Soul's Code

In the 1930s in a New York studio, a revolutionary mind-body practice called "Contrology" began to gather a following among dancers in George Balanchine's and Martha Graham's companies. The concept of Contrology is what we now commonly refer to as isolation: using mental focus to target our recruitment of specific muscles. A German gymnast named Joseph Pilates was the guru of Contrology. And pilates, as we now call it, remained an underground movement (pun unavoidable) for about six decades, preserved for us by the dance community, until it broke out to the masses in the late 1990s via L.A.'s celebrity-fitness culture.

Now every gym and professional sports team in America has a pilates program.

But pilates is a spiritual practice as much as it's a physical workout in the sense that it literally brings your attention to the core of your being, to the muscles and tissues deep in your torso and those that wrap around your bones. It takes so much attention to isolate these muscles that you can only execute the movements if you totally withdraw your awareness from work-a-day thoughts. Pilates routines draw you out of your mind, bring you into your body — and into a quasi-meditative state.

A lot of science and evolution of body consciousness has taken place in the 75 years since Joseph Pilates brought his eponymous practice to New York City. What are the cutting-edge mind-body modes hovering below the radar today?

What will break out as the next pilates?

Click through the radio buttons in the slide-rule below and check out our nominees — from “fusion workouts” like Nia, S Factor and 5rhythms to proprioceptive training, arguably the nanotechnology of fitness, and the high-tech Gyrotonics. They are as rad in the middle of America's Great Recession as pilates was in the Big Apple during the Great Depression.

NEXT: Nia, a post-modern, mind-body workout

Thirty years ago a man named John Black* raped and murdered my sister. In May, I visited him in prison and told him that I forgave him.

TOM HUDGENS

The realization that I could actually do such a thing came unbidden. It wasn't something I struggled to attain. I just looked one day and there it was: my own voice saying, 'You can forgive him.' That voice spoke to me often. Eventually, I acted upon it.

Three years ago, after a miserable year in a career that I loved in theory but not in practice, I was struck with the idea of attending a meditation retreat. I typed 'silent meditation retreat' into a search engine, and discovered Spirit Rock Meditation Center, located on 400 acres in Marin County, California.

I hoped that whomever Donald Rothberg was, he would be good.

I arrived excited and ready, and received the traditional insight meditation instructions: 'Sit quietly and comfortably, your spine erect, and follow the sensations of your breath . . . '

I was 9 years old when my family received the news that my 22-year-old sister was murdered. John Black, who was also 22, confessed. He received the death penalty, but the sentence was later commuted to life. Well into adulthood I wanted him dead, believing that, in this case, the death penalty was just.

A month after I attended that first retreat and began meditating, the realization came to me that I could forgive John Black. It was a quiet realization, arising with no fanfare.

About a year later, I attended a second, much larger retreat, presided by Sylvia Boorstein and Christopher Titmuss. During a Q A-type forum where people were checking in, I heard a powerful 'inquiry' — a woman bravely explained she was so beset with fear for her family in this unbalanced world that she was considering buying a gun.

I couldn't logically connect the notion of forgiving my sister's murderer with this woman's fear, but my realization became, in that moment, very, very insistent. Before, it had knocked on my door very quietly; now it was pounding.

A day or so later, my whole body shaking, I inquired of Christopher Titmuss: 'Can I trust this realization to forgive? Does it mean I really need to do it?'

His reply was a cut-to-the-chase question: 'Will you do it?'

'Oh yes,' I said.

If I could have just walked into that maximum-security prison, invisible, through the security fences, the tightly-coiled razor wire, past the guards, through the heavy, polished brass doors, through a succession of locked gates, up to the 'dorm' on Floor 6 and just sat down with John Black and talked with him, offering forgiveness, then turned around and invisibly walked out, I would have. But that wasn't possible.

I discovered a 'Victim-Offender Dialogue' program administered by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The program provides a structured, safe 'space' in which victims (or, in my case, close relatives of deceased victims) go to the prison and meet with offenders face-to-face, with a mediator present.

'Something we recommend,' the young woman told me on the phone, 'is to write the offender a letter, telling him what you hope to get from the meeting.'

A month or two went by. Finally, I wrote:

Hello John. This may be hard to believe, but I come to you in a spirit of peace, compassion, and understanding. I loved my beautiful, dancing, dark-haired sister very much. I was 9-years-old when you took her from the world. Her sudden death, at your young hands, was deeply tragic and traumatic to the many of us who knew and loved her. We still remember her vividly and honor those memories . . . If you would like to know more about her, I will gladly tell you.

But I want you to know that I am willing to listen to whatever you wish to tell me. If you would like to tell me about your young life before the crime, I will listen. If you would like to talk about that night, February 27th, 1978, I will listen. If you would like to talk about 30 years in prison, I will listen.

Any questions you want to ask me, I will answer as completely and honestly as I am able. There is nothing specific that I need to hear from you: in meeting with you, I am not attached to any particular outcome. I'm doing this because this is the kind of world I want to live in, where people can come together and talk and come to deeper understandings . . . I wish you well, John.

Sincerely, Tom
April 27, 2007.

I knew very little about John Black. When I reached 22 years of age, some 17 years ago, I traveled to a courthouse in Austin, Texas, and read the transcript of the trial. Black's confession was blunt. I saw a picture of him — just an ordinary-looking, white guy with glasses. His signature was in grammar-school cursive.

In the Texas penal system, the victim and/or family initiates the mediation/dialogue. But the offender has to agree to the process. It is entirely voluntary. He could back out at any time, as could I.

Neither of us did.

NEXT: Readying my heart to meet my sister's murderer

Stick it out, rather than walk out is a distinctly anti-Me Generation response to survival fears and unmet wants — the opposite of the Baby Boomer ideology of self-gratification and self-indulgence.

So if both your savings and your relationship are in crisis, how can you tell if the latter is worth saving? We offer a checklist, courtesy of the noted couples counselor and author, David Richo. Richo's way is the Buddhist 'middle way' between poles of excessive self-concern and Depression-era self-sacrifice. A triple-threat, as they say in Hollywood, Richo is a one-time Catholic priest, who earned a Phd. in psychology — and then went Buddhist. A Jungian psycho-therapist, Richo is also the author of 13 books, including his breakthrough, How to Be an Adult in Relationships.

He may be the world's most insightful observer of how relationships work, or don't. And whether you should stay, or go. Here is a schema we made up to show the difference between a realized teacher like Richo and mass-media schlock-jocks like Dr. Phil:

DR. PHIL: I am here to help you fix the story of what happened to you, bolster your personality (ego), and push you to get what you want.

DAVID RICHO: Entrenchment in ego is the biggest obstacle to intimacy. I am here to help you become more conscious of your conditioning, and how it is keeping you stuck in repetitive patterns.

OPRAH/DR. PHIL: Have some self-respect, get some spine, and kick him to the curb . . . (just like Oprah did to that one, who wrote A Million Little Pieces).

DAVID RICHO: If the purpose of relationships is to show us where our (inner) work lies, there's actually no blame to spread around. You'd say, 'Thank you for showing me what my work is.'

OPRAH/DR. PHIL: What are the things you want in a man to be happy? Tell us (translation: my ratings/audience) your (ego's) needs.

DAVID RICHO: If you rush into a relationship because of attraction and chemistry, it's probably best to run the other way unless you can say: "Oh, here is a chance to do my work, and the other person agrees that they'll do theirs." But if you think of the relationship simply as, 'we're going to satisfy each other,' the unconscious will present it's "bill".

1. Attention
2. Acceptance
3. Appreciation
4. Affection
5. Allowing

Agreement (as in, a relationship isn't a high-concept thing; it's essentially the sum of a series of kept agreements)

Authentic presence (as in Martin Buber's "I am thou")

• Address the problem. Name it. Articulate an issue in the relationship, without blame: "I am unhappy with how much you drink."

• Articulate how it makes you feel, and relate it to something in your past. Report the feelings that go with the problem (processing). Acknowledge how the feeling is fueled by your past. How do you know if it's connected? If you're experiencing it intensely, and taking it seriously, it's connected.

• Make an agreement with your intimate partner about how to change it.

NEXT: What Does "For Richer, For Poorer" Mean During a Recession?

In our mind, a spiritual resort is a place where you can go out of mind. A place that’s therapeutic not just for your body but the most over-worked and over-heated organ in this mad, mad world . . . your brain.

NEXT: Present Moment Retreat, Mexico

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Oprah's endorsement helped make a viral, online video called, The Secret, a mainstream hit a couple of years ago.

The theme of The Secret is that the good or bad you see in your life situation is a reflection of the contents of your consciousness. No, not your intellectual property — your intention. The producers of the indie Internet phenomenon co-opted the phrase, "the law of attraction" — as in, you have what you believe in. Or more to their point: your affluence equals your attitude.

By that measure, many Americans — and good people all around the world — must have been thinking some very, very bad things, indeed, since September, 2008. Since then, in the United States alone, 7 million jobs have disappeared. That's more than the entire workforces of Sweden and Norway, combined, the source of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.

The unemployment rate is almost twice as high as it was during the 'jobless recovery' and 'off-shoring' panics during George Bush's first term (official Bureau of Labor Statistics graph below):

The Secret and 'prosperity preachers' like Joel Osteen would trick us into a contradiction: That the power of thought will exempt us from the givens of life. But as the higher power that they aspire to says: we all have to live with givens such as suffering, loss, even taxes — and neither The Secret nor Rev. Osteen can deliver an exemption unto us.

Don't take the macro economy, personally For one thing, the stock market, labor market and real estate markets lie far outside the control of any of we single minds.

Many motivational speakers are wanna-be mystics who miss the message The Osteens and Tony Robbins and other TV-type motivational speakers mine the body of work of transpersonal psychology and mystics. But they distort and mind-warp the mystical principle that we humans have the power to translate energy into form, the same way that the invisible nuclear force in an atom materially positions electrons and other particles that are the building blocks of the world around us. Spiritual power doesn't directly correlate to financial instruments. Look at the Dalai Lama.

Soul's Code contributors offer first-person stories of recovery from job loss, blended with insights from spiritual teachers and cognitive tactics drawn from professional therapists.

NEXT: When Material Loss Equals Spiritual Gain

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, Hawaii's Katie Davis and Calgary, Alberta-based Karen McPhee (pictured here).

NEXT: The ‘Anti-Me’ Generation

Oprah has made a minor franchise out of what she calls an “Aha Moment.” In Oprah’s world, they’re the “unforgettable, connect-the-dots moments, when everything suddenly, somehow changed.”

If the phrase sounds like a cliché, that’s because it is. Oprah cribbed it from the German psychiatrist Karl Bühler, who actually coined the term 100 years ago. Oh!

Here are *real* Aha! Moments — from Ramana Maharshi to Byron Katie — that blow Oprah off the screen.

To Karl Bühler an Aha experience was “a peculiar, pleasure-oriented experience within the course of thought that pops up with the sudden insight into a previously intransparent context.”

A half century later, Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, refined the idea with his definition of a Compare our examples to what passes for an Aha! Moment in Oprah’s magazine:

Donald Trump wanting to hit on his 3rd wife when they first met because she “she had an aristocratic, reserved air without being at all haughty.” The Donald’s apparent realization was “that even after you’ve done a lot of living, you can still be amazed by what can turn up in life.”

Despite my sudden shyness, I managed to give Melania every single one of my phone numbers. She seemed suspicious, which made me realize she was not only an incredible-looking woman but an intelligent one as well. She questioned me about each phone number: Business or personal? Limousine or bodyguard? I could tell she knew her stuff. I could also surmise that she knew who I was, and I remember deciding, Well, depending on her sources, that could work either for me or against me.

Or here’s Hillary Clinton claiming that it was a little girl’s voice (as opposed to, say, a hard-wired, life-long ambition) that convinced her to run for the U.S. Senate in 2000

It was an incredibly difficult decision, and I needed a push. Fortunately, I got one. In March of that year, I went to New York City to join Billie Jean King at an event . . . We gathered at a local school, joined by dozens of young women athletes, all of us assembled on a stage beneath a giant banner that read dare to compete, the title of the film. A young woman named Sofia Totti, the captain of the girls’ basketball team at the school, introduced me.

And then something unexpected happened. As I approached the microphone to say a few words about the importance of giving girls every opportunity to grow and reach their potential, Sofia grabbed my hand and whispered in my ear: “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton,” she said. “Dare to compete.”

This is what stand-up comedians would call “great material.” They make jokes about whispering girls and Clintons. But we won’t

NEXT: Aha Moment: Byron Katie, 1986

Every police station, hospital ER and women’s shelter in America knows that the highest incidence of drunk driving, domestic violence and other crises are recorded during Thanksgiving, Christmas and birthdays. In this series we’ll follow nine paths into, and out of, addiction — from the mainstream to the mystical.

NEXT: Addiction for Dummies