By  Raphael Awen

Are you able to feel good about yourself before and without doing anything to feel good about yourself?

That’s the question a part of me is entertaining today.

It has always felt good to this part of me to be achieving something, moving some kind of index forward. There’s been a bunch of layers of indexes upon indexes that I’ve used in my life, a whole dashboard of levers and dials to monitor, control, respond, and ultimately, receive a reward from.

At one time, it was things like home improvement or business building. More recently, it has been more spiritually and emotionally oriented to something akin to a higher level of personal improvement, attaining a higher level of consciousness. I can see and feel however, where I’ve been still beholden to the old orientation of feeling good about myself because I did something positive.

‘It’s all still doing and achieving’ this part of me says!

Learning how to be centered, in joy, grateful, or whatever other prescription one can come up with is still a prescription, a means to improve one’s condition or fate, and thus feel better about oneself.

Problem is though, now, that efforting in order to feel better about myself is fast losing its appeal and natural seeming effortless energy, and has been for some time. It used to work quite well. It appeared it would hold me for life. It doesn’t anymore. To this part of me, it has felt like a slow and ongoing death. Now, however, it’s beginning to look and feel much more appealing.

What could an alternative look like? And how would I relate to that alternative without trying to ‘apply’ it, as another more sophisticated kind of personal improvement that promises me something, leaving me squarely in this same old predictable, safe and shrinking territory?

What would moving from a life of expectation and knowing to a life of the unexpected and living in the unknown look and feel like?

As this part of me asked Divine Mother this morning more about this ongoing dilemma, the response came back.

‘Doing and achieving was a way that you could justify receiving love in the past. It was all love, but you just couldn’t accept it without giving something in exchange to feel worthy of it. You received the love in the form of some improvement and that always felt good.

‘There was nothing wrong with that, it’s just the phase you needed to go through, complete in order to be ready to enter this next phase.

‘Life is always improving you could say, but it ‘does’ this effortlessly by allowing both death and rebirth. Life allows inbreath and outbreath, increase and decrease.

‘What is before you now is the opportunity to simply let in the love without equating it to any deserving of it, or to any earning of it. It is a graduation that you can’t graduate with, or measure, or set a timer to. It simply is because you are.

‘Receiving this love is akin to feeling worshipped. Feeling yourself receiving divine love and grace, flowing to and through your being because that is who and what you are, in your deepest essence of being. Worthy. Not because you did anything, or demonstrated anything worthy. Not an exchange. Not a transaction.

‘Your sexual fantasies have often had this dream at root of them, being worshipped in this way, where an other can convey onto you sheer joy and pleasure simply because of love and life. In this you can recognize your wiring for this kind of experience.

‘Life and love wants to dance with you, play with you, focus on you, share with you, draw you into pleasure, into its more. This is the new phase before you.

‘The old lays dying all around you. The new arises right in the midst of it all. Allow it to greet you and usher you into the life you’ve always dreamed of, and into who you always were, are and will be.

Much love,

Raphael Awen

SoulFullHeart.org

The pic above are part of the the view from the campsite where Jelelle and I seem to settling into for the summer, living into adventure and unknown and new things to learn and feel, along with old layers to shed as well. Our beloveds arrive later this week and next! Gabriel Amara Kasha Rokshana Bianca Gieber

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life.  Visit soulfullheart.org for more information about sessions, events, videos, etc. 

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