Tag: personal growth

Supercharged Personal Growth

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

 

By Raphael Awen

joy

Many of us have been made aware that time and space are not ultimately real.

They are real enough to us as we live our lives within a certain bandwidth of consciousness; the bandwidth that we call 3rd dimensional reality, but we are seeing and coming to terms with that time and space are creations or emanations of consciousness itself. They are very much like holographic projections we say, as we try to grok what life would be like if we didn’t see time and space as so damn real all the time (pun intended).

This leaves many of us somehow with a feeling of being tied to time and space, like we need to free our consciousness of time-and-space kind of reality processing. We tend to lean towards ‘If only, I could feel myself more outside of time and space…’, as we desire to get on with our consciousness awakening path. After all, amazing things like teleportation, telekinesis and dematerialization are all apparently on the other side of time and space as we perceive them.

This overriding desire to leave the realm of time and space can very helpful, and it can also be a big hindrance.

Initially, this awakening to see the ‘unrealness’ of time and space is essential to see ourselves outside of 3D reality for the souls we are; for the energy we are; for the consciousness we are; for the emanations of infinite love that we are. All very good stuff.

However, in that, there is an inherent tendency to see time and space as what limits us from the heart and soul freedom we long for; what keeps us bound to 3D consciousness. We feel we need to get out beyond time and space to the truer, or deeper reality.

I’m feeling this, this morning, in myself. I feel how more than anything I want to grow. I want to perceive myself and my life and my relationship with every’one’ and every’thing’ in this momentous and measurable flow of growth. So of course the idea of coming free of time and space limited perceptions and soaring into heart and soul reality lands pretty much at the top of my list.

Here’s the kicker though. The two things that are most needed for growth are (you guessed it) nothing else, but TIME and SPACE! Try growing a few vegetables successfully without time and space!

What a pretzel. I want to get free of time and space so I can grow??? It doesn’t work that way.

So what’s really going on here?

Consciousness itself gave us time and space as its own emanation. It didn’t give us something we don’t need. We need time and space for our growth. The problem is not with time and space, but instead how we have made a god out of time and space, rather than revere the source of time and space; consciousness itself.

So how could this be different…on a practical level?

In every space and at all times, see if you can more and more turn your awareness to awareness itself. When you do this, you are supercharging the intended purpose of time and space, which is growth.

Look at this. It’s really important. Put it in your own words. Frame it within your own experience and reference. Grok it into your sacred world.

When you experience time and space with reverence, you are experiencing the emanations of consciousness itself. When you turn your consciousness in reverence to consciousness itself, you have love looking at love; you have life staring at life; you have God looking on God. And you have all the time and space you can imagine to work this out and into your life as you know it.

Now, you’ve got the quantum version of hydroponic heart and soul growth cooking big time. And the coolest thing is that there isn’t a single time or space where this opportunity is not available to you. It’s as simple as turning your attention.

Holyyyy!

Now, you’ve just left all the constraints of time and space and fully inhabited them at the same time. Welcome to the God class. You are God enrolled in God 101.

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Please visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information and inspiration.

The Game Of Life Is Rigged In Your Favour

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

bliss

Dissonance is simply resonance’s way of remembering where we came from, and guiding us back to essence.

Stress, anxiety, fear, or any other ‘negative’ state cannot ‘negate’ us out of the overwhelming ocean of resonance in which we live and move and have our being.

This bliss that we are only awaits our conscious acceptance and increasing awareness of it. There is no other journey, but this inward one. You ARE God millions and billions of times over, and over, and over.

Now this, I am well aware, is not most people’s felt reality, as it admittedly has not been mine for many years. It may even stir feelings of anger for some to read such a far-fetched sounding declaration. For others, who sense these words are true, about the deep underlying resonance of all things, they are able to accept the words mentally, but are left longing to feel this as a deeper lived in reality, and in turn create a state of ever deepening bliss, for themselves and their world around them.

Both of these reactions, of either accepting these words, or rejecting them, are testament to the truth of the underlying perfection of all things. War, racism, hatred, and any other ill you can name are also evidence of our deep seated longing, as well as the means, to find our way back to the bliss of our origin, our essence, and to where we are returning. Even our exploration of ‘evil’ is ultimately ever and only a coming to terms with an infinite love that has already won.

Our truest state of grounded fulfillment in this journey is simply reverence, and the stuff that flows from that, like gratitude, kindness (acknowledging that all are ‘kin’), joy, creativity, love. And all of these are more reflections and resonances of where we came from, what we actually are, and what we are also becoming.

The deck is so stacked in our favour that the game of life rides a razor’s edge of losing its legitimacy as a game. Hell, if we’ve already won the game, why set out to play? There’s only one valid and profoundly true answer to that question and it’s this: the only valid reason to play is simply for the fun of it, and for the community of it. Nothing else…(near as I can tell). The universe wants to play, and it wants to play with you.

Now, there are only a few things that the universe set out as essential ‘rules’ to this game. Bear in mind though that the only point to the rules is the preserving the whole point of the fun and the community.

Free will is the one big rule. Nothing can or will be pushed on you. The universe doesn’t offer any unsolicited advice, but yet longs for your inquiry to share what it has and what it knows. In fact, it’s all yours to begin with, only being held in trust until you are ready to claim your heir-ship.

The sovereignty of the individual is another rule (maybe just another way of restating the first rule) of the game. The universe set up this game with the deepest respect that you and I would be subjected to pain and even the loss of our awareness of our true original identity. The only way it could justify doing such a horrid thing was to make us not only reflections of itself, but also literally make-us-itself, at the outset of the journey. We are the divine out feeling anxiety, hatred, fear when we do. It was only in this way that the divine could subject us to such horrid experience of perceived loss. It was only in this way that we would never be earning our way to back to God-hood, but instead only learning and returning our way to our full birthright experience of our God-hood essence.

You are infinite wonder. You are the sacred experience of divinity out journeying and journaling its way through its own capacity and its own polarity for bliss and reverence.

Possibly this is what makes God, God, this incredible capacity for reverence. All that it knows, it knows in and through you. You need no other, for all other is you. Your mind struggles to comprehend, but this in no way excludes you from the knowing. This knowing lives in you as fully as it ever will already, now, present tense. The only thing, and this is the point of the whole game, the whole journey we are on, is your and my awakening to this that already is, and all of that, simply for the fun and the community it.

So what are we left with now? In light of all this that is (which is way more than you and I can begin to digest it seems), how then shall we enter the next moment? What will take us from our present consciousness of perceived lack, exclusion, separation, and return us to the fact of this bliss?

Those questions are the quest! Just asking them and feeling them creates longing. This longing is the propulsion that is necessary to authorize movement and rememberance. This heart open quest is what opens you to all of the guidance, strength, and healing you need.

All that is ever in front of you, regardless of the content, regardless of the time needed, can never be outside of your journey back to source, awakening to the source you already are.

 

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Please visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information and inspiration.

The Necessity of Density For Our Ascension

Published on by Kasha Rosa2 Comments

by Leena Colibri

cosmic-dance

Every ounce of density, challenges and pain we live in and face in this and any life, serves the purpose of giving us something to work and be with, yet also push against as we grow. Our personal growth accelerates with every bit of strength we muster in order to push away (with love) from an old way of being. Our ascension quickens with every effort we make to change our way of taking in ourselves, life, the Cosmos, and love itself. Every single step we take inward, helps to propel the changes we draw and make outward as an expression of our process of deepening self love and care. Even plants in their infancy have to push away their seed shells and penetrate the soil they’ve been planted in, in order to sprout and grow towards the sun that continually calls to them. So it is that we too have an ongoing process that is very similar and is playing out in an intense way right now.

I remember my favourite part of swimming lessons (when I was able to overcome my fears and actually get into the water!), was that feeling of pushing off the wall at the side of the pool, and rocketing through the water like a dolphin or mermaid. That visceral feeling of pushing off and away from something dense in order to fly, still lives in me now. I can see myself as a child, finding the power and muscle in my legs, propelling myself from one side of the pool to the other. The experience was a bit more tiring in dance class, but there was a similar feeling of learning to jump in beautiful airborne poses by pushing off the dense ground, again feeling the power alive and growing in my developing legs.

Today I feel a parallel in my adult life as I heal and live into ascension, and it lives in my heart with clarity now, that this is what each of us is experiencing. That density that propelled us into new territories of our physical reality as human beings when we were children, is that same density we are pushing against in order to soar in our hearts and souls as adults today. It is the density of the earth beneath our feet and the 4 concrete walls we live in, but it is also, in more contextual words, what we can call the 3rd density or 3rd dimension – This reality many of us held as THE reality for so long. There are some of us who judge it for being there altogether, but I, and you, have needed these hard-packed grounds of belief systems and tough situations. We have needed these challenging mirrors that may not now reflect us as we are, but as we could be if we do not take those steps we need to in order to merge with our own hearts again. We have needed, and at times still need, something to push against so we can continue to grow. We even needed it in our mother’s womb. We pushed against her from the inside, building muscle tone and strength for our foreseen exit from that warm place, and entrance into this world that was going to give us only more walls to learn to push against, building strength within and without.

There is a deep love and appreciation we can have for the densities we have had to push against in order to grow and evolve. In fact, we need to love it, or we will be pushing against it much harder than necessary, maybe even causing harm in our wake. Density offers us the contrast to where our light bodies and higher vibration frequencies need and want to go. It offers us a necessary grounding for our lives until we don’t need it anymore… until we need density of a new variety to help hold us and provide us with the means to keep growing.

This 3rd density ground inside and outside of us is where we get to rediscover our wings.

It is our launch pad, our pool wall to push against. Eventually it will become a memory, as all walls that have contained us now are. Until then, we can trust that it must still be what we need, to build up the strength for our next level of flight, physically, spiritually, and emotionally and for our ever-arising ascension processes.

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Leena Colibri is a SoulFullHeart facilitator, writer and poetess. Find out more about the SoulFullHeart Way of Life at www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com

Embracing Change As A Mirror, Healer And Ally

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

by Leena Colibri

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We are all facing changes right now. Many of these changes are major upheavals as the veils become thinner and we are finally able to not only listen to, but hear ourselves and our guidance more. Some of these changes we choose voluntarily as our relationship with ourselves deepens and we realize more clearly what it is we truly need and/or desire to have in our lives. The poignant ache for a deeper love that we don’t necessarily know where it could come from or what it could look like is landing with a thud in each of our hearts, giving us new direction, especially in relationships, but also in our careers and geographies.

With change comes process…the pain inside our very sacredly human pain bodies becomes louder in order for us to finally hear it, feel it and heal it. It is an awakening to those ways in which we have been numbed out, “going with the flow” to a degree that has actually seen us shrink to fit circumstances and relationships, and how we have deprived ourselves of love from ourself to ourself, let alone how we have blocked it from flowing to and from others or even the Divine.

This process of learning how to be with change and especially be with ourselves when we are experiencing change, is becoming unavoidable with our global process of ascension. Too, though, our process of vibrating higher is coming in faster than ever before, and the experience of that is now able to deepen for us, the more we can move through what’s holding us down. Change is designed and brought on by love, ultimately… it pushes up what we need to feel in order to fully move into our next chapters and unveil more of who we really are at our core.

My relationship to change hasn’t always been very spacious and in moments it still isn’t. Most of the time, the changes that are being asked of us by love are not easy to embody or willingly say “yes” to, and unfortunately that can also create an experience of life happening to us and not us happening to life. We can feel at these times as if our power is in some sort of cosmic vacuum, even though it’s really just being lovingly challenged. I hold this as my truth and it does help me process through change much easier, especially during these times of intense waves of energetic frequency alterations and the life adjustments that happen accordingly.

Just like the ways in which the sun’s rays can be felt coming in much stronger as the result of weakened barriers holding it’s power back, so we are all experiencing a renewed press of love moving through us much stronger. The process of this awakening that love brings to us is most alive when we embrace the changes we’re being invited into, that aren’t simply outward but actually quite often very inward. We are learning to rearrange our inner furniture to accommodate more love in our lives and of course that translates to adjustments and, at times, all-out upheavals needing to happen outside of us too. If we can trust, somehow, that it is all held in and by love, then we can begin to let in change as the mirror, healer and ally that it actually is and always has been for us.

 

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Leena Colibri is a SoulFullHeart facilitator, writer and poetess. Find out more about the SoulFullHeart Way of Life at www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com

Itchy Skin, Itchy Heart: Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

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By Leena Colibri

This is why I walk this path. This is why I am able to walk through fire without flinching. These shifts are what make the ride through my shadowland worthwhile.

Note: This is the sixth entry in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read part one. 

The white, dried-out, chalky dust of the baking soda/water mix I’ve applied to my itchy, red skin continues to flake off in the seemingly million places where I have put it. Even typing as I am now is tough because part of me continues to be distracted by the dust now accumulating on the keys of the keyboard, worried that they will somehow wedge themselves in between them and ruin the keyboard altogether. Yet this reaction and distraction is small potatoes compared to the incredible itch that I applied the baking soda paste to combat in the first place.

My palms are the itchiest at the moment. And the itch, unlike on the rest of my arms, is not surrendering to this thick white substance and continues to itch relentlessly. Perhaps my healing chakras on my hands are opening. That could very well be, as the process I’m in now is very much preparing me to eventually offer healing to others.

Interestingly, my process since my last stay at the sanctuary about 10 days ago, has been about emotionally letting go of an old skin. I have been feeling just how much a part of me would rather keep people at arm’s length (or farther) and all of the toxicity that she has absorbed from past templates on how to be in life that led her to this level of resistance to compassion many years ago. This has been quite an intense amount of shadow to go into and I am still in it, though the light is now appearing at the end of the tunnel, right in step with an intense allergic reaction on my skin that keeps ebbing, flowing and itching.

When my process into this shadowland first began last week, almost right away I ended up with a fever that laid me up for several days. That first night of sweating spells felt akin to past lives of self-induced fevers caused by taking various herbs in order to download “Divine” messages for the upcoming season as per the demand of the people I was in service to as a Priestess. I had flashes of past life possibilities and felt also a breath of air from the Divine that told me everything was alright and that I needed these waves of detox to help me move into my next layer of myself.

By the time I returned to La Cruz, where I am living part time in order to work my online job and help support our community, I was feeling much better though I had a round of intense tummy troubles that eased off eventually but then returned a few days later, though not as severely. Now I am wading through a rash that suddenly came on several days ago and seems to get worse, but then get better before getting worse all over again. Right now it feels like this wave is simply another way for the toxic energy I have been moving for the last 10 days + to continue leaving my emotional, spiritual, and physical bodies. Phew. I am looking forward to getting to the other side of this one.

I wanted to share my story in this moment because it somehow feels important, for you as well as for me. It helps me digest all of the changes moving through me and also may help to illuminate for you why you may suffer some intense physical symptoms at times. In my very recent experience, it seems this is how our bodies communicate to us that there are changes going on and there is such a strong need for more stillness and self-care during this period of time. Not to mention that if you aren’t already, I would strongly suggest you check in with what you are feeling or maybe what part of you is avoiding feeling. Doing this helps me move my symptoms faster. It is not something I have been doing frequently enough lately, perhaps…and yet I can also feel how my body, for some reason, has just needed to express my healing in this way. This helps me and my parts to surrender to it easier.

Along with the waves of healing that I feel coming into me even while the symptoms are strong, I feel myself emerging from something akin to a long, long slumber. I feel as if I am being renewed and baptized into a new way of being that isn’t going to come over night but that I am consciously stepping into right now.  The amazing thing is that I feel how the shifts outside me are a reflection of the shifts happening inside me, and that even while I hold part of me’s reactions to people, I can still feel my heart opening. These are the pieces I treasure right now. This is why I walk this path. This is why I am able to walk through fire without flinching. These shifts are what make the ride through my shadowland worthwhile.

I hope this inspires you in some way to keep going into yourself too. I know that even writing this out for myself has helped me look inside and recognize what is happening in a new way. I may be a half-baked butterfly still mostly nestled in a cocoon for now, but it is only for now. I am on way. So are you.

Catalina Colibri is an initiate of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life and you can read more of her writing here on this blog. Please visit SoulFullHeart Way Of Life for more information.

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

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

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

recovering faith

 

By Kathleen Calder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Introducing “Essencism”: A New Movement Towards Ourselves

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment

 

glowing-heart

 

By Kathleen Calder

I have begun to consider myself an “Essencist”. I don’t think that term exists yet, but I like it. Why? Because it doesn’t already have a role attached to it, an image of the person who may be involved in it, or even necessarily an existing set of beliefs. Well, I guess in a way it does, since I am coming up with it as someone who embraces SoulFullHeart, a healing and consciousness path where we speak of “essence” quite a bit, and yes, we have some specific beliefs we work with. They are fluid though, as life and the Divine always seem to be arising for us anew, depending on the chapter of our lives we are living out individually and as a community. To be an “Essencist”, to me, means that no matter what changes your life brings you, you believe in the power of your essence and you are also constantly in hot pursuit of what you feel it to be in every single moment, letting it be an unending journey of discovery with relentless curiosity.

I feel like I am diving into a chapter of pursuing what the heck my essence could be. I am experiencing the beginnings of what promises to be a deep journey of self-mating – deep, hot, romantic pursuit of the parts of me who have been neglected or put aside until now, and ultimately of my own heart and soul and what it’s made of. Is it difficult for parts of me to imagine that this phase could last a long time and that could mean not pursuing mateship with a man for a long time? Yes. Of course. And I also feel that I wouldn’t want to offer a future mate anything less than what I am already discovering about myself and my truest heart or my essence, nor do I desire a mate who can’t or won’t offer me the same, coming from an overflow of his own self-mateship.

So here we go, with much strength and motivation…but where is my vulnerability around it? Parts of me don’t feel too good about this idea, while it sounds good. It is different than what most other young women and men my age care about doing. So there is a deep loneliness I can feel inside myself too in this moment. Yet I can feel the possibilities of there being others and the chance for deeper relationships with others my age than I have experienced so far. And how could I draw what I really want in relationship if I am not pursuing it and cultivating it inside myself?

Perhaps the essence of being an “essencist” is actually selfishness, then. I selfishly want to focus on myself so that I can selfishly claim the gifts of that journey and the manifestation of that which I have always wanted in my deepest essence. To be an “essencist” means embracing personal other-ness – the fact that you are as unique as you feel yourself to be, whether you have been born with the sex of a woman or a man, or earned the role of accountant, actor, mother, brother, teacher, or priest.

What I want more than anything, as far as I can feel for what I know of my essence thus far, is to know and be known, but not in a superficial way. I feel encouraged to inhabit a new way of being in life where I pursue myself with so much curiosity that it overflows into a deep curiosity about others and puts me in a position where I love others’ essences so fiercely that I will fight for it the way I am beginning to fight for my own. I have already experienced tastes of my capacity for this as I have felt many moments of my capacity to feel others and how it is deepening with every step I take towards feeling myself first.  I am becoming more and more compassionate towards the false while advocating for the real. In a world that very much still tries to revolve around created personas and smokescreens, this is very challenging. This could be why I like the idea of a movement, if you will, that we could call “Essencism” – encouraging all human beings to get back to themselves in a healthy, authentic way, cultivating a relentless overflow of self-love that spills over into every aspect of their lives.

I feel in my essence a spark that keeps glowing, even when the night is at its darkest and all of life seems to parts of me to be conspiring against my/their happiness or comfort. It is something that I really don’t feel I will ever fully come to know, but that’s not as important as it is to keep discovering and getting closer to that answer, even if all I end up with at the end of each day is more data pointing out what it is not. So for now I will continue to try on each and every day and take it for a spin in my proverbial Cadillac, seeking and finding more answers while feeling myself deeply through every challenge and hard-to-feel feeling inside my parts and my heart.

 

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

A Keynote To Selves: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

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

(Raphael delivered the following address on Saturday, May 7, 2016)

I would like to begin by thanking each and every one of me for your presence here this afternoon.

I am especially grateful for your curiosity, your desire, along with your hopes and your dreams.

I called this private meeting by specific invitation to each and every one of you as the personalities that make up what is tragically and all too simply referred to as ‘me’, as if ‘you’ didn’t exist. I know we all too often seek to be seen as one, understandably so, given our culture and the cults we are inescapably a part of, but we are in fact a glorious ‘we’ that I seek not only to address today, but desperately also need to get to know.

I know that you as distinct persons live in me as I often experience two or more of you as a tension or a polarity between two choices or energies inside of me. When I am less present to that tension, one of you willingly and sometimes willfully steps in to hold that tension. Here I again see your presence, your reality, your power, and your being. I could go on with example after example of your distinct and separate reality, but that would be in service only of convincing others, not present here today. You, I sense and feel, need little convincing.

I wonder what it is like being a part of me. I wonder what it is like for you when in my partial or full absence, you are left with doing life as me and in my name. What is it like for you to feel the power of my life; the identity of my life; the realized and unrealized dreams and potential of my life? What is ‘my’ life to you? How much of it is a shared reality of yours and ‘mine’, and in what ways? When and why were you born? Who in me did you rule over or submit to, and why?

Though we share one body, one brain, one physical history, and the illusion of being only one, we are in fact many. We are each different. We are each unique. As the Apostle Paul tried to convey in his teaching about the body of Christ when he said ‘Can the hand say to the foot, I have no need of you,’ we must recognize that we are a ‘we’, both separate, distinct and an inseparable oneness at the same time. Both are true. The folly would again be quite plain if when asked, “How are you?” to reply, “I am doing great. My liver has cancer, but I am just great, thanks.” As Paul went on to conclude: ‘When one suffers, all suffer. When one rejoices, all rejoice.’

I would like to not only recognize the fact of our distinct beings, but go on to get to know and feel the distinctions among us. I cannot say that I know you unless I am allowed and afforded a way to feel what you feel, to see what you see, to hear what you hear. I can no longer overlay my view of life onto you and rob you and myself from the sensational pleasure of mutual curiosity.

If one of you is not well, ‘I’ am not well. One of you, or I, may wish to hide another part of me that is in pain for a variety of reasons, as I know too often is the case for most of us ‘humans’. But let us be much clearer here in this private place than we are in the public place; ‘I’ am not well when one of you, one of ‘us’ is in pain, or disconnect, or has a deep unmet need.

All too often, ‘I’ have presented the conclusive “I am fine, thanks,” in response to an inquiry about how I was doing. I was quick to divert the lie by returning the presumptive non-question back to the other ‘person’; “And, how are you?” We have for so long co-signed this co-dependent perception of self as being a single personality that it is truly stunning that any functionality and sanity remains in us. We have even gone so far to as to culturally outlaw the very idea of being more than one with labels such as ‘multiple personality disorder’. I would like to go on record in this meeting, in this place with each of you present, to say that the term we must now accept into our lexicon is in fact ‘single personality disorder.’ The source of so much of our neurosis and the suffering of people is found here in this denial of being.

Before I wax too strong in my convictions and again fall prey to an old focus on others, I must apologize to you, the parts of me that I present as ‘I’. I deeply and profoundly apologize for my complicity in this appearance of being well when I was not. I was wrong. I am sorry. I am sorry for all the pain I caused to each and every one of you in a multitude of ways that it will take some time to fully feel. I wish to end this cycle now. I wish to take all the time it takes to feel it all, even if it extends beyond this life, or to alternative realities of what I’ve thought ‘life’ to be. I want to feel what you feel. I want to experience life from where you experience it. I must also ask each of you to join me in this apology to one another; to accept the end of this façade along with all of its attendant maladies that take away from our true and glorious wellbeing.

Both I and we have lived a long time in a picture of reaching out to others. I and we identified strongly with attaining a picture of being a leader with influence over others. Here, we felt and thought and imagined would be our fulfillment to the full. Others would convey and reflect back to us our worth, our sense of a life well lived. Today, I am inviting each and every one of you to see that the others I sought to help, that I sought to gain the favor of, are in fact not ‘other’, but WE are the ‘they’ we sought to heal and help. The realization of self that we sought to attain inside of a picture of being a healer to others is now dawning on our consciousness as the realization of our selves. There is no other to heal. There are no others in need of healing for me to offer or affect healing to.

Just as Jesus said, ‘I am the door, If anyone enter in by me, he shall find rest,’ so too each of us must find the grace and power to say the same thing of our-selves. Each singular one of us, in this multiplicity of being, is responsive to and responsible for our own healing. We must each own our own healing. Each one of us is responsible for our own conditioning, our own beliefs, and our own relationships to all of life. Each of us must now find the door to our hearts to search our souls deeply to determine what is worthy of remaining and what must be let go of in the sacred domain of our lives.

What we previously imagined to be the good life of being known by others must now be transformed into the much deeper and more glorious good life of knowing our selves. Our sense of meaning and purpose and gift to the world must also now originate and complete inside of our selves. Our fame must spread deep and wide to all the ends of our own kingdom.

How could I have imagined that we could have been of service to others while there was violence to our selves? How could I have dreamed of a world at peace while our own world was not even acknowledged? I want to sacrifice these imaginations and dreams on the sacred and holy altar of this new calling that is here now. I now know however, that unlike I thought in the past, I cannot mandate anything. I have no mandate today.

I have a desire. I have a dream.

In my dream, I awoke. I awoke to the presence and personality of you. In my dream, I was pierced by acute curiosity of who and why and what you were and are, and will become. This dream has overtaken me. I wish to yield every remaining breath and sunrise to this dream.

I surrender my future to us. I will love you in every breath. I will long to get to know you in every joy and in every sorrow.

I long for this day to begin now.

May we enter a new world now,

world without beginning,

world without end,

Amen.

Thank you to each and every one of me.

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!

The Fog

Published on by Kasha RosaLeave a comment
dirt-690427_960_720

By Kathleen Calder

I haven’t been to the other side yet.
There’s no knowing
just feeling
just sensing in a moment to a moment, by a notion of a passing moment.
A passion drives on
beneath the waves of the crash
of the bang and the ping and the
                SLAM!
                        …there it is again.

 

And it waits for no one, but it thrashes in spite
wishing to be fought for
and thought of.
Felt
         seen
                   heard.

 

A hand reaches to my heart.
Electro currents of fiery change-waves
upheaving and churning the swell of the currents
the water and air around me
the unexpected gentle and suddenly
being brought back to the reality
            That I am loved…

 

The kicking, the screaming
still inside me
being boiled and bustled by that hand.
Those Divine fingers
playing in the air like a song
of ice, fire and water
changing the state of my outward sustenance
so that I learn to breathe
             new air.

 

I could never have asked for this

 

I would never have asked for this.

 

Not if I didn’t somehow know
somewhere inside the inside
That I was
             born for this
                               borne by this
                                               and reborn
to discover, rediscover, forget and then remember
              maybe somehow
             there is always love.

 

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.

 

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.