Tag: personal growth

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

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(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.

Consciousness And ‘Single Personality Disorder’: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

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

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

By Raphael Awen

I hope you’ve been enjoying this series and that it has been tweaking your feelings and your awareness on different levels and in different ways.

We’ve covered together how who and what ‘you’ perceive ‘yourself’ to be is but a fraction of who and what you really are as a human being, as a person, as a self. We looked together at how the self, both in its essence and its expression, is something closer to Infinite Love. We may be limited in our use of linguistics to describe this reality, but our ‘Arising Isness,’ as we called it, is powerfully unlimited.

We stretched our consciousness together in the previous eight blogs to get a feeling tone of what we are speaking about. I encourage you to take in each of those prior blogs with an open and desirous heart before taking in this one, as we are going to take this to a new level today that I hope blows your mind.

But first, a little lead-in…

You are awareness. You are consciousness. You are not your body. You are not your emotions. You are not your mind. You have a mind. You have emotions and you have a body. What holds body, mind and emotion in containment is consciousness.

You may be new to this idea that you are an awake and aware consciousness, and you may not readily see yourself as a consciousness. I would say then that you are less conscious of being a consciousness. Your consciousness is not then a big part of your waking awareness. If this is true, then you have more of a ‘density’ and less of a ‘porosity’ in your aware sense of self. This density then is an energetic block or filter to you having deepening and growing self-awareness.

Everything I’ve said so far today I don’t think would be too different from so many spiritual practices that are out there today. I may be using unfamiliar words, but the energy is the same. Even Christianity, as I practiced it for most of my life, was about expanding my sense and experience of self into a place of being ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ that was meant to color my life. Also imperative in Christianity was holding an identity of ‘who I am in Christ’ as an elevation of consciousness. Daily devotional practice of prayer and meditation in the scripture was intended to induce an inner change of self-awareness.

Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism alike all offer something similar in that they want to raise your consciousness to something they deem as some kind of a higher plane. This blog series is no different in that sense. Soulfullheart is also no different in that sense in that it too seeks to raise consciousness to something different from the more common or status quo.

I’d like to make a grand deviation today from this common denominator of all spiritual practice. I’d like to offer you something truly new and different from every spiritual path that I’m aware of. I believe this has the power to truly rock your world in a profound sense.

That is of course, if you’re up for it. Please open your heart, feel your desire, fasten your seatbelt and come with me for a ride. Come fully and then decide what your truth is. Here’s the ride:

All spiritual practice is greatly limited by a self-perception of oneself being a single personality. Of course the ‘you’ that considers itself a single personality is a single personality, but that is because this is in fact only a single part of you doing your life as you. ‘You’ have in effect been hijacked by a part of you and you don’t even know it.

You are in fact a ‘multiple personality’ within a larger conscious awareness. What you call ‘you’ is in fact a whole family of personalities, sharing a body and a mind. I hope this isn’t such a stretch for you to see, because it really feels like a ‘no, duh’ to me.. ‘how could we have missed this huge piece?’

Like any family, there is inside of you a huge range of being what we call functional or dysfunctional depending on the long list of family dynamics at play. Power plays, shutdowns, pleaser roles, etc., with all of these coming from distinct parts or subpersonalities of yourself, to make up what you have just called ‘you’ up till now.

We’ve been told that being a ‘multiple personality’ is a disorder that one needs to seek therapy for. I’m telling you that the true disorder is rather a perception of being a ‘single personality’. The ‘you’ that leads most people’s lives and does everything from their spiritual seeking to their careers and their relationships is only one part of them, or one part of them in a strategic alliance with another part to give it its functionality or dysfunctionality. This is the part of them that is running their life and doing their life. It is primarily a part of you that is reading this series, evaluating it, and deciding if this new idea I’m offering today is for ‘you’ or not.

A part of you may be having a big reaction to my line of reasoning today. I’m writing provocatively to press this part of you and its distinct reaction into your awareness in an attempt to make my point.

Could this really be? Could it be that you are not anywhere close to the integrated being that you imagined yourself to be? If this is true, it really explains so much. It takes huge pressure off of yourself. It also puts a new and healthy pressure on you to discover who you really are.

Up till now, you see, with this perception of yourself being a single personality, there is only this poorly equipped primary part of you holding your ‘you show.’ You are in fact a whole cast of characters seeking to get their needs met and adapting in a host of ways and means inside of you – all the while only under the care of this primary part of you. It’s like a teenager barely old enough and responsible enough to babysit has been charged with doing life.

What I want to impress upon you today is that a profound change occurs when you let in this self-perception that I am offering you. Then it changes again another huge degree when a new and deeper sense of self can arise as a healthy parent to these parts of you. This is nothing less than a tsunami of change to let into your life, and some careful consideration is called for.

If you wish to go on doing your life as you’ve known and perceived yourself to be as a single and unified self, you of course have most of current consciousness to support you in that choice. I personally would not trade what I have discovered in coming to know myself as a tapestry of parts for anything, especially not for alignment with a deeply suffering and struggling collective consciousness.

In this blog series, we’ve looked at ‘you’ as being an individual or an ‘in-divi-dual.’ In that, we saw that a human being is this paradoxical ‘duality that can’t be divided.’ The duality we are talking about is on one hand a ‘singleness’ of being and on the other hand an ‘allness’ of being that can’t be singled out. This whole range of being is like a cosmic projection of the Infinite Love that is the essence of all life – projecting itself onto a screen where you show up as a you. If any of this sounds confusing, that’s because it is confusing! We don’t at the best of times have much of a clue as to what and who we are. We settle for measly roles and identities to make up for this unbearable wonder of being that we are. This blog series has been an attempt so far to expand out your sense of self into the cosmic realities we’ve dove into together.

Where I want to take you in today’s blog is to feel into that who you feel yourself to be in this cosmic sense is very different from who you feel yourself to be in an everyday sense. Embracing the cosmic Nondual, as it is called, into your waking reality is a challenge that most people seeking it become very focused on and dedicated to. I’m saying that the reasons behind your interest (or disinterest), focus and struggle have to do with this entire undiscovered world of you being a tapestry of parts, rather than the single personality that has been running your you show up till now.

There’s this magical and expanded sense of self that extends into and includes no less than all of life and the universe. Then I am offering that the single you, the you that differs from me, is in fact an entire another wild ride of discovery into yourself as being so much more again than you imagined.

So, how does this ride land in you, or part of you rather? Does part of you feel ready to let go of doing your ‘you show’ the way he or she has? Is part of you ready for a new you to show up that hasn’t been around up till now?

‘Part of me’ so enjoyed sharing its passion with you today. ‘I’ enjoyed feeling this part of me express its passion.

I invite you and your parts to read more about parts of yourself, in an article Jelayan and I wrote in an article here.

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.

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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

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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!

Spiritual La-La Land In A Time Of Impending Collapse: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

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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 Six of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales.)

By Raphael Awen

It’s time in this blog series to pose a very important question.

The question goes something like this: How is seeking the nondual, or any other form of spiritual seeking for that matter, relevant at such a crazy time of global change that we are in the midst of? How is it not just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

We are in the midst of epic changes to our industrial society and its way of life that we are all embedded in. The long and the short of it is that gasoline from a gas station, water from a tap, food from a store, or electricity from a hole in the wall are not likely to persist for much longer. All of the inter-related systems that hold these realities in place are growing more and more vulnerable and tension-filled by the day. I am personally surprised each passing month to see the present order of things stumble against the odds into the next month.

The transition we are facing promises to be difficult almost beyond imagination, chaotic and marked with great loss of life.

My sense is that if you haven’t faced this approaching chaos and come to your own personal grounded choices around it, your spirituality (of any kind) is in la-la land.

Eighteen months ago, my wife and I and two close friends chose to relocate to living off grid two countries south and entered into a crash course of learning to grow our own food. It’s a long story and a great story and you can read it here in our free e-book called Living As If. It’s free monetarily speaking, but reading it will cost you. It will cost you some of your indifference; it will cost you some of your comfort; and it will cost you some of your happiness that’s based in denial. If you’ve been looking to spend those things from your life, the free e-book is a great place to start.

I almost want to apologize for pontificating here. Almost. I just called you indifferent, didn’t I? I am trying to build an audience, not thin one out, but this message cannot be pansied around with. If you haven’t considered the changes that you can feel are coming, you are fucking around with your own life. It’s just that plain and simple. It’s suicide and indifferent to boot. I’d much rather you got offended and left off reading my blogs than using my teaching on the nondual as a way to keep your pile of denial intact. What I’d most rather see, however, is that you could listen to your own heart without needing any prodding from me or anyone else and prepare to ride out the coming storm.

Facing into this with power and choice will feel like nothing short of joining a cult. Your seeking to get others on board in your circle of family and friends will be seen as proselytizing. It will probably add up to being the most difficult thing you have undertaken this life.

When you look at this though through a first-things-first lens, no other approach makes any sense at all. As humans, our needs for survival will always trump our needs for seeking meaning. We embrace spirituality only when our basic needs of food, water, and shelter are met and have a reasonable expectation of continuity.

You may be in a place of what appears to be life-stability at the moment, but I venture to say that you have been sensing the approach of deep structural changes coming to our collective way of life. How could you not? This has left you with an ungrounded feeling. Your ventures into spirituality and meaning are left with one foot outside of the circle. You’re not all here, and rightly so, you shouldn’t be. Maybe ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, this could be a different story, but not now.

As I’ve been writing this series on the nondual, I’ve had a growing sense of disconnect to be offering it into an audience I fear has done little to reconcile with these coming changes. I’m openly asking the question of myself: how does this form of spiritual seeking that I’m advocating for not just another form of a mind-numbing drug?

The shit is about to hit the fan – make no mistake about it.

Like the Captain in the movie Titanic so soberly said just minutes after the iceberg was struck, “This ship will go down.” The Titanic story is a powerful prophetic story for our time. Our collective hubris is only exceeded by our denial, and we are about to be called on it.

Big outbreath….phew. I had to say that… in that way.

My own tendency towards denial is as good as the next person’s; the difference though is that I am aware of mine. That awareness has led and continues to lead to changes – not talk of changes, but balls-to-the-wall grounded change.

So what then is there left to say about the nondual in relation to all this unavoidable change?

My truth is that all the talk in the world of the nondual isn’t worth a fiddler’s fart if you are not in your power facing this approaching storm.

Consciousness itself has prepared this transformation for us, not against us. Consciousness doesn’t see the loss of physical life with the same hysteria as we do. Consciousness sees it as a transformation, not an end in itself. What is at stake is not your consciousness per se, but your physical life and the goals you as a soul associated with this life.

I am convinced that most will not (as they say) know what hit ‘em, as they feel completely victimized and overwhelmed by circumstances outside of their control. Everything in their conditioning will support their chosen view of excusing themselves.

But for those of us who unmistakably sense this coming storm, such luxuries of consciousness don’t add up to much, do they?

The Christians believe strongly in Jesus returning to sweep them away before it gets too unbearable – that at least gives them some form of hope or comfort. Their collective sense of coming chaos is well founded and grounded; it’s just their solution that doesn’t add up. No savior is returning to take care of your business for you. All the universe, God, the Divine, and Jesus himself will be glad to help you – but no one and nothing is going to do this for you. Doing stuff for you is known as infantilizing, and we are moving past that now in our emerging collective consciousness.

You can expect to be infantilized if you must and that will ensure you some comfort in the midst of this great chaos, though it will also pretty much guarantee your early demise. Or you can adult-up and make choices with the power you have and ride out this storm consciously in the deep and personal transformation of yourself and the collective that this will prove to be.

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!

You As An ‘In-divi-dual’: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

infinitelovegates

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

By Raphael Awen

Just before diving back into the warm waters of where we left off, I’m curious what digestions you have going on inside of you from the last blog in this series. I’d love to hear from you through the comments of this blog.

Take a moment if you can to feel what feelings and reactions came up for you in the comparisons we made of your dual and nondual nature.

If you’re like me, the feeling that the nondual needed me (and us) in order to come to know itself, began to open some things out for you.

It suggests (and this may be sacrilege to some) that the nondual wasn’t complete in itself. It decided at some point to extend its completeness out of itself into the expression of you and I, and the rest of the conscious universe. It birthed something out of itself.

However we imagine the infinite completeness of the nondual to be, it would seem that in its consciousness, it came to want something. Even if that wanting was a wanting to share its completeness, the nondual came to have a need. It lacked. It wanted to have an ‘other’ both to share its bounty with, and as a reflective mirror in which to look back on itself. We, along with the rest of the conscious universe, were birthed out of this need.

Need, want, and desire is the stuff that parented us. This is a tough one for many people to come to terms with. Many seek out the nondual as a way to tame their desire nature, feeling that their desire nature is at root of their suffering. Many spiritual teachers in turn offer this as a hook to gain adherents.

Identifying with one’s nondual nature will not help anyone rid themselves of their desire nature, though many will stumble in making the attempt. It will change a lot related to your desire nature, but desire itself is an inseparable part of being the combination of dual and nondual natures that we are.

This brings us back to where you and I live everyday. As great and magical as the infinite fulfillment, infinite love, infinite possibility world was and is, it wanted to take that out for a spin. You and I are that test drive, along with shoes, cars, sex and having a unique personality.

From this comes a whole other scary piece about you not existing as a ‘you’ in the un-individuated consciousness world of the nondual. No ‘you’ to ever know shoes, cars or sex.

No ‘you’ to know desire and its offspring – personal pleasure and displeasure.

Here, without a ‘you’ or an ‘other’, there’s no way for relationship either.

The nondual’s hunger in its awareness was to find a way outside of itself in search for a relationship mirror to come to know itself. This longing for relationship, to be known and seen by an other, is at the very core of our being. It would seem then that this need to be known extends all the way back to our nondual essence.

We also looked in the last blog entry in this series at how the nondual (oneness) birthed us into duality (‘twoness’) but put it in an inseparable package. English language captured this reality well in coming up with the word ‘In-divi-dual’ – duality that can’t be divvied, or twoness that can’t be separated. Maybe, we’re stumbling upon the better way to describe the root of all of our suffering – attempting to separate the inseparable.

It was Charles Eisenstein who first introduced this awareness to me where he teaches about the illusion of the split between spirit and matter in his free book ‘The Ascent Of Humanity’, which offers a heart and soul expanding picture of this fundamental split in consciousness awaiting reconciliation.

Christianity, where I spent a big part of my life, is a great example of this split as well. But you can look to the world around you and find this separation attempt everywhere you turn. In Christianity, the separation of essence attempt begins with man having a ‘sin’ nature, a ‘fallen’ nature. It’s the age-old thing of ‘you can’t sell someone on a solution unless you’ve sold them on the problem first,’ which of course is all inside a picture of seeking to gain control over the essentially uncontrollable ‘others’ of our dualistic reality.

Money, (and this is some more of Charles’ influence here) is maybe the king of all spirit and matter splits, because to make money out of something, that is to ‘monetize’ something, you need to separate the thing from its essence. You need to turn people into slaves, you need to turn forests into marketable board feet, you need to turn personal desire and passion into jobs. And to be able to do any of that, you need the illusory-spirit-and-matter split kept well intact. All matter is spirit; recognizing that leads to more and more wholeness. Remaining Ignorant to that leads to greater and greater neurosis.

You, however, as both spirit and matter, both dual and nondual that can’t be separated, that one part can’t be made better or worse, that can’t even be differentiated for that matter – is a grand invitation into a whole new self perception.

If this is true, then what does that say about all the minutia of how you see yourself in every aspect of your daily life? Letting in this new self-perception begins to affect everything in your life.

Raphael Awen hails from SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. You can also track him on twitter @raphaelawen. Please visit our Patreon Page if you’d like to support SoulFullHeart Sanctuary.

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.

The Illusion Of You: Golden Earth Tales

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

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(Part 2 of the ongoing blog series: Golden Earth Tales)

By Raphael Awen

Who are you, dear reader of this blog? What brings you here? You’re looking for something, right? But what is that something? In fairness to you, I could turn those provocative questions on myself: Who am I, dear writer of this blog? What brings me here?

The rational mind and language itself stumbles in this domain of heart.

In the root of our heart and psyche though are these embedded questions of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I?’….they are seeking some kind of a response. These are the questions that make up our life quest and offer it meaning. The response you’ll have to accept though will be an energetic one, not a mental one, as we shall see.

In part 1 of this blog series, I described my visit to the parallel dimension Golden Earth. I believe this experience came to me as part of my deep, lifelong quest to explore the ‘Who am I?’ question. Building from there in this blog series, I offer a framework of the path and experiences that led me there. Am I biased? Hell, yeah! How and where it lands in you is sovereignly up to you. Remember, the plumber may claim experience and even expertise, but he only gets his authorization to come into your house and address your problem from you. What’s good for the plumber is good for the spiritual teacher too; both get their authority, their permission to serve from the sovereign of the house – you.

My truth is this……that who you actually are and what you actually are is not who and what you think you are. Who you think you are is a self-perception that is presently encrusted in the five-sense reality dimension of physical earth, the rational mind, and collective consciousness. Those are the things that we have all agreed upon are the umpires that call ‘what’s in’ and ‘what’s out’ of your reality. As much spiritual and emotional work you and I may have done, we don’t get to walk away easily from this consensus reality and its effect in our psyche. We are social beings who seek to know ourselves by comparative difference; but not so different that we no longer feel like we belong. Therein lies the rub.

In that milieu, either directly or indirectly, we are often brought the ‘who are you?’ question. Most every time we respond, myself included, with some form of telling people the basic facts about us and what we do. ‘My name is Michael, I’m 49, I’m married to Susan, I’m a computer programmer and I live in San Francisco.’ Sorry, but all that didn’t even come within a country mile of who you are. You told us about you, it’s periphery; it’s a story. You didn’t get to your essence.

Well, ‘fair enough,’ we might say. ‘I don’t think the person questioning was looking for anything deeper.’ True, but is that enough for you? If it is enough for you, it isn’t for me, and I say ‘Go Home.’ Hanging around here will only frustrate you (and me), so I invite you to strongly consider taking your leave. Look for a plumber when the need arises. I’ve needed to do just that many times in my life to find my own truth and my own authority.

‘No, it’s not enough!’ I hear your heart saying, if you’re taking me up on my offer. ‘I am not my name. I am not my marital status, nor my gender or my age. I am not my profession or my place of residence.’

We may then go another round and wax a bit more poetic. ‘I am a lover of animals.’ ‘I enjoy gardening.’ ‘My passion is to help children with learning difficulties.’ It’s still in the realm of what you do, albeit with more heart, but still more story that falls short of essence. Nice try, but try again.

Going deeper, we could say that you are not your past, present, or future. Neither are you your body, your personality, your emotions, your desires, your dreams, or anything else in the realm of things you have. By process of elimination, we are getting closer to seeing through this illusion of you to finding your essence. But we’re not there yet. What else could speak to this essence, if the mind and even language itself stumble at the challenge?

The quest isn’t a small one, or even one you will ever completely solve. If you’re like me, you’ve eaten up a big chunk of life already in this lion-size hunger of yours.

I was an all-in Christian for much of my life and if had I been raised a Muslim, or a Buddhist, I’m sure I would have given myself just as fully to that answer at hand for as long as I needed, given the size of my hunger to know. I was more surprised than anyone around me by my sudden admission that Christianity had given me all it could. As an adult, I bought into what I was raised in because of its promise that it would hold me with its watertight answers for a lifetime. Leaving was anything but easy. It meant giving up my deepest treasures and identity to go back into the renewed search for meaning, no longer dulled by answers.

I recall the big yellow Christian bumper sticker campaign in my hometown in the late 70’s, proclaiming, ‘I Found It’. Well, in 2008, ‘I Lost It,’ and I had to come back to my essential quest. I am not unique in this. People that have subscribed deeply to a mainstream answer are finding it eroding in the rigors of their hearts, lives and shifts in the collective. ‘Answers’ in this way are what kill quests.

For many, or even most, these questions are too uncomfortable to face. “I can get out of joint if I keep contemplating my navel,” a former friend once offered, “or I can get on with what’s in front of me.” It’s hard at times not to envy this person, but consciousness has a way of maturing, and what was before off one’s radar, no longer is. Your consciousness simply outgrew itself, and as much as you may want to, there’s no getting back into the box. Welcome to the club.

We’ve been speaking of this question and its quest so far from a mental perspective. We’ve been employing the mind as our tool of inquiry. If you are feeling some angst to break through something or out of something as you are feeling into this question with me, I’d like to offer that what you are coming up against is the limitations and frustrations of the mind. The mind does many things amazingly well, but in other things, it fails miserably. This quest and its question cannot ever be ‘answered’ in any final sense. To the mind, this is bad news if it sees this as a statement of its inadequacy.

It can, however, instead actually be good news, if it sees this a retirement party. Here the mind can finally acknowledge with relief the lousy explanations you’ve been giving yourself and others to the ‘Who are you?’ question. Here the mind can sit back and marvel, at the lure of what every cult, culture, religion, spirituality and philosophy on the planet seeks to offer this quest, without assuming responsibility to sort through any of it. The rational mind was never meant to handle these questions.

As Rumi offered, ‘Only with the heart can you touch the sky.’ These questions are questions of the heart. It is the heart that holds our curiosity to know. It is the heart that spans the realms of both your expression and your essence. The knowing that the heart seeks is not any kind of a mental explanation. It is a ‘knowing and feeling’ that transcends the mind, and that reaches into essence, your essence. The mind, hopefully now enjoying and admitting its relief from where it floundered, is now welcome to this domain where the heart is the guide and authority. Here the mind, in surrender to the heart has a place, as a much needed role model of letting in love. Here the mind can finally admit and reflect back to you the reality of your heart; “I want, I need, I hunger for more.”

With your heart now at the helm, and the mind in surrender, the nature of these questions look and feel very different. What the heart knows and feels is that who you are is infinite mystery. Who you are is ultimately unknowable. The heart however knows this unknowable. It feels it. It basks in it. The heart feels the essence of all things as love, the ultimate upstream reality. Love is the only true source and substance behind all matter, behind all being, behind all consciousness. To the heart, all else is only constructed illusion.

You are infinite love. I am infinite love. Try saying those words aloud to yourself, with eyes closed, breathing fully and deeply. ‘I am infinite love.’ Say it again. You’ll feel two things; the mind chafing a bit; and your heart reaching and expanding out into the essence of who and what you actually are. Your own heart is now initiating you into your essence. This essence is your upstream source of being that you as a unique human being are the expression of.

In the next blog in this series, I will explore this magical essence deeper; what it is and how you can know it and feel it; and where that might take you.

Raphael Awen is a co-founder of and a teacher at SoulFullHeart Sanctuary. Visit soulfullheart.com for more. Follow him on twitter @raphaelawen for blog updates and more or subscribe to this blog (if not already) to receive each new posting of his and others from Soulfullheart Sanctuary directly in your email.

Awakening Is Like A Flower Bud Unfolding

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

heartflower

Awakening is less like a lightning bolt coming from the sky as it is like a flower bud slowly unfolding its petals in response to the warmth of the sun.

Feelings of warmth, comfort, and joy course through me; these are the feelings of the energy that move in response to my beloved mate Raphael. The feelings are familiar but the intensity of soul frequency is new. Our relationship is eight years old and brand new, both. The marriage between Jillian and Wayne (our previous names) is complete and a new union is arising between Jelelle and Raphael. This is not just semantics, changing these names, but a symbolic decision to represent the stunningly new sense that we both feel about ourselves. We also retired the inherited family name of Vriend and have chosen the last name of Awen, which means Divine Inspiration and is also the fifth element.

Who are Jelelle and Raphael Awen? It is unknown and familiar; it is us in our best moments and us in our letting go of the past definitions. It is the result of years of process work, devotional connection to the Divine, and, recently, meditative astral journeying to our true soul home called Golden Earth and the parallel dimension of Avalon. In one way changing a name is easy; it is getting to the place of genuinely wanting to inhabit something new that is challenging.

This is the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. It is about change and transformation, life arising anew at every sunrise and sunset, we get to arise anew along with it, even changing our names if we are called to. It is about nature’s beauty matching and holding space for our own inner beauty to respond and bloom.

We’ve rejected feeling that earning money should be the goal of life and embraced that money represents love and can come in many forms (including gift exchange) and shouldn’t be the meaning of life. We’ve rejected pressure to conform to the rationalist, five sense picture of reality and embraced that our reality is much more vast, mysterious, and multidimensional than we can even imagine.

We feel that you have to say ‘no’, to push back on what you’ve been conditioned and programmed to believe about life, in order to experience what your meant to experience: yourself as an expression of Infinite Love. The SoulFullHeart Way Of Life operates from this foundation of Infinite Love, it overflows from this well spring, and it gushes from this pulsing vein. Any other source is an illusion created by the false self. Saying ‘no’ is only for a phase of time until you are made bare and new with only ‘yes’ as your necessary response to what you are offered. Yes to desire, yes to learning, yes to connection, yes to love. You become a student and teacher of Yes.

This came to me this morning as one way to describe the process of awakening that participation in the SoulFullHeart calls us to inhabit: Awakening is less like a lightning bolt coming from the sky as it is like a flower bud slowly unfolding its petals in response to the warmth of the sun. We provide the warmth of the sun in the form of love, support, guidance, and a setting in which you can truly focus on your process. You are the flower, each unfolding petal revealing the essence of your heart and soul expression. And the Divine smiles on it all, caught up in the goodness of our efforts and desire.

Jelayan Awen is co-creator and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information.