Uncategorized – Page 39 – Divine Self Embodiment Blog (Formerly SoulFullHeart)

Afterglow Of Our Tears: Feel, love, and heal

Published on August 13, 2016 by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

hearthearth

Upstream of the negativity, we find our deepest fears, our un-manifest soul longings, and our regrets as well as our remorse, that will need to be brought out into the light of day and into the hearth of your heart for any epic change to occur to the flow of the magic in your life.

Lately, I’ve been feeling retracing some steps into a career thing of the past, and have been faced with some fears of simply repeating the past as opposed to inhabiting a new place and way of being inside of myself that is a much deeper manifestation of my true soul power. In my quandary, I feel a guidance coming from an angel connection that I envision.

The Angel’s name is Marcel, and these are the words and feeling tones he presses upon me and offers me to feel as well as to share as a new reality offering to live into:

There is never actually a lacking magic or power in your life. There is never the absence of the largesse of your being in your life. You will not one day learn how to be or do something more or differently than you presently are and then have a more fulfilling life or more magical life.

Your power and largesse of your magnificent being is here and fully present right now. This potent power may well be in subconscious service to your fears and staying small, but the power, your power is not absent or un-manifest, or lacking.

A powerful magic is currently directing, leading and populating your life as you know it right now.

The only thing that can bring true and deep change in your life is you awakening to and taking responsibility for this present power and magic of yours….making it conscious. Only then can you place your power in service of living into your bigness instead of your smallness.

When you make this choice, you will face directly the conditioning, the fears, the pain that underlies the current or past configuration of your not so magical feeling life. For this reason, most have not yet found the courage to embrace their power. However, facing and feeling and healing these ‘negatives,’ is the only way to the life you seek and desire.

Humankind moved in the direction of the solution to identify positive thinking as an answer, and to recognize the power of negativity, but has largely yet to look at what underlies the negativity. Here, upstream of the negativity, we find our deepest fears, our un-manifest soul longings, and our regrets as well as our remorse, that will need to be brought out into the light of day and into the hearth of your heart for any epic change to occur to the flow of the magic in your life.

When, and as this happens, everything changes. Nothing can stay the same, for the power holding an old configuration in your life has been fundamentally and irrevocably changed.

Feel your desire for these changes. Allow to come up to be felt every feeling energy that opposes this desire. Feel it, love it and heal it. This is not anything like cycling in a suffering loop of negativity. This is the bridge you must cross, that most aren’t yet willing to cross, out of the fear of their own manifest bigness.

Ask for help. Feel the divine feel you as you feel and heal all there is to feel. Let the dam of your tears break out. Feel the fear of never changing, of remaining stuck, of remaining un-manifest, of not showing up for your life. Don’t leave a single tear unshed.

Now, in the afterglow of your tears, there is an unmistakeable grounding and support – your always present magic, but now manifesting an entirely new arising world and universe.

You are now entering a parallel universe that is nothing less than your deepest dreams and desires arising into life as you never knew it before.

If these words resonate for you, I’d love to feel what you are feeling as you resonate. Say something! Claim something for yourself. I’d like to help you in any way I can if you are ready to take these steps to help yourself.

Love from Raphael and Marcel

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Please visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more.

Claim Back Your Own Magic

Published on August 12, 2016August 11, 2016 by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Raphael Awen

magicmystic

Every nuance or tsunami of feeling that moves through my being, whether in reaction to circumstance or simply an arising tide inside of me, I am responsible for. I am responsible for it because I created it.

If my heart and mind cannot accept this responsibility and take ownership of it, then this reality too, I have created by forcing this awareness of my creative power into my subconscious. This however does not make it any less true.

Everything that is occurring in my life is a projection of this powerful creative reality. I create my feeling states and my feeling states then in turn go on to create, shape and fashion my experience.

There can be no fundamental change in my life until I come to new and conscious terms with my creator essence. One of the most powerful shadow expressions of this creative power is seen in people’s ability to suppress this truth and keep it well off their radar. There is no lack of magic and alchemy; there is only the question of how it is being related to.

I pledge anew to take responsibility for my own needs, wants, wishes and desires. I pledge to no longer hold life, or God, or my mate, or my body chemistry, or society responsible for my fulfillment.

I am truly sorry for having lived in these dead and life sucking frequencies and for the energy I placed into our magical collective. I forgive myself and accept that this too was all part of my creation and growth path.

I claim back and surrender to my own magic.

I enter this day and moment as the creator God (capital ‘G’ intended) that I am. I accept all that comes, as more opportunity to live and love into this never ending learning.

I invite you to connect with me as deeply as you want to in living into this new reality. You are invited to join our private group called Soulfullheart Circle on facebook if you haven’t already and we can connect some more there.

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information.

Itchy Skin, Itchy Heart: Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on June 2, 2016October 12, 2016 by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

By Leena Colibri

This is why I walk this path. This is why I am able to walk through fire without flinching. These shifts are what make the ride through my shadowland worthwhile.

Note: This is the sixth entry in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read part one.

The white, dried-out, chalky dust of the baking soda/water mix I’ve applied to my itchy, red skin continues to flake off in the seemingly million places where I have put it. Even typing as I am now is tough because part of me continues to be distracted by the dust now accumulating on the keys of the keyboard, worried that they will somehow wedge themselves in between them and ruin the keyboard altogether. Yet this reaction and distraction is small potatoes compared to the incredible itch that I applied the baking soda paste to combat in the first place.

My palms are the itchiest at the moment. And the itch, unlike on the rest of my arms, is not surrendering to this thick white substance and continues to itch relentlessly. Perhaps my healing chakras on my hands are opening. That could very well be, as the process I’m in now is very much preparing me to eventually offer healing to others.

Interestingly, my process since my last stay at the sanctuary about 10 days ago, has been about emotionally letting go of an old skin. I have been feeling just how much a part of me would rather keep people at arm’s length (or farther) and all of the toxicity that she has absorbed from past templates on how to be in life that led her to this level of resistance to compassion many years ago. This has been quite an intense amount of shadow to go into and I am still in it, though the light is now appearing at the end of the tunnel, right in step with an intense allergic reaction on my skin that keeps ebbing, flowing and itching.

When my process into this shadowland first began last week, almost right away I ended up with a fever that laid me up for several days. That first night of sweating spells felt akin to past lives of self-induced fevers caused by taking various herbs in order to download “Divine” messages for the upcoming season as per the demand of the people I was in service to as a Priestess. I had flashes of past life possibilities and felt also a breath of air from the Divine that told me everything was alright and that I needed these waves of detox to help me move into my next layer of myself.

By the time I returned to La Cruz, where I am living part time in order to work my online job and help support our community, I was feeling much better though I had a round of intense tummy troubles that eased off eventually but then returned a few days later, though not as severely. Now I am wading through a rash that suddenly came on several days ago and seems to get worse, but then get better before getting worse all over again. Right now it feels like this wave is simply another way for the toxic energy I have been moving for the last 10 days + to continue leaving my emotional, spiritual, and physical bodies. Phew. I am looking forward to getting to the other side of this one.

I wanted to share my story in this moment because it somehow feels important, for you as well as for me. It helps me digest all of the changes moving through me and also may help to illuminate for you why you may suffer some intense physical symptoms at times. In my very recent experience, it seems this is how our bodies communicate to us that there are changes going on and there is such a strong need for more stillness and self-care during this period of time. Not to mention that if you aren’t already, I would strongly suggest you check in with what you are feeling or maybe what part of you is avoiding feeling. Doing this helps me move my symptoms faster. It is not something I have been doing frequently enough lately, perhaps…and yet I can also feel how my body, for some reason, has just needed to express my healing in this way. This helps me and my parts to surrender to it easier.

Along with the waves of healing that I feel coming into me even while the symptoms are strong, I feel myself emerging from something akin to a long, long slumber. I feel as if I am being renewed and baptized into a new way of being that isn’t going to come over night but that I am consciously stepping into right now. The amazing thing is that I feel how the shifts outside me are a reflection of the shifts happening inside me, and that even while I hold part of me’s reactions to people, I can still feel my heart opening. These are the pieces I treasure right now. This is why I walk this path. This is why I am able to walk through fire without flinching. These shifts are what make the ride through my shadowland worthwhile.

I hope this inspires you in some way to keep going into yourself too. I know that even writing this out for myself has helped me look inside and recognize what is happening in a new way. I may be a half-baked butterfly still mostly nestled in a cocoon for now, but it is only for now. I am on way. So are you.

Catalina Colibri is an initiate of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life and you can read more of her writing here on this blog. Please visit SoulFullHeart Way Of Life for more information.

Feeling My Spirit/Matter Split (Part Two): Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on May 17, 2016October 12, 2016 by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

This is part two of Feeling My Spirit/Matter Split in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read part one.

recovering faith

By Kathleen Calder

My intention for this writing today is to have you join me in a feeling space around what it means to be “separate”. What comes to you when you think about separation? A recent break-up or completion with a beloved? The day your mother/father/other family member died? The day you left for college or moved out of your childhood home in general?

Each movement and phase of life often involves a death and rebirth cycle that can encompass some sort of separation being necessary. Of course the very first separation we viscerally experience in our lives comes at the very beginning – the moment we emerge from our mother’s womb. The very first tears we cry are often in this moment, feeling the separation from our warm gestation place and mourning the chance to be the closest to our mother that we ever will be. For the first time, we can feel sensations in our bodies of a changing need for our adaptation and therefore survival. We are still dependent, but we have exited from an intense phase of being held by something bigger than us. We now must begin to build our muscle tone, our dexterity, and, beyond the physical, we must also start developing our emotional bodies, for once again we have been born into this dense and often difficult environment which we call life on Earth (as we know it today, anyway).

As each new skill learned and new emotion is discovered and felt for the first time, we start to develop a digestive system within us and a new way of processing data that needs less and less help (ideally) from our caregivers as we go along. With each new chapter of our lives, we let go more and more of (or desperately try to cling to in denial of our need for change) those pieces of our life that once represented who we were and can no longer stay with us as we continue to grow. Like a child constantly outgrowing their clothes, we too are meant to outgrow relationships in which the person can’t or won’t make the choice to come with us or vice versa, and the “clothes” (or, sadly and more commonly, armor) we have tried on in order to reflect, avoid, or defend our emotional realities.

We are meant to gestate over and over again and birth out into a new world just the same. We are meant to have help digesting the “food” others give us to help us grow, both consciously and unconsciously. We are meant to cry out if we feel neglected in any way, or as if there is a lack of love flow in our lives. We are meant to ache out the pain of our separation from the original source of Infinite Love in infinite supply. Only then, in my experience, can we begin to feel that though the fog may feel thick sometimes, we are always connected by a Divine umbilical cord. This is not an ideology. To me, it feels like simple fact. And yes, I and parts of me, are still letting that in.

This, to me, is the core of where our Spirit/Matter split lies. It is certainly the core of mine. I truly feel that my soul has been around and around this world and each time that the original and at times insurmountable feeling of being separate from the Divine must be felt through again with the first breaths of a new life beginning, has been harder and harder. At times parts of me have reacted to this by going so far into Matter that it “matters” more than Spirit possibly could. After all, it is the more relatable place to be in for most human relationships…perhaps because deep in our souls and hearts we are aching out the same pain of the original separation and just want to avoid feeling it as much as we can.

There have also been times in my life where parts of me have tried to lean so far into Spirit that the art of responding to life and at least the Matter that really “matters” got waylaid. This over-leaning into Spirit led me into a sort of constant depression and heaviness inside me as parts of me reluctantly walked through heartbreak, loss, and disappointment, fixating on the pain and not the goodness of life, as if throwing some sort of tantrum and saying, “Look Divine Mom and Dad! Look at how miserable I am! I shouldn’t be here! Take me home, please!”

This sort of stark split isn’t the easiest life theme to work. I am grateful to be awake enough to it that I can feel and begin to understand how my parts formed around it and why they have the reactions they do. There is still some deep pain inside me about living out another life on Earth, especially during this dark time for humanity, but at least now I am equipped to feel it through and ache it out consciously instead of having it play out in the same pattern it has until now. Perhaps it will still need to play out in some ways that are similar to how it has done so in the past, but I can trust that if that comes up, there is something more I need to look at and feel about it.

Spirit and Matter may feel like opposites at times, but really they seem to be meant to work together. We are meant to ground into Matter while opening up to Spirit and engaging in all of this with others in conscious and sacred friendship and community. Sadly, not many of us are raised to feel that both are equally important. We wouldn’t need to be here if Matter didn’t have something to offer the Spirit within and around us.

As I continue to write this, I feel how I am writing in the world of Matter through Matter’s means, while connecting to and channeling Spirit. Spirit can come through because of this conduit of “me”. Right now Spirit is communicating through my heart, my brain, my language of English, the keyboard I am typing with, the computer that is holding and hosting this document, and eventually the World Wide Web where these words will be posted. And this is only one way in which to try and communicate what I am communicating. There are myriad other ways in which Spirit tries to reach us and show us that Matter is not all there is or all we need. Sometimes that message can only come through severe accidents or diseases or just at the very end of a life…but then again, it also comes to us through orgasm, deep connection with others, deep and prioritized connection with ourselves, and each and every time we find ourselves awed or humbled by nature itself in any form. There is no difference between any of these experiences, except method and form. Spirit is there. Matter is there also. One cannot be found without the other, just as we ourselves are an embodiment of both.

It feels like Spirit has enjoyed expressing through me today, regardless of how deeply it can actually land its message in you through me. I am but one messenger and one pipeline. And in truth, this sense of a split that needs acknowledge and healing is such a sovereign, personal, and sacred process to be in, that whatever path you are walking right now is your own expression of it. Maybe one day our paths will align, and if they do, I will be there to walk this healing path with you in whatever way we are meant to do so together.

Kathleen Calder is an initiate at the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary and you can read more of her writing here on this blog. Please visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary for more information about staying with us and virtual sessions

The Journey to Us: Love Letters to My Queen

Published on May 14, 2016August 2, 2017 by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment

This is the first in a series of letters and poems that sends out my heart cry to my Queen. The woman that has been with me yet apart from me since I really let in my ache for a mate about a year ago. I had a part of me that had resisted deep, powerful, and transformative sacred romance with a woman that could take me to places I never felt like I could inhabit. I am still in the process of healing, and always will be, but I am more than ever ready to do so with someone who can inspire and ignite my King. These are for you, my love, wherever…whomever you may be.

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Today I begin my journey to Us in earnest

Two souls in ache to mate

…to discover

…to grow, expand, and deepen.

At times you feel like you live on the other side of the world

At others you are right by my side

Head resting on my shoulder

Your arm entwined with mine

Some times, the hard times

You feel like you don’t exist at all.

But I keep walking

Keep feeling

Keep trusting that you have been with me all along.

Along busy, noisy roads

Just trying our best to keep it all together

Keeping the insanity of this world from unraveling us.

Along tranquil, serene trails

Connecting to our souls, our reason for being

Letting the magic of Nature’s divinity cleanse us

Clear us

Along the inner tributaries of our hearts

The winding, curving rapids of our lust, passion, and power

The straight and gentle flow of our stillness and groundedness.

We are destined to find each other

We already exist.

Can we let that in?

Can we allow ourselves to be terrified and undeserving

While continuing to call out to each other?

Can we hold both desire and fear?

I will do so for you

For you are my reason

my inspiration

my motivation

You are my mirror

my challenge

my co-creator

You are my Queen

And I ache to be your King

Your strength to lean into

Your passion to wrap around

Your heart to feel you

Your arms to hold you

Your body to make love to you

Your soul to awaken with

I send you this heart cry, my love

Wherever you are

Whomever you are

Let it stand and shine like a beacon

A solar flare

We will find each other.

I will not stop

I may trip

I may struggle

But I will never stop feeling

How much I want to love you

Now matter how much it may hurt to do so.

Gabriel Heartman is an emoto-spiritual teacher, men’s facilitator, energy healer, writer, poet, and heartist with the SoulFullHeart Way of Life. Visit https://www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about space holding sessions, group calls, videos, community, etc.

Visit our patreon page to offer a money donation to support our offerings athttps://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Introducing “Essencism”: A New Movement Towards Ourselves

Published on May 11, 2016October 12, 2016 by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

glowing-heart

By Kathleen Calder

I have begun to consider myself an “Essencist”. I don’t think that term exists yet, but I like it. Why? Because it doesn’t already have a role attached to it, an image of the person who may be involved in it, or even necessarily an existing set of beliefs. Well, I guess in a way it does, since I am coming up with it as someone who embraces SoulFullHeart, a healing and consciousness path where we speak of “essence” quite a bit, and yes, we have some specific beliefs we work with. They are fluid though, as life and the Divine always seem to be arising for us anew, depending on the chapter of our lives we are living out individually and as a community. To be an “Essencist”, to me, means that no matter what changes your life brings you, you believe in the power of your essence and you are also constantly in hot pursuit of what you feel it to be in every single moment, letting it be an unending journey of discovery with relentless curiosity.

I feel like I am diving into a chapter of pursuing what the heck my essence could be. I am experiencing the beginnings of what promises to be a deep journey of self-mating – deep, hot, romantic pursuit of the parts of me who have been neglected or put aside until now, and ultimately of my own heart and soul and what it’s made of. Is it difficult for parts of me to imagine that this phase could last a long time and that could mean not pursuing mateship with a man for a long time? Yes. Of course. And I also feel that I wouldn’t want to offer a future mate anything less than what I am already discovering about myself and my truest heart or my essence, nor do I desire a mate who can’t or won’t offer me the same, coming from an overflow of his own self-mateship.

So here we go, with much strength and motivation…but where is my vulnerability around it? Parts of me don’t feel too good about this idea, while it sounds good. It is different than what most other young women and men my age care about doing. So there is a deep loneliness I can feel inside myself too in this moment. Yet I can feel the possibilities of there being others and the chance for deeper relationships with others my age than I have experienced so far. And how could I draw what I really want in relationship if I am not pursuing it and cultivating it inside myself?

Perhaps the essence of being an “essencist” is actually selfishness, then. I selfishly want to focus on myself so that I can selfishly claim the gifts of that journey and the manifestation of that which I have always wanted in my deepest essence. To be an “essencist” means embracing personal other-ness – the fact that you are as unique as you feel yourself to be, whether you have been born with the sex of a woman or a man, or earned the role of accountant, actor, mother, brother, teacher, or priest.

What I want more than anything, as far as I can feel for what I know of my essence thus far, is to know and be known, but not in a superficial way. I feel encouraged to inhabit a new way of being in life where I pursue myself with so much curiosity that it overflows into a deep curiosity about others and puts me in a position where I love others’ essences so fiercely that I will fight for it the way I am beginning to fight for my own. I have already experienced tastes of my capacity for this as I have felt many moments of my capacity to feel others and how it is deepening with every step I take towards feeling myself first. I am becoming more and more compassionate towards the false while advocating for the real. In a world that very much still tries to revolve around created personas and smokescreens, this is very challenging. This could be why I like the idea of a movement, if you will, that we could call “Essencism” – encouraging all human beings to get back to themselves in a healthy, authentic way, cultivating a relentless overflow of self-love that spills over into every aspect of their lives.

I feel in my essence a spark that keeps glowing, even when the night is at its darkest and all of life seems to parts of me to be conspiring against my/their happiness or comfort. It is something that I really don’t feel I will ever fully come to know, but that’s not as important as it is to keep discovering and getting closer to that answer, even if all I end up with at the end of each day is more data pointing out what it is not. So for now I will continue to try on each and every day and take it for a spin in my proverbial Cadillac, seeking and finding more answers while feeling myself deeply through every challenge and hard-to-feel feeling inside my parts and my heart.

Real Men Feel Their ¨Heart-On¨: Diary of a HeartMan Blog Series

Published on May 10, 2016September 5, 2016 by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment

This is the fifth in a series dedicated to the Journey of the Sacred Masculine. If you wish to read previous posts you can go here.

Where have all the real men gone? By that I mean the men that are willing to be real. Real with their hearts. Real with their pain. Real with their vulnerability. Of course when I hear that question a part of me hears other answers. ¨Real men eat meat. Real men have no fear. Real men don´t cry.¨

I grew up with that meme. All the while feeling my inner sensitivity and the porosity of my heart and soul. A punisher and critic developed inside me to remind me how much of a man I wasn´t in comparison to other men. The sensitive part of me never felt strong enough, good-looking enough, smart enough, or talented enough to be considered a ¨real man¨.

I have done much work to support the healing of this wound. Even today, I still find myself feeling this energy inside me even though it is less intense. It demonstrates how deep the wounding goes. It also shows that as we heal our own personal piece, we invariably start working our way through the collective wounding, and then the archetypal. It’s big shit we are doing, and I want to hold that with reverence and compassion for myself and my parts. It is a process that has a treasure trove of challenges and rewards.

It may feel to a part of me that I will never get to my destination. My place of destiny. A place of sacred masculine kingliness. This is the other meme to heal. That somehow there is some lofty finish line. Some grandiose port of arrival where all of life comes to celebrate our victory. We made it, without ever really understanding what ¨it¨ is. Do we cease to exist when we get there? Will we be disappointed when all the fanfare eventually dies out? Or is it just another part of an infinite journey of exploration, growth, healing, becoming, and creating? An infinite art project.

I may not have those answers, but what I do feel is that I am on a quest of uncovering. Uncovering what it is to be a sacred human man in a time in which we have chosen emotional disconnect, spiritual absolutism, and physical imperialism. I want to heal my own shadow so I can let in more love and more light. The same love and light that can be overflowed into the hearts and souls of other men on similar quests.

Those are the men I want to find myself surrounded by. Men that feel the greater context of their personal content. Men that feel the sadness and powerlessness in other men that inspires them to reach out to be a lifeline for healing and growth. Men that aren´t afraid to feel deep pain and be expressed in vulnerable, salty drops of water. Men that have a love for women in their full expression of feminine power, beauty, and sexuality, while healing their own shadow at the same time.

As I walk outside, down the streets, and at the beach I ache to be seen and felt in my sacred masculinity. I want to walk around with my ¨heart-on¨ and be a beacon to sacred men and women alike. To be an expression of love, strength, courage, and compassion. To be a symbol of self-love, self-worth, true power, and sacred sexuality. I will continue to be as real as I can be. To be true to my heart and devoted to my soul. I will continue to choose who I wish to let in and who I wish to be around. I will continue to pray and desire to draw other real men who want to feel their ¨heart-on¨ too.

It can be a lonely place for a part of us that feels an ache for connection and transaction. It is easy to be less that what you are for the sake of relieving this ache. But then when you feel the larger ache, the ache for authenticity and deep resonance, it pales in comparison. It is a tug between authentic loneliness and false companionship. In the loneliness there is our truest self waiting to be born in the waters of our worth. As we hold to what we want and desire, so shall we be gifted with its presence when we have finally learned to love ourselves first.

Sequoia Heartman is an apprentice teacher of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit SoulFullHeart Way Of Life Website for more.

A Keynote To Selves: Golden Earth Tales

Published on May 8, 2016 by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

(This is Part Twelve of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

(Raphael delivered the following address on Saturday, May 7, 2016)

I would like to begin by thanking each and every one of me for your presence here this afternoon.

I am especially grateful for your curiosity, your desire, along with your hopes and your dreams.

I called this private meeting by specific invitation to each and every one of you as the personalities that make up what is tragically and all too simply referred to as ‘me’, as if ‘you’ didn’t exist. I know we all too often seek to be seen as one, understandably so, given our culture and the cults we are inescapably a part of, but we are in fact a glorious ‘we’ that I seek not only to address today, but desperately also need to get to know.

I know that you as distinct persons live in me as I often experience two or more of you as a tension or a polarity between two choices or energies inside of me. When I am less present to that tension, one of you willingly and sometimes willfully steps in to hold that tension. Here I again see your presence, your reality, your power, and your being. I could go on with example after example of your distinct and separate reality, but that would be in service only of convincing others, not present here today. You, I sense and feel, need little convincing.

I wonder what it is like being a part of me. I wonder what it is like for you when in my partial or full absence, you are left with doing life as me and in my name. What is it like for you to feel the power of my life; the identity of my life; the realized and unrealized dreams and potential of my life? What is ‘my’ life to you? How much of it is a shared reality of yours and ‘mine’, and in what ways? When and why were you born? Who in me did you rule over or submit to, and why?

Though we share one body, one brain, one physical history, and the illusion of being only one, we are in fact many. We are each different. We are each unique. As the Apostle Paul tried to convey in his teaching about the body of Christ when he said ‘Can the hand say to the foot, I have no need of you,’ we must recognize that we are a ‘we’, both separate, distinct and an inseparable oneness at the same time. Both are true. The folly would again be quite plain if when asked, “How are you?” to reply, “I am doing great. My liver has cancer, but I am just great, thanks.” As Paul went on to conclude: ‘When one suffers, all suffer. When one rejoices, all rejoice.’

I would like to not only recognize the fact of our distinct beings, but go on to get to know and feel the distinctions among us. I cannot say that I know you unless I am allowed and afforded a way to feel what you feel, to see what you see, to hear what you hear. I can no longer overlay my view of life onto you and rob you and myself from the sensational pleasure of mutual curiosity.

If one of you is not well, ‘I’ am not well. One of you, or I, may wish to hide another part of me that is in pain for a variety of reasons, as I know too often is the case for most of us ‘humans’. But let us be much clearer here in this private place than we are in the public place; ‘I’ am not well when one of you, one of ‘us’ is in pain, or disconnect, or has a deep unmet need.

All too often, ‘I’ have presented the conclusive “I am fine, thanks,” in response to an inquiry about how I was doing. I was quick to divert the lie by returning the presumptive non-question back to the other ‘person’; “And, how are you?” We have for so long co-signed this co-dependent perception of self as being a single personality that it is truly stunning that any functionality and sanity remains in us. We have even gone so far to as to culturally outlaw the very idea of being more than one with labels such as ‘multiple personality disorder’. I would like to go on record in this meeting, in this place with each of you present, to say that the term we must now accept into our lexicon is in fact ‘single personality disorder.’ The source of so much of our neurosis and the suffering of people is found here in this denial of being.

Before I wax too strong in my convictions and again fall prey to an old focus on others, I must apologize to you, the parts of me that I present as ‘I’. I deeply and profoundly apologize for my complicity in this appearance of being well when I was not. I was wrong. I am sorry. I am sorry for all the pain I caused to each and every one of you in a multitude of ways that it will take some time to fully feel. I wish to end this cycle now. I wish to take all the time it takes to feel it all, even if it extends beyond this life, or to alternative realities of what I’ve thought ‘life’ to be. I want to feel what you feel. I want to experience life from where you experience it. I must also ask each of you to join me in this apology to one another; to accept the end of this façade along with all of its attendant maladies that take away from our true and glorious wellbeing.

Both I and we have lived a long time in a picture of reaching out to others. I and we identified strongly with attaining a picture of being a leader with influence over others. Here, we felt and thought and imagined would be our fulfillment to the full. Others would convey and reflect back to us our worth, our sense of a life well lived. Today, I am inviting each and every one of you to see that the others I sought to help, that I sought to gain the favor of, are in fact not ‘other’, but WE are the ‘they’ we sought to heal and help. The realization of self that we sought to attain inside of a picture of being a healer to others is now dawning on our consciousness as the realization of our selves. There is no other to heal. There are no others in need of healing for me to offer or affect healing to.

Just as Jesus said, ‘I am the door, If anyone enter in by me, he shall find rest,’ so too each of us must find the grace and power to say the same thing of our-selves. Each singular one of us, in this multiplicity of being, is responsive to and responsible for our own healing. We must each own our own healing. Each one of us is responsible for our own conditioning, our own beliefs, and our own relationships to all of life. Each of us must now find the door to our hearts to search our souls deeply to determine what is worthy of remaining and what must be let go of in the sacred domain of our lives.

What we previously imagined to be the good life of being known by others must now be transformed into the much deeper and more glorious good life of knowing our selves. Our sense of meaning and purpose and gift to the world must also now originate and complete inside of our selves. Our fame must spread deep and wide to all the ends of our own kingdom.

How could I have imagined that we could have been of service to others while there was violence to our selves? How could I have dreamed of a world at peace while our own world was not even acknowledged? I want to sacrifice these imaginations and dreams on the sacred and holy altar of this new calling that is here now. I now know however, that unlike I thought in the past, I cannot mandate anything. I have no mandate today.

I have a desire. I have a dream.

In my dream, I awoke. I awoke to the presence and personality of you. In my dream, I was pierced by acute curiosity of who and why and what you were and are, and will become. This dream has overtaken me. I wish to yield every remaining breath and sunrise to this dream.

I surrender my future to us. I will love you in every breath. I will long to get to know you in every joy and in every sorrow.

I long for this day to begin now.

May we enter a new world now,

world without beginning,

world without end,

Amen.

Thank you to each and every one of me.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

Feeling My Spirit/Matter Split (Part One): Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on April 28, 2016October 12, 2016 by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

This is the fourth entry in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read the third one.

By Kathleen Calder

The old photographs in front of me in digital form are, for parts of me, evidence of an old life and an old me. An attachment to them lives on inside me though I have looked at them a thousand times, and I feel reactions rise up yet again to my body, my outbound energy, and my self-loathing (that may be too strong of a term to use, but at times it does feel I have harbored that strong of a feeling about myself inside parts of me). Photos of a “me” in university studying Theatre, of a “me” exploring freelance modeling and the sexual messiness that came with that at times, and ultimately a “me” that felt most times worthless, incapable and even, yes, “stupid”, “ugly”, “fat”, etc.

It feels tender to let these feelings rise up again and yet for another part of me it feels useless…why let part of me obsess over the past? What is this part looking for…more suffering? These are unanswered questions in the moment, yet there is something about what I was living through that I feel connects directly to my process today.

I remember well the thought pattern I fell into and couldn’t get out of, starting around age 12. Puberty had begun to set in and my body began to develop the shape that I now have. My social world was getting tougher with hormones arising along with an emerging desire to have a boyfriend, while watching other girls my age draw what seemed to part of me like “all of the attention.” Immediately another part came in with messages of needing to find ways to compete but also with messages of my “incompetence” to do so.

On the other hand, I also remember being a “good Catholic girl”. Part of me leaned into church and the feeling of being with “God”. I realize now that this was my first experience of something bigger than me holding me, even if I wasn’t sure how to picture it exactly. I feel with some tears in the moment that this is what held me more than I realized at the time and kept me going through these tough years where I had parts developing like crazy to cover over my porosity and sensitivity as much as possible, to make life feel doable and less insane-feeling. Yes, it was in a Catholic framework, but the Divine is still the Divine and I have had many lifetimes of leaning into an inexplicable energy that comforts, challenges, and ultimately helps me grow somehow.

To me this all demonstrates the beginnings of what would become my own “Spirit/Matter Split”, which is easily one of the greatest themes at work in my life and perhaps for all of us on a global scale. Only recently have I begun to feel how big of a deal it would be if the biggest thing I do in this life is learn to bridge Spirit and Matter instead of feeling them as separate entities. As I go on I will illuminate what I mean.

What I wrote in the beginning illustrates the deep self-punishment pattern parts of me were in. Aspects of this included an obsession about how I looked and what my body weight was. It also included adopting many different “medications” in an attempt to quell this voice inside me but also to lift me up from the heaviness of what most people call “real life”. I remember there being a dense dreariness in my field about how life was supposed to be and how it would inevitably turn out. At times I still have this and I am now working with it consciously in order to feel and heal the parts that still hold it as Truth. This is a piece of family and cultural legacy. No amount of positive affirmations or reframing of my thinking could penetrate this voice and heal these wounds long-term.

So far, I can feel that…

Matter is the density of the material world, both energetically and physically. It is the churning of machines in our industrial factories. It is the ground on which we walk, run, cycle or drive. It is our physical bodies that we tend to obsess over, hold contempt for, and blame for so much. It is “is-ness”.

Spirit is the abstract. It is our feelings and our intuitions, which both can come with such an intangibility that they either pass through us unnoticed or are deliberately ignored/buried. It is life force itself. It is often an experience and a flow that cannot be put into words, it just IS. In a way it is “is-ness” too, but more so in the sense that it is literally All That Is, all at once.

See? One I can talk about more directly, while one needs to be described poetically in order to do it justice in human/Matter terms. Matter is meant to be temporary, fleeting, in the moment, tangible and dense, while Spirit is meant to be ever-lasting, enduring, unbreakable…and though it is mostly energy, it is what we can count on to always be there and it is what our hearts and souls long for more of, consciously or unconsciously.

There is no good vs. evil here. There is not even a real comparison between the two concepts. They are ultimately One; we have just created a duality perhaps to make parts of us feel better. There is a definite, bittersweet pain that comes with feeling Divine connection while there is still so much life to live, especially during this phase of life on this planet. But what could/would it mean if we integrated our daily life experience and our spiritual experiences and indeed didn’t have to define or compartmentalize either one from the other? What if the whole idea behind Matter is that it is a conduit and holding space for Spirit to play in? And what if we are the ones meant to link the two?

What if I am one of the ones called to be a bridge and lead others in this during my lifetime?

What if you are meant to come with me?

I’m realizing now how little experience I have had with nonduality in this life. I am looking forward to being able to let in some tastes of it as this dualistic experience of life continues to heal inside me. For parts of me, being able to be in a strictly human life with abandon has been comforting for short phases, though it has never really brought me satisfaction or deep joy. Perhaps as my parts begin to realize that they finally will get their deepest needs met while leaning into Spirit and taking practical life steps at the same time, I will become more ready to let the Nondual in and therefore let in my essential essence and more tones of my soul and of the Divine than I have ever let in yet.

Well, if life’s Matter is the playground I’m beginning to feel it is, then what have I got to lose in exploring this theme of bridging Spirit with it, except old patterns of being in life that my parts and I are tired of anyways? What could/would shift in my life if I can integrate the two?

I suspect that I, and my life, will change in more ways than I count.

Sounds pretty good to me!

The Magic Of Your Power Combined With Your Vulnerability: Golden Earth Tales

Published on April 23, 2016 by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

(This is Part Eleven of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Life is about growth and change. Not even death affords an escape from this reality; for death is not a cessation of being, but only more change.

Our journey into and through a physical life is a great metaphor and reflects this reality. Our soul being accepts the journey of taking on human flesh. This journey into human flesh begins as the microscopic combination of sperm and egg, which gives way to a time of exponential growth and change, becoming comfortable and familiar with a home environment, only to be burped out into a brand new world, and then another. Infancy gives way to toddlerhood, which gives way to childhood, then adolescence, teen years, adulthood, mid-life, and into our fullness of life, and completion of a life.

Our soul chose the change of taking on human flesh, human emotion, human gender, and human experience.

You chose to incarnate.

You chose to change.

You chose to surrender to having needs and desires.

Most of us forget this for much of our lives or even for many entire lifetimes. Most of us become attached to belief systems and ways of life that enable us to maintain this forgetfulness of the power and presence of our choice. We do this at almost any cost.

This is not without good reason. In our power, we chose human life; we chose vulnerability. We are unable to escape human vulnerability with any obtainable thing or relationship. In fact, every desirable thing you obtain only heightens the fear of losing that good thing. Even life itself, we fear losing. Most of us can barely stand to feel the utter susceptibility we find ourselves in. We’d rather effort a myriad of feelings and distractions to not have to feel this vulnerability.

Strangely, we put our power in service of denying our vulnerability. In so doing, we miss out on the magic of both.

You have most likely structured your relationship with life to provide you with a sense that life is happening to you. Like a monk who has chosen life in a monastery, you surrender to an arrangement of what you can expect in return for what you are expected to give. Life is fearfully bigger than you. You make a deal for some predictability, some security, and accept the monotony that comes with that. All of this as an exchange to maintain the sense that life is safely bigger than you.

Now, you get to feel like you are riding the waves of life as best you can with the choices you have. You have outsmarted life. You have surrendered to it. You have made yourself smaller than life. You let life circumstance direct and lead you. Aren’t you spiritual? Aren’t you surrendered? You have given yourself to God (in some form) and God will take care of you.

What if this is only a set up perception of life from this part of you that hasn’t reconciled itself to the vulnerability you find yourself in?

What if life isn’t actually happening to you, but instead, you are happening to life?

You are not the victim of another person, or an illness, God or any devil, a slowing economy, aging or any other of the multitude of things that are felt to occur to us.

What if life is only and ever reflecting back to you the power of your choice?

What if life is in such deep and reverent gratitude to you for the gift of your power filled surrender to human vulnerability that life only wants to reflect back to you your power and greatness?

Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search For Meaning, shares his experience in the hell hole of a nazi concentration camp where he came to the deep and profound realization that it was he and only he that could interpret and apply meaning to his experience. His captors, he came to realize, had not even the slightest ability to take that power from him unless he gave it to them.

What meanings are you applying to the circumstances you find yourself in? Are the circumstances happening to you or are you responsible for creating and drawing these circumstances to yourself? What is life and its never ending change wanting to awaken you to?

What courageous step is life asking you to take now in this never ending discovery of who and what you are?

What are you done with that’s time to let go of? A relationship? An identity? A habit pattern? A way of life?

What are you ready to embrace and allow entrance into your life?

What courage are you in possession of that can fuel your next step?

Life only and ever wants to take you into more of you. Life understands your fear, for it has felt its own fear of the life that it finds itself in. Life invites you out to play, to discover, to be curious of who and what you will become around the corner of your next choice.

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