Soul’s Code

According to one of the leading psychotherapists and spiritual authors in the United States, trust is a four-fold path

Adapted from, Daring to Trust: Opening ourselves to Real Love and Intimacy, By DAVID RICHO — A compass is a trusty tool for a journey, and we can see the four directions that trust can take using the symbol of a compass. Draw a diagram to see for yourself.

Place the words “I TRUST” in the center with a circle around it.

In the East position write: “MYSELF”

In the West position, pencil in: “OTHERS”

South: “REALITY,” or “WHATEVER HAPPENS”  — or “HOW LIFE UNFOLDS.”

Robert Louis Stevenson called it Mr. Hyde; Jung called it the personal unconscious. The great sages say we heal when we own the denied part of ourselves.

BY MICK QUINN AND DEBORA PRIETO, 1st of 2 parts — Picture the ecosystem of relationships that hold you in this time and place, from lovers to office politics and friends and family. Ask yourself six questions:

1. Are the ways in which other people act emotionally disturbing to you?

2.Do you sometimes feel that other people don’t seem to care enough?

3. Do you question the insensitive ways of others?

Can you inherit hate? The karmic question is tested in an HBO documentary about the most notorious public enemy alongside Bin Laden and Hitler

BY PAUL KAIHLA – A DEA agent once told me a story he heard about Pablo Escobar, the late founder and CEO of the Medellin drug cartel. Escobar saw an attractive woman in a Colombian hotel. He ordered his henchmen to do two things: kill the woman’s husband, and bring her to his room, where he raped her.

The tale may be apocryphal, and it appears in no public accounts. But what is in the public record thanks to multiple investigations and sig-int intercepts is that Mr. Escobar ordered: the assassination of 3 Colombian presidential candidates, as well as 100’s of cabinet ministers, judges, prosecutors and cops; the bombing of an Avianca jet that killed 110 passengers . . . it’s a long list of atrocities.

In other words, if you’re going to document a case study on the origins and transference of hate, violence and sin, Pablo Escobar is a cardinal candidate.

Ever wonder how bunny eggs, death and resurrection fit together?  A pagan history of  the goddess, and how the church stole Easter

BY DANNY KENNY — Ever since I was an angelic little boy, there are many reasons why I’ve always loved Easter. But I would no longer be angelic in good Irish Catholic fashion if I didn’t admit that gorging myself with sumptuous chocolate eggs after a cruel, six-week enforced abstinence (during Lent) from my first love wasn’t a huge part of that.

Even as a child I had trouble equating chocolate eggs and Easter bunnies, but when you’re in a self-induced chocolate coma, such heady thoughts soon pass.

On a deeper level — even though I grew away from my childhood addiction and religion — I still retained a different kind of deeper love for the annual celebration of renewal, faith and hope.

The gospel of LOST: Steeped in mystical memes and Einstein’s deconstruction of time, here are 12 reasons that LOST was the most “enlightened” show on TV

BY PAUL KAIHLA — In the 2011 liturgical calendar of American TV, what have we got? Jersey Shore ?! Millionaire Matchmaker? They make Sarah Palin look seriously spiritual. And they strip all shame from the vapid Lloyd Braun-Marc Cherry content called Desperate Housewives. Also an ABC product.

In this 2011 season of Lent, we still long for LOST. Why bring up religious matters?

LOST was a religious experience. Here are 12 reasons why:

“The greater the disparity between our healthy needs and our childhood environment, the greater our focus on survival rather than maturation.”

BY MARY COOK — “But I’ve always been like this.”

“I’ll be hurt if I become vulnerable.”

“I’ll have no power if I don’t intimidate.”

“Without my character defects there’ll be nothing left of me.”

Those kind of thoughts usually come out in therapy. But many of us run on auto-pilot, and such archetypal ‘beliefs’ loop in auto-pilot in our unconscious mind — the operating system of our psyche.

And out of fear we hold ourselves hostage to defense mechanisms that keep us dysfunctional.

Our own intentions don’t trump those of the universe. Even BP received signs from above before the Gulf oil spill

DAVID RICKEY: Long before the big spill, something or someone — let’s say God or the universe — tried to warn BP Oil and its contractors that a massive blowout was imminent. Eleven workers and thousands of birds, mammals and reptiles would still be alive today had the company paid attention to the warning signs rather than exert its own will.

The more I read, and more importantly the more I experience, I am convinced there is a purpose behind this whole amazing universe. Or, to bring it down to a bit more manageable level, behind life on this planet. My own life is full of synchronicities,

A Jungian psychologist’s take on Eros and Valentine’s Day

BY PAUL KAIHLA — This is the one day of the year in our secular society where a celibate Catholic gets top-billing, marquee treatment. There were probably three saints called Valentine, one of whom history says is entombed in Rome’s catacombs.

But the origin of Valentine’s Day is in a medieval social custom, so it’s not like a long, lost high-holy-day has been hijacked by capitalist consumerism.

The custom marks the first day of spring mating season, so let’s hand over the mike to psychologist James Hollis for his take on how we modern humans channel that energy — eros, in Greek mythology:

Eros is dynamic and shape-shifting . . . always going somewhere, seeking to connect, to fill in, to transcend. Just as nature, we are told, abhors a vacuum, so our psyche is terrified by emptiness. Seeking to fill that emptiness, we all too often fill it with ourselves. Wheresoever space opens, into that hole flies projection . . . Eros substitutes as it seeks the Cosmic Other in the frail vessel of the Beloved.

Illustration, “tu lip,” courtesy of Angela Brown

Claire Elek’s paintings have names like, “The Hero’s Journey into the Bone Forest.” In a Soul’s Code exclusive, Elek reveals her own heroine’s path of self-discovery

The color-infused canvases of Toronto-based artist, Claire Elek, will float you into a world resplendent with dreamy, mythical images.

She has the depth of a spiritual teacher when talking about shamanism, Jungian theology and female archetypes — and not surprisingly, they are powerful influences in her paintings.

A catalyst for Elek’s highly-collectible art (one of her drawings is owned by Canadian author Margaret Atwood) were her Gauguin-like travels through South America and Southeast Asia.

Camping out in a tent in California’s coastal ranges, near the spot where Robert Louis Stevenson honeymooned, puts a different spin on the myth of mother earth

BY SMADAR DE LANGE — Can you escape from society? Does being a hermit have a transcendental value? Does nature unlock the secrets to spirituality?

There is an American tradition, going back to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond — and re-expressed in Sean Penn’s 2007 movie, Into the Wild — that honors rustic solitude as something sacred.

The concept of freedom in Western Civ has gotten mixed up in the Wild West with the image of the Marlboro Man, the stoic dude riding in solitude toward the horizon — or in another cultural image, a mountaineer challenging the immense force of nature, all alone at the peak of a mountain. (Or, conversely, Daniel Day Lewis with a pick inside a shale shaft in his Oscar-winner, There Will Be Blood).