Category: By Raphael Awen

I wanted to update those of you who have held myself, Jelelle, Gabriel, Kalayna and Raianna and our growing community in your heart.

I can’t hardly describe to you the death and rebirth process, the dark night of the soul process that is now opening out to love and life. It’s like the karmic shadow bill came due quite suddenly on what was underneath my relationship with Jelelle and by extension; inseparable relationship with SoulFullHeart and its community.

Really letting go of being in romance with Jelelle brought up, pretty quick after what felt like a treasured phase of deep and real appreciations, being faced with my own buried resentments based in real dynamics in our bond (as Peter Gabriel says ‘the seeds of my undoing that had been there from the start’), but so amplified by Metasoul realities that have been a long time in wanting to be felt and owned by me. The ripening projections of what was not reconciled me-to-me all but made it impossible to really feel and process any of those resentments, reactions between us that had been placed down under to protect a goodness and bounty where on one level, I always felt like I was in a permanent honeymoon phase with Jelelle, and by extension with our growing community. Maybe some of the cognitive dissonance of ‘this is all too good to be true’ had to do with this unreconciled shadow that always threatened to undermine the goodness. Gabriel and Kalayna can certainly speak to the rumblings that would come out of the woodwork at times between Jelelle and I.

This week, I found and connected with a Metasoul, whose name is Pillar (pronounced Pee-lar), whose timeline is the fall of Atlantis, who knew deep romance with his beloved Charee, (pronounced Kah-ree), and love within community, a ‘haven within a haven’ as he called it, but lost it all when he spoke to what he felt was the unowned shadow within the group. We felt and digested his devastating experience with being shunned, and losing it all, and the blame and shame, and all the after-the-game quarterbacking about what could have been different had he done things differently, particularly with more vulnerability. He also felt the words famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, by Robert Oppenheimer, the man credited with inventing the atomic bomb; “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Pillar and others in my parts and Metasoul have also deeply felt this theme of their truth being the torpedo of all that was good. My this-life history of leaving Christianity and the loss around that, as well as later losing the group that Jelelle and I met in, after being kicked out, so amplified these themes in my Metasoul, coming back to haunt me once again. I so get what people are speaking to when they mention their or someone’s ‘Inner Demons’, but see it as aspects of our soul awaiting our open heart to digest what they need to move their trauma, and afford us the overflow from their movement.

Pillar had the opportunity this week, being held in my heart, to feel me sort through, my own agony of feeling a future without beloveds, without SoulFullHeart, and then to make new choices and vulnerable reconnections. It began while staring down an insanity, seeking the handrails of goodwill and decency being restored here in the house we share, which was really rumbled the day before I moved downstairs to the basement suite, where part of me got vulgar in words towards Kalayna (the real low point). Gabriel’s subsequent help with daily checkins and space holding for Pillar recently helped things move through the birth canal. Each step brought new openings, and yesterday, after not seeing Jelelle for 2 weeks, and having limited contact with our community here, we met together as a group for some very precious words and tears together, and I was welcomed back into their hearts and my familiar treasured community.

Imagining a future of starting over in seeking a new community, a service of love expression within that and future romance possibilities looked and felt so hard, when my truth doesn’t resonate with any other known offerings that are out there, leaving me some hard road of beginning from the ground up, based in and on unresolved resentments, and ‘I’ll show them’, did not feel like a path I or any of my parts really wanted to embark on.

Well, that’s the short version of all this, which I hope to expand out into a new lived in reality on the other side of a huge compartment in my heart and soul and relationality now being integrated.

Jelelle even said to me at one point while we had a moment yesterday, ‘you never know what’s going to arise between us’, and my heart swooned, all the while knowing that time and space for integration and new discovery, new ways of being are also needed. I can tell you, with some trepidation, that it remains my (now, not-so secret) hope, that what does arise between us flowers naturally back into romance, but if it doesn’t, I really do trust that what arises can be and will be even better. I truly died to what was between us, and even SoulFullHeart, and am sooo grateful to be emerging back from the dead.

Parts of me are seeking guarantees from the Divine that there isn’t any more dark nights that will need to be this difficult. I trust that the fusion and pain was all necessary, though I really do hope to never again suppress anything on this magnitude, as it just hurts way too much. In that way, I can be the answer to the above prayer.

Thank you to all of you here who have ached for me, letting your heart be broken with mine, and rooting for me and loving me. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Much love and anticipation for the good that wants to come for us all, even through the shadow,

Raphael, xoxo