BY RICK LEED — Everyone understands the concept of ‘giving’ to a child in need by opening your home as a foster parent and potentially (though not necessarily) proceeding to adopt that child. The most common and simplest way to view this metamorphosis is that you are doing good by helping someone else — by sharing your safe, warm personal, family home with a child who might otherwise live in a ‘group home’ (the word that has replaced the word Dickens made famous, “orphanage”) .

It is true: you are doing good by helping another.  But the good you are doing is hardly one-sided.  There are many studies, much research, and a long social and spiritual history that shows that the biggest beneficiary is the giver of this gift. You benefit in so many ways even more than the child for whom you are providing foster care.

Many agree that charity and kindness done in secret is somehow the best kind.

A case study from a famous surgeon

Here is one of my favorite examples. It’s from  a doctor who is a friend of mine. He is a wellness and fitness expert — and for the past two decades, also has happened to be the world’s most famous cosmetic surgeon:

“I met a young lady, a prospective patient, in my office for a consultation about plastic surgery.

“She was, to my eye, aesthetically perfect.  But, I noticed that something was missing, namely, that inner light or radiance that comes from a good soul or a charitable and giving spirit.

“This intangible inner beauty is, in some way, what the woman may be reacting to when she sees herself her in the mirror and isn’t happy with her reflection. But instead, she is thinking that outside tweaks — a slighter thinner bridge on her nose, a minor chin re-shaping, or fuller or larger breasts — may give her the something she senses is missing.  But I know it won’t really change the way she sees herself . . .”

“This is what I wish I could prescribe to the young woman: Go quietly, without calling your friends and announcing it, to a homeless shelter or soup kitchen or children’s hospital, and become a volunteer.

“After spending some hours doing something charitable like this, go home, and look in the mirror, just as you are, without makeup, with casual clothes, with your hair loose, unstyled, or in a ponytail.  You will see a more beautiful you.

“You will see some kind of smile radiating from your face even if your lips are closed, and you will see a more beautiful person because the beauty you added is more valuable, more potent, than anything a plastic surgeon, a makeup artist, a hairdresser, or fashion stylist could add.”

The sacred contract of parenting

So, what is the relationship between the views of this enlightened plastic surgeon and the concept for the motivation for becoming a foster parent?

Volunteering with children waiting for adoption in Colombia: Milena Arango Kaihla

Well, certainly, it is absurd to think of so dramatically changing your life by becoming a foster parent in order to look more attractive via ‘inner spiritual beauty.’  Surely, some hours spent at a homeless shelter or hospital as a volunteer are less messy, and less demanding than becoming a foster parent.

But the truth is that we can light up our inner soul, our innermost spiritual beauty, by doing something as special as becoming a foster parent.

No, of course it is not for everyone.  And it isn’t for someone who thinks it will make them look prettier on the outside by being a “prettier person on the inside” or for someone who thinks it will make others think of them as a “better person.”

Have you got “the right stuff” to be a foster parent?

There are many steps a person must take before doing this.  They demand a bit more than the indignities of, say, flying in America post-9/11. Fingerprints, a criminal background check, foster parent classes and then — a kind of personality test: meeting the child/children to see if there is a ‘match.’

At each stage, one is called to truly question their own motivation: Is the idea that, “I am doing a good deed for a child in need”? That may be valid. But it is essential that you not sit back, awaiting gratitude from the child or from the people in the bureaucracy who entrusted you with the child.

Direct and overt gratitude (however deserving it might be) may be slow in coming, at least in a verbally-articulated way.

Maybe the truth is that the way to proceed is this:  Don’t expect or ask for praise or commendation from anyone.  Just do it.  And just know that the heart that will be overflowing with gratitude will be your own.  The life that will be enriched the most is actually your own.

The best way I heard it put was this way:  A woman was helping her foster son with homework (not an easy task these days) while an adult friend of hers was present and watching.  The friend said to the woman, “Boy, that boy is lucky that you came into his life!”  And the parent responded happily, “Actually, I’m the one who is lucky he came into my life.”

Rick Leed is a Soul’s Code director, and successful film and television producer who has also developed international brands via cross-channel platforms.  His credits include DR. 90210 for E!; plus content for MTV, Discovery, NBC, ABC, Paramount, Fox and Disney.  He and his husband Joe raise David and Katie in a loving Los Angeles home with a swimming pool.

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.

We had many debates about the relative strengths of Islam and Christianity. While I conceded that Islam was certainly a recognized and perfectly acceptable path to the divine, I swore I would never convert.

I have always been a closet spiritual seeker, rather than overtly religious. Raised as a Baptist, I was taken to church weekly by my parents and was often moved by the self-less nature of Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament. I studied many religions in university, eager to see into other ways of being and believing. I was curious but not particularly drawn to any new path.

However, over time I did become Muslim — and I have practiced Islam for almost six years.

At first it was horribly awkward and terrifying. There were prayers to memorize in Arabic, and rituals to emulate. And this wasn’t a popular time for the move I made, coming just months after the 9/11 attacks (we live in the northeast).

Plus, Islam seemed to have a rule for everything! I gave up pork and alcohol. I taught myself how to pray by watching a video I ordered from the internet. The rites and language seemed very foreign, and I felt that I didn’t have the same connection to God I had once had.

But as time passed and I came to know and love many of my “brothers” and “sisters” in Islam, and as I memorized prayers and practiced rituals, I came to love Islam. I had accepted Islam intellectually and rationally long before — but the day I made my Shahada (declaration of faith) supported by my sisters in Islam, it truly entered my heart.

Islam means “submit,” and I have come to see that abandoning ego and submitting to certain directives and rituals in pursuit of something higher can create a sense of peace and certainty.

For sure, I’ve witnessed prejudice, misunderstand and blowback — especially given the tensions surrounding the war on terror, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that are the response of our governments to 9/11.

This everyday example is relatively harmless, but happens often: My mom owns a hair salon where she caters to an older set of grey haired ladies. One day an elderly woman commented to my mom that during Ramadan the Skydome in Toronto had been converted into a makeshift mosque to hold the thousands of Muslims who lived in the area. “Can you imagine?” she said, bewildered by the fact. “Where do you think all of those Muslims came from?”

My mom stopped cutting and pointed to a picture of my husband and I that she keeps on her hairdressing stand. “You see those people that you look at every week when you get your hair done?” my mother asked. The woman looked closer. “Well those people are Muslims!” my mom declared with pride. “That’s my daughter and my son-in-law. Muslims are everywhere! You might even know some!”

Many people have questions when they meet a Muslim convert for the first time. “Really? You converted? Do you mind if I ask you why?” Or, “What did your parents say?”

Well, my parents are accepting people who actually know a lot about Islam, and often educate others about it. They know that we worship God, and that the Arabic word for God is Allah. They know that we don’t worship the sun or moon. They know that we honor many of the same stories and prophets as Christians, including Abraham, Moses, Noah and Jesus.

We don’t think Jesus was God but we do think he was sent from God to teach us how God wants us to live. We respect other religions and don’t believe there is any compulsion in religion. We love peace and family and are hardworking members of the community. And I guess those are all of the reasons I converted — that, plus I love a boy who just happens to be Muslim.

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 . . .

with an early-childhood pattern of dysfunction. I remember playing Monopoly with my brothers while my parents fought loudly downstairs, or writing silly songs in my bedroom while my parents fought loudly downstairs.

You get the idea. As often as possible I would find a bubble of escape — sometimes to friends’ homes for sleepovers, where I would get a dose of “up.”

The goofy banter at their breakfast tables was a sweet symphony compared with the cacophony of crying and pleading in our house. My parents split up when I was a teenager, yet my diaries reflect nothing dark from those days. They’re all about “Mom’s yummy fudge!”, or “the cute guy who smiled at me in the elevator.”

Writing my life “up,” however, didn’t make it so.

Marrying ‘normal’

I thought I was smarter than everyone when I married a very nice guy with “normal” parents. I’d show my family. Marriage and stability were easy. I could make mine last because I had found love.

But I had a little magnet inside me that kept pulling me to darkness, or darkness to me.

In a picture of us camping, he is kissing our dog’s head and has his arm around me. His devotion is clear to me now. He respected me, but back then I didn’t believe anyone could.

I was in a constant state of fear, bracing myself for when it would all end, when he would leave me for a sweet co-worker or hot neighbor.

“Up,” in other words, didn’t feel natural. After seven years, the marriage was over.

From divorce to down time with a lost soul

After I left him, boy did I visit some darkness. I found a lost soul, a heavy equipment operator in whose presence I felt used, dirty, small and afraid. Something inside me would never allow me to move in with him.

I felt strangely at home in his madness, but would always return home, into the light.

Saturday: Shooting hoops at the local rec centre, just the two of us. I’m losing. First he tries to show me how to shoot, but I keep missing. He’s getting annoyed. I let out a nervous laugh. Quite suddenly, his face tenses up and turns red and he screams, enraged:

“YEAH SO I’M A BETTER ATHLETE THAN YOU. FUCKING GET OVER IT!”

Huh? I back away slowly. The front desk guy comes in and checks if everything’s okay. My boyfriend says, “yeah” and smirks. When the coast is clear, he grabs my left breast.

Sunday: Back in my apartment, the sun streams through the lace curtains. I bake muffins and savor them with a pot of strawberry tea. After breakfast, I walk half an hour through town to the local beach. A group of friends are waiting with guitars. I’ve brought mine, too. I play and sing for hours in the sand with positive, friendly people, enjoying the sun on my face. Even more wonderful is the absence of tension. This is how life should be, isn’t it? But I really should be getting back.

Darkness, light. I juggled those for a year until I was almost hopelessly sucked into the darkness.

I tried to leave the scary guy several times but had a disturbing, recurring thought:

“I don’t want to be happy. I want to be with him.”

When I bounced this line off my younger brother, he laughed and said that that would be a wonderful T-shirt for women who shack up with abusers.

I was smart enough to see the ridiculousness of my ways, always kept a foot on the upside — and one day left the darkness for good.

The light had always surrounded me, but I finally chose to live there.

Life has small, manageable ups and downs. The world is full of darkness, but none as dark as what can happen inside one’s own head.

Today, I’m surrounded by so much sunshine from every angle that I can’t believe I ever let myself slide into that deep, dark pit. The memory of my little “visit” still makes me sick to my stomach. But I had to touch bottom before springing back up.

The author chose not to share that she was stalked at the time she wrote this, in addition to the situation that she described above. Soul’s Code adds it to the record as a testament to our contributor’s capacity to transcend the circumstances of story and narrative.

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 remembered the first time I held the crystals and experienced vivid visions, powerful emotions and a feeling of familiarity, like coming home.

When my relationship finally ended, badly and painfully,  I was distraught. So I booked a crystal healing session and leapt on the first train from London to Brighton, arriving on my crystal healer’s doorstep in tears.

We went straight into a deep healing session and I floated out and away from my body, right out into the vastness of space.  Far below me, I felt her placing the blue quartz on my heart.

Physically it felt as though my heart was breaking open, then like cracks or lines of energy spreading out from the centre, and finally, like space and opening out and warmth.

Tears ran down my face, but they were tears of release and gratitude. There was no pain, no replay of any emotions or circumstances.  It was kind of like being operated on under local anesthetic; while part of me could feel real physical sensations part of me was floating amongst the stars.

Then at some point I lost all awareness of physical sensations and was entirely out of body. I was somewhere beautiful, being shown things, surrounded by loving beings, wandering in the beauty of the stars and the magnificence of the universe, the dark vastness of space.

Coming around at the end of the session, my heart, or more accurately my heart chakra, the centre of my chest, felt as if bruised. It remained this way for a few days.

Mentally and emotionally I felt light, clear, clean, positive, as fresh and new as if I’d just been reborn.

I didn’t have the slightest residual painful thought of that relationship or that person, then, or ever again.

How I became a crystal healer

I’d already loved and responded to the crystals.  Now, knowing they were capable of such heart healing, I determined to become a crystal healer and share such beauty with others.

My first crystal healer taught me how to dowse the chakras, taught me the meanings and ways of working with stones and introduced me to Katrina Raphaell’s lovely books.

Since my friend wasn’t a teacher and I wanted to become a qualified practitioner, I completed an accredited two year Crystal Healing Diploma.  While this took away some of the magic for me, I felt it was necessary to take care of the statutory and legal requirements of training.

I felt a duty to my clients to learn first aid, anatomy and physiology, counselling skills, etc. as well as extensive academic and practical study of crystal and gem therapy, in order to be the best and safest therapist I could be.

I became a crystal healer and eventually a teacher of crystal healing practitioners in my turn. Eventually all the magic came back.  With the experience and wisdom I have now, I seek to teach with a balanced mix of magic and comprehensive practical training.

What to look for in a healer

If you are looking for a crystal healer, or crystal healing training, I recommend that you find someone offering a mix of magic and grounded training and experience.

Go to someone who loves the stones, whose stones sparkle with life and who is also caring, practical, and down-to-earth.  Find someone you feel intuitively safe with, someone with some training, some practical experience and a lot of loving wisdom.

If you just want to start discovering a bit about crystals and how their energy works — go and choose some that attract you.  Hold them, meditate with them, place them somewhere lovely in your home and notice what happens.

If you can do some kind of experiential live or online workshop to learn about different ways of working with your stones, a good grounding in the basics will save you time and is invaluable. Then explore, discover and learn from the crystals themselves.  Only then read the crystal reference books and guides, to confirm your own real experience.

This way, your discovery of crystals will be a strong, wonderful, enlightening journey.

Susanna Bellini teaches crystal healing online and at her centre in York, UK.  Visit her at Bronze Dragon.  Her recent article for Soul’s Code was Enlighten yourself while you sleep.

BY SUEANN JACKSON-LAND — I can close my eyes and see myself at around 8 or 9 years old, sitting with my knees scrunched under me on the floorboard of a 1974 Dodge Coronet. The first poem I wrote was a prayer. Rounding the corner in that same old big brown boat that disguised its ugliness as a car, I can also clearly remember hanging on to the interior door handle as the door swung open and I looked at the pavement racing past me.

Living with my mother was like that. You’d be riding along on a nice sunny day, enjoying the view of the Susquehanna River and downtown Harrisburg one minute and having a face first view of the macadam a minute later.

We had moved from Mechanicsburg to Lebanon, Pennsylvania in 1974. I believe it was around Thanksgiving of that year. The very first thing I remember about the house on Oxford Drive was that it had a fireplace in the middle of two rooms. Encased in a wall that you could see from both the family room and the living room, I found the perfect hiding place. My mother had become increasingly violent toward me and I was disappointed because I thought, too, that the move would somehow change everything and make us a family again.

“Three hugs,” they would say and all three of us would embrace in the kitchen. Three hugs.

My dad was gone all the time, working. We had a bigger house, two cars in the driveway and all the accoutrements of living in the “wealthy” neighborhood in little Lebanon. He was so busy trying to keep us afloat, perhaps he thought if he worked hard enough or long enough it would be easier to come home. Once again, we had wiped the slate clean and appeared to be the perfect family. Something was happening, however, that could not be stopped or somehow hidden, I was growing older. It was no longer possible to deny what was going on. I knew other children would find out and I would be teased or ridiculed about my parents. It was only a matter of time.

When we moved I was 9, but I was an old 9. I began to yell back at my mother. Like so many snapshots in my memory, the story is incomplete. The last memory I have of my mother alive was the day she grabbed a pair of scissors and chased me around the house. I can’t even tell you what I did to spur it on. From the living room, I tried to run and crawl through the fireplace because I knew then I’d be in the family room and I could run out the patio door to the backyard; but I knew she was going to catch my leg so I just ran to the corner of the doorway in the foyer and crouched on the floor. I was cornered.

She was coming at me with the scissors raised and I was yelling at her, “Mommy don’t! DON’T!” I could hear myself crying and screaming but somehow I wasn’t in my body any longer. I was standing aside and watching the crazy woman and the little girl. The mommy, my mommy, came to a halt in front of the crouched girl and started making faces at her. She was crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue and saying, “Aw com’n, SueAnn, it’s just a game. See? I’m not going to hurt you. Whatever gave you an idea that I would do that? Don’t overreact, now.”

That’s how my life has been. Right there. See with your eyes, feel with your heart, know with your intelligence, but rely on someone else’s explanation of what really happened. Deny it. Suppress it. Act it out. And when you really want the answers and gather up the courage to ask, the pleas will fall down an empty canyon gathering darkness and going nowhere. It’s just your imagination.

I was just looking at the date of “when” in time I began writing this chapter and it was July 2, 2001. Three days later I would be hospitalized for suicidal thoughts. I have always denied any suicidal thoughts because I, above all else, did not want to become my mother. Doris began to attempt suicide long before I was old enough to even recognize the word, let alone the act.

I have scant memories of my mother being hospitalized in the Polyclinic Hospital in Pennsylvania for drinking rubbing alcohol or was it Clorox, I can’t remember now. What I do remember is that she was gone for a little while and she learned how to make octopuses out of yarn. Creative, we are, the Jacksons. I suppose we must learn to escape the doldrums and the voices that loom in our collective subconscious. My mother came home with a purple octopus and an orange octopus and it was a brief glimpse, a warm touch, from the person other people knew.

This story has been told so many times that I recite it now without the emotion that used to accompany it. It became my explanation for every single thing that I did wrong or that was wrong with me. It was my crutch for a long time, and, truthfully, I needed the crutch.

I think what hurt most was my pride. I’d like to be emotional, or even a daughter, and say that I missed my mother; truthfully, I was relieved.

SueAnn Jackson-Land is a writer living in Sudbury, Ontario. She would like to be a chaplain, but is mostly just grateful to still be breathing, to be given the opportunity to learn, to forgive (and be forgiven) and go on.