My Descent & Ascent: Free To Be She Chapter Three Excerpt

The heroine’s journey is not only a story I tell, but a story I have lived. Its descent and ascent have been carved into my own body, my heart, my soul through veils falling, crowns stripped away, the underworld gates opening. These are not just symbols, but moments that broke me open and remade me.

There are moments when the descent is not chosen but demanded, when the ground you thought you were standing on is swept away and you are asked to walk barefoot or even crawling on your knees into the underworld.

My descent began in the container of a spiritual group that I was part of twenty years ago that promised light, love, and freedom, and for a time, it gave me these things. I was seen there, stretched there, awakened into lifetimes of memory, priestess gifts, and soul frequencies that had long been waiting. I experienced Sagehood and Sainthood accesses in myself and also the raw edges of my shadow reflected in others.

And yet, as always happens in the heroine’s journey, the same temple that awakened me also wounded me. For 4.5 years I poured myself into its teachings, its community, its promise of liberation. But there came a breaking point, a mirror of abusive patterns going on in the community that I could no longer ignore.

It was when love came for me, love in the form of Raphael, a man I had known for three years within that same group. Our union was not calculated or strategic; it was soul-recognition, cellular remembrance, the spark of sacred partnership long desired by me. When we first kissed, I felt every chakra in my body light up from head to toe in a blissful rush that surprised me. In our first weeks dating each other, I felt the wild joy of homecoming, of finally meeting the one who matched me in depth and devotion.

But our relationship, which was initially celebrated by the group as sacred, was eventually declared forbidden. Our teacher, the one we had trusted to midwife us into God and Emotional Body Enlightenment, named our love ‘codependence’, called it illusion, and placed before us an ultimatum: choose your relationship, or your belonging here in the group.

That moment was a massive severing for me and parts of me who had become attached. The group had been my family, my anchor, my portal into awakening and now would be lost to me. And yet, my heart knew. To betray this love with Raphael would have been to betray myself, to split from the very essence of the Divine feminine that was awakening within me. So, we walked away together.

The descent that followed was not clean. It was grief and rage, betrayal and heartbreak, alongside the dizzying bliss of falling in love. I felt both orphaned and reborn, grieving the loss of what had nurtured me while tasting the goodness of true union. It was a paradox too great for the strategic ego to reconcile. The only solace came from my journal letters to God and long digestion talks with Raphael.

In those days I lived what I now call reconciliation: holding both the shadow and the gift, the wound and the blessing, the devastation and the ecstasy. My 3D ego was unraveling its ties to authority, to belonging at any cost, while my 4D ego wrestled with shadow projections, betrayal narratives, and the longing for light. And yet, in the very swirl of contradiction, my Divine Feminine Self began to breathe through.

This was not a victory march, nor a conquest. It was a bliss mess. It was individuation in the rawest sense: stepping out of a system that had defined me, claimed me, even loved me, in order to claim my own soul path. I even wrote a public blog for a time about my mixed experience in the group and with the teacher as it felt so important to reclaim my voice and my truth, even if it was scary for parts of me who were afraid of retribution and drawing even more judgement from others.

It was true reconciliation: seeing the teacher as both wounding and catalyst, the group as both nourishing and constricting, myself as both naïve and courageous. And it was the first taste of unification: the knowing that love…true love, sacred union love, the kind offered with a counterpart, is the clearest mirror of the Divine outside of ourselves that we will ever find.

The descent stripped me of all falsities while the ascent gave me the sacred marriage experience with Raphael. And in the ashes of what was lost, I began to glimpse my Queen’s crown that was not made of gold placed on my head by ‘outer authorities’ but bestowed by my own heart and soul…forged from the fires of individuation and the heat of Divine Mother’s validation.

Love,

Jelelle Awen

This is an excerpt from Chapter Three of Free To Be She on the Heroine’s Empowerment Journey of Individuation, Reconciliation & Unification. I have been sharing a daily passage from each chapter of this book, my sixth book about awakening, spirituality, parts work, sacred union, and quantum soul reconciliation. Its release is on January 1, 2026…when it will be available to purchase in E-book, PDF, and print editions (and eventually an audiobook version in my voice).

This book is more like a transmission than conceptual or intellectual, more like a love letter from and with Divine Mother to all women and the men who love them. Long in the gestation, inspiration, and now..finally…the birthing and offering phases. More info to purchase this book when it is available here