Life requires participation, a balance of activity and retreat into calmness, a balance of humanness and spirit. Seek always that balance. Create it for yourself in your own life, volitionally taking charge so that your humanness and your spirit share equally in your aliveness. Create joy in your balance. Create serenity in your balance. Create space for all that you need and yet create space for nothing as well. Create abundance but also allow for total absence of anything except the energy of your total being.
In humbleness and with renewed energy accept your place on earth, the life you are in, the duality of humanness and spirit, and create your life anew. You are your own empress and emperor, your own house of power, knowledge, wisdom and love. Don’t be afraid to utilize it all for your advancement into balance, harmony and beauty. It’s time to take the next step. Keep going!
Since I am not writing a blog this week I offer instead a channeled message to start off the weekend. It’s pretty helpful and calming. It might even be a good idea to listen to it frequently over the next few days as a reminder to stay grounded and centered.
The energy of now is certainly testing us all!
Offered with humbleness and gratitude, and wishing you all good luck! -Jan
It’s shifting time. We are in the midst of change, a time of turmoil and concurrent calm, like wild ocean waves slapping against the solid earth. The waves are tumultuous and, yes, the sandy shore is shifting, but the earth is unmoving. Our determination must be like the solid earth, our spirits like the shifting sands as we weather through the waves of change. This is not change of discontent but change that is naturally occurring and deeply necessary for all of us.
Don’t feel alone. We are all in this together. Gather yourself like the steady earth. Know that your spirit is fully prepared for the shift. Align with the intent of now. Even as the waves pound the shore of your life, remain united in your determination to withstand the storm. All will recede in time and then you will find yourself upon steady ground once again. And then your path will clear and your vision be ready to take up its journey forward.
Remain fully conscious of who you are and where you are heading. This is a crucial moment in your life. It is imperative that you remain fully committed to your path, centered in the domain of self that you have worked so hard to bring into fuller realization. With eyes focused forward and feet firmly planted continue your journey. Stay balanced by keeping your weapons of strength and creativity at the ready, your spirit afire, your heart calm. This day is important. Honor it but also take full advantage of it and the powers within the newly forming self. Be your own best friend today.
What are the deepest issues? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Our deepest issues are unrelenting. They appear and reappear at different stages of our lives, often clothed in new costumes, but underneath lie the same issues.
We can recognize that we’ve once again stumbled upon a core issue when we find ourselves leveled, feeling utterly defeated. At such times, it is natural to be overtaken by feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. Our core issue appears insurmountable and we wonder if we’ll ever overcome it in this lifetime!
At such times, we are equally likely to be drawn into the energy field of blame, whether assigning it to self or other. Blame offers a respite from feelings of defeat but offers no real solution to our deepest issues.
Reflecting upon the course and meaning of his life, Carl Jung wrote, “The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me.”
From Jung’s viewpoint we might turn and view our own deepest issue, our nemesis, as the question that life has addressed to us. Life asks us to take up this question in the form of a core issue, a deeply painful problem, and awaits our answer to that question. Life itself needs the answer to know how to proceed in new directions.
Using myself as an example, I can say that life has asked me very deep questions about the nature of family. My earliest experiences in the womb, as I experienced the violence of my biological father while in a state of oneness with my mother, were to mark and initiate my core challenge as one of confrontation with the ambiguous nature of family. My discovery, at the dawn of adolescence, that but one of the parents who raised me was actually my biological parent taught me that my love for my parents transcended biological origin. By mid-adolescence I was confronted inwardly with the truth that my growing needs could no longer be housed by my family. This led to the painful but necessary decision that the truth was more important than loyalty to family and I had to leave. A few short years later, at the age of nineteen, I married Jeanne, an adopted woman deeply bonded to her adoptive parents, with no connection to her own biological parents. With this union, though we deeply bonded as a unit and created a new family, the challenge continued.
Life presents us all with crosses to bear and insights to gain… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
As a husband I had to let my partner go. As a parent, I’ve had to deal with the serious addiction issues of two sons. These challenges compelled me to make decisions and take actions that to conventional society appeared to defy the unconditional acceptance of family at all costs. I have borne the tension of life and death, as well as rejection, disdain, and not being understood by many as I’ve navigated this path of doing the right thing beyond convention. Doubt is a constant companion when you choose to travel outside the gates of the norm; it’s a solitary path.
I am quite contented with the tension of my solitary path because I know it is the meaning of my life; it’s my answer to the question life has addressed specifically to me.
Jung mused: Were our deepest issues in fact Karma from previous lives? If this be the case, we bring into this life the state of our knowledge accrued from previous life attempts to solve life’s question, renewed again in the circumstances of our current incarnation. Perhaps on a broader scale we carry the Karma of our genetics and must grapple with the failed attempts of our ancestors to solve the questions life addressed to them as well.
Perhaps life simply addresses us with the relevant question needed to solve its stumbling blocks at this stage of the evolution of our species. Perhaps life asks us to find the answers to our survival as we stand on the brink of destruction.
I imagine that our deepest issues embody both personal and impersonal questions, that is, Karmic and ancestral, as well as the evolution of life itself in our time.
At an impersonal dimension, I believe that life has addressed the question of family to all of us, as how we answer this question is critical to our survival, more so than ever. Ancient attachment to family in the form of “blood is thicker than water” has resulted in the blind loyalty to tribalism that is at the epicenter of current world conflict in the Middle East. Here we witness daily a willingness to take down the world in defense of religion and the blood line.
But the Middle East is merely a mirror of a pervasive tribalism that afflicts the entire world in multitudinous forms. Examples include the needs of my country over yours; this is tribalism. The world financial elite is a tribe opposed to the tribe of the 99%. The tribe of Republicans are at war with the tribe of Democrats, no holds barred.
The dominant player in these tribes is loyalty, blind loyalty, over truth. Loyalty to the blood line or to the Club breeds greed, because in that scenario the only thing that matters is me and mine; we alone are entitled.
The light of a new world is trying to break through… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
For life to survive at this juncture in human evolution we must transcend the binding limitations of blind loyalty and open the family to embrace the true needs of our interdependent whole. This isn’t romanticism; this is concrete fact.
These are the answers I’ve come to through deeply suffering the needs of the family that life has challenged me with. If we can all look to our deepest issues as life beckoning us to solve the deepest mysteries and aberrations that we all share, that we all might flourish freed of unsolved problems, perhaps then we can learn to be more loving toward ourselves as we suffer our deepest issues and bring them to resolution. Perhaps then we can all be and embrace the Human Family—our one true family.
Finding meaning, Chuck
Quote from Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections p. 318
