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Your Most Courageous Story

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Leonardo

(Wayne’s Note: Leonardo is the part of me that Soulfullheart recognizes as our daemon, or our soul guardian. I feel Leonardo as the part of me eager to express and lead others into more of themselves. I felt his desire today to express around a favorite theme of his and share it with you, which is an aspect of his and my most courageous story.)

A deep thing about you is that you subscribe to a story. The story you subscribe to has everything to do with your hopes, dreams, desires, fears, and passing moods, and ultimately, the fun you are having or not having.

And there is an even deeper reality to you than the story you currently subscribe to. Many stories are capable of being played out in your life. You are a story player, like a record player. You are capable of playing a different story than the one you currently tell. You, as an experiencer-of-story itself and a teller-of-story is much closer to who you really are, than the chosen or inherited story you presently tell.

Your story could be about love or hate, abundance or scarcity, control or trust, adventure or guarantee, knowing or not knowing, fulfillment or boredom, competition or co-creation.

What’s more, you are also the writer of your story, whether you realize it or not.

It is most common that the story you grew up in is the story that you will play out for your entire life, and in turn pass on to others. This is because your needs for comfort and familiarity often trump your needs for love and learning new ways that life can be. In this way, it will strongly seem that you simply inherit your story, rather than lead it. To many, there will not even be any awareness that they are captive to story in their lives. The feeling that you are responsible for your story is one that many don’t want to feel, and work hard to live their entire lives as a testament to that chosen belief.

Stories are what we try on in the search to find out who we really are. Stories are ultimately what we let go of, but only when we are done with them, and when they are done with us.

Being engaged in seeking our truer stories is much more fun than mindlessly living out stories passed on to us.

We resist when others try to force their story on us, or advance their story at our expense. Your right to your story is one of the most sovereign things about you, and when others disrespect that, you do well to part with them, and feel the loss in it as well.

But when others simply live their story for us to see, without superiorizing, we are often attracted to their story. It hurts when others hold their story as more valuable than they hold you as a person, because the message they send is that your story is more real and more important than you; that people don’t really exist, only stories do.

As a soul being, after any given lifetime, you will probably awaken from your unawareness of the story you played out and assess that you would like to choose a different story in your next life, and awaken to your creative role in your story.

Some of us, through personal crisis, change our story mid life, and go on to explore more than one story in a given lifetime. This often hurts to let go of the people so dear to us who are not ready to explore in the same way you are. It often feels like being disloyal or disobedient to God to try on other stories in your lifetime. But it is actually, being loyal to yourself that feels so strange and uncomfortable.

All of us will eventually come to see that we must recognize and take stock of the story being played out in our lives. We must go on to take responsibility for our stories, and see if the story we played out is a worthy one or not. Would we like to live that story again? How fun was it really? Is it a story that will get told over and over again for the beauty and lessons of it, or is it a story preferred to be forgotten?

What the entire world is actually waiting and aching for is for you to live your most courageous story.

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

Letting in what we really want

Published on by Raphael Awen1 Comment
By Wayne
Without realizing it, we configure life and relationships in such a way as to only get part of what we want, and to try to leave the rest of what we want off our radar.  Just enough to feel safe. Having more fulfillment than we are used to doesn’t feel safe at all. Drawing what we really and most deeply want in life is not the impossibility, or the matter of chance as we’ve made it out to be.
Drawing what we really want is difficult because it starts with letting ourselves have the want, admitting to ourselves and others that we are not happy with what we have, and seeing how we have played a huge role in setting up and maintaining the unfulfilling picture, and then taking steps towards what we really want. And then even though today is a continuation of yesterday in your life’s configuration and situation, you’ve changed direction, and you’ve changed the air quality, and you’ve changed the energy.

And those closest to you will likely not like it. If the friendship or relationship got it’s good start around an unspoken agreement to be a coping mechanism for the lack of fulfillment in your life, then the bond needs to hold to that in order to survive. Loyalty is often held up here as the greatest of all virtues.

I feel this consternation at times with Jillian. We both regularly reach out for more with each other. But we hit a wall inside of ourselves to let in what we discover. If Jillian finds more of herself and her fulfillment in life, how will that affect her desire towards me? If we find levels of fulfillment together that were before off our radar, how do we expect to maintain that? How do I expect to find that again if I were to lose Jillian? It pushes up a big performance piece for a man. If I held the space of passion and leadership, and did my part for this to arise, and it worked somehow, how do I expect to keep that happening? As a woman, she will probably let herself want that more than I am ready to as a man.

Sex is a really good place to see this vulnerability.  A man can dream of being with an attractive and sexual woman and all without feeling how he would never let himself truly have that as it would be crazy on many levels to be around.

Having more of what you really want is way more about letting it in, than finding it.

It starts with finding and getting to know the part of ourselves that resists letting in more.

2012: Year of Transformation and Letting Go

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

By Jillian

So, it’s here….2012. The year that prophecies and predictions, both modern and ancient, claim will cumulate with a world vastly transformed from the one that we live in now. During 2011, this transformation was already in process with widespread outbreaks of protests, governmental upheavals, devastating weather events, social unrest, and economic collapse. Many feel that this will continue, escalate, and accelerate during 2012; leading not to the destruction of the planet or literal end of the world, but still to a significant change of it.

Cycles in nature are seasons of birth, death, rebirth, and arising from the ashes. This process of birth-death-rebirth are woven into the fabric of our species; an imprint from the Divine in our DNA. Over and over again in our human history, the civilizations we have built, the beliefs we’ve attached to, that which has given our lives meaning, has been taken away, forcing us to let go.

We feel that surviving this current cycle of change is about feeling that which you are being asked to let go of, seeking intimacy and meaningful connections with yourself/others/the Divine, and surrendering to this overall process of birth-death-rebirth. There is no real way to prepare for this kind of change; there is only seeking the heart and grace for which to respond to it.

We are a society out of balance with more emphasis on our masculine expressions of achievement, doing and image-based progress, and action. Coming back in balance with our feminine expressions of heart and being-based leadership, compassion, connection to each other and our earth is a transformational process, experienced not without growing pains, loss, and the letting go of what isn’t working for us anymore.

Hate, fear, and greed have been the signatures of this “iron age” and the golden age feels to offer us the opportunity to heal these shadow aspects of our human nature. There is much hope and love in this offering, even as there will be loss and pain in the process.

This is the first part of a four part series about the 2012 Mayan/Inca/Aztec prophecies and what they offer about this process:

The End of Emotional ‘Extend and Pretend’

Published on by Raphael Awen

By Wayne

We are in the middle of huge change.

Just what is going on? And at what pace is that happening? And, more so, how will it affect me and my family? What’s a sane amount of preparation? To what degree are we going to have to ‘just wing it’?

Many of us are managing our lives and facing these new challenges in such a way as to remain buoyant, to look on the bright side, and not to succumb to an anxiety that we feel around us and in us. We’re afraid of going into our anxiety, for fear it will swallow us. If not swallow us, it certainly would slow us down, affect our performance on our jobs, affect our relationships, etc. Our success is dependent on our positive bearings, we feel. While that strategy feels like it has worked in times past, it is actually setting you up for a much harder landing, given the pace of change we are facing. This is essentially the ‘Extend and Pretend’ approach of our political, economical, and spiritual leaders, as reflected in our mainstream media, that has held so much of our allegiance.

This ‘extend and pretend’ approach also applies to how you relate to your internal reality. The challenge comes with getting in touch with your emotional reactions and conversant with what you really feel, especially what we call the, ‘negative’ emotions of shame, anxiety, and depression. In my opinion, allowing yourself to feel these feelings is the single most important thing you can do to prepare yourself to be in a place of fitness to face these unfolding changes. Nothing it seems  in our current society supports this kind of awakening. But, your depression and your anxiety and your attempts at control are not what’s wrong with you. They are the path to being the most real you and the most alive you and the most contributing-to-the-world you that can be. If you can embrace them.

I feel a voice, the voice of my own heart calling out to me, and you:

If you sign on to your most alive path, then you are about to enter the most interesting and intense journey, the most well written plot and sub plotted story, the story of you. But you can’t know and experience it any other way than by living your way into it, on this planet, at this interesting and transitional time. You already have it. You don’t need to attain something, or overcome something, or escape you in order to enter this very true story.

Your only requirement is yielding to this story of you.

If you sign on, Life will soon bring your first choice embarking into this story. You won’t know where it is going to end up, you will only know clearly in this one choice what YOU really want. Oh, you will have a wrestling of what you ‘should’ do and anxiety about the possible outcome, but in your heart, you will know what is the path of your true and real story, the internal script or scrip-ture of your life, for this one choice at hand. It will take huge courage, no doubt, but not more than you currently have available to you.

Living in this story will become your new mode of living. It offers you no guarantee of what is coming financially, or what is coming regarding your career, or even your relationships. Chances are strong that most people are not resonant with or ready to join you in your new way of navigating life. It’s funny this new way is all about navigating, but nothing about controlling. You value the people in your life and the money and advantages you have, but you no longer live from the dead ground of basing life’s choices on protecting and preserving them, at the cost of your true story.

Life’s choices still come at you whether you sign on to this most authentic and magical journey of you or not; it’s just that the choice you make is often very different from what is considered safe or even sane.

As I write these words, my heart aches at the pain I’ve felt and the time and relationships it has taken for me to transition from an external scripture to an internal one. From an ‘extend and pretend’ mode of life to a real and authentic one. Arriving at adulthood, I attached myself so deeply to learning and living by the Christian Bible as the truth of all life, the meaning of all life, the guarantee that my living and breathing on this earth would come to the most meaningful outcome and the most reward, both in this life and the next if I lived out of and in allegiance to that truth. I see now that the challenge of following my own heart in the way and degree I describe above I was working towards, but not yet ready for. It was the most authentic journey of my life then. There was no possible other outcome it seemed. Until there was.

Actually, the story of you (as it was for me) is so difficult to let in, in fact, that most of our lives (and lifetimes) are spent in earlier domains while we gather the courage for the next step, the next true and authentic and totally natural step. And, none of this is wasted time or unnecessary pain as it all leads to growth.

There is such a deeper ground of living arising now, in the midst of global collapse, where the ‘extend and pretend’ modes of life are finally wrapping up. And we are all being invited to live an internal and external reality that is more in alignment with our authentic selves.

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

Let Go Of Hidden Agendas: Move Towards What You Really Want

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Wayne

It’s not your or my agenda that’s the issue; it’s the hidden aspect of it that holds us back.

Certainly don’t kill your agenda: love it and bring it out into the open. Every time you find a hidden aspect of it, own it, share it, trans-parent-ize it and every step along the way will then lead further to more of what the world is waiting for.

Wholesome parents feel what their child is feeling before they can put words to it, often even before they consciously know what they are feeling. Relating to our hidden agenda as a loving parent, is to get trans-parent with ourselves and to discover what we hesitate to see in ourselves.

I’d like to give an example that many of us can relate to. An acquaintance or friend asks to go for coffee, begins the get together with light talk, sprinkles in a few questions and then it dawns on you, sure enough…. that they are trying to get you into their latest multi-level marketing scheme – Amway or equivalent – and they didn’t tell you beforehand or even hint that was the purpose meeting with you. They hid their agenda for fear that you would have turned them down had they told you the real purpose and intention of the meeting. You feel betrayed, and rightly so.

Most of us have become way too aware of hidden agendas for that to work anymore.

Tepid relationships, tepid leaders, tepid coffee…yuck. Get real, get passionate. Share with me what your agenda is. Tell me what I’m missing AND be open to and desirous of my honest response. You and I won’t come out the same.

We are all wanting, even under our despair, to live in passion, in what we really want. You can have what you really want. It is possible…and this isn’t a shallow positive thinking approach.

The huge change you desire that looks so different from your current life, so unreachable from where you are now, is possible….IF:

If you are willing to move one step at a time towards that goal. Own it, dust it off, love it. AND be willing to adjust that goal as you go.

If your honest goal is be a millionaire, which others may judge as shallow or selfish, or empty, you need to fully embrace that goal for YOUR reasons. Why else are you here for, except but for to have a real human experience and to share it with the world. Much good and fulfillment and happiness could come from you becoming a millionaire. If however, along the way to that goal, you discover say that what you really in fact wanted a feeling of security and love that money could not provide you, then be willing to make changes to your goal. To what you really want. The millionaire goal was your best picture of what you most deeply wanted. Now you have a revised goal.

If you find yourself impoverishing others in pursuing your goal of obtaining wealth, and discover that the wealth you are seeking in the way you are seeking it is not wealth at all, be open to seeing your hidden agenda, and what is underneath of it. What you really want, to feel secure and important, and even powerful is possible, but in a much more transparent way, a way that is far less stressful, and more in tune with love and nature.

The difficult part of having what you really want is not that you cannot make it magically happen, like you tell yourself it is. The difficult part is that life feels so different when you begin to let in what you really want. Did you get that? ‘Letting in’ rather than ‘making happen.’ In fact we use the picture of impossibility as an excuse to justify remaining in despair, when the deeper truth is that we are not willing or ready yet to let in the abundance and goodness and aliveness of our real desires and the transformation (real scary changes) that come along with our deepest purpose and desires.

And so back to my original point – hidden agendas show us where we are not fully aligned with our truest desires. Our true desires don’t have anything to hide or apologize for. A hidden agenda that becomes conscious to us simply shows us a fear factor that is wanting to get enough love to let go of, and ‘let in’ more of our real passion and reason for being here.

Following Your Heart’s Path

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Wayne

When most of us want to make a life change, we often hear use the phrase, ‘following our heart.’

But, what is that took us off of our heart path in the first place?

A lot of things may have conspired to take you and I off of our heart path. First and probably foremost, is the need (and pressure) to belong. Perhaps you only had so much courage to be different, back in the day when you did. The people you cautiously shared your budding dream with, your dreams of meaning and connection, your dreams of more, immediately and in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle ways, let you know and let you feel what you would lose in your connection with them if you were to persist in changing what was comfortable and important to them.

Maybe you revised your plans in hopes of changing them first, so as to not lose them and then be able to go on your way with them in support of you. They, in turn, did not really want to lose you, especially with your bright and positive energy adding to their lives. So, an unspoken compromise was reached, that looked like it was based in mutual respect, but really was based in an agreement that you get to hang around as long as you suppress this wild and crazy desire to live in your deepest sense of purpose and meaning.

For people who wish to remain asleep to their deeper calling, it’s really hard being around people that remind them of what they gave up, or never had the courage or support to explore.

Embracing ourselves in this deeper way always involves letting go of things or relationships we currently hold dear.

Sadly, when we step out and begin to repossess our dream, our connections are tested to reveal what they are made of. Often times, a friend isn’t ready to change the nature of the relationship in the ways that you are proposing.

It’s at this juncture that many reevaluate their push to embrace their dreams feeling how it negatively effects their relationships, or threatens their financial picture. Conversations with friends and family end up being about valuing how not to judge others and respecting each other for who they are and how love holds everything together and takes us to a better world.

Really….?

Giving up on your dreams and deeper journey and sense of purpose and meaning is accepting and loving others?

Isn’t the truth something more like this? Your deepest respect for you and them is refusing to be any longer in a connection with them that’s losing its integrity.

I say go back to your dream, dust it off, embrace it, feel it. Like a good parent, make efforts to care for it, and begin taking steps towards it. Share it only with those who will honor it. Look for those who will support you living your way into it.

And, feel and grieve the loss of what you are letting go of.

And, move on.

We all desperately need the dream in your heart to come alive.