Tag: consciousness

Life As A Divine Playground

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

By Jillian Vriend

So much of our western world and culture is based on a foundation of fitting in, compliance, and coping. Instead of encouragement to express our individuality and take passionate risks to tell our truth and feel our feelings, we are indoctrinated in the school of conformity, suppression, and making nice with others. We are pressed to get an education, find a career, settle down with a spouse, have kids, buy a house, go on vacations, and eventually retire until the day when we leave this earth. This is considered by many people, especially in the western culture, to be a sign of successful inhabitation of being here and so they feel at rest and in joy with their lives, happily settling into a life of busy content and materialistic gain.

Or do they? If this were true, if this “recipe” for happiness were the real food that we need as humans than why do so many, if you dig beneath the surface numbness, have feelings that would contradict this contentment picture? Beneath the surface lurk those “dark” feelings that we don’t like as a society to address and look at. We prefer to medicate them with happy pills, treat them with behavior modification strategies, buy another image-based item to make us feel better, go see another escapist movie to give us the sense that life could be adventurous yet only in our fantasies. Or we have extramarital affairs, use drugs/alcohol/work/religion to numb us to make it through another day, go on vacations to escape from our daily grind reality.

We prefer to get so busy in a linear, achievement-based life that we have no space and time to feel ourselves or anyone else around us. We prefer to bury the desires and aches that are the source of this dissatisfaction. We prefer to relate to our pain and fear on a surface level rather than dig into the depths of ourselves where perhaps terrifyingly dark and messy emotions and memories may dwell. We prefer our violence on the television or to play out in dusty, remote “third world” countries where we can remove ourselves from the action and cheer for our “country” on the sidelines. We prefer to distance ourselves from the tragic and devastating conditions that the majority of our species suffers in.

I’ve been offered and have experienced myself that as sacred human children of the Divine  we are meant to and capable of much more than this flat line existence based on conformity, disconnect, and achievement created by our false self and the many parts that make it up.

The earth is our playground, offering us a denser existence in which to experience ourselves truly embodied in physicality while at the same time connected to our divine essence. Embracing and becoming aware of both our roots and our wings. On this playground, we get to play, experiment, see what works and see what doesn’t. We get to express who we are, each of us being a spark of individuality in expression here while still being connected as One. We get to relish in the joys of being human- making love, eating food, listening to music, falling in love.

On this playground, we’ve been offered the opportunity (if we choose) to explore intimacy with another person who is separate from us, to join with them in sacred union, and to see how undefended and heart open we can become with each other. Parts of us experience hurts and wounds from being separate in this denser reality and also from the reality of our world being set up the way that it is in this current phase of human evolution. Parts of us have these hurts and yet they are a gift too, because the healing of them offers an ongoing adventure into the terrain of ourselves, especially the unknown and undiscovered aspects of ourselves.

This picture of life as a playground, the one that SoulFullHeart offers, is a shift from the mainstream and preferred one of our western culture. And being that, it’s not for everyone as we all are on our own sovereign journeys with our own reasons for being here with our own things to work out. For those of you who do feel a sense of “yes” to the picture of reality that I am offering here, then you also have a sense perhaps that it is not an easy path to follow, and that it is unknown, painful and scary at times.

Yet, we are not meant to do it alone.

Like-minded and -hearted souls will be drawn to join with you on the journey as you are brave enough to ache for what you want, willing to give up the things that may keep you stuck, and risk to be in vulnerable intimacy with yourself (including your parts and their shadow and wounded sides), with others, and with the Divine.

Also, support is always available from the Divine, which aches to experience us relating in a magical and unbound way to the opportunity of life that they have gifted us with. It does not want us to be stuck in boxes, trapped by how we relate to debt or money, slave to time, and in deep pain and frustration that we cannot seem to successfully numb. It does want to help us experience life as It intended us to, learning from us as we learn from It, loving us as we love It, and with It holding us along the way!

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

In My Own Way

Published on by Gabriel Heartman2 Comments
Photo Taken By Chris on Goat Rock Beach, CA

By Chris Tydeman

(Note from Chris: As I have been moving through the SFH process, I have been experiencing my parts in relation to other people and daily activities. This piece comes as a part of me is recognizing and letting go of those things that he once held dear and defined himself through.)

I have walked the halls of this life

By feeling the walls and ground along the way

Never truly seeing where I have been going

Just following the thoughts that surround me

For they are all I have ever known.

When I cannot feel them, I panic.

Where am I? Where am I supposed to go?

I flail, feeling for something solid

Something to hold on to

Anything to help me feel like I am somewhere,

That I am someone.

The floor collapses and I fall

Unsupported by what used to hold me in place.

I am in a vacuum

In terror, I try to rebuild the hall with anything I can remember

But every time I try, it lasts for only a short while

And I am back again

Alone, empty, unknown

A voice from within whispers, but I cannot hear.

I call out for it, but only echoes of solitude come back to haunt me.

In this hell, I begin to weep

And the dam of my heart breaks open in a deluge.

A piercing pain overwhelms me

A fire begins to rage

Then I hear that voice once more.

The softness and clarity are unlike anything I have ever felt.

Her voice wraps me like a blanket

I continue to burn, but no longer in pain

“You are never alone my son. My love will always be here to support you and guide you. You are more than you can possibly imagine. You no longer need to be defined by that which you are not. Instead, surrender to that which you are.”

With those final words, a faint light begins to appear.

As it brightens, a new world appears before me.

A world that I could only have imagined

For I did not have the eyes to see

This time there is a vastness in front of me

This time I still may not know where I am going

But this time I will do it my own way.

​

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

Suffering From SPD (Single Personality Disorder)?

Published on by Raphael Awen2 Comments

By Raphael Awen

(Raphael’s note: I’m letting my inner teenage part express in this blog entry. His name is Marvin, and he seeks aliveness and meaning with others, especially around creative expression.)

“Hey Hon, do you wanna do that hike today?” she asked.

“ah…I don’t know….,” He said flatly.

“Or is today better to do that gardening? We got all the stuff for it?” She offered, looking at himfor connection.

“hmmm,” he toned back non-committally.

“Is there anything you’d like to do today, we haven’t had much time together for a while?”

He shrugged back with a facial grimace.

——  —–  —–

Have you ever been in a conversation that goes something like that? Sure, you have right? On both sides of the conversation probably.

But, have you ever been in a conversation where you or the person you are speaking with instead of being flat, replies to an offer with a thoughtful pause and says open-endedly, “Well,…. part of me does, ……and part of me doesn’t.”

Isn’t that way more refreshing, and honest? You can go somewhere with that response. It acknowledges that we all experience a push pull inside of ourselves.

—–  —–  —–

‘Single Personality Disorder (SPD):’ The resulting compounding stress in one’s life from the delusion that everything they think, say and feel comes from one personality source inside of them.

‘Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD):’ The stress of knowing and experiencing that you are more than one, but that there isn’t a healthy you at home who can hold, love, and reparent the various parts of you.

Seeing ourselves as made up of parts or subpersonalities, as it has been called, breathes so much relief. I can genuinely be drawn to something inside of myself and have a repulsion to it at the same time. I can like you and hate things about you at the same time. I can be majorly motivated towards something and lose the motivation in a heartbeat?

Part of me may definitely dislike the roller coaster effect of one part feeling something while another (or many others) feel something else. This is the part who seeks to appear “put together” to others who seem to be quite put together, while another part of me would so prefer to just check out from it all.

I’m curious, does that feel true for you too?

Soulfullheart offers a process where you can both get to know the various parts of you as well as be the kind and loving parent that your parts need to heal.

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

Opening Our Blind Eyes

Published on by Raphael Awen3 Comments

Image

By Wayne Vriend

Is it possible that there are things you cannot see right now?

How often are you moved to tears at the wonder and complexity of your physical body for instance?

How often do you feel a love presence coming to you from yourself, or from the Divine, or from another person in your life, to the point of feeling overwhelmed by the love?

If you’re like me, it’s not as often as you’d like.

Could it be that our eyes, our receptors of reality, have been turned down to a frequency that we can bear? To a lower frequency that matches our wounded experiences of this life, and past lives, up till now?

If your answer is ‘yes’ to my question, let me ask you my next question.

What would it take to open our eyes? That is to increase the frequency our eyes transmit and receive at?

My experience is that it takes a process of healing those past wounds. It takes an emotional authentication process, called life, a drama story played out in the real time of your life that allows for the feeling and healing of the past wounds, and embraces and lets in a new space for the new arising story, your unfolding story. It takes feeling the parts of us that are afraid to see yet ache for clearer vision at the same time.

If your answer is ‘no’ to my question about the possibility of there being so much more to see that you have seen till now, then let me ask you one more question.

Is the reason you are still breathing have something to do with proving that your present level of seeing is your highest reality? To prove that you are as attained as possible in this present moment?

I feel a presence in my life that wants to accelerate my ability to let in my next phase. What is my next step in a deeper sense of play, of passion, and of seeing? For me, I sense it is deeply about my own personal journey to see more and help others that ache to see more. I feel it will be about continuing to expand my work in Soulfullheart to individuals and also about speaking to groups about what I see, and how that relates to what they want to see and share . It seems simply true that describing what you see to others has to do with expanding vision. If I don’t share what I’m seeing, then my eyes wax dim. If I let out what I am letting in, like breathing, then my eyes wax brighter.

In this lifetime for me, so far, I have deeply let in and let out several things; Christianity, and being a missionary and teacher within that; a 23 year marriage; raising two daughters; and a 28 year entrepreneurial vision and effort at a contracting business; are the big ones that come in the moment. I needed to live through each of these stories, in real time, in order to feel and heal….in order to feel and heal some more, in order to, you guessed it, to feel and heal some more.

I deeply believe that what you have yet to see, and what I have yet to see, makes for an adventure that’s deeper than any adventure story we’ve ever read or seen in a movie. What you and I have yet to see is why we create and are drawn to stories.

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

Challenging The Part of You That Argues For Your Limitations

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

“Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours,”  Richard Bach

By Jillian Vriend

After more than ten years of serving people in various capacities and settings, I’ve heard many self-limiting arguments from a client when part of them is resisting a challenging growth phase in their process. Whether the challenge is coming from life in the form of a crisis or is self created by the choices they are making or is coming from an intuition or guidance offered by me; it can be very difficult for parts of us to allow us to move to our next tier of growth, even if we say initially that we really want to heal, change, and transform.

As a SoulFullHeart Guide, when I hear a justification from a SFH client for not doing journaling or for letting weeks go before scheduling the next session or for continuing medications and self defeating patterns and suffering loops that they’ve previously felt they needed to end, I think of the quote, “Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they’re yours.” From a soulfullheart perspective, I would change this to: “Become the part of you who argues for our limitations and, sure enough, that’s all you are.”

If you were working with us as a SFH Client and found yourself in a challenging phase, rather than trying to just shift or reframe your thinking or encourage you to modify your behavior, we would advocate that you identify the part of you that holds the resistance and is the “arguer for the limitations”. We’d have you ask this arguer part what they are afraid of if you continue to commit to your process; encourage you to negotiate with them by offering that even though you feel this part of you is resistant that you desire to heal and grow; and feel with this part how you can agree on a pace and timing that honors their feelings while still allowing movement forward.

You would feel how this part of you received arguments of limitations from your parents, family, and social conditioning. This negotiation through a dialogue with you (as your growing SoulFullHeart Self)  is what allows you space from the parts of you that are feeling shut down, overwhelmed, kicking out, and resistive. This also allows for space from possible unfelt mother and father projections that may be going on towards life, God, or your SFH Guide. If this previously resistive part is able to respond to the challenge, deeper levels of trust, respect, and leaning in are created from that part towards you, the new parent in the “house”, and future negotiations through difficult phases should be easier.

Basically, SFH offers that you need to show up to challenge yourself and parts of you about the limiting truths they hold about time constraints, lack of resources, inability to give up a medication or toxic relationship, etc. or you cannot move beyond their reality to experience the life that you most desire. A life where time and resources feel abundant; where what you previously related to as a medication no longer is being used to suppress your feelings, and where what previously felt daunting becomes an opportunity for growth and healing.

These movements can be supported by a SFH Guide challenging the arguments and justifications that you give and inviting you to connect with the part of you that is offering them in the way I’ve previously described. If the client cannot go there, then we trust that this just isn’t the time for them to go deeper into their process as their reality of not being available for it has become their only reality. It would be invasive for us to push deeper if there isn’t a “them” there, a growing centered and more mature version of themselves, to respond to the challenge.

Ultimately, what we most desire for people is a growing experience that they can challenge parts of themselves in a loving way that holds accountability while making the commitment of time, money, and energy to their process because it feels most self loving and nourishing to them to do so for their own growth and healing. When this is the ground of the exchange, they get to experience the possibilities that open up and the healing that happens when they become more emotionally conscious about the parts inside of them and how their undigested and unfelt reactions to life limit them from becoming who they were meant to be and living the life they really want.

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

Moving Beyond Compartments And Into The Flow

Published on by Jelelle Awen2 Comments

By Jillian Vriend

We are being offered an invitation to move beyond compartmentalization in our lives. The defensive aspects of our persona create compartments (both energetically and emotionally) to hold back love and desire from flowing into all areas of our lives. We may also compartmentalize our “work self” from the person that we are at home; or our public service persona from who we are in private; or our spiritual seeker from our practical side. I feel this is also what happens when people attend weekend or week long spiritual seminars, have a “peak experience”, and yet have difficulty integrating it into their daily lives long term. The experience and our authentic response to it has been put in a compartment by our defenses, waiting a time when it will feel safe to express this way again. In all of this compartmentalizing, we are essentially resistant to letting our natural essence arise and flow through every moment and in response to every situation in our lives.

The invitation from the Divine is that we can flow into life from our natural essence, on the current of love, and in every arising moment. This invitation is offered to us now….and now…..and now. It is our minds, our conditioning, our conforming to a linear-based culture, and, most of all, our fear of not having love and not being liked, that keeps us in these compartments. It is much easier to be rejected and feel shut out by people if we are only actually bringing a portion of ourselves (and a highly formed version) rather than our whole authentic and unpredictable selves!

An example of this from my past was when I worked as a business coach and manager during the work week and engaged in my spiritual/emotional passion calling on weekends and “off work times.” My authentic expression and true passion was reserved by my defenses to come out only when it felt safe for it to, when I was in group circles where everyone else was being this way, in an individual facilitation session, or when I was alone with my parts.

In the beginning, this compartmentalization was comfortable and actually not even conscious to me. I also compartmentalized my romantic relationship away from my spiritual/emotional work as my mate at the time didn’t accept and understand what I was engaged with. It felt easier to keep that side of myself contained off from him because whenever I brought it up we would fight and have conflict about it.

Yet, the more I opened my heart, my soul, and myself through the work that I was engaging in, the harder it became to just go to work in the office and separate that from my “personal life.” And also it became more painful and difficult to separate my romance from my deepening relationship with the Divine and the one with myself and my parts. Eventually, the love and desire were in overflow enough that it became possible to make the changes that I needed to in order to end the compartmentalization. This meant the end of the relationship, although it didn’t necessarily have to be that way if he had felt drawn to engage in the same healing process that I did (which he didn’t.) And, this also meant the eventual moving on to a full time focus on offering my spiritual and emotional healing gifts to others and out of business coaching.

These changes took tremendous courage and also lots of breathing space, time, love, and negotiating with and feeling of my defenses. As the compartments became fewer and fewer, the dam holding back my natural essence and love collapsed and an overflow of love, desire, passion, flooded into my life. This flood continues in this moment as a tendency to compartmentalize my life is moved through with a fresh flow of love from the Divine or in connection with Wayne or in an offering during a SoulFullHeart session where I am learning and growing, even as I am offering to others a way to respond to life and love.

My current guidance is to feel the painting contracting work that I am doing is as sacred as the healing work that I am offering. That the Jillian who holds a paint brush is the same as the one who is holding someone’s heart desires and fears.

And, I feel in embracing this offering that there is less resistance to working, more sweetness and enjoyment of it, and a sense of honoring and service that just is no matter what I am doing or engaged with. There is more surrender to trust love will flow and find its way, even through conflict and difficulty. There is more trust that the container of love that has no boundaries, limitations, or compartments!

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

Throwing Caution To The Wind: Uncovering What You Really Want

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

By Wayne Vriend

You may want a better job, or a more reliable car, or a car that says you are really cool, or the latest smart phone, or some new clothes, or a new friend, or your spouse or mate to change in some way. But if you were to take a look at whatever it is that you want and to ask yourself if there is a deeper need underneath the surface want or need, what do you think you might discover?

As you ask this question, try not to judge the the surface want or need as either vainly superficial or justifiably necessary. This way of judging your needs, both approving or disapproving of them, is all part of hiding from the desires and needs that are at the root of them.

Maybe the deeper want or desire is something like hunger for approval from others, or being noticed. Maybe it is a sense of self importance that you are craving. Maybe it goes deeper still to a need to feel Divine approval or love. These are all real human needs. I like being noticed and feeling that my life is important, and being approved by others I respect feels really good too.

What you and I really want is our lifeline in a sea of drowning humanity. Your deeper desires are keys to who you are at a deep level.

I’d rather feel genuinely important than rely on a physical object like a smartphone or a car, or an emotional object like my role or status in society, that does such a poor job of affording me any consistent feelings of self love.

Genuine human need is what underlies vanity and even hideous barbarism. All of us would behave the same way if our needs were being unmet in the same way, and if our present life and past life experiences were similiar.

So, what is that YOU really want?

It’s hard to know isn’t it? If you knew what you really wanted, you wouldn’t stumble along pursuing lesser wants whose fulfillments seem so short lived, and oftentimes cause deep hurt? Would you?

Most people do what they have been enculturated to do with this “problem” of desire. That is to kill it, or control it, or to manage it, so it doesn’t cause problems and pain.

We’ve made desire itself to be the bad guy. But the truth is that the very essence of being human and being alive is to have wants, is to desire, and being the most alive is to have the strongest wants and desires. What condition is your ‘wanter’ in? Dead people are people who no longer need or want anything.  Dead people don’t look longingly in storefront windows and they can’t be sold sex, or ice cream, or a career.

I sincerely believe that the root problems of our aches and pains in life, physically, emotionally and spiritually can be traced back to having a wanter that has been neglected and is in poor shape. Just as it requires a healthy metabolism to shed the weight your body no longer needs, so it requires strong healthy desire to let go of the things that you need to, and are ready to, in order to make room for the new things you really need and desire.

Maybe the definitive expression of vulnerability itself, is to feel the need for something that you don’t yet have access to, or control.

You have to in fact work to get it. You have to do the work of drawing it to yourself. This isn’t actually as hard as it sounds though. Doing work that is fun is what you did as a child without realizing it. You called it ‘play’ in fact. You gave all that you had in terms of time and effort and resources to get what you wanted, and you did it for the fun of it. Your parents may have questioned the appropriateness of your passion, or feared you ending up in a pile of disappointment, but not you. You went all out. You couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t. Any hurts you encountered along the way, you were sure to recover from. You threw caution to the wind.

So what happened since then? You were told a host of things, in language and tone that was foreign to you, such as: ‘that isn’t really a responsible way to live; money doesn’t grow on trees; you need to care not just for yourself; work should come before play; responsibility is being grown up.’ You were told a whole bunch of things designed by nearly dead people with nearly dead wanters who needed to dim the light of your wanter; who in fact needed to sacrifice your alive reality on the altar of their dark deadness. They needed you to tone down in order to not feel the pain of their chosen deadness. They needed you to live as a medication to their deadness. Hence the gospel of putting others needs before your own.

What happened is that you just had the permission to be childlike in this way robbed from your adult reality. I’d like to see it given back to you. I’d like to be around more people like you who ache to return back to this authentic way of being human. Humanity is depending on people like you to take back what you had, what is in fact native to you, but that you lost.

This is the harder work, but it too can be done with all the seriousness of a child at play, with Divine help and guidance, and with deep and lasting rewards that no man can ever take from you.

If my words resonate with you, and you know that getting help with this kind of a life change is part of what you really want, I’d be honored to help you. I’d get to have a lot of fun helping you and uncovering the parts of you that hold your deepest desires. But only if that is what you really want! The deepest cost isn’t the time, or the money, or the effort. The deepest cost is enduring the process as well as finding the willingness to let go of what you in fact don’t really want, but are only presently attached to.

I know of no greater bravery, and I see its’ potential in you!

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