Surrendering to Transformation: Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

by Kathleen Calder

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

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The day of my arrival, I stepped off the bus in Tomatlán, greeted by the warm embraces of Raphael and Sequoia. Raphael was the first to offer me a hug of welcome. Instinctually I placed my third eye chakra directly onto his heart chakra, and sobbed many tired, worn-out, and backed-up tears as I and parts of me let in that we had finally arrived home and that the process we had been holding around the life we were collapsing in order to return to our sanctuary, was complete at last. The drive home to the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary itself felt long and short at the same time as I held relief, heartbreak, and excitement in every breath.

It is no small thing to let go of a life you have created. In SoulFullHeart we talk about parts of us engaging in and helping to create and hold different chapters of our lives. I have had many chapters in and out of SoulFullHeart in the last four years, some of which I have digested on this blog. This time was very different as I deliberately invested so much more of myself than I ever had before. I believe this ¨going in¨ experience is actually what eventually led me out of this last chapter and back into SoulFullHeart…which I never really left, it feels like. This return feels so palpably different for me too, as this time around I truly feel I am looking for deeper transformation and deeper answers. My ¨seeking journey¨ is officially over and I feel like retiring from it. I have found my vocation and what I really need to keep healing and returning more and more to myself and who I was born to be. It does feel like I am meant to help others eventually as well.

The morning after my arrival, I woke up feeling a happiness in my heart, though still feeling waves of mourning looming in the background. Jelayan checked in with me during breakfast, asking me if I felt ready to start working in the gardens with her again or if I needed some time. I felt like parts of me were eager to get back to work, as it were, and dive back into life here, probably to help ease the transition a bit more. So, after breakfast we readied our buckets with harvesting and planting tools and changed into our work clothes.

Jelayan offered that I could wear a pair of her shoes that were still in pretty good shape while the pair I was intending to work in were falling apart (I didn’t have all of my footwear or my things, since it would all be coming back with a couple also living on our sanctuary when they returned from Puerto Vallarta in their truck later that week). I put the shoes on my feet and we started off down the path away from the house.

Suddenly, I felt a sharp stinging in my middle toe on my left foot and, as I paused to respond to the pain, Jelayan and I spotted a big scorpion scurrying away. Evidently he had been hiding in the toe of the shoe I was wearing on that foot…and I had neglected to even think to check them before putting them on! We were only steps from the house (thank god), so we both calmly made our way to the kitchen to prepare the natural remedies we have learned to deal with in responding to such incidents. Jelayan herself had been stung last year, so she remembered what worked for her and different ways to stay calm. I was so surprised to feel myself as calm as I was.

Jelayan chopped up about six cloves of garlic and put them all in a bowl with some honey and gave me some hibiscus water, very heavy on lime juice, to drink while I swallowed the chopped garlic. The honey wasn’t so much for a medicinal purpose as for the purpose of helping me get the garlic down, though I’m sure its medicinal properties as an antibiotic helped me out too. Then she placed some lime and a slightly chopped clove of garlic on the area where the scorpion stung me. The pain ebbed and flowed during this first hour as I took in the medicine and also Jelayan’s healing touch on my now traumatized foot. Her presence alone helped to keep me calm, and we both feel that the most critical thing you can do is keep calm in a circumstance like this one.

Eventually she helped me to my room where I put a woolly sock on my foot and obviously was now resigned to stay in bed for the day.

The worst symptom I had was the throbbing pain in my toe that overwhelmed my entire foot at times in intense waves that had me clutching at my mattress and bed linens. It took about a week for my foot and leg to feel normal again and now, two and a half weeks later, my toe is finally starting to feel back to normal. Wow. What a process.

Digesting the experience SoulFullHeart style means looking at what ¨scorpion medicine¨ offered me through this incident, and all the different reasons why it happened. Yes, it was partly a careless move on my part to slip on a shoe without inspecting it first, so there was a wake-up call in that. Yet, the fact that it laid me up in bed for about three to four days since I couldn’t walk well enough to work, was an indication that something in me needed that time to just ¨be¨ after making such a big move. I needed that time to rest and digest what I had just dismantled in my life a bit more, and also, I feel like the movement of the toxins through my bloodstream may have helped me detox from some of the energies I took during the last nine months.

In Ted Andrews´ book, Animal Speak, he offers that the scorpion represents transformation and that it tells us that transformative changes can either be chaotic or calm. When I think back on this last chapter away from SoulFullHeart, but also on many of the major beginnings and endings in my life, I see a pattern of mostly chaos without a lot of surrender. It is possible that without the physical need to just be with myself for my first few days back here, I would have restarted my life here in a much less calm, maybe even chaotic way, in terms of my emotional body. It could be that the scorpion helped me find another layer of me – one that really can handle such intense circumstances and still hold it with as much grace as possible, addressing my physical and emotional needs instead of burying them, which really just tends to lead to more trouble, maybe even chaos, later.

There’s undoubtedly so much in life to be careful of, and so much that can cause us pain, and yet all of it seems to offer a message of transformation being possible if we can surrender to it in the right moment. It feels like surrendering to the circumstance while holding our parts and our spine is step one,  as demonstrated by the calm urgency Jelayan and I somehow embodied, and diving into our physical and emotional needs around the circumstance is step two. Each and every major event is another opportunity to go inside yourself and it is my sense that we draw these occurrences because of our need to do just that – go IN. Feel what’s at stake. Feel what it is you want and need.

I sincerely hope I don’t have to draw another scorpion sting, especially as this rounds up all of the intense things I have been through in this last life chapter, which I will share about eventually as they become relevant.

I appreciate you reading and taking this in! If you feel moved to contact me directly, based on this or any of my other blogs, my email is kathleen.m.calder@gmail.com.

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.

Letting In Arising Wonder: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

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

By Raphael Awen

I recall when I was first introduced to the terms ‘dual’ and ‘nondual’. The teaching intrigued me. It resonated in my heart.

I learned that an entire world of wonder had been dimmed down inside of me, as well as in my culture. This, I learned was due to the mind’s ability and propensity to categorize and ‘map’ my experiences, judging and evaluating them that in turn removed me from the essence and wonder of the experience itself.

The basic teaching goes that we, with our mind’s capacity, ‘dualize’ what we experience. We rate it, we judge it, we locate it – all of which we could not do were it not for this ‘dualizing’ ability. I was taught that the mind, metaphorically speaking, creates something similar to the grid lines that are established over an archaeological dig that provide reference points for where discovered items were found, allowing for mapping, cataloguing, and further study.

The problem, however, is that experience itself and the map of the experience are two very different things, but our minds have lost awareness of this. Our minds instead have become fused with the maps we create of our experience, causing us to lose more and more contact with the aliveness of the experience itself.

Let’s see if we can create a metaphor to bring this home a bit.

What are you doing right now? You’re reading a blog, and sizing up what you are getting out of it. That’s the mental map description/perception of what’s going on. But is there another deeper reality that you do not perceive right now, that is screened out from your perception by this mental map ‘doing’ your experience for you rather than the arising wonder of experience itself?

What else is there to notice? What are you missing, if anything?

What about the use of the written word, in this case English? Here I am referencing pen strokes that evolved into keyboard strokes, conveying written meaning into something called sentences that in turn produce a myriad of brain synapses firing that in turn produce wave after wave of rapid fire evaluations in you, and in turn emotional responses. I don’t guess your mind was paying attention to any of that just now. But isn’t it off-the-charts amazing reality that we came up with the motor skills and the mental skills to create squiggles in the sand that in turn came to be agreed upon and adopted as an alphabet to convey such specifics in meaning?

You are a participator in all of this and I’ll bet that you haven’t given yourself any pats on the back for your achievements in any of this since the third grade. Your use of alphabet and linguistics is all old-hat to you. Your mind has long gone on (or should we say ‘off’) in search of new things, which it will in turn deaden eventually into more of the same-old-same-old.

I could go on and on describing things that have just been assimilated into the mental map of how we navigate experience. There’s your eyeballs; there’s the temperature of the room you’re sitting in and however that came to be; there’s the lingering taste in your mouth from what you just ate; there’s the stream that became a river that became part of a hydroelectric dam that produced the electricity to illuminate the screen you are reading from.

Given all that experience has to offer, it’s an amazing wonder in itself that you are barraged with such oceans of experience without being totally stoned out of your mind in a hallucinogenic experience of what we would call total insanity. You have your mind to thank for that. Your mind ‘dualized’ the aliveness of the experiences themselves into an endless array of filed, categorized, and tamed representations of experience.

But how do we get back to the nondual, the raw experience and its plethora of the wild and amazing? I mean, I don’t want to be totally stoned and unable to function, but I would like a generous helping of arising wonder to be lapping onto my shores in an ever-increasing way. I’d like a good buzz for sure. I think you would too, right?

Here is the offer to discover the nondual where all is an arising wonder, where there are no (or at least, less and less) representational categories by the mind that kill off experience. It’s not too far at all to describe it as an altered state of consciousness. Of course it is.

At this point in my introduction into the world of the nondual is where I was kind of convinced this was for the particularly advanced or evolved in consciousness. It was an ‘attainment’ and that there were many steps between where I was at and where something magical like an ‘nondual awakening’ might begin occurring for me. My mind filed it off as something hopeful for the future, maybe one day. Maybe if I got really dedicated to some kind of meditation process to induce this for me.

My mind, in other words, just dualized the hell out of what I was being introduced to. Part of me pessimistically ‘knew’ that if I really let myself feel this desire for this kind of awakening, I’d probably fall prey to following a bunch of teachers and spending a lot of money in the process, and so it too helped to file this away for another time and place.

What I’ve been saying in this blog series and want to say over and over again is that nondual access isn’t something to attain. You already have it. You may well and correctly say ‘But I don’t experience the arising wonder in my daily experience that you speak of.’ That’s something different, isn’t it? I’m saying that the acceptance inside of yourself that you already have this something is what will precede it transacting for you in your felt experience of life.

You are already as enlightened as you will ever be – ‘positionally’ speaking. That’s part of your ‘In-divi-dual’ (your dual and nondual nature that can’t be separated) as we’ve been saying in this series. All that’s left is for it to manifest for you ‘experientially’. This is something that you are in direct control of. You choose to let into experience what you are already are and have.

Someone else may convince you to let this reality in or reject it, but only you can carry it out. You are the sovereign. There is no God, or god, that will take care of this for you. You have to want it; you have to let it in (if you want to that is!). You are the god who creates your experience here. Ask God/god instead to help YOU let-this-in.

Then fasten your seatbelt because you are opening yourself to a depth of reality that the universe and you are alchemizing through your desire nature.

Why would you settle for anything less?

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary.

 

 

 

The Kingdom Within: Diary Of A Heartman Blog Series

Published on by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment

By Sequoia Heartman

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We are not truly separate in the wider picture. If we are going to truly evolve as a species, we must agree that our inner world has a direct influence on our outer world.

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At the end of last week´s blog I called out to you, my brothers in heart and soul, to join me in recreating a new picture of how we relate to each other as men. It isn’t as easy as just deciding or desiring to make that happen. There is work to be done. We tend to want to focus on ¨fixing¨ the outer world through our actions and words. We might take up a political, environmental, or social justice cause to help turn this global Titanic around. These are noble and imperative. I do not wish to dissuade anyone from engaging in these endeavors. We as men have what seems like a program to focus on the external: to assess problems and apply solutions. There is also a collective male need to have something of one’s own that we alone have authority over. “A man´s home is his castle,” is an expression that comes to mind. This is an outward expression of an inner primal urge.

But the root of our current picture lies within each and every one of us as individuals and then is networked out as a collective. If we see it that way, as a network of individuals, we can understand how one of us greatly affects the other. We are not truly separate in the wider picture. If we are going to truly evolve as a species, we must agree that our inner world has a direct influence on our outer world.

Take a snapshot of the world and you get a picture of what is happening inside of us in the deepest pockets of our unconscious. The consciousness of our current leaders is a manifestation of this collective tragedy and, instead of making anything better, they are actually making things worse. So, we need a new leader. One that is willing to see and feel this truth. One that is willing to rise to the throne of their inner kingdom and awaken the inner King.

The path of the true King is through the heart. Inside all of us, both men and women alike, is an inner terrain of energies that manifest as parts or subpersonalities. These are explained in detail here. There are also etheric energies that we could call our Soul Brothers under the banner of our MetaSoul which is eloquently introduced here. Consider these parts of yourself and your soul as your subjects, advisors, and court. They all hold some of your power, wisdom, and love, but initially they may be elusive, resistant, and down right ornery. Some will even try and assume the throne until you are present enough to lovingly unseat them.

There are many tunnels and hidden caves inside your inner castle. Each one leading to previously unknown aspects of yourself. As you engage in this inner exploration, your outer expression begins to shift, as well as the networked collective. You are making shit happen from just where you are. No need to be elected into a seat of power. You already have it!

But this inner alchemy is very sensitive to outer influences. If you find yourself surrounded by distractions, whether it is a big city, a busy lifestyle, or an unsupportive environment, it will be difficult to make substantial changes in a certain period of time. And as our collective ship is approaching the proverbial iceberg, time is running out. The kingdom within can be deeply accessed in a supportive, off-grid environment. A place where all your former distractions are removed, in a healthy and compassionate process. A place where people have been exploring their own inner kingdoms and making changes from the inside out.

Am I selling staying with us at the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary? Damn straight I am. I want you here. I want us to explore our kingdoms together, get to know each other, and grow and learn from each other.  I want us to collaborate and create a new way of being and living together. I don’t want you in that hell hole you find yourself in everyday, just for the sake of maintaining an old attachment to the tired story. I want to feel you in your guts and nuts. Your heart and soul. I want to be invited into your castle, man. There’s good shit in there!

But if you cannot find your way here, then find your way somewhere. Anywhere that is not connected to the dying machine. I feel you in my heart, brother, and I want you out. Out of the powerless and into your power. Out of your head and into your heart. Out of the dark and into the light. You are the most important person in the world, just as you are. You are a true beacon of hope and change, not some political wank´s campaign slogan. You are true King among the pretenders. But you gotta get out and go in.

If you have any comments or reactions to what I have written, please leave a comment or you can personally email me at sequoia.heartman@gmail.com.

Sequoia Heartman is an apprentice teacher at SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. Visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary website for more.

 

A Day in the Life: Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

By Kathleen Calder

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The day begins.

I wake up to the sound of a rooster greeting the dawn with his crow. It isn’t an invasive call for me, since my room is actually quite far away from where he normally keeps his brood. In fact my sleep, thankfully, is rarely interrupted by the sounds of the animals due to my location. If my sleep is interrupted at all, it’s normally because of an unfelt reaction or something that part of me is trying to work out.

Usually the light is just breaking over the morning as I draw my covers down and slide out of bed. On the average morning my heart feels ready to greet the day and my friends and teachers, knowing and feeling our genuine desire to connect to one another through all events of the day, even if that means feeling through tension and being in conflict at times.

Breakfast is just one of the three meals we share together each day and we either take turns on collaborating or one of us chooses to lead when it comes to the making of each one. Meals are an opportunity for us and parts of us to check in about our processes and what we feel happening within us as we live out the day while also feeling each other. So much happens on an emotional and not just physical level for all of us. I feel this is true for every human being, it’s just about having enough fluidity and space inside yourself and direct support from those close to you in order to really feel it and let it move you. I had almost forgotten about the richness of my inner reality until coming back to live here again. Our personal sharing at the table can be triggering for parts until they learn to lean into it, especially since it is a brand new experience compared to any past attempt to do this sort of sharing at mealtime with birth family members or even friends and to cultivate this level of intimacy with them.

After breakfast is complete I quickly get myself suited up for organic gardening or whatever other task is happening that day. For me so far the task has mostly been gardening, which I feel is good for me on so many different levels. Connecting with the plants is not something part of me ever thought I would be doing as deeply as I have been lately but it does seem to naturally be starting to happen as I take in their needs for water, weeding, and general attention. I feel something coming back to me from them in the form of harvest but also healing energy. There have been moments when I have been alone in one of our gardens and suddenly I feel tears start to surface as I feel the safety and support from the love of nature around me to feel whatever I am feeling in that moment. There is a way that nature seems to move us towards healing at an exponential rate since it seems to have a much greater capacity to give and receive love than even the amazing humans around me can!

I am often in the gardens with Jelayan lately, helping her with replanting, watering, and weeding. It’s time to replant a number of our plants right now so she needs the help and I’m enjoying taking in her knowledge so that I can maybe lead some more in the gardens some day if it feels right. I value having this one-on-one time with her too as she is a woman who has healed so much and yet is also so in her own self. Taking in her healthy templating means a lot to me, and perhaps even more now that I was away from it for almost 10 months. Learning to collaborate together is a big deal and I am working on letting it in, since most of the woman-to-woman relationships I have experienced have been strained by unconscious (or sometimes conscious) competition and energetic bullying. We’ve had a lot to feel through and work out in our relationship but I feel a new opening for us as the appreciation for being in each other’s lives has been renewed. Connection with her is a serious blessing.

Sometimes the morning routine shifts based on our individual emotional needs. Yes, this is valued above all productivity. For me personally, I get that if I don’t take the time to be in my process, then not only does my productivity tend to suffer, but I am less present overall for my relationships with the others and also for life in general. This can actually be a dangerous thing here at our Sanctuary where there are scorpions, snakes, and unpredictable events can happen.

So, that being said, sometimes the mornings are stiller for me in terms of physical activity. I have and continue to have much to feel through as I continue to land here, decompressing, detoxing and de-medicating overall after my many months away. During those months away, I was immersed in a lifestyle that carries only hints of the amount of love I feel here at the Sanctuary amongst the others but also with the trees, plants, and animals that surround me. So, as expected, my emotional body in the form of my parts, has begun to surface to be felt again and I find myself needing space and breathing to just be with me or to ask for space-holding and facilitation from Jelayan, Raphael or Sequoia, since at times that is actually what a part needs. All three of them understand the process of mourning and letting go that I am walking through with my parts right now as the layers over my natural sensitivity continue to melt away with their love and support and that of the Divine as well.

After we have lunch together we usually rest and check in with ourselves some more, or go off to the river or wherever we may want to. Basically it is free time and often we stay indoors since it’s the hottest part of the day. Sometimes I use this time to nap and/or journal or go on an etheric journey to visit and check in with my guides and parts. The other day I used this afternoon time to have a session with Raphael, since a big part of my process lately has been with a very young and vulnerable part of me who needed to feel a loving father-like energy holding space for her. It was a tender process and I have discovered that she is actually a part of me that holds much of my core essence (what makes me who I am in an authentic way). I am still working with this part of me and find that the space and time of being on the Sanctuary is very nurturing for her and actually is what encourages her to come out more.

Later in the afternoon there is a second round of watering for all of the gardens that must be done. After that there is a bit more rest time before dinner prep begins. Dinner is usually also eaten together, though we all stay flexible with our needs, keeping in mind that sometimes parts of us would rather eat alone, depending on what is coming up for us emotionally.

After dinner the day completes and most of the time I retreat to my room for more decompressing, journaling, etheric journeying and/or reading. If I want to I can go for a walk or head up to our garden and our plot of land that we call Tranquila to watch the sunset or to just be. Once the sun sets it gets dark pretty fast and this pushes up some fear for my parts about the wildness around us. I want to face these fears though and find a way to feel more harmony and trust with the wildness that may just reflect an untapped wildness inside of me that parts of me are afraid of. Jelayan started to realize this about her parts’ own fears or inhibitions about the wildness of our Sanctuary and writes about it in her recent book Keep Waking Up!.

Sometimes it can feel hard for parts of me that miss having Netflix or a movie to veg out on, or even a local pub to visit and have a beer at the bar! Yet it surprises me how much easier this has become, now that so many more of my real needs are being met on a daily basis and the need for comforts like these has dwindled considerably.

It felt important to share with you about my average day here at the Sanctuary and what it is like to stay here as an initiate, to paint some picture for you of what your life and process here may look like should you decide to stay with us. All of my current process, I feel, is eventually going to make room to let in more people and their own processes. I want to feel your story as much as I want you to feel mine. I love the connections I have with others and I want more too. This life is not glamorous, though it is beautiful and, if you are ready to let it in, you won’t be able to ignore the truth of this and the truth of the love we live into and embody more of every single day.

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.

 

You As An ‘In-divi-dual’: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

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

By Raphael Awen

Just before diving back into the warm waters of where we left off, I’m curious what digestions you have going on inside of you from the last blog in this series. I’d love to hear from you through the comments of this blog.

Take a moment if you can to feel what feelings and reactions came up for you in the comparisons we made of your dual and nondual nature.

If you’re like me, the feeling that the nondual needed me (and us) in order to come to know itself, began to open some things out for you.

It suggests (and this may be sacrilege to some) that the nondual wasn’t complete in itself. It decided at some point to extend its completeness out of itself into the expression of you and I, and the rest of the conscious universe. It birthed something out of itself.

However we imagine the infinite completeness of the nondual to be, it would seem that in its consciousness, it came to want something. Even if that wanting was a wanting to share its completeness, the nondual came to have a need. It lacked. It wanted to have an ‘other’ both to share its bounty with, and as a reflective mirror in which to look back on itself. We, along with the rest of the conscious universe, were birthed out of this need.

Need, want, and desire is the stuff that parented us. This is a tough one for many people to come to terms with. Many seek out the nondual as a way to tame their desire nature, feeling that their desire nature is at root of their suffering. Many spiritual teachers in turn offer this as a hook to gain adherents.

Identifying with one’s nondual nature will not help anyone rid themselves of their desire nature, though many will stumble in making the attempt. It will change a lot related to your desire nature, but desire itself is an inseparable part of being the combination of dual and nondual natures that we are.

This brings us back to where you and I live everyday. As great and magical as the infinite fulfillment, infinite love, infinite possibility world was and is, it wanted to take that out for a spin. You and I are that test drive, along with shoes, cars, sex and having a unique personality.

From this comes a whole other scary piece about you not existing as a ‘you’ in the un-individuated consciousness world of the nondual. No ‘you’ to ever know shoes, cars or sex.

No ‘you’ to know desire and its offspring – personal pleasure and displeasure.

Here, without a ‘you’ or an ‘other’, there’s no way for relationship either.

The nondual’s hunger in its awareness was to find a way outside of itself in search for a relationship mirror to come to know itself. This longing for relationship, to be known and seen by an other, is at the very core of our being. It would seem then that this need to be known extends all the way back to our nondual essence.

We also looked in the last blog entry in this series at how the nondual (oneness) birthed us into duality (‘twoness’) but put it in an inseparable package. English language captured this reality well in coming up with the word ‘In-divi-dual’ – duality that can’t be divvied, or twoness that can’t be separated. Maybe, we’re stumbling upon the better way to describe the root of all of our suffering – attempting to separate the inseparable.

It was Charles Eisenstein who first introduced this awareness to me where he teaches about the illusion of the split between spirit and matter in his free book ‘The Ascent Of Humanity’, which offers a heart and soul expanding picture of this fundamental split in consciousness awaiting reconciliation.

Christianity, where I spent a big part of my life, is a great example of this split as well. But you can look to the world around you and find this separation attempt everywhere you turn. In Christianity, the separation of essence attempt begins with man having a ‘sin’ nature, a ‘fallen’ nature. It’s the age-old thing of ‘you can’t sell someone on a solution unless you’ve sold them on the problem first,’ which of course is all inside a picture of seeking to gain control over the essentially uncontrollable ‘others’ of our dualistic reality.

Money, (and this is some more of Charles’ influence here) is maybe the king of all spirit and matter splits, because to make money out of something, that is to ‘monetize’ something, you need to separate the thing from its essence. You need to turn people into slaves, you need to turn forests into marketable board feet, you need to turn personal desire and passion into jobs. And to be able to do any of that, you need the illusory-spirit-and-matter split kept well intact. All matter is spirit; recognizing that leads to more and more wholeness. Remaining Ignorant to that leads to greater and greater neurosis.

You, however, as both spirit and matter, both dual and nondual that can’t be separated, that one part can’t be made better or worse, that can’t even be differentiated for that matter – is a grand invitation into a whole new self perception.

If this is true, then what does that say about all the minutia of how you see yourself in every aspect of your daily life? Letting in this new self-perception begins to affect everything in your life.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary.

Diary of a HeartMan: Brotherhood of Sacred Power

Published on by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment

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I see and feel a picture in my heartmind. There are machines that have cords attached to the brains of men who are nothing more than slaves sucked of their essence. Above the machines are other men who are the creators and controllers. They have a sinister yet pained look on their face. In the background there are men hunting and killing other men. In the whole scene there is a play-out of control and powerlessness. In not one place do I see men in their full power together, creating and leading.

This feels like a painting of the collective masculine condition. Everyone feels alone and isolated, detached from their humanity and nature. What is missing is an authentic and sacred brotherhood. I used to call a close friend of mine a ¨brother¨ and even my brother in-law a ¨brother¨. What did that really mean? Our desire to call each other brother was based on a need to feel a deeper connection that we weren´t getting from other men. One that we couldn´t get from the women in our lives because there is a uniquely male ache, just as there is a uniquely female ache that we cannot relate to as men. And this ache isn´t satiated just by playing sports, fixing or building things, complaining about politics, or going to bars and trying to get laid. So what the hell is it?

Raphael and I attended a men´s group in Canada to get a feeling for what other men were talking about and feeling together in these kind of circles. I had never been to one so I had no idea really what to expect. The men in the circle were processing an issue that had been effecting them as a group and was centered on one man in particular. What was refreshing was that I was around other men who were actually being more real than I was used to experiencing outside of my relationship with Raphael. However, in the end it was really nothing more than a place to off-gas frustration, letting it permeate the space without actually getting to the heart of the issue so that there could be movement and healing.

In the circle there was a sense of brotherhood but it still didn´t hit the mark for me. Not by a long shot. Relieving frustration is not enough. I am certain not all men´s groups are like this. I don´t want to generalize by my one experience. One could say, ¨Well, at least they have that outlet.¨ I guess so, but why stop there? There is collective ache out there that is so desiring to be felt by those that feel the same. In all the expressions of ¨brotherhood¨ from the dense to the more porous, I feel you, I, and all of us are searching for love and a reclaiming of our authentic male power.

I feel ¨man-love¨ deserves its own dedicated blog space, so I will get to that on a later post. The loss of our natural power as sacred masculine beings has occurred over history. Our separation from our spiritual essence, I feel, has led to a collective experience of fear and isolation. The male psyche, without feeling its divinity, needed to gain some sort of control in order to cover over this existential terror. Over the centuries, many men, and women, have tried to direct us back to the source of our real nature as spiritual beings, but only to be rebuffed by the empirical, the tyrannical, and the industrial.

Men in days gone by gave their lives for ¨freedom¨. Men, and women, are still doing it today. I put the word in quotes because it feels like a loaded term. Whereas a kingdom is the domain of a king, freedom is the domain of the free. It represents power. The ability to live in your fullest expression. But what is your fullest expression? Is it to be able to digest all the entertainment you want? Is it to be able to buy all the coolest technologies that complicate rather than simplify your life? Is it to be able to work your ass off for 30 years only to find out all your savings disappeared because the fuckers in charge shorted all the stocks that were in your 401k? Fuck no!

The Tyranny of Industry has put more men in slavery than any other despot in history. Is that an over the top statement? Do you want me to find the ´facts´? If that is the case then you are in the wrong room. I want you to feel this on a soul level. Look around you. What do you see and feel when you observe other men going through the motions every damn day? What has this done to our sense of power? Are the men and women overseas really fighting for ´freedom´ or are they handing over their power to the grim reapers of the corporatocracy?

All of this makes me feel a sadness in my heart. We have allowed ourselves to be divided and conquered. However, to make this an us versus them only puts us in the realm of victims. We are not victims. We are powerful beings who desperately desire to remember what we have forgotten. Even the men who are ¨in control¨ are no different than you and I. We are all brothers in need of a community of love. Individually, you need to feel your own responsibility in continuing the story that I mentioned in my last blog. What part do you play? Only then can you see what choices you can make to move from slave to sovereign.

The Industrial Age has had a huge impact on us as men in regards to our balls and our hearts. We are in a time of great change and upheaval. The control structure will try to hold on as long as possible but inevitably will collapse. This is where a vacuum is created. What will fill that empty space? Fanaticism or grounded, human leadership? A despot or a king? Looking at the world today it is hard to find a single example. We have a destiny together, you, I, and us . Rome is burning and what comes out of the ashes is totally up to us. I hope you will join me in creating another picture more humane and beautiful than the one I started out with.

My Week Back At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

By Kathleen Calder

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SoulFullHeart way of life asks us to be our biggest selves, yet also gives us room to breathe and feel our way into our next chapters, holding us the whole time.

I made a checklist. It contained ítems that part of me adamantly wanted to remember to bring with me ‘in case’ I needed them. Even with the intention of staying only a week, there is so much to remember to take with you physically in preparation for the off-grid, rural lifestyle. I held some concern that I would have to readjust after being away from it for 9 months and that it might be challenging to jump right back in.

Of course this happened on several levels since the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary is not just a physical existence. Even for the person who is not choosing to be emotionally or spiritually conscious, it wakens something on the inside and catalyzes movements within and without that are maybe unexpected. Though I guess that, based on my own experience of returning there, perhaps mostly everyone who goes there goes with an intention – something they want to find clarity about or something that simply needs to move inside them, even if it can’t be named in the moment.

I could hardly wait to give the gifts that I brought for my friends and teachers. Coming from the city, there is a sense of being able to give abundantly. However, I feel as if the gifts I received from them were worth more…reminding me that being given the opportunity to land inside an open and loving heart is the greatest gift of all. These three people have known me for four years now. We have been through a lot together and not just in a physical existence sense, but in terms of emotional terrain. They are easily the people who know me best. The reason? I can’t perform for them for long. My parts, etheric or emotional, cannot dance in front of my authentic inner reality without being felt and detected. These people will not be duped and they will not stand my shrinking. I could not stand theirs either. SoulFullHeart way of life asks us to be our biggest selves, yet also gives us room to breathe and feel our way into our next chapters, holding us the whole time.

I arrived at the Sanctuary with the intention of finding clarity for my life situation and what I should feel into doing next. I have been in a relationship for the last few months. It has been very loving and with a man I have adored but I have been missing the exploration of my soul consciousness, which I seemed to mostly put on pause after leaving the Sanctuary in April. My romantic partner and I have had different focuses in our lives and that has been good for us as a couple in some ways, but has been hard for us in others. It has also been unfair to him that I haven’t been happy living in Puerto Vallarta. He was the main reason why I wanted to be there. I wanted to inhabit life with him and see where it took us. We moved in together quickly but I don’t regret a single thing about that. It was what we both wanted and I knew from the beginning that it could bring the relationship to a speedier completion, or of course that it might not either.

My years in SoulFullHeart, my templating from Raphael and Jelayan as my teachers and my relationship with Sequoia (he was Christopher at the time), all taught me to go in, in and in, holding any fears but following the love flow in front of me, trusting that no matter where my heart takes me I will benefit and others will too. I’m feeling now how life is not a game of finding something to keep forever. We aren’t entitled to that. Lasting love is possible, as Raphael and Jelayan have found, but it comes with a journey of finding your own love overflow that cannot begin until you authentically love and mate with yourself.  All the time in and out of relationships is practice and experimentation. The only formula for keeping love is the one that keeps us in stuck relationships that don’t deepen or evolve and keeps us from growing and healing individually.

In a way, I feel humility when I think about this, but also I feel like I breathe a bit easier. I guess that means that I have held a lot of stress in the past of making a life phase or a romance ‘last forever’ when I inherently know that it may not be meant to and that in some ways I may not actually want it to. I now feel much more open to where life wants to take me next, trusting a bit deeper that whatever happens next will only lead me to more healing and feeling more complete inside myself.

My time with the others, but also my time alone, felt more fulfilling during this week at the Sanctuary than it did in the past. So much so that I feel drawn to live there again. I have just completed all there was to complete in Puerto Vallarta, including the romance that I have held dear. The latter is the toughest part right now. The details of that I will keep to myself for now since it’s pretty raw for both of us.

I feel as if my return to the Sanctuary is a return to me. It is my self-love and my desire to have more self-love that I can share with others and help them heal too that led me there originally and is leading me back there to live. I am born to be a healer, especially during this time of transition for the planet and humanity. I have an emerging self that I have barely tapped into in these last 28 years. I am a complete mystery to myself in the moment and I find that refreshing. I’d rather feel like I am an unfolding story than a book that has already been written and read twenty times. All I have right now are clues to who I could be and am becoming and I can’t imagine another place where I can explore this than at the Sanctuary with the support of my most intimate beloveds.

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.

A Series Dedicated to the Sacred Masculine: Introducing Diary of a HeartMan

Published on by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment
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Image by Light Worker

The story is bullshit and you know it on some level. You know, the one about who you are as a ¨man¨ in a seemingly soulless, invulnerable, industrial society. The one that convinces you that you have no personal power. That money rules and you are its bitch. That you should ¨pick a side¨ and go to battle against an opposition that is owned by the same fucker that owns yours. The story has cut off your balls, closed your heart, and has left you feeling impotent, pissed off, or both.

All of this affects the way we relate to each other as men. Real men. Not the assholes that want to dominate, violate, and discriminate in the name of the Holy, the Law, or the Almighty Dollar. Not the sackless automotons who do their time like good little citizens waiting for the end of their life to actually live their life. I mean those of us who are actually conscious of what the hell is going on and feel a deep desire to connect to other men about it in a vulnerable way. But fusing to the story has made us less vulnerable, just as our fathers before us and their fathers before them. That expressing our deepest despair, fears, and/or rage is not acceptable, desirable, or functional.

In this series I want to create a room for you and I to feel together what being a man in our current society has done to our sacred masculinity in relationship to ourselves, women, the earth, and our essence as infinite love. I want to pierce the veil of our collective facade. See what lurks in our shadow and shines in our light. See what it is we are truly made of that has been covered over and forgotten in this post-modern world. What is your soul cry about? Why are you and I here together at this particular time in history? How can we come together and heal what is preventing us from truly being brothers in heart and soul?

We swim in the same ocean, you and I. Everyday. We are a lot more alike than a part of you thinks. We are inextricably connected and affected in our sufferings and our joys. There is an opportunity for us to feel and heal our way to be the kings we have forgotten we truly are. I invite you to participate with me in this exploration in male vulnerability, power, and spirituality. You may agree or disagree, lightly or fiercely. The question is, can you show up for it?

This room is obviously one in which women are equally invited to participate. It is through the heart of the feminine that we ultimately find our true masculine. A king doesn´t quite possess his full kingliness without a queen. Our relationship to the collective feminine will be explored at length in this series. I hope to hear from many women during the course of this series to add to the depth of feeling and breadth of context.

You can comment on the blog below or email me at cheartman@outlook.com. I am not connected to the internet daily, so it may be a few days before I can respond. I look forward to connecting with you, learning from you, and hopefully getting to know you.

Sequoia Heartman is an apprentice teacher at SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. Visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary website for more.

Expression (Duality) Vs. Essence (NonDuality): Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

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

By Raphael Awen

I hope you’ve read what we’ve covered so far in this series. You may need it for where we’re going today.

In the previous blog, we started saying some things about the unknowable nature of the nondual. This of course is said to be the height of insanity and hubris both: using our dualistic minds to attempt to describe nonduality because the nondual ‘just is’ and cannot be known or described. The mind has this bent towards trying to grasp knowledge and, as we shall soon see, this approach doesn’t work so well with the nondual as it is not a thing to be grasped.

In today’s exploration, let’s see if we can get the mind to loosen up a bit from this attempt at capturing and possessing knowledge to be more in a place of childlike observation and wonder and letting the virgin unknown remain unmolested and wild. This would be a beautiful ‘letting in’ of our nondual nature – a nondual awakening of its own.

Sex is ever the great metaphor and teacher here. While sex is a great mystery that can be written about, described and portrayed – many hard-ons and orgasms later, it still isn’t any closer to being known. The more it’s explored, the farther away from being known it gets!

Today, with this childlike wonder, we’re going to do a side-by-side comparison of our Expression and our Essence, and begin to look at the oneness (inseparability) of these two. We’re going to attempt some technical description, but all in an effort to open out the childlike wonder further, and further, and still further.

Let’s start with what we mean by the two terms.

Expression is the magical and captivating awakening that birthed a ‘you’ into the world of duality, a world of ‘twoness’, many ‘twonesses’ in fact, from a world of one oneness. I call it a ‘dual awakening’, because it was just that. You and I were awakened into a state of the wide and wonderful world of the dual. It’s so captivating that most of us struggle to retain any awareness of the Essence we were sourced from and actually are.

Essence is your awakening into the nondual, which is actually more of a re-awakening as you were parented out of the nondual. You knew it as part of the consciousness of the All. So this awakening is a remembering of being – being re-‘membered’ back to source, to our essence of nondual oneness.

Let’s start now with the side-by-side comparisons. Fasten your seat belts. Don’t worry if some of it feels a bit hard to track. This stuff is meant to bend the mind. We’ll debrief at the end.

The doorway into Expression is a doorway of fulfillment. You were individuated out from the nondual when and where all the nondual knew was its own satiation point (if there is one in an infinite world) of full-up ful-fill-ment.

The doorway into Essence is boredom. Boredom is our experiential saturation point where wonder has been so reduced by the mind, that the magic of arising isness has fallen prey to being normal. Here, boredom fuels a yearning and return to essence.

Expression is about being one of the many, an individual. Shoes, cars, sex, having a personality, career, etc., whatever makes up your sense of self-awareness and individuality.

Essence is about being one of the one. It’s all ‘Allness’. All just is in un-individuated awareness and stillness. No cars, no shoes, no sex, no personality.

You hold both of these polarities in your being, and when you feel both of them as real, you are moving towards deeper self-realization.

Our reality as Expression is about knowing through defining and comparing. ‘This, not that’ is the captivating mantra of expression. In knowing, we seek efficiency and effectiveness.

Our reality as Essence is all about ‘not-knowing’. As Essence, we get to yield and surrender to ‘not-know-our-way-to-knowing.’ Efficiency and effectiveness are useless here in Essence. You’ve already arrived.

In Expression, we give and receive love. Here, relationship finds an ‘other’ to be able to have a relationship with. Here, also, love attempts to get its definition by comparative difference. ‘Love is kind, love is patient, love is not evil or hateful.’ Love, in expression is very much conditional. It is ‘conditioned’ upon me feeling loving towards an ‘other’, or an ‘other’ deeming me worthy of love. Also here in Expression, hatred and evil serve to magnify Infinite Love’s reality by way of comparative difference.

In Essence, all is love and only love. No hate or evil to contrast it with. Here love doesn’t transact or relate, for there is no ‘other’ to relate or transact with. Love ‘just is’ in stillness and fullness. Here is where we get our ideas about ‘unconditional’ love. There is no other to condition love with.

Expression ‘happens’ to make up a story. Essence has no such drama. All is infinite stillness. You are deep stillness expressing in story.

Where expression has quest, essence has rest. The unsettling questing questions of ‘Who am I?, Why am I here? What is God?’, etc. are the result of our self-birth-awareness into duality. Essence knows only the rest of ‘love is all’, and ‘love pervades all’. You are inseparable quest and rest. Only your perception of being separate makes for your illusory unrest.

While expression seeks containment, essence seeks escape. Expression is like a child seeking to be held, reassured, that all this energy and ‘outboundness’ can return to a resting place when needed.

Essence has no need or any place for reassurance. It is somehow a full-up-full infinity. It fills All with All. You can’t get any more in. Instead, Essence seeks to pop out of itself, to ‘blow a gasket’ if you will and find a mirror in which to see itself, to come to know itself.

You, as inseparable Expression and Essence, get to breathe in the magical best of both worlds. Maybe we could call this ‘Expressence.’

In Expression we are vulnerable. Attesting to our vulnerability is that we seek medications of all kinds, both pharmaceutical and behaviorally, including our essential need for an ego to manage life. Suicide, in the form of literally killing oneself, or in the form of closing ourselves off to life by shutting down desire; all attest to this vulnerability.

In Essence, we are invincible. Here there is nothing that is not us that can stand opposed. Essence is the presence of ‘Allness’, which bears the burden of fullness. Joy without end.

Expression’s Utopias are many. The Christian Heaven is a good example, where the basic idea is all needs are met, joy and love filled, absence of evil, etc.

Essence’s Utopia, on the other hand, is its desire to come to know itself. To do this though, it had to come outside of itself to enter duality, the domain of comparative difference.

Let’s pause on the comparisons for now and see what we can feel about it all.

In all of these comparisons, I’ve hinted strongly at the central feeling point. You are a distinct ‘twoness’ that can’t be separated. When you try to separate them, you become a neurosis factory, hopefully helping you fall back into what you already are. So, don’t go looking for a nondual awakening as if it’s something outside of yourself to be found. You’d be like the confused fish who went off in search of water. You’re swimming it! By the same token, don’t attempt any form of making your duality bad, something to be transcended. You’d be a fish making water the issue.

Popular teaching on the nondual does just this when it teaches that all suffering comes from the nasty fact that we seek and we want all the time. Were it not for our desires and constant seeking (including spiritual seeking), we would avoid all suffering. Identify instead with your nondual nature, they say, and you’re free.

But you as an ‘individual’ are an ‘in-divi-dual’, which by definition is two parts that can’t be divided. You cannot identify, not healthily at least, with only your nondual nature any more than you can your dual nature alone. I’d like to offer that the real cause of suffering is related to this very splitting of consciousness that they are advising. In other words, you get to be both on fire with your wants and desires and surrendered to having need of nothing. The freedom from suffering is found in having both, not suppressing one at the expense of the other. That’s an alive and prospering human being! ‘Whatever you do, don’t kill your wanter,’ I hear the universe crying out from every cell that contains life!

Though the universe has so much more going on than we may ever come to know, it hasn’t got this all figured out as much as you and I would like to think it does. That thinking is a child’s projection on a parent. We’re coming of age now and maturing in how we see life. It’s literally making this stuff up as it goes. It’s ‘not-knowing’ its way to knowing, and you and I are on the cutting edge of its experiment.

The universe needs you to know itself, and you need it to know yourself.

You are Infinite Love’s wild and untamed frontier.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Subscribe to this blog to receive each new posting from Soulfullheart Sanctuary directly in your email.

Our Essence As Infinite Love: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

(This is Part 3 of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales. To begin at part 1, go here)

By Raphael Awen

We left off in the previous blog in this series with an introductory feeling tone of being infinite love. We felt into how who and what we see ourselves as needs a deep and overwhelming expansion of consciousness to let in the higher reality of infinite love. We need to add in here that this reality of infinite love includes the other infinities of infinite possibility, infinite stillness, infinite potential, and infinite power. There’s more you can add in. After all, it’s only words and language we’re using to attempt to access a feeling tone of your essence.

There is nothing more powerful than a feeling tone that moves through your being and colors your self-perception. When you’re depressed, we could say that you are depression. While not a true statement of your essence, you have for many intents and purposes, become depression in this dimension. Your self-perception, already shrunken to the five-sense earth dimension, now shrunken further into a narrower still bandwidth of perception has become flooded with a powerful feeling tone.

Let’s for comparison sake say that the opposite of the word ‘depressed’ is ‘expressed,’ (because we can invent our own lexicon anytime we want, after all, we are infinite possibility!) I’d certainly rather be in a state of expression than depression, and wouldn’t we all? Well, the truth of that question is actually, no, most of us only think we would rather be in a state of expression over depression. Depression is a shut down and safe place that we subconsciously and understandably choose as a soul, out of wounded emotional patterns. Then parts of us buy into the pathetic current biological and medical paradigm and get to play victim and draw some sympathy. What’s crazier still though is that the depressed person actually not only plays victim with their depression, they also use it to avoid the depression.

Depression is actually one of the soul’s beautiful doorways leading into healthy and alive expression and unless you are willing to honor your depression, you won’t find this doorway. This is the pattern of choice for most, because leaving depression and entering expression of essence (very different from happiness which is more of a medication) is a deeply fearful thing (as well as very understandable). We’ll get into soul-fear dynamics and how they conflict with our innate desire to grow a couple blogs from now, but my point here is that getting into your essence is getting into a feeling tone that floods your being, that colors it, that irreversibly changes everything about you, never to return again to life as you knew it. Thank god it’s a progressive thing that digests and unfolds in your life, or we’d all pop circuits and become true loonies if it were not so, but it is without a doubt, personal transmutation, at a pace you can bear. You become different at the core of your being.

If you’re not up for the world of feeling, or have some story that feelings aren’t real, save yourself a whole lot of frustration and leave off this path now of seeking to experience essence. Many spiritualities, especially the ones that teach about ‘the nondual essence of all being’ (which is what we are getting into in this series) are just this kind of suffering loop that pound their pulpit declaring that your feelings can and must be ignored, turfed or transcended in some form to allow you access into your essence. They go on further to say that this is the core of your suffering: that you want. It’s your needs and desires that are at the root of all your suffering.

Simply follow their method and picture of reality to kill your wanter, or ignore it sufficiently, and you pop into another magical dimension. ‘Does this actually work?’ you say. Well of course it ‘works,’ or there wouldn’t be myriads of souls embracing this approach. But what ‘works’ is that only a part of you got into the door of some aspect of your essence, while entire swaths of your being got paved over. Here you find the common denominator of Christianity and the New Age Movement. Who’d have imagined these strangest of bedfellows coming to the same demise? We are so nearing the end of these partial solutions and it’s evident that many of us are rattling our cages in hunger for and even demand for more. I support that rattle.

I almost feel to apologize for the rant energy flowing through me right now. But I have no apology. You can find teaching galore on essence, but what you won’t find much of is any personal transparency, real transparency on how that’s working or not working for the person teaching it. Sorry, but I have no interest in that teaching or teacher. ‘Get real or go home’ a part of me so wants to say to both spiritual teachers and spiritual seekers. I, in contrast to this part of me, can more tenderly admit the personal hurt and pain of lost relationship, underlying this anger. One way or another, the universe will learn what it seeks to learn. It’s our choice what role we play in that.

Thank you for feeling this. I hope I’m making you mad or glad. We need to get into the feeling domain big time if we hope to access true and lasting connection to our essence.

So then, now that we hopefully made some sacred space to feel into essence, what can we say about it? It has been called the ‘nondual’ for lack of a better term. What is meant by this is that the realm of true essence is non dualistic. It is not the world of dualism; that is comparative difference.

A little boy recognizes an airplane in the sky and says, ‘Look, airplane.’ He’s already lost a good amount of his wonder at the sight, compared to the first time he saw one, now that he has the label for it. The label is already taking over the awe of the actual thing. Not much later, it no longer even raises his eyebrow. This is a picture of how the dualistic mind labels and enters the world of ‘this, not that’ and so deadens experience by categorizing and labeling. Wonder is reduced to a computer like filing system.

So, if the ‘nondual’ is not all this, then what is it? It is the world where ‘twoness’ doesn’t exist. There is no other to compare or ‘dualize’ with. All is arising wonder. Many say that this state is not a state, for to call it that, you would be in effect defining it, and it cannot be defined or compared. It just is. It is the upstream reality and source of all matter, life and consciousness. Experientially, people who claim this awakening to the nondual claim to be free of this ‘deadening to wonder’ overlay that all of had to take on in becoming human.

It’s sort of like the proverbial ability to ‘stop and smell the roses,’ but from an altered state of mind, or better said, from a mind broken of its need to dominate the essence of a thing. It’s kind of funny, because here we are pretzeling our minds trying to define and understand the nondual which is said to be indefinable and unknowable. I like to offer that the nondual is a return to a magical state of wonder, coming more and more free of the mind’s deadening effect, and more essentially, that this state of being is actually your home frequency of being.

Now, for instance, if you need to arrive somewhere on time, you’re still going to need your dualistic mind. 8 o’clock comes an hour earlier than 9 o’clock. Time is one of the biggest illusions of all. We simply made it up with our minds’ ability to dualize and then all synchronized our watches. Voila, see you at 8! Time isn’t real. Money is another one. So is language. These are all things we made up for our own purposes. Totally cool shit to say the least. All of the mind’s abilities in these ways are not to be downplayed. They do a ton for us, but they also seriously limit our hunger to experience essence.

What we wrestle with so strongly in our search to return to essence and its awakening is actually an awakening in itself that came before. It is your awakening into duality from nonduality that your mind is still mostly not done with yet. You were born out of the nondual (mind you, you weren’t a ‘you’ in the state of oneness) into duality, you were sourced out of it. You are ‘dual awakened,’ we could say. Hence like the little boy, you live in a world of comparative difference. It’s a powerful thing in and of itself, but with the obvious downside of becoming so identified with duality that almost all connection to our essence is lost. Bad news indeed! ‘No me gusta’ we’d say here in our emerging Espanol – ‘I don’t like.’

What helped me recently is feeling into my essence as infinite love. I again say feeling, because the mind can’t grok the word ‘infinite,’ being finite as it is. I feel energy coming from my original source nature assisting me in letting this in. Jelayan recently wrote beautifully about letting in the ‘drip-line of my nondual nature.’ It sends a wave of awareness over my being that I can feel wants to flow more and more.

In the next blog in this series, I will get into side-by-side comparison of our essence (nondual) and our expression (dual). Admittedly, that’s a very dualistic thing in further attempt to ‘explain’ the nondual. Maybe, we will all reach the edge of our minds tolerance for such insanities and pop over into the nondual, or at least into a big soaker hose like Jelelle’s article offered.

Raphael Awen is a co-creator and a facilitator at SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Follow him on twitter @raphaelawen for blog updates and more or subscribe to this blog (if you haven’t already) to receive each new posting from Soulfullheart Sanctuary in your email.