Tag: By Raphael Awen

The Universe Doesn’t Owe You Anything

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By Raphael Awen

The Universe isn’t actually holding out on you.

The Universe doesn’t actually owe you anything.

The reason this is true is because the Universe has already given you everything it has to offer without holding anything back.

This is a tough one for parts of us to accept, as they have been conditioned to cause-and-effect reality here in 3D experience. ‘I do good and I get good in return’ is the childlike perception that we then project onto the Universe or the Divine, giving it god-like status, that parts of us can then play victim to, or hold responsible for our frustrations or unmet desires.

It’s called ‘unconditional love’ because it has all come to you signed, sealed and delivered without conditions. The only conditions that we all experience are the conditions around us being able to let in this love that is technically all-ready all ours.

Our experience of life in a past, present, and future reality, along with the cause and effect piece, as well as the world of free will can all be used to support this child’s picture of God holding out on us; of God or the Universe not being willing to give us our deepest desires.

What if the whole of that is all about a ploy coming from a part of us playing victim to life, and seeking a strategy to deal with this unfathomable infinite love that we are so fearfully tasked with letting into our very being?

What if you already have it all, and it’s just a process now to let it in?

What if part of that having it all is that even the frustrations, and longings, even the dis-ease in the body, even the breakdown in relationships, are all pointing to this perfection that we have been submerged in and are coming to terms with, here in this very particular Gaian conditioned experience of free will, cause and effect, ‘reality’?

My ‘working hypotheses’ is that this is closer to what is true for each of us. I can’t prove it to be true from a 3D mindset, but I can feel it to be true from a 5D mind.

Now, I am invited to feel and get to know any part of myself, or any aspect in my Metasoul who is still living in the old world of expecting God or the Universe to come through for them. This makes sense when you feel that if I have it all, then all there’s left to do and be is to share it all, beginning with myself and then overflowing to others.

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit  www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Finding And Following The Quest Of Your Own Truth

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By Raphael Awen

‘Could it be that a part of you has a very good reason for feeling depressed?’

‘Why does conflict seem to pop out of nowhere?’

‘Why do I see repeating patterns of abuse or neglect in my relationships?’

Deep QUESTions like these are powerful, and taken to heart, they can lead you on a powerful quest, to the heart of your power and self leadership, and self response-ability.

They will lead you to your truth to the degree you are ready to make the quest, your quest.

Remaining comfortably subscribed to someone else’s truth, in an effort to fit in, or in an effort to avoid rejection, when you can see and feel the growing disintegrity of those ‘truths’ can only now provide you with a discomfort in the diminishing sense of belonging.

Choosing to really discover your truth will take you to the edges of everything you belong to, and invite you into seeing what you belong to and why, in a new way.

The first question above took me on a spiritual and emotional journey that I was ripe for in my life, where I simply knew that I couldn’t live with myself, if I didn’t allow the QUESTion to fully take me on its quest.

For me, the only picture that could satisfy my degree of what some might call a ‘maniacal’ quest, was the picture of what is known as ‘Parts Work.’ In fact, I couldn’t even embrace the quest very far without seeing and getting to intimately know the various parts of myself and their investments in my current life structures and relationships. For me, any and every spiritual path and emotional path that couldn’t, or wouldn’t recognize and make central, parts of ourselves, felt to me like they were a band-aid of denial over the screaming reality in the room. The quest took me through a path of one self-lovingly negotiated step at a time of changing my relationship to everything in my life, and it still does to this very day.

Discovering your truth will call you to the edges of everything you’ve believed in and why. I sure wouldn’t wish or advise such an experience on you if you couldn’t open up to feeling the parts of you and their investments in your life as you currently know it.

Your truth will sort you, and everything in your life like nothing else can.

It sounds serious, and it is, but it’s also your funnest fun!, …that you came here to discover and become.

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit  www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Choice: The Arena Of Our Growth

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By Raphael Awen

The whole point of coming to participate in 3D life and this dimension here is not to escape it, or transcend it, but to get the point of it, which has to do with choice. Nowhere else are our choice points so stark, and so greatly leveraged for our growth.

We chose this after all, didn’t we?

In so called higher states of oneness or bliss, we get to feel the source that we are and the source that we came from, and we need these reminders and feeling states, but they are not the arena of our growth.

Your life right now, and how you are choosing to live it, and the beliefs and values you subscribe to, in order to hold it together, or to make changes to it, are where your growth and ‘Ascension’ are most grounded.

I would so rather be in relationship to someone truly surrendered to where they are, and what life is presently asking them to feel, than around those claiming and flouting a higher dimensional experience that doesn’t feel real.

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit  www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Day 7 ~ Journal To The Demiurge

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Journal To The Demiurge with Raphael Awen

By Raphael Awen

(This is Day 7 of an ongoing series, to begin at day 1, go here: https://goo.gl/CgrWXZ)

Raphael: Good Morning everyone here in this growing circle on this first day of the New Year, 2018, and those reading and tracking this Journey, expanding it out and beyond. The Demiurge wasn’t created overnight and it’s going to take a sizable something to reach out to it, wouldn’t you say, Metatron?

Metatron: I wish and intend the very best possible for everyone here and reading this for the New Year. I don’t live much by your calendar, as you know, but I do feel you, as you do. It’s a good way to measure and reflect, as well as to set intentions for the year to come. I’m very excited for the intention at hand to connect with the Demiurge. Your planet and humanity has been under his rule to such a significant degree, far more so, than most realize. Believers and nonbelievers alike.

To your question, Raphael, I feel it does take a sizable something as you say, but maybe not in the way you might think. This isn’t a numbers game that creates a tipping point, per se. Numbers-based tipping points in the collective are more a downstream outcome of what we are setting out to do, rather than the intention or the necessity. What I mean by that is when one of us opens our heart to really connect with the Demiurge, not out of subservient fear, or worshipful reverence, but mutual respect with a healthily boundaried open heart, this creates a very sizable something that hasn’t been done before. The actual number of us approaching only increases the resonance of this one-heart ambassadorship. One of us could do it, but more is better.

Raphael: You really don’t see this as ever having been attempted before, Metatron?

Metatron: I can’t see where it has, Raphael. If it had, there would be a different frequency coming from him, I feel. Up till now, he has still felt to me like he is largely unmoved from his trajectory. This was evidenced in your story, how solid it felt and immersed it felt to be living in his world, like it was thee reality of all realities. When this shifts, Christianity itself will look and feel very different. Christianity tires itself out at times, but the basic piece of duty and obligation keeps returning one way or the other. That is the Demiurge. He doesn’t care about the label, or the setting, as much as the energy.

Raphael: Okay, wow…

Metatron: I’m curious to ask you, what you felt since sharing these big pieces of your story so far?

Raphael: The year-end reflections have been expansive, appreciating the huge difference from where I once was, when I didn’t have any sense of ever being outside of that, to where I am today, very much outside of that. Yesterday, while celebrating with close beloveds, there was so much to let-in, in gratitude and also to feel in exciting new desires arising too.

Last night, I had a dream of a man, someone close from my past, asking for help and looking so worn out. I’ve never had that kind of a dream before, or real life contact either, where I was being approached as a resource from one of the characters in my play this life. So it feels to me like a big ripening is happening for people around their souls timing to make a similar exit from ‘serving God’ as I did.

I feel a ton of compassion for what there is to go through, having felt and lived through every piece.

Metatron: Yes, I feel you need to share how you actually made your exit, not just from a church community, but from Christianity itself, and how that played out.

Raphael: Yeah, that feels like an important piece to digest going forward. I’m wondering about launching into that at the moment or if there any other pieces to digest first. Maybe feeling of any intentions arising for the journey and the year ahead possibly?

Metatron: Good call. I’m all ears.

Rhodes: Raphael, I’m feeling how intensely you went into Christianity, and I did too, embedded in there with you, how we both slowly, but surely, made our exit. There are so many vistas before us now that we are wanting to enter, but it feels like this Journal intention and undertaking is a prerequisite somehow to inhabiting this new land, like a piece of unfinished business. Up till now, we’ve never spoken publicly much about Yahweh, or Jehovah, or the Christian capital ‘G’, God, being a false God. It’s kind of interesting, because one of his Ten Commandments was about not having any ‘graven image, false gods, before him’, when he himself was and is that very thing, a usurped personalization of the source of everything.

So, in all that, I’m feeling we need to make it formal, a coming out publicly, that we are no longer under any kind of fear-bound duty and obligation to the Demiurge, which is what we’re doing here. If we had any tinges of this false fear-based reverence towards him, it only would trigger his default pattern of his God complex.

I am hoping that 2018 goes down in history as the year that this false god domination over humanity and the planet finally dissolves, and a great turnaround occurs. I am willing and wanting to serve that end.

Raphael: Yumm! I love feeling all that in you, Rhodes. I so need you on board with all this. You’re right about the publicly coming out part, onto the archetypal stage, creating a new story to confront an old story, this ‘his story’ to be remade into the true story of the people, of their true origins, their true dimensions, and their true destinations.

Who else?

Merlin: I’m amazed at where your journey has taken you, Raphael. And I’m looking forward to feeling the next pieces of what happened next, and how it happened. What wants to happen now couldn’t unfold if you hadn’t courageously gotten real and honest with yourself in all those choice points. This is true leadership, being able to lead yourself, to lead parts of yourself through the gauntlet of what you dialed up this life. Leadership with others then naturally arises with others desiring a similar awakening, like a spring loaded easy thing. No manipulation or control needed, because it has no relationship with those very low and dense frequencies. I, too, want to feel and state my desire to complete this mission, to take it to where it wants to go, to whatever outcome can arise from it. I so want to second Rhodes’ desire for 2018 to be known as the year that the Demiurge packed up operations on earth and in humanity’s reality. I say, ‘long enough, and no more’.

Raphael: Okay, that’s a vote of love and confidence to take in. Thank you, Merlin. I guess with that I’ll drop back into storytelling mode for a bit then again.

It’s been a good digestion for me again to take in this period of my life from two or three decades back. Sometimes, we need an even longer vantage point from which to look backwards to feel certain things.

All that story I shared about the airport synchronicities got me to feeling that life really is that magical all the time. At least, that’s how I recognize it to be more and more now, with magical moments coming together at all times holding the fabric of reality together, we just struggle to let it in as being that magical, so we have this other equally magical ability to normalize it and numb ourselves to it. We must also need those abilities too for some good reasons or we wouldn’t be doing what we are with them. I personally would like to dial back a big chunk of the normalizing though, that I still do, in order to let in more of the magic.

Wait, that’s philosophizing again, not storytelling. Let me see if I can shift gears. Sometimes it’s easier to teach than it is to vulnerably share experience and feelings.

So, yes, there I was, leaving a beloved and only church family behind, one where I had recognition and was well liked. Mar-yam was with me on that one as we were both done at the same time with these charades, as I called them. There was a ton of other churches around in our home town of Abbotsford, British Columbia, which happened to be the church capital of Canada, in the sense of having the most churches per capita. We had no thought of leaving Christianity, but our dedicators were admittedly tiring of the rededications.

We joined a much larger fancy congregation, of the non-chandelier-swinging variety, that had some big things happening. It was reputed to be the second largest congregation in Canada at the time. This gave us a place to simply attend often entertaining services and be with some friends and family who had joined us from other settings and  also had made a similar switch. I really felt thinly attached however. Part of me liked it that way, and part of me didn’t.

We never tithed anymore, the practice of giving ten percent of your income, which had been a long time practice, since my late teens. One year, back in our old church, Mar-yam and I alone were responsible for over 20% of the churches income that year as we had decided to tithe not only on our personal income, but on our business income as well. Later, I came to realize how much of a financial fear was rooted in my heart around the practice. We were addressing our money anxieties by doing a deal with the Demiurge. Many places in scripture promised a big blessing and return on giving. Tithing was also a command, rather than an option, as far as our theology went. I so recall the first bit of income we decided not to tithe on, after feeling how controlling the whole teaching was, and how the most controlling leaders and teachers used it to their advantage. We were feeling mostly okay with it all, but an unmistakable part of us was half ready for the sky to fall on our heads at the same time.

Finding our way out of tithing was a pretty big ‘handwriting on the wall’ kind of event for us. Of all the strict ‘law’ type practices from the Old Testament, this was the one that kept surviving from right on through the Roman Catholic Church, through every successive Protestant movement and down to every last latest greatest church deal right up to the present. One very well-worn Bible verse spoke about you were ‘cursed with a curse’ if you withheld the tithe, and were guilty of ‘robbing God’.

Remind me to take that one up with the Demiurge, for sure.

Dollars in the bag, and bums in the pew, with chapter and verse to prove it all, is still thee deal that Christianity thrives on. When you break with tithing, as a dedicated Christian, you are beginning to play on the creek banks of the river to your freedom. You are saying that you can pick and choose your own interpretations and even defy the Demiurge (God) while dressing it up (necessarily) as something different.

With that kingpin of a legalistic relationship with God/the Demiurge finally shifting for me, as in the ‘obedience in exchange for blessing’ kind of relationship, I was significantly setting my sails in a new way, and ‘backsliding’ from ‘true Christianity’.

With my awareness tuned in this way to any manipulative psychological pressure tactics that I couldn’t stomach any longer, I was also now reactive to the stories of God’s behavior in the Old Testament. What part of me used to hardly notice, I now saw as behaviors that could only be labeled as ‘asshole’ anywhere else. I was getting into a conscious ‘mid-faith’ crisis.

I sat through message after message gagging on what I was hearing. I recall, one Sunday, as service was just letting out, as we were walking up the sloped sanctuary aisles towards the foyer, with some close long-time friends who had sat close to us, Rene said, ‘Wasn’t that an awesome message?’ feeling genuinely touched. I looked at him and so struggled with my own long-standing image, our friendship, his being touched, Mar-yam looking at me and knowing full well what I was feeling, and my fuming internally over what I now felt was a big shit pile, to put it in Jim’s immortal words. I managed to get out a calm, ‘I didn’t like it at all’. Rene didn’t know what else to do, but to look away. What else can you do when one of the most dedicated and level headed and fellow loyal brothers is losing it?

A year or so earlier, the same head Pastor of that large congregation who preached that message that Sunday, happened upon me in the foyer as service was underway while on my way to the bathroom. He was a genuinely kind older man, and asked how I was, as I recalled he had greeted me similarly once before. I was a bit more surprised though when he followed up with, ‘If you’re free soon, please call the office so we can arrange a coffee out together one day.’ I liked the child-like guileless something about him that no doubt the congregation liked too when he had been selected as ‘Senior Pastor’ for this happening congregation. By this time in my faith, I was really putting in time as far as regular church attendance was concerned, ‘keeping something intact for the girls’ was one way of framing it. Really, I just wasn’t ready yet to come to terms with what was brewing. Privately, I was however very given to these ‘grace’ teachings I was exploring, in contrast with the ‘law’ teachings that were interwoven through everything I’d known and practiced. While still technically Christian, they were very outside of what my outer Christian world would consider anything close to orthodox. They sustained me in the interim, but also troublingly moved me further away from center.

I arranged with the office a week or so later to meet with Pastor Vern that same afternoon, what happened to be Halloween. We sat down in a small quiet coffee shop, and began small talk. Being a good conversationalist, he asked me a leading question or two, and I began to share a bit and weave in a thoughts of the alternative Christian teachings I was so deeply embracing, but knowing very well where the no-go edges were at the same time. He paused me mid sentence to find his pen, and to gather a napkin from the adjacent table to write down what I had said feeling the compelling alternative nature of my words. I knew I was way off into Christian Universalism, which is a breath of fresh air to anyone burdened with the standard fare law/grace mixture of ‘God loves you, but…’. Before we left that day, Vern had filled more than one napkin stopping me several times to transcribe my exact words. I so missed being able to teach or speak, and the camaraderie around that. I knew all too well however that if Vern had seen the deeper edges of where I was coming from, he’d not have sat comfortably with me that day in the coffee shop. Part of me felt like I got to my abandon my painting contractor costume for one closer to a spiritual teacher that Halloween afternoon.

As I share this piece in the moment, I so feel how aspects of my Metasoul would get activated in situations like this, even though I had no conscious sense of them at the time. I have come to know and discover a Metasoul Brother Aspect in Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, over the more recent years and have felt many of the angsts and passions that flow through Martin. I don’t claim to have been Martin Luther in a past life, but rather to share a Metasoul lineage with him connecting some similar frequencies and passions. Rhodes, as my Gatekeeper, has been a while in opening out this access, for good reasons I feel. I can feel Martin wanting to process and feel both passions and regrets, and maybe even to choose a different outcome somehow. I can feel him in an adjacent timeline, what we call the 16th century, but very much happening in the Now. It feels really fitting that Martin would find his way into my storytelling and this journal-journey, as I feel him possibly having a big stake in this ambassadorship to the Demiurge. I’ll let this mention brew in him and invite him to share as soon as he’s ready to. He’s quite different from what most have projected onto him and he’s changed a bunch too. I learned recently that he referred to the pope as ‘Pope Fartass’, which is great that he could take on the Pope. Hopefully, he’ll be up for the Demiurge now.

The track that held its course steadily in my life during this time was my contracting work and family life, kind of in that order. I engaged the services of a business coaching company called E-myth, and was assigned to a bright coach named Mark. I met three times a month for an hour on the phone and engaged in the processes E-myth offered, for over a year. During that time, I managed to double my business income, with less stress and more satisfaction in many ways. I gave myself to this brighter light in my life at the time and secretly hoped that maybe my dreams could be realized by becoming ‘financially independent’. Part of me was convinced that if I could set aside the focus of earning money, and instead focus on my now-floundering dreams and passions of teaching and leading somehow, then I could realize these dreams. The picture had several untidy seams in it, but I gave myself to it for this year plus, nonetheless, as it was the best thing going in a growing graveyard where my dreams made the tombstones.

Mark informed me on one of our calls that he would be leaving the company soon, and that I would be contacted by his manager to arrange another suitable coach from within the company for me to continue in the program with. My admiration for Mark had grown over the year plus together and I knew he was a part of something spiritual, but. non-Christian, outside of the company he worked for, but hadn’t found the courage to ask him about it. My soul, along with my Gatekeeper, I see now, was holding a timing around this, knowing the rumbles it would lead to. As I knew I was about to be losing Mark soon, I asked him one session a more personal question. I said to him, ‘Mark, how do you respond, when you’re really getting the results you want in work life and then depression comes up to upend all the progress?’ I really hoped, as well as suspected that he wasn’t going to give me a coachy kind of pat answer, but yet had no clue how he might address it. The one sentence answer he gave me proved to be nothing short of revolutionary. He answered my courageous question with another courageous question. He simply said, ‘Did it ever occur to you that a part of you has a very good reason for feeling depressed?’

I walked around for a week following feeling like I had just had spiritual and emotional surgery. I told everyone close to me about it. Mark’s words found their mark of hitting a nerve of wanting to stop making the emotional body bad or wrong. The words resonated deeply with the alternative Christian theology that had held my attention for what was by now, over a decade. What was so nourishing to me was the stance of not only no longer suppressing feelings, but even, god forbid, exploring them to feel what they were trying to tell us. We had no frame for any such thing in all of the Christianity I’d ever been a part of.

About five years prior, another life changing moment occurred that led up to this one, that, had it not, I wouldn’t have been ready for this one. For almost 20 years, since I was 19 years old, I simply had no conscious experience whatsoever with depression. Here I was as a late thirties guy, married, business owner, doing extra well, because I didn’t struggle with the lower emotions. When others around me got depressed, I simply noted it, maybe gave them a pick-me-up kind of response, and moved on. I simply couldn’t relate to it since ‘God had delivered me’ from my ‘inferiority complex’ back when I was a late teen. Something though was beginning to shift for me as that summer. My emotional weather dial took a big shift towards feeling bouts of depression. My newer theology and life experience it seemed helped me be more vulnerable and honest with myself in a good way to feel what was real. I instinctively knew not to hide it, and talked about it openly with those close to me, even seeing a counselor for a couple sessions and taking some St. John’s Wort herbal medicine to assist.

This life changing precursor ‘moment’ event happened one evening during this same summer of depression when Mar-yam and I were watching the movie, A Message In A Bottle, portraying a man’s loss of his wife to death and his processing of the deep grief that engulfed him. Evening movies had a way of either putting me to sleep, as was often the case, or holding my intention deeply, as this movie did. As I watched the movie, it began to get under something that was ready and wanting to move in my emotional body. I’m watching this portrayal of grief and trying to hold back my tears of the only thing dear I’d ever really lost; the 11 month relationship I’d had at 19 with the woman named Cheryl, that I mentioned earlier.

A year prior to meeting Mar-yam in Bible School, my life had gone from like two to almost ten overnight, and then ended suddenly without explanation, as Cheryl broke it off between us. I refused to feel any tears the next day, as I felt at the time like they were a hole I’d fall into and never recover from. Well, the ‘next day’ came back to me sitting on that couch, asking to be felt. I knew now that these feelings weren’t there as ‘the enemy’ or a nemesis that would take me down, as I had unconsciously related to them in my late teens.

Whoah, Metatron, my handrail, I’m really getting wound up in the story telling. How’s this landing, do we need to pause?

Metatron: Are you kidding, don’t stop now, my friend. We’re all on the edge of our seats.

Raphael: Awww, you’re the best, Metatron. I’m aching to tell this next piece actually and so glad to have your interest, so sit back in those seats for a bit, and I’ll take your cue.

So as I was saying, this movie portrayal of genuine grief moved through me like a freight train, in a good way. We finished the movie and went to sleep. When I could tell Mar-yam was asleep, I faced the opposite direction and cried quietly to myself some very rare tears, feeling the loss of the relationship with Cheryl those 19 years prior. The troubling night dreams I’d had of her into the early years of my marriage had long subsided thankfully as I consciously didn’t want to undermine my marriage ‘hanging onto the past’. In the morning, I told Mar-yam about the tears and the flow of emotions. She intuitively felt it was a good thing and supported me to feel whatever needed to be felt.

That next day, I reordered my schedule and took the day off to go spend the day in a park that Cheryl and I had enjoyed together. I sat there on the grass, overlooking the ocean and at first, a part of me wondered what we were attempting to do. Any apprehensions soon left as I wrote out my grief and loss in a letter addressed ‘Dear Cheryl’ taking my cue from the movie. Wave after wave of tears rolled through me as I went back and forth between crying and writing. I was so astounded feeling how though it was 19 very full years later, it felt like it was the very next day.

After the tears finally paused and the writing felt complete, I got out some matches and burned the letter on the rocks there. I made my way home and again shared the experience with Mar-yam, and in time, a few others close to me. I knew this was a life changing event, even though those around me seemed to tolerate my story of it more than celebrate it. Looking back, I can feel where part of me was tugging on them to see and feel the significance I knew was here, this willingness to feel, and in so doing to heal. This part of me knew it was changing, and could feel the fear of losing them if we didn’t change together.

A week or ten days later, I took another day trip to another park Cheryl and I had enjoyed together, and again the tears flowed, not as intensely this time, but sweetly as I said aloud to myself ‘I’m human. I get to lose. I get to grieve.’ It felt so good to come to this dawning awareness.

So, as I said, it was another five years of life and process later when Mark, my coach’s words found their ‘mark’. ‘Did it ever occur to you that a part of you has a very good reason for feeling that way?’

Holy Fuck! Why couldn’t all of the money and life and passion I’d put into Christianity ever come up with something so simple and so profound? Why couldn’t just one Christian leader drop the charade and get real, just one, all I ask is one? Why couldn’t one Bible verse have pointed to this? I’d have jumped on it! One would have done it. Instead, it’s this non-Christian business coach, from a pagan business coaching company, of all people!

As Christians, we were all too busy fighting the devil in our elevated spiritual warfare schemes, or flagellating ourselves trying ‘put on the mind of Christ’ along with a million other verses pulled out of our asses! Fuck, what a stinking shit pile of horse shit, Jim! With a great big Jesus rug, the size of a camp meeting revival tent to try and sweep it all under….

Go ahead, Rhodes, Is that you rumbling just now?

Rhodes: Yes, thank you for letting me get that out. ‘We’ were Marvin at the time, all mixed in together not very differentiated, but each of us were feeling this all on a bunch of different levels. I see now, all of this was perfect to help us find our way through a sequence of waypoints on an ongoing journey, one that we are still on, actually. I have that bigger picture coming to me now feeling you tell your story, which is my story and our story. We needed every sniff of that shit pile. We needed every pain and reaction. We signed up for it because we needed it. We simply couldn’t have found our way without it. All the way to now even to facing the Demiurge, the Demiurge within and the Demiurge without.

Raphael: Wow, Rhodes. That’s some heavy stuff. The Demiurge within. The taskmaster inside myself who wasn’t ready to feel, who then in turn gave that disowned life force energy over to the creation and sustenance to the Demiurge without. As below, so above. As within, so without. That’s pretty spacious now, though at the time, it just hurt like fucking hell, in dark times, with no light in sight. Thank god for the bread crumb trail out of the jungle, nonetheless.

Well, I hope you can pause along with me cause now I’m running out of gas. I can feel how I’d like to share the next piece of actually admitting to my known world that I no longer held Jesus as my personal savior and finding the courage to face Mar-yam to tell her I wasn’t willing to remain in our marriage bond, and then how I began to walk all that out. But, it feels best to let this piece digest along with what Rhodes just opened us out to as well.

Wow, this piece about how I created the Demiurge is hitting me. All my Christian life, my subscription to the idea that he was the creator was a way to deflect my own responsibility to my own creatorship. I can feel how this Journal is a way to accept that responsibility now and respond in a new way.

We’re off to see the Demiurge, people. It’s been a long long time in waiting, but we’re off to see the Demiurge!

I hope he’s open to company.
Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Patreon Money UPdate: January, 2018

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By Raphael Awen

The last moments of ‘Enero’, or January as its known in English, with our dancing moon today, and it feels like a wave of gratitude again for a changing expanding timeline in every way, including financially for us at SoulFullHeart. We’ve been feeling and having ‘surplus’ and some giant new desires to go with that surplus.

We began ‘trans-parent-izing’ our money picture each month a few months ago with a ‘Month End Money UPdate’. The desire and experiment in doing this is to offer a grounded picture of our world to those who are drawn to us and our world, and would like to be a part of it financially. There is a way, as they say, that ‘money doesn’t lie’. So today, again, allow me to ‘show you the money’. 🙂

After a few year long trajectory of radically ‘deconstructing’ our relationship to money and career, and patiently letting in a new and arising one, including coming to the edge of several ‘cliffs’ along the way, and even taking a few guided cliff jumps as well, we are now in an arising ‘constructive’ phase of SoulFullHeart creation and community.

This month saw 5 or 6 new Facilitants choose to enter weekly SoulFullHeart process and sessions, as well as several new people planning on beginning sessions. At the moment we have eleven active Facilitants. We also had one person join us for a life changing ten day immersion visit, (we were all changed) that we see happening more and more. We also formalized our plans for the ‘UK in May’ as I’m calling it at the moment. Our beloved cocoon of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico is drawing to a close. We are now planning on relocating to Glastonbury, England, this year, where we feel a whole new layer of SoulFullHeart finding its way in the world.

Ultimately, we’d like to draw more heart interest, more love and the more money that comes with that, and roll it all back into, yet again, more love.

The ‘UK in May’ budget currently stands at around 21,000 USD for the five us, and 2 dogs. The items in this amount, in order from largest to smallest are: airfare, first and second months rent, dentist, clothing, some debt to pay off for recently purchased computer equipment, 3 used Macbook Pros and a used Iphone, luggage, visa entry fees, and veterinary.

We would so love to receive with wide open hearts any amount of money you would like to fuel us with, be it a donation in the moment through our PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart
or a monthly recurring donation through our Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart

If you would like your donated amount to be designated towards ‘UK in May’, please say so, and we will only use those funds for those expenses. Otherwise, we may end up never leaving the beach and Starbucks here. (Just kidding)

Without any further ado, here is the Money UPdate for January, 2018:

(all figures in US Dollars)

$3,926 – Total Revenue for January.

Total Revenue breakdown as follows:

$2,168 – Gabriel and Kalayna’s English Teaching through VIPkid.

$1,758 – Total SoulFullHeart Revenue broken down as follows:

$1,337 – Payments for Sessions.

$74 – Group Call Donations for our one Group Call this month.

$160 – Book Sales

$187 – General Donations – People just sending money!

Thank you to all of you for your interest, desire, love, and money. A very special thank you to those who are a part of weekly SoulFullHeart session space. More about sessions here: http://www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com/sessions

So from myself, Jelelle Awen , Kalayna Colibri , Gabriel Heartman , and Raianna Shai , as well as from some near and dear souls presently deepening with us, THANK YOU, for your love, for your support, and for showing us your money. 🙂

Together, we are changing the multiverse, one lonely planet at a time… xo

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit  www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Karma As A Mirror, Rather Than A Punishment

Published on by Raphael Awen3 Comments

By Raphael Awen

Karma Is A Mirror, Rather Than A Punishment.

The universe we live in is not a punitive world, but rather a world of built in cause and effect, inside a deep framework of love and accountability.

That’s a very big difference…

Cause and effect offers us as souls a way to achieve most deeply what we came here to achieve. Our journey as a perceived separate self is just that; a perception of our third dimensional self who has been conditioned to believe this. This admittedly powerful perception is what we use in the domain of cause and effect to grow deeper and deeper towards self-love and other-love, coming to realize in higher self reality that ultimately self and other have no dividing line. The entire point is growth, and the realization of love, not punishment.

Here we come to feel deeply the words of Jesus found in the gospel of Thomas offering a more accurate (then what’s found in the Christian bible) wording of the golden rule, that ‘as you do unto others, so you do unto yourself.’

The whole point of a cause and effect (karma-based) universe is to offer us and all consciousness a mirror in which to see ourselves and in turn to feel ourselves. The effect of our actions upon others cannot be separated from effect upon ourselves. This effect however is a mirror, not a punishment, regardless of how painful the blossom of that karma may be in our personal worlds.

The only reason we could cause harm to another is because we are out of touch with the feeling wave we affected in that ‘other’ with in our actions. Karma offers us a mirrored feeling sense of those actions and their effect. It is in feeling that we are returned to our deepest humanity.

Murder and rape are often cited as the worst crimes that could ever be committed, which may well be true, but let’s look at them in a different way from a soul or higher self perspective. It feels true to me that when we choose to incarnate in our pre-carnational planning and liaison meeting with our soul family and guides that we actually agree to these roles of victim and abuser in this holographic projection we call 3D life as a means to effect and perfect our growth as conscious beings. Many times, we’ve actually willingly traded roles as victim and abuser in other lifetimes.

One of the deepest wirings in the universe is the wiring of free will. And it feels true that this is why we rate murder and rape as the worst crimes because they are such deep infringements upon free will. These crimes violate not only the individual, but the nature of the universe. The universe in this way could be seen as a play ground in which we are all coming to terms with the dimensions and implications of free will.

However, as I mentioned earlier, what if we actually pre-planned these experiences and okayed them as both victim and abuser? Well, then they didn’t actually violate free will did they? It feels like in this way that free will cannot actually be violated in the intelligent universe that we share. Now, however, both the abuser (through karma) and the victim are left to feel the effects of the ‘crime’ and harvest the growth of the drama that they actually wrote the script for and chose to act out together.

Now, there are no actual victims, which brings us to the maybe the next biggest hard-wire of the universe: The power to choose our response to any action. Again, we are faced with our growth and the universes total support of us coming to realize our incredible power and essence.

Let’s let go for a moment of our charged perceptions of these ‘worst’ crimes and consider a much ‘lesser’ crime; a bully child on a playground calling another child a degrading name. Here again we can feel the same playouts of victim and abuser. Both ‘victim’ and ‘abuser’ are indelibly effected by the drama and will be propelled in their growth journey as they digest this experience to return to their essence of love through this perceived deviation outside of love. When the pain of this so called lesser crime is gut wrenchingly fully felt, it doesn’t actually feel any lesser than rape and murder. The degrees we assign crimes are all smoke and mirrors designed from our wounding and unresolved pain to help us avoid feeling.

The whole point of the journey here is the realization that nothing can actually remove anything from love. Love is only all there ever is, while the perception of ‘not-love’ or what we call ‘hate’ only serves to backlight love as the only and ultimate reality.

That’s what got us here so busy learning our way to this re-memberance of what we actually are – all members of the same family of oneness.

This brings us to what we can do to stop the karmic playouts in our lives. The whole point of the karmic wiring in the universe is to get us to simply stop and feel. When we feel and take emotional stock of the pain our actions caused an ‘other’, we feel full circle the deep love of the universe for the other and we feel forgiveness for ourselves. We feel how the pain that we caused someone caused them to doubt (if not disown) the universes essence of complete and total love. Now, there is no more karma playouts because we have fully felt the pain that wants to be felt and balanced. We know we have fully felt the pain and this us completed the karmic cycle when we can feel deep self forgiveness for ourselves. Until deep tears of self forgiveness come to us, we are still enroute to ending a karmic cycle. The universe is patient in this way, and though it may feel almost masochistic to us to have these seemingly endless playouts in our lives, with some of them even extending over many lives, the universe doesn’t see that as too big a price to pay for our embodiment of deep self and other love.

Self love is the actual goal, because love for an other can never exceed the actual love we feel for ourselves, and self love cannot actually be separated from the love we feel for an other, because we are not actually separate.

The other reason self love is the big deal is that we simply cannot give that which we do not possess. Real love is ever only an overflow, never an injunction, or a should.

This journey to self love is the whole point of these drastic dramas and playouts. All of the resulting compensations for our pains and addictions are all a discovery of the infinite love fabric and wavelength frequency vibrational essence of everything.

Everything is a feeling. And when we come to feel the pain we caused ourselves through karma or that we caused an other, we return fully to love.

This takes us deep into the territory of the original soul birth wound that lives in each of us – a feeling of being separated from God or Divine Source. And actually, we all were individuated (a kind of separation) out from God, but the entire point of individuated life is for us, through feeling, to come to recognize ourselves as the God essence that we are and always were. We even come to forgive Divine Source for individuating itself in its quest to know itself through us and our perceived separate experience.

It is in this way that karma offers us feeling as the only way to true healing. In SoulFullHeart, we explore karmic binds and woundings through process ground of your 3D pain body and soul field. During sessions, the facilitator acts as a sort of confessor and guide to empower your self forgiveness, letting go, and healing.

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit  www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Wild At Heart

Published on by Raphael Awen2 Comments

wild

By Raphael Awen

The universe is untamable. It is wild at heart.

There are no insurance providers that can underwrite the inherent risks in your participation here. When you suffer a loss, there is no claim you can file to get reimbursed for any loss of your assets.

You get to lose, actually. You get to suffer loss. You get to mourn and grieve the loss. You came here to lose. You gave up the experience and knowledge of possessing everything and spent it lavishly like a drunken sailor on the experience of what it feels like to not have. This is the souls journey of discovering the love that you are, that you can never lose on a higher level.

This is the stuff, you, and everyone around you, ARE, and are made of, regardless of your awakening or spirituality, or your culture.

When we attempt to tame our 3D worlds, like we all naturally do, to make it bite-sized or manageable, to lessen the risks, to build in predictability, we attempt only to tame ourselves in relation to the wild universe; we acknowledge, even if only subconsciously, that the universe itself is untameable.

Why does the wild fear the wild in this way?

What is it about the wild that makes it so fearful?

Could we live without the wild, where all was known and tame and predictable and safe?

Would romance be romance were it not for the wild unknown?

What even is this wild we speak of?

It is said to be ‘the natural state, prior to being cultivated’.

Is the wild you, then, the You who was prior to being cultivated by your present culture, the real you?

Is it the You who is underneath all of the cults you ever subscribed to and are currently a member of?

Were the cults, and enculturations and cultures all necessary to point us back to our truer selves that cannot be cultivated?

Did we subscribe to pain itself to point us back to the bliss we are?

What would be the point though of willingly forgetting who we are, and returning and remembering if it wasn’t to expand and benefit ourselves in the process? Who would surrender to the loss everything were it not for a clear benefit?

What might that expansion and benefit be about?

What would you and I be so googly eyed over that we would give everything we had to exchange for that something?

Even attempting to write about the wild, as I am here, is a fools game, for in so doing, I attempt to understand and know the wild, and thereby, to tame the untamable. Yet, somehow, playing the fool surrenders to the wild at the same time.

Many attempt to tame themselves through a form of obedience. If I can surrender to a power much greater than I, I can claim that I am the lesser, and in so doing, attempt to make the greater responsible for my fate. We surrender to the greater, and pawn off obedience in exchange for a false of security to keep this wolf of wildness away from our door.

Others try to tame themselves through awakening or spirituality, to transcend, and thereby to escape the wildness that lies at the core of life itself.

These, and many other strategies can work for a time, as we are given the ability to proximate ourselves to this wild universe, to feel into our next choices, but when we overstay at the hotel stasis, thinking we’ve tamed the universe, we only amplify an underlying un-ease and dis-ease that is at the root of our assumption, that then rocks our bodies, our relationships and Gaia herself. The wildness of the universe seemingly makes our next choices for us as we build courage to flow with, rather than resist the wildness.

The resources you’ve cobbled together, that provide a sense of security, be it family, friends, money, career, fame; all of it is external to the degree you haven’t explored and surrendered yourself to your own wild heart. These external resources can’t ever be that imagined insurance provider because they are external to you. You, as the wild, contain all the love and safety you ever need, where even death and loss cannot remove you from your wild essence, as love itself.

You get to lose, and never lose at the same time.

The parts of you that make up your personhood are equally as wild and untamable as the universe itself. Even the parts of you that attempt to tame your world are themselves untameable. They possess a wildness that can only be related with, but not tamed. If they soften and become relational and malleable to you and your heart, they do so out of their wildness, not an overlay of cultivation. They do so out of their wild hunger and search for the love that you and they are.

If you’d like some help and community around going to your next unexplored domains, I’d love to serve you. I’d love to serve you with the resource of your own authority, desire and awakening.

My truth is that you and I came here to feel, what we couldn’t otherwise feel from where we were. Feeling is the healing that awakens us to the godhood and personhood both, that we are.

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit  www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

The Lighthouse Of Our Longings

Published on by Raphael Awen4 Comments

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By Raphael Awen

Our deepest longings that feel the most impossible are actually deep messages from our hearts and souls to our more conscious selves, that we are invited to feel.

We are not guaranteed the fulfillment of the outward picture of those exact longings, but rather the things those longings represent. We are guaranteed that the longing itself leads us into something much deeper from beyond the veil of forgetfulness regarding our truer essence, and changes us in the process.

This is actually a frightful guarantee to parts of us. We cannot own and pursue the longing without being irreversibly changed.

Following this lighthouse of our longing, that carries the unexplainable homing skills of a pigeon, the longing and desire shifts and changes as we reposition ourselves in relationship to it, leading us to our true heart home.

The experience of the initial steps lead to the next ones. We are afforded exercise of the heart muscles that will be needed for the next steps. The first steps are just as magical as the later ones as each step brings the joy of coming into more and more of our infinite essence.

Falling in deeper and deeper love with our many varied selves, we overflow with true love for all being and all life.

 

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit  www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

 

The Grail Pursuit Of Soul Tribe

Published on by Raphael Awen2 Comments

tribe

By Raphael Awen

The desire to find and be a part of Soul Tribe, feels like it is increasing exponentially for many of us in the times we are moving through.

It’s a feeling for me that has always been there in my life. At times, it has expressed in really applying myself to the tribe at hand, be it my birth family, my current circle of friends, my church family, a spiritual group, etc. What I found for myself personally was that the deeper I pressed into the family at hand, the sooner I found myself uncomfortably at the exit door to the relationship. While the exit door was usually an exit of my own choosing, as I was always welcome to drop what I was advocating for and needing, stop rocking the boat, and instead settle in for the life-long haul; I seemingly couldn’t stop myself from moving on.

Something has always felt at stake. Something has always felt that I needed to chose, to pursue, to desire and to need. Something has always also felt that I wanted to be needed, to be chosen, to be desired and to be needed. What has changed is the frequency bandwidth that I am broadcasting at in all of that wanting and needing. This then in turn led to natural moving on points, that I was being invited to step into.

Some people work hard to quell these feelings, and though there has been times that a part of me could envy living that way too, I keep coming back to a ‘search for the holy grail’ kind of living, and to do that with Soul Tribe.

My Soul Tribe is about the wanting, the needing, the desiring, the rocking the boat when the boat is needing to be rocked or even capsized. It is about the entering and the leaving. It is about completing one context of life so to be able and energized to enter the next context of life. It is about the endless curiosity expansion into the unknown.

My Soul Tribe is about feeling all the losses along the way, to mourn them, to grieve them, to allow the next phase of Soul Tribe to arise and overflow into my life as I currently know it.

My Soul Tribe is about feeling my truth resonate inside the tribe, where even a natural and healthy ‘conformity for love’ can breathe that isn’t a codependent grasping for love. I get to conform when I want to and need to. I also get to be uniquely different when I want to and need to. I get to do it all and be it all inside of community. I get to need and want love. I get to be loved. I get to feel all the parts of me who are in different stages of their own relationship to love and community.

What is your Soul Tribe about? Are you in a ‘lone-wolf’ between phase that is preparing the courage to pursue again? Are their past tribe wounds that are wanting to be felt by you? Are there parts of you who refuse to ever risk again, while at the same time, other parts of you aching for real resonant heart and soul frequency community?

SoulFullHeart is one such tribe. I belong to it and co-lead it. Session space is offered as the clear doorway into it. If it calls to you, I’d so love to host your inquiry further, all the way to the deeper and richer unknown that your soul can’t resist pursuing.

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit  www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

Return LOVE in money form: https://www.paypal.me/supportsoulfullheart or visit our Patreon page to become a monthly supporter: https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.

Day 8 ~ Journal To The Demiurge

Published on by Raphael Awen1 Comment

Journal To The Demiurge with Raphael Awen

By Raphael Awen

(This is Day 8 of an ongoing series, to begin at day 1, go here: https://goo.gl/CgrWXZ)

Raphael: Good Morning Demiurge Team, and maybe it’s time to say good morning to the Demiurge as well. I’m feeling him listening in. He didn’t get called Omniscient and Omnipresent for nothing. “Good Morning Demiurge, Thank you for tuning us in, we hope to be at your doorstep soon”. There, how’d I do?

Andy: That was perfect, Raphael. I don’t know how many good mornings he has, but it felt good to wish him one. Maybe, he’s a really sad guy underneath a whole tough-guy skin?

Raphael: That’s so true, Andy. We really don’t know how he really feels about anything, do we?

Andy: I don’t think he’s ever had any real fun, like with the best food, or sex, or visiting new and exciting places. He always seemed to be too busy policing the world and sacrificing animals, and even sacrificing his own son. That’s some pretty weird stuff. I wonder how he really feels about all that now?

Raphael: We are so going to need to clear our minds and hearts of all the stuff we’ve thought about him up till now, and, like you say, Andy, begin to wonder about what it really feels like to be him, in his skin. If we are going to effectively create an ambassadorship to meet with him, that is…

Andy: I don’t think he has any fun. If he did, he wouldn’t be so angry and unhappy all the time. He wouldn’t need people to be a certain way to make him happy. But, I don’t know for sure, that’s just what I think.

Raphael: How are we going to have fun today, Andy?

Andy: Let’s all jump on Merlin, and let him take us back in time to where we are in your story. And maybe he can find us an ice cream shop while we’re at it.

Raphael: Perfect! Merlin?…

Merlin: Yes, there’s a Golden Earth variety of Baskin Robbins that has infinite flavors without any duplicates. We can all go there. I usually dial up a meadowy forested one, if that works for everyone. We might need the trees and the earth today.

Raphael: Sounds perfect, Merlin. While you get us settled in there, with some comfy seating, I’ll find my heart and my place in the story.

Yesterday, as I was digesting all this with some yoga stretching, I felt tears come. I’m so glad to be fluent with my tears now in life. Yesterday, they felt like love from the Divine for the version of me and all the parts of me who walked out this journey, and who is continuing to walk it out by wanting to go full circle and see where this journey still wants to take us. It’s like, we can’t ever know, and that’s what makes it truly an adventure, to see what wants to ‘advent’ on the calendar of new horizons. Thank god for Andy’s innate desire for adventure and exploration that helps me see past all the too serious adult stuff.

Okay, then, back to my story. When I was at this point of being on the last legs of my faith, my marriage and my social world, all at the same time, I didn’t know how any of it was going to play out. I just knew I so needed to follow the trail, and take the next step, and that I couldn’t live with myself not to follow the trail. Sometimes courage comes from just feeling the regret and remorse we would feel if we didn’t make a choice in line with our deepest heart, the kind people commonly speak of on their deathbeds. None of the options are easy, but one is definitely more rewarding in the long run and addresses any and all possible future regrets.

Early in 2005, the year it all went down, after a particularly busy work winter, Mar-yam persisted in the idea of us going to a resort for a week’s vacation. Part of me was so into ‘getting ahead’ and wanting to tame expenses, that I resisted the idea till the last minute. Finally, I gave in and we went for a week to a resort in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico in March of that year, being more ready for a break than I realized. It feels weird to tell this piece of the story because, as I sit here, telling it, in the first few days of 2018, it’s almost 13 years later. I’m sitting on the opposite side of that same bay in Mexico where we vacationed back in 2005 and can see the distant lights of that same resort in the predawn light. Isn’t it weird how life synchronizes things to help us feel what we yet need to feel?

We arranged our time at the resort with every other day being a chill day at the resort and the other days being a guided tour somewhere. Mid week, on one of our resort days, I woke up feeling unusually emotional. Something was catching up with me, but I couldn’t tell what it was. It came up some more as we sat in the lounge chairs on the beach feeling a bit loosened up with the all inclusive pina coladas. As we ordered some lunch at the poolside later, I literally ended up crying in my soup, tears streaming down my face and landing in my soup bowl. It was weird because I couldn’t tell what I was feeling so emotional about. I tried to not look too conspicuous, but also knew I needed these tears, even if I couldn’t feel what they were about. Little did I know that they were about letting go. Mar-yam and I did have a good time, in the managed goodwill we had together, but it was also conditioned upon not talking too deeply about the writing on the wall that neither of us wanted to face.

It was just a couple months later when that one sentence from Mark, my business coach, ended up being a spiritual and emotional surgery for me. “Did it ever occur to you that a part of you has a very good reason for feeling that way?” were the words he offered in response to my question about how to relate to depression and performance. I knew it was now time to open myself to feel everything there was to feel, to no longer resist feeling, and I also knew that I was inclined to not feel at the same time, that there was a lot backed up, waiting to be felt. I knew I needed help.

I asked Mark more about the spiritual group he was a part of, thinking that him and I were about to part ways. He offered me the book written by the groups founder, Daniel Barron, titled curiously enough, There Is No Such Thing As A Negative Emotion. I could feel the book was a part of a stepping stones, going on place somehow. It was, after all, a book some years earlier that had led me to E-myth, the business coaching company that Mark was now leaving.

When the snow got off the mountains that summer, a group of friends invited me to join in on an ambitious day hike. I so loved my hiking trails around southern British Columbia and Northern Washington. I usually enjoyed my own company the most, but decided to join in on this big hike all pre arranged by others. When the group on that sunny perfect day decided they would go on to one more big vista after lunch before returning the way we’d came, I saw my chance to stay behind alone for a few hours. I had a whole wilderness campground to myself and found a choice site surrounded by tall evergreens to hold the space for me to feel what I knew I needed to feel. I rolled out my sleeping mat and settled in.

Rene, one of the close friends in the group that day, strangely had kept his distance from me, yet relievingly at the same time. I needed space. We had been on a hike with the two of us some months earlier where I found my courage to ask him about what felt like a growing distance between us, and the struggle to talk about what we really felt. He let me finish and simply replied, “You’re the one who changed, Marvin”, as he returned to the trail. Marvin is my birth name that I went by at the time. Rene was right. Marvin was changing faster than even he could keep up with. Rene wasn’t wavering at all from the course we met on. We met in Bible School. We raised our children to be dedicated Christians. We both traveled regularly to be a part of missions endeavors. Rene had even become a fellow painting contractor following in my steps, and a good one at that, crediting me as his mentor. I could subcontract work to Rene in busy times by sending him the job specifications in the fax machine and then forget about it until the check arrived. He was just that damn reliable!

He and his wife had built a house on our street two doors down from us to be close and share family life together. When Rene saw me working on a yard project, he put his own aside and joined me, loyal to the core. Rene let me know that day, however, on that hike that his loyalty stopped when it came to the kinds of change he could feel I was toying with. He was interested in me as a friend because he felt I was the kind of person who’d stay the course, for the worthiest purpose on the planet, one that wouldn’t change with a bit of mid-life turmoil. I felt torn. Where else would I ever hope to find a friend as faithful as Rene?

As I lay there on the mat, I knew intuitively that there wasn’t anyone interested in making the kinds of changes I was about to make, including Mar-yam. Many of them hadn’t budged on any of the smaller changes I had made along the way. I knew the choices I was entertaining now were the end of my social world as I knew it going forward. I’d had plenty of time to scope that one out. I’d barely found the courage myself to follow my own heart. I couldn’t expect them to be ready on my schedule to join me now.

I knew I needed to do some big internal business that day on the trail. I knew I needed to choose. Wave after wave of tears came as I chose to let go of my 23 year marriage laying on that mat, using a spare t-shirt to dry my face. I didn’t know when, or how, I would walk it out, but I knew the order of the day was to make a solemn choice, and to begin to grieve the loss, in the serenity of that wilderness, alone, but yet held by love, and a grace, and those super tall surrounding space-holding evergreens.

My mind went first on to my girls and imagining their pain and confusion. With Rachel at 19, and Avonlea soon to be 16, this tore my heart open to feel them enduring the news I would sometime soon be dropping on them; the news I had so convincingly told them as younger girls that they would never hear from me.

Rachel and Avonlea always were a great joy to have and to raise, both fully expected and waited for. My own inner child got to be a kid again with them and may even have resisted them growing up in some ways with all the fun he got to have with them. Mar-yam and I let our lives naturally revolve around the girls in many ways,  and we wanted it that way. They simply were one of the greatest things about life.

When Rachel was seven and we were telling Rachel not to use some word, as it was bad language, she got inquisitive as she had heard us talk about the difference between ‘swearing’ vs. ‘barnyard language.’ vs. ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’.

“So, Daddy, is that a swear or a barnyard language?” she asked. I answered as directly as I could, and her next innocent words were, “So, Daddy, tell me all the swears, all the barnyard language, and all the Lord’s name in vain words”, as she climbed up into my lap, expecting clarification. I took a deep breath and proceeded to be the first one to tell her the main bad words, along with a fitting seven year old’s definition for each, including the word ‘fuck’, figuring she best hear it from me first. It felt very strange getting that word out of my mouth as I hadn’t let that word pass my lips in about 13 years, nor did I expect I ever would again.

Avonlea was different from her sister, seemingly efforting fitting in less, and coming up with more of her own version of who she wanted to be. One day, she enterprisingly came home from school with a completed report she had done on foxes that she was quite happy with and proceeded on her own to go knock on some neighbors doors to offer to read it aloud to them for 25 cents if they were interested.

As they grew up, neither Mar-yam or I did the super-strict thing with them, and deferred to being more open and relational rather than having intense rules for them to follow. When they were young, we did practice spanking from time to time, without anger, which ended abruptly one day, when Rachel stuck her finger in my face and said as defiantly as she could, ‘You can’t spank me, I’m twelve!’ She had a point. This was getting old.

Their lives had by now come to revolve around their friends, school and boyfriends, but a part of me so wanted still to be there for them in every way I could. I had looked forward to whom they might marry one day, knowing those men would be a significant relationship for me as well, as I had never raised sons.

My mind went next on to my parents, how would all this land in them? They’d been married forever and would be ‘till death do us part.’ How would they file all of this?

Then Mar-yam. After all these years of being easily and naturally together with deep commitment, without any big outward crisis to make this somehow more justifiable…….I’m going to be doing what?! I could so see and feel the incredulous looks that were going to be coming from close friends and family, and worst of all, from Mar-yam.

Truth is, a part of me didn’t know who I was outside of those roles and totally feared being in life without those roles and sense of identity. That had been true for a few years now, as an older auto-pilot setting that my life was stuck on was getting more and more backlit asking for my attention. It was Mar-yam who admitted, while stopping for lunch on a day trip into beautiful Washington state together one fall day a full couple of years prior, “Let’s face it, if we were choosing partners today, we wouldn’t choose each other”, seemingly more ready to talk about the quiet, but growing differences between us. Parts of me were just so not ready, until they finally were, to face my own truth.  

Whooahh, you guys, how’s all this landing in you? I’m a little self conscious feeling how I’ve never really outed this whole story like this before in one fell swoop.

Andy: I’m like on my 8th ice cream cone, Raphael, but I’m having a great time. You story tell better than any movie I’ve been to. Some of this I didn’t even know, feels like.

Merlin: I think Andy speaks for all of us, Raphael. The setting is magical here and the realness of your words and heart and experience so outdoes any story I’ve ever heard.

Metatron: You say you feel a bit self conscious, Raphael. Can you feel what that’s about? Maybe you’d like to speak to that before going on?

Raphael: Thank you, Metatron, for the invitation to feel. I feel in this moment a reverence for the parts of me who lived through all these stages of life, of entering and leaving one context and relationship after another. In a very real way, you could say all of our lives are about ‘entering and leaving’ regardless of our belief system, or how open or resistive we are to change. What we miss out on though is the opportunity to feel. We tend to not feel while we are in it. We tend to not feel when we story tell about it. We tend to not feel when we photograph it and try to schedule it for feeling later somehow. I feel all these parts of me now seated in the time-travel theater of my own life captivated with both the courage and the fear, the movements and the stuck places, and all of it opening out into a big curiosity about the magic of my own life; how much I know about it; and how much I don’t know about it, to this very day, that awaits my deepening reverence.  

To the journey at hand, to meet with the Demiurge, I feel how my devoted relationship with ‘God’, was about needing him to hold my own divinity like in a safety deposit box for safekeeping until I could awaken to it, come to see it and become responsive to it, come to terms with it. I feel this is the same for every last one of us who holds a piece of consciousness, be it an object, a thing, an animal,  a person, an Archangel or a Star BEing. We are all getting comfortable with being divinity, at different stages of consciousness. We are divinity out divining. Something must be a placeholder for our reverence till we are able to hold it for ourselves. What we revere, we fear. We need to fear ourselves in a really good way. We need to fear settling for something less than we set out for. It isn’t a competitive world where there is only a few winners. In the world I live in, everyone gets to win, if they are ready to. Everyone who wins enhances the chances for those around them to win as well.

I so needed the Demiurge to hold my own divinity that I wasn’t able yet to recognize or hold. As I story tell, it feels like I said, a time-travel into a feeling theatre, where I can not just hang around in the past, but actually rearrange the furniture while I do. I can sit in admiration for the me who made the choices I did. I can feel the me who even chose to come here to live this life in the first place, who dialed up many of the story lines that I needed to walk out. I can feel another me in other dimensions and times who wasn’t able to make the choices I made and is watching and feeling intently.

I can feel that Mar-yam and I have had many such soul-story playouts that needed to come together this life again, how in this third dimension, they are arranged into past, present and future, but in a higher dimension, they are all unfolding in one present now. Even though I haven’t had contact with her in 3D for a decade or so now, it is also true that we are inseparable, while being distinct at the same time, needing this journey of separation.

I can feel Rene and I, in another dimension, sharing seats at King Arthur’s round table in Camelot and how each of us can readily recite the oath from memory: “This is the oath of a Knight of King Arthur’s Round Table and should be for all of us to take to heart. I will develop my life for the greater good. I will place character above riches, and concern for others above personal wealth. I will never boast, but cherish humility instead. I will speak the truth at all times, and forever keep my word. I will defend those who cannot defend themselves. I will honor and respect women, and refute sexism in all its guises. I will uphold justice by being fair to all. I will be faithful in love and loyal in friendship. I will abhor scandals and gossip-neither partake nor delight in them. I will be generous to the poor and to those who need help. I will forgive when asked, that my own mistakes will be forgiven. I will live my life with courtesy and honor from this day forward.”

We are so much more multi-dimensional than we’ve realized, but we are awakening to it now. Possibly, and this ‘possibly’ feels very important to feel into as we approach the Demiurge, we simply were not ready, and the universe itself was not ready, for us to enter the deeper bliss and infinite magic of our being, and so we co-created the Demiurge to hold the polarity and the reticence until such a time as we were ready, ready to feel.

The universe is asking me to feel myself as I relive experience, Metatron,… thank you for asking. I can feel the round table of my own parts who make up any and all human beings wanting and needing the sacred space of being initiated into a right-of-passage place of invitation to ongoingly simply feel. Isn’t that the point of all story, to feel, and then to be moved by what we feel? None of us needs to look any further than our own stories. It is our own stories that offer us the most to feel.

Metatron: Okay, Sounds like you felt the self-conscious feeling and it moved right on through, yes? 🙂

Raphael: It did.

Metatron: Well, I’m curious what happens next?

Raphael: Now, you’ve got me curious, hah! Life took off in some very surprising directions about that time, that became a lot to just ‘be with’. It was like life was getting me ready for what was wanting to come.

Let me see what scenes are playing in the theatre in the moment and I will do my best to recall and feel them as we do. Thank you all for your sweet and ongoing interest. From a little boy, a part of me loved having as much attention as I could possibly handle and you are all stretching me on that note at the moment!

So, around the same time as that fateful hike day, I’ve quietly ordered this book written by the founder of this group Mark was a part of. I knew this act alone was a turning point. The title alone, There Is No Such Thing As A Negative Emotion, struck a nerve, and the words called me deeper into my own awakening of my emotional body. I read the book through, feeling opened out deeply as I did. When I finished the book a few days later, I emailed Mark and asked him to help me find a facilitator in the work that the group offered so I could enter this new world deeper. I then turned the book over and began reading it again from the beginning. I’d read tons of books in Christianity, and some outside of Christianity, but this so felt like light years ahead of anything I’d come across.

This so makes me feel, guys, how in life, we are always in process between entering and leaving. We are always preparing to enter a next phase and preparing to leave a soon to be previous phase. None of us are outside of this. Even when we feel nothing is changing, and you can’t see a stitch of change on the horizon, just the act of you feeling that, of either wanting change, or resisting change, or thinking there is no change happening, is what facilitates change. Our lives are always in a continual state of change. We could say life is change. It feels vulnerable to feel that.

Nothing that parts of us are attached to are guaranteed to remain. This though, brings us to the best part. When we feel how we have what we have, without any guarantee of it remaining, we are invited to feel deeply our own hearts, our own feelings towards that thing, be it a treasured thing, or an unwanted thing. Every thing is wanting and waiting for our hearts.

It also makes sense that each of us only has so much capacity in the midst of change to feel what we are able to in that moment. I think this is why we got onto taking pictures and videos, knowing there was more feeling to be done later, that we couldn’t access in the moment.

As I share my own story, I can feel how I’m being invited to feel this bigger picture that I couldn’t feel at the time. All story is designed to get our hearts to come out and play.

I’m wondering in the moment if part of me is stalling a bit on telling the next piece of my story, waxing a bit philosophical instead. I’m coming down to the place of telling Mar-yam that I am leaving our marriage bond.

Those were the words that I picked up from Eric, the facilitator from Mark’s group that I connected with from Ashland, Oregon. The work the group did was called ‘ESH’ that stood for ‘Emotive Subself Healing’. The word ESH alone, I knew was enough to be off putting to my world around me, as confirmed soon enough when Mar-yam passed along to them the group’s website.

Each next step I took was moving me closer to acting on the choice I made weeks earlier in the wilderness surround of the tall space holding evergreens.

Ashland, Oregon, proved to be a very unique place. It was like it was literally from another planet. At first, I might have saw it as a bit hippy, but as I spent time in the town, the restaurants and coffee shops, people watching, I saw the world through some very different eyes. You probably couldn’t find a more polar opposite than my hometown of Abbotsford, the church capital of Canada.

One of Mar-yam and I’s closest couple friends were missionaries from the Philippines, whom we’d spent time with there. When they heard from Mar-yam where I was that weekend, they told her about the ‘dark principalities and powers’ that were over Ashland, Oregon, that they felt every time they drove by it most summers on the highway doing their annual mission church tours.

The people there however didn’t feel demonized at all to me. Quite the opposite. They felt real, open and curious. The children out in the vegetarian restaurants with their parents felt like creatures from another planet. Soft, bright, free. I walked through the parks, did some clothes shopping, and found places to rollerblade. A Mcdonald’s restaurant had opened some time back and was forced to close. The people here were into real food.

Mar-yam called to check in with me that weekend. She knew something was up, something big. Our conversation was abrupt and matter of fact. Part of me was so not interested anymore in her cautions or her inquiries. As I drove the ten hour drive home that weekend, I knew the time was now. As I pulled off the freeway for gas midway, I called Eric, to tell him that I was going to be ending it with Mar-yam when I got home and asked him how he felt about that. He replied “I trust it, Marvin. You are following your heart for everyone involved.” I knew to ask for support when I needed it.

I arrived home mid afternoon that fall day, five days short of our 23rd anniversary, pulled up in the driveway, left my suitcase in the car and went inside. Mar-yam greeted me and I asked her if I could talk with her. We sat down in the living room on the new couches that were positioned opposite each other, that we had purchased soon after a recent renovation. Tears came as I began to simply tell her that I was no longer willing to remain in our marriage bond. What a surreal feeling, like pulling a trigger in slow motion, that ends something and starts a chain reaction of other things. Mar-yam responded with a more stoic ‘I knew it’, part of her seemingly happy with her accurate intuition as a way to deflect from the pain of the moment. The conversation was short and soon moved to the need to tell the girls. Before the day was out, we sat down with Avonlea, who listened thoughtfully, and said, “I can do this, as long as you don’t get all weird and be at war with each other”. Mar-yam and I had been so prone to not have conflict over the years, that some deeper conflict would probably have actually been a healthy thing between us. I was surprised though to feel how easy she took this news. I slept downstairs that night in the now spare bedroom as Rachel had just left for nursing school across the province two weeks earlier. I called my parents that evening and told them, along with my brother and sister. I needed to act. I needed to choose. I needed to take responsibility.

It felt strange but somehow doable at the same time to move out, having been offered a bed at my brother’s house for the moment. I knew this was permanent. Mar-yam asked to go for a tea a few days later where she tenderly asked if we could try and work things out. I said ‘No’. She asked ‘why?’, and part of me defiantly answered her, and everyone else who was energetically in the room, along with the Demiurge, “Because, I don’t want to, that’s why!”

I was breaking up with duty and obligation. I knew if I was to ongoingly succeed at finding my own heart, I’d need to ongoingly part with duty and obligation. Mar-yam accepted my declaration that day as final and we soon got underway with separation logistics, that were able to be managed easily and with mutual respect.

Later that same week, of all crazy things, Rene’s elderly mom died, and I was naturally invited to the funeral. I knew attending that funeral would only be more duty and obligation, and that he and I’s heart were close in an old way, but not in the new arising way that was happening for me, and parts of me. It felt strange responding to the invitation to say that I didn’t feel close in heart to be able to share in his grief.

In the work I was doing with Eric, I was journaling with and getting to know a part of myself. The first part I worked with, I called Wayne, after my middle name, who held the tones of depression. I simply couldn’t take Wayne back into the flames of a burning house for any more of the proper type duty and obligation reality when he and I were sharing and feeling real heart tones and deep tears moving between us. At the same time, I couldn’t begin to guess how Rene and his family could file this as anything else but deceived behavior. Mar-yam had already said that she thought the connection I described in my journaling with Wayne was with a ‘familiar spirit’ and that I was fast falling for the deception that we’d been taught against all of our Christian lives.

Some weeks later, Rene asked to go for early morning breakfast as we often did in the past. It was clumsy, with nothing but the inertia of a now dried up past between us. He told me he respected how I handled the financial separation with Mar-yam, and that touched a part of me, again feeling the deep code of respect between us. Finishing the last few bites of breakfast, I found my heart and through precious tears, said that really all there was left to feel and acknowledge was the pain of goodbye. It felt so good to finally feel what felt real in real time. Love for me. Love for my parts. Love for other. We wished each other well, left the table and went on with our lives.

What Ice cream cone are you on now, Andy?

Andy: Lost count, Raphael. I lost count.

Raphael: Wow. Did you save some for me, because I could use a triple about now, sugar-free if you have it?

Andy: This place has infinite supply, you should try the Rocky Rhodes, it’s to die for…

Raphael: Too perfect, I’ll take one scoop of that, another of the Magic Merlin, The Unicorn, and one of Metatron’s Metaphysics. I’ll pause with that for now and maybe someone feels to wrap this up for today. Thank you everyone for being the best audience on and off the planet!

Merlin: Whoah, Raphael. I almost don’t want to add anything for fear of disturbing this awesome feeling space. But, I’d like to say how I feel how that, were it not for these evolutions of your life, and these choice points, we wouldn’t be here, connected in heart and purpose. I feel like I am very much a part of your round table, Arthur, I mean, Raphael. And I’m very glad to be with all of you, my fellow brothers in this galactic Camelot.

Metatron: Dang, you said that well, Merlin. I will not do myself the disservice of trying to improve on it. I did however note, with your words about our brotherhood, that somehow, we ended up as a team of all men? I move that we call on the multiverse to gather us an opposite gendered being to join us for this worthy journey as soon as possible.

Andy: I know just the one. I vote for Animalia! She’s a ton of fun and she’s our very own in-house feminine.

Merlin: Yes, and who knows, there’s maybe more sleeping beauties and Queens Of Hearts, that have a thing or two to resolve with the Demiurge, that we all need to feel as well.

Metatron: Totally works for me. I’d be so honored. The testosterone level has been getting a little high in here.

Rhodes: Thank you, Raphael. Thank you everyone. I loved feeling this part of the story today. I know I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t made these epic choices, Raphael. I look forward to feeling Animalia’s input going forward too. She is like major hot stuff though, I just need to warn you, in a good way.  I feel us taking all the time we need to feel all there is to feel in approaching the Demiurge. I feel him, feeling himself as we are approaching.

Andy: Ten-four everyone. Until next day. Please leave by the exits and don’t forget the speakers.
Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about Weekly Sessions, Live Streams, Videos, and Community.

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