Category: By Raphael Awen

The root of all of our ‘disorders’ has to do with being what we experience as being birthed out of the divine. We experience it as being de-parented from our divine and are left with the orphan wound.

Everything that’s seen as wrong with you or I can be traced back to this wound. It’s only by going into this wound as a portal, as an opening (interesting that the literal meaning of the word wound is opening) that our experience of true divine connection is restored.

Why would it all be this way? Why the being birthed out of the divine? Why the veil of forgetting? Why the seeming need for a conscious choice of awakening?

My awareness and ‘answer’ to the above questions has been that it all has to do with the divine not having a way of knowing itself, experiencing itself. What beauty is there in perfection if it cannot be observed, if it cannot be contrasted? Hence the divine created ‘other’ along with duality, both of which didn’t exist before, at least in expression.

But what’s dawning on me now, beyond all of the above understanding (that has infused a lot of my writing up till now) is a deeper feeling sense of the entire point being about communion, if I could use that word, or ‘sacred union’ to try another. This is where the feelings and experiences are likened to a ‘bridal chamber’ where the beloveds are totally in thrall to one another and all the practicalities of life are suspended to make room for this exchange of what amounts to witnessing the divine.

I’ve long thought of this as the reverse of the de-parenting or orphan experience, but what’s also dawning on me now is how this is less of a reverse, and more of a transverse, a step further along the path, rather than a step back. It makes sense that in our conditioning, we would try to retrace our steps, like finding our way out of a jungle, to try and return to source.

But the divine is not lost or seeking to restore something lost, or trying to win a battle between good and evil, or between ‘god’ and ‘devil’.

If this is all the divine’s forward step, then this all sheds a lot of light on what we call our attachments. Our sense of ‘I Am’ is conditioned to our attainments and attachments. To deny the need for a healthy ego, where so many spiritualities have detoured into (in my opinion) is to dissociate from the human experience and journey. A suicide and a ‘deicide’ (the killing of the human and the deity within) in one fell swoop.

It’s the ego that has attachments, and the journey through life, if anything, is a negotiation of one’s attachments, letting in new ones and letting go of old ones. A baby comes with none and the deceased leave with none.

This makes you and I literal expressions of the divine’s own evolution, or better said – I Am The Divine Now.

I was struck this morning by the relationship of the words ‘morph’ and ‘orphan’, where morph means to essentially shapeshift, and orphan means to lose one’s parents. The shapeshift we all underwent was being parented by the divine and then losing experiential awareness of that fact.

Now we’re left with belief based god connections that are largely robbed of genuine feeling experience or if there is some kind of emotional connection, the feelings and experiences are skewed and hijacked by the obvious orphan wound into something unnatural and unbecoming to a grounded human, often rooted in exclusivity or absolution of guilt. There’s something commoditized, scarcified and being sold about it all. But even this darkness and taking advantage of our forgetting is also sourced in the divine’s evolution. No?

If you’ve read this far, first, thank you, and allow me to make this personal.

At 62, and with a lot of change in life experience, roles in family, religion, geography, birth family gains and losses, soul family gains and losses, being challenged with letting in a ton of goodness and even finding myself choking on it all at times, I’m feeling the choking is about this ongoing negotiation in the divine’s own adventure. The choking always seems to be about letting go of an old attachment and a part of me not feeling assured of just what the new attachments will be about, or if we can make those attachments, or actually enjoy them.

I’ve felt a lot of reaction in my digestive system and sleep patterns for years even that feel like an ongoing negotiating of an upgrade to a higher level of consciousness. For so many decades prior, I could eat whatever I wanted to and sleep like a baby, and without so much as a cold in my body, let alone any deeper ailments.

Now, I’m eating far healthier than I ever did, living a stress free life in so many ways, and yet there’s this discomfort in the body, a dis-ease, a loss of the former ease.

If that doesn’t describe a death and a rebirth, I can’t imagine what would! Needing to let go of baked goods for instance, that mainstay from the hearth and heart of Gaia, usually prepared and served by the feminine heart and gifted to the children – that’s one of thee most satisfying of all attachments that I’ve come across. And rooted in so many lifetimes!

Let THAT go?!

Why?

The invitation is to feel the attachment instead of dissociating from it, or pave over it. The guidance I’m getting is that it is in the willingness to actually feel loss, to actually experience loss, (which is the very thing the divine couldn’t do ‘before’) that is what moves us forward in the divine’s birth canal into what hasn’t actually existed before in divinity, what actually leads to the bridal chamber of sacred union with all of life and love. A loss wouldn’t be a loss if there was no attachment to it. You came here to navigate attachments. You came here to have them and to let them go, and make new ones.

This speaks to the morphing going on in the orphan, shapeshifting from one who’s lost and losing (a loser) to one who’s found and gaining, a ‘foundling’ we could call you.

That word just popped out and I had to look it up – get this:

Foundling: A “foundling” refers to an infant or young child who has been abandoned and found with no known parents or guardians. This term is often used to describe a child discovered and taken in by others or an institution, as the child’s origin is unknown.

Wow!

I was raised on those words from the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ – ‘I once was lost but now am found’. I believe that these words are the divine’s own testimony if you will. You are the divine’s expression right now, as you are, and how your and my ‘attachment disorders’ are currently playing out and through is all just the cutting edge of divine evolution.

Maybe all we’re really in need of is a little grief counseling, when it comes right down to it. I know of no better way to do this than to show up for the part of me who’s in the grief, who’s negotiating the change of conditionings currently playing out in my world. This is literally being in the bridal chamber – a place for sorrow and joy in equal measure!

One more thought in closing today. The word diet literally means ‘way of life’. A change in diet is a change in one’s way of life. All cultures have a cultured diet. It feels like the change in way of life we are being invited into is about all of the ‘foods’ that have sustained us. All of our appetites that are shifting.

I can’t think of anything more fun than being connected with people who are living out this cutting edge of change in their way of life. Challenging? Without a doubt! My greatest so far, but also the most rewarding and where my appetites are!

Bon Apetite!

Love,

Raphael

The mushroom pic is from along the trail from this week’s hike. Strangely, every single one these guys only grew along the very edge of the trail, nowhere else to be seen, seemingly wanting to be noticed. How divine!