By Raphael Awen
I’d like to share a deep personal update regarding myself and my relationship with Jelelle.
A few weeks ago, Jelelle and I agreed to give some space, and to sleep apart for a night or two, and that quickly arose to more clarity and relief and draw towards giving ourselves back to ourselves. A peaceful, palpable and supported guidance arose each day, amidst the shock and grief of that at the same time, to let go of our romantic and sexual bond of 12 plus years, and to see what wants to come next beyond that.
Something undeniable was completing, had become more recognizable in recent months, and had now gone full circle and all we could do was be with it each day for the past several weeks. We checked in with one another most days since sharing deeper digestions, discoveries, apologies, many tears and love. Our immediate Soulfullheart community around us was our first line of support and we then in turn shared this on our members only Soulfullheart Portal. The support and love was overwhelming, making this unimaginable feared thing, somehow doable, albeit a rollercoaster at the same time.
Jelelle and I agreed that we would like to share this publicly now in concert with one another as it feels weird at some point to not be transparent, after a needed more private space was taken. I feel accountable to love itself, to be transparent about my story, my gains, my losses, and then to let love return me to me, and me back to love.
This is definitely a strange time, and timed with Gaia’s own solstice movements into death and rebirth. I feel weak in my body and mind to be sharing this all now, but I trust it at the same time. A cold arose in my body and has been moving through, something I can’t remember having a full on cold like this in so many years, understandable now as the body, heart and soul goes into a deep reset.
I shared on our recent group call that Jelelle and I led that I felt maybe the one greatest treasure of discoveries this life is a discovery that has since led to all the discoveries and treasures that followed, including the treasure of these years with Jelelle, and that single most outstanding discovery is the ability to grieve. Without the ability to grieve, we limit ourselves from life’s death and rebirth cycles. Being incarnate into human form is to sign up for gain and loss, for joy and sorrow, and to the degree I can let in and feel the loss, is the degree the deeper joy that wants to come is then allowed to come.
At 19, when a girlfriend broke up with me, it took me a full additional 19 years for life to feel safe enough for me to come to a place to let in the grief of that loss. The loss, though 19 years prior, was now through an awakening process like it was the week before as I suspended life as I knew it sufficiently to allow the waves of grief and tears to roll through. Looking back at that delayed grief experience now, some 20 years later, I can feel how epic of a turning point that was for me and how subsequent life changes that arose could be referenced back to that time. It was the kindergarten of my relationship to grief. I felt so human to feel my grace to lose deeply and in that to prepare for the magic of what was lost to return in whatever ways it wanted to. Being able to draw the relationship with Jelelle and then have the ability to show up for the many rigors that relationship would call me too was definitely rooted in that earlier grief process.
Fast forward to today and I can so see how the arising treasure now in all this journey is the deepening into the love that wants to exist, me to me, my feminine to my masculine and vice versa, a love that can never be lost, or ‘taken away’.
That all may sound a bit like a contextual big picture kind of perspective, and it is to be sure, but it doesn’t take away from the waves of feelings of allowing myself to completely melt down, repeatedly these past weeks into inconsolable tears at times of letting go. A deep and profound consolation does arise when I can just allow each part of me to have their unedited and necessary reactions.
Jelelle and I have always acknowledged that our romantic bond would sustain while it was mutually growthful for us to deepen in this inward journey, and oh, how it has done that! This arising into deeper vulnerability where the only guarantee is an inward one, raises the stakes too, I’ve found, inviting more risk, more investment, more trust, and mostly more growth into The All that I Am.
Maybe some of you who have followed us feel surprised or even shocked on some level to feel us not sustaining as a couple. I can only tell you that that is a human tendency, and a familiar one of my own, to project some kind of perfection onto an other, to pedestalize, a projection of your own perfection that you are just not ready to quite hold just yet and so you need a place to put it for safekeeping. If I was a part of that projection for you, I am honoured to have served you in that, and I’m sorry for your loss, while at the same time feeling the needs for each of our pedestals to topple when the time is ripe. The beloveds closest to us know all too well the grist in our edges that showed up in our relationship, and how sacred and necessary those edges were. I particularly am discovering a torch of illumination onto my configurations and relationship patterns these past days again, feeling what was parked in shadow and what was energized in light, and how all of that wants and needs to be loved now in the relief of a sacred completion inside of me – a homecoming, a returning home to myself after an amazing mission into beauty and bounty, a time to debrief, to let go and let in.
To each of you who have loved and lost, and were subsequently willing to feel that loss, I feel like your kin, your kind, to have shared in that experience. To enter love is to enter love’s illusion and disillusion. Romance is particularly idyllic and fairy tale, where we are invited to make that fairy tale as true a fairy tale as can be, to ingest all of its experiences, and then to allow all of that to return to love itself. It’s got to be the biggest bravery and deepest vulnerability there is, to do this from the heart.
Inevitably, there is the temptation to assign blame in the aftermath, as a resistance, a distraction to feeling the depth of the loss. Thank God, Jelelle and I both seemed to have truly made it past that mile post some time back together. There’s like this banquet of love to be felt on the other side of the blame game. If no one is to blame, then I can see where I limited love and admit it and ask forgiveness, not to be absolved of guilt, but to let love have its new and ongoing way with me, and hopefully between Jelelle and I into new grounds of love together.
Beginning this month, as the place we’d been staying with the 5 of us as a community, was no longer available, and as our New Year travel plans for Malta were cancelled due to Covid, we all decided it was best and desirable to hunker down here in Glastonbury. Gabriel and I found a place to live in town to allow for the needed space to ground into this new reality, while remaining in connection as a fivesome here.
Thank you to each of you reading this, feeling me, yourself, as I pause to feel what else I’d like to say in this post. Making this public feels like another layer of digestion, of accepting this new reality. Sharing this is an opportunity to receive love from love itself in the form of your responses and I open myself to that love.
I’m so freaking grateful to have found my tears of reunion and to be a part of others finding their tears of reunion with themselves and with love. I’m grateful to serve others in their discoveries with love. I’m called to be this trans-parent, because god (our parent) knows, all that’s really needed is transparency – it heals everything and allows love to flow.
Jelelle, I want to say publicly how profoundly grateful I am to you to have been your partner in romance, in sensuality, in sexuality, in vulnerability, in angst, in tears, in longings, in service to others, in evolution, in bounty and beauty, and in loss too. If I can lose this much, what does that have to say about how much more there is to gain, in new forms of love, with myself, with you, with life and with others? You are truly beautiful beyond compare. I hope I can stay in the room to endure the new forms of that love that want to radiate between us and through us, to allow the gift of these past 12 years to continue to unfold, into more joint service, into deeper community and service with others. I love you.
Raphael
Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheart.org for more information about sessions, events, videos, etc.
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