By Jillian

I’m feeling blessed to be in a natural paradise on a warmish, sunny day in May. I’m on Gabriola Island, a remote feeling island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada that is only a 30 minute ferry ride from Vancouver Island yet feels like a world away from the hustle bustle of the lower mainland. In March, Wayne and I decided to rent a cottage here and divide our time between being here and our condo in North Vancouver.

It was a decision based on desire, not practicality, although we trusted that the financial means and the lifestyle changes would work themselves out if we followed our hearts. It was a decision from our souls with both of our daemons urging us to claim this piece of “paradise” where they could unplug from the frenzied and full grids of a metropolitan area and breathe in the quiet, natural beauty, and lighter population base.

We were following our growing desire and clarity to offer our SoulFullHeart work and felt that being away from it all would inspire our creativity, alchemy, and codification of this work. Oh, and it has! While being here, I’ve designed most of our website soulfullheart.com, received the name SoulFullHeart and our slogan, “Become Who You Were Meant To Be”, have placed an ad for SFH in the local paper, and we both find that writing comes fluidly and easily here. Wayne and I have both felt significant movements with our daemons here- feeling the transition for us to offering SoulFullHeart as our main source of income and passion work. We’ve also been synchronistically blessed to be offering our SoulFullHeart work to the couple we rent the cottage from here on Gabriola.

So, for us, this place is paradise.

Yet, for many people who live in places such as this one, it doesn’t feel like they live in paradise; instead it feels like they live in hell. If they are unhappy, struggling, and miserable in their lives, the physical location doesn’t impact this emotional reality. This is the wisdom inherent in the saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Although you might feel temporarily relieved and even inspired by a beautiful outdoor surrounding, the deeper feelings that you’ve subconsciously buried will bubble up and express eventually. Also, many of the parts of you that are in pain and suffering aren’t in this physical reality and time anyway. They are stuck in a time and place that captures their deepest cause of wounding and don’t feel much improvement or relief from settings or environments, even if they have favorite places to be. There are definitely environments that can help you feel yourself more; that are free from toxicity and negative associations. However, the environment alone can’t offer healing at the deeper subconscious levels where the source of your pain lives.

This is why unhappy couples on vacation may only temporarily relieve the state of discontent and resentment between them before it explodes into fighting, contention, and disagreement. As much as they would like the trip to paradise to alleviate and dissipate all their issues, the truth is that the reprieve is temporary at best and their issues merely follow them there.

Similarly, this is why you can go to a place to attend a “healing retreat” for a brief period of time and feel temporary movement from it. Yet, long lasting transformation may not accompany such a sojourn away from your daily routine. True transformation happens when it becomes your daily life, when your sense of yourself comes from within, and when parts of you have been felt in the realities where they emotionally live. It can be confusing, baffling, and even shameful to feel that you’re miserable in paradise. Yet, this is a reflection of your emotional reality and it’s difficult to deny or escape from for long.

Any physical place can feel like paradise when your sense of paradise comes from within yourself and then is reflected outward. When you truly and deeply love yourself from the worthiness place that arises through feeling these wounded parts inside you, you’ll be more naturally drawn to gorgeous places, yet you don’t need them in order to feel life is good, blessed, and beautiful.

By Jillian

We are drawn to the idea of embracing abundance in our lives and feeling grateful for anything that we are given. It just seems like such an enlightened and right way to feel about the things that we have, want, and receive in our lives.

The problem comes when you long to embody this feeling of abundance and gratitude, to change your attitude about it, and yet find that you are still drawing circumstances that keep you in loops of scarcity. You can also become then in suffering over and in resentment about what you can’t seem to draw: whether what you desire is financial, material, to have a nourishing relationship, to offer your deepest soul work, and even to be in more feelings of gratitude and abundance!

As a former business coach and manager, I spent many years with small business clients and coaches re-framing their thinking and urging them to shift their attitudes about the areas of scarcity in their lives, businesses, and careers. It seemed that all of them could quickly grasp the benefit of thinking more positively, being grateful, appreciating what they had, embracing abundance, opening up to the possibilities…these are not difficult or counter intuitive ideas. I noticed, however, that while they might have a temporary point of view shift or a moment of clarity while in session, it was rare that they could extend this centered way of feeling into the long term, even after they drew what they wanted! Once they got it, their feelings of scarcity and need would just move on to something else.

I was doing parts process work at the same time I was a business coach, along with attending facilitator training to offer parts work to others. Through this work, I was realizing how powerfully impactful our subconscious wounding is on our capacities to feel gratitude; to draw what we most deeply desire; and to embody a sense of abundance about our lives. Basically, I was self validatingly experiencing and witnessing in countless others how changing our thinking isn’t enough; it isn’t truly transformational at the level of where our seat-of-being operates from. We can attain an enlightened view point without actually healing the root wounds that are at the source of our unworthiness, of our feelings of scarcity, and of our subconscious underlying belief that we do not deserve to have what we want.

Going for a “change in your thinking” is like skimming along the surface of the water and expecting the conditions at the depths of ocean floor (which deeply impact the surface level) to change. Just as “changing your behavior or attitude” around spending money and setting a budget only address the external realities, not the inner reality that is actually impacting how we feel about what we draw.

To get to and heal these deeper depths, the parts identification process I engaged with allowed me to feel the part of me (and be felt by others) that held my unworthiness; the part of me that felt my parents push-pull around spending money and the punishing loops they engaged in after buying something; and the part of me that had numbed me out to the Divine frequencies of authentic abundance and gratitude.

We offer through our SoulFullHeart process that layers and layers of defensive protection, conditioning from our family, social, and religious upbringings, a fundamental lack of trust in God, etc. directly and deeply impact our capacities and abilities in these areas. During our childhood, our key experience of scarcity was a lack of feeling loved, a lack of abundant affection, a lack of gratitude from our parents toward us as children, toward themselves and each other, and a lack of being felt emotionally. In order to actually heal and transform this experience of deep lacking to a growing ground of experiential inner emotional abundance, ongoing negotiation and offerings of self love (and in session with Wayne and I) is necessary between the growing centered version of ourselves, our Sovereign Self, and the parts of us that feel life is still rooted in scarcity based on their experience of our childhood and our adult life.

We were meant to feel life as abundant; feeling every breath, moment, and experience as a sacred gift; trusting what comes to us and the Divine timing around if it does or doesn’t; and feeling gratitude for whatever does come from the Divine. Yet, in order to embody this natural state, we offer that you have to feel and heal your way there; not just think your way there; being patient with the ebbs and flows and with the inevitable phoenix cycles that you’ll experience along the way; and while being open to letting go of what you think you can’t live without in order to experience drawing what you actually need.

By Wayne and Jillian

Taking any journey requires some planning, and a glance over the plans can give you a pretty good idea if your plans will succeed. We all take many ill-prepared journeys in our lives, and we learn much from them. These misinformed adventures are pretty unavoidable given our need for the lessons in them. Yet, we also honor the part of you that would like have some plan for success. And, we honor the parts of us too that would like to avoid the friction of engaging with people who end up requiring us to hold more of their healing process than they are willing to hold and commit to for themselves.

The SoulFullHeart (SFH) process with us is a journey into discovering who you really are underneath the concessions, self image, and conforming behaviors that part of you has lovingly created to be accepted and to fit in with others. In the SFH process, you will discover what you’ve lost sight of and then out of desire, pay the prices that come up to return to your true you, what we call your, “Sovereign Self.” The Sovereign Self is the version of you that is authentic, non-conforming, passionate, engaged, compassionate, and willing to feel emotions in order to heal. The Sovereign Self arises through the ongoing process of intimacy with yourself (through journaling with your parts and your Daemon); with others (through nourishing relationships and work with us); and with the Divine (through connection with your Daemon who will deepen your personal experience and relationship with the Divine.)

The first thing you are going to need for this journey to discover your most authentic self is plenty of desire and plenty of despair. This is the kind of despair that is coupled with desire and presses you to act. If you feel basically happy in life and in your relationships, then this work probably isn’t for you, or the time is not now. You have to be able to say, ‘I’m in pain and I’m ready to do something about it.’ It was true for me (Wayne) that for a big part of my life, the part of me doing much of navigating of life, would self assess as well as congratulate myself for being a ‘happier than most’ kind of person, and this part of me worked hard to keep my own despair off my radar.

Sometimes a romantic or personal crisis can initially open you up to exploring the process and can act as a necessary catalyst for your growth. Something in life needs to arise that you can admit to yourself not only what isn’t working, but underneath that, how parts of you are in neglect and suffering.

What are you in pain about? How bad is it hurting you? How important is it to you to seek healing? What do you most deeply want and desire? Would you put money and time towards it? Would you give up lesser things? Would you take a ‘leap of faith’ to trust and surrender to the process in order to heal your despair and draw what you most desire?

The next thing you are going to need is a willingness to let go of the things in your life that have been provided by part of you to help you cope with your despair and keep your deepest desires buried. This process is not about powering your way valiantly to overcoming addictions that are slowing you down, but rather lovingly discovering what they are, how they are being used, and why they are there. Then, from that place, as the underlying pain or trauma that is the reason for the addiction is felt and healed, you can naturally, effortlessly and self lovingly finally let go.

Please note however, that we are not simply talking about what most refer to as addictions.

Our defensive persona that has adapted our lives to get and keep love, provides us with medicating realities that it feels best serves us, but in the process, cuts us off from our own heart. These navigating-love kind of arrangements exist most powerfully in our romantic connections, then in our friendships and our family connections. Our whole lives we’ve been trained and conditioned to fit in, conform, and value safety in our relationships in order to continue receiving love that feels varying degrees of good to us (at least it is familiar). But in the process of trying to preserve various love sources in our lives, we have become largely numb to our own essence and true goodness, as well as our deeper purpose for being here. It is unthinkable to most people to truly examine and be willing to give up (even if only for a phase of time) all the relationships in their lives that are not nourishing to their deepest Sovereign Self.

If this is ‘off limits’ territory for you, then we offer that before you invest too much, that your SFH process will most likely be unable to go deeper. This path will take time, money and courage, but all of these costs are based on a ‘find and pay as you go’ plan with you and your sovereignty in charge of confirming if this is right for you as it unfolds. You might be wondering if you have what it takes for this journey. It’s key to note that the process itself and the subsequent changes in you is what creates in you all that you need to keep going forward. Yet, it is important for you to feel if this kind of exploration into letting go of the medicative aspects of behaviors, relationships, spiritual practices, careers, your stories about your life, and even thought processes is something that feels valuable for you.

The next thing you are going to need is where it gets a bit more challenging. You need to be able to say that you know you are a big soul and that you know you have a mission to fulfill on the earth during this lifetime, even if that mission isn’t clear. You need to be open to feeling that your soul’s mission is at stake from being left unfulfilled and undiscovered if you are simply to remain unchallenged about relationship, career, and lifestyle choices that you are currently making.

The last thing is that you need to done with, or close to done with, most all of the healing modalities and spiritual/religious practices that you have been a part of in the past. We honor the goodness and value of all of these offerings, but ask you now to embrace going much deeper into you than these one-size-fits-all, blend in with the group paths. Big souls lead new paths, rather than hide out in existing ones.

What is your path? Is it being fulfilled? What’s in the way? If you are ready to embrace those questions in the context we’ve described above, then you are arriving at the beginning of your truer sovereign courage and expression. This is something that, as it arises, no one can take from you, and that no one can control. This is you claiming your legacy as a big soul, as a Divine child, and as a crucial piece of the bigger picture.

The world is aching for your contribution. The discovery of your Sovereign Self that can embody this contribution is a process that we’d very much like to be around and to serve in you if what we’ve described here and on our website is resonating for you.  Please contact us to arrange an initial conversation (at no charge) so we can feel and discuss the soulfullheart process together.

By Wayne

If you already know that much of your true and deeper self as well as your soul’s purpose for being here is threatened to remain unfulfilled this life, and you’ve felt how the conspiracy to keep it that way starts inside of you, and only secondarily and at your authorization is that conspiracy’s power held by others over you, then you know that changing it will require choice and action on your part. Right?

But this awareness in you didn’t start just last week, it goes back a long way. You can probably recall and share stories about this awareness arising in you and the choices that followed. The teachers you embraced; the groups you joined and left. But the ache comes back to you to live inside of a bigger context, and in deeper meaning, and in greater joy and depth in your daily experience. Which is surprising really, given that much of your previously esteemed paths are not so valuable to you now.

This creates a push-pull in the spiritual seeker. These paths held you for a time, and were even a part of your sacred journey, but something you expected them to deliver, didn’t happen, or you’d still be there, right?

What are the one or two things, if you found them in a spiritual group or leader, that would reawaken your soul journey and compel you to come back on board? Conversely, what are the negative things, if you found it below the surface in a spiritual group, that would be a deal breaker for you? Do you know? Knowing what you’re looking for will save you from unexpectedly being taken again by the next shiny object in the form of a spiritual group or teacher.

You may want to pause before reading the next paragraph where I mention what mine are, so you can ask yourself what yours are before having mine in your head.

For Jillian and I, the big ones are about how far does the respect for individual sovereignty go. Or said in reverse ‘how much pressure is there for you to come under subtle forms of control?’

Any offering that purports to help you find you by putting you under control has obvious integrity gaps, just not so obvious to you and I while we were invested in them. Falling back into conformity is so understandable given our need for love and to hold an identity, but what we conformed to obtain is diminished by the inauthentic way we obtained it.

I think the reason you are taken like me with these questions is that you know something about you. You know that you expended a lot of time energy and money in the past seeking this deeper you. You know that given the right conditions, you are likely to do it again, even as you are feeling your reluctance to do just that.

I want to offer you a new path that promises to find your sovereign self in a deepening way, and let’s you self-validate the results.

And, what’s the cost of that?

The cost is the willingness to let go of what you find to be not you.

How far would your current group or spiritual teacher support you to truly live that?

Well, you say, “Much of the time, I don’t feel any different from all the sleepy citizens around me. I hang out with them, get bored with them, talk like them.”

Maybe you are asking: “Could it be that this is who I really am? Or that I just need to find a way to be more satisfied, maybe work on attaining happiness; maybe polish a few of my rougher edges?”

“But, what of the gnawing deeper questions that live in me? Why do none of the others around me seem to ask the questions that I ask? Why am I so unable to be truly happy? Why do I feel like such a lousy citizen?”

We offer that if you feel the tone of your despair, and the hunger of your questions, they tell you that you have settled for a story. A small story. And every time the story line gets smaller, you feel a heart tug; a distant reminder; an ache. You have unknowingly joined the cult of Pleasantville and, for you, it isn’t pleasant. It’s a harmful cult to the degree that it deadens your passion, desire, and authentic feelings. It’s harmful to the degree that the conformist picture of Pleasantville keeps you stuck in suffering loops, focused on achievement and material gains, obsessed with meaningless content, and engaged in petty power struggles.

Ultimately, it’s your soul that’s at stake. Not an eternal damnation kind of ‘soul at stake,’ but your soul’s journey through this life that’s at stake. Your deepest purpose; your deepest reasons for being here; your deepest gifts expressing; and your deepest fulfillment are at stake of not being fulfilled if you continue to belong to the cult of Pleasantville.

You are a big soul and you know it.

Somehow, you came to live and be among the sleepy citizens of Pleasantville.

Sleepy citizens are sleepy because for now, they choose to see themselves as just like everyone else, and not the big souls that they are.

And, what if the reason you ended up among the sleepy was simply your soul’s plan to set up a real life drama where you would be faced with the choice of embracing your true identity?

Big souls simply don’t arise in Pleasantville. Pleasantville is created by people intent on having a place to save them from their soul’s desire and divert them from their soul’s path.

So, leaving Pleasantville is no easy task.

It seems the first peril is being preyed upon by sleepy leaders, the slightly wiser than you who know you carry this unaddressed longing not far below the surface, so they offer quick and easy solutions to their own benefit, designed ultimately to keep you in Pleasantville.

The next peril is facing how you have invested so much into living among the citizens. You’ve invested into the status quo your sense of identity, self image, meaning and purpose, social connections, standing in the community, career achievements, and your sense of home. Although this investment is beginning to feel shallow and lacking to you, it also is the only reality and life that part of you has ever known.

Truth is, until this part of you gets felt and its’ reality is allowed up into your consciousness, there will simply be too much terror around leaving Pleasantville.

While this part of you is stuck in unconscious terror, anxiety, and conformity, it feels impossible to change this all pervasive reality no matter how consciously unhappy you are.

We offer through the SoulFullHeart process that as your soul guide/protector (what we call your daemon) is felt in its’ many faces and expressions, trust and communication deepen, giving you access to Divine inspiration, courage, and passion to claim your soul bigness and make the necessary life changes to support this bigness. You will feel through this process the resistance, strategies, hooks to the past, and even thought processes that your Daemon has held to keep you safe and secure; to keep you a “good citizen.”

Your daemon has provided you with Pleasantville citizenship out of a deep love for you, and you need to develop a centered, mature adult you to negotiate with it, to tell it that you want something more and that you want to follow your purpose path, no matter where it takes you.

Once your daemon feels your growing conviction and strength, it can start to let go of its’ masks and overinvestment in your daily life. Your life becomes truly your life with your Daemon acting as cherished soul advisor and pipeline for Divine love to reach you, as was originally intended.

Your Daemon’s participation and courage is essential for you to leave Pleasantville as it doesn’t naturally abide there anyway.

If you feel this tug in your heart to leave Pleasantville and claim your soul bigness, are you ready to take the next step and set up a call with us? In that call, we’ll feel your circumstances, readiness, and timing related to beginning this journey.

There’s much at stake and much to gain. We’re here to help, guide, and offer support during the journey. One that we continue to take every day in an ever deepening and renewing way. The journey never ends; just the path changes that we choose to go on. Are you ready to change your path?

I’m reading, “The Tar Sands – Dirty oil and the future of a continent,” by Andrew Nikiforuk. This book is a prophet’s call in our time…convincing, damning, and a wonder the author’s voice hasn’t been silenced.

I am shocked at how compelling greed and falseness is through and through our systems of government and business. Where have true leaders gone? Gone they are, we are a ship without a rudder, about to be hurled on the rocks of our own folly. Hopefully to some soft landing that saves us from ourselves.

The shocks come in waves; the shock of the living conditions in Fort McMurray, Alberta, the main town at the heart of the Tar Sands; the shock of the working conditions, the shock of the inflated wages and stunning cost overruns, the shock of the estimated 40% of workers high on cocaine and other drugs just to cope; the shock of the environmental protections agencies standard rubber stamp report of ‘no significant damage’ to the environmental impact study question at hand.

You have to be immune not to shocked by what you read about and feel in these pages.

The shock goes deeper however, than a ‘us vs. them’ kind of reaction. The shock goes into our collective addiction to cheap oil that has fuelled (pun intended) this reality. This is something we have co created as an industrial society and it is something we must together uncreate. It doesn’t seem however on the surface at least that there is much evident collective will to reverse this mammoth race to more and more raping of the earth, and plundering everything in our path for a feeling of security. But this is where mother earth will hopefully come to the rescue to save us from ourselves before it’s too late.

Scary too is our current Canadian government’s evangelical christian leanings that hold that the earth is soon to be burned up by God himself and a new heaven and a new earth popped in it’s place. And it’s belief that people who get worked up about saving the planet just don’t get that the far more important job is saving one’s soul from eternal torment in hell. This, of course, can’t be outright admitted, but look at the environmental track record and our recent pull out of the Kyoto accord. Something much bigger than just a political persuasion is at work here.

God’s kingdom is coming to Canada, and it’s a boom for the tar sands, like it or not. But the huge cost and devastating environmental impact can’t be underestimated.

My 17-year-old daughter recently spent a week in Mexico building a house for a single mother with six children. She went on the trip through Live Different, a non-profit organization dedicated to hosting Canadian high school students on humanitarian trips to build facilities for people in need around the world. Last year, she went to the Dominican Republic, which was still in the throes of intense trauma from the Haitian earthquake. Her trip included a heart breaking day spent in the local garbage dump, picking out recycled products from the trash with locals who do this every day to feed their families.

With these two experiences, my daughter’s compassionate humanitarian heart has been awakened by the local people she’s met from these struggling countries. It’s amazing what her group has accomplished in a very short time frame to make these people’s difficult lives easier. She’s also been profoundly touched and inspired by them. The children are open, friendly, affectionate, and their parents self contained, grateful, hard working, and humble. She’s fallen in love with the people she is “serving” and, in the exchange, been served herself.

She has formed connected, passionate, and close relationships with her fellow students on these trips. United by the pay offs of hard work and generosity, these students become a “family”, connected not by blood but by heart. A deep intimacy forms between them, a palpable one even to those of us not there, that seems to transcend beyond just the shared experience but becomes one of the shared value of living in the moment- loving, laughing, feeling, doing, giving, receiving, experiencing.

Removed from the routines of school and the distractions of technology, they are present to each other and to life. It’s no surprise that deep romantic relationships form from the trips as two souls normally busy with school and social pressures are freed up to see each others’ true heart, authentic spirit, and feel bravely supported to pursue love. Indeed, love and connection become the priority.

I’ve found myself deeply inspired and captivated by my daughter and her friends as they share and digest from their trip. They are like a bonfire, alive with their experience and their connection with each other. I’ve learned from them and felt my own inner 17 year old come alive in response to their desires and passion. I wish that their and our daily lives could offer this sort of transformational experience all the time with every moment felt as a meaningful one.

I feel that the Divine invites us to experience life this way; to let in love; to feel passion; to allow our desires to arise; to serve; to receive. That we can go on a “trip” any moment to share our hearts and our gifts in exchange with others. We can prioritize intimacy and connection; we can feel alive and purposeful rather than deadened by routine, obligation, and achievement. We can appreciate life as a gift rather than a burden.

Thank you to my daughter, her friends, and the Live Different folks for bringing this reminder of the sacred nature of life and the human heart this week.

The abuses of our land, of our planet, so poignantly demonstrate how we are out of balance as a species- expressing our male shadow side…..achievement-based, short-sighted, dominating, and greedy….following urges and unchecked impulses in masochistic and saddistic ways without feeling compassion, remorse, or the bigger context of the impact it has on our world and the world our children will inherit from us.

While watching this film, I often gasped, near tears, “How can we let this happen to our earth?”, shocked by the destruction and devastation depicted in the images. Wayne replied (also disgusted but less shocked because he had seen these tar sand images before), “Out of sight is out of mind for most people. Remember too that the Tar Sands are a really lucrative industry for Canada.”

This film puts what is out of sight into the mind and, hopefully, into the heart and into the awakening consciousness happening around the world. Yes the demand is there for fossil fuels and it can be answered this way…but at what long-term cost for such temporary gain?

Information below is from the film’s website about the dangerous effects of this relatively new and expensive (the cost much beyond a financial one) means of meeting the world’s demands for and ever decreasing supplies of oil:

Located beneath 4.3 million hectares of boreal forest in Alberta, Canada, the tar sands are a mixture of sand, clay and a heavy crude oil called bitumen that is either mined in open pits or extracted from underground by injecting superheated water.

Getting the oil out of the tar sands uses roughly three barrels of water per barrel of oil, or as much water as a city of two million people. After use in tar sands processing, 90 per cent of this water is so contaminated with toxic chemicals that it must be stored in tailings ponds so huge that they can be seen from outer space.

Tar sands oil production releases five times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil production. Tar sands projects will release an estimated 40 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2007 and ensure that Canada will continue to be one of the worst greenhouse gas emitters per capita in the world. – From Petropolis

For over a year now, investors around the world are holding their breath watching the drama unfold over whether the Greek Parliament will choose to default on its’ debt or instead to ‘kick the can down the road’ by complying with the IMF’s crushing austerity demands in return for yet another ‘loan.’ Everyone in this power play knows, but won’t admit, that the newly loaned money cannot – and will not – be paid back. So, why all the fuss getting Greece to accept new loan money? Because this would buy a bit more time and delay the seemingly inevitable collapse a bit longer. It would buy a bit more time to scramble for a bigger scrap of control or power.

Authorities are ever reluctant to simply state what they know, especially in this case with Greece: ‘This ship will sink.’ When a leader hits a wall and can’t get through it, their leadership is in complete jeopardy and the power advantages that come with it. A true and genuine leader should be able to say, ‘I’ve hit a wall and don’t know the way through, but I’m looking for it.’ This admission, this confession, would be honest and transparent, but would also probably cost the leader their following. People generally choose the leader who gives them best feelings, even if (and especially if) they are not based in reality.

The Bigger Picture is not:

The bigger picture is not just about the economic collapse of Greece and all the dominoes that would fall as a result of it; or the global unrest of the Arab Spring countries; or the riots that just occurred here in Vancouver over our beloved Hockey (the way we Canadians like to relate with our suppressed rage); or about our contracting economies; or Obama’s ever expanding wars; or our oil reserves drying up; or mother nature’s unprecedented (in our lifetime at least) droughts, floods, tornadoes, tsunami’s and nuclear catastrophes; or the mass animal deaths that have occurred this year. The bigger picture is not even just that life as we’ve known it and created it is moving unstoppably now on a conveyor built towards profound change that will affect every last one of us, everywhere.

The Bigger Picture is:

The bigger picture is that what isn’t REAL is collapsing and what is real is being reborn. And if this process doesn’t continue happening, the truth is that you and I don’t really want to be here on this planet.

So what is ‘Real’ ?

Is how you relate to money real? What about how you relate to time? Are your face-to-face friends real? How about your Facebook friends? Is your career and the feelings of security it affords you real?  Is your sense of the Divine real?

‘Real’ – when it all boils down – is about something being ‘Real-er’, as in more real. A walk is more real than playing a video game, for instance. And, more real yet is a walk in a forest over a walk in a shopping mall. More real still is feeling, while being in the walk in the forest, the interconnectedness of all life, instead of focusing on achieving your exercise regimen in less time than yesterday.

Your existence is as much a profound mystery as the thousands of year old trees you and I are conditioned to be mostly oblivious to. But profound mysteries are hard to draw nourishment from, to feel as real, and to let in as things that can make us feel good and alive about ourselves in our everyday lives. So we accept abiding with lesser things as real; we crave drugs and false perspectives to help us get by. Lesser justifications such as ‘I owe, so off to work I go’ or ‘I don’t have the time for that’ or ‘I have to get ahead.’

Here’s where The Collapse comes in.

And, it’s good news.

You and I don’t have a hope in hell of ‘making’ ourselves or others more spiritual, or more contemplative, or more connected to nature, or more engaged in what really matters. The truth is most of our efforts to become more centered or more engaged in what really matters actually achieve the opposite because they are rooted in the belief and culture and lifestyle that we are in fact not fully connected right now to the Divine.

In other words, you cannot become any more connected to the Divine than you already are, but you definitely can become more aware and conscious of that reality, just as you can feel a whole lot less connected to the Divine by making an effort to become closer.

And herein lies the rub: How THEN does that effort to become more conscious of our already existing connection with the Divine not just become another self defeating religion and internal and externally played out conflict?

The truth is we are too deep in the soup of our falsely created world now to find our way out by ourselves. I can’t tell you how we will find our way. I can admit, however, that I can’t tell you, and that’s more than most will afford you. I guess I am a little proud of that fact, and that helps to mask the hurt I feel of feeling so largely alone in this choice, to seek realness over influence.

The Collapse, however, can tell us and lead us in the way out of this soup. It can sort us; it can let die what must die in order for our ‘realer’, ever emerging, truer us be given the permission to arise.

The chaos and hell you and I and this planet are about to go through can only be felt as arising goodness if we can feel that the collapse is not malevolent (intending to harm us), but rather a passionate and compassionate bringing us back to finding our way.

And when we do find our way, I can assure you, we will look back in gratitude for what we would never have consciously dared to ask for. We will no longer envy our pets for being more connected to nature than we are. We will not be disconnected from each other or from the Divine in the way we have become now.

In the meantime, be kind with yourself and the pressure you are about to feel and are already feeling way more than most people let themselves feel. This is cooperating with the Divine in creation and in sometimes necessary destruction. Cooperation comes in the form of an invitation to connect with your daemon- your divine guide and guardian, who can offer humanity comfort and clarity during these troubled time in our evolution.

I feel this is our true reason for being here on the planet at this time. A time like no other.