You gotta give to get. It’s an age-old maxim that finds happy residence in the house of spirituality, where inhabitants have long recognized that the path to abundance is paved with good deeds. The getting, in the instance introduced by MS sufferer Cami Walker, is the reward of personal well-being. And the giving? Well, that’s up to you.

In 2006, just a month after getting married, Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In the period to follow, this LA author, only 35, succumbed to bouts of anxiety, depression and drug addiction that left her reeling. She felt, she recounts, useless, and doomed to live a life in which she had no contributions to offer the world. Read full article »

There are many paths to spirituality. While some might find the solace they seek by adopting a map that travels the most conventional of routes, others discover their truest selves in a pottery class. Or between the pages of an Oprah magazine. Or at the mall.

One of the coolest ways in is shamanism, an ancient pseudo-religious phenomenon that folks have been trying to explain for a couple of hundred years. Read full article »

New years are gifts from the gods, granted to harried mortals who’ve burned through the previous 12 months and are hungry for a do-over. The ceremonial turning of the calendar offers as close to that as any of us is likely to get.

It’s why the dawning of 2012, across a landscape that’s pocked with more battle scars and brewing despair than most of us can remember in our lifetime, could not be more welcome.

Best to exploit this next annual stretch by Read full article »

The end of the year looms large, as it does at every end of the year, and the pressure is on for the annual stock-taking to unearth at least some shred of good news. But things are crappy right now and everybody knows it. 2011 is simply not going to be recast as anything remotely pleasant, no matter the number of times we turn it around in our brains.The world’s economy is coming apart like a flaky pastry and there ain’t a baker in the place with a recipe for repair.

News report after news report clocks in with the latest devastation: every day there are Read full article »

Exactly what gifts yoga has to bestow on those chronic conditions modern medicine diagnoses in our fragile, mortal selves is not yet clear. But it’s becoming so.

 Increasingly, stories surface of the myriad ways in which yoga is curing diabetes, cancelling cancer, erasing arthritis. The life-healing energy produced by yoga’s efforts, say those who believe, help us to “negotiate” our diseases. Read full article »

Everyone knows what it’s like to be under the “leadership” of a crummy boss. This is the guy who has no particular sense of what his employees need or want from their professional lives, and demonstrates no interest whatsoever in becoming otherwise enlightened. He’s in the gig for the ego boost and the paycheque, and precious little else.

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“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven,” goes Ecclesiastes 3:1. “To everything, turn, turn, turn,” piped up The Byrds a few years later, on a more secular note.

Both are right, and none more poignantly so than at this time of year, when nature sheds its summer clothes and hunkers down for its most ungenerous stretch. Read full article »

The question of what your religion is, arguably among the most historically simple of queries, takes on new complication in today’s increasingly complex spiritual landscape. However, because human beings find life so much simpler when we can put ourselves in a box, we persevere with the line of inquiry. It’s why myriad tests have emerged to help folds nominate precisely what kind of spiritual personality they possess. Each is unique, but they all draw from the same four-legged framework. Here’s a sampling

Author Corrine Ware has put together a model for nominating your spiritual type that borrows heavily from Myers-Brigss. Here, interested parties can undertake diagnostic assessment of the psyche designed to help them understand where their spirituality defining lines are drawn: head, heart, mystic or integration (identifying with a group as a whole and individualization (separating oneself from a group). Read full article »

Mascara streaks down her cheeks and rage gathers in her heart, Laura Dern’s character Amy Jellicoe nearly mows down a coworker in an emotion-fueled march down an office hallway in one of the early scenes of the new show, Enlightened. “Amy!” implores another employee. “You look insane!” Jellicoe doesn’t miss a beat with her furious response: “I don’t care anymore,” she wails, “I’m done!”

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When Steve Jobs died, the world reeled in elaborate and extravagant response. The passing of a man who had been CEO of a company inspired such poignant, world-sweeping sorrow among a legion of strangers that it was kind of a miracle.

Clearly, this man Steve Jobs was something more than one more corporate whiz with an eye for trends and a knack for design. He was a special soul, a man whose divinity was a Read full article »