Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
What guidance do you have for us today?

I must congratulate you all on your efforts to maintain balance in your lives. This is what you must continue to focus on, no matter what comes to greet you from inside or outside. Your ability to straddle your worlds, with perfectly balanced footing, yet still able to flow well in either world, unafraid, is your ultimate goal. Along with that, your challenge is to remain aware, and this may perhaps be even more challenging. Awareness is the challenge that you must hone and take with you into the worlds that you experience now, while in human form, and later when you transition into new life.

To maintain balance at all times may seem impossible. You may find your self feeling imperfect in your attempts to maintain stability, focus, and clarity. Do not, however, chide the self, nor attach frustration or blame to the process you must undergo. Your feelings of imperfection are but struggles that must be encountered. Look upon them as challenges, as openings to events of recapitulation, or steps in learning your greater challenge of awareness.

I do not like to see you caught in struggles with your self over who will have control, remaining in battle without first gaining some insight, even if it be the insight that: “Oh dear, here I am again, caught in the same battle with myself. Why am I here again? I must have something still to learn. What can it be?”

Asking these questions is recognizing the self in the process and, no matter what place you inhabit in the process, acknowledging that it is meaningful and necessary. Your next step toward training your awareness becomes to go beyond the questions of why and what, to look around you and see what it is in your world that has gotten you to this place now. For even if you have been presented with the same battle over and over again, each time you enter into that battle, familiar though it may be, it is actually being triggered by something in your environment of now. So, what in your life, now, is signaling your place of work, your issues that need attention, and your process?

To look upon life as a process of self discovery and growth, as well as participation in the outer world, each equally necessary and available, while learning detachment from both of them in order to evolve, is your ultimate goal. You see? You must fully live every aspect of the self, every aspect of life upon that earth, with all who you must encounter, even your inner people, before you can evolve to new life. Encounters with the inner aspects of self are perhaps the greatest challenges and this is what I seek to aid you with. For the inner selves are quite well-hidden and trained to keep you on your toes, urging you to confront what you must. Perhaps an inner self now urges you to go into deep depression or contemplation of some aspect of self that is dark, unnerving, shameful, uncomfortable to take into consideration? Perhaps you resist this aspect that must be encountered in order to grow? Perhaps you prefer to by-pass it, ignore it, or step on it, to keep it quiet in one fashion or another? Well, in so doing will your balance be tilted, unseated, and pushed off kilter. Am I right?

As you attempt to push away what comes to you in your growth process, perhaps because it is so difficult to consider, so do you interrupt and disturb the natural flow of your process, as it desires to unfold. Then you get into your battles of resistance and the whole thing falls into quite a mess. I know the process well. But I also know the process from the warrior’s point of view, and that is what I seek to teach you about.

Now be mindful, when I speak of the warrior self, I do not attach to any conventional or unconventional practice or religion. In fact, the warrior’s process involves you alone, what you are presented with, and how your life greets you with what you need to learn, regardless of religion or affiliation of beliefs. I speak of life itself showing you what it means to become a warrior. Your most enabling task is to learn balance, the warrior’s stable stance, a foot in one world, and the other foot in another. Whatever those worlds may be in your life, and they may shift many times throughout the day, so must you learn to hold your self in a good, firmly grounded stance, no matter what comes to shake you from your foundations, to scare you into submissiveness, or to force you to consider other options.

There are no other options. Your balance is necessary. Do not ever think that this is of no consequence, or that you can evolve through that lifetime without the balance of a warrior. Without it you will float through life, but you will not evolve. You will not truly face your challenges, for how could you without your feet planted firmly? Your challenges would simply blow you away with a mere puff of air. Is that what you want? Is that how you foresee your self, an unstable individual? I do not think you do, My Dears. And if you do, for even a moment (or longer), perhaps that is where you must go. Perhaps you must evaluate the self who is struggling to find the balanced stance of the warrior self. You see, nothing is ever a wrong perception, or a misguided directive.

Every aspect of life is a valuable lesson. But your questions must be based on growth, with balance. They must be based on your process, with awareness of future evolution, and on gaining clarity of who you are and for what reason you exist, in order to become the warrior that you are fully capable of becoming now, in this lifetime.

I know I present you with a lot of ideas to contemplate. But today, on this first day of your new President Obama’s life as your taskmaster, as he presents you all with challenges, so must you all learn to balance your selves. This entails inner/outer work; child/adult balance; crybaby/maternal balance; weakling/paternal balance; sordid/beautiful balance, and so on, and so on. It is quite a task! But as you undertake it, you will begin to feel what it means to be in balance, to stay in balance, and eventually to shift into your balanced warrior state upon a second’s notice. You might also find that you are naturally there more often than not, because it feels so right, so natural, and so proper for you to be there.

Wherever you are in your process, I ask this of you, as I conclude for today: Slow Down! Slow down your frustration. Slow down your desire to grow, to jump ahead, to have it done. You must take each step of your journey in order to reach your goal. It is the journey that teaches. The goal is but an enigma, because you do not know what the goal is, what the prize is, until you have taken the journey. You may have an idea of what it is, but I can guarantee you that it does not exist, for you are not yet who you will be, so how can your goal be already present to greet you. You would find it not quite fulfilling when you got there if you hold it too closely to your heart, for, ultimately, your goal is to learn detachment in order to be totally open for a new journey ahead, beyond anything you can now imagine, in this life and the next.

So, My Dear Ones, the question of balance remains always present to remind you to ground your self in the reality of life, the place where your lessons are presented, and your tasks laid out before you. In balanced awareness will you be able to process and progress. Good Luck!

NOTE: I just wanted to mention that Jeanne has, in a previous message, spoken about gaining balance through physical movement. I will try to find the reference later and I’ll post it under Guidance. So look for it there, probably titled, Balancing Act, or something like that. In the meantime, if you are a yoga practitioner, any of the balancing poses are really good for feeling your balance and for strengthening your ability to shift into balance whenever you need it. (i.e.: tree pose, triangle, even mountain, to name but a few off the top of my head.) -Jan