Soul's Code

A breakout book puts the favorite workout of celebs and the spiritual on the defensive

A disciple of B.K.S. Iyengar says that yoga teachers injure themselves as much as football players: “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”  (New York Times)

Recovering yogi Glenn Black: the vast majority of people should give up yoga (Daily Mail)

Five years in the making: The Science of Yoga: Risks and Rewards (Simon & Schuster)

Blowback from the yoga industry: Teachers rally to keep their students (The Daily Beast)

Will the values of our next President be made of the Mormon stuff?

What Mormon and Muslim fundamentalists share in common: Romney vs. Obama (Huffington Post)

Officially outlawed in the 19th Century when Utah joined the United States of America, polygamy makes for great ratings in award-winning 21st C  television. (LA Times)

On Broadway: Mormonism makes a blockbuster musical. (NY Observer)

Web 2.0: some of the hottest lifestyle bloggers are Mormons (Good Magazine)

Massachusetts and JFK redux:  Romney and religion. (Huffington Post)

Political activists on both the left and right project dark times ahead. We present a contrarian upside, spiritually-speaking:

 1.  You can start the year by seeing the Dalai Lama, live (Dateline: Bodh Gaya, India)

2.  The world will have more saints in 2012 (Dateline: Vatican City)

3. The Mayans, the New Agers and the movie were wrong: Why the world did not end on Dec. 21, 2012

4.  The world economy ain’t so bad, after all (Global Insight, the world’s largest economic forecaster)

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 . . .

Buying into 2012 as more “doom and gloom” is a collective projection. A new solar year is a sacred event that can ground you.

BY DAVID RICHO, author of Daring to Trust and 14 other books about spirituality and psychology — Annual planting among ancient peoples began with prayer that recalled how the gods performed this same task at the beginning of time. The human lifecycle, thus, became a repetition of a primal religious event.

Whatever happens every year becomes a promise in perpetuity, and thereby the phases of life and the seasons fit into a spiritual framework.

Among ancient peoples this fostered a sense of belonging here on earth.

Repetition and participation give humans roots: “I am real because I am part of something. I have a grander meaning than is outlined by my fragile body.”

Invites you to express yourself with the most loving minds of our generation, the Soul’s Code community

SOUL’S CODE — Allen Ginsberg famously wrote the first line of his Beat revolt-poem, Howl, on the other side of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, the geographic formation around which we held clandestine meetings while creating Soul’s Code. “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation  . . . ,” Ginsberg declared.

We promise a low signal-to-noise ratio. No porno. No surf rage. All spirit. In fact, we nicknamed our app, Soul Stream.

Christmas politics and high-tech wealth creation

Professor Gingrich needs a history lesson about the Holy Land: “We are Palestinians” (New York Times)

300-member American journalist association: Ranks death of Bin Laden top religion story of 2011

2012 end-times and climate change? A green Christmas in  . . . Ottawa, Canada (Ottawa Citizen)

1-percenter Christmas collateral damage: Foreclosure kills California homeowner’s Peanuts holiday tradition (MSNBC)

If the Old Testament were a reality show: “The Real Housewives of the Book of Samuel”

SPIRITUAL IQ QUIZ — It’s once again time to elect the leader of the Free World. Or in the words of the Tea Party, it’s time to know thy enemy — beat down your enemy, and then pray for your enemy.

Hell, maybe some of us are sleeping with the enemy. (“Come on down, James Carville”).

Or maybe you don’t think of Republicans as enemies at all. Maybe you’ve transcended politics as an instrument of behavioral change.

Click on the radio buttons below to drill-down into the way that the candidates in the Republican presidential primary connect with the force, so to speak.

Play ‘Dark Souls’ and you will die — again and again and again.

From Software’s latest game — released this month — is long. It’s hard. It can be almost painful to play. And it has absolutely enthralled videogamers.

Maybe that’s because, like a great spiritual teacher, this videogame challenges gamers to learn. Only then will a player be rewarded with the next challenge.

If you’re a certain sort of spiritual person all of this might sound familiar — and maybe a little insulting. No one is going to become enlightened by grinding away a this game on their XBox 360 or PlayStation 3.

• Plus: Five new movies with both ‘Soul,’ and ‘Code’

SPIRITUAL IQ QUIZ: Scoring soul, musically-speaking

BY SOUL’S CODE — Music. Spirituality. They go together like peanut butter and jelly. But how much do you really know about the spiritual lives of your favorite musicians, or the musical lives of the spiritual leaders who shaped our world?

Modern music came to us from the spiritual — or more precisely, the monastic. Gregorian Chants, sung in chorus by monks as a series of meditative Om’s in the High Middle Ages, inspired the creation of written music and what we now call musical notation.

Click on the radio buttons below to test the depth of your soul, musically-speaking: