The Tar Sands – Dirty oil and the future of a continent

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Wayne Vriend

I’m reading, “The Tar Sands – Dirty oil and the future of a continent,” by Andrew Nikiforuk. This book is a prophet’s call in our time…convincing, damning, and a wonder the author’s voice hasn’t been silenced.

I am shocked at how compelling greed and falseness is through and through our systems of government and business. Where have true leaders gone? Gone they are, we are a ship without a rudder, about to be hurled on the rocks of our own folly. Hopefully to some soft landing that saves us from ourselves.

The shocks come in waves; the shock of the living conditions in Fort McMurray, Alberta, the main town at the heart of the Tar Sands; the shock of the working conditions, the shock of the inflated wages and stunning cost overruns, the shock of the estimated 40% of workers high on cocaine and other drugs just to cope; the shock of the environmental protections agencies standard rubber stamp report of ‘no significant damage’ to the environmental impact study question at hand.

You have to be immune not to shocked by what you read about and feel in these pages.

The shock goes deeper however, than a ‘us vs. them’ kind of reaction. The shock goes into our collective addiction to cheap oil that has fuelled (pun intended) this reality. This is something we have co created as an industrial society and it is something we must together uncreate. It doesn’t seem however on the surface at least that there is much evident collective will to reverse this mammoth race to more and more raping of the earth, and plundering everything in our path for a feeling of security. But this is where mother earth will hopefully come to the rescue to save us from ourselves before it’s too late.

Scary too is our current Canadian government’s evangelical christian leanings that hold that the earth is soon to be burned up by God himself and a new heaven and a new earth popped in it’s place. And it’s belief that people who get worked up about saving the planet just don’t get that the far more important job is saving one’s soul from eternal torment in hell. This, of course, can’t be outright admitted, but look at the environmental track record and our recent pull out of the Kyoto accord. Something much bigger than just a political persuasion is at work here.

God’s kingdom is coming to Canada, and it’s a boom for the tar sands, like it or not. But the huge cost and devastating environmental impact can’t be underestimated.

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

Petropolis: Stopping The Tar Sands

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

Every Canadian…every consumer of gas, should watch Petropolis, a film from Green Peace that offers a stunning aerial perspective on the Alberta tar sands. There’s very little narration as miles and miles of scarred, gouged, poisoned, and stripped land are juxtaposed against pristine and breathtakingly beautiful images of the still untouched acres of the Boreal Forest.

The abuses of our land, of our planet, so poignantly demonstrate how we are out of balance as a species- expressing our male shadow side…..achievement-based, short-sighted, dominating, and greedy….following urges and unchecked impulses in masochistic and saddistic ways without feeling compassion, remorse, or the bigger context of the impact it has on our world and the world our children will inherit from us.

While watching this film, I often gasped, near tears, “How can we let this happen to our earth?”, shocked by the destruction and devastation depicted in the images. Wayne replied (also disgusted but less shocked because he had seen these tar sand images before), “Out of sight is out of mind for most people. Remember too that the Tar Sands are a really lucrative industry for Canada.”

This film puts what is out of sight into the mind and, hopefully, into the heart and into the awakening consciousness happening around the world. Yes the demand is there for fossil fuels and it can be answered this way…but at what long-term cost for such temporary gain?

Information below is from the film’s website about the dangerous effects of this relatively new and expensive (the cost much beyond a financial one) means of meeting the world’s demands for and ever decreasing supplies of oil:

Located beneath 4.3 million hectares of boreal forest in Alberta, Canada, the tar sands are a mixture of sand, clay and a heavy crude oil called bitumen that is either mined in open pits or extracted from underground by injecting superheated water.

Getting the oil out of the tar sands uses roughly three barrels of water per barrel of oil, or as much water as a city of two million people. After use in tar sands processing, 90 per cent of this water is so contaminated with toxic chemicals that it must be stored in tailings ponds so huge that they can be seen from outer space.

Tar sands oil production releases five times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil production. Tar sands projects will release an estimated 40 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2007 and ensure that Canada will continue to be one of the worst greenhouse gas emitters per capita in the world. – From Petropolis

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

The Collapse: Helping Us Find Our Way

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Wayne

For over a year now, investors around the world are holding their breath watching the drama unfold over whether the Greek Parliament will choose to default on its’ debt or instead to ‘kick the can down the road’ by complying with the IMF’s crushing austerity demands in return for yet another ‘loan.’ Everyone in this power play knows, but won’t admit, that the newly loaned money cannot – and will not – be paid back. So, why all the fuss getting Greece to accept new loan money? Because this would buy a bit more time and delay the seemingly inevitable collapse a bit longer. It would buy a bit more time to scramble for a bigger scrap of control or power.

Authorities are ever reluctant to simply state what they know, especially in this case with Greece: ‘This ship will sink.’ When a leader hits a wall and can’t get through it, their leadership is in complete jeopardy and the power advantages that come with it. A true and genuine leader should be able to say, ‘I’ve hit a wall and don’t know the way through, but I’m looking for it.’ This admission, this confession, would be honest and transparent, but would also probably cost the leader their following. People generally choose the leader who gives them best feelings, even if (and especially if) they are not based in reality.

The Bigger Picture is not:

The bigger picture is not just about the economic collapse of Greece and all the dominoes that would fall as a result of it; or the global unrest of the Arab Spring countries; or the riots that just occurred here in Vancouver over our beloved Hockey (the way we Canadians like to relate with our suppressed rage); or about our contracting economies; or Obama’s ever expanding wars; or our oil reserves drying up; or mother nature’s unprecedented (in our lifetime at least) droughts, floods, tornadoes, tsunami’s and nuclear catastrophes; or the mass animal deaths that have occurred this year. The bigger picture is not even just that life as we’ve known it and created it is moving unstoppably now on a conveyor built towards profound change that will affect every last one of us, everywhere.

The Bigger Picture is:

The bigger picture is that what isn’t REAL is collapsing and what is real is being reborn. And if this process doesn’t continue happening, the truth is that you and I don’t really want to be here on this planet.

So what is ‘Real’ ?

Is how you relate to money real? What about how you relate to time? Are your face-to-face friends real? How about your Facebook friends? Is your career and the feelings of security it affords you real?  Is your sense of the Divine real?

‘Real’ – when it all boils down – is about something being ‘Real-er’, as in more real. A walk is more real than playing a video game, for instance. And, more real yet is a walk in a forest over a walk in a shopping mall. More real still is feeling, while being in the walk in the forest, the interconnectedness of all life, instead of focusing on achieving your exercise regimen in less time than yesterday.

Your existence is as much a profound mystery as the thousands of year old trees you and I are conditioned to be mostly oblivious to. But profound mysteries are hard to draw nourishment from, to feel as real, and to let in as things that can make us feel good and alive about ourselves in our everyday lives. So we accept abiding with lesser things as real; we crave drugs and false perspectives to help us get by. Lesser justifications such as ‘I owe, so off to work I go’ or ‘I don’t have the time for that’ or ‘I have to get ahead.’

Here’s where The Collapse comes in.

And, it’s good news.

You and I don’t have a hope in hell of ‘making’ ourselves or others more spiritual, or more contemplative, or more connected to nature, or more engaged in what really matters. The truth is most of our efforts to become more centered or more engaged in what really matters actually achieve the opposite because they are rooted in the belief and culture and lifestyle that we are in fact not fully connected right now to the Divine.

In other words, you cannot become any more connected to the Divine than you already are, but you definitely can become more aware and conscious of that reality, just as you can feel a whole lot less connected to the Divine by making an effort to become closer.

And herein lies the rub: How THEN does that effort to become more conscious of our already existing connection with the Divine not just become another self defeating religion and internal and externally played out conflict?

The truth is we are too deep in the soup of our falsely created world now to find our way out by ourselves. I can’t tell you how we will find our way. I can admit, however, that I can’t tell you, and that’s more than most will afford you. I guess I am a little proud of that fact, and that helps to mask the hurt I feel of feeling so largely alone in this choice, to seek realness over influence.

The Collapse, however, can tell us and lead us in the way out of this soup. It can sort us; it can let die what must die in order for our ‘realer’, ever emerging, truer us be given the permission to arise.

The chaos and hell you and I and this planet are about to go through can only be felt as arising goodness if we can feel that the collapse is not malevolent (intending to harm us), but rather a passionate and compassionate bringing us back to finding our way.

And when we do find our way, I can assure you, we will look back in gratitude for what we would never have consciously dared to ask for. We will no longer envy our pets for being more connected to nature than we are. We will not be disconnected from each other or from the Divine in the way we have become now.

In the meantime, be kind with yourself and the pressure you are about to feel and are already feeling way more than most people let themselves feel. This is cooperating with the Divine in creation and in sometimes necessary destruction. Cooperation comes in the form of an invitation to connect with your daemon– your divine guide and guardian, who can offer humanity comfort and clarity during these troubled time in our evolution.

I feel this is our true reason for being here on the planet at this time. A time like no other.

Divine Feminine Invitation To Love

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

By Jillian

How do you write from stillness? From stillness that asks you to communicate nothing; that requests nothing of you; that is indefinable? How do you write about nothing and the invitation of the ever arising moment that is both nothing and everything? How do you write about the invitation to be and not to do?

The words I’ve written in the past (many which are no longer published) have tried: the effort was in every syllable and every sentence. The effort was in the collaboration of them into a book form; the effort was in needing others’ to read them in order for them to feel real; the effort was in the need to inspire and to influence without being fully authentic to how I was really feeling about the people I was serving.

How do you write of process without the alluring promise of attainment and enlightenment? How do you write of the process that is being with the feminine aspect of God in the moment where the future is unknown and the past is being asked to be let go of? And beyond writing about it, how do you offer this process to others as it is; as it is a state of being and not doing? There is nothing to attain here; nothing to gain as an achievement. How do you offer something that promises nothing and yet asks for so much to be given up? How do you offer the divine feminine aspect of God to a world which is so dominated by patriarchal male god frequencies?

These have all been pressing questions for me. Yet, lately, the question for me is deeply personal: What is BEING with her? This is new, it feels like, being with this question in a way that is not about doing anything, defining anything, making a paradigm out of anything, needing to prove anything or give up anything, teach others anything, or attain anything.

She is made of veils; She is mystery. Her face is shifting, arising, and familiar all at the same time. I can’t stand in absolute truth behind what I’ve written before about Her in the past. I can’t state definitely that she appears only in four faces and which of those faces is associated with which season. She will not be paradigmed or systemized; this is all I can seem to know about Her. She is like ash slipping through any fingers that try to contain or hold Her.

I thought I was to light incense; I was to pray; I was to learn and receive and give “Reiki”; I was to write about Her and how to be with Her and Her four faces; I was to hold circles and “workshops”; and I was to hold other people in this process too. As much as I resisted a paradigm, I felt pressured and compelled to make one out of her. I have no desire for doing any of that in the same way. I cannot find or experience her in any of those things or in any doing other than responding in the moment to what is offered without needing to carry out a ritual or to wrap my experience of Her into a mental bubble of understanding.

I cannot define anything beyond calling it, “love” that She is holding the possibility for in every single moment. A “love” that is organic, natural, real, and not as separate as it once felt to me to be. A “love” that moves between the wondrous man called Wayne who has linked his life and journey with mine. I feel her hold the container for the exploration of this love in every moment.

As I let go of understanding and defining her, I have surprisingly begun feeling her lately in people drawn to our meaningful connections group. Her essence flows in their association with Her, in their past experiences in other lifetimes, in their religious conditioning. I felt her in the tender relationship of a young girl part raised Catholic living inside of a vibrantly intuitive and spiritual woman. I felt her in the powerful energetic frequencies of a sensitive and beautiful man. I felt her catalytic force rumbling possibility through the defended layers of a marriage. And, I feel her in the steady invitation to Wayne and me to transparently lead with our hearts open, our boundaries set, and our desires flowing.

She is the canvas that holds the picture of life and the womb out of which life is created. I accept her without a name or a story or a creed or a cult or a gospel or a paradigm. I accept her as a feeling, as a deeply personal experience, as related to intimately by every soul whether they are conscious of it or not. I accept Her as the invitation to love.

Letting in what we really want

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012: Year of Transformation and Letting Go

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

By Jillian

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of Emotional ‘Extend and Pretend’

Published on by Raphael Awen

By Wayne

We are in the middle of huge change.

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

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

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

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

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

Your only requirement is yielding to this story of you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring Femininity In Relationship: Responding versus Charging Ahead

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

By Jillian

Desire can be an ember. It can be slow burning. It can be tentative and hesitant; cautious and unsure. Desire can be provisional and exploratory; unsettled and indefinite. Desire can be open to consideration; speculative about how it will be ultimately fulfilled. Yet, always hungry and eager to be fed.

My desire has been ravenous at times; eating up greedily, swallowing up, galloping ahead, making hasty choices and rushing in, eager to finally feel satisfied. This hustling, mad dash to the finish line, has led to rushed decisions at times and hurried commitment to situations that were more frustrating than fulfilling.

This rush to gratify my own desires impacted my marriage by creating a dynamic between me and my husband Wayne where I was leading, charging ahead, and he often felt that his desires, concerns, and leadership didn’t have much room to be expressed. It was if the fire of my desire and my vision would consume us both. While I loved feeling that passionate surge inside of me, what I came to realize was that what I really desired was to collaboratively create, and lead with Wayne as an expression of our intimacy and closeness with each other.

I’ve experienced that intimacy invites us to heal by offering a ground of deepening familiarity and closeness with another person that also provides us with a powerful mirror in which to see ourselves. As the saying goes…Into-me-I-see through intimacy. Through my relationship with Wayne, I was able to see that the way I related to my own desire was more masculine in nature than feminine. I feel that the invitation to a woman in intimacy with a man is to respond to male leadership with her own desires and leadership. Responding this way allows a woman to rest in her heart, in her trust, and in her yin power.

Female Yin power, to me, is not so much about creating results and taking action (although of course we do!), as it is about feeling the emotional truth of a situation, leading with our heart, supporting our mate, and trusting that where he is leading is where we need to go next. This does not mean we are blindly following along or being subservient to our mate.

I had been a single woman and mother for many years before my marriage and was used to following my own desires to the exclusion of any one else. I was my own mate in this way, married to myself, and got used to not having to collaborate with anyone around major life decisions or choices related to following my passions. Yet, I also ached for that mirror of Intimacy to offer me a deeper look at myself; and I desired for a mate that I could collaborate with, be inspired by, and co-lead with.

Three years into my marriage, I am now in a phase where I feel that what I most deeply desire is to feel that my desire can heat up, it can be a seed or a flicker. And, most of all, that it can be fanned by, inspired by, and ultimately gets fulfilled by the beautiful union of my husband’s desires with mine.

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

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Wayne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following Your Heart’s Path

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Wayne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really….?

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

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

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

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

And, move on.

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