Monthly Archives: October 2010

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Balance, Restless Dog & Broken Buddha

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Last week I wrote about balance being important during a recapitulation process, but maintaining balance is of course important at all times. By balance I mean everything from keeping the body and mind healthy with good eating, sleeping, exercise, and stimulating mental activity, to living a thoughtful, compassionate, loving, aware existence in the world, as well as finding a spiritual practice that personally resonates and allows for exploration of the inner self.

For me, balance means all of these things and much more. I’m in balance when I have time for creative work and meditation, even if only for a few minutes during especially busy or stressful times. I’m in balance when I cook, delighting in preparing even the simplest meal with fresh ingredients, and being offered the opportunity to share it in the presence of good company. I’m in balance when I take a few minutes to walk the dog or stroll down the road on a sunny afternoon taking in what nature offers. I’m in balance when I’m focused on a task or project. I’m in balance when I do inner work, attending to what arises during the day to puzzle or challenge me. I’m in balance when I write this blog. However, I awoke feeling very out of balance this morning and with absolutely no idea what I would write about today.

The dog was restless all night. We wondered if she was perhaps letting us know that her time here is almost done. She’s old. Her legs are bad. She’s deaf. When she sits outside in the yard the vultures begin to circle overhead. We’ve been noticing this phenomenon for weeks now, their keen senses of smell and sight picking up on the vulnerabilities of an old animal who would be unable, at this stage of life, to survive out in the wild. During the night I heard the coyotes howling several times and I wondered if she heard them too, calling her to the next world, come to accompany her spirit on its next journey. I worried about letting her out during the night, though she insisted, knowing that they were out there on the prowl.

She has a tendency to wander off. Early this morning I let her out for the millionth time since the night began and went into the kitchen to put the coffee on. Most of the time she goes outside and just stands motionless or wanders around marking her territory then heads back to the front door to be let back in, it’s a predictable routine. This time when I went to let her back in, she was nowhere in sight. Pulling on my rubber boots I went outside to look for her, noticing that the night sky with its brilliant spread of gleaming stars was beginning to cloud over. I saw her heading toward the neighbor’s open garage and set off at a jog, hoping to head her off before they discovered me standing between their cars in my pajamas. Before I could catch her she darted inside. Embarrassed, I darted in after her and coming up behind grabbed her by the thick mane around her shoulders, surprising her. She whipped around and stared at me, as if to say, “What the heck!? What are you doing?” Which is what I said to her.

Stubbornly, almost digging her heels in, she reluctantly allowed me to push, drag, and shove her back into the house. A little while later, Chuck had left for the office and she needed to go out again. By this time I was beginning to feel extremely frustrated, more out of balance at each scratch at the door signaling her desire to go out. This time I put a leash on her and took her for a walk. Upon returning to the house she refused to come back inside with me, though it was beginning to rain. I left her sitting outside, her leash looped around the neck of the stone Buddha we have sitting in front of our entryway. That ought to keep her safe, I thought.

Every few minutes I checked on her. Like the Buddha she sat quietly, sedately, the grand dame, the queen surveying her land, seemingly contented. All of a sudden she got up and before I could get to her she had dragged the heavy stone Buddha off the step. It fell, smashing its head into the step below, severing it from the body. The dog stood there, unaware of what had just happened. I grabbed the leash before she could do anymore damage and just stood there looking down at the beloved Buddha, the calm sentinel marking our door for so many years, now broken.

The Buddha has always been a symbol of balance to me, serene and calm, he sits unmoving, nothing bothers him and now he’s lost his head! “What does this mean?” I moaned, absolutely regretting the moment I had decided he was strong enough to keep our big dog from wandering. What does it mean indeed? I placed the head back onto the shoulders, where it now sits quite comfortably again. You would never know it was broken simply by looking at it.

I pondered the meaning of the Buddha losing its head. Suddenly I saw the significance of it: he doesn’t need his head! In other words, the Buddha is not the Buddha because of his head. He is the Buddha because he practiced losing his head, by sitting in stillness, detaching from the foibles of the conjuring mind. The Buddha is the symbol of mindlessness, empty head, having finally achieved ultimate clarity, enlightenment, and freedom from the temptations, frustrations, and restless activities of this world.

I must face my own attachment to this beautiful stone Buddha. Though the Buddha has lost his head I must not weep. I must be as contented as Buddha. Even now, with head severed by restless dog, he sits perfectly still, keeping watch over our front yard, still presenting me with the utter calmness of balance that I seek. Or perhaps now truly symbolizing what it means to maintain balance in life, that no matter what comes along to interrupt the flow of our lives or knock our heads off we must learn to anchor ourselves in the inner peacefulness and joy of just being.

If you wish, feel free to share or comment in the Post Comment section below.

Sending you all love, good wishes, and balance.
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

#723 Facing the Dispersion

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Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
What message of guidance do you offer us now?

This is a time of great culmination and dispersion. Imagine waves at sea, with no sight of land but far from any shore, slapping into each other, rising up in collision and confrontation, and yet there is little to do as a result of this clash but to sink back down into the great wide ocean once again. Such is the time of now, the time of culmination and dispersion, yet what is the deeper meaning?

Beyond returning to the unconscious, the great wide ocean of discontent, all of your experiences are meaningful for the moment, and far beyond as well.

All are challenged to take not only meaning from the events in life but to learn the lessons about the self those events send swirling up into awareness. The deep sea that does tend to the earth and its inhabitants in so many ways does also keep hidden the deeper meanings of life, evolutionary or otherwise.

I do not mean to confuse or speak only in metaphorical or allegorical terms, for I do not intend wasting words. I seek to expand awareness, to prod you, My Dear Readers, awake; to ask you to use your intuition and knowing to guide yourself more steadily through life—so bear with me. Who can you rely on to offer real advice? In truth, you must resort to the self, for only the self knows what lies deep inside you. You must, if you are to evolve, find the means of allowing the self to express, to be expressed and fully known, both inside and outside the self.

This inner process requires a good dose of humility, a large portion of innocence, and the ability—learned, practiced or innate—to trust that you can allow the energy inside you to guide you, as the waves upon the sea, to the point of culmination and dispersion.

It is only through calling up the deeper truths of the self, often by force, that the spreading of them will occur. In forcing the self to face the deeply sunken treasures of truth, long buried or otherwise hidden, the next step in personal growth may have a chance.

That next step is facing the dispersion I speak of. To face this kind of dispersion requires affording the self the deepest respect, first of all. Only with deep respect for the self will you be able to take seriously all that shoots forth and falls around you as your inner and outer waves crash and disperse.

In honesty must your self-respect be guided to acceptance of all that lies floating about on the waters that are your life. You see, you are but nature itself, like the ocean, with things seen on the surface and things hidden below, even to the very bottom and beyond, in the muck that lies far beyond normal reach. You are nature itself and as such you have within you the same forces that nature bears. These include unknown forces that emerge when you least expect them, forces that will shake you awake and ask you to humbly step back, to look at your life in all its broken bits and pieces floating like debris upon the ocean top. These forces ask you to accept that indeed these doings are honestly my own, and then to allow this humble self to accept the responsibility for not just picking up the pieces and putting them away. No, the real process of clean up after a storm is to examine how this storm happened, whether it was conscious or unconscious, and to use those fragments of self to build a new more naturally acceptable self.

All humans are innocent beings at the core. All fear life, as much as they fear death, yet do they too easily elect to pretend that neither is that important. Caught in an alternate reality of sameness, they lose sight of the truth of life. They forget they are the ocean and the moon and stars alike. They forget they are innocent beings with the forces of nature rocking inside them. They quell and soothe this true nature. They pretend it could not possibly exist, that what they experience could not be true. “How could this happen?” they ask. “This could not happen to me!” they cry. “What did I do to deserve this?” they wonder.

In truth, if you look at your life as the ocean itself you may be able to better understand the reflection of self as nature. If you prefer, look to the sky, for it too is like the ocean. One lies above and one below, yet do they offer the same opportunities for growth. They offer the opportunity to look beyond what you see before your frightened eyes. They ask you to pierce the surface of your world and explore what lies beyond.

My advice for you, My Dear Ones, is to continue piercing your own world. Do not accept it simply because it presents itself in one form or image. Look at your life and remind yourself that though this is my life at this moment, it is but the surface that I must break through. I must use the forces of nature inside me to explore my inner world for guidance but also for direction.

One must be ready to undertake the shattered bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam that float upon the ocean of life as indeed that which is laid before the self to examine. This is indeed a time of energetic self-examination. If you take a moment to study the self you may find that your culmination has already occurred. It may have happened years ago when you least expected it and since then you have been trying to put the pieces together again, in the same way, attempting to re-form an old image. However, that is not possible. The only thing to do now is to accept that a new world, a new self is called for. A new self must be prepared now.

A new life must be created from the dispersed self. But be sure to keep in mind also that this is the opportunity you have waited for, the moment of decision you have longed for. Do not miss it this time. Do yourself the honor of doing it differently!

Please feel free to post comments or respond to this message from Jeanne in the post/read comments section below.

Fondly and innocently offered.

Chuck's Blog

#722 Chuck’s Place: Miller Time

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These days I find my current reading on the bookshelves of our local recycling center. A couple of weeks ago I picked up five gems, one of which was Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child (the 1994 Revised Edition). Actually, I’ve never read a thing by Alice Miller and have only encountered her name peripherally when reading the works of others, who tend to disparage her overvaluation of the “child within.” I was curious to read her directly, but she was not my first choice among my five new acquisitions. In fact, it was Jan who first picked up her book and subsequently insisted that I read it.

Last Sunday night I had a dream about a relative of mine who was holding an object the size of a bar of soap, which was comprised of powerful chemical agents, used to dissolve things. I awoke from this dream remembering the I Ching reading I had written the day before, Dissolution, and also recognized the mandala shape of the object. I interpreted my dream to mean that my individuation (mandala) required breaking down (chemical bar) or recapitulating a specific experience in my life (the relative). Jan awoke commenting that she both kept waking up at 1:01 a.m. and had just had a dream where she was in college and kept having to repeat the course: Life 101. It was another sign for recapitulation. I resolved to pick up Miller’s book to kick off my effort.

By Wednesday, I had another dream where half of my house was sold and two older women were installed as tenants needing care and having control of our furniture, particularly the large screen TV! Wow, I had reentered the land of mothers, a place I thought I’d “finished with” years ago.

Upon reading Miller’s introduction to The Drama, I became immediately aware of why she raised the ire of so many analysts I’ve appreciated so deeply over the years. She summarily dismisses people like Winnicott and Jung; in fact, she dismisses all schools of psychotherapy. For her, the only thing that matters is the body and the truth it holds of childhood experiences, traumatic and otherwise, that need to be retrieved, relived, acknowledged, and energetically released to free the adult self to live a full and real life. Her major beef with mainstream psychotherapy is its dismissal of the truths and enduring impact of childhood experiences, in favor of the rational, cognitive processes of the mind to spin reality and manage symptoms. More simply put, modern psychotherapy values thinking over feelings embedded in body memory.

On this point I couldn’t agree more with Miller. The reigning mode of psychotherapy in the modern world is entitled: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT); translation: you are what you think; change your thoughts, change your self. Miller is ruthless in her attack upon this psychotherapy premise, which she claims actually ends up colluding with patient’s defensive systems, especially defenses of denial, rationalization, and intellectualization, which are used to suppress the childhood truths held in their emotional and bodily symptoms. From a compensatory standpoint I am able to understand her dismissal of so many valuable contributors to the mental health field, though I can’t help but see her passionate one-sidedness as somewhat akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Nonetheless, her core premise is utterly valid. Without the full retrieval of the truth of our lives we don’t know who we are and are hampered in our ability to evolve, in fact, our evolution will be limited to our symptoms merely taking on new forms.

As I see it, Miller, in shamanistic terms, is laying out a course of recapitulation. Firstly, she emphasizes the body, the ultimate truth holder. Though the tender psyche of the growing child may need to fragment the truth of its experience to survive, the body registers everything. Very often focusing on bodily feeling and sensation, with intent, will open the door to actual stored experience. Bodily pains, sensations, illnesses, habits, and postures all represent avenues to stored memories. How conditioned are we to seek relief of symptoms through medication, medical intervention, or bodily manipulation? In contrast, how often do we see our symptoms as purposive and meaningful, invitations to awaken to stored memory that needs to be recapitulated?

Even in the absence of bodily cues, don Juan instructed Carlos Castaneda to focus on the sensory aspects of an event set up for recapitulation. Carlos states on page 106 in Magical Passes the following:

“This recollection entails getting all the pertinent physical details, such as the surroundings where the event being recollected took place. Once the event is arranged, one should enter into the locale itself, as if actually going into it, paying special attention to any relevant physical configurations. If, for instance, the interaction took place in an office, what should be remembered is the floor, the doors, the walls, the pictures, the windows, the desks, the objects on the desks, everything that could have been observed in a glance and then forgotten.” [Italics added.]

Miller makes the bold assertion that childhood is over. You can never go back and redo it through reliving it. The needs of the child frozen in childhood will never be met for that child because childhood is over. She, I believe, cautions us here about getting caught in the big baby or the archetypal wounded child; this is not recapitulation, it’s a bottomless pit of tormented need and woundedness that can, at best, only achieve momentary catharsis. After experiencing relief the needy child reasserts itself, seeking eternally fulfillment of its unmet needs, never waking up to the fact that childhood is over.

What Miller does encourage is the rightful mourning and release of held feelings, but most importantly the full lifting of the veils of childhood to empower and free the adult self to achieve a full life. The difference here is between an adult trying to find fulfillment as a child and an adult freeing themselves to fulfill their needs as an adult. In shamanic energetic terms, this is the retrieval of the full energy of the self previously frozen in veiled, unknown experiences of one’s life. This sets the stage to realize one’s true energetic potential. The past simply becomes known fact, devoid of energetic or emotional encumbrance. Energy is now available for human fulfillment and the definitive journey in infinity.

The other night, I woke at 3 a.m. and Jan woke at 3:01. I think we are on the right track now, Miller time!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck