Tag: emotional healing

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

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

This is the fourth entry in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read the third one.

recovering faith

 

By Kathleen Calder

The old photographs in front of me in digital form are, for parts of me, evidence of an old life and an old me. An attachment to them lives on inside me though I have looked at them a thousand times, and I feel reactions rise up yet again to my body, my outbound energy, and my self-loathing (that may be too strong of a term to use, but at times it does feel I have harbored that strong of a feeling about myself inside parts of me). Photos of a “me” in university studying Theatre, of a “me” exploring freelance modeling and the sexual messiness that came with that at times, and ultimately a “me” that felt most times worthless, incapable and even, yes, “stupid”, “ugly”, “fat”, etc.

It feels tender to let these feelings rise up again and yet for another part of me it feels useless…why let part of me obsess over the past? What is this part looking for…more suffering? These are unanswered questions in the moment, yet there is something about what I was living through that I feel connects directly to my process today.

I remember well the thought pattern I fell into and couldn’t get out of, starting around age 12. Puberty had begun to set in and my body began to develop the shape that I now have. My social world was getting tougher with hormones arising along with an emerging desire to have a boyfriend, while watching other girls my age draw what seemed to part of me like “all of the attention.” Immediately another part came in with messages of needing to find ways to compete but also with messages of my “incompetence” to do so.

On the other hand, I also remember being a “good Catholic girl”. Part of me leaned into church and the feeling of being with “God”. I realize now that this was my first experience of something bigger than me holding me, even if I wasn’t sure how to picture it exactly. I feel with some tears in the moment that this is what held me more than I realized at the time and kept me going through these tough years where I had parts developing like crazy to cover over my porosity and sensitivity as much as possible, to make life feel doable and less insane-feeling. Yes, it was in a Catholic framework, but the Divine is still the Divine and I have had many lifetimes of leaning into an inexplicable energy that comforts, challenges, and ultimately helps me grow somehow.

To me this all demonstrates the beginnings of what would become my own “Spirit/Matter Split”, which is easily one of the greatest themes at work in my life and perhaps for all of us on a global scale. Only recently have I begun to feel how big of a deal it would be if the biggest thing I do in this life is learn to bridge Spirit and Matter instead of feeling them as separate entities. As I go on I will illuminate what I mean.

What I wrote in the beginning illustrates the deep self-punishment pattern parts of me were in. Aspects of this included an obsession about how I looked and what my body weight was. It also included adopting many different “medications” in an attempt to quell this voice inside me but also to lift me up from the heaviness of what most people call “real life”. I remember there being a dense dreariness in my field about how life was supposed to be and how it would inevitably turn out. At times I still have this and I am now working with it consciously in order to feel and heal the parts that still hold it as Truth. This is a piece of family and cultural legacy. No amount of positive affirmations or reframing of my thinking could penetrate this voice and heal these wounds long-term.

So far, I can feel that…

Matter is the density of the material world, both energetically and physically. It is the churning of machines in our industrial factories. It is the ground on which we walk, run, cycle or drive. It is our physical bodies that we tend to obsess over, hold contempt for, and blame for so much. It is “is-ness”.

Spirit is the abstract. It is our feelings and our intuitions, which both can come with such an intangibility that they either pass through us unnoticed or are deliberately ignored/buried. It is life force itself. It is often an experience and a flow that cannot be put into words, it just IS. In a way it is “is-ness” too, but more so in the sense that it is literally All That Is, all at once.

See? One I can talk about more directly, while one needs to be described poetically in order to do it justice in human/Matter terms. Matter is meant to be temporary, fleeting, in the moment, tangible and dense, while Spirit is meant to be ever-lasting, enduring, unbreakable…and though it is mostly energy, it is what we can count on to always be there and it is what our hearts and souls long for more of, consciously or unconsciously.

There is no good vs. evil here. There is not even a real comparison between the two concepts. They are ultimately One; we have just created a duality perhaps to make parts of us feel better. There is a definite, bittersweet pain that comes with feeling Divine connection while there is still so much life to live, especially during this phase of life on this planet. But what could/would it mean if we integrated our daily life experience and our spiritual experiences and indeed didn’t have to define or compartmentalize either one from the other? What if the whole idea behind Matter is that it is a conduit and holding space for Spirit to play in? And what if we are the ones meant to link the two?

What if I am one of the ones called to be a bridge and lead others in this during my lifetime?

What if you are meant to come with me?

I’m realizing now how little experience I have had with nonduality in this life. I am looking forward to being able to let in some tastes of it as this dualistic experience of life continues to heal inside me. For parts of me, being able to be in a strictly human life with abandon has been comforting for short phases, though it has never really brought me satisfaction or deep joy. Perhaps as my parts begin to realize that they finally will get their deepest needs met while leaning into Spirit and taking practical life steps at the same time, I will become more ready to let the Nondual in and therefore let in my essential essence and more tones of my soul and of the Divine than I have ever let in yet.

Well, if life’s Matter is the playground I’m beginning to feel it is, then what have I got to lose in exploring this theme of bridging Spirit with it, except old patterns of being in life that my parts and I are tired of anyways? What could/would shift in my life if I can integrate the two?

I suspect that I, and my life, will change in more ways than I count.

Sounds pretty good to me!

 

Kathleen Calder is an initiate at the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary and you can read more of her writing here on this blog. Please visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary for more information about staying with us and virtual sessions.

The Magic Of Your Power Combined With Your Vulnerability: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

(This is Part Eleven of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Life is about growth and change. Not even death affords an escape from this reality; for death is not a cessation of being, but only more change.

Our journey into and through a physical life is a great metaphor and reflects this reality. Our soul being accepts the journey of taking on human flesh. This journey into human flesh begins as the microscopic combination of sperm and egg, which gives way to a time of exponential growth and change, becoming comfortable and familiar with a home environment, only to be burped out into a brand new world, and then another. Infancy gives way to toddlerhood, which gives way to childhood, then adolescence, teen years, adulthood, mid-life, and into our fullness of life, and completion of a life.

Our soul chose the change of taking on human flesh, human emotion, human gender, and human experience.

You chose to incarnate.

You chose to change.

You chose to surrender to having needs and desires.

Most of us forget this for much of our lives or even for many entire lifetimes. Most of us become attached to belief systems and ways of life that enable us to maintain this forgetfulness of the power and presence of our choice. We do this at almost any cost.

This is not without good reason. In our power, we chose human life; we chose vulnerability. We are unable to escape human vulnerability with any obtainable thing or relationship. In fact, every desirable thing you obtain only heightens the fear of losing that good thing. Even life itself, we fear losing. Most of us can barely stand to feel the utter susceptibility we find ourselves in. We’d rather effort a myriad of feelings and distractions to not have to feel this vulnerability.

Strangely, we put our power in service of denying our vulnerability. In so doing, we miss out on the magic of both.

You have most likely structured your relationship with life to provide you with a sense that life is happening to you. Like a monk who has chosen life in a monastery, you surrender to an arrangement of what you can expect in return for what you are expected to give. Life is fearfully bigger than you. You make a deal for some predictability, some security, and accept the monotony that comes with that. All of this as an exchange to maintain the sense that life is safely bigger than you.

Now, you get to feel like you are riding the waves of life as best you can with the choices you have. You have outsmarted life. You have surrendered to it. You have made yourself smaller than life. You let life circumstance direct and lead you. Aren’t you spiritual? Aren’t you surrendered? You have given yourself to God (in some form) and God will take care of you.

What if this is only a set up perception of life from this part of you that hasn’t reconciled itself to the vulnerability you find yourself in?

What if life isn’t actually happening to you, but instead, you are happening to life?

You are not the victim of another person, or an illness, God or any devil, a slowing economy, aging or any other of the multitude of things that are felt to occur to us.

What if life is only and ever reflecting back to you the power of your choice?

What if life is in such deep and reverent gratitude to you for the gift of your power filled surrender to human vulnerability that life only wants to reflect back to you your power and greatness?

Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search For Meaning, shares his experience in the hell hole of a nazi concentration camp where he came to the deep and profound realization that it was he and only he that could interpret and apply meaning to his experience. His captors, he came to realize, had not even the slightest ability to take that power from him unless he gave it to them.

What meanings are you applying to the circumstances you find yourself in? Are the circumstances happening to you or are you responsible for creating and drawing these circumstances to yourself? What is life and its never ending change wanting to awaken you to?

What courageous step is life asking you to take now in this never ending discovery of who and what you are?

What are you done with that’s time to let go of? A relationship? An identity? A habit pattern? A way of life?

What are you ready to embrace and allow entrance into your life?

What courage are you in possession of that can fuel your next step?

Life only and ever wants to take you into more of you. Life understands your fear, for it has felt its own fear of the life that it finds itself in. Life invites you out to play, to discover, to be curious of who and what you will become around the corner of your next choice.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive your support.

‘I seek, therefore I am’: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive your support!

(This is Part Eight of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Who are you, dear reader of this blog? What brings you here? I hope I am not being too forward with asking such pointed questions. Let me back up.

First, I want to thank you for being here.

Thank you for being here.

You are here with your being.

Your being, I venture to say, is seeking something. You would not be here (or anywhere else online for that matter) if you were not seeking something.

Seeking something is what makes you a you.

You may be someone who stumbled on this blog series or seen it mentioned somewhere. I welcome you here.

You may be an old friend coming to check out what I am doing, or a family member who misses me since we left off contact. I welcome you here. I miss you too. Our curiosity about each other and missing of each other evidences that we are unified in our need and desire for something. We may have parted over a debate over what particular something is worthy of seeking, but we are joined back together in the realization that we share a deep and profound commonality in that we seek.

You may be someone who feels sharply in disagreement about my life choices or what Soulfullheart is about and you’re here seeking to confirm those suspicions. I welcome you here as well, fellow seeker.

That we are all in search of something is a reality so deep that we are willing to separate over what we seek in order to insure that our freedom to seek, and to seek as we choose, be held intact.

‘I seek, therefore I am’, is our shared humanity.

I have a growing awareness that who and what you and I are is so much more than what we have even hardly begun to discover. What we call, ‘The Self’ is so vast that even our disagreements and differences are a necessary part of our journey of discovery.

I also deeply feel that this quest to know will never be fully realized because who and what we are is an infinitely expanding reality. We can grow in our acceptance of the wonder about what we are, but we will never arrive at any destination of fully knowing ourselves. We’ll have to settle for more instead of all.

As you read these words, can you feel an awakening in you of an expansive feeling of your own bigness? The feeling that you are so much bigger than you have ever realized about yourself is a challenging feeling to let in.

Your current experience of life is but a fraction of what there is to experience, and this will remain true for the rest of your life.

This points to the reason most of us fill our lives with so much busyness and distraction. Underneath the busyness is an unfelt and disturbing feeling of ‘I don’t know who I am.’ When that feeling is made conscious as well as accepted to be a beautiful part of your humanity, it changes so much about how life looks and feels to you.

Your seeking to know yourself is but a part of the universe’s search to know itself.

The love that you seek is but a part of the love that you are.

The life you seek is but a part of the life that you are.

I am one with you in that experience. I am one with you in this essence.

Here is where we are utterly inseparable.

Here, between you, me, and whatever we call the Divine, there is no ‘other’.

We are all One.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

My Process of Self-Intimacy: Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on by Kasha Rosa1 Comment

This is the third entry in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read the second one.

IMG_3097

 

By Kathleen Calder

As intimate as this blog series is becoming already, I feel like I want to invite you in even more. It occurred to me that maybe the writing we share here, though we intend it to be invitational in tone, may make you readers feel like you are only circling around something and not really in it. Well, in a way that’s true, but in many ways it isn’t.

In many ways, we feel you joining in with us during our Sunday group circles, our shared meals, and our daily activities. We want you to be here. It’s up to you to qualify yourself to at least make contact, let alone take the leap to be here with us physically. I want contact. I want you to be known and I want to be known too. I want to experience you…and of course inside me is the ache to be experienced. This is what I want to animate for you in this writing today. So, with that in mind, I intend to invite you in even deeper to my world and deeper into what I call my ‘process’.

It is no joke to ask someone to leave their world or even their known consciousness behind in order to experience and participate in a new one. I’ve needed this invitation extended to me many times throughout these last four years with SoulFullHeart. I haven’t been an active part of this healing work for the full four years and, in fact, have had to take many so-called ‘breaks’ from it. I put quotations there because if SoulFullHeart is in you, it is you, and there is no real break from it or way of shaking it. Parts of me have tried. I guess that’s how you know your soul-calling: when something is inside you, calling you forward, grabbing your attention, even when you think you’re adequately distracted by other things.

There is nothing more powerful than finding your way to your deepest, most sovereign, and heart-centered choice to be a part of something. Part of me has, for many years, only identified with being a ‘black sheep’. There has been an insistence inside me that there is no way for me to truly belong anywhere or with anyone or any particular group of people. Socially this was a struggle for part of me for many years, until the last one or two years when I started to wake up to my genuine uniqueness based on my unfolding soul journey, which helped to reframe any feelings of ‘not being enough’ for others to accept into their social lives.

I have also found myself thinning out the number of people I would like around me at any one time. It’s not about snobbery or snubbing anyone, but about self-care and self protection. For now my circle is small and intimate and that feels safer as far as holding my need to land in others’ hearts in a deep way and be felt. While sometimes part of me can still find some comfort in hiding the real me in a crowd, most of the time being in a large group feels very vulnerable and uncomfortable for my sensitivity level.

I, Kathleen, want to know and be known more intimately, and I get to live into that every moment that I sovereignly choose to. It is a huge process though, to reconcile the desire to hide and the desire to be seen. I feel this could be true for everyone in the world on some level. Needless to say, at times in my process so far the desire to hide has won out and I have had to back away from being consciously in my process. The thing is, the process doesn’t truly stop, ever. You’re in your own process right now, actually, whether you are trying out any of the journaling we suggest or are just reading our writing. Something, even subconsciously, is bound to go in.

Each time parts of me have tried to abandon our process together, chaos has ensued, moving me away from these three people who I have been so intimate with. It has needed to play out that way and it hasn’t really, either. However, my emotional maturity level simply couldn’t allow it to be any other way. I have been through many shifts and changes in my life and all of the major ones have seemed to come on a tornado of chaos and I have felt like I was literally on fire at times! Change, while difficult for most people, has come easily for parts of me who have been very addicted to it. There has been an ease in running away, and what is ‘running away’ from SoulFullHeart but a ‘running away’ from myself? Running from intimacy is something every human being can share stories of, I’m sure, and self-to-self intimacy is really the true fear, I feel, for most of us – myself included.

The saying: “Wherever you go, there you are,” rings so true for me and is what I experience of life. It is what keeps bringing me back to the support that Jelayan, Raphael, and Sequoia offer me as I keep going into myself with less medicating and without avoiding any aspects of my process that are ripe and ready for me to feel into and heal.

Before I began my process of parts work exploration through SoulFullHeart, I was very social and aiming to become an actress. I had graduated theatre school and actually became certified as an Intuitive Coach as well, since I wanted to not only become a well-known performing artist, but a spiritual leader and author. I wanted to show the world I was a healer and to prove something – rather, parts of me did. The idea of maybe one day becoming too sensitive to party often or have one-night-stands was foreign and undesired in some ways. Part of me wanted to be part of the collective, even though she never felt she truly was and in fact was in denial of how badly she really wanted out. No doubt this was a lot to sort through.

Nowadays, I still want to be seen, but the glamour aspect has been giving way to the idea of just being embraced for who I am at my most vulnerable and authentic core of my being. This would have been so hard to say four years ago. This is why SoulFullHeart offers that people who may be interested in this work take it one step at a time. Parts of us have a lot at stake and a lot they have been working to accomplish in our lives. Deconstructing them needs to be a process for the sake of our own sanity. In some ways, you never truly know when this process begins for you, as it just sort of does, and usually it is on a wave of desire for change and doubts that the life you are leading now is truly enough for you, even if these desires and doubts feel subtle at the time.

It feels good to share a bit more about what my process has been like. In the future my goal is to weave in bits of stories from my process and perhaps some more visceral sharing of what it actually feels like to feel a part of you for the first time. I feel this may help any of you who are inching towards contacting us and taking on that first session, to imagine what that experience could be like for you.

If you are curious to know more about what I have shared today or have any questions for me, my email is kathleen.m.calder@gmail.com. I would be happy to hear from you.

Kathleen Calder is an initiate at the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary and you can read more of her writing here on this blog. Please visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary for more information about staying with us and virtual sessions.

Realizing Reality Together: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

(This is Part Seven of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

Thank you for joining in on this blog series. I’m really glad to have your involvement.

I have this expanding sense humming through me today of what a human being actually is. I could say more accurately is that I really don’t know what a human being is. And as I accept that into my consciousness, I let in arising wonder. This sense of wonder and childlike curiosity extends to me, you, and even to the Christian couple who this past week accused me of being ‘a cult leader who talks to demons’.

Friend, foe, or in between, we are all part of the human cult and we are all in search of something. We affect each other and we are an intertwined part of each other way more than we realize.

I’ve also had a growing sense of some other ‘participants’ in this blog series from another dimension called Golden Earth. It’s actually what got this blog series launched and I wrote about it in part one. I don’t have any five-physical-sense ‘proof’ of its existence, but I have been afforded the self-permission to imagine it being ‘real.’ I ‘see’ and ‘feel’ through my imagination the active interest of a group of students that like hanging out together in the Golden Earth café and are keenly interested in brainstorming together around what I’ve been putting out in this blog series.

Of course, this all sounds like a science fiction story, and I can say that maybe that is in fact what all this imagination is – a story from beyond our normal scope of perception. What’s crazy though for me (in a good kind of crazy way) is that I get this growing sense that what you and I call ‘real’ and verify as everyday normal reality through our five physical sense perception of reality, doesn’t sound that far off from my ‘Golden Earth’ reality. My sense is that the reality that you and I participate in as ‘real’ is only real because you and I have in fact ‘realized’ it together. We made it up. We made it up in our own personal ‘fact-ory’. And then to top it off, we agreed that it was real. What a bunch of conspirators we are! I guess I am a powerful cult leader after all….wow…. and so are you …. like it or not. We make stuff up as we go.

If any of this stuff is a more accurate picture of the underlying reality that undergirds what we call reality, then at the very least, it puts us back in a place of childlike wonder. That childlike wonder opens out all the edges of what I consider real and true. This lens of childlike wonder filters and swirls through my adult mind and leaves me with a, ‘Holy shit, who the hell are we?’ feeling. ‘Holy’ and ‘hell’ are now in the same sentence somehow.

I mentioned the couple who called me ‘a cult leader who listens to demons’ as I’m still digesting this week the energy of our all-too-real confrontation. While my personal boundary is that no one gets to be a part of my life while they want to energize their reality in an intolerant way towards me, there is another way that none of us can escape anyone else. As we’ve been feeling into in this series: we, at a deep and fundamental level of reality, are all One. We cannot even differentiate enough from that Oneness for there to be an ‘other’ to have a difference with, let alone fight with them.

My mind starts to ride out on some of these feeling waves and mind waves, like a great surfboard ride, and it comes up with more and more profound questions. It’s hard staying on one train of thought for very long. It isn’t too far off from getting stoned really. But before you judge that as a bad thing, consider that what you call ‘reality’ may be, in fact, coming from the completely intoxicated and drug-impaired perception of what you and I just made up and declared real. Hell, you’re not the safe designated driver to get me home safely that you imagine yourself to be. Nor is the Christian couple offering me their Jesus picture of deliverance and salvation. I may not even be safe to drive myself home! I just may need to walk, or stumble, or just pass out on the sidewalk and try again tomorrow, thank you very much!

I love this madness!

I can feel the students at the Golden Earth café really rocking about now, so excited to feel us feeling into this together. If we can soften our perception of reality back to a place of childlike wonder, then they and we get to come out and play. I see the universe knocking on the door of my childhood home – “Hello, Mrs. Awen. Can Raphael come out and play today?”

When and how in the heaven and in the hell did we lose our sense of play? When and how did we make spirituality about being right or being saved or delivered?

The good news is that we fell and bumped our head and are suffering a bit of amnesia. We only fell from the grace of knowing who and what we are. We didn’t fall and bump ourselves out of god’s grace, as the Christian narrative goes. That story has held a good many of us (myself deeply included) for a good long time, and it’s running out of gas. New stories are now vying for our attention.

My truth is that you and I don’t have but the tiniest bit of what there is to be had as far as your sense of self extends. You are so much more than you ever dreamed yourself to be. We live in an Infinite-Love reality that is ever expanding, and so everything we come to treasure as meaningful or real only gets its value because it calls us to get comfortable with deepening our picture of reality.

With this blog series, I’m realizing I don’t have anything to sell you on. Well, to be honest, I’ve been putting out there my own ideas of reality and I guess making a case for that. But, in another way, I get to admit that I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m selling. That, I feel, is what has earned me the title this week of being a powerful cult leader – I am in the great unknown and dangerously having some fun and dangerously enticing others to join me, and what this couple could see and verify for me is that I just might succeed in pulling that off – God forbid, hallelujah and praise Allah!

Reality is being auctioned off to the highest bidder. What do you have to bid for this treasure? What kind of reality do you dream of? What do you want? Deep down in the depths of your being? What makes you tick? What’s your wanter wanting underneath its wants? Are you angry that what you’ve subscribed to hasn’t paid off? I’m glad if you’re pissed. Get pissed at me if you need to. I’ll throw it back in your face and we can be a part of changing consciousness together.

As I said in my last blog, we as a species are at an epochal shift in our consciousness and existence. It is the time of the greatest change we have encountered so far. We go through periods of relative stability (history) that are followed by tumultuous and sudden change (herstory).

You and I get to be in on this, in whatever way we want to be. Once we begin awakening to that, it changes everything, and doesn’t stop.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter via @raphaelawen, or on facebook: ­­­­­­­facebook.com/raphaelawen1. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. We’d love to receive some of your money!

Surrendering to Transformation: Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

by Kathleen Calder

This is the second entry in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read the first one.

 IMG_3097

The day of my arrival, I stepped off the bus in Tomatlán, greeted by the warm embraces of Raphael and Sequoia. Raphael was the first to offer me a hug of welcome. Instinctually I placed my third eye chakra directly onto his heart chakra, and sobbed many tired, worn-out, and backed-up tears as I and parts of me let in that we had finally arrived home and that the process we had been holding around the life we were collapsing in order to return to our sanctuary, was complete at last. The drive home to the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary itself felt long and short at the same time as I held relief, heartbreak, and excitement in every breath.

It is no small thing to let go of a life you have created. In SoulFullHeart we talk about parts of us engaging in and helping to create and hold different chapters of our lives. I have had many chapters in and out of SoulFullHeart in the last four years, some of which I have digested on this blog. This time was very different as I deliberately invested so much more of myself than I ever had before. I believe this ¨going in¨ experience is actually what eventually led me out of this last chapter and back into SoulFullHeart…which I never really left, it feels like. This return feels so palpably different for me too, as this time around I truly feel I am looking for deeper transformation and deeper answers. My ¨seeking journey¨ is officially over and I feel like retiring from it. I have found my vocation and what I really need to keep healing and returning more and more to myself and who I was born to be. It does feel like I am meant to help others eventually as well.

The morning after my arrival, I woke up feeling a happiness in my heart, though still feeling waves of mourning looming in the background. Jelayan checked in with me during breakfast, asking me if I felt ready to start working in the gardens with her again or if I needed some time. I felt like parts of me were eager to get back to work, as it were, and dive back into life here, probably to help ease the transition a bit more. So, after breakfast we readied our buckets with harvesting and planting tools and changed into our work clothes.

Jelayan offered that I could wear a pair of her shoes that were still in pretty good shape while the pair I was intending to work in were falling apart (I didn’t have all of my footwear or my things, since it would all be coming back with a couple also living on our sanctuary when they returned from Puerto Vallarta in their truck later that week). I put the shoes on my feet and we started off down the path away from the house.

Suddenly, I felt a sharp stinging in my middle toe on my left foot and, as I paused to respond to the pain, Jelayan and I spotted a big scorpion scurrying away. Evidently he had been hiding in the toe of the shoe I was wearing on that foot…and I had neglected to even think to check them before putting them on! We were only steps from the house (thank god), so we both calmly made our way to the kitchen to prepare the natural remedies we have learned to deal with in responding to such incidents. Jelayan herself had been stung last year, so she remembered what worked for her and different ways to stay calm. I was so surprised to feel myself as calm as I was.

Jelayan chopped up about six cloves of garlic and put them all in a bowl with some honey and gave me some hibiscus water, very heavy on lime juice, to drink while I swallowed the chopped garlic. The honey wasn’t so much for a medicinal purpose as for the purpose of helping me get the garlic down, though I’m sure its medicinal properties as an antibiotic helped me out too. Then she placed some lime and a slightly chopped clove of garlic on the area where the scorpion stung me. The pain ebbed and flowed during this first hour as I took in the medicine and also Jelayan’s healing touch on my now traumatized foot. Her presence alone helped to keep me calm, and we both feel that the most critical thing you can do is keep calm in a circumstance like this one.

Eventually she helped me to my room where I put a woolly sock on my foot and obviously was now resigned to stay in bed for the day.

The worst symptom I had was the throbbing pain in my toe that overwhelmed my entire foot at times in intense waves that had me clutching at my mattress and bed linens. It took about a week for my foot and leg to feel normal again and now, two and a half weeks later, my toe is finally starting to feel back to normal. Wow. What a process.

Digesting the experience SoulFullHeart style means looking at what ¨scorpion medicine¨ offered me through this incident, and all the different reasons why it happened. Yes, it was partly a careless move on my part to slip on a shoe without inspecting it first, so there was a wake-up call in that. Yet, the fact that it laid me up in bed for about three to four days since I couldn’t walk well enough to work, was an indication that something in me needed that time to just ¨be¨ after making such a big move. I needed that time to rest and digest what I had just dismantled in my life a bit more, and also, I feel like the movement of the toxins through my bloodstream may have helped me detox from some of the energies I took during the last nine months.

In Ted Andrews´ book, Animal Speak, he offers that the scorpion represents transformation and that it tells us that transformative changes can either be chaotic or calm. When I think back on this last chapter away from SoulFullHeart, but also on many of the major beginnings and endings in my life, I see a pattern of mostly chaos without a lot of surrender. It is possible that without the physical need to just be with myself for my first few days back here, I would have restarted my life here in a much less calm, maybe even chaotic way, in terms of my emotional body. It could be that the scorpion helped me find another layer of me – one that really can handle such intense circumstances and still hold it with as much grace as possible, addressing my physical and emotional needs instead of burying them, which really just tends to lead to more trouble, maybe even chaos, later.

There’s undoubtedly so much in life to be careful of, and so much that can cause us pain, and yet all of it seems to offer a message of transformation being possible if we can surrender to it in the right moment. It feels like surrendering to the circumstance while holding our parts and our spine is step one,  as demonstrated by the calm urgency Jelayan and I somehow embodied, and diving into our physical and emotional needs around the circumstance is step two. Each and every major event is another opportunity to go inside yourself and it is my sense that we draw these occurrences because of our need to do just that – go IN. Feel what’s at stake. Feel what it is you want and need.

I sincerely hope I don’t have to draw another scorpion sting, especially as this rounds up all of the intense things I have been through in this last life chapter, which I will share about eventually as they become relevant.

I appreciate you reading and taking this in! If you feel moved to contact me directly, based on this or any of my other blogs, my email is kathleen.m.calder@gmail.com.

Kathleen Calder is an initiate at the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary and you can read more of her writing here on this blog. Please visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary for more information about staying with us and virtual sessions.

My Week Back At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

By Kathleen Calder

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SoulFullHeart way of life asks us to be our biggest selves, yet also gives us room to breathe and feel our way into our next chapters, holding us the whole time.

I made a checklist. It contained ítems that part of me adamantly wanted to remember to bring with me ‘in case’ I needed them. Even with the intention of staying only a week, there is so much to remember to take with you physically in preparation for the off-grid, rural lifestyle. I held some concern that I would have to readjust after being away from it for 9 months and that it might be challenging to jump right back in.

Of course this happened on several levels since the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary is not just a physical existence. Even for the person who is not choosing to be emotionally or spiritually conscious, it wakens something on the inside and catalyzes movements within and without that are maybe unexpected. Though I guess that, based on my own experience of returning there, perhaps mostly everyone who goes there goes with an intention – something they want to find clarity about or something that simply needs to move inside them, even if it can’t be named in the moment.

I could hardly wait to give the gifts that I brought for my friends and teachers. Coming from the city, there is a sense of being able to give abundantly. However, I feel as if the gifts I received from them were worth more…reminding me that being given the opportunity to land inside an open and loving heart is the greatest gift of all. These three people have known me for four years now. We have been through a lot together and not just in a physical existence sense, but in terms of emotional terrain. They are easily the people who know me best. The reason? I can’t perform for them for long. My parts, etheric or emotional, cannot dance in front of my authentic inner reality without being felt and detected. These people will not be duped and they will not stand my shrinking. I could not stand theirs either. SoulFullHeart way of life asks us to be our biggest selves, yet also gives us room to breathe and feel our way into our next chapters, holding us the whole time.

I arrived at the Sanctuary with the intention of finding clarity for my life situation and what I should feel into doing next. I have been in a relationship for the last few months. It has been very loving and with a man I have adored but I have been missing the exploration of my soul consciousness, which I seemed to mostly put on pause after leaving the Sanctuary in April. My romantic partner and I have had different focuses in our lives and that has been good for us as a couple in some ways, but has been hard for us in others. It has also been unfair to him that I haven’t been happy living in Puerto Vallarta. He was the main reason why I wanted to be there. I wanted to inhabit life with him and see where it took us. We moved in together quickly but I don’t regret a single thing about that. It was what we both wanted and I knew from the beginning that it could bring the relationship to a speedier completion, or of course that it might not either.

My years in SoulFullHeart, my templating from Raphael and Jelayan as my teachers and my relationship with Sequoia (he was Christopher at the time), all taught me to go in, in and in, holding any fears but following the love flow in front of me, trusting that no matter where my heart takes me I will benefit and others will too. I’m feeling now how life is not a game of finding something to keep forever. We aren’t entitled to that. Lasting love is possible, as Raphael and Jelayan have found, but it comes with a journey of finding your own love overflow that cannot begin until you authentically love and mate with yourself.  All the time in and out of relationships is practice and experimentation. The only formula for keeping love is the one that keeps us in stuck relationships that don’t deepen or evolve and keeps us from growing and healing individually.

In a way, I feel humility when I think about this, but also I feel like I breathe a bit easier. I guess that means that I have held a lot of stress in the past of making a life phase or a romance ‘last forever’ when I inherently know that it may not be meant to and that in some ways I may not actually want it to. I now feel much more open to where life wants to take me next, trusting a bit deeper that whatever happens next will only lead me to more healing and feeling more complete inside myself.

My time with the others, but also my time alone, felt more fulfilling during this week at the Sanctuary than it did in the past. So much so that I feel drawn to live there again. I have just completed all there was to complete in Puerto Vallarta, including the romance that I have held dear. The latter is the toughest part right now. The details of that I will keep to myself for now since it’s pretty raw for both of us.

I feel as if my return to the Sanctuary is a return to me. It is my self-love and my desire to have more self-love that I can share with others and help them heal too that led me there originally and is leading me back there to live. I am born to be a healer, especially during this time of transition for the planet and humanity. I have an emerging self that I have barely tapped into in these last 28 years. I am a complete mystery to myself in the moment and I find that refreshing. I’d rather feel like I am an unfolding story than a book that has already been written and read twenty times. All I have right now are clues to who I could be and am becoming and I can’t imagine another place where I can explore this than at the Sanctuary with the support of my most intimate beloveds.

Kathleen Calder is an initiate at the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary and you can read more of her writing here on this blog. Please visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary for more.

A Series Dedicated to the Sacred Masculine: Introducing Diary of a HeartMan

Published on by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment
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Image by Light Worker

The story is bullshit and you know it on some level. You know, the one about who you are as a ¨man¨ in a seemingly soulless, invulnerable, industrial society. The one that convinces you that you have no personal power. That money rules and you are its bitch. That you should ¨pick a side¨ and go to battle against an opposition that is owned by the same fucker that owns yours. The story has cut off your balls, closed your heart, and has left you feeling impotent, pissed off, or both.

All of this affects the way we relate to each other as men. Real men. Not the assholes that want to dominate, violate, and discriminate in the name of the Holy, the Law, or the Almighty Dollar. Not the sackless automotons who do their time like good little citizens waiting for the end of their life to actually live their life. I mean those of us who are actually conscious of what the hell is going on and feel a deep desire to connect to other men about it in a vulnerable way. But fusing to the story has made us less vulnerable, just as our fathers before us and their fathers before them. That expressing our deepest despair, fears, and/or rage is not acceptable, desirable, or functional.

In this series I want to create a room for you and I to feel together what being a man in our current society has done to our sacred masculinity in relationship to ourselves, women, the earth, and our essence as infinite love. I want to pierce the veil of our collective facade. See what lurks in our shadow and shines in our light. See what it is we are truly made of that has been covered over and forgotten in this post-modern world. What is your soul cry about? Why are you and I here together at this particular time in history? How can we come together and heal what is preventing us from truly being brothers in heart and soul?

We swim in the same ocean, you and I. Everyday. We are a lot more alike than a part of you thinks. We are inextricably connected and affected in our sufferings and our joys. There is an opportunity for us to feel and heal our way to be the kings we have forgotten we truly are. I invite you to participate with me in this exploration in male vulnerability, power, and spirituality. You may agree or disagree, lightly or fiercely. The question is, can you show up for it?

This room is obviously one in which women are equally invited to participate. It is through the heart of the feminine that we ultimately find our true masculine. A king doesn´t quite possess his full kingliness without a queen. Our relationship to the collective feminine will be explored at length in this series. I hope to hear from many women during the course of this series to add to the depth of feeling and breadth of context.

You can comment on the blog below or email me at cheartman@outlook.com. I am not connected to the internet daily, so it may be a few days before I can respond. I look forward to connecting with you, learning from you, and hopefully getting to know you.

Sequoia Heartman is an apprentice teacher at SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. Visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary website for more.

Our Essence As Infinite Love: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

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(This is Part 3 of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales. To begin at part 1, go here)

By Raphael Awen

We left off in the previous blog in this series with an introductory feeling tone of being infinite love. We felt into how who and what we see ourselves as needs a deep and overwhelming expansion of consciousness to let in the higher reality of infinite love. We need to add in here that this reality of infinite love includes the other infinities of infinite possibility, infinite stillness, infinite potential, and infinite power. There’s more you can add in. After all, it’s only words and language we’re using to attempt to access a feeling tone of your essence.

There is nothing more powerful than a feeling tone that moves through your being and colors your self-perception. When you’re depressed, we could say that you are depression. While not a true statement of your essence, you have for many intents and purposes, become depression in this dimension. Your self-perception, already shrunken to the five-sense earth dimension, now shrunken further into a narrower still bandwidth of perception has become flooded with a powerful feeling tone.

Let’s for comparison sake say that the opposite of the word ‘depressed’ is ‘expressed,’ (because we can invent our own lexicon anytime we want, after all, we are infinite possibility!) I’d certainly rather be in a state of expression than depression, and wouldn’t we all? Well, the truth of that question is actually, no, most of us only think we would rather be in a state of expression over depression. Depression is a shut down and safe place that we subconsciously and understandably choose as a soul, out of wounded emotional patterns. Then parts of us buy into the pathetic current biological and medical paradigm and get to play victim and draw some sympathy. What’s crazier still though is that the depressed person actually not only plays victim with their depression, they also use it to avoid the depression.

Depression is actually one of the soul’s beautiful doorways leading into healthy and alive expression and unless you are willing to honor your depression, you won’t find this doorway. This is the pattern of choice for most, because leaving depression and entering expression of essence (very different from happiness which is more of a medication) is a deeply fearful thing (as well as very understandable). We’ll get into soul-fear dynamics and how they conflict with our innate desire to grow a couple blogs from now, but my point here is that getting into your essence is getting into a feeling tone that floods your being, that colors it, that irreversibly changes everything about you, never to return again to life as you knew it. Thank god it’s a progressive thing that digests and unfolds in your life, or we’d all pop circuits and become true loonies if it were not so, but it is without a doubt, personal transmutation, at a pace you can bear. You become different at the core of your being.

If you’re not up for the world of feeling, or have some story that feelings aren’t real, save yourself a whole lot of frustration and leave off this path now of seeking to experience essence. Many spiritualities, especially the ones that teach about ‘the nondual essence of all being’ (which is what we are getting into in this series) are just this kind of suffering loop that pound their pulpit declaring that your feelings can and must be ignored, turfed or transcended in some form to allow you access into your essence. They go on further to say that this is the core of your suffering: that you want. It’s your needs and desires that are at the root of all your suffering.

Simply follow their method and picture of reality to kill your wanter, or ignore it sufficiently, and you pop into another magical dimension. ‘Does this actually work?’ you say. Well of course it ‘works,’ or there wouldn’t be myriads of souls embracing this approach. But what ‘works’ is that only a part of you got into the door of some aspect of your essence, while entire swaths of your being got paved over. Here you find the common denominator of Christianity and the New Age Movement. Who’d have imagined these strangest of bedfellows coming to the same demise? We are so nearing the end of these partial solutions and it’s evident that many of us are rattling our cages in hunger for and even demand for more. I support that rattle.

I almost feel to apologize for the rant energy flowing through me right now. But I have no apology. You can find teaching galore on essence, but what you won’t find much of is any personal transparency, real transparency on how that’s working or not working for the person teaching it. Sorry, but I have no interest in that teaching or teacher. ‘Get real or go home’ a part of me so wants to say to both spiritual teachers and spiritual seekers. I, in contrast to this part of me, can more tenderly admit the personal hurt and pain of lost relationship, underlying this anger. One way or another, the universe will learn what it seeks to learn. It’s our choice what role we play in that.

Thank you for feeling this. I hope I’m making you mad or glad. We need to get into the feeling domain big time if we hope to access true and lasting connection to our essence.

So then, now that we hopefully made some sacred space to feel into essence, what can we say about it? It has been called the ‘nondual’ for lack of a better term. What is meant by this is that the realm of true essence is non dualistic. It is not the world of dualism; that is comparative difference.

A little boy recognizes an airplane in the sky and says, ‘Look, airplane.’ He’s already lost a good amount of his wonder at the sight, compared to the first time he saw one, now that he has the label for it. The label is already taking over the awe of the actual thing. Not much later, it no longer even raises his eyebrow. This is a picture of how the dualistic mind labels and enters the world of ‘this, not that’ and so deadens experience by categorizing and labeling. Wonder is reduced to a computer like filing system.

So, if the ‘nondual’ is not all this, then what is it? It is the world where ‘twoness’ doesn’t exist. There is no other to compare or ‘dualize’ with. All is arising wonder. Many say that this state is not a state, for to call it that, you would be in effect defining it, and it cannot be defined or compared. It just is. It is the upstream reality and source of all matter, life and consciousness. Experientially, people who claim this awakening to the nondual claim to be free of this ‘deadening to wonder’ overlay that all of had to take on in becoming human.

It’s sort of like the proverbial ability to ‘stop and smell the roses,’ but from an altered state of mind, or better said, from a mind broken of its need to dominate the essence of a thing. It’s kind of funny, because here we are pretzeling our minds trying to define and understand the nondual which is said to be indefinable and unknowable. I like to offer that the nondual is a return to a magical state of wonder, coming more and more free of the mind’s deadening effect, and more essentially, that this state of being is actually your home frequency of being.

Now, for instance, if you need to arrive somewhere on time, you’re still going to need your dualistic mind. 8 o’clock comes an hour earlier than 9 o’clock. Time is one of the biggest illusions of all. We simply made it up with our minds’ ability to dualize and then all synchronized our watches. Voila, see you at 8! Time isn’t real. Money is another one. So is language. These are all things we made up for our own purposes. Totally cool shit to say the least. All of the mind’s abilities in these ways are not to be downplayed. They do a ton for us, but they also seriously limit our hunger to experience essence.

What we wrestle with so strongly in our search to return to essence and its awakening is actually an awakening in itself that came before. It is your awakening into duality from nonduality that your mind is still mostly not done with yet. You were born out of the nondual (mind you, you weren’t a ‘you’ in the state of oneness) into duality, you were sourced out of it. You are ‘dual awakened,’ we could say. Hence like the little boy, you live in a world of comparative difference. It’s a powerful thing in and of itself, but with the obvious downside of becoming so identified with duality that almost all connection to our essence is lost. Bad news indeed! ‘No me gusta’ we’d say here in our emerging Espanol – ‘I don’t like.’

What helped me recently is feeling into my essence as infinite love. I again say feeling, because the mind can’t grok the word ‘infinite,’ being finite as it is. I feel energy coming from my original source nature assisting me in letting this in. Jelayan recently wrote beautifully about letting in the ‘drip-line of my nondual nature.’ It sends a wave of awareness over my being that I can feel wants to flow more and more.

In the next blog in this series, I will get into side-by-side comparison of our essence (nondual) and our expression (dual). Admittedly, that’s a very dualistic thing in further attempt to ‘explain’ the nondual. Maybe, we will all reach the edge of our minds tolerance for such insanities and pop over into the nondual, or at least into a big soaker hose like Jelelle’s article offered.

Raphael Awen is a co-creator and a facilitator at SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Follow him on twitter @raphaelawen for blog updates and more or subscribe to this blog (if you haven’t already) to receive each new posting from Soulfullheart Sanctuary in your email.

Openness To Feeling Our Feelings As An Awakening Process

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

By Jelelle Awen

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The SoulFullHeart definition of awakening is not about being liberated from feeling anything negative. It is about having the consciousness and heart capacity to hold the reactions, move through them, and gain invaluable healing and understanding in the process.

This afternoon, I experienced a sense of feeling unhappy, which is admittedly rare for me most of the time. It was a vague feeling of unhappiness without a strong charge, but really felt more like a restlessness. I couldn’t feel specific content which created this feeling, but I sensed it has something to do with changes that are coming, both personally and for our community here at the Sanctuary. Changes that will provide a crucible for growth and self understanding, as change always does. It felt like part of me was tense about these changes and how they will impact us and what they will push up to be felt.

There was a rare breeze moving through this afternoon and it seemed to reflect my impatience back to me. As has been my spiritual and emotional healing practice for many years, I asked myself: “Which part of me is agitated?’ and ‘What is going on in my life right now or what has been previously subconscious to me that is now coming up?’ Finally: ‘What do I need to be open to feeling?’

This openness to feeling the source of my reactions has led me to the place I am now most of the time….can it be called, ‘awakened’? Or, even, enlightened? I suppose it could be, seen through a certain filter. Or, at least that I have had tastes of being awakened based on the experiences I have had and continue to have. Why, then, if this is true, am I feeling restless and, even, agitated? Isn’t all that supposed to be ‘behind me’?

I feel that these questions are at the heart of the distortion about being awakened or enlightened. As if, suddenly, like receiving a bolt from the sky, we are free of our feelings and reactions. As if, we are released from our humanity and no longer ‘plagued’ by shifting moods and emotional tides. Maybe for some souls this is true….maybe it was true for Buddha as he was described by others. And for Yeshua and for Krishnamurti perhaps. But, it seems to me that these saints and sages must have had passing moods and feelings too. They were human after all, even if they had ascended to a place of consciousness that is well beyond what most of us experience every day. While I admire deeply the great saints and sages, I don’t look to them for a model of being without feelings but rather as templates of how to hold higher states of consciousness and our humanity in one individual expression of Infinite Awareness and Infinite Love.

For those of us interested in personal and spiritual growth, I feel that what we are after is understanding and awareness about our reactions and moods. We want to understand and, therefore, ultimately heal our pain and suffering to experience more joy and wonder about our lives. And through this understanding, be able to make choices that feel more in alignment with who we authentically are and our soul purpose reason for being here. Perhaps some of us want to experience our nondual nature in magical moments freed from the tight constraints and filtering of our minds. Or, we want to feel the arms of the Divine around us, guiding and holding us, even as in moments It sets us free to fly our own routes, sovereignly following our passions and our desires.

The SoulFullHeart definition of awakening is not about being liberated from feeling anything negative. It is about having the consciousness and heart capacity to hold the reactions, move through them, and gain invaluable healing and understanding in the process. Being with my feelings in this way for over ten years is what has opened my heart and soul to let in the altered states of consciousness that I have experienced and the overall joyful and magical way that I relate to my life. Yes, ‘bad’ moods still occur for me, but they are held with sacredness and honor. And, they move quite quickly rather than sticking to a deeper, unconscious depression and suffering place inside of me as they did before I began my growth process.

Within the SoulFullHeart community, we invite everyone to share reactions and feelings that come up – as I will do at dinner tonight with my mate Raphael and others after checking in with myself and my guides to feel into the source of my feelings. Being able to share our vulnerable feelings with others who can feel us and love us is another key to awakening to our essence as Infinite Love. Without a support for our inner world to come out, our false self suppresses it and part of us pretends everything is fine. This suppression comes from a sense of feeling separate from each other, which then makes it necessary to hide what we really feel. When we are invited to be authentic with ourselves, with others, and with the Divine from a place of connection and Oneness about what we are feeling, we experience the reactions move and heal. We experience that everything about us can be held with love and sacredness, even what we would have previously judged as ‘negative’ or ‘unenlightened.’

Now that I am finished writing this blog, I feel better and lighter. My heart is filled with the truth of what I am offering and my desire to share this with others who are tired of suppressing their feelings and pretending to be what they are not. The agitated mood is moving along like the breeze, not gone for good but ebbing and flowing until I need it again.

Jelelle Awen is co-creator and a facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Please visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about sessions.