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

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(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.

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 your support.

Arise For The Woman

By Kalayna Colibri

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She will softly give you the love you need

And fiercely protect the preciousness of herself

A lioness, a lamb, a lark, all

In each interchange, an exchange of energy and an inhale of ecstasy

The intuitions ignored or stomped out

Cannot come to give the gifts they are invoked to give

or called to create

 

Would you stand in her way, or would you make a way for her?

Would you carve her name in your arm in the hopes of a few feeling moments?

Would your heart echo hers, or sing the same old song?

Would the lust you may feel give way to your love?

Would her blossom and fragrance of constant change be let into your cave of not-ever-knowing?

Would her guidance become yours and her power become your scepter?

Would you take her hand, her heart and still give her yours?

Would there be enough you to give her everything you could in a rightful exchange of hearts, bodies, minds, and souls?

 

Do you see her?

Does she stare back at you in that mirror ahead?

Can you look in her eyes and feel a challenge but just enough? Do you turn your power over to her or conjure yours to meet her there?

 

When the time comes, you will know.

She will test your King

You will evoke her Queen

And in tandem you will find

What you never thought you would

…until the moment you could let it in.

***

Kalayna Colibri is a SoulFullHeart facilitator for women around (and under) the age of 30, energy healer, indigo-crystal bridge, writer, and poetess. Visit 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 at https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Who You Are And What You Are Is Not A Question: Golden Earth Tales

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

By Raphael Awen

Who you are and what you are is not a question. A question is something by definition that you seek an answer for and when that question is answered, the quest is over.

Who you are and what you are is part of the great unknown. Who you are and what you are cannot ever be known.

You are so much more, so vastly much more than you ever dreamed of. In fact, most all of your dreams and imaginings so far have been about trying to manage this ferocity of your being. So too, have been your relationships and occupations.

You have pulled most everything about you into your orbit in hopes of, on one hand, obtaining a clearer picture of who you are and, on the other hand, needing to dim the piercing light of who and what you are.

Your greatness has no measure. You are forever a part of the great unknowable.

What quest remains, it is not the quest to know, but instead the quest to be.

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!

Creating From Divine Inspiration Rather Than Depression

By Jelelle Awen

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As I participate in the creation of the home we are building for Sequoia out of cob (a combination of clay, subsoil, straw and water), as I witness this cabana birthing out of the ground from materials which come exclusively from the ground….I am reminded of the death and rebirth cycle. Creation always brings us closer to the edge of where things begin and eventually where they complete. Immersed as I am in this project right now, I know that some day it will be finished and no longer will it arise anew, responding to contributions of my alchemy, passion, and physical focus. I will have moved on to something else, a new creation will beckon me to make something out of nothing.

Our attention and creativity is meant to wrap around something with focus on the end product while holding reverence for the process. Then, we are able to detach and move on to the next. I find that the more access I have to the part of me or subpersonality that holds my creativity, the more I can navigate and inhabit whatever I am involved in from a place of investment and then detachment.

For many years, my creativity was high jacked by the part of me that holds depression. It seemed that I couldn’t write creatively or work on a creative art project without being in a state of sadness, angst, and melancholy. This depression part of me didn’t feel alive unless she was creating something and yet, she could only be creative by dredging up her pain and using her agony as the primary source of fuel. I stopped publically writing for a few years as I focused on feeling and healing this part of me through journaling with her and being felt by a parts facilitator. This part of me had a complicated relationship with my creativity. She felt that she needed to express this way as means to off gas her pain even though it didn’t actually get felt, only exploited. I believe that a lot of artistic and creative people have a depression part that relates to their creativity in this way which is why so many of them suffer from suicidal depression. Add in another part of us that needs validation and attention from others related to our creativity and it can be a recipe for suffering.

It took me some time to find my writer’s voice again, healed greatly from depression and suffering, and now coming from a new source of Divine inspiration. Creating from this place is about an overflow produced from connection with myself, parts of me, Raphael, others in our community, animals, nature. It comes from an overall sense of joy and goodness about my life. It comes from the feeling of loving and being loved. This love spring has gushed forth eight years worth of blog entries and five books. It turns out that connecting with Divine creative inspiration is also pretty productive.

If someone asked me about how to relate to their creative process, I would offer that we have to feel which part of us is ‘in charge’ of it. As I already mentioned, it can be a depression part which primarily holds it. Or, there can be a very strong identity or persona part related to our creativity with a self image-based claim of being an ‘artist’ or ‘writer’. Or it can be an inner, young child part of us that relates with it like a secret outlet kept hidden away from others because it feels too vulnerable to share. It can be suppressed by a protector or controller part of us to such an extent that we don’t feel like we are creative at all. If creativity is about connecting to Divine inspiration, then also we need to look at the part of us (which we call the Daemon or soul guardian) that opens up access to our soul consciousness and Divine connection. When in Divine thrall or communion, we feel that the act of creating and our creation is ultimately in service of the Divine and in surrender to It as well.

Whether it is building something or writing or painting or making banana bread, creativity can be an expression of our sacred humanity. It can be a glorious testament and honouring of that which transcends reality even as it paints off of the canvas of our ordinary lives. It can honor that which begins and that which inevitably reaches a completion. The Divine doesn’t require masterpieces; only honestly focused expressions of our authentic essence creatively dipping into the waters of Infinite Love in celebration of love and life.

Jelelle Awen is co-creator and a facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way of Life. Visit SoulFullHeart Way Of Life for more information about staying at the Sanctuary and sessions.

 

Consciousness And ‘Single Personality Disorder’: Golden Earth Tales

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Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive your support!

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

By Raphael Awen

I hope you’ve been enjoying this series and that it has been tweaking your feelings and your awareness on different levels and in different ways.

We’ve covered together how who and what ‘you’ perceive ‘yourself’ to be is but a fraction of who and what you really are as a human being, as a person, as a self. We looked together at how the self, both in its essence and its expression, is something closer to Infinite Love. We may be limited in our use of linguistics to describe this reality, but our ‘Arising Isness,’ as we called it, is powerfully unlimited.

We stretched our consciousness together in the previous eight blogs to get a feeling tone of what we are speaking about. I encourage you to take in each of those prior blogs with an open and desirous heart before taking in this one, as we are going to take this to a new level today that I hope blows your mind.

But first, a little lead-in…

You are awareness. You are consciousness. You are not your body. You are not your emotions. You are not your mind. You have a mind. You have emotions and you have a body. What holds body, mind and emotion in containment is consciousness.

You may be new to this idea that you are an awake and aware consciousness, and you may not readily see yourself as a consciousness. I would say then that you are less conscious of being a consciousness. Your consciousness is not then a big part of your waking awareness. If this is true, then you have more of a ‘density’ and less of a ‘porosity’ in your aware sense of self. This density then is an energetic block or filter to you having deepening and growing self-awareness.

Everything I’ve said so far today I don’t think would be too different from so many spiritual practices that are out there today. I may be using unfamiliar words, but the energy is the same. Even Christianity, as I practiced it for most of my life, was about expanding my sense and experience of self into a place of being ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ that was meant to color my life. Also imperative in Christianity was holding an identity of ‘who I am in Christ’ as an elevation of consciousness. Daily devotional practice of prayer and meditation in the scripture was intended to induce an inner change of self-awareness.

Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism alike all offer something similar in that they want to raise your consciousness to something they deem as some kind of a higher plane. This blog series is no different in that sense. Soulfullheart is also no different in that sense in that it too seeks to raise consciousness to something different from the more common or status quo.

I’d like to make a grand deviation today from this common denominator of all spiritual practice. I’d like to offer you something truly new and different from every spiritual path that I’m aware of. I believe this has the power to truly rock your world in a profound sense.

That is of course, if you’re up for it. Please open your heart, feel your desire, fasten your seatbelt and come with me for a ride. Come fully and then decide what your truth is. Here’s the ride:

All spiritual practice is greatly limited by a self-perception of oneself being a single personality. Of course the ‘you’ that considers itself a single personality is a single personality, but that is because this is in fact only a single part of you doing your life as you. ‘You’ have in effect been hijacked by a part of you and you don’t even know it.

You are in fact a ‘multiple personality’ within a larger conscious awareness. What you call ‘you’ is in fact a whole family of personalities, sharing a body and a mind. I hope this isn’t such a stretch for you to see, because it really feels like a ‘no, duh’ to me.. ‘how could we have missed this huge piece?’

Like any family, there is inside of you a huge range of being what we call functional or dysfunctional depending on the long list of family dynamics at play. Power plays, shutdowns, pleaser roles, etc., with all of these coming from distinct parts or subpersonalities of yourself, to make up what you have just called ‘you’ up till now.

We’ve been told that being a ‘multiple personality’ is a disorder that one needs to seek therapy for. I’m telling you that the true disorder is rather a perception of being a ‘single personality’. The ‘you’ that leads most people’s lives and does everything from their spiritual seeking to their careers and their relationships is only one part of them, or one part of them in a strategic alliance with another part to give it its functionality or dysfunctionality. This is the part of them that is running their life and doing their life. It is primarily a part of you that is reading this series, evaluating it, and deciding if this new idea I’m offering today is for ‘you’ or not.

A part of you may be having a big reaction to my line of reasoning today. I’m writing provocatively to press this part of you and its distinct reaction into your awareness in an attempt to make my point.

Could this really be? Could it be that you are not anywhere close to the integrated being that you imagined yourself to be? If this is true, it really explains so much. It takes huge pressure off of yourself. It also puts a new and healthy pressure on you to discover who you really are.

Up till now, you see, with this perception of yourself being a single personality, there is only this poorly equipped primary part of you holding your ‘you show.’ You are in fact a whole cast of characters seeking to get their needs met and adapting in a host of ways and means inside of you – all the while only under the care of this primary part of you. It’s like a teenager barely old enough and responsible enough to babysit has been charged with doing life.

What I want to impress upon you today is that a profound change occurs when you let in this self-perception that I am offering you. Then it changes again another huge degree when a new and deeper sense of self can arise as a healthy parent to these parts of you. This is nothing less than a tsunami of change to let into your life, and some careful consideration is called for.

If you wish to go on doing your life as you’ve known and perceived yourself to be as a single and unified self, you of course have most of current consciousness to support you in that choice. I personally would not trade what I have discovered in coming to know myself as a tapestry of parts for anything, especially not for alignment with a deeply suffering and struggling collective consciousness.

In this blog series, we’ve looked at ‘you’ as being an individual or an ‘in-divi-dual.’ In that, we saw that a human being is this paradoxical ‘duality that can’t be divided.’ The duality we are talking about is on one hand a ‘singleness’ of being and on the other hand an ‘allness’ of being that can’t be singled out. This whole range of being is like a cosmic projection of the Infinite Love that is the essence of all life – projecting itself onto a screen where you show up as a you. If any of this sounds confusing, that’s because it is confusing! We don’t at the best of times have much of a clue as to what and who we are. We settle for measly roles and identities to make up for this unbearable wonder of being that we are. This blog series has been an attempt so far to expand out your sense of self into the cosmic realities we’ve dove into together.

Where I want to take you in today’s blog is to feel into that who you feel yourself to be in this cosmic sense is very different from who you feel yourself to be in an everyday sense. Embracing the cosmic Nondual, as it is called, into your waking reality is a challenge that most people seeking it become very focused on and dedicated to. I’m saying that the reasons behind your interest (or disinterest), focus and struggle have to do with this entire undiscovered world of you being a tapestry of parts, rather than the single personality that has been running your you show up till now.

There’s this magical and expanded sense of self that extends into and includes no less than all of life and the universe. Then I am offering that the single you, the you that differs from me, is in fact an entire another wild ride of discovery into yourself as being so much more again than you imagined.

So, how does this ride land in you, or part of you rather? Does part of you feel ready to let go of doing your ‘you show’ the way he or she has? Is part of you ready for a new you to show up that hasn’t been around up till now?

‘Part of me’ so enjoyed sharing its passion with you today. ‘I’ enjoyed feeling this part of me express its passion.

I invite you and your parts to read more about parts of yourself, in an article Jelayan and I wrote in an article here.

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!

‘I seek, therefore I am’: Golden Earth Tales

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Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive your support!

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

By Raphael Awen

Who are you, dear reader of this blog? What brings you here? I hope I am not being too forward with asking such pointed questions. Let me back up.

First, I want to thank you for being here.

Thank you for being here.

You are here with your being.

Your being, I venture to say, is seeking something. You would not be here (or anywhere else online for that matter) if you were not seeking something.

Seeking something is what makes you a you.

You may be someone who stumbled on this blog series or seen it mentioned somewhere. I welcome you here.

You may be an old friend coming to check out what I am doing, or a family member who misses me since we left off contact. I welcome you here. I miss you too. Our curiosity about each other and missing of each other evidences that we are unified in our need and desire for something. We may have parted over a debate over what particular something is worthy of seeking, but we are joined back together in the realization that we share a deep and profound commonality in that we seek.

You may be someone who feels sharply in disagreement about my life choices or what Soulfullheart is about and you’re here seeking to confirm those suspicions. I welcome you here as well, fellow seeker.

That we are all in search of something is a reality so deep that we are willing to separate over what we seek in order to insure that our freedom to seek, and to seek as we choose, be held intact.

‘I seek, therefore I am’, is our shared humanity.

I have a growing awareness that who and what you and I are is so much more than what we have even hardly begun to discover. What we call, ‘The Self’ is so vast that even our disagreements and differences are a necessary part of our journey of discovery.

I also deeply feel that this quest to know will never be fully realized because who and what we are is an infinitely expanding reality. We can grow in our acceptance of the wonder about what we are, but we will never arrive at any destination of fully knowing ourselves. We’ll have to settle for more instead of all.

As you read these words, can you feel an awakening in you of an expansive feeling of your own bigness? The feeling that you are so much bigger than you have ever realized about yourself is a challenging feeling to let in.

Your current experience of life is but a fraction of what there is to experience, and this will remain true for the rest of your life.

This points to the reason most of us fill our lives with so much busyness and distraction. Underneath the busyness is an unfelt and disturbing feeling of ‘I don’t know who I am.’ When that feeling is made conscious as well as accepted to be a beautiful part of your humanity, it changes so much about how life looks and feels to you.

Your seeking to know yourself is but a part of the universe’s search to know itself.

The love that you seek is but a part of the love that you are.

The life you seek is but a part of the life that you are.

I am one with you in that experience. I am one with you in this essence.

Here is where we are utterly inseparable.

Here, between you, me, and whatever we call the Divine, there is no ‘other’.

We are all One.

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!

My Process of Self-Intimacy: Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

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

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By Kathleen Calder

As intimate as this blog series is becoming already, I feel like I want to invite you in even more. It occurred to me that maybe the writing we share here, though we intend it to be invitational in tone, may make you readers feel like you are only circling around something and not really in it. Well, in a way that’s true, but in many ways it isn’t.

In many ways, we feel you joining in with us during our Sunday group circles, our shared meals, and our daily activities. We want you to be here. It’s up to you to qualify yourself to at least make contact, let alone take the leap to be here with us physically. I want contact. I want you to be known and I want to be known too. I want to experience you…and of course inside me is the ache to be experienced. This is what I want to animate for you in this writing today. So, with that in mind, I intend to invite you in even deeper to my world and deeper into what I call my ‘process’.

It is no joke to ask someone to leave their world or even their known consciousness behind in order to experience and participate in a new one. I’ve needed this invitation extended to me many times throughout these last four years with SoulFullHeart. I haven’t been an active part of this healing work for the full four years and, in fact, have had to take many so-called ‘breaks’ from it. I put quotations there because if SoulFullHeart is in you, it is you, and there is no real break from it or way of shaking it. Parts of me have tried. I guess that’s how you know your soul-calling: when something is inside you, calling you forward, grabbing your attention, even when you think you’re adequately distracted by other things.

There is nothing more powerful than finding your way to your deepest, most sovereign, and heart-centered choice to be a part of something. Part of me has, for many years, only identified with being a ‘black sheep’. There has been an insistence inside me that there is no way for me to truly belong anywhere or with anyone or any particular group of people. Socially this was a struggle for part of me for many years, until the last one or two years when I started to wake up to my genuine uniqueness based on my unfolding soul journey, which helped to reframe any feelings of ‘not being enough’ for others to accept into their social lives.

I have also found myself thinning out the number of people I would like around me at any one time. It’s not about snobbery or snubbing anyone, but about self-care and self protection. For now my circle is small and intimate and that feels safer as far as holding my need to land in others’ hearts in a deep way and be felt. While sometimes part of me can still find some comfort in hiding the real me in a crowd, most of the time being in a large group feels very vulnerable and uncomfortable for my sensitivity level.

I, Kathleen, want to know and be known more intimately, and I get to live into that every moment that I sovereignly choose to. It is a huge process though, to reconcile the desire to hide and the desire to be seen. I feel this could be true for everyone in the world on some level. Needless to say, at times in my process so far the desire to hide has won out and I have had to back away from being consciously in my process. The thing is, the process doesn’t truly stop, ever. You’re in your own process right now, actually, whether you are trying out any of the journaling we suggest or are just reading our writing. Something, even subconsciously, is bound to go in.

Each time parts of me have tried to abandon our process together, chaos has ensued, moving me away from these three people who I have been so intimate with. It has needed to play out that way and it hasn’t really, either. However, my emotional maturity level simply couldn’t allow it to be any other way. I have been through many shifts and changes in my life and all of the major ones have seemed to come on a tornado of chaos and I have felt like I was literally on fire at times! Change, while difficult for most people, has come easily for parts of me who have been very addicted to it. There has been an ease in running away, and what is ‘running away’ from SoulFullHeart but a ‘running away’ from myself? Running from intimacy is something every human being can share stories of, I’m sure, and self-to-self intimacy is really the true fear, I feel, for most of us – myself included.

The saying: “Wherever you go, there you are,” rings so true for me and is what I experience of life. It is what keeps bringing me back to the support that Jelayan, Raphael, and Sequoia offer me as I keep going into myself with less medicating and without avoiding any aspects of my process that are ripe and ready for me to feel into and heal.

Before I began my process of parts work exploration through SoulFullHeart, I was very social and aiming to become an actress. I had graduated theatre school and actually became certified as an Intuitive Coach as well, since I wanted to not only become a well-known performing artist, but a spiritual leader and author. I wanted to show the world I was a healer and to prove something – rather, parts of me did. The idea of maybe one day becoming too sensitive to party often or have one-night-stands was foreign and undesired in some ways. Part of me wanted to be part of the collective, even though she never felt she truly was and in fact was in denial of how badly she really wanted out. No doubt this was a lot to sort through.

Nowadays, I still want to be seen, but the glamour aspect has been giving way to the idea of just being embraced for who I am at my most vulnerable and authentic core of my being. This would have been so hard to say four years ago. This is why SoulFullHeart offers that people who may be interested in this work take it one step at a time. Parts of us have a lot at stake and a lot they have been working to accomplish in our lives. Deconstructing them needs to be a process for the sake of our own sanity. In some ways, you never truly know when this process begins for you, as it just sort of does, and usually it is on a wave of desire for change and doubts that the life you are leading now is truly enough for you, even if these desires and doubts feel subtle at the time.

It feels good to share a bit more about what my process has been like. In the future my goal is to weave in bits of stories from my process and perhaps some more visceral sharing of what it actually feels like to feel a part of you for the first time. I feel this may help any of you who are inching towards contacting us and taking on that first session, to imagine what that experience could be like for you.

If you are curious to know more about what I have shared today or have any questions for me, my email is kathleen.m.calder@gmail.com. I would be happy to hear from you.

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.

Realizing Reality Together: Golden Earth Tales

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Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

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

By Raphael Awen

Thank you for joining in on this blog series. I’m really glad to have your involvement.

I have this expanding sense humming through me today of what a human being actually is. I could say more accurately is that I really don’t know what a human being is. And as I accept that into my consciousness, I let in arising wonder. This sense of wonder and childlike curiosity extends to me, you, and even to the Christian couple who this past week accused me of being ‘a cult leader who talks to demons’.

Friend, foe, or in between, we are all part of the human cult and we are all in search of something. We affect each other and we are an intertwined part of each other way more than we realize.

I’ve also had a growing sense of some other ‘participants’ in this blog series from another dimension called Golden Earth. It’s actually what got this blog series launched and I wrote about it in part one. I don’t have any five-physical-sense ‘proof’ of its existence, but I have been afforded the self-permission to imagine it being ‘real.’ I ‘see’ and ‘feel’ through my imagination the active interest of a group of students that like hanging out together in the Golden Earth café and are keenly interested in brainstorming together around what I’ve been putting out in this blog series.

Of course, this all sounds like a science fiction story, and I can say that maybe that is in fact what all this imagination is – a story from beyond our normal scope of perception. What’s crazy though for me (in a good kind of crazy way) is that I get this growing sense that what you and I call ‘real’ and verify as everyday normal reality through our five physical sense perception of reality, doesn’t sound that far off from my ‘Golden Earth’ reality. My sense is that the reality that you and I participate in as ‘real’ is only real because you and I have in fact ‘realized’ it together. We made it up. We made it up in our own personal ‘fact-ory’. And then to top it off, we agreed that it was real. What a bunch of conspirators we are! I guess I am a powerful cult leader after all….wow…. and so are you …. like it or not. We make stuff up as we go.

If any of this stuff is a more accurate picture of the underlying reality that undergirds what we call reality, then at the very least, it puts us back in a place of childlike wonder. That childlike wonder opens out all the edges of what I consider real and true. This lens of childlike wonder filters and swirls through my adult mind and leaves me with a, ‘Holy shit, who the hell are we?’ feeling. ‘Holy’ and ‘hell’ are now in the same sentence somehow.

I mentioned the couple who called me ‘a cult leader who listens to demons’ as I’m still digesting this week the energy of our all-too-real confrontation. While my personal boundary is that no one gets to be a part of my life while they want to energize their reality in an intolerant way towards me, there is another way that none of us can escape anyone else. As we’ve been feeling into in this series: we, at a deep and fundamental level of reality, are all One. We cannot even differentiate enough from that Oneness for there to be an ‘other’ to have a difference with, let alone fight with them.

My mind starts to ride out on some of these feeling waves and mind waves, like a great surfboard ride, and it comes up with more and more profound questions. It’s hard staying on one train of thought for very long. It isn’t too far off from getting stoned really. But before you judge that as a bad thing, consider that what you call ‘reality’ may be, in fact, coming from the completely intoxicated and drug-impaired perception of what you and I just made up and declared real. Hell, you’re not the safe designated driver to get me home safely that you imagine yourself to be. Nor is the Christian couple offering me their Jesus picture of deliverance and salvation. I may not even be safe to drive myself home! I just may need to walk, or stumble, or just pass out on the sidewalk and try again tomorrow, thank you very much!

I love this madness!

I can feel the students at the Golden Earth café really rocking about now, so excited to feel us feeling into this together. If we can soften our perception of reality back to a place of childlike wonder, then they and we get to come out and play. I see the universe knocking on the door of my childhood home – “Hello, Mrs. Awen. Can Raphael come out and play today?”

When and how in the heaven and in the hell did we lose our sense of play? When and how did we make spirituality about being right or being saved or delivered?

The good news is that we fell and bumped our head and are suffering a bit of amnesia. We only fell from the grace of knowing who and what we are. We didn’t fall and bump ourselves out of god’s grace, as the Christian narrative goes. That story has held a good many of us (myself deeply included) for a good long time, and it’s running out of gas. New stories are now vying for our attention.

My truth is that you and I don’t have but the tiniest bit of what there is to be had as far as your sense of self extends. You are so much more than you ever dreamed yourself to be. We live in an Infinite-Love reality that is ever expanding, and so everything we come to treasure as meaningful or real only gets its value because it calls us to get comfortable with deepening our picture of reality.

With this blog series, I’m realizing I don’t have anything to sell you on. Well, to be honest, I’ve been putting out there my own ideas of reality and I guess making a case for that. But, in another way, I get to admit that I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m selling. That, I feel, is what has earned me the title this week of being a powerful cult leader – I am in the great unknown and dangerously having some fun and dangerously enticing others to join me, and what this couple could see and verify for me is that I just might succeed in pulling that off – God forbid, hallelujah and praise Allah!

Reality is being auctioned off to the highest bidder. What do you have to bid for this treasure? What kind of reality do you dream of? What do you want? Deep down in the depths of your being? What makes you tick? What’s your wanter wanting underneath its wants? Are you angry that what you’ve subscribed to hasn’t paid off? I’m glad if you’re pissed. Get pissed at me if you need to. I’ll throw it back in your face and we can be a part of changing consciousness together.

As I said in my last blog, we as a species are at an epochal shift in our consciousness and existence. It is the time of the greatest change we have encountered so far. We go through periods of relative stability (history) that are followed by tumultuous and sudden change (herstory).

You and I get to be in on this, in whatever way we want to be. Once we begin awakening to that, it changes everything, and doesn’t stop.

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!

Spiritual La-La Land In A Time Of Impending Collapse: Golden Earth Tales

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Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

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

By Raphael Awen

It’s time in this blog series to pose a very important question.

The question goes something like this: How is seeking the nondual, or any other form of spiritual seeking for that matter, relevant at such a crazy time of global change that we are in the midst of? How is it not just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

We are in the midst of epic changes to our industrial society and its way of life that we are all embedded in. The long and the short of it is that gasoline from a gas station, water from a tap, food from a store, or electricity from a hole in the wall are not likely to persist for much longer. All of the inter-related systems that hold these realities in place are growing more and more vulnerable and tension-filled by the day. I am personally surprised each passing month to see the present order of things stumble against the odds into the next month.

The transition we are facing promises to be difficult almost beyond imagination, chaotic and marked with great loss of life.

My sense is that if you haven’t faced this approaching chaos and come to your own personal grounded choices around it, your spirituality (of any kind) is in la-la land.

Eighteen months ago, my wife and I and two close friends chose to relocate to living off grid two countries south and entered into a crash course of learning to grow our own food. It’s a long story and a great story and you can read it here in our free e-book called Living As If. It’s free monetarily speaking, but reading it will cost you. It will cost you some of your indifference; it will cost you some of your comfort; and it will cost you some of your happiness that’s based in denial. If you’ve been looking to spend those things from your life, the free e-book is a great place to start.

I almost want to apologize for pontificating here. Almost. I just called you indifferent, didn’t I? I am trying to build an audience, not thin one out, but this message cannot be pansied around with. If you haven’t considered the changes that you can feel are coming, you are fucking around with your own life. It’s just that plain and simple. It’s suicide and indifferent to boot. I’d much rather you got offended and left off reading my blogs than using my teaching on the nondual as a way to keep your pile of denial intact. What I’d most rather see, however, is that you could listen to your own heart without needing any prodding from me or anyone else and prepare to ride out the coming storm.

Facing into this with power and choice will feel like nothing short of joining a cult. Your seeking to get others on board in your circle of family and friends will be seen as proselytizing. It will probably add up to being the most difficult thing you have undertaken this life.

When you look at this though through a first-things-first lens, no other approach makes any sense at all. As humans, our needs for survival will always trump our needs for seeking meaning. We embrace spirituality only when our basic needs of food, water, and shelter are met and have a reasonable expectation of continuity.

You may be in a place of what appears to be life-stability at the moment, but I venture to say that you have been sensing the approach of deep structural changes coming to our collective way of life. How could you not? This has left you with an ungrounded feeling. Your ventures into spirituality and meaning are left with one foot outside of the circle. You’re not all here, and rightly so, you shouldn’t be. Maybe ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, this could be a different story, but not now.

As I’ve been writing this series on the nondual, I’ve had a growing sense of disconnect to be offering it into an audience I fear has done little to reconcile with these coming changes. I’m openly asking the question of myself: how does this form of spiritual seeking that I’m advocating for not just another form of a mind-numbing drug?

The shit is about to hit the fan – make no mistake about it.

Like the Captain in the movie Titanic so soberly said just minutes after the iceberg was struck, “This ship will go down.” The Titanic story is a powerful prophetic story for our time. Our collective hubris is only exceeded by our denial, and we are about to be called on it.

Big outbreath….phew. I had to say that… in that way.

My own tendency towards denial is as good as the next person’s; the difference though is that I am aware of mine. That awareness has led and continues to lead to changes – not talk of changes, but balls-to-the-wall grounded change.

So what then is there left to say about the nondual in relation to all this unavoidable change?

My truth is that all the talk in the world of the nondual isn’t worth a fiddler’s fart if you are not in your power facing this approaching storm.

Consciousness itself has prepared this transformation for us, not against us. Consciousness doesn’t see the loss of physical life with the same hysteria as we do. Consciousness sees it as a transformation, not an end in itself. What is at stake is not your consciousness per se, but your physical life and the goals you as a soul associated with this life.

I am convinced that most will not (as they say) know what hit ‘em, as they feel completely victimized and overwhelmed by circumstances outside of their control. Everything in their conditioning will support their chosen view of excusing themselves.

But for those of us who unmistakably sense this coming storm, such luxuries of consciousness don’t add up to much, do they?

The Christians believe strongly in Jesus returning to sweep them away before it gets too unbearable – that at least gives them some form of hope or comfort. Their collective sense of coming chaos is well founded and grounded; it’s just their solution that doesn’t add up. No savior is returning to take care of your business for you. All the universe, God, the Divine, and Jesus himself will be glad to help you – but no one and nothing is going to do this for you. Doing stuff for you is known as infantilizing, and we are moving past that now in our emerging collective consciousness.

You can expect to be infantilized if you must and that will ensure you some comfort in the midst of this great chaos, though it will also pretty much guarantee your early demise. Or you can adult-up and make choices with the power you have and ride out this storm consciously in the deep and personal transformation of yourself and the collective that this will prove to be.

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!

Come Talk With Me: Diary of a HeartMan Blog Series

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

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There are times when I feel like I am writing to a wall. I mean, yes, I write partially for my own edification. It leads me into forgotten or disowned places within my heart and soul. I get to feel the edges of my true passion and desire. It helps to facilitate me into a leadership role. In a way, it allows me to have sex with myself. So, I keep writing.

But, dammit, it would be even juicier to have an exchange with you. Why in the hell are you reading this in the first place? To add another layer to your entertainment addiction? To take in some ¨interesting ideas¨ and sock them away in some pouch where your testicles used to be?

C´mon man, what is really going on with you?

What is rumbling under that facade of yours? Do you feel any inconsistencies in your inner and outer world? Do you see and feel what is happening to our humanity? To our planet? Does this shake anything inside of you? Or is it just business as usual? I can’t imagine you feel that if you have chosen to follow this blog. So you being here reading these words have a purpose.

That purpose is engagement. I don’t claim to have all the answers. Hell, I don’t claim to have any answers, other than the ones that are staring me right in the face. Such as that….We are killing each other. We are consuming more resources than we are creating. Our economy is dependent on false confidence and toilet paper currency. The planet is getting warmer and we are in an extinction era.

Does any of that mean anything to you?

My intuition tells me you don’t believe we are just a bag of bones and that our existence is meaningless. You wouldn’t be here if you did. Even if we were all to perish, there is still a consciousness that we are all connected to. If we hold that truth, we can all go somewhere together. A place that is healed of the darkness and tragedy we currently find ourselves in. We call this place Golden Earth. But to do that, we need to enter our own darkness. Feel our own tragedies and the one of our soul brothers and sisters.

And you can’t do that alone, man. You need relationship. You need another to feel you and contend with. To elicit your shadow and light your fire. Someone you can learn from and someone you can teach. You can do that with me…with us. We have paid some prices in our journey. We have gone through many fires in the name of our authenticity, our sovereignty, and our worth. But the resulting expression of growth, power, and love is ultimately priceless and worth it all.

Let’s go somewhere together. Stop sitting on the sidelines waiting to be called into the game. The reality is you are already in it. The universe is the stadium of fans waiting for you to make a move. It wants you to take off your clothes and get naked. To jump into the fire of your wild, instinctive nature. To break the chains of civility and get jiggy with your humanity.

What is it that scares you? What is it that you don’t buy or struggle with? More than likely I have been there. One of us embracing the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life has been there. Our credentials are our own experience and our actions. There are many who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. They have vision but lack the courage of their own conviction.

I want to hear from you. I want to talk with you not at you. We don’t need to agree, we just need to start talking.

You can email me at sequoia.heartman@gmail.com.

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