Category Archives: Chuck’s Blog

Welcome to Chuck’s Place! This is where Chuck Ketchel, LCSW-R, expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Currently, Chuck posts an essay once a week, currently on Tuesdays, along the lines of inner work, psychotherapy, Jungian thought and analysis, shamanism, alchemy, politics, or any theme that makes itself known to him as the most important topic of the week. Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy page.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Look Into The Mirror Of Self-Importance

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Who is looking back at you in the mirror?
-Artwork © 2026 Jan Ketchel

What rules the outer world, at this moment in time, is the most fantastic display of self-importance the world has ever known. Of course, it’s the most fantastic display, ever! It wields the Midas Touch, as everything it touches turns to gold, real or imagined!

Let us face this outer reflection of insatiable self-importance as we discover its hidden presence within the workings of our own inner Soul. We are all subject to the Hermetic Law, as without so within. May we all truly find the gold within in this golden moment of our planetary progression.

Self-importance has its roots in the developmental needs of the human ego. The mention of ego often provokes a pejorative reaction, as it is frequently associated with negative self-importance, one of its trappings so offensive to the virtue of humility. However, in its functional form, ego is the part of the personality that forms an identity that navigates the life we were born into, and the entire journey of our lifetime in human form.

In fact, ego is a part of our Soul that generally suffers amnesia at birth—what is called a blank slate—where it is separated from its royal ancestry of infinite Soul, to be born into a human family, as a mere mortal who will live and die in human form. This royal scheme is the greater Soul’s intent to explore vistas of being that only life and death in finite form can provide.

Ego, born into this state of alienation, is obsessively driven to bond to parents who will ensure its survival. It grows through helplessness and dependence to secure independence, when it can more fully undertake its hero’s journey to complete the mission it unknowingly signed up for prior to birth.

Ego has an insatiable desire for attention, particularly from its parents, which is largely met by parents through mirroring glances of acknowledgement, joy, and welcomeness to young ego, who experiences validation and the definitive right to take up space and thrive in this world. Failures in early mirroring can lead to depression and obsessive attention seeking behaviors, as such an ego lacks secure attachment and inner worth.

Ego may revert to strategies such as ego inflation, where it puffs up its self-importance to more securely navigate life. Equally, ego may choose to hide, seeking no attention. Attention entails performance, which can lead to failure, shame, and rejection. In this adaptive hideout, one may live a fantasy life of importance and fulfillment, though secretly feel entitled, superior, and resentful.

Another ego strategy for navigation is the pursuit of perfection to avoid the judgments inherent in being seen. The problem with perfection is that it leaves no space for the acceptance of being a mortal human with flaws and inadequacies. Avoidance of rejection and shame can monopolize all of one’s energy for life.

Blatantly mirrored, in current world rule, is an ego strategy that exercises its full might to consume all world attention and stamp out all possible criticism and limitation. This strategy is a concretized attempt to achieve wholeness and oneness by literally having, and becoming, all that is.

Ultimately, we are all being challenged to address our fixations with self-importance as the collective planetary ego prepares to evolve in this Age of Aquarius, which we have recently entered. The ego of the Aquarian Age is opening up to telepathy, where thoughts and feelings are transmitted without verbal communication. This mind-reading function does not require another to be locally present for thought-sharing to occur.

Ego cannot hide out during telepathic communication. The ego becomes the emperor with no clothes in this scenario, for all is known. Ego can no longer hide behind words and persona; it is simply seen as it truly is. This progression in evolution requires that ego be in acceptance of the truth of what it is, with all its flaws and limitations. This alignment with truth opens the door to love of self, as well as love of equally flawed neighbor.

P. P. Quimby discovered that most of what becomes disease in our lives is  erroneous ego beliefs, which condense and are reflected in the external conditions of our body. His method of cure was to have his patients see the blatant truths of these errors and open to the love and truth of their divine beingness. This orientation also opens us to the truths and intentions for the greater good for all rather than the cloistered, self-serving ego of deception.

This attitude of love and reverence for everyone prepares us to take full conscious possession of our divine ability to manifest, via suggestion to our divine subconscious mind, sincere fulfillment for self and all others.

Until recently, we have all projected these divine abilities to create and manifest onto godly beings beyond ourselves, or concretely upon money and physical objects. The Age of Aquarius is reflecting to us our royal potential, as we retrieve our projections and advance our innate energetic abilities.

In effect, the more truthfully we face and accept the full truths of our lives, the more ego discovers its true royal heritage, which it can then align with for the greater good of self, and all others. Ego then serves the needs of its greater Soul, in truth and wisdom, rather than its own self-aggrandizement.

The shamans of ancient Mexico, who recognized the utter necessity to become free of self-importance, stressed that laughter was the best medicine in accepting our flawed selves and the wily ways we adopt to cover ourselves up.

Every one of us has the capacity now to advance the world from within, by facing the giant of self-importance, so boldly mirrored to us from without. May we follow the true guidance reflected by this utterly glaring projection!

With affection for all,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Being In The Oneness Of Wisdom

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Shine the Inner Light of Oneness…
-Artwork © 2026 Jan Ketchel

We arrive at the place of wisdom when we stop active thinking and open to receive inner knowing. We innately know when we are in sympathy with our own High Self. We are in sympathy when both our conscious presence and our High Self are each experiencing the same feeling at the same time. Wisdom springs from this union, this oneness.

When we think, we invariably separate from this state of oneness. Thinking requires contrasts, as it reasons, weighs and compares. In oneness we are in pure light, absent the shadows generated by thinking. In thinking, we actively turn our light toward, and interact with, the created objects of our thoughts. As valuable as thinking is, it separates us from our oneness of being.

This interaction of light and separate objects does produce knowledge of the workings of the physical world, which often condenses into opinions and beliefs, but the best of this knowledge is always shy of the wisdom born of the pure light of absolute oneness. Without wisdom, all knowledge is limited by some shadow of error.

The current renaissance in psychedelic journeying is born of the spiritual impulse to bypass the errors and constraints of the thinking left brain to obtain wisdom through the right-brained experiences of greater oneness.

This method of bypassing the filtering power of the left brain involves the ingestion of synthetic drugs or plant medicines that deliver their own intents in steering the brain into latent but frequently unused neural pathways.

If the insights gained in these journeys are recapitulated and integrated into daily consciousness one might incorporate new wisdom in one’s perception of life, resulting in new behaviors. This is called neuroplasticity, where the neurons of new experience are paired with the neurons of ordinary life, forming new neural pathways. As Joe Dispenza frequently points out, “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

However, let not the pervasiveness of psychedelic use create the illusion that psychedelics are legal. Though many clinical trials are exploring the clinical value of psychedelics—as was the case in the 1970s when Richard Nixon, fed up with the Vietnam War protests of the love generation, shut down all clinical trials and made all psychedelics illegal— they are still mostly illegal in today’s world.

One potential side effect of psychedelic journeying is a kind of fascination with the heightened awareness experienced through the substances ingested, which beckons repeat and novel experiences, but which fails to integrate those experiences into new neural pathways, or to change default habits. 

Other approaches to the transpersonal states of wisdom involve the use of the breath. In fact, after the 1970s shutdown of psychedelic trials, researcher Stan Grof, together with his wife Christina, developed Holotropic Breathwork to achieve the same experiential outcomes he had accessed with psychedelics.

I will offer an insinuation of a practice with breathwork that I personally use to actualize this intent of greater union. I use the word insinuation rather than structured practice, for to make it an official thing robs it of its spontaneous wisdom. If something resonates for you, try it, but allow your own wisdom to guide you in how you practice it.

I call this practice, Holy Union. I must confess that I am very much a failed Christian, but I have always appreciated the insinuation of a union with the Divine, as suggested by the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion.

Both Christian Communion and Jewish Sabbath utilize the substances of bread and wine to sanctify spiritual union. In Holy Union Breathwork, one inhales and holds the spirit of air, or the Holy Spirit of Wisdom.

Every time we breathe in air, we are communing with the spirit dimension, whose air physically enters and nourishes the body and then exits with its toxins. If we choose to hold our breath after an inhalation, we enter a state of prolonged union of the greater oneness of body and spirit.

Certain Pranayama breathing practices, such as Kumbhaka, incorporate holding the breath, as do breathing practices established by Wim Hof. It matters little how long one might hold one’s breath. One should always pay attention to the body and only hold the breath for as long as is comfortable. What is important is the intent to be in a state of oneness, however brief that might be.

Set the intent for Holy Union with the High Self before the inhalation. Breathe in a comfortable level of air. Hold the breath according to the limits suggested by a method you have chosen, or simply for as long as you feel comfortable. Do not struggle! That will only lessen the intention. The intent is deeply relaxed, loving union. After the exhalation one might choose to hold the breath briefly again, before taking another inhalation of Spirit.

Sometimes, I might choose a mantra, a word that has spiritually presented itself to me, and quietly say that word over and over again while I hold the breath. Words are power objects, especially if they have been previously paired with, or become wired with, transcendent experience.

The words relax, oneness, love, peace, if imbued with spiritual mana, will immediately calm the solidity of the physical body to join the higher vibration of the High Self.

At other times, I might completely silence the mind and put full attention to the physical experience of vibration, as body and mind blend into a oneness of sheer energy.

Sometimes, I have entered the Holy Union with the intention of total adjustment or healing from a physical condition I have felt imprisoned by.

Often, upon entering this state of vibratory oneness, I discover a total realignment to health from my previous frozen state of energy, which is then sustained throughout the day.

Again, I could not prescribe for anyone how they might structure their own spiritual breathwork practice. These are just suggestions for beginning a process of self-exploration.

We all, universally, breathe. I simply offer the possibility of an awareness with breath that offers everyone the opportunity to partake in being in the oneness of wisdom.

In Oneness,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: What Is The Matter?

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Reach out to Lady Wisdom…
-Artwork © 2026 Jan Ketchel

Matter comes from the Latin word materia, which means the physical substance that is born of mater, who is mother. Our physical body, our physical lives, and the life of our times is the creation of the father-of-suggestion in union with mother, the material substance of the subconscious mind.

Mother brings forth all physical life. The state of that life reflects the quality of the suggestions it has been impregnated with; are they of wisdom or are they of error? Wisdom is infused with impartial truth, error is filled with one-sided opinion.

Our current world is largely defined by the instant reactions of social media, from the White House on down, where the play and battle of opposites vie for dominance of public opinion, which serves as the ruling suggestions to the matter of our time.

Prior generations have struggled to establish union in response to this volatile battle of opposite opinions, often resorting to suppression, or to passing on to the future the insolvency of unrealized truth.

The founding fathers of America knew very well that slavery was immoral, but did not address it in the Constitution, forcing the future America, some 75 years later, into Civil War to resolve the issue. And though the outcome of that war ended slavery, the North and the South never came into real union.

The discontent over this imposed solution was suppressed and housed in the body of America, giving rise to a diseased nation, at war with itself, once again seeking solution in one-sided rule.  Such is the karma of unsettled solutions, yet to be resolved into the peace of true Wisdom.

These unsolved issues—be they the equality of the sexes and races, an equitable outcome of Zionism, the divine might-makes-right of kings in imperialist acquisition, or the racist intent of Naziism that seeks its alchemical gold through the destruction of its projected shadow—have all broken through from the body of the world’s suppressed unconscious, once again begging completion, as we prepare to receive the advanced wisdom of the Aquarian age we are now physically living in.

The stupendous overarching truth of now is that human consciousness is on the cusp of a major evolutionary leap that requires a clearing of all the errors and opinions that have formed the ruling suggestions to our subconscious minds, and created our current reality. Take for instance the power of suggestion itself. Once an individual awakens to their personal power to create their physical life, the sky is the limit.

Donald Trump, a master hypnotist, astutely aware of the power of suggestion, recently offered this guidance when asked about the limits on his own global power: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

This is indeed a fundamental truth for everyone in relation to their subconscious mind. The suggestions to the subconscious mind are all powerful. Mother subconscious will produce in matter that which is suggested to her. The question, as Donald Trump points out, is the state of one’s morality. Is it based on the wisdom of truth, or the error of opinion? Either way, those suggestions will be manifested.

The unsolved matters of prior times, currently living through us, cannot find peace until we face them squarely and submit to the truth of Wisdom. We cannot revert to old defenses or old beliefs. These unsolved matters demand truthful resolution before we can evolve.

Resolution requires that we suspend the judgment of blame. Full acceptance, of what was and what is, is the precursor to a morality that will produce suggestions to materialize our creative potential for the greater good of all.

Inwardly, we must face the isms that have ruled our sense of self and our sense of the world. Inwardly, we must ask: Is our morality narcissistically dominated by the desire of ego for its own aggrandizement, or is it serving the wisdom of what is truly right? Inwardly, we must free our beliefs from internalized false opinions about ourselves based upon the thoughts and actions of others.

I close with this matter, the guidance and support of Lady Wisdom from Proverbs 3:16-18:

“Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.
 She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her.”

Reach out to Lady Wisdom,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Love Is The Greatest Power

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Love is the greatest power there is…
-Artwork © 2026 Jan Ketchel

Love is the feeling and sensation of the absolute oneness of everything. Love dissolves the falsity of fear generated by the separatist opinions of now. Opinion has its inevitable karma, as a weigh station on the road to the truth. Have no fear. Love is the greatest power; its truth frees us from the prison of opinion.

To arrive at love we must first discover the deepest opinions that have ruled us. When we attach to a belief it becomes the operating system of our lives, manifested and maintained by the subconscious mind. Just because we have this power to materialize our thoughts—by making them real—does not mean that they express our deepest truth, our oneness in love.

Until we are liberated from the solitary confinement of our limiting beliefs we continue to live behind the prison walls of their construction. Old ideas may have created a negative, lifelong, self-fulfilling prophesy. But don’t be fooled into believing that the repetition of cyclic experience is a basic proof of who you are. Beneath, and above it all, we are the oneness of love.

The mighty carnival of outer life has not disappointed in its current tales and attractions of power. When you boil it all down, it’s all a craving for the attention of specialness. Even this hunger for attention is but a cruder grasping for love. The error of this attempt to coerce the oneness of love is in its motive power of influence for profit, manipulation and force. Refined love naturally attracts love, for like attracts like. Thus, being in the oneness of love is reflected in being in love without. Have no doubt!

However, the key to the power of love lies within. The marketplace of outer opinion is a slave market of diseased ideas and cures. The challenge is great enough to identify and unseat the internalized beliefs that have constructed our lives as unworthy of love. To simply state, with gratitude, “I am a being of love,” is to invoke the great power of love to subsume the misguided intent of false rulers within, as love takes up rule with the power of truth.

Intend the awakening of love to those most dear and those most feared. Energy healing is ultimately a telepathic experience of mind influencing mind. When we think of someone with the intent that they choose love as their healing modality, that thought travels on the energetic wings of intent and is presented to the subconscious mind of our subject. We cannot control the outcome of this interaction, for all beings have free will, but love is indeed the greatest power of benevolent influence.

Never share these acts of subliminal healing love. To do so is to risk an influx of self-importance that steals attention from one’s selfless healing intent. Furthermore, to share with another one’s healing intent is to invite the doubt or jealousy of another, which will also bring those thoughts to the subconscious mind of our subject.

Keep it pure, keep it in love, for love is the greatest power.

Loving thoughts,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Think It Forward With New Thought

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Create some New Thoughts in the New Year…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

While both Freud and Jung dabbled with hypnosis, each ultimately abandoned it as a tool to explore and heal the human psyche. Each would go on to offer his individual gifts to psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, but their abandonment of the exploration of hypnosis closed an important door to an essential gateway to knowledge of the anatomy and dynamics of the soul.

In the mid-19th century, an informally educated American clockmaker and mesmerist from Maine, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, abstracted from his hypnotic healing work a metaphysical working model of the psyche. While practicing mesmerism, his fervently inquisitive mind discovered the role of telepathy and the power of thought in creating physical reality, particularly physical illness.

Quimby ultimately abandoned mesmerism and spent the later part of his life as a healer. He would just sit with patients, himself in semi-trance yet also consciously present, thus in two places at once. He would then connect to the subconscious mind of his patient and have revealed to him the beliefs that caused their affliction.

Invariably, Quimby would discover that the root of the problem lay in a powerful belief, which the patient was often quite unaware they held in their subconscious mind. Quimby also discovered that the subconscious mind automatically manifested that belief, both physically and psychologically, as expressed through the patient’s symptoms.

Quimby would then explain to his patient the validity of their current condition, whose etiology was the physical manifestation of their belief. Quimby was also able to show them the limitation of their current belief in defining the deeper truth of their being, which was one of health. Fully embracing this new positive belief often led to a physical healing, largely through the mysterious but definite action of mental thought upon the physical manifestation capacity of the subconscious mind.

Quimby determined that the psyche is filled with powerful beliefs either internalized from significant relationships in one’s life or generated by  conscious thinking. Thus, for example, if one believes that they should be punished or limited because of something they have done, they might experience some kind of physical paralysis. Once freed of this limiting or punishing belief one’s paralysis could be lifted.

Quimby came to believe that the power of suggestion was fundamental to the human mind, which he believed to be of divine origin. The conscious mind holds the key to creation through the power of suggestion, while the subconscious mind has the divine power to physically manifest these suggestions received from the conscious mind.

In fact, every part of human life is generated by this dynamic relationship. Though apparently wide awake, we live in a state of constant trance, manifesting physically, at every moment, what we believe to be true.

For Quimby, health was achieved by taking conscious control of suggestions, based upon the truth of one’s divine origin rather than on the errors of opinions or suggestions not in alignment with truth. Quimby emphasized the human power of free will to create either physical problems or health and success, all based upon beliefs.

Quimby discovered a core shamanic truth. For shamans, humans are energetic beings who mentally generate a physical existence through the power of intent, or the power of suggestion. Though our physical life is quite real, it would be an error to say that it is our ultimate truth. Ultimately, we are energetic beings, with unlimited possibilities of physical expression.

Shamans call our physical life an interpretation of energy. There can be many interpretations of that energy, as Quimby points out, that generate physical illnesses. We have the ability to change our belief, whereby interpreting energy in a new physical way, through the manifesting power of the subconscious mind.

Unfortunately, Quimby died young, at the age of 64, in 1866. At that time, he was treating upwards of 500 patients per year. I surmise that his early death was caused by the same technical error that uninformed shamanic healers often make in soul retrieval healings.

Often, it is the shaman that literally takes possession of their patient’s lost soul, which had been caught in the grip of an unhealthy suggestion. The shaman then takes on responsibility for reconciling the tormented part soul within themselves, which they then return to their patient, who is healed through this restoration of their wholeness by the shaman.

The side effect for the shaman, via sympathy, is to also experience the symptoms of their patient’s tormented soul, which takes its toll upon the healer’s health. Carlos Castaneda taught that, in modern shamanism, the shaman is a guide but does not assume responsibility for a patient’s troubled soul. That healing must be fully assumed by the patient’s personal process of reconciliation with their lost soul, in recapitulation, for instance.

Although Quimby died prior to the formal naming of the New Thought philosophical and spiritual tradition, his work is credited universally as the birth of that movement. The ‘new thought’ of New Thought is that human beings are an active part of divinity, evolutionarily destined to discover and exercise their own divine power, in alignment with the greater good for self and all. Thus, in the New Thought tradition, the life of Christ, and other Bodhisattvas and Old Testament prophets, is revisioned as a teacher introducing humans to their divine powers.

Our current world could be characterized as a flurry of divine errors that reflect human experimentation with the power of suggestion to the subconscious mind. These errors are having the effect of the breakdown of civilization, as we have known it.

On the other hand, new life, or new interpretations of energy, require a clearing of old beliefs that must give way for new divine possibilities to take root. The atrocities of now are real, but suggestions are coming so rapidly that nothing in this interim period of transition is likely to achieve permanence. On the other hand, our world is unlikely to ever return to the comfort of a familiar past.

The opportunity for now is for all of us to individually and collectively state suggestions that align with the greater truth and good for all. That is a sustainable interpretation of energy. That is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius that we all share in. It’s why we are here now, to assume divine responsibility for the world dream we are in the midst of dreaming forward. How momentous!

Do think this New Year forward, with New Thoughts of love, truth and wisdom.

Happy thoughts for this Happy New Year,
Chuck