Fire Walking Ceremony | Originally uploaded by Skip the Filler.

STEPHEN OMOHUNDRO — I thought I’d share the powerful experience I had at a Tony Robbins workshop in Colorado Springs.

For the last several years I’ve had a practice of noticing when I’m touched by something and following up on it. I had seen Tony’s infomercial many years ago and thought of him as a charismatic speaker but a bit too “rah-rah” for my taste. His interview with Larry King, however, had a depth and subtlety that grabbed my attention. He exhibited a compassion and strength that I felt I could learn from. I did a web search and discovered the three “Inner Strength” videos that he recently did with Cloe Madanes, and bought them on eBay.

Each shows him working with someone who undergoes a profound and lasting change in a very short time. I was blown away by these videos and decided to share them by hosting some “movie nights” at my place. About 20 friends attended and most were also very touched by them.

I really resonated with his framework of 6 basic human needs: certainty, variety, significance, love, growth, contribution. And with explicitly identifying which needs are being met by the choices one is making. And creating change by consciously choosing new ways to meet those needs. I decided that I wanted to experience his work in person. His main event is called Unleash the Power Within.

Something like 50,000 people do this per year but for many of the programs they are shifting to a format where Robbins is on video and other instructors actually lead the workshop. Because I wanted to see him live, I decided to fly to Colorado Springs to take it. About 2,700 other people from all over the world attended the event at the huge and beautiful Broadmoor hotel. I shared meals with some amazing participants and was blown away by their backgrounds: a woman with a black-belt in Shotokan karate who will be competing in the Olympics, a fashion designer who dressed all of Donald Trump’s wives, a nurse who is building an AIDS hospice, a mechanic who designs custom specialty motorcycles, a fireman, a guy who made millions in real estate over the last couple of years, a professional chef who “stages food” for movies including Jurassic Park, etc., etc.

The workshop was beautifully produced, using music and live video to generate an energy much more like a rock concert than a normal seminar. The first three days were led by Tony live, the fourth day had him on video with other people leading. The hours were quite long, from 8:30 in the morning till 11:30 at night on the second and third days with just one meal break. But, amazingly, I wasn’t bored for a second and the few times I stepped out for a snack or to go to the bathroom I always felt like I had missed something valuable. He was an amazing seminar leader, staying at an incredibly high energy level for the entire time. He’s probably the best public speaker I’ve had the privilege to watch. Really engaging the audience with humor, stories, shock, emotion, surprise, etc.

The workshop was very experiential and he brilliantly shifted between speaking, having participants move and dance, doing exercises, and working with individual people. He was extremely perceptive about the state of the room and the people he worked with.

The intellectual content of the seminar was very good but not very different from things I have learned elsewhere. The real power of his work is in producing shifts that occur at a deeper level below ordinary conscious thought. You can hear an idea like, “You should overcome your fears,” and understand it and think it’s a good idea. But it is entirely different to have the visceral experience of that in your body.

His work comes out of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and he gained early attention by being able to quickly cure people of phobias and addictions. In the workshop, he taught us many techniques for consciously shifting our physiology in order to change the way we feel and act. He worked with several people who were experiencing depression at that moment, and by using the techniques, were able to shift themselves out of it in a few seconds.

The first day involved lots of little exercises and content culminating in almost everyone doing a firewalk (walking barefoot on hot coals without being hurt) on the first evening. The firewalk is pretty amazing in itself but primarily served as a metaphor for the inner processes that went on for the rest of the workshop. Most of the fears we struggle with in ordinary life are about things which are fairly intangible. By doing lots of visualizations and work on the tangible fear of walking on hot coals, you see how your inner process works. By learning techniques for shifting your physiology and doing the firewalk, you get the experience of inner transformation. I only talked with a few people who didn’t do it, though beforehand, many (myself included) didn’t think they would. And most emerged unscathed. I only saw a few people who got blisters on their feet. At the end of the first night, I felt I had experienced some amazing shifts and had already gotten my money’s worth. People who had taken the workshop before, though, told me that it was just a prelude to the real work on the next two days, but I couldn’t imagine how he would top the first evening.

But they were right. The second day involved tons of powerful exercises and visualizations. Lots of work on one’s process of choosing and making committments and delving into exactly what your deepest values are. An example of an amazing exercise was about sensing and mirroring another person’s physiology. One person would think of an emotional event in their lives, and a second person would position a third person into the same posture, facial expression, breath, and tone. That person would then say how they were feeling and any images that came to mind. It was amazing how often they experienced detailed images of the other person’s experience whom they had never even met before.

There was a huge piece that was very powerful for me about true happiness coming from being able to contribute to other people. And building a team to support and challenge you. Choosing a peer group whose expectations of you will lead you to grow in the directions that you most need.

The third day was the most powerful. First, lots of NLP exercises on discovering effective strategies by modeling people who are successful at what you want to do. Applications to relationships and discovering what your partner needs in order to feel loved. And then a long and incredibly powerful piece he calls “The Dickens Process,” after “A Christmas Carol,” where Scrooge makes profound change after deeply confronting the future he will have should he not change. It involved a very painful confrontation with the underlying beliefs that get in the way of taking the actions you need to.

After going deeply into that normally-hidden pain, it becomes amazingly easy to shift those beliefs. On the other side of the process, things that seemed completely true before seem silly and ridiculous afterward. With that comes a huge feeling of freedom and energy. At this point the whole room was in such a state of joy that people were spontaneously dancing on their chairs, cheering and shouting. It took quite some time for the room to come back to rest. He ended the evening with some amazing tools on anchoring and instantly shifting an emotional state.

Overall, I’d say it’s the most powerful personal growth work I’ve done and I’ve experienced quite a few different paths. (Of course I just finished it, so I may still be biased at the moment!) If anybody else is interested in doing it, I’d be glad to tell you more about my experience.

Stephen Omohundro is a mathematician and physicist who is a co-author of the research software, Mathematica.

The Secret‘s wishful thinking, versus the reality of 7 million American jobs lost. Soul’s Code introduces its own guide to balancing job security — and inner security

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):

For almost 10 years, the unemployment rate 'traded' in a narrow band

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.

New Age Fundamentalists believe we can “co-create” our own reality, but for all of their alternative-ness, they translate that concept through the prism of a conventionally-safe American dream: big house, hot car, trophy spouse (throw in a 401K). It’s a highly fractal, partial view of the ultimate reality they claim to have a purchase on.

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.

Our new slideshow, Spiritually $urviving Job Loss, isn’t about getting rich, or getting your job back tomorrow, just yet.

It’s about managing a sense of well-being in these times. It’s about inviting each of us to call something back into ourselves, when forces in the external world seem to threaten our very sense of survival.

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.

Heli Tuomi-Carlisle is a mother of two who is a charter member of what economist Richard Florida famously calls, the Creative Class. Vaishali Love has gone from boom to bust to enlightenment, and forms the book-ends of this series. Ronda LaRue was a Fortune 500 exec who went post-modern shaman, and founded a spiritual micro-resort in Ojai, California. David Rickey is a psychotherapist, writer and Episcopal rector in San Francisco who has counseled hundreds of people through job-loss.

READ THEIR INSIGHTS: FIVE SPIRITUAL WAYS TO $URVIVE JOB LOSS

David Rickey is an Episcopal priest, Soul’s Code co-founder and counselor in San Francisco who does a weekly ministry at a residence for the elderly in northern California. Follow David on Twitter.

When the Sopranos was on the air, Soul’s Code liked to call the HBO “family” show the TV series with the most mystical messaging. Sorry Tony, but ABC’s Lost now blows your crew off the screen on that score. The way that Lost routinely plays with the notion of both linear time and personal identity as illusions of the mind makes it the most spiritual show on TV.

Episode 9 of Season 5 is called, “Namaste”, a Sanskrit word uttered when you bow to the divinity, or spark in the heart chakra, of another. “Namaste” is also the greeting they say on the Lost island to new recruits at the Dharma Initiative, a 1970′s scientific commune that is now the center of action for Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lily), Sawyer and the other main characters.

Lost trivia: The Dharma Initiative is loosely inspired by  a utopian community called Gaviotas, founded in the 1970′s by Colombia’s Paolo Lugari and other scientists. Also, note the common literary roots that Lost shares with the 1960s art film, Last Year at Marienbad, which is No. 11 in the Soul’s Code slideshow, Transcendental Movies.

Handwriting’s on the wall for Tony Robbins’ vanity

Handwriting analysis expert, Bart Baggett, of Handwriting University International, has analyzed superstar self-help seminarista, Tony Robbins’, handwriting and has discovered what he believes to be traits that include “vanity, pride, fear and self consciousness” — all based on the  exaggerated loop in Tony’s “D’s.” Far from hurting his career, however, Tony’s telling D’s — and the fears Baggett says they indicate — are one secret of his success. View the video here.

Oprah’s karma runs over Jennifer Aniston’s dogma

Actress Jennifer Aniston is said to be in a tizzy over Oprah Winfrey’s refusal to see her latest tear-jerker, Marley & Me, which co-stars Owen Wilson. It tells the story of a Marley, an adorable pooch who dies “Old Yeller” style. According to Popcrunch, Oprah, who lost her own dog last year, said that it would be “bad luck and bad karma to indulge in watching Marley & Me.” It’s easy to understand why anyone who has lost a beloved pet would not want to sit through two hours of tears, but bad karma? The big “O”, may want to look up that word again.

Dr. Phil runs out of ideas (the musical)

Writing on her blog, Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, back in January, poetaster J-Money offered these lines of eloquent doggerel verse entitled, “Dr. Phil Haiku #5.”

Debate: Should we ban
Baggy pants? No! What would
Happen to Kris Kross?

Today marks the day
That the Dr. Phil program
Ran out of ideas.

Thanks for the giggle, J.

Yuppie Islam

A feature in this week’s Time magazine tells of a quiet Islamic revolution going on in the Middle East. The movement, says author Robin Wright, strives to find a uniquely Muslim way to be modern, rather than either rejecting modernity outright, or aping Western customs. The new movement stands for greater equality of the sexes and rejects customs like female circumcision. “Since 9/11, polls have consistently shown that most Muslims do not want either an Iranian-style theocracy or a Western-style democracy,” says Wright.  “They want a blend, with clerics playing an advisory role in societies, not ruling them.”  Of course, religious conservatives say this is just “easy Islam,” “yuppie Islam,” or “Western Islam.” We say, power to all yuppies

Today’s quote from Eckhart Tolle

The word ‘enlightenment’ conjures up the idea of some super-human accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that… is quintessentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. Forgetting this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation… — “The Power of Now.” (Thanks to Coyoteprime for bringing this item to our attention.)

BY PAUL KAIHLA — The 2007 “TED” conference — an eponymous acronym for ‘Technology Entertainment and Design’ — drew celebs-with-substance like Philippe Starck and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the conference center in Monterey, CA this weekend. It’s slugged as a summit of “icons, geniuses and mavericks,” but it’s really a Silicon Valley boondoggle that parades as Davos Lite.

Few geek/policy-wonk conferences deliver YouTube-able entertainment. But this high-powered, high-tech, Meet-Up totally delivered thanks to the presence of Al Gore, the sole member of Google’s advisory board, and Tony Robbins. The one-time TV infommercial schtick-man used the forum to re-brand himself, up-market.

Here’s the news-making line Robbins shot back after Gore humorously heckled him:

He’s broken my pattern, that son of a bitch.

But Robbins said it as a laugh-line, and the camera’s cut-away in the video above shows one of the first laughs he got was out of Gore himself. (Look for it at minute 6:00 in the above video.)

The occasion was Robbins’ point that the saboteur in each of us makes excuses for big misses in our lives. How does it do that? By story-telling about the ostensible ‘missing’ resources that apparently undermined our situation.

Gore, who was sitting near the front, added “the Supreme Court” to Robbins’ Power-Point litany of “lack of money, technology and time.”

Robbins’ rejoinder is that emotion (translation: energy, passion) is a far more convincing resource.

Said he unto Gore about the 2000 presidential election: “If you’d communicated with that emotion I bet you would have beat his ass, and won.”

New Age bulletin boards are all a twitter because Robbins earned street-cred with his audience of Silicon Valley egos and cynics by prolifically swearing.

Snippets = “bullshit,” “ass,” “get a fucking life,” “shit,” “crazy shit,” and of course, “son of a bitch.”

Tony, we concede, has it goin’ on. No wonder Clinton sought his counsel during the Lewinsky scandal: this guy makes America’s most-loved living president wilt with shame in the charisma and self-deprecating-humor department.

Robbins’ key message: Give unto others, and you shall receive the same for yourself. His style: black Baptist gospel. Gore hugged Robbins at the end of his 20-minute presentation.