Soul's Code

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.

How to have teeth as white as a Hollywood star — and take your dentist out of the equation

BY SOUL’S CODE — One of the themes of this site is exploring techniques and tools that do an end-run around insurance companies and the medical establishment. If there are things that you can do on your own to improve your physical and emotional well-being, why pay a psychiatrist, a hospital or a doctor exorbitant fees?

So we occasionally check out new products like our review of facial scanners that we nicknamed “New Age Botox” (they promised to make you look healthier without sticking a needle in your skin). Unfortunately, we didn’t think those ones worked very well, if at all.

But now we’ve found a new use-at-home product that displays dramatic results.

Post-mortems on Oprah’s 25-year run

It’s O-ver: Wednesday is doomsday for Oprah fans.

Blow-back from her hometown paper, Chicago Tribune: Way too much of a good thing?

Sin no more: Catholics blame Oprah for decline in sacramental confession.

Soul’s Code piles on: 9 Aha moments that blow Oprah off the screen!

Why we stagnate despite our best intentions to achieve greatness, overcome addictions and compulsions — or, like, just be happy.

BY MARY COOK — The next Pulitzer Prize winning novelist might be living next door to you but, for whatever reason, has yet to write a novel.

Your best friend might want to quit smoking but is on the porch having a smoke right this minute. Why?

What psychologists call associations.

Perhaps the non-writing writer associates hard work with her overbearing parents, and the smoker associates cigarettes with self-affirmation or self-pampering.

Celebrities neck-in-neck with Jesus; Lindsay Lohan role-plays her demons; popularizing philosophy; India’s marijuana minstrels.

The high road: India’s poor and happy minstrels share their truth by singing, begging and toking

The Lohan road: In an upcoming role, Lindsay Lohan might play an investigator who tracks down celebrities who – like her real self – can’t cope with fame and disappear.

Thinking 101: Should philosophy be translated to the masses or reserved for the experts?

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.

A real hockey mom shares her search for exercise that tunes her body and soul.

BY MICHELLE MORRA-CARLISLE — I am not tough. If a gang of men with sticks repeatedly pelted me with a rock-hard projectile you might find me on the ground in the fetal position, pleading with them to stop.

What I actually mean by that is that, unlike Sarah Palin, I am a real hockey mom. I live in Canada. And when I first saw my husband play goal and assume the iconic, fearless “bring it on” stance, I was in awe. As well-rounded as I consider myself to be, in that moment I saw that in my non-athletic development I had missed out on something important.

The fittest of the fit are sublimely aware that for the mind to be in optimal shape, so must the body, and vice versa.

How marathon training taught a yoga drop-out to meditate

BY ALISON DUNN — “Clear your mind,” the yoga teacher advised. “Let go of all your petty frustrations, all your worries, all your cares and let your mind become a blank slate. Only then will you take your consciousness to a higher level.”

Fat chance. There was no way I could achieve enlightenment in Savasana.  My mind was too busy racing through my endless to-do list, my worries and my troubles. I kept focusing on everything that was wrong in my life and couldn’t seem to let go. By making me lie still and focus on my negative thoughts, yoga simply wasn’t the answer.

Instead, I ran a marathon.

The sub-text of the award-winning cable TV series has a lot to say about a society that bred Enron, Dick Cheney and Real Housewives

MICHELLE MORRA-CARLISLE: “Sociopaths can’t feel psychic pain but they can feel physical pain,” says narrator Dexter as on-screen Dexter plucks a hair – with gusto – from the head of a likely serial rapist and killer. It’s for a routine DNA test but the viewer, along with Dexter, feels pleasure when the bad guy says, “Ow!”

The bad guy somehow is not Dexter Morgan, hence the mastery of this Showcase series now in its fifth season. A man with an irrepressible urge to kill, Dexter (played by Michael C. Hall) is not an antagonist for the hero to catch. He is the hero.

From Enron and Wall Street graft to the White House — both occupants on the inside like Dick Cheney and crashers from the outside like the reality-show Salahis — psychopathic behavior in the world around us seems to be at a collective high. Dexter serves as a sympathetic benchmark for the mental miasma in our midst.

Mark Hogancamp’s alcoholism was literally beaten out of him. Now his trauma and transformation are on the big screen in the new documentary, Marwencol

BY MICHELLE MORRA-CARLISLE — I started dancing, really dancing, at 38. Until then, that ultimate form of stepping-out-of-my-shell was too much like stepping out of Michelle. My turning point came four years ago at Halloween when I donned a mini-dress with a wild psychedelic print, a big blonde beehive wig and electric green gogo boots. As it turns out, the alter ego I created — “Gogo Batgirl” — can dance, and not in a lame, white-bread way. She has no fear, moves gracefully and is a lot more fun at parties than my official “me.”

As freeing as that costume was, I was okay with storing it in a box afterward and going back to my everyday self.

The line between self and alternative-self is not so clearly defined for Mark Hogancamp.

A part-time illustrator and full-time drunk living in Kingston, NY, he was severely beaten outside a bar in 2000. When he woke from a nine-day coma he remembered nothing of his former life — not even that he liked the taste of alcohol. Instant recovery from his addiction, however, was only small solace for the brain damage that cost him his memories and fine motor skills and forced him to relearn to eat, walk, read and write.