Tag: awakening

Premise 17: You have a mind, you are not your mind

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Raphael Awen

premise17

Welcome to day 17 of the 21 day SoulFullHeart Magical Mystery Premises tour.

I’m not quite sure if I should be out writing today, feeling not quite all here mentally, but in a way that feels really good. The stranger part is that today’s premise is called the ‘Beyond Mental Premise.’ How fitting.

Let’s see where we end up and as long as I have a few designated drivers just in case. And no, it’s not about a drug-induced high. 🙂

Today’s premise goes like this:

“We have a mind; we are not our mind.”

The very term mental illness is grounded in our collective mental illness. It’s the minds way of trying to reconcile a world without feeling. The mind needs to be grounded in feeling, but alone it can never get there. Without feeling, the mind goes nuts. Then it goes to insane lengths to reconcile a world void of feeling. People that are recognized as functional and well adapted people are essentially people who are at present reconciled to their mental illness with a societally accepted and ‘co-signed’ mortgage on their true sanity.

You have a mind, but you are not your mind.

Most people cannot fathom the essence behind these words. The mind is so in the forefront of navigating life and has been for so long, that parts of us have no other sense of identity or reality apart from the domain of the mind.

Who you are and what you are is so much more than the computer that is doing your 5 sense calculations for you. You may claim to believe what I am saying and agree deeply. But this alone doesn’t mean you live outside of the almost total mental domination and control of the mind.

Belief is a function completely of the mind.

Feeling is the function of the heart. The heart has ways and means the mind knows nothing about. An easy test to see if something is a feeling vs. a belief is to see where the tears are. You may pat your heart while you speak your beliefs, but without movement expressed in tears and vulnerability, you are still squarely in mental territory. Another easy test to see what’s of the mind vs. the heart is to feel where someone’s words do not match their energy.

The smiling clerk asking to help you is usually so dragged out in anxiety and the toxic corporate environment they work in that the offer to help is something most of us tend to instinctually avoid or at least manage carefully as we engage. The energy doesn’t match the words. We’ve become so accustomed to this however that we are truly surprised to find and feel the unmistakable difference of when someone’s words and energy actually do match. We want to make them our new best friend. Jelelle and I experience this often as our energy does match our words, at least as far as we can feel.

Truly living from the heart is so shut down in our conditioning, in how we were raised and in our collective agreements about what relationality is, that access to the heart is almost all but completely sealed off.

This dire view of relationality as it exists now is a bedrock premise of SoulFullHeart’s offer. If it is too negative for you or bleak, I can simply say that this work wouldn’t be for you. We are not in any way about finding positive thinking solutions or spiritual ‘love and light’ practices or outlooks to bridge this deep ache and gap in what it feels like to be a human being on the planet at this time in our collective evolution.

Facing into this stark picture of where we are at without any denial mechanism to lessen it is the only grounded place from which one could healthily choose to get in touch with and thereby feel and heal the wounding they are carrying. The mind and the parts of us identified with it will not yield their dominance easily, no matter the degree of suffering.

It’s important here to feel that the mind and the parts of us identifies with it are not bad or wrong. They are simply doing the best they can.

I recently watched a popular teacher offer that in order to meditate effectively, one had to recognize the mind as being like having a monkey in your car while you are trying to drive. Not just a monkey he said, but one on drugs and one that had just been stung by a scorpion. No other way around this, he offered, but to simply get the mind to eventually shut up through repeated meditation. Can you feel how barbaric we’ve become in our drug dispensing solutions to medicate (including using meditation practice) rather than face our wounding?

SoulFullHeart instead sets out a path of getting to know and relate with the parts of ourselves that are stuck in the identity and prison of the mind. This is done through a heart open ‘template other’ that we refer to simply as a facilitator whose own work at opening their own heart makes them energetically and emotionally present and porous that no other certification or mental attainment can offer. Without this energetic and emotional presence, parts of us trapped in the mental domains simply cannot be elicited from their suffering. They can spot a fake with ease, and simply won’t respond. Why leave what feels like the best thing going to them?

Over time, once our parts experience, feel and come to trust reality adequately beyond the prison of the mind, it is so natural for them to be open to true creative play and imagination that comes from the heart and third eye. Now, the mind as the saying goes, can finally become our servant, rather than our master.

The other critical piece in SoulFullHeart’s picture is the arising authentic self, which we call the SoulFullHeart Self, who can show up consistently for the parts of us who are fused to mentally navigating life. This sovereign self, an inner reality, vs. an external spiritual practice or group, is the only way this can be healthy and sustainable. The answer is ever and only you. Read more about subpersonalities and the authentic self here:http://www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com/soulfullheart-subpers…

SoulFullHeart’s bold claim is only about helping you find that you.

I invite you to feel these words as deeply as you can. If you’ve read this far, I trust you have been. Let these words move you. Let them help you find your tears.

And if you’re ready for a bold action step of reconciling your words with your energy, contact us to explore a first free session together. Sessions are the doorway into SoulFullHeart if you are feeling to explore more. First session is free and very affordable after that.http://www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com/sessions

Thanks again for taking the premise tour. I am nothing short of honoured to have you along.

Raphael Awen is teacher and facilitator of SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information. 

Premise 13: Feeling our healthy human suffering is necessary

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By Raphael Awen

premise13

Welcome to mega day 13 of the 21 day ‘SoulFullHeart Magical Mystery Premises Tour.’

I know today is meant to be a big day of realization, and so I’m going out on a limb and calling it so. I’ll need your help though to make it happen as our energy co-creates more than we realize. We’re again going to enter conceptual ground today in search of heart ground, where a deep feeling doorway is opened out for us to feel together. Let’s see if the mind can surrender us to this doorway.

Thank you for pausing with me on the premises tour for the past few days as I was in what felt physically like a bit of a flu or a cold, but energetically and emotionally was a love bath awakening experience for me, that I can’t quite explain, it also feels important to not hide it either. I trust there’s some new energy here as a result for this and the remaining premises.

So today, we’re talking about suffering. Every spiritual path under the sun offers some explanation of the cause of suffering, from which and for which they offer a solution. SoulFullHeart is no different in this respect. My point though is about how far reaching this conceptualization of suffering and its cause is in any spiritual practice or healing modality. The suffering picture defines the healing picture. ‘Problem, reaction, solution’ is the lens we see so much through as everyone from sales training personnel and conspiracy theorists point out. This has to do with how we are wired. We want to find problems and fix them in our dualistic reality.

I’d really like to get to the root of our suffering and find a way to fix it, wouldn’t you? Pardon me for the ‘fix it’ language. In one way, you need no fixing, and perfection is found in imperfection. In another way, I very much want and need growth and change. Both are true.

Let’s have a look then at SoulFullHeart’s ‘Cause Of Suffering Premise’:

“What we refer to as suffering is actually about an unhealthy suffering over healthy human suffering. To be human is to keenly feel and in this way, to suffer. Unwillingness to have a personal relationship with this inherent vulnerability of being human manifests in the fear of love; lack of individuation; the illusion of the separate self from Self, Others, and God; and by not seeing the bigger soul reason behind healthy human suffering.”

In other words, you don’t suffer, rather you suffer over your suffering. Big difference.

Let me try and explain. (I feel something I want to get at today and feel together with you and I’m still feeling it and finding the words as I/we go. I feel like we are all learning together, even if I assume the role of teacher and you of student in this moment.)

To be human is to feel. Most of cultured human life, not in our essential expression, but rather in our fear-based strategized approach to living life is about not feeling. Pretty much any and every aspect of life can be and is related to medicatively as a ‘feel good’ drug used to not feel deeper realities of human vulnerability. Healthy, normal, good things in life are used every day as drugs to not feel, and in this way, constructive things are actually destructive in our lives.

You, as an embodied human, have deep needs. To fully live your human life requires beginning with feeling your needs. If you are willing to feel your needs and your vulnerability to those needs, then you are in other words dependent on something larger than you for your fulfillment, at least as how you define YOU most of the time.

I don’t grow my own food, build my own shelter. The money that I use to buy things I want and need is energy that comes to me by exchanging my energy with others energy. In this way, I am far from complete in myself. The love I experience with Jelelle is a projection of my self love, yes, but it just isn’t the same without her as a projection screen. To be human is to be in want and need. To be in want and need is to be in suffering. This is healthy human suffering. Hence, most people’s entire relationship to life, at a deep fundamental level, is about not feeling human vulnerability, or about limiting these feelings as much as possible.

It hurts to suffer. It hurts way more, however, to suffer over our refusal to feel our vulnerable human suffering. In this way, we are suffering over our suffering. I’m offering to you that what we call human suffering and all of its manifestations isn’t true suffering at all, but really about our refusal to feel our truest humanity, which is vulnerability. You are human. You get to hurt. You get to suffer.

When we refuse to feel our vulnerability, life brings to us jacked up expressions of suffering in the form of painful life circumstance asking us to get in touch with our humanity, i.e. feel our needs. Our refusal or inability to feel our human vulnerability leads to suffering over this vulnerability and that is the shit that really fucking hurts like hell, way more than the grounded suffering of being human.

Life and love are all conspiring to bring us back to the love we are and are expressions of.

If all of this is so, why would we wire it up this way, to suffer needlessly? Aren’t all of us looking for an easier way? Wouldn’t pragmatic selection help us find this easier way? How could we have missed this?

But, I say, we aren’t missing this, are we? We are looking at it right now. Holy shit! Could we be looking at something brand new? Others may well have said it before, but it’s still new to you and me and we for sure missed the memo if we are still stuck in suffering over our suffering! Right?

And it’s precisely this propensity to suffer over our suffering that we collectively aren’t getting yet, except in very small doses, which led us to create a garden with a pretty, but effective fence around it called SoulFullHeart.

When you elect to stop suffering over your suffering, people get mad and you will need a fenced garden to hold the energies you want and keep out the energies you don’t. You’re going to need to create a garden of your own, or come on and join us in creating one.

Let’s let this sink in for now and come to the rest of this premise next day.

Thank you for being a fellow ‘wonderer’ in this tour and you can take in my writing on the other premises on this blog. You can also find them by scrolling down on my personal fb timeline.

If I can directly help you in changing your relationship to your suffering, here is my/our sessions page at soulfullheartwayoflife.com/sessions.

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information. 

Premise 12: Collapse of Our Industrialized Way of Life Is Part Of A Death-Rebirth Phase

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By Raphael Awen

images-2

Good morning and welcome to day 12 of the 21 day ‘SoulFullHeart Magical Mystery Premises Tour.’

Today’s premise is one that is challenging to relate to. It is about the deep changes underway to our industrialized way of life. How we get food, water and energy is undergoing massive change.

Here’s the premise called the Deconstruction Premise:

“Our current industrialized way of life that provides food, water, and energy is collapsing, leading to massive change that is part of a bigger picture phase of deconstruction, death, and rebirth.”

Talk about a shift in premises!

Everything our current collective way of life is premised upon is based on cheap fossil fuel energy. Food from a store, water from a tap and gasoline from a gas station are all most of us have ever known. And it can’t continue the way it has. We’re literally running out of gas.

So severe is what we are facing that the shifts and changes in our environment point to the possibility even of near term human extinction.

SoulFullHeart has no interest in making a case for what we are going through, but rather seeks a way to hold what we are going through. Many of us on the planet are feeling these deep changes and many are offering all manner of responses, in order to prepare for the chaos to come, and really, the chaos is already here.

We recently made a big life change in leaving Canada, leaving careers, and moved to Mexico to live off grid. We did that for 18 months and just recently came back to living in the city of Puerto Vallarta. The changes we made had a lot to do with responding and preparing for the changes we saw coming.

Talk about a changing premise though. Like I said at the outset of this journey, a premise is not something written in stone for time and eternity. Far from it. A premise is simply a statement of what we currently see as foundational to how we are responding to life. We always need to be willing to let go of a premise or have it overhauled just as much as we are saying that the premises of any community need to be transparent.

We wrote an entire book on this premise called Living As If less than 2 years ago, and have since made the book unavailable because we shifted so much from where we were when we wrote the book.

Now, we still see the massive changes underway. We still see the need for preparation to be way more about inner preparation of the heart, like we wrote about in our book. But something deeper is shifting for us. And it’s a bit difficult to describe, but let me try.

When we feel a mental, in-our-heads approach to life, we will never be able to find trust and rest. No amount of external preparation for any coming storm will ever be enough. Even preparation of the heart is called into question, as much as we advocate for that. The bigger piece is the frame around how we relate to life itself.

Many and most may be simply not meant to weather this storm. Many are meant to lose their physical lives. Loss of life as we see it through our 3 dimensional mind-body perception of life is not how life itself sees life. Life is energy and there can be no loss of energy. Energy is ever and only changed, but never lost. There is no such thing as loss of life, in this sense that lives beyond 3D perception.

There is no avoidance of change. We all will go through great change. We are in fact in it right now. In another way, we have always been going through great change. It’s just that a time of much more sudden change is upon us.

Accepting this, coming to terms with it, is about adopting a reverence for what we have right now, and being fully present to the moment. Being ‘present to the moment’ loses the air of being a bull-shit new age quote card for Facebook, when a doctor tells you that you have less than a year to live. We are on notice that life as we know it isn’t going to remain. We’re welcome to get another opinion, ignore the opinion we got, or just increase the dose on our meds and hope for the best, but in all of these options, we can’t escape choice.

We’re living collectively in a hospice moment. Hospice is where people live who are expecting to die. Where did we ever, even in good times lose sight of death? Now, nature itself is gifting us with the awareness of our own demise that is way more immediate than our own death of old age.

Even near term human extinction feels like a real possibility.

When we feel this, it changes everything. It gifts us with a deep exploration of what really matters to us, what we want, what we are playing with that we need to get serious about.

Life is asking us to ‘quit fucking around with your heart and soul’ to those of us that feel this urgency. Many are not feeling any kind of such urgency and I feel, they are not meant to this life. They are on their perfect and chosen path, and trying to get them to resonate with me and my choices is a waste of energy and precious time (even the illusion of time is a precious commodity to us that consciously want to heal and grow).

What is actually collapsing is something deeper than our industrialized fossil fuel-based way of life, though that is a part of it. What is really collapsing is a way of seeing life itself as a three dimensional reality through the body-mind perception.

We are in the midst of a great and inescapable death and rebirth. None of us can escape no matter how great our preparations. We are being invited to see ourselves now as heart and soul beings who are energy, which energy manifests in human form, which form is undergoing collapse and rebirth.

See if you can feel that for a moment, because the mind doesn’t do well with this. Feel it, and then feel your intuition guiding you to your individual choices that are unique and sovereign to you. There isn’t any cookie cutter advice here when it comes to what to do. Doing is what is collapsing. Being is what is arising.

I’m going to pause on saying more around this premise, because it feels like less is more here somehow. I invite dialogue as always and I invite your direct contact if you’d like me or Jelelle Awen to hold space for your personal process around any of this.

Our sessions page is here if you want to read more about how we work with people: http://www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com/sessions

I’m honoured to be present and living in hospice with you. I want to live and live fully, now.

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information.

Premise 3: Going Beyond The Body-Mind Reality

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By Raphael Awen

premisethree

Welcome aboard day three of the SoulFullHeart Magical Mystery Premises tour.

We only have two days sailing behind us and already it feels like so much more. Jump right in though if this is your first day, you can complete the circuit when and if you want to anytime.

A sightseeing tour is a really good analogy for what we’re doing together in these 21 days.

SoulFullHeart is a way of life and I’m offering 21 scenic tour vistas seen through each of our premises allowing you to essentially window shop to see if this truly warrants any more of your time, attention, or money.

There’s no charge to take this tour, but to actually enter and experience the territories we’ll be looking at each day will undoubtedly cost you. If your heart is truly hungry and ready, the cost will be something joyous, even as it is also sorrowful at times. But, it’s only at the point of buying something from someone that the real transaction or exchange occurs. Don’t mistake browsing for buying. Choice and transaction in this way with the resource of your choosing is no different than in the material world.

So here’s the third SoulFullHeart premise called the Nature Of Reality Premise:

“SoulFullHeart invites you to be open to a different picture than the body-mind reality, which is that everything is made up of energy; time/space/money are illusionary; everything is sourced from Infinite Love; and our innate nature is both dual and nondual.”

This premise if we are able to open it out together today will be nothing short of mind blowing.

Like setting out on a whale watching tour, there is no guarantee of actually seeing any whales and many days a whale watching tour must settle for being a ‘whale looking’ tour. I honour that what we see together will be a combined effort of what you and I choose to see, intend to see and are ready to see. It’s a co-created reality.

However, we have something big in our favour. We’re going to be looking at the idea of consciousness expansion today, and to do that, we’ll need an expanding consciousness just to get in the door. Consciousness itself likes being taken in and noticed. It’s like feeling the whales under the boat reluctant to surface until they can sense your reverence, respect, and awe, but when they do, watch the splendour unfold.

In this way, we draw this out together. I’m not responsible alone to put on any show. We do it together if there’s enough trust and desire between us, as well as resonance with what is. I feel part of me rest as I say that, and it felt both important to say as well as a portent of things to come in the rest of this tour together.

Now that we’ve got our seats, let’s dig in.

This premise begins with an invitation and that’s important because we are all grounded in a current way of seeing the world. The invitation is to look at another way of seeing the world, but of course, we can only do that through the lens we have. We can’t shatter this current lens in order to pop on a new one, and nor should we, we’d blow all of our circuits. It’s an invitation to see as much as you can and to then trust that what you were able to see was perfect, and that you were changed just by the act of truly looking. It’s an ongoing and never ending process because we actually live in an infinite reality picture.

Let’s talk now about the body-mind reality. ‘Body-mind’ is, in the way I’m referencing it today, a way of relating to life, that in turn ‘creates’ your world. Body-mind is seeing the world through the five sense reality only of sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound. ‘It’s real as long as I can sense it with the five senses’ is the powerful reality shaping mantra. Now, I know that isn’t your mantra or you wouldn’t be drawn here, but it is so deeply embedded in the world you were raised in, and the world you live in, every day, day in and day out. Body-mind reality has a powerful energetic pull that can be described as a gravitational pull that holds an order of things and an entire crystal clear cosmology out in front of you.

Money doesn’t grow on trees. It’s the results that count. Rome wasn’t built in a day. And on and on the sayings go. They form part of the outlying edges or borders of this perceived reality. If you are a more porous individual, you even add in some esoterics into the picture to make it bearable, but you have yet to actually ever escape the power of this matrix.

Body-mind in its essence is a wave form frequency of a specific bandwidth. As we are energy, as we’ll explore further today, we are totally susceptible to the frequencies we currently have dialed in on our receivers, and then we go on to rebroadcast those same frequencies contributing to the strength of the body-mind collective-consciousness reality. Now, to use another metaphor, it’s no longer us that is online doing the browsing, but rather the prevailing collective consciousness, or the computer itself that is doing the browsing. We are now essentially controlled around all the things that really matter with just enough free choice to keep the blinders in place. ‘Would you like fries with that?’ It’s now a false projected reality that we are co-creating because create is what we do. It’s what we are.

Everything around us is energy in motion, a frequency band manifesting as what we see and experience as matter. It isn’t real as we’ve understood five sense reality, and, at the same time, it is real on another plane, but it’s real reality can only be seen through a new lens that is the new plane.

Let’s look at money to help us grok this. Money isn’t real. It’s a thing we co-created collectively and is only real because of our agreement around it that we reinforce every day by our relationship and interaction with it. Money is actually nothing more than a means of exchanging value, or energy, or ultimately love. But it seems so crazy real! My focus on money, my need for money, my future money, my lack of money, and on and on. ‘I must secure the money, and then I will consider what other things I want in life’ is the energy that holds so many people. Money in this way is possibly the most powerful prison-forming matrix ‘thing’ that holds us in its clutches all of our days. And it’s nothing but energy!

Money is energy. I am energy. You are energy. Energy always flows. All the things you like and don’t like about your life are energy flows. The computer you are looking at and the chair you are sitting on are nothing more than energy manifesting in a specific form true as ever to the frequency they broadcast at.

Money as real from within the five sense reality is an illusionary reality. If you want to break the powerful hold money has upon your life, you must recognize that it isn’t money itself, but rather how you see money, or more accurately, the lens with which you are looking at money, specifically the body-mind.

Time is also another powerful illusion. The ‘realities’ of past, present, and future are held together by our collective body-mind reality-creating relationship to time. How cool would it be to flip the table here and instead see that time itself is the illusion and we get to use that illusion of time to our benefit. Healing anyone?

Space is another one. As energy, we are essentially living in a holographic projection that energy is creating giving us the magical illusion of space. It’s like going to the movies, except you ARE the movie.

If you’re like me, you are feeling really itchy about now. You can smell something big, but you can’t grasp as much of it as you want to. These are things to be lived into. The conditioned world doesn’t give way in a moment…..we instead live our way in a discovery process, that again, has no ending or destination, just like the Isness from where we come.

Here the saying ‘It’s not the destination that counts, but the journey’ needs to be revised to something like ‘ultimately, there is nothing but the journey, forget any destination other than simply being on the journey.’

This so resonates with us all, every last one of us, every last expression of energy ALL being God. Yes, including evil. It’s all Infinite Love out seeking to know itself in an infinitely unknowable reality.

All is Infinite Love expressing as infinite possibility, and nothing else matters.

Now, we see how we are both, like God, rooted in both duality and non-duality. We are playing with the duality in things like more or less money, things we prefer and don’t prefer, health is better than sickness, etc., all as a dance of Infinite Love energy that wants to come to know itself in all of its infinitely possible expressions.

When I feel all of this, my sense of the distance I’ve covered in my growth or my healing, though important to a part of me who still needs and relates to some form of measurement, gives way to the silliness of trying to measure anything in an infinite picture. 1/2 of infinity is still infinite.

And that is why I can resonate and be nourished with someone who is simply on the same path, regardless of their progress on the path. It’s sharing the same infinite path, me where all progress is immeasurable. The path affords us a processing and transactional ground for our relationship. Outside of the path, however, our frequencies have nothing but static. I can and do love the person not on my path, but I don’t attempt to transact very far with that person.

That’s already true for every relationship you and I currently have. It’s the resonant frequency band that literally holds it together.
Change the frequency and you change everything.

Okay, that’s enough for today, isn’t it? Talking about infinity can go on forever.

I want to close today by welcoming your inquiry into how The SoulFullHeart Way of Life healing process and I can serve your healing process. If you are a man, I would so love to be in an energy exchange with you providing we both resonate with each other. And if you are a woman, my beloved Jelelle would love to connect with you around beginning the process. Check out our sessions page for more info, and let’s simply get on Skype together to talk about it. Tell me what’s real for you.

I also welcome and deeply take to heart any donation you feel to give in support of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. You can find our donate button on our home page at soulfullheartwayoflife.com. Nothing gets my attention quite like an email from PayPal, saying ‘You’ve got money.’ 🙂

Until tomorrow and day 4, be well in your unfolding journey. And remember, there is nothing to count, there is only journey.

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information. 

Premise 2: Mature the ego and experience Oneness

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By Raphael Awen

soulfullheartenment

Welcome to day two of our 21 day Magical Mystery Tour of the SoulFullHeart Premises. Today promises to be a big day in premises as we’re exploring our second premise.

‘Why are you offering premises, though?’ you may ask.

Every spiritual or healing practice is premised upon a specific worldview about the nature of things. This worldview dictates what happens and how it happens or doesn’t. It may seem like a mental engagement at first, but for those with a keen eye and heart for what they really want and need, nothing sorts out a choice point like considering the premises of a given healing offering.

When premises are not clearly laid out and available for all participants to consider as they get involved with a group, it all too often leaves them falling prey to conforming to the groups identity out of a codependent and understandable need to belong, rather than choosing to be a part of a community because it lights up your heart and soul growth like no other.

If you’ve been deeply involved in a group or community in the past that failed as a community or simply failed to hold your interest and engagement, I invite you to weigh every single SoulFullHeart premise in these 21 days together and ask yourself, ‘If I ever did join back in with a group again, what would they need to embody for me to get involved?’

SoulFullHeart may not end up being your choice or even what’s right for you, but you will have moved your souls healing path hugely forward by giving your attention to the importance of premises. Premises are what the foundation is to the house.

Ready to go?

Here is the second SoulFullHeart premise:

“SoulFullHeartenment is an awakening state of consciousness involving the paradoxical processes of individuation or ego maturation while healing the illusion of the separate self leading to a deepening sense of union with self, others, and God/The Divine.”

Another mouthful, right? Let’s sort it out and I think you’ll get from this what you are meant to. These are pregnant words carrying a lot of energy and you can have very different experiences of them at different moments. Likewise, me putting more words around them can go in different directions on different days.

Let’s start with the word ‘SoulFullHeartenment.’ We made up this word to carry an energy specific to the result of undergoing the SoulFullHeart healing process. SoulFullHeart is a path of simultaneously healing both soul and heart wounding, or as Jelelle likes to say, ‘healing from our roots and our wings.’ One is not preferred over the other nor is one used to minimize the other.

We feel that where heart wounding is not adequately explored and healed, all of our exploration into soul domains and non-dual states, or simply a healing therapy, are largely a medicative reality for the untouched heart wounding. However, where the personhood ground of the heart is explored and healed, the doorways into soul domains and non-dual awakening are far more natural and effortless portals into our authentic self expression.

‘SoulFullHeart-enment’ then is this place of never ending movement into ever deepening human expressions of our essence as Infinite Love, in both heart and soul frequencies. It’s not a state of attainment, but more likened to living in a parallel universe where it’s your native place of residence from the moment of choosing this inclusive path. All claims of ‘progress’ are surrendered to simply not having any way of measuring anything in an infinite reality. Progress, for what it’s worth, is simply being on the path.

It’s much like trying to describe to others a totally mind blowing sexual experience. It’s obviously new to you, and has you all aglow, but try as you may, there’s no way to quantify what you had. All you can do is claim ‘more than’ in comparison to what you had before. It seems to be one of the few areas that a government bureaucracy hasn’t ever been able to regulate, measure, and tax because it is so immeasurable and so uncontrollable.

Let’s go on now to this piece about ‘an awakening state of consciousness.’ We see that when souls enter a human life, they are largely surrendering to falling asleep and mostly forgetting their true identity and their intentions for their soul healing mission in a given life. It is this ‘having our hands tied behind our back’ in relation to our awakening that calls us from our very depths to forge a deep resolve and choice sufficient to cast off our pre-chosen slumber.

Many are not meant (from their own sovereignty) to awaken this life and instead are working their healing path through staying asleep. One is of no more intrinsic value than the other, and both are God expressions. If you are a soul that has chosen to awaken this life, you are enabled to do this by way of comparative difference, and choosing amongst options and your personal power to act on those choices. It is in this very real human drama setting that your epic healing story occurs.

This awakening consciousness unfolding has a powerful paradox, however, at its root, and two at first seemingly ‘at odds’ vectors. In SoulFullHeart’s picture, they are powerfully, perfectly and inextricably one.

One is your path of individuation. This is the path of coming to terms with being a distinct and defined self, an embodied sovereign human, with boundaries and power to decide, decree, and declare what goes on and doesn’t go on within your borders. And you can’t do any of that without an ego. Ego is seen simply as your centre of awareness and there are no judgments against the ego as being the source of all suffering and pain as taught in so many spiritual practices and traditions.

We feel rather that it is about what our egos are currently attached to, and the relative health or unhealthy nature of those ego attachments that are at issue. However, to remove the ego is to render a person non existent. The premise that ‘self is bad’ is the underground root conviction of these teachings, stemming from undiscovered and unhealed unworthiness at the core of the personal and collective being. You can’t express or have experience as a human without ego and without a persona to conduct life. Some face has to show up for the party.

Doesn’t that all by itself just take a ton of pressure off in relation to all the bullshit you had heaped on you about trying to rid yourself of ego?

Now, if your ego is currently attached to Nascar, beer and high fives, you and I aren’t going to have much ego resonance, but rest assured, you’ll be able to find plenty of others with all the ego resonance you need to find enough community and work your healing path in the way that you are, regardless of my judgments about the unconscious nature of your journey.

I’ll have to take my judgments, along with my ego and be on my way seeking resonance around what my ego is currently attached to. And when we’re all said and done, there will be plenty of time to debrief and compare notes with one another and, I’m sure, both learn from each other, over a beer even.

But, it’s about maturing the ego, not obliterating the ego.

You are an individual. The definition of that word contains a deep explanation of how we see the self. In-divi-dual translates out to ‘a duality (dual nature or two-ness) that cannot be divided. You are an inseparable expression of both being utterly distinct and indistinct from everyone else around you. Both are true and it’s only when both are seen and held as true that a healthy relationship with life can unfold inside of you.

All the goodies of individuation are yours, like sex and buying shoes and having a personality. So are all the goodies of being all wrapped up in Oneness, utterly inseparable from All That Is. You already are completely non-dual awakened in this way with the only thing you are working on is becoming more and more conscious of this preexisting fact regarding the true nature of your being. And you don’t have to kill the ego to attain anything.

Forget attainment……It’s tiring and the source of a ton of suffering, control, and superiorizing. Instead, if you need work at something, do like Jesus said and ‘labour to enter into rest’….do your own personal healing that will allow you to let in the spring-loaded essence that you already are, but is yet unmanifest in daily expression.

So, where does all of this take you, then? It takes you to ever deepening union with self, others and the Divine. Union with all of self begins in SoulFullHeart as the crucial getting to know, feeling and healing of our subpersonalities, who hold our this life and past life wounding. This leads the way to true and alive relationality with others and the Divine….all of which are paradoxically one and inseparable from the self at the same time. A relationship by definition requires an other to relate with. It’s a bit crazy making to begin to feel into, that we are both ‘other’ and ‘not other’ simultaneously, but ultimately it is the path to true sanity, because it is in alignment with What Is.

Trying to describe this in words is like the difference in sex between genital friction, as in the clinical word ‘coitus’, compared to a heart, soul and total body having a connection that is so deeply a personal and a transpersonal experience at the same time, where the afterglow goes into infinity and words fall hopelessly short of description.

We are wired in our essence to fire on these cylinders in all the dimensions of our being. We use the phrase ‘Self, Others, and The Divine’ a lot to highlight the essential growth tracks of our relationality. Our personal relationality is founded on the interrelationship of self, other and the Divine. We separate what cannot be separated in order to provide a relational space in order to come back to the utter Oneness and inseparability that we are.
Pretty cool, huh?

I know today’s premise discussion opens out a lot of questions about things we touched on today like subpersonalities, the nature of reality, God, dual and nondual, etc., and I wanted to let you know that these are all coming up as separate premises right around the corner.

Thank you for being on day two of this tour. See you tomorrow sometime after sun up for day three.

I’d really like to know you are on board for this journey, so I welcome your comments and questions.

Please visit our website at soulfullheartwayoflife.com for a listing of all the premises and more information.

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information. 

Seek And Ye Shall Find You

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Raphael Awen

cliff-jump

I know you’re out looking for something.

You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. The same is true for me.

I have an answer for you today. And that answer is that I am not your answer. Your answer is YOU. If I am anything to you, I can only serve as a reflection to you of you. If you are anything to me, you can only serve as a reflection of me to me.

The something you are out seeking today is you. The something I am out seeking today is me.

I happen to know that you are seeking the fulfillment of your being in all of its aspects. You want to learn, to grow, to find meaning, to have purpose and passion in your life, and to share all of it in meaningful connection with yourself, with others and with the divine.

Why be here and why ‘do’ here if not for these things?

All of life is arrayed to help you find these things. You already have them, but admittedly, they aren’t your experience as much as you’d like them to be. Hence, you dare to desire, you dare to be out seeking. You dare to look to an other even.

But I can do absolutely nothing for you unless you are out to help yourself. In fact, if you make me your source, while refusing to be your own source, the result can only be abuse of each other.

You are the light of the world. You, as you are now, with your desires for growth and change, with your pains and wounds that you don’t let anyone see.

Love wants in to your defended and seeking heart. Love wants to bring you new reflectors of your essence. Love wants to invite you out to risk again.

Take this light that you are shine it into the world of your desire, your aches and your longings. Let love meet you, embrace you, hold you, reassure you.

Will you?

I know you’re out looking for something…

Seek and ye shall find.

Let nothing stop you. Be radical! Your life depends on it.

Raphael Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information.

You Are Your Own Saviour and Saboteur

Published on by Raphael Awen2 Comments

By Raphael Awen

youareyourownuniverse

You are your own saviour and saboteur, both.

What it feels like and looks like and is like to be doing your life as you…is all created by you. There is no ‘other’ of any kind to blame or to credit for the life you live. Not mate, not friend, not parents, not god, nada.

Your life evolved through and by your choices. Even the wounding experiences you experienced were not random, or the act of some malevolent power greater than you. You as a soul choose and allowed what would play out in your life.

You choose this journey of coming to terms with your own greatness, and included every detail that would form your growth path, your awakening path.

Your deepest pains and challenges can either be used to weave a victims’ claim together in surrender to the fear of your own greatness, or they can be the stuff you were sovereignly given, by your sovereign self to manifest in this domain your true essence.

Staying small is also a great act by a great and powerful being. Rising to your greatness in your awareness is also an equal expression of your greatness.

The universe is quite ambivalent to your choice, supporting you whichever direction you choose, because it can’t save you from anything. It can’t choose anything for you. It follows your lead.

You are your own universe. Totally magical. Totally powerful.

Can anything matter more than finding, feeling and healing whatever challenges stand between you and this great truth. Choose life, choose love, choose carefully the help you need.

Your choice and your desire are your most powerful allies.

I would be so honoured, along with my beloved, Jelelle, to serve you through any transition points you are making. We have both walked this path and continue to. Life has changed for us in unimaginable ways, and never stops changing.

Love,

Raphael

Becoming The Birdsong: Meditations With Kuan Yin Blog Series

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

Kuan-Yin-and-Bird

Note: This is a series of blog entries sharing experiences and conversations I have while meditating and opening myself to the frequencies of Kuan Yin, a female form of a Bodhisattva or enlightened, ascended teacher. To read the first in this series, please go here. 

By Jelelle Awen

Sunrise here at the Sanctuary in rural Mexico brings an orchestra of bird calls. It starts with the crooning of the rooster at the first hint of the new day and sometimes as early as four o’clock in the morning. The rooster says, “Get up! Get up! A new day! A new day!” This is the first time in my life that I have been woken up not by an alarm clock, but by an animal bred for this function. It is mostly wonderful.

The birdsong then escalates as dawn approaches, so many different kinds of chatters and trills that it seems impossible to identify them all. It is a flurry of noise and, while ‘silent’ from industrial sounds such as motors and engines, it is by no means quiet here at the Sanctuary in the early morning.

This is the time that I feel most open to meditation and connection to altered states of consciousness. I have learned to mostly ‘block out’ nature’s sounds and it becomes background music while my process takes center stage. More about the birdsong in a moment…

This morning, I am floating in “Ma Om….” mantra, seeing if my mind can let go and rest in longer stretches without actually thinking about something every few seconds. But, then it is my mind that is tracking if it can go without thinking! Sigh.

As I open to Ma Om, my two quartz crystals I am holding in my hands become burning hot with energy moving through me. Kuan Yin is more of a blur today, less solid, and more an energetic presence. I can feel Her energy but I am struggling to feel my love and adoration for Her this morning. Usually it flows through quite freely and sometimes I can even let in Her reciprocating love for me. Something is blocking my letting in capacity and I suspect it has to do with letting in love on my birthday a couple of days ago.

Then, I am suddenly engaged in an etheric conversation with Padma – who feels like a past life aspect of mine who lives(d) in India in the year 1930. Padma has been recognized as ‘born with strong Atman (internal Godhead) with a strong connection to Brahman-God.’ She tells me that she left her family at six years old to go with her Master, Nomanji, to live in his ashram and become a great yogi and saint. This is considered a great honor, but I feel her loneliness.

She is now 18 years old and can’t remember what it is like to be a ‘normal’ person. “All I do is meditate and sleep,” she tells me. I ask her if this makes her unhappy.

“If I think of what I am missing…if I think of myself as a self, then I can get sad. But, there is no ‘I’ there,” she responds.

I tell her that I want to help her feel her sadness. Immediately she admits to me that she would like to leave her Master, who is not cruel to her, but she does feel that she has outgrown him. She would like to start her own ashram and she says that there are those who want to be her devotees. I agree to support her emotional process (which she has suppressed and transcended) if she helps me with opening out my consciousness to transcendent frequencies and to liberate my mind more fully.

After we make an agreement, I feel her energy leave my presence and I am alone again with “Ma Om.” I feel more open in my heart chakra now that Padma’s sadness has moved out. This is when I become aware of the birdsong around me, which seems to have just increased suddenly in volume.

There is one particular bird that is singing at a length and volume that seems to penetrate my field.

Kuan Yin offers for me to, “Follow the birdsong,” so I do, turning my attention to it.

At first, I am just listening to the chatter back and forth of this bird and one of its kind in another tree. Then, I feel rumbles of energy move through me with each refrain from the birds. It feels like their song is inside of me. It is a jerky thing because I’m not sure if I like it at first.

Eventually I surrender to it and then I am in flight with every tweet, in motion with every twitter. It is a liberating sensation.

I try not to interpret if there is a message from the birdsong, even though I can feel how they are communicating one to me. I can feel how Kuan Yin is communicating to me through birds, which seem to be one of her favorite creatures to use as a communication medium. This is fortuitous since I happen to live on what is essentially a bird sanctuary, with some very rare and endangered species of birds here.

I just am the birdsong and I feel Kuan Yin’s encouragement. I am reminded of Her showing me a lotus and offering that it knew more about who and what it was because it didn’t know and was just arising isness. Becoming the birdsong offers the same kind of not knowing and being in isness.

The song tapers off at some point and my attention moves back to me and the start of my day here at the Sanctuary

For a few hours afterwards, as I am watering and tending to the gardens, I feel a lightness in my mind and a sense of suspended moments without mental tracking…..what I call, ‘loosened brain.’

And, I am more aware of the birdsong around me and its offering of communion, lightness, and freedom.

Jelelle Awen is a co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit SoulFullHeart Way Of Life  for more information . You can read her tweets here and become her friend or follow her on facebook.

Letting In Love On Our Birthdays

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

multi-colored-heart_-with-beams_-of_-light_

Compassion flows the strongest from self love, not self sacrifice.

Note: This is a series of blog entries sharing experiences and conversations I have while meditating and opening myself to the frequencies of Kuan Yin, a female form of a Bodhisattva or enlightened, ascended teacher and face of the Divine Mother. To read the first in this series, please go here. 

By Jelelle Awen

I am diligent, repeating my “Ma Om” mantra and touching parts of my body, imagining Kuan Yin merging with me. I particularly hover my hands over my seven chakras, which are whirling centers of energy in our etheric or subtle body. I grip a rose quartz in my hand as that is the stone that holds the energy of the Divine Mother to me.

I feel the warmth of Kuan Yin’s presence and her voice, bright in my head, saying, “Happy Birthday, Jilly Bird!”

I am a little surprised by her enthusiasm about my 44th birthday. “Is it happy? I mean, is it really anything?”

“It is a celebration of you! I celebrate you!” She enthuses at me.

“Birthdays are an illusion, aren’t they?” I ask, ever trying to be the good student.

“In the sense of….there is no time, yes. In the sense of……you being born and dying every arising moment rather than just being born in one moment, yes.”

“Yes, and in the sense of numbers of years on earth being meaningless to reflect true maturity.”

She smiles her soft smile at me.

“In previous years I have felt a young part of me, my inner child, become very excited about my birthday,” I say. “She would want to feel special and she wanted attention. This year, she feels content inside of me and, in some ways, like this day is the same as any other.”

“Birthdays offer a space to receive appreciation, recognition, and well wishes. You want these, don’t you?”

I don’t have to think about this for long. “Of course. Although sometimes it can be a struggle to let it in.”

“Yes, a struggle. This is what to feel today, Jelelle. On your birthday. To feel letting in love into your heart.”

At that moment, I feel a surge of warm energy in my fourth or heart chakra. It radiates out, like the sun, like a stone dropped into a pond rippling soft waves in all directions.

I feel the capacity to let in love expand with Her energy and Her encouragement.

I also feel how compassion has to start with myself before it can truly overflow to others. Letting the love and appreciation I receive on my birthday from those people most intimate with me creates an overflow that can then go to others. This is the true way that compassion flows the strongest……from self love, not self sacrifice.

I carry this feeling of letting in with me as I check my emails and my facebook account. I am brought to tears a few times by the outpouring of love and appreciation that I receive from others, especially those in our SoulFullHeart community.

And, I feel in this where my heart is more comfortable still giving out then letting in. Even after years of being in a marriage with a mate who showers me with affection and attention. Even after years of receiving gratitude from students who I serve and have served. Even after years of feeling connection with the Divine Mother and the exquisite sense of being loved by Her as a beloved daughter.

The process of letting in and receiving love is an ongoing one and I believe a much harder energy to inhabit than giving love. It is a wonderful practice though, on our birthdays or any other ‘normal’ day.

~

Jelelle Awen is an emoto-spiritual teacher, sacred feminine and union facilitator, soul scribe, waySHOWer, galactic love ambassador, and co-creator and teacher of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. She is author of  Keep Waking Up! Awakening Journeys To Avalon And Beyond and an upcoming book to be released on June 1st, Sacred Human, Arising Wonder. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about space holding sessions, group calls, videos, community, etc. Visit our patreon page to offer a money donation to support our offerings at https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Feeling My Spirit/Matter Split (Part Two): Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

This is part two of Feeling My Spirit/Matter Split in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read part one.

recovering faith

 

By Kathleen Calder

My intention for this writing today is to have you join me in a feeling space around what it means to be “separate”. What comes to you when you think about separation? A recent break-up or completion with a beloved? The day your mother/father/other family member died? The day you left for college or moved out of your childhood home in general?

Each movement and phase of life often involves a death and rebirth cycle that can encompass some sort of separation being necessary. Of course the very first separation we viscerally experience in our lives comes at the very beginning – the moment we emerge from our mother’s womb. The very first tears we cry are often in this moment, feeling the separation from our warm gestation place and mourning the chance to be the closest to our mother that we ever will be. For the first time, we can feel sensations in our bodies of a changing need for our adaptation and therefore survival. We are still dependent, but we have exited from an intense phase of being held by something bigger than us. We now must begin to build our muscle tone, our dexterity, and, beyond the physical, we must also start developing our emotional bodies, for once again we have been born into this dense and often difficult environment which we call life on Earth (as we know it today, anyway).

As each new skill learned and new emotion is discovered and felt for the first time, we start to develop a digestive system within us and a new way of processing data that needs less and less help (ideally) from our caregivers as we go along. With each new chapter of our lives, we let go more and more of (or desperately try to cling to in denial of our need for change) those pieces of our life that once represented who we were and can no longer stay with us as we continue to grow. Like a child constantly outgrowing their clothes, we too are meant to outgrow relationships in which the person can’t or won’t make the choice to come with us or vice versa, and the “clothes” (or, sadly and more commonly, armor) we have tried on in order to reflect, avoid, or defend our emotional realities.

We are meant to gestate over and over again and birth out into a new world just the same. We are meant to have help digesting the “food” others give us to help us grow, both consciously and unconsciously. We are meant to cry out if we feel neglected in any way, or as if there is a lack of love flow in our lives. We are meant to ache out the pain of our separation from the original source of Infinite Love in infinite supply. Only then, in my experience, can we begin to feel that though the fog may feel thick sometimes, we are always connected by a Divine umbilical cord. This is not an ideology. To me, it feels like simple fact. And yes, I and parts of me, are still letting that in.

This, to me, is the core of where our Spirit/Matter split lies. It is certainly the core of mine. I truly feel that my soul has been around and around this world and each time that the original and at times insurmountable feeling of being separate from the Divine must be felt through again with the first breaths of a new life beginning, has been harder and harder. At times parts of me have reacted to this by going so far into Matter that it “matters” more than Spirit possibly could. After all, it is the more relatable place to be in for most human relationships…perhaps because deep in our souls and hearts we are aching out the same pain of the original separation and just want to avoid feeling it as much as we can.

There have also been times in my life where parts of me have tried to lean so far into Spirit that the art of responding to life and at least the Matter that really “matters” got waylaid. This over-leaning into Spirit led me into a sort of constant depression and heaviness inside me as parts of me reluctantly walked through heartbreak, loss, and disappointment, fixating on the pain and not the goodness of life, as if throwing some sort of tantrum and saying, “Look Divine Mom and Dad! Look at how miserable I am! I shouldn’t be here! Take me home, please!”

This sort of stark split isn’t the easiest life theme to work. I am grateful to be awake enough to it that I can feel and begin to understand how my parts formed around it and why they have the reactions they do. There is still some deep pain inside me about living out another life on Earth, especially during this dark time for humanity, but at least now I am equipped to feel it through and ache it out consciously instead of having it play out in the same pattern it has until now. Perhaps it will still need to play out in some ways that are similar to how it has done so in the past, but I can trust that if that comes up, there is something more I need to look at and feel about it.

Spirit and Matter may feel like opposites at times, but really they seem to be meant to work together. We are meant to ground into Matter while opening up to Spirit and engaging in all of this with others in conscious and sacred friendship and community. Sadly, not many of us are raised to feel that both are equally important. We wouldn’t need to be here if Matter didn’t have something to offer the Spirit within and around us.

As I continue to write this, I feel how I am writing in the world of Matter through Matter’s means, while connecting to and channeling Spirit. Spirit can come through because of this conduit of “me”. Right now Spirit is communicating through my heart, my brain, my language of English, the keyboard I am typing with, the computer that is holding and hosting this document, and eventually the World Wide Web where these words will be posted. And this is only one way in which to try and communicate what I am communicating.  There are myriad other ways in which Spirit tries to reach us and show us that Matter is not all there is or all we need. Sometimes that message can only come through severe accidents or diseases or just at the very end of a life…but then again, it also comes to us through orgasm, deep connection with others, deep and prioritized connection with ourselves, and each and every time we find ourselves awed or humbled by nature itself in any form.  There is no difference between any of these experiences, except method and form. Spirit is there. Matter is there also. One cannot be found without the other, just as we ourselves are an embodiment of both.

It feels like Spirit has enjoyed expressing through me today, regardless of how deeply it can actually land its message in you through me. I am but one messenger and one pipeline. And in truth, this sense of a split that needs acknowledge and healing is such a sovereign, personal, and sacred process to be in, that whatever path you are walking right now is your own expression of it. Maybe one day our paths will align, and if they do, I will be there to walk this healing path with you in whatever way we are meant to do so together.

 

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