Returning Home: Reflections in Awakening and Remembrance

By Stephan Santiago

What if the greatest mystery of life is to remain in a state of acceptance and respond to life knowing we are always supported? If we are walking along the same path to an eventual outcome, what is the purpose and meaning for each trial and triumph? Are there enough similarities in each of our lives that we can share and learn from?

In this book on reflections, the paths we embark on provide an indicative view of the souls journey. The steps we take reveal questions that require understanding, so that we fuel our growth as a soul being, and break free from the limitations of a human being.

Returning Home is a reflective view on the journey we all embark on with collective similarities. It is the fundamental knowing that at our core, is the deepest desire to return home and to know that in the end of our journey, we lived and loved well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Nov 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504305280

Stephan Santiago

Stephan Santiago brings to his writing a collection of hard-won insights based on his reflections on life. He is deeply familiar with the rigorous pace of modern life. This experience has inspired him to pause, reflect and remember his soul journey.

Book preview

The Journey

We look on life with innocence, waiting for perfect moments to surface, qualifying our needs, desires, hopes, and dreams. Yet these very same moments bring us closer and closer to our intended path. Our desires meet with the true nature of source and provide the lessons that trigger an awakening and steer us back to our intended path. It is in these moments that purpose is revealed, calling us to self-reflection and the hope that the universe will again recognize life’s yearning to express its true intent and purpose through us. This is the soul remembrance, allowing for an awareness to resurface and return us to where we started, but now recognizing it for the first time.

The reflections presented here speak of the lessons and the paths that we, as a collective conscience can reflect upon with familiarity. The steady layering of preconceived ideas and imposed beliefs erodes and hinders us as spiritual beings, oftentimes without our understanding it. But if left entrenched, this process slides us further into an all-too-common dream state of living and responding to a physical world, a limited and restrictive world that wills us to be bounded by laws of conditioning, conformity, and acceptance. This is the human existence.

We follow a path of false certainty and security, clinging to what is familiar, convinced it is safe, proven, and, most of all, necessary. This is a cycle of misplaced assurance that qualifies our worth and instils the belief that we have arrived and have found our purpose. Only then are we awakened by an event that prompts us to consider the question; What if my whole life has been wrong? Asking this question may serve to initiate our return to source and to what was truly intended for us to fulfil in this life.

The words that follow allow me to walk with you as I have journeyed thus far in my own awakening and remembrance. It is my hope to share this grace with others as I journey together with you through the Dance, the Dream, the Awakening, and the Return Home.

The Dance

The Soul Experience

The spiritual curriculum of each life has one aim: to get us back to God.

—Iyanla Vanzant, Peace from Broken Pieces

In birth, we agree to experience once again the soul’s calling—the need to revisit and recognise contrast, the desire to appreciate shifts in perception of what we believe to be true and to come to terms with what it means to be with or without. In re-examining human perspectives, we are called to understand the greater meaning of our journeys, where life quenches the desire to continue reminding ourselves what it means to be whole, to be free from the trappings of conforming to social ideals.

In union, where two have found each other in bond, we open a doorway for another soul to arrive. It is not of our choosing or our will to mandate this arrival, though a mother and father will continue to hold on to the belief that they have the final say in allowing life to continue or not. A newborn’s arrival is perfect. It trusts in the balance and harmony that life fosters and continues to embrace. It knows no imperfection; neither is it bound by the laws of what should be and what should not. Parents have a responsibility not just to nurture but to allow a child to be free to express and commune with life. It is life’s perfection that allows the parent and child to exist in duality, knowing roles will eventually reverse—if we allow for lessons to surface and flow without the constant desire to consult the ego and play the role of an authoritarian.

A soul contract brings the people, the lessons, the paths, and the reflections to a partnership between soul and the physical. A child will already have picked every event in his or her life—from parents to experiences—that sets him or her in motion on the path of learning from the intended experience leading to an eventual remembrance. Children know they will initially choose to relate to commonalities and conditions that encourage the need to embrace human form and strive to live a spiritual life. However, the opposite will hold true as we as spiritual beings strive to understand this human form and realise we are more than what the physical world limits and expects.

Trusting the Senses

When we begin to identify with that timeless, pristine awareness rather than with the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that pass through it, we’ve taken the first step toward facing the freedom of our true nature.

—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Joyful Wisdom

Events in your life that advance the growth process will repeatedly have you question what you can and cannot trust. What you know to be true or untrue tends to coincide with your understanding of what is familiar and known to be acceptable, often entrusted to senses the physical form has familiarised and justified as your boundaries. This is the conditioning to which you have adopted unconsciously.

What you have perceived from your beliefs and ideas will set the tone of your journey—the turns you will take and the repetitive cycles that will patiently return you. You will eventually understand where you erred so as to allow the next chapter in your life journey to unfold. These are the lessons and experiences that will provide the level