First, we send love and support to our young friend Joel who has begun his definitive journey in infinity. May your pure storytelling spirit find the guides you need as you embark on this next leg of your journey, gladdening all you encounter. Keep going Joel, it’s just another summer program, and we know you can do it.
It’s the true journey we are all on, the Soul’s journey. Let us take full advantage while here in human form to bring light within ourselves, and each other. And then, when it’s time, follow that light into infinity, seasoned loving warriors of the SOUL.
Not that long ago the possibilities seemed endless… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I notice how quickly nature gets the upper hand. Before I know it, the weeds have taken over. A few weeks ago I thought I might, this year, finally have time to tackle some big areas on our property that are overgrown before the poison ivy and fast growing vines of all sorts took over, but alas! Nature, as usual, has gotten the upper hand.
I find myself dreaming numerous dreams every night, dreams growing as rapidly as weeds. Chuck reports the same.
Each morning we wake up almost reeling from the amount of nightly dream activity, grasping to remember what we can, though we both find that we have to let most of it go, too many, too quick to catch. It does seem, however, that this is prolific dream energy time and not to be missed.
Recent work on my next book has made me realize just how much nature, both nature outside of us and nature inside of us, and our dream world are in synch, setting us up for what needs to be done now and what is to come. As I reread and edit the journals I kept during my recapitulation, starting 14 years ago, I see just how much was laid out then and just how much has transpired since then.
Experiences I had a few decades ago, and even longer ago than that, as well as things that happened to me in my daily life really did lay out future possibilities. I see that very clearly now. Of course, where I was to go and what I was to do were always my choices.
Forks show up regularly… which road to take? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Opportunities to take a certain route, a certain path, to make a life changing decision, however, are offered to us all the time, in a myriad of ways. This too I see very clearly now, as I see just how my own nature, my own dreams, and my own experiences, as I navigated life, really did support and prepare me to be a changed being in a changed life.
We might find support in the simplest of synchronicities, or in the most profound of experiences or dreams. My dreams were always guiding me, offering advice, spelling out things that I was not sure of, offering help when I asked or needed clarity on something. I took from them what I needed and moved on. Now, however, as I reread and edit what happened to me during my recapitulation, some of those more mysterious dreams are utterly clear now. I see that in part they were premonitions of what was to come. At the time they offered useful guidance, helped me through some tough times, but now, as I look back, they make sense in a different way.
What at the time seemed fantastical has actually come to pass. What at the time I could make sense of in one way, now makes sense in a totally different way. What seemed to be supporting dreams at the time, now prove to be laying plans for a future life and a future me, neither of which I could have ever imagined, but which actually came to be.
I started keeping dream journals in my late teens. Some of them I still have, others got lost in my many moves. There were stagnant years when I did little journal keeping, though I always kept sketchbooks and in many of those I jotted down significant events and dreams too. My own nature likes a pen in hand and quiet moments of contemplation. I can truly say, based on my own experiences and all the dream keeping I have done, as well as the significantly meaningful events in my life, that there really does seem to be a plan to it all, to life. At least that’s how I’ve experienced it!
What your own life really has planned for you may be cloaked in your dreams too. The main thing is to be open to life. And if you think you don’t remember dreams or that they are neither fantastical nor mysterious, think again, because life just won’t let you get away with thinking that way. Just look at the weeds!
Not weeds! …Sometimes it’s not so clear… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Nature has its own ideas and they are sprouting up all around us all the time. We just have to tune in. So watch out what you dismiss from your everyday experiences. You might see weeds, but you might also be missing something important!
Life won’t leave you behind, just make sure you don’t leave it behind. Enjoy what comes to find you and go out and meet it. That is the biggest lesson I’ve learned; if you want something to happen, make it happen. Show up, be present, take action when appropriate, and learn from your experiences, dreaming or otherwise.
Tread lightly upon Planet Earth, leaving behind you only good energy. Know that every thought, word, and deed impacts not only the planet but all other living organisms, subtle and gross alike. Act with restraint, respect, and kindness through all the days of your life that all beings may benefit. In this generous manner will your time upon that giving planet be in synch with a new and changing position requiring that mankind acquiesce to a new place in the hierarchy and allow nature to guide.
Change your thinking. Change your attitude. Change your behaviors. Change yourself and perhaps you will be part of the natural resolution, Mother Earth’s response to the many crises now raging. Her solution? Temper all human greed.
Get in alignment with all that SHE offers and, without fear, allow nature to be more important than you. Nature will respond with compassion, for it needs you, but only as part of the generous whole.
A warrior learns to read energy and is aware of the self at all times, in all situations. A warrior knows when to step in to something and when it is time to slip out, when to go inward and when to go outward. A warrior is always aware of what is going on inside the self but equally aware of what is going on outside the self, and so a warrior learns to navigate both inner and outer life to advantage, staying in balance, taking into consideration all that has been learned, using it to not only advance but to continually learn something new. For a warrior knows that to always be a student of life has far more value than being a master of no usefulness over others. In the end, a warrior knows that mastery comes from within, in constantly seeking new life and new knowledge, utilizing a hungry student attitude for mastery of self.
Face the self and find the light… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
After the death of Alyce, his wife of fifty-some years, Elmer Green set about a recapitulation journey, revisiting many of the actual places they had journeyed to in their life together. He called this journey “encountering his Nostalgias,” a process of reliving previous experiences that he now fully faced, fully felt, and fully absorbed in energetic essence. As he neutralized each nostalgia in the process, putting it to rest, restoring the various landscapes of prior experience to their objective, present reality, he reclaimed the fullness of his energy in the process.
In fact, when invited to give a lecture in Philadelphia at Temple University, he refused the offer of a plane ticket and instead insisted on driving the distance from his home in Kansas in order to experience the nostalgias connected with a trip he and Alyce had taken along the same route in 1971.
“I don’t want to short-change those memories by…flying overhead,” he wrote in The Ozawkie Book of the Dead. As he explained further: “…I searched for and interrogated, and absorbed, nostalgias. Thus freeing Alyce from personality bonds and weight from me, and freeing me to live in the present rather than in the past.”
The shamanic practice of recapitulation does not require that one revisit the actual landscapes of one’s life experiences, as they are all deeply impressed in the subconscious landscape and body self anyway and can be accessed through shifting one’s focus to the details of those prior life experiences within, accompanied by the side-to-side sweeping breath of recapitulation. Nonetheless, as Elmer discovered, there is great value in returning to actual settings. The triggers of nostalgias brought on by travel provide an immediate opportunity to shift into a recapitulation, to relive and retrieve the golden energy entwined and ensnared in places and experiences of the past.
The emphasis on a willingness to FACE—to allow the self to open to the fullness of emotionally charged experience—is the first challenge. The adult self must take charge, exercise its volition and willingness to be fully present to what it might encounter as it takes the journey with its younger self.
Feeling: energy seeking release… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The journey into memory requires the fullness of FEELING—this is what distinguishes recapitulation from mere memory recall. Reliving means fully feeling the emotional energy stored in and attached to a nostalgia or memory, pleasant or traumatic.
Interestingly, nostalgic and traumatic memory can be equally potent in emotional charge, and equally split off and protected from conscious realization as well. It’s the intensity of the energies contained in the nostalgias and memories that we are protected from, until the adult self achieves the grounding and willingness to face and feel those emotional intensities. They are transmuted in recapitulation, disentangled from the persons and places of the past as they are relived.
In shamanic terms, this disentangled energy is freed to come home to the self, as Elmer points out, while also freeing others from being entangled with it as well. And in Kundalini terms, it is freed to rise to the higher chakras. It is cleansed, smoothed over, through the taming of the energies in the recapitulation process.
As the adult self withstands the impact of reliving past experiences, a light is shown upon the objective truth of those experiences. This includes a fuller view of who the players truly were in the experience, as the archetypal energies and dramas fall away, and only the truth remains.
The confusions, beliefs, and incomplete processing of a prior experience is finally allowed to be fully digested as the defensive casings fall away. What emerges is a factual knowing of the full experience, now devoid of emotional/energetic charge.
ABSORPTION is the next phase of the journey. Perhaps a child self, a child’s innocence, is finally freed to join the personality and enjoy its rightful place in the life of the personality.
Perhaps a nostalgic experience with a loved one, long held at bay because of withheld emotions of sadness connected with loss, will finally be allowed to be absorbed as ethereal love, which sends one deeper into a Cosmic journey. Fully absorbing the intimacy of a prior love frees one to go deeper into love, in this life and beyond.
Absorb: soak up, soak in, be absolved of… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
In either case, the energy once trapped in an experience is returned to the self in a living, unified way, as an outer experience becomes a neutral fact laid to rest, no longer an attachment that binds one’s energy to this world or to another being.
To Face, Feel, and Absorb all our nostalgias and traumas is to find the wholeness that will allow us to take our next journey in infinity, beyond our prolonged reincarnation journeys on this magnificent planet Earth. We are then ready to launch into new experiences and adventures in infinity, fully imbued with and capable of giving the deepest love.
