Soul's Code

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 . . .

When the temperature grows colder, these simple DIY treatments can warm you, body and soul.

BY ALEX ANZALONE –  The retreat to a warmer, safer place in winter is more than a physical phenomenon. When it’s cold out, not only our bodies but our energy and attention start to head inward.

Part of staying balanced involves being aware of this shift and adjusting our habits to reflect it. Because we are all inseparable from the rhythms of nature, life is easier when we go with the flow rather than work against it. Self-care, stress reduction, nutrition and touch are all essential to staying balanced, healthy, and happy.

I call the following my Five Hot Winter Health Tips because they warm both the body and the soul. Try whichever ones you like to coax your energy out of hibernation:

Flying triggers anxiety in even the most enlightened. Try this in-flight meditation to curb air-rage

SOUL’S CODE — Look no further than 30 Rock, and its politically-ambitious star Alec Baldwin’s pre-Christmas meltdown on an American Airlines flight from New York to LA. The pilot ordered the Hunt for the Red October actor removed from the plane (and let’s not kid ourselves, Alec is an Elite American Advantage club member).

Alternative healing and advanced science continue to converge — and leap-frog ahead of conventional wisdom

BY DAVID RICKEY and RICK LEED — As we evolve, both scientific researchers and esoteric healers have advanced new therapies to treat our bodies and our minds but when we first hear of some of them we make a snap judgement that this sounds too wacky to be legit. We use words like voodoo medicine or magical thinking.

Think back to examples like quinine and willow bark — the former a tribal medicine used by Peruvian Indians, the latter an ‘old wives’ remedy. In the modern age, the first was prescribed by doctors as a treatment for malaria and the second in derivative form as aspirin.

One of the most profound new spiritual teachers in Europe shares an excerpt from his newest book

BY TONY SAMARA — Meditation is not just a repetition of your characteristics that you put into practice in everyday motion and life. Meditation is being a revolutionary. It is being a rebel and breaking free from what is holding the space in this negative little world that we believe to be the truth. To be different takes a little bit of courage.

Can our brains evolve fast enough to solve the problems that the un-evolved mind has created

BY DAVID RICKEY —Einstein said that the level of consciousness that created a particular problem cannot solve the said problem.

A hot new book by sociobiologist Rebecca Costa, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking our way out of extinction, illustrates Einstein’s point by documenting how our rate of social and technical change is out-stripping evolution.

Look at the economy: we have developed complex computer programs that can trade stocks in milliseconds. We have developed virtual ways of making money, and created a subculture of the super-rich.

People on a spiritual path who aren’t into Botox still care about beauty. Soul’s Code samples new non-invasive technologies

Those who seek an inner-sense of knowing want to cleanse their tissue with yoga, organic foods and fasts — not inject it with a paralytic, neuro-toxin derived from botulism (one microgram of the stuff Botox is made from is lethal to humans). But many still want to look good, naked and otherwise.

Entrepreneurs are targeting this cross-over audience with launches of alternative skin technologies. These products haven’t hit the mainstream but are making the rounds at alternative health conferences; Soul’s Code checked out a few at the Conscious Life Expo — an annual mega-show at LAX that attracts tens of thousands of visitors:

SkinDream TITANIUM looks like a hand-held shower nozzle, and uses low-frequency sound waves (ultra-sound) to stimulate your skin — and “restore your natural beauty”Soul’s Code guinea pig: Was told that after a 10-minute glazing with the nozzle that the redness would be replaced with radiance; there was no visible change.

Meditation doesn’t require much time — you can do it while you’re thinking

DAVID RICKEY: I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to say that Meditation is important for spiritual growth. Ken Wilbur claims that it is the quickest way to advance spiritual evolution. But it might come as a surprise that I don’t meditate, at least not in any classic way. I could say “I don’t have the time.” But the truth is I have never had much discipline. So, I have a form of meditation that takes no real time and requires only a bit of discipline.

Author Tony Samara insists that anyone, anywhere, anytime – in a cancer hospice, or on Afghan battlefields – can be in bliss. A new excerpt from his book, From the Heart.

BY TONY SAMARA — Whether your suffering is a low-grade depression or a paralyzing fear, you can rise above it. From the Heart is a collection of satsangs (Sanskrit for “association with truth”) from live workshops with spiritual seekers from around the globe. In this excerpt, a uniquely-simple way of overcoming one particular source of pain in our lives: the mundane.

Jimmy Kimmel and dot.com sports mogul Mark Cuban are hooked: Sheen’s “surprise” late-night comedy apotheosis

Tiger-blood royalties: Analyst upgrade and bull-run on Sheen T-shirt stock

Curing life’s ills, addicts and Wynona Judd: Not-a-goddess embraces ‘Brain Training’ technology — a computer and EEG

Law of attraction: The more that Charlie Sheen goes fringe, the more that fringe people join his flock

Soul’s Code analyzes co-dependency: Addicted to the addict