Soul's Code

Pamela Wilson asks: When you worry, or feel fear, can you say this to the anxious voice in your head? “You are welcome here!”

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.

Soul’s Code exclusive: One of today’s leading spiritual teachers shares her prescription for feeling great

A companion piece to Pamela Wilson’s first column for Soul’s Code, Age of Sorrow, Age of Wakefulness, this meditation invites you into restorative rest and gratitude for every granule of your being. Invite someone close to you to close their eyes, and try reading these words to them sotto voce.

BY PAMELA WILSON — Sit quietly and look inside, feel the sensations in your chest.

Katie Davis is a female mystic, fellow traveler of Eckhart Tolle’s and teacher of the kind of love that makes relationships last

GUEST COLUMN: KATIE DAVIS author of Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment — All love is one Love and when we fall in love with one another, it is said that we are experiencing the divine. Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi poet, defines love as a mystical moment, when two spiritually-connected individuals meet.

We call it love at first sight.

In this meeting of eyes, Rumi romantically writes, we not only experience the union of two loving souls but also the Love that is the crux of the universe.

In the words of Nelly Furtado, I’m like a bird. It took an aboriginal healer to tell me why it’s perfectly okay to fly.

BY MICHELLE MORRA-CARLISLE – Being corralled like cattle in a crowded subway underground, I always wonder where everyone is going. And my own destination was a mystery to them, one gray slushy day, as I held onto a steel pole and got jostled about. What would they think if they saw what was in my purse – a small bundle of tobacco wrapped in red polka dotted cotton and tied with string?

That, amazingly, is the “fee” they charge at Dodem Kanonhsa, an Elders’ Cultural facility created by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto. It’s in a highrise office building, on a busy street with no trees in sight. To step out of an elevator, down a hall and into a peaceful “lodge” is surreal to say the least. I was sure I felt some kind of magic, even though I knew the magic was government funded.

Inspired by female mystics, Pamela Wilson and Neelam, a medical student drops out, has a peak experience in India, and becomes “Nirmala”

(Read the first part of this two-part series)

GUEST COLUMN: NIRMALA — After being in the presence of Pamela and Neelam, I just couldn’t let this desire for Freedom go. I had the sense that there was surgery going on in my chest, like it had been ripped open.

Despite the fact that I absolutely knew there was nothing I could do about it, now that I had admitted I wanted this freedom more than anything, I could never turn back to my old life.

So, I gave my share in our house to my wife and quit medical school.

Soul’s Code has sung the praises of female mystics and spiritual teachers since our inception —  meet our inspirations, Pamela Wilson, Byron Katie, Caroline Myss, Katie Davis, Vaishali Love and Karen McPhee

Test your S-factor, as in, the measure of the soul:

1.  According to transpersonal psych studies, women have an edge when it comes to remembering, understanding and relaying their mystical experiences. Why is that?

A.  Women are smarter than men.
B.  Women have better communication between the left and right sides of the brain.
C.  Men have fewer mystical experiences than women.
D.  Men censor themselves more than women, and will not admit to having mystical experiences.

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, 21^st century spirituality. Call it the ‘Anti-Me Generation.’

Click here to read the 7-part series where Soul’s Code introduces some of the avatars of of what could rightly be re-labeled, the sage sex:

BY PAUL KAIHLA — 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.

What is your “story”? It’s a self-image, and self-talk that we repeat to ourselves internally and to others in conversation

GUEST COLUMN: GINA LAKE — People don’t just have ideas and self-images about themselves; they have stories.

These stories come up repeatedly in internal self-talk or conversation with others. They are easy to identify: like any story, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and usually something tragic about them.

Most have a “poor-me” or “isn’t it awful” quality about them, but others serve to glorify the self. Some change or disappear over time, while others endure for a lifetime. The stories we are most identified with have strong feelings attached to them. They have an emotional charge that we and others feel when we tell them, and they tend to trigger emotionally charged stories in others.

This often becomes the basis for relating to others, the means of sharing.

From a hero’s journey to a great awakening, 4 similar features spiritual masters like Jesus, Lao-tse and Gandhi share in common

GUEST COLUMN: RONDA LARUE — More and more people have been asking me lately, “What do you mean by the word mystic?” There’s a lot of confused thinking out there and some outright misconceptions about the term. In a very real sense — and because mysticism concerns the essence of life — it is audacious to even try and define it. Words are insufficient and often get in the way of understanding.

Mysticism is a quality of presence that is quite literally beyond and before any words. Nevertheless l, like others, feel compelled to at least try to frame mysticism in words. Mysticism is terribly misunderstood by mainstream culture, and it always has been. Many people think being a mystic means some kind of odd occultism — someone who studies magic or renounces life and goes off to live in a cave. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The self-improvement industry is dominated by a dozen multi-millionaire celebrities, and a big guru has not emerged since 2004. Shari Arison is already a billionaire in her own right, and may have the inner right-minded stuff to break out