A Day in a Life: Get Your Flow On…Get Your Glow On!

I noticed this face at the back of the wood stove... with its glow on! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
I noticed this face at the back of the wood stove…
with its glow on!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

We’ve had some warmer days, hints of spring in the air. The snow is melting. I can actually see some brown grass and the earth that has been buried under two feet of snow for so long, now ready to receive some sunlight. The red wing blackbirds are back. The robins are mating. The bluebirds are flitting about. Nests are being constructed. There is movement in the air around us, stirrings of new life. It’s time for us to stir ourselves out of our winter habitats and habits. Time to get our flow on. Time to get our glow on.

During my recapitulation, I discovered that even a tiny physical shift could change my perspective, my attitude, my dreams. Simply rolling over in bed at night and sleeping on a different side or in a different position would often mean the difference between waking up in dark moodiness or light exhilaration. Not only that, but my dreams changed from nightmares to positive experiences, my mental outlook shifted, and my creative energy revved. Movement, I soon discovered was the main key to shifting my process in a new direction. Though I often felt that my recapitulation was in control, I discovered that I had plenty of control over my life in simply making a decision to move. Movement became a major factor in creating a new reality for myself.

From the time I was a kid, I noticed that when I was active I had better energy. Running around, playing tag, dancing, swimming, all caused my depression to lift and I’d feel alive. Soon however, I’d return to the sedentariness of my shyness, my perceived inadequacies and my sense of self-worthlessness. The glow dimmed as the depression swept in again and took me back into its numb world.

It took me years to even realize that I was depressed, and more years than that to realize that something else besides my own inability to be happy on command lay behind it. Now I view my past as my catalyst to new life, not in a negative way at all, but really a lifelong companion seeking to wake me up and get me moving. Now I move into the flow of life with renewed energy, with a far broader outlook. I see things differently now. I’ve got my flow on and where my depression used to be, my glow walks beside me now.

Made for walking! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Made for walking!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Even in the darkest of winter and on the coldest of days, Chuck and I bundle up and take a walk, shaking up our molecules and getting our energy vibrating. The way we feel is directly tied to our physical bodies. We can partake in changing things for ourselves by paying attention to what happens when we sit and then when we move.

We can notice that when we’re sedentary our energy sits right down beside us and takes a break. But if we’re active, our energy pops right up and gets happier, more creative, has a fresher outlook on life overall. When we’re more active we begin to see things differently and life comes to greet us in a different way too.

Sometimes just getting some fresh air into our lungs is all we need to get us flowing more naturally and easily with what life brings us. And once we get ourselves moving, we do get our glow on!

Here is a link to the beautiful Melanie singing: Babe Rainbow

Looking forward to spring!
Jan

Chuck’s Place: Cognitive Dissonance & Inner Silence

Can you handle the cognitive dissonance? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Can you handle the cognitive dissonance?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

While reading Felix Wolf’s The Art of Navigation, I’m ignited with sudden clarity regarding cognitive dissonance. Describing it to Jan, I crisscross my arms overhead in an abrupt gesture to demonstrate the clash of dissonant energetic currents. At the exact second that my arms cross in the air above my head, loud crashes impact each of the two large living room windows. A cardinal hits one, a blue jay the other. Momentarily stunned, they each fall to the ground and then fly off. I took this dramatic synchronous event as a sign to write this blog.

Felix Wolf, a fellow traveler whom I’ve never met, has also deeply immersed himself in the shamanic world of Carlos Castaneda. Though Carlos ended his shamanic line, the energetic permutations of his knowledge vibrate in new ways throughout the world. For Felix it has emerged as the art of navigation, for me it has been the clinical application of recapitulation.

What comes alive for me in Felix’s writing is the emphasis the Nagual, Carlos Castaneda, put on using cognitive dissonance to achieve the coveted state of inner silence, the springboard to infinity. Carlos explained that the mind, with its modus operandi of rationality, constructs a world with a river of energy that flows in one direction only, its true north being reason. Our internal dialogue, the flow of thoughts in our minds, groups its interpretations of reality along this flow of rationality. What the mind can’t handle is the experience of a thought, fact or event that flows in the opposite direction of its reason. When that happens there is an interruption in the operations of the mind that lands us momentarily into a state of inner silence.

In inner silence we are treated to perceptions devoid of inner dialogue, devoid of the mind’s normal interpretative system. For a moment we step outside the incessant internal dialogue box of the matrix into a world of energy. Joseph Campbell once wrote: “Every now and then, while I’m walking along Fifth Avenue, everything just breaks up into subatomic particles and I think, ‘Well, Jesus Christ, that is what it is.'”

When I was in my very early twenties, Jeanne and I, still in our young marriage, lived and worked in Manhattan. Jeanne, employed by an international importer, had met a young man at a trade show and was smitten with attraction. The depth of her feeling did not go away. What threatened me most was that she was attracted to his spirit. How could this be? I was spirit man!

I allowed these colliding currents of energy to crash. I asked myself the question: “Are Jeanne and I not meant to be together?” Immediately the world grew quiet and I dropped into the most peaceful calm state I’d ever known. I stayed there for a while, utterly calm, no thoughts. I emerged greatly perplexed by the meaning of this experience. I refused the thought that we would end. I awaited the return of my mind to overrun the thought of ending, but I never forgot the experience.

In holding together through our recapitulations we are able to see what's there... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
In holding together through our recapitulations we are able to see what’s there…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Twenty-five years later, I lay next to Jeanne as she drew her last breath in Switzerland. I was confronted with the dissonance of the person I cherished the most in this world, now dead before me. In that moment, the world went silent and a very deep sense of calm swept over me. It stayed with me for hours.

Several years ago, Jan and I sat in the office with the intent that Jan would channel Jeanne. Jan sat opposite me. As I looked over at her, her form suddenly blurred and before my very eyes she transmogrified into Jeanne; it was like a scene out of the movie Ghost! My reason was overcome by an incontestable contradiction. All went silent and I entered that state of deep calm.

In each of these experiences I was able to hold the dissonant energies together and be transported into the calm of inner silence. However, this is not always the case. Frequently, the collisions of dissonant experiences generate a fragmentation that takes years and deep work to weave together, master, and release to the calms of silence.

In the psychological world, trauma is identified as the mind’s encounter with an incredible disruption to its reason, to its normal expectations of order. This can be the traumatic impact of being in a sudden earthquake or being subjected to unexpected behavior, such as physical or sexual abuse at the hands of a “loved one.” These ruptures in normalcy fragment consciousness, as the normalcy of the mind’s expectations are disrupted, sending one out-of-mind and often out-of-body. In such cases, cognitive dissonance leads to a dissociation that requires a recapitulation to recover the fragmented self and the energy needed to withstand the dissonant energies of the shattering experience before one can release to the deep calm of inner silence.

Shamans spend years recapitulating their lives, piecing together the ruptures in their minds that once led them into states of non-ordinary reality. When we are capable of sustaining the full truth of our own recapitulation experiences—reconciling the dissonance—the mind ceases to be dominant and we reach inner silence with what was or what is, freed from the judgments of the inner dialogue, delivered at last to the place of deep calm.

With recapitulation and reconciliation, we are now capable of seeing and being in the greater reality with deep calm. We are now able to explore dimensions of reality that exist beyond the narrow bands of reason. We are able to participate in infinity, with utter calmness.

The machinations of the mind are like the squirrel's incessant chewing... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
The machinations of the mind are like the squirrel’s incessant chewing…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

May we see our encounters with cognitive dissonance, those ruptures in the continuity of the mind’s expectations, however shattering, as opportunities to accrue moments of inner silence. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico maintain that all our inner silence moments in life accrue until they reach a critical mass. At that point we are capable of living in inner silence at will. Cognitive dissonance—like planes that suddenly disappear without a trace—are opportunities to launch ourselves into an expanded reality through inner silence; a reality we are now charged with evolving into as Planet Reason enters its waning stages.

From the calm,
Chuck

A Day in a Life: The 70 Percent Self

Vibration is all around us... affecting us in some way... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Vibration is all around us…
affecting us in some way…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

We are 70% water. With so much water making up who we physically are it’s no wonder that we vibrate when something from outside shocks or startles us. Notice how a sudden loud sound sends reverberations through the body. Notice how terrible news sends shockwaves through us. Notice how affected we are by beautiful sounds, beautiful thoughts, beautiful sights, as beauty too sends chills through us.

Water is rarely still. Even a sedentary bowl or glass of water is in constant motion, sound waves constantly rumbling through it, shaking its molecules, though this may not be visible to the naked eye. Think of the oceans in constant motion, water flowing deep inside the earth, magnetic forces and the earth’s shifts vibrating the waters of the world. Even water that is stagnant, if shaken up has the possibility of changing its molecular structure from a putrid state to a healthy state. Vibration alone is enough to change water, but the quality of that vibration makes all the difference.

Masaru Emoto, in his book, The Hidden Messages in Water, showed how negative vibration and positive vibration impact water. In other books he continues his explorations of the subject, concluding in The True Power of Water that: “Since the quality of water improves or deteriorates depending on the information given to it, the corollary for humans, who are made up primarily of water, is to take in good information. When we do, our mind and body can become healthier. Conversely, when we take in negative information, we can get sick.”

Fascinated by the work of Emoto for several years now, I have turned once again to reading his studies, pondering our watery selves and the current health of humankind, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The more I remain aware of myself as 70% water, the more I notice vibrations around me and how they impact me personally.

I remember myself as a child swimming all summer long, safely embraced by and at ease in the water of the swimming pool. How buoyant, how light I became! Almost as if I had lost my human form, I became one with the water. All troubles washed away in the water. In its vibration my own vibration found resonance.

We all send energy vibrations out from our core... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
We all send energy vibrations out from our core…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Our human form allows us to feel our inner vibratory selves most keenly in the presence of sound. We can put a glass of water in front of a speaker, turn up the music, and see how the sound vibration from the speaker affects the water. It affects us too. The fact that we are 70% water further clarifies for me the concept of resonance. When we feel resonance with someone or something we are basically feeling the effects of resonant sound waves. Sound waves, as I’ve been discovering through my own experimentations, affect the human body quite profoundly. Emoto would agree that the sounds we expose ourselves to can leave us feeling happy, healthy, calm and balanced, or they can leave us feeling depleted, moody, and negative. He exposed water to ugly words and then to beautiful words and observed the difference. In crystal form, the water that had been exposed to beautiful words produced beautiful crystals while the water that had been exposed to ugly words produced equally ugly shapes.

Certain music turns me right off. I feel hatred and anger coming on its sound vibrations and I do not want to listen to it. It comes at me with assaultive dissonance and my inner vibration gets uncomfortably revved by it. I feel my water molecules jumping around and getting heated up, making me feel agitated. My 70% water tells me it doesn’t like it at all! Other music moves me with sound vibrations that, though revving, are also happy and joyous, with good feelings, and once again I float in happy buoyancy similar to the swimming pool water of my childhood. The water that I am made up of seeks positive water in return—vibrations that resonate.

When I turn to nature, I notice how my watery self likes the sound of the wind, though gusts send it shaking. It prefers calm winds and the sound of water gently babbling, though I am fully aware that big winds of change and massive tidal waves are often welcome as well, that they shake me awake, out of my complacency and negativity. And so, even though I seek resonance in my life, I’m fully aware of the potency of dissonance, that it has a purpose, and so I welcome it when it comes. I use it to look for what in my life, and in my body self, needs shaking up. I thank it for making me aware of the need for change and use it to my advantage. After all, I want to keep myself as vibratory as the waters of the world, for I do not want to become stagnant!

But I’ve gotten to a point in my life where like-resonance is most important. If it’s lacking my watery self will not stop for long; it moves on quickly now, though I might, at one time, have felt obligation or duty more strongly than resonance. Now I choose resonance over the proclamations of old voices or inhibiting social constructs that once controlled my feeling self. I now give myself permission to bow out and away from dissonance with no regrets or bad feelings if nothing fruitful is offered in return. I walk away from negative energy rather than be assaulted by it. If someone is punching me in the gut, would I stick around to keep getting punched? No thank you! Sometimes a negative situation is just negative and it’s simply most healthy and appropriate to move on to more positive energy.

In peaceful co-existence... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
In peaceful co-existence…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In resonance we find deep satisfaction and calmness, the flow of all life resonant with ours, and in resonance life will flow with us, naturally bringing us its bounty. If we open ourselves to good vibrations, we will receive that which is good, and our vibratory 70% water selves will thank us!

Our deepest selves, I believe, all vibrate at the same rate. We are all beautiful music at our core, the same vibratory energy of the earth, the same sound waves of nature. Sometimes we are calm and sometimes we are agitated, but at our deepest core we all vibrate to the same sound. Perhaps we will all, one day, tune into the same music and hum the same tune.

Tuning in, sending you good vibrations,
Jan