All posts by Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: An Opening

Leave a comment
Our ancient reactions are like old walls of defense, but they can be taken down… one breath at a time… -Photo by Jan Ketchel
Our ancient reactions are like old walls of defense,
but they can be taken down…
one breath at a time…
-Photo by Jan Ketchel

When we are met with a smile, a nod, or a gentle welcoming gesture, we are programmed to soften, feel safe, relax our defenses and breathe freely. This innate archetypal bodily response to accepting supportive validating gestures may be inhibited by a history of traumatic interruptions that threatened safety; however, these bruises in human interactions can heal and, over time, allow us to relax into our innate capacity for love. We never lose our innate capacity to give and receive love.

The journey to freeing our innate capacity to receive the world, and express our full presence in it, is multilayered but largely physical. The bruises of trauma generate archetypal bodily defenses far more ancient than the archetypes of human interaction.

Failures in human interaction trigger an intrinsic self-driven defense system that functions independently of the behavior of others. If others cannot be trusted then the self alone becomes the source of safety.

The body turns on its own vigilant guard to protect the boundaries of the self. Sleep may be light or infrequent as a result of such vigilance. Muscles remain taut, shoulders tight, breathing shallow. All bodily systems, in fact, stay on heightened alert to possible danger, cautiously anticipating, planning, and avoiding potential trouble. This completely self-reliant defense system is ancient and highly useful in times of real danger. In our evolutionary history there was a time when it alone insured survival. Though less necessary in the modern world, it can be activated in a heartbeat should we be confronted with serious danger.

A major challenge in healing from trauma is turning off this ancient defense system when it has been activated unnecessarily. Here the human ability to reflect and choose a new action is particularly useful.

We can employ the mind, with its ability to observe and reason, to assess whether we are indeed really, in the here and now, in danger. The realization that we are not in danger in no way lessens the grip of this ancient defense that protects us through its control of our body, but it does give us a point of awareness, within our body, that alerts us to where the true work lies.

Reason alone has little to no impact upon the body’s defenses. We can, however, intentionally direct our awareness to our body and notice the state of our muscles and organs—heart, stomach, throat, etc.—as well as our breathing. We can, with awareness and intention, begin to direct our breath to various parts of our body that we notice to be clenched or shut down. We can, for instance, progressively soften and loosen our solar plexus or heart as we gently direct our breath into it. Similarly, we can begin to release tension in our shoulders and legs, or wherever we find tension in the body, by intending ourselves to do so. The body quite obediently listens and responds to our intentions.

As we consciously release the grip of vigilance in our body, our brain receives different messages from our body self that lies separate, beneath the head of reason. If our muscles and organs are relaxed, our brain concludes that we must be safe. The brain is then freed to stop its own vigilant story making that had given definition to the worrisome messages that it had been receiving from a tense, defended body.

Every time we release the tension of a clenched part of our body we change the message to the brain and the brain, in turn, changes its message back to the body. Over time, the brain can send the message that it’s okay to relax; we are safe. With safety comes receptivity, and our inherent archetypal ability to engage in deeper human connection opens. Smiles, nods, and warmth are able to be more safely received and expressed. We open.

This process of opening is indeed multifaceted and includes the journey of recapitulation, but it can be supported and enhanced, at any time—even in this moment—with one gentle directed breath.

Breathing away,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Reconciliation Of Retrograde

1 Comment
Trickster energy… - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Trickster energy…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

It’s 6:21 AM. I’m driving slowly along the windy hilly roads to work. My mind is preoccupied with the experience Jan and I had last Friday at the VA Hospital in Albany. We’d been invited to present on PTSD. We decided to give an experiential presentation for which I’d brought my EMDR light bar. There was a delay getting into the conference room, as a prior meeting was spilling over into our time. Our presentation time was compromised, as another presenter was to follow immediately after us.

Once we finally entered the room, I quickly attempted to set up the equipment. Suddenly we entered a cartoon-like dream. Everything we touched, although meticulously packed, fell apart. The tripod literally fell into pieces, impossible to reassemble.

“Okay,” I resolve, “I’ll hold the light bar without the stand.” As I go to clip the control switch into the bar I discover that the clip is broken. There is no salvaging the equipment now! That’s it, I decide, the trickster shaman’s world trumps. The Magical Breathing Pass of Recapitulation will have to be the main experiential feature. And so, about 25 people learned and experienced this ancient Magical Pass and it’s application to PTSD.

As I continue to drive to work, I recall that the time crunch of the presentation also precluded a brief group hypnosis that Jan was to give at the close of the talk. Suddenly, my awareness is abruptly drawn back to the present moment: a young deer is staring at me, frozen in the road. I slam on the brakes—a near miss!

The symbol for Mercury...
The symbol for Mercury…

What does it all mean? For the past several days, I’ve been experiencing and observing opposition and retrograde. We exist and are composed of fields of competing energies. Mercury, the trickster energy, is indeed in retrograde. At the VA we experienced the ancient shamanic energy opposing and trumping the modern mechanical/technological world. At the moment I recalled the opposition of time and trance—no time for a group hypnosis—I was awoken from my own highway hypnosis to not kill a deer. Here was the opposition of time and timelessness: being present in this moment to not kill a deer vs being lost in the timeless world of the mind’s meanderings.

We all struggle with oppositions within the self. Carlos Castaneda relates in Magical Passes how don Juan Matus explained this in a metaphorical sense: “…that we are composed of a number of single nations: the nation of the lungs, the nation of the heart, the nation of the kidneys, and so on. Each of these nations sometimes works independently of the others, but at the moment of death, all of them are unified into one single entity.” (pp. 103-4)

Our challenge in this life is to reconcile those oppositions within us, the trickster included, into an integrated whole, in a process that Jung termed individuation.

Sometimes the nation of the stomach craves that which the other nations of the body reject. Sometimes the neocortex—our rational brain—rejects the impulses and needs of our limbic system—our animal brain.

When my neocortex confronted the frozen limbic response of the deer in my headlights, it managed to direct my body to hit the brakes. My own limbic system worked in concert with my neocortex to supply the rapid response to react physically to the crises at hand. This is an optimal response—nations of the self unified, acting in concert.

In times of retrograde, Mercury, the trickster, can confound all attempts at collaboration. Mercury laughed as I fumbled with the equipment at the VA. Rather than fight, I read the signs and immediately shifted. Acquiescing, I flowed with the energy of the moment and instead taught deep bodily knowledge.

Opposition is within us all...
Opposition is within us all…

When I asked the I Ching for guidance regarding this period of retrograde, it once again, not surprisingly, produced the hexagram of Opposition, #38. The moving lines—in the third and fourth places—depicted a wagon with oxen being dragged backwards. Now there’s a retrograde image! The guidance reads: though humiliation might occur, sit tight, wait, align with a likeminded person who can be trusted. In the case of the faulty light bar, I turned to my neocortex, which acted in concert with spirit: Go with the flow, trust the Magical Pass.

In shaman’s terms, the guidance is to suspend judgment, to look beyond the impasse. Reconciliation lies in the deeper meaning of the trickster’s intent—to reveal a deeper truth: The ancient Magical Pass of Recapitulation is all you need to be freed of PTSD.

We can reconcile with all our retrograde energies if we accept their opposition with patience and perseverance, not falling for the trap of self-blame. The deeper meaning of Mercury’s retrograde lies in the wings of Mercury—our freedom to fly—achievable if we don’t get caught in the heaviness of opposition.

Flowing on the wings of Mercury,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: It’s All In Body

Leave a comment
We must go down into the murky depths of our own reservoir if we are to experience wholeness... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We must go down into the murky depths of our own reservoir if we are to experience wholeness…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The clinical wisdom of our time highlights the role of the body in psychological healing. To resolve our deepest issues, we must go down into the depths of the body to discover our hidden truths and restore a fluid connection to the wellsprings of our life energy.

For many years, I have spoken about out-of-body experiences and energetic life beyond the physical. Soul retrieval journeys, such as the kind taken in recapitulation, are in fact intimately connected to our in-body reservoir.

When we reenter the scene of an earlier experience in life, we utilize the sensations in our bodies to lead us to the actual event. The body stores all experiences and once we arrive at their gate, in recapitulation for example, we are thrust full-body into what happened to us in the prior experience. In traumatic recapitulation, we may have a full in-body sensation and complete reliving of a long-forgotten experience.

Many visits to hospital emergency rooms actually result from unknown, unsupported, tripping into stored bodily memories of trauma, inadvertently triggered by some associatively related current life experience. Often, after exhaustive testing, physicians are clueless in diagnosing the disturbance, often assuming panic attack. For the patient, the physical experience has been so real and in-body that this explanation seems highly dubious. Nonetheless, what ensues is perhaps a trail of treatments to control panic, which misses the true nature of the symptom: the triggering of a dissociated life experience stored in the body seeking re-association through reliving and resolving the turbulence it holds.

Modern clinical wisdom and ancient shamanic wisdom point the way to the innate, archetypal bridge of bilateral body movement to enable the grounding needed to experience and integrate dissociated parts of the soul that lie in wait in the body reservoir.

In dreaming, we naturally experience bilateral rapid eye movement, commonly called REM, that clears and processes the remnants of the day just lived. In nightmares, we experience failed attempts to naturally resolve traumatic moments. When no resolution occurs, these traumas end up stored in energetically volatile and incomplete states in the body—often a cause of physically distressing symptoms. Chronic pain and debilitating symptoms, even anger and fear of intimacy or conflict, may in fact be trauma related.

Francine Shapiro advanced the instinctive bilateral physical movement that we all use when we dream, incorporating it as a direct method to facilitate the integration of traumatic experience, in a waking state, through the protocol of EMDR. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered the bilateral recapitulation breathing Magical Pass millennia ago, as a means to enable reintegration of lost parts of the self. These inherent and consciously facilitated practices provide the bridge to safely encountering and putting to rest the stored energies of unresolved traumas.

The body stores that which is incomplete, awaiting resolution when the time is right. The body equally holds the key to safely resolving that which it holds, through bilateral movement, whether exercised consciously with recapitulation or in EMDR, or unconsciously in dreaming. Only through fully accessing and resolving all that the body holds will we acquire the energetic wholeness to launch, with completion, out-of-body when it’s time to pass on into new life.

In body,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: What Is the Meaning Of Diligence & Sorrow?

Leave a comment

In Everyday Tao, Deng Ming-Dao states: “One cannot go far in life without diligence.”

Nature is Tao, constantly changing, so like us... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Nature is Tao, constantly changing,
so like us…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

He goes on to say: “It is useless to argue: this life is one of suffering. Nothing can be done except through our efforts. Disasters hit all of us without meaning or explanation. Wars are constant around the globe. Family members abuse and exploit one another. Hard work is often rewarded with betrayal. The government is a haven for those who would oppress others. Despite the great wealth of information, ignorance is ever present. Money is used for selfish gains and not to help others. Spiritual leaders are often shown to be hypocrites. Homelessness is rampant. Most people do not have enough to eat. Those who have enough eat more than their share. We spend our lives looking for love, only to find bitterness. We pin our hopes to distant dreams that never materialize. We listen to teachers who tell us to work hard, only to find that the world has changed by the time we leave school. We hurt ourselves with self-doubt, low self-esteem, and slavery to desires.”

“Prophets disappoint us, priests befuddle us, teachers deceive us, bosses exploit us, parents reject us, spouses desert us, children are taken from us, and at the end, it is just us, staring at the grave.”

“This life is one of suffering. Those who don’t know how to suffer are the worst off. Those who follow Tao know that there are times when things will be very difficult. That is the time to be diligent. There are times when the only correct thing we can do is to bear our troubles until a better day.”

On Sorrow, Deng Ming-Dao writes: “Sadness is part of being human.”

“People describe sorrow as a pain in the heart,” he goes on to say. “They don’t point to the head or anywhere else—they point to the heart. Everyone feels sadness. The ancients believed that different parts of the body held different emotions. But just as we need all our organs in order to be whole and functioning, so too must we accept all emotions as part of the cohesive and balanced whole of our inner lives. Every emotion has a function, and all of them together contribute to our actions.”

“Our emotions are learned; they are inherent. An infant, in the first hours after birth, already has emotions. Throughout childhood, it is apparent that children’s feelings remain integral parts of their personalities. We cannot destroy our emotions any more than we can live without organs. So the best thing to do is to accept them and the role they play in our lives.”

“When sadness comes, we have to accept it. It is here. It is part of our life. We cannot negate it. We cannot avoid it. We need not think that there is something wrong with us if we feel sad. We should accept it as something indelible and necessary.”

“No one likes sadness. But it plays a part in our lives, just as any one of our organs plays a part. But while sadness is indelible, it is not predominant either. Other emotions exist too, and they will inevitably follow sadness. Therefore, those who follow Tao seek to find any advantage sadness may offer.”

Thank you Taoist wisdom!

May you all be well,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: New Models Of Possibility

Leave a comment
The answer is true connection... - Art by Jan Ketchel
The answer is true connection…
– Art by Jan Ketchel

Having read the synopsis of Don Jon, I was curious as to how the movie might address a major relationship challenge of our time: addiction to internet pornography.

The movie was energetically rajasic, difficult to stomach, however, it managed to realistically offer an insight into the core challenge of porn addiction and how to go about addressing it. The main male character, who had a very active sex life, even a relationship with Scarlett Johansson—who I later learned has twice been announced the sexiest woman on earth by Esquire magazine—preferred pornography to an actual flesh and blood person because it allowed him the freedom to lose himself in masturbation rather than have to face the challenge of intimate connection. The antidote to his fixation was to learn to actually look into the eyes of his partner and feel a genuine connection.

When I recently spoke with my daughter, currently completing her graduate studies in Social Work, I suggested that she view the movie as part of her own clinical education. She called me the next day to inform me that her boyfriend had preferred to see Gravity, and so they saw that instead. “Dad, why didn’t I go into science… there’s so much more out there,” she expressed excitedly. “We’re just a tiny part of it all!” She went on to share a dream she’d had after seeing the movie.

“I was with friends at the ocean,” she said. “We wanted to create a whirlpool. We started making the whirlpool. I was the furthest out in the ocean. Remember, Dad, when we were in the Hudson River and we struggled with the current. You always warned me about the undertow. Well, it got me in the ocean. I was pulled away. Suddenly a voice inside me said, ‘Just let go,’ and I did. I let go and I was fine.”

I was so struck by her experience and dream that off we went to see Gravity the next day. I have never seen a movie where the lead actor is a woman astronaut in space. What an amazing experience! And I could see the impact such an image could have on a young woman’s imagination of what she might really do in this life. Just a week before, I had been drawn to read an article in the New York Times—Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?—lamenting the paucity of women in science. One causal suggestion from this article was the lack of female models that one would feel comfortable realistically identifying with. Sandra Bullock’s performance may open a new era of models for girls and women to free themselves into new vistas of possibility. Had my daughter been a child today, she might actually have chosen to go into the sciences after seeing this movie with this strong female lead.

The lessons of Don Jon may offer men, as well, freedom from the stuckness and control of two-dimensional images as they challenge themselves to open to the immense possibilities of real life intimacy. These two movies, as diverse as they are from each other, hold similar messages: don’t ever underestimate the possibilities!

Enjoying the movies, and the possibilities too,
Chuck