Written by Jan Ketchel and including a channeled message from Jeanne Ketchel.

In recent conversations with Jeanne we have discussed learning to navigate through life using simple mantras of intent and opening up to innocence within. Personally, I have always found the process of allowing my innocence to guide me and speak to me as very liberating. It has afforded me the opportunity to learn how to bypass a lot of old ideas about myself, releasing myself from their captivity and in so doing learn how to channel. It has further allowed me the opportunity to embrace a different journey from the one I had so determinedly set out for myself when I was younger.

Most of my life—before the last decade—was spent in running away from things that although disturbing and often frightening to face were really attempting to liberate me from their energy and a programmed way of thinking and perceiving. If we turn and face that which we think is out to get us, pursuing us in order to make our lives miserable, we might discover that it is not actually some foreign energy or alien entity chasing us, but a part of ourselves that is just trying to overtake us in order to help us truly know ourselves more fully.

In doing a recapitulation, by turning and facing the past, however horrible and disturbing, we offer ourselves the opportunity to quite abruptly and cleanly switch gears. We offer ourselves access to a new path and new energy but, most importantly, our truths.

I know that all the talk that Chuck and I do about taking a recapitulation journey, and the opportunities it offers may seem quite impossible or even pretty far-fetched, but the fact is that it is one of life’s greatest and most liberating challenges. It is not an easy task to either begin or to stop it once it has begun, for the unfolding, once engaged, takes on a life of its own and it will not cease until it has carried us through our darkness. Oh, we can try to slow it down. We can try to run from it as we have in the past, step out of its path, hide from it, but once we have allowed ourselves to step into the energy of the recapitulation process our awareness, now finally awakened, will not ever fully go back to sleep.

Having the knowing-self finally present in our lives, the one who speaks so bravely and truthfully to us, is what I could not reject once I stopped running and hiding. Even attempts to refuse its missives could not be thwarted for long. And you know what? I didn’t really want to stop the process that I saw so clearly unfolding before me. I was just afraid of all the changes that I knew I had to go through, all the experiences I knew I needed to have.

Probably the most frightening part of the recapitulation process was learning to totally let go of everything I had been taught, as I challenged everything and began to open to learning new ways of seeing and perceiving everything. But the funny thing was that encountering those new ways was like reuniting with well-known friends, friends who had always been present in my life, just waiting for me to find them. Those new ways had been pursuing me, running alongside those horrors that I had been keeping just one step ahead of for so long.

The other day, I said to Chuck, I wonder where I would be now if I had not met you. I could not visualize a life at all. In fact, there was no other life. Once I made the decision to recapitulate there was only one path that opened up for me. From then on, I did not have so many decisions to make because there was only one path in front of me. The only decision I had to make was to just keep going, one step at a time. Suddenly, there were no longer any more forks in the road—the road just stretched out endlessly in front of me. I am still on that same road. It is still endless. And I am still faced with the same challenge: to keep going, to keep opening to the unfolding of the journey ahead.

In running, I had attempted to outpace not only my bitter truths, but also my true self. Fortunately, I paid attention to the signs, the synchronicities, and the desperate calls of that true heart-centered self. I still pay attention. I’m doing that right now, as I allow myself to sit down and have conversations with someone who no longer exists in human form. And then I dare to take it one step further and write about these conversations each week in this blog. Sometimes I surprise myself, but when Jeanne asked me to be a partner in this adventure, I—that true self—could not refuse the call, for it had been ringing through me my entire life, reverberating, louder and louder, until I finally decided that nothing else mattered.

When I finally decided to stop running, catch my breath, and sit down, I was given the biggest challenge and gift of my life, as I watched the movie of my past play out within me and the movie of my future too. Now I guess I will ask Jeanne to follow up on that part of the process of navigating through life, of taking that big first step of choosing to stop and listen. There will be no change in life if choices are not made—I think we all know that by now. It doesn’t matter how many times we are shown that everything is possible and that everything is meaningful, and it doesn’t really matter how many times our innocence calls; if we choose not to face what they are trying to tell us, we won’t get anywhere.

So Jeanne, I ask you to talk today about this process of choosing to stop the world long enough to see a new path, long enough to see that something incredible awaits us in the future. How do we bear the tension of accepting that we may not be on the right path, even though we have it so well planned and thought out? How do we acquiesce to the true path, even though we can’t quite see it?

My Dearest Readers: What Jan is talking about is indeed paying attention to the call of the holy spirit within. Each one of you has this spirit who abides in you, with you, protecting, guiding, and lighting your way. It is not an outer, separate being, but the true self who holds your entire scope of lives in its memory bank, the past and the future. This holy spirit is your whole self, wholly contained within, wholly affordable and accessible, waiting just beyond ego, beyond the door of that world, beyond thoughts that keep you so concerned about doing life as you have been taught. It is ready to teach you how to do life differently, and this is what Jan speaks of today.

She is right that choices must be made. Nothing will happen in life, no progress will be made if you do not choose to embrace life. If you never leave your house, your fears will surround you evermore heavily, pressing down upon you, calling you to face them. If you choose to hunker down and ignore them you can be assured that they will come knocking ever-louder, for they see that you are at innocent’s door. In your state of fear you are actually preparing yourself for the grand breakthrough that will release you to the guidance within.

Your breakthrough to accessing your fears must be accompanied by your sober, knowing self. Your mature adult self, who has been your running companion, must now turn into your strength in a new form. The power of your adult self must become your new mother and father, and when I say “new” I mean your true mother and father guiding you properly, from your pool of innocence and knowing, rather than from your previous experiences of who a mother and father are.

In choosing to take a recapitulation journey, with your spirit and your mature self, which will indeed lead you to encounter so much more than just your past, you will begin to understand that a journey is a solitary one, based on the energy that you were imbued with a long time ago.

So what, Jeanne, is the next step to getting to this place of listening to the holy spirit and new parents within?

Find your breaking point. Find your point of no return. Find yourself fully aware that there is no turning back. Find yourself absolutely done with life as you know it, fed up, exhausted by it, tired of it, bored, depleted, un-nurtured, unfed by it. Look at where you are in your life and, using your holy spirit and your mother and father within, ask yourself if you are ready to change.

Your fears will fly up in your face, so be ready for this. Keep listening to the truth within, and step slightly off your old well-worn path and do something different for the self alone. Even a tiny moment of change may be all you need to begin the shift of a lifetime.

Jeanne, you are reminding me that one of the simplest things I began to do for myself when I was at my breaking point, when I knew I was about to break my world apart, was that I began to take a bath every evening after dinner was over and the kids were doing homework. I established with everyone in the family that I was not to be disturbed for the half hour or so that I was soaking in the tub. I had never taken baths and I had never refused my kids access to me, so it took a while before everyone got used to the new routine, before the kids stopped coming to the door to ask me things and before I could say, “Not now, when I’m done,” and before I could actually accept that I liked and needed those few minutes of down time. I began to change some of the dynamics that I had long perpetuated within the family structure simply by removing myself from them, but by doing it in a way that was personally nurturing for a change. I asked my old scolding parents within to go away too while I soaked in the tub and asked a gentler pair to enter and that was the beginning of change in my life. The act of lying in water too allowed me to learn how to soften both inside and outside.

Perhaps, fellow journeyers, there is something in your life that will afford you the opportunity to break through? Perhaps you already know what it is, but you just have to choose to flow with it.

Jeanne, do you have anything else to say in closing today?

Only this: Do not dismiss the innocent self, the holy spirit, the wholly necessary and evolving self who speaks of what you need but cannot fulfill it without your participation. Choosing to do something even slightly different in your life invites other aspects of self to participate more fully and that is the catalyst, the shift, to breaking through the walls that keep you encased in your fears.

As you face your fears you will also be facing your treasures within. Invite some new people into your homes today, into your inner sanctum of self. See what they suggest you do for the self in order to get beyond where you are now. Even if you have done a lot of work on the self, there is still always more to do. You are never done with life.

Experiences await! Open the next door and see where it leads. A solitary journey, you will see, is full of good traveling companions; you just have to let them come along for the ride!

Thank you, Jeanne!

Please feel free to post comments or respond to this message in the post/read comments section below. And thank you for passing the messages on!

Most fondly and humbly offered.