By Raphael Awen
If you’re not unhappy, you’ll never come to know true happiness.
Twenty years ago, I had ten big desires brewing inside of me, that all felt so out of reach. Today, I’m actually living in the fulfillment of all ten.
In some ways, at 62 years old, I’m happier than I ever imagined I’d be and in some ways, I’m not.
If you’re curious and drawn to some real transparency, please allow me to explain, but only if you’re truly wanting to dare to own your own sacred journey, as well as your deeper desires.
If you’re here and reading this, I feel it’s safe to assume that you’re connected to a deep common denominator in each of us to grow and expand. That’s why I’m writing and reflecting on this, actually, to keep on growing.
A quick list of the 10 really big desires I had brewing back in 2004 were as follows:
To escape the world I had created in a profitable niche world in my 30 year long painting contracting business. It was too easy and felt like a trap in many ways.
I wanted to leave the city I had spent the last 40 years in, but that felt so far out of reach.
I wanted to get out of debt financially.
I wanted to express my soul purpose and live in a much deeper sense of mission in my life, with more influence and connection with my world around me.
I wanted to be really intimately connected with a soul mate romantic bond inside of that mission.
I wanted to travel and live somewhat nomadically, and be in a much deeper connection with nature inside of that romance and soul purpose.
I wanted to get beyond a very limited sexual expression and repertoire which was all I’d ever known.
I wanted out of a 23 year marriage as well as my lifelong relationship with Christianity, both of which were reaching the end of their natural life cycle inside.
I wanted to learn how to live inside of the superabundance of the universe where I didn’t ‘work to earn a living’.
Each of these desires spoke to something really true of my soul. Looking back, it’s quite striking to feel how each one of these desires has been fulfilled when 20 years ago, each one only felt like a dream, where the entire self-help Tony Robbins like phase of my consciousness where ‘You can manifest the life of your dreams’ was no longer anything I had much steam for inside of me.
The dreams felt more and more taunting to me as I couldn’t see where and how I could move towards them. All I could feel was a sense of my life powering down in many ways, and my impulses to protect what I didn’t want to lose kept making me feel more trapped and more in despair of ever realizing these elusive dreams.
It’s an even stranger thing to realize that from the vantage point of 20 years ago, I’m both more fulfilled today than I’d ever imagined and I’m also not.
All of these desires were quite external to my internal world, which wasn’t nearly as in focus at the time. Many of the desires were strategic hopes of not having to enter my personal internal hells to find this imagined external heaven. What life and my soul gave me was a mission much deeper than the one I was superficially, externally, dreamily focused on, and that was to begin to truly feel and heal long avoided terrains inside of me.
Parts of me back then imagined in all those dreams, if I were somehow ever to make them more than dreams, if I actually realized them, that I’d be guaranteed to be outside of a world of deep challenge, of any experience of fears and insecurities, that I’d have life by the tail somehow, at least on my terms. I would be in expansive heart and soul fulfillment somehow. The dreams were like an imaginary world to cycle in, to escape into. In many ways, they felt so safely impossible, that parts of me didn’t actually worry about what it would be like to actually move my life from where I was then to where I wanted to be.
I didn’t really have a travel plan or a relocation plan because I didn’t see myself traversing that gap between my reality and my desires, until I began unavoidably falling into that gap.
I feel many men and women are right there now, falling into that gap, into that primordial void space. We are in deep cycles of death and rebirth, where not only individuals, but also entire cultures and ways of being in the world are reaching the end of their intended life cycles. We’ve received a sobering terminal illness diagnosis that feels quite unavoidable and convincing. Change is coming. Time to prepare, but how?
Where my unhappiness lives in me today is realizing this expectation or even demand that I’d be happier than I actually am was some kind of expectation of being saved or removed from life itself. My soul, and your soul never actually expected that life here in physical form would be free of deep challenges, or immune to unhappiness.
Your and my soul knew then and knows now that the propulsion system and digestive system of our growth always includes a ‘wanter’. No wants, no appetites, no unhappiness…; no real life.
Your and my present ‘skin in the game’ of carrying unfulfilled desires is what makes us interesting, useful and capable of deep joy, reverence and meaning. Without new desires showing up on the shores of your deepest fulfillments to date, you are withdrawn from life and love itself.
The biggest purpose at the core of the universe may be love itself wanting to come to know and feel itself, to unveil itself to itself. If that’s accurate, then you and I, as manifestations and expressions of that love itself, best gear up and ‘fear up’ (in a healthy way) of giving ourselves over to love’s cycle of despair, turning to yearning and then fulfillment and preparing to do it all over again. If love ever decides it has come to the end of its infinite learning and growth and to rest on its laurels, then we can be sure that heaven will be somehow beyond the risks of boredom and atrophy, that have and would surely plague and haunt us at this and previous phases of our consciousness.
I want more. You want more. This connects us like nothing else does. Your and my rewards and fulfillments can’t actually be kept to ourselves. My big piece of the pie doesn’t mean a smaller piece for you. If one of us figures it out, it’s actually figured out and plainly available for each of us. There’s no patent office to file your proprietary and personal claim on your fulfillment, or your ‘life hack’. This is because there is on a deeper level, only one of us in this illusory game of the ever appearing separate self.
Love needed the staging of the sovereign individual, the separate self, a birthing of its own image, likeness and stature, billions of times over, to prove its point that the whole show is a love show, including the deepest polarities and ‘evils’ and ‘devils’ we are faced with.
The despairs, the evils and the devils are all wanting nothing more than reconciliation with love. Every trauma and despair within you is a portal to the more that you are self-assigned here to seek.
The separation fears and traumas are all vital to learning and growth. The happinesses turning to more wanting needs to be factored in. You are this big of a being.
I want it all. I want it for me. I want it for you. I want it for love.
That’s my new desire and dream. I’m looking for more connection with more dreamers. Let’s get transparent with one another. What hasn’t worked? How can that inform what’s wanting to take form now?
What new ways of life and love want to express in this reunion side of the separation equation?
Are you willing to get honest and real? Because until you do, while you’re still part of the game, and love’s game and ever worthy, wherever you are, you’re just kind of boring and uninteresting to me. I’m not really drawn to you. On a higher level, I’m in awe of you, that you’re soul would take on such levels of disconnect and unfulfillment to transmute for love in time, but until this soul turn of reunion turns a corner in you, there’s just not a lot of any kind of a personally interesting game to play with you.
We both ever and only have equal worth and intrinsic value, but we’re just not on the same page. The game of separation and difference and polarity is still here, but only really to stage more reunions, and more learning.
I want to be a part of your despairs and your dreams, because when I’m allowed into that, I’m allowed into more of me, more of love itself, more of the divine’s sacred evolution.
Much love,
Raphael 
For more on my journey from those 20 years ago, check out Jelelle and I’s book: ‘Under The Bloated Banyan – Our Sacred Union Journey From False Light To True Love’ You can read more about it here: soulfullheart.org/underthebloatedbanyan
I’m also posting some longer writings like this one on Medium.com if you’d like to connect with me there. This post can be found here: https://medium.com/…/if-youre-not-unhappy-you-ll-never…
Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheart.org for more information about sessions, events, videos, etc.
They’re the ones I want to be around. They’re the ones that nourish. They’re the ones I want to model after.
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