Soul's Code

“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.

Islam means “submit.” I’ve used the code of my adopted faith to accept, and turn, public opinion

GUEST COLUMN: REBECCA JONES *— When I met my husband, then-roommate, he was living in the basement of our shared student apartment. We became friends simulating Star Wars battles with toy light sabers and fell for each other watching a Ghostbusters marathon. Sheltered from the world, we seemed to have more similarities than differences.

To be quite honest, it still sits strangely when I hear people say I married a “Muslim man.” I feel like I fell in love with a boy who happened to be Muslim. That was almost 10 years ago.

But just because I fell in love, didn’t mean I fell in love with his faith.

* Rebecca Jones is a pen name requested by the author to protect her family from any potential backlash.

CONFESSIONS: “When my little brother said I was like a T-shirt for women who shack up with abusers, I knew I had hit rock bottom”

ANONYMOUS — Sometimes I feel fondly — even grateful — for hitting what I consider rock bottom . . . so long as I never have to visit there again.

If there’s a contest between life’s ups and downs, ups are in. Some people pop pills to stay up.

Up is nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but I also believe that down is a place where you can do some foundation work for a personal renovation.

My downward journey started . . .

An up-close and personal account of infidelity from a Soul’s Code contributor goes deeper than the public contritions of governors, celebrities and other cheaters

BY CASSANDRA KELLY — Sometimes, to amuse myself, I think about the parallels between my life and the lives of those that our society has deemed “famous” or “stars.” For instance, I grew up in poverty — so did Gloria Estefan.  I’m a pilates lover and so is Jen Anniston.

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.

“I had flings with over-sexed football players, a boss at a TV station — and now see them as fallout from sexual abuse in my Catholic home”

MARINA GIULLIANI (Read part 1 , 2 and 3 of this Soul’s Code excerpt from the book, Sins of my Faith) — Being sexually-pleasured as a young child meant I was always very uncomfortable in situations where using my sexuality to get my own way was not an option.

The thought of heading to a segregated Catholic high school was pure torment.

My sister Angela had chosen the school a year earlier, and I was stuck with it. Now four to five years of nothing but girls and nuns loomed ahead of me. I was completely disillusioned by all things Catholic, and I hated the boxed-in feeling of girly stuff.

In high school I’d soon be totally engulfed by both.

“Can enlightenment happen through meditation and practice?” Drawing on Eckhart Tolle, her personal experience and science, the answer is: Yes

By Anonymous — I began meditating about two and a half years ago, at the urging of a then-friend (translation: a fellow I was very briefly dating.) I was an avid journal-writer, and felt that was enough for clearing the detritus-of-the-day from my mind.

But a couple weeks later, when someone came into my office and was handing out flyers for beginning meditation classes, I decided to take up the invitation. My work ‘situation’ was super-stressful, and I thought that meditation might help ameliorate the effects more than what I saw people around me using to cope — from Ambien to alcohol.

I also have an intuitive faith that if something is put in front of my face two or three times, it’s probably a Moby Dick of a message from something beyond my mind trying to jog the latter.

Lindsay seeks a new Inferno; A year without sex?; Deepak mentors Gaga; Evangelicals and oil

Inferno: Lindsay Lohan set to star in porn-star-turned-feminist Linda Lovelace’s bio.  Lohan’s character (Linda Susan Boreman, aka, Linda Lovelace) descends into the fire pit of sexual exploitation and abuse.

Can delayed sexual gratification lead to greater intimacy? Hephzibah Anderson’s new book Chastened, recommends women slow down the freight-train of sex without intimacy.

Lady Gaga and her bizarre Illuminati dreams: Gaga confides in Deepak Chopra, Rolling Stone interview reveals. Lady Gaga’s performances are a dream come true in more ways than one: Gaga relates how her morbid dreams provide material for the stage.

French stripper’s “tribute” to aboriginal culture: Motives for topless dance on Ulura Rock questioned

The skinny man movement: More men dieting and seeking surgery to be thin

Evangelicals take on Gulf oil spill: Distance from Creation = distance from God

We all know guilt. And some of us understand first chakras. Both are about our primal sense of safety: acceptance

BY DAVID RICKEY — All of us have experienced guilt, and some of us are plagued with feelings of shame. These are very primitive emotions tied to tribal issues embedded in the first chakra.

The need to belong and be accepted by the tribe/family provides the fundamental sense of safety and well-being.

The threat of being abandoned by the tribe is experienced as the threat of death.

When we live at the level of the first chakra — in the ancient Eastern tradition, the chakra hierarchy assigns this energy to your genital awareness, and the hegemony of survival and material needs over your psyche.

I find my soulmate, but a cyber lover causes a rift in our bond

Read the Soul’s Code exclusive series, Sins of my Faith

In Marina’s last episode she begins therapy with a psychologist and realizes that she’s become estranged from both her creative, and feminine sides.

BY MARINA GIULLIANI — After years of hopping from bed to bed I’d finally found a place where I felt truly comfortable.  I sealed my promiscuous past in a vault at the back of my head and jumped at the chance for a normal relationship.

Chris was the love of my life, and we were involved in a full time relationship from first sight. The product of a nasty alcoholic father, and a mother who made up for all his father’s evil deeds, Chris had more goodness than any human being I’d ever met.