Soul’s Code

PhyllistheAuthor — In order to be able to walk for 250 miles on our pilgrimage beginning May 23, we have been walking various trails in our area. Today we visited the Powhatan Watershed Natural Area about three miles from our house. One of the surprise benefits of our training has been that we have rediscovered our local area. Another benefit is that the additional walking we have been doing has made us feel great. It’s a great prescription for anyone looking to clense their mind or get into better shape. “Praying with your feet,” it’s called.

Our son, Alex, visiting from California, joined his mom and dad on today’s hike. Shown here is a natural arch that resulted from a tree damaged during an ice storm. I remember several ice storms during my time in the area. We certainly lost our share of trees to them. It’s amazing that this one has managed to survive.

Alex photographed this butterfly so we could identify it. I have searched through our Audubon guide to butterflies and I haven’t found it. Does anyone know what it is? It has brown wings that are ringed with a black rim and white spots.

I snapped a picture of a wild iris. Can you spot it? It is near the center of the picture. Seeing the iris growing wild made me think of the silent beauties of the world that grow, and too often go, un-noticed. Sometimes you have to just have faith that somebody will come along one day and appreciate the beauty you’ve been quietly cultivating. On seeing the iris, my husband commented on how as a boy he would go fishing and bring back wild irises

for his mother.

I ran into a solution for overcoming obstacles when I first started writing. I met a god named Ganesha who helped me through writer’s block. I keep a postcard with his picture above my computer, and he helps keep the words flowing. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that an elephant-headed Hindu deity is watching over you. That axe you see in his hand — it’s for cutting the bonds that tie you down or hold you back. A really useful tool.

I jogged three miles yesterday and walked eight. I am in training for our trip to Spain where we will walk from Leon to Sanatiago de Compostela. This was the farthest I’ve trekked in one day.

Training at this time of year is special. The trees are in bud, daffodils are blooming, and every day spring seems to leap a little forward.

I have ordered a backpack and hiking boots called Waffle Stompers. What a wonderful name! Our plane tickets are on their way to our house. So our plans are moving forward with each step we take.

Yes, this is me with a yellow arrow stuck to my back. Pilgrims on route to Santiago de Compostela, the most famous of the medieval pilgrimages follow yellow arrows along the pilgram route, called the Camino.

The reason I am wearing one is that my husband and I are planning on a pilgrimage to Spain and the shrine of the apostle St. James. We plan to walk 221 miles from Leon to Santiago with all our gear in backpacks.

This last weekend an organization called American Pilgrims on the Camino met in Williamsburg. I learned a lot about what to expect on this great adventure.

As part of the program, the group went to Jamestown for a five mile walk. Since I knew the area, I ended up showing them the way, wearing a yellow arrow.

If you would like to learn more about this pilgrimage, take a look at either or both of these sites: http://www.ricksteves.com/news/tribune/camino_santiago.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela

Pilates can be as spiritual an experience as yoga. One teacher’s spontaneous guided meditation at the end of class

BY PAUL KAIHLA — People often talk about the “body-rush” they feel after doing pilates, and I experienced a long-lasting wave of that after a class this weekend.

There was this swirl of energy and aliveness in my body, and elation in the mind. It doesn’t happen for me every time. A lot depends on the presence of the instructor and who is in the room.

At the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco we have Nicole Tesson, a dancer by training.

To me, dancers like her are a step ahead of a lot of us in their spiritual evolution because their whole discipline is devoted to bridging the Cartesian division between mind and body.

The dance profession, by the way, preserved pilates for the rest of us, during decades of relative obscurity after Joseph Pilates introduced it in the 1930s in New York (to dancers in George Ballanchine’s and Martha Graham’s companies). Pilates finally became a fad among the beautiful people in L.A. in the 1990s, and now it’s a staple in the training repertoire of virtually every professional sports team in America. But dancers remain the first and foremost apostles of pilates.

The reason I think it’s also a spiritual practice is because it literally works on the core of your being, the muscles and tissues deep in your torso and that wrap around your bones. It takes so much attention to isolate these muscles that you can only do the movements if you totally withdraw your awareness from work-a-day thoughts. The movements bring you out of your mind and into your body — into a quasi-meditative state.

Nicole brought us all the way into one at the end of our class with these words that she later said, “just came out of my mouth”:

Bring yourself back into your breathing.

Enjoy your breathing . . .

Feel the weight of your body melt into the mat.

Let the inside fall to the outside,

and the outside, fall to the floor.

A vanguard of self-schooled female mystics are doing an end-run around the mainstream self-help and New Age movements — and are advancing a radical, 21st century spirituality. Call it the ‘Anti-Me Generation.’

In this series, we introduce some of the leading lights of the sage sex, and their teachings

Across the centuries, spiritual seekers have invariably been women and the teachers men; From Jesus to Gurdjieff and Rumi to Ramana Maharshi, enlightenment has been a male-dominated business. But figures like Byron Katie are in the vanguard of an astonishing advent in the mystical tradition: she is a leading light in a scattered coterie of women who have propounded a radical, new esoteric spirituality and seem to have leap-frogged ahead of male counterparts in the pursuit of the sacred.

Their work, if you want to call it that, isn’t wholly cribbed from Indian gurus or apprenticeships in Asian monasteries but forged in a homegrown fashion in the crucible of the modern, over-caffeinated, high-tech West – sometimes as a result of frustration with oriental traditions. Alongside Katie, these self-schooled spiritual masters include Oregon-based Catherine Ingram, Santa Fe’s Pamela Wilson, and Calgary, Alberta-based Karen McPhee (pictured above).

1 2 3 4 5 | Next