or dogmatic and in that sense, they attract hundreds or thousands of people, and because those thousands of people are internally so afraid—in the same way that the charismatic external person is also afraid but with the mechanisms working differently — the external person, or the politician, is able to touch the fears of a person and control their whole being by bringing more limitations into their space. These limitations usually have to do with manipulation and fear.

Unfortunately, this is happening a lot in the world. Politicians don’t mean to do this; they’re not bad people. They’re just doing what you’re doing, but they’re externalizing and blaming the externals rather than seeing that it’s a process that is something that they need to deal with and the thousands of people around are the ones who help the politicians to sustain that whole illusion.

This is why this meditation is so important. Imagine if we went up to the politician and said, ‘Look, don’t focus on the chaos, focus on the light inside of you and practice this meditation for five or ten minutes.’ Then the world would really go through a revolution. I’m speaking in a way that you may think is esoteric, but actually it’s very practical.

After living for several years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, Tony Samara ventured to the jungles of South America — to the Amazon and to the Andes — where he lived and studied among a community of Shamans.  Tony Samara is now visited by people from all parts of the world and from all walks of life, seeking spiritual guidance or simply the experience of being in his presence. He is a spiritual teacher who encourages all to lead their lives actively in a noble way in order to realize the evolution of human consciousness.

Hear Tony Samara’s Live Satsangs at www.TonySamara.TV. Deeper than Words is available on Amazon.com.

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. It obscures the fundamental.

What would that be? The degree to which we are so thoroughly extensions of the same fabric of reality, and only show up as distinct personalities when looking through the prism of the world’s gross appearances.

Or as Albert Einstein said: “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”

You aren’t what you wear

Or as Pamela Wilson herself puts it: “We wear a form.”

In that department, the universe has distinctly smiled upon Pamela Wilson.

The Napa Valley, CA-based resident has a movie star’s looks but, naturally, doesn’t carry any of the bling or baggage that usually goes with it. She speaks with the gentle, intentional manner of a kindergarten teacher.

If Pamela’s spiritual starting point sounds too much like The Matrix for you reading these words, lay that at my door. The experience is different when you walk into a room that has her attention.

The mind loves to make comparisons, so here’s one: she is cruising through all of which life presents on the up-and-down outside, from a very deep center on the inside. A metaphor: I strongly sense that her internal

experience is like the windless ‘eye’ at the center of a hurricane or tornado.

To make more comparisons, here’s the kind of paradigm-shift she made:

Most of us: The fundamental denizens of reality are the objects we see with our eyes — like the chairs and people in the auditorium — and the thoughts we carry around in our heads about our own situation (and judgements about others).

Pamela: The baseline of being is constituted by nothing — a vast, empty formlessness we humans sometimes call consciousness, or awareness. To turn Einstein’s famous phrase, our belief that we have individual identities and personal stories is a kind of optical illusion of consciousness, which has a mischievous yet playful property.

The metaphysics of meditation

Pamela helped us take a few steps down that path at the beginning of her appearance. She cued us, during 20 minutes of silence, into observing the streams and loops of self-talk that fill our awareness. If the mental noise in our heads is akin to radio static, she tuned in the channel set on clear air:

Guided by that spaciousness, many feelings arise. A white-haired man who arrived early to sit in the front confesses that he feels centered and present at the moment but fears a chronic anxiety will return after he leaves the event.

Pamela invites him to consider that all thoughts and feelings are made from the same bricks and mortar, or substrate: presence.

Whether they are positive or negative, their natural cycle is to appear and then disappear. Kind of like snowflakes.

What arises as worries, fears and regrets wants to disappear. Yet we have a habit of swatting them back into play with a mental backhand, just as they’re about to dribble off the court.

We “crystallize” anxious thoughts and self-reprimands precisely by labeling with the above tags. No one consciously wants pain: But we effectively render those sensations into habitual pressures by judging them bad. A voice in our head intervenes, places anxious thoughts and self-reprimands in the column of life’s should nots — and seeks to banish them.

The paradox is that the mind’s apparent counter-measures are the very impulse that holds these “negatives” in place in our systems. “There’s no better velcro for identification than opposition,” Pamela responds.

Another way to apprehend anxious thinking, Pamela counsels, is to see the train of thought as a service. The mind has many services — protection services, suggestion services, etc. Accept the first-principle that they are services, not foreign invaders vectoring into your space. No matter what appears, say to that thought-loop, “You are welcome here.”

Pamela makes a beautiful analogy to the satellites and space-junk orbiting the Earth in the Clarke Belt: “Do you think the vastness of space complains that those objects are there? It couldn’t care less. You are that space.”

Step 2 in this two-step, she asks the white-haired gentleman, “Now that you’re here, can you ask that presence that displays itself as anxiety, ‘What are you’? Underneath. ‘Where do you come from?’ “

Our favorite line of the night: “At this moment in timelessness we are all called to act like sages.”

Pamela Wilson is a spiritual teacher with an international following. Among her next workshops: Berkeley, CA on August 28, 2011 , and at the Science and Non-Duality Conference in San Rafael, CA, October 19-23.

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?’

All of this came into sharp focus, with all the drama of Hollywood, in Los Angeles during the second week of July when one of America’s busiest stretches of freeways, the I-405, had a massive closure for demolition and reconstruction.

It shut down the city. The only way for people to avoid traffic jams because hundreds of thousands of travelers — and tourists going to Disnleyland and LAX in peak season — was to take detours along very small and already congested side roads, or simply stay at home.  Civic officials were so desperate they actually enlisted celebrities with huge Twitter fan bases — like Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen, and Kim Kardashian — to help get the message out to the millions: stay the hell out of L.A.  Buy groceries, hunker down, cocoon at home and don’t even look at your car keys.

What happens when you add “cars” plus “Armageddon”

It inspired talk radio to coin the term, ‘Carmaggedon’ — likening the man-made catastrophe to Godzilla trashing Tokyo, with sci-fi sound-effects included.  With Los Angeles paralyzed, each of us reacted differently, which raises the question:

Can the collective conscious embrace events like this as an opportunity to reflect on our own ability to just ‘let go,’ instead of — at the extreme — going ‘drive-by’?

The question, on a psychological and spiritual basis is this:  What do you do when there is absolutely nothing you can do?

Does letting your blood pressure go through your moonroof as you foam at the mouth, lean on your car horn, and spew profanities really improve the situation?  We know it doesn’t, of course, but we often go nuts anyway.

My experiences in Los Angeles over the last few years include two memorable ones involving traffic.  One was when my 14-year-old daughter and I were going to see a school play on a Sunday afternoon (Annie, no less, about the eternally optimistic orphan, who sings that ‘the sun will come out, tomorrow’).  It was the day of the Los Angeles Marathon, which had recently had a route shift, and no one, including us, was prepared.  Giving ourselves 90 minutes to reach her school — normally a 20-minute drive — with a path that seemed quite clever, we found ourselves in grid-locked, unimaginable snarls of traffic with movements of several feet over the course of ten-minutes.

It was an hour since we’d left home, and we were barely a quarter of the way there.  Then, after two hours on the road, we had barely gotten another quarter of the way there.  We had already missed the whole first act of the show.  My daughter was crying, I was yelling, telling her that this wasn’t my fault, or anyone’s fault.  We both were exhausted and stressed and full of rage and resentment.  Even turning around and heading home without seeing the play — which we did — was still a disaster, because we had to re-trace our steps again at a snail’s pace.

How to let go of it, before totally losing it

During that awful trip--and during the other memorable one involving city-wide gridlock caused by a visit to LA by President Obama — I remembered things told to me  by two different and quite wise psychotherapists:  Getting mad, being upset, stressing out, becoming filled with rage and anger will not make the traffic dissipate.

The simple fact is that there is nothing you can do about the traffic, so, why beat yourself up over it?  Why not just ‘let it be’ and try to realize that you won’t get where you are going any faster by beeping your horn or cursing at other drivers (or cursing to yourself).  Why not try to breathe, find some inner peace, find some reserve of positive energy, maybe even — God forbid — find some twisted humor or irony in the situation?

Traffic, an inevitable reality of our current state of modern urban life, can’t be cursed away, wished away, or beeped away.  We can blame the other drivers on the road, or we can blame ourselves (‘why the hell did I take this street instead that street?!’), or we can curse or beep our car horns in a gesture that is equivalent to primitive man yelling or grunting or howling at an eclipse or some other natural occurrence or mystical phenomenon.

So, perhaps, the simple thing to take away from this is that sometimes, you have to accept that when there is nothing you can do to improve or change the situation, the only thing to do is . . . nothing.

RICK LEED has lived in the world’s top traffic capitals, including London, New York, and now, L.A. In the past two years, however, he has experienced even worse traffic in Mexico City and Sao Paolo, Brazil — proving that no matter how bad you think traffic is, it can always be worse.