By Jillian Vriend

So much of our western world and culture is based on a foundation of fitting in, compliance, and coping. Instead of encouragement to express our individuality and take passionate risks to tell our truth and feel our feelings, we are indoctrinated in the school of conformity, suppression, and making nice with others. We are pressed to get an education, find a career, settle down with a spouse, have kids, buy a house, go on vacations, and eventually retire until the day when we leave this earth. This is considered by many people, especially in the western culture, to be a sign of successful inhabitation of being here and so they feel at rest and in joy with their lives, happily settling into a life of busy content and materialistic gain.

Or do they? If this were true, if this “recipe” for happiness were the real food that we need as humans than why do so many, if you dig beneath the surface numbness, have feelings that would contradict this contentment picture? Beneath the surface lurk those “dark” feelings that we don’t like as a society to address and look at. We prefer to medicate them with happy pills, treat them with behavior modification strategies, buy another image-based item to make us feel better, go see another escapist movie to give us the sense that life could be adventurous yet only in our fantasies. Or we have extramarital affairs, use drugs/alcohol/work/religion to numb us to make it through another day, go on vacations to escape from our daily grind reality.

We prefer to get so busy in a linear, achievement-based life that we have no space and time to feel ourselves or anyone else around us. We prefer to bury the desires and aches that are the source of this dissatisfaction. We prefer to relate to our pain and fear on a surface level rather than dig into the depths of ourselves where perhaps terrifyingly dark and messy emotions and memories may dwell. We prefer our violence on the television or to play out in dusty, remote “third world” countries where we can remove ourselves from the action and cheer for our “country” on the sidelines. We prefer to distance ourselves from the tragic and devastating conditions that the majority of our species suffers in.

I’ve been offered and have experienced myself that as sacred human children of the Divine  we are meant to and capable of much more than this flat line existence based on conformity, disconnect, and achievement created by our false self and the many parts that make it up.

The earth is our playground, offering us a denser existence in which to experience ourselves truly embodied in physicality while at the same time connected to our divine essence. Embracing and becoming aware of both our roots and our wings. On this playground, we get to play, experiment, see what works and see what doesn’t. We get to express who we are, each of us being a spark of individuality in expression here while still being connected as One. We get to relish in the joys of being human- making love, eating food, listening to music, falling in love.

On this playground, we’ve been offered the opportunity (if we choose) to explore intimacy with another person who is separate from us, to join with them in sacred union, and to see how undefended and heart open we can become with each other. Parts of us experience hurts and wounds from being separate in this denser reality and also from the reality of our world being set up the way that it is in this current phase of human evolution. Parts of us have these hurts and yet they are a gift too, because the healing of them offers an ongoing adventure into the terrain of ourselves, especially the unknown and undiscovered aspects of ourselves.

This picture of life as a playground, the one that SoulFullHeart offers, is a shift from the mainstream and preferred one of our western culture. And being that, it’s not for everyone as we all are on our own sovereign journeys with our own reasons for being here with our own things to work out. For those of you who do feel a sense of “yes” to the picture of reality that I am offering here, then you also have a sense perhaps that it is not an easy path to follow, and that it is unknown, painful and scary at times.

Yet, we are not meant to do it alone.

Like-minded and -hearted souls will be drawn to join with you on the journey as you are brave enough to ache for what you want, willing to give up the things that may keep you stuck, and risk to be in vulnerable intimacy with yourself (including your parts and their shadow and wounded sides), with others, and with the Divine.

Also, support is always available from the Divine, which aches to experience us relating in a magical and unbound way to the opportunity of life that they have gifted us with. It does not want us to be stuck in boxes, trapped by how we relate to debt or money, slave to time, and in deep pain and frustration that we cannot seem to successfully numb. It does want to help us experience life as It intended us to, learning from us as we learn from It, loving us as we love It, and with It holding us along the way!

Visit soulfullheart.com for more articles and information about the SoulFullHeart healing process.