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Chuck’s Place: The Heart Is Truth

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Listening to the truth of the heart…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Emotion is like the wind unleashed in the unruly passion of a hurricane. Experience its power and intensity, but don’t attach. Don’t mistake passion for the heart’s intent. The wind is a passing sensation. How can the wind offer stability? Such an illusion breeds only delusion.

A child’s innocence is not childish. To the contrary, innocence is the only requirement to advance in infinity. Innocence greets oncoming time with total attention, unencumbered by thoughts, needs, desires and entitlements that filter the discovery of what truly is. Innocence is the key to hearing the heart’s true message.

The ego is the master of our time. The ego both generates its own thoughts and attaches to the pervasive flow of thoughts in the universe. The ego also harbors the childish child that seeks to remain the eternal child, driven by the pleasure principle.

Even the most mature thinker might belie the hidden child insisting to live in the sandbox of its thoughts. Be mindful to distinguish the golden child—the child that grows through innocence—from the eternal child, the one who refuses to ever leave the nursery.

For the ego to mature to innocence it must learn to command its attention. Much of the time the ego is asleep at the wheel of consciousness, as the drone of the subconscious flits from association to association and takes it down different roads of thought. Of course, thoughts automatically generate emotions befitting this unfolding drama of thought.

As in meditation, the task for the ego is to become aware that it has slipped into unconsciousness and to bring its attention back to presence in the current moment. Placing attention on the breath is a universal alternative to the focus on thought.

As the mind is cleared of its preoccupation with thought, the ego can place its attention upon the heart. Breathing into the heart focuses attention to the place of truth. Sometimes the heart speaks with a subtle or strong sensation that punctuates a word or thought that spontaneously presents itself as you ask the heart a question. This is an affirmation, either a yes or a no, or a suggestion to explore further.

Sometimes the heart affirms with an outside synchronicity, like a bird loudly breaking into song at the moment a thought appears. Sometimes the heart speaks directly in words of calm whisper. Often there is a definite feeling of rightness, a knowing of what is right to do. Feeling is a weighing function, like a scale, distinctly different from the windstorm of powerful emotion.

The heart is the place for ego and High Self to meet. Ego, however, must be cleansed of its egoism and narcissism to enter the chamber of the heart. Short of this, the ego, like every narcissist, can only hear itself. The ego must surrender to its true purpose, to serve the intent of its High Self, like the knight who serves the ruler.

Freed of attachment to emotion, with the receptivity of pure innocence, and the commitment to serve the intent of the High Self is the path to receive the truth of the heart.

From the Heart,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Embodying The Mood Of Love

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Relax into the mood of love…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

It begins with deep calm in the body, the soul’s physical extension into this life. The true father of all modern somatic therapy, Wilhelm Reich, brought intimate attention to the opposition between natural impulse and defense in human musculature.

The suppression of sexual and aggressive energies, as well as powerful emotions such as sadness, is executed through what Reich called body armoring, the tensing of muscles that freeze the free flow of instinctive and emotional energy.

A tense throat constricts the vocal expression of emotion. A tense belly and solar plexus create a wall that short-circuits the natural energetic current of tender emotion, natural reflex, and instinctive movement that  issues from the lower half of the body.

Love is the energy of union and wholeness, the glue that binds together all of creation. To embody it we must soften our armored muscles.

The standoff between impulse and defense creates pools of charged energy, which in turn generates fears of an uncontrolled tidal wave of chaos and eventual loss of control. Indeed, a cathartic release, such as a deep cry or scream, might be necessary before a natural balance between expressive and receptive energies can be established.

One can directly speak to the body and receive a response. “Stomach, relax and release tension,” or “Shoulders, let down, release tension,” are suggestions to the body subconscious that result in immediate relaxing of rigidity.

Be gentle and accepting of small increments of release with each suggestion. Allow the body to gradually let go and adjust to the influx of freed energy. As the body musculature releases, invite and allow the breath to flow gently, expanding and opening new channels. The key word here is gentle. Follow each gentle breath with a slightly more deepening next gentle breath. Force nothing; gently widen the channel over time.

On the mental plane, Carlos Castaneda’s suggestion to suspend judgment is foundational. When we judge we create separation; this is good, that is bad. Thoughts, feelings, sensations and intuitions that are ‘bad’ are suppressed, and the body responds by rigidifying against them; they are not allowed.

In a shamanic recapitulation, or in an end of life review, as reported consistently by many who have experienced near-death experiences (NDE’s), the salient feature is total acceptance of every experience and every person one has experienced in life, regardless of their abuses and failures. This is the mood of love embracing everything with equanimity.

Boundaries may be absolutely necessary in this life but love knows no boundaries, all is accepted. Love and boundary can coexist. That was Christ’s golden message: Love All!

Total acceptance of self and other, of every aspect of life lived, and lost, is the path to embodying the mood of love.

Release, breathe, and accept,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Be At Peace With It All

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At peace in reconciled wholeness…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Interconnectedness and oneness are the underlying truths of our spirit being. However, incarnation as a physical person is a journey of separateness, as we are born into a world of self and other. This world of distinctly separate objects offers a journey of evolution, where consciousness and knowledge grow, and creativity flourishes.

Nonetheless, evolution ultimately devolves into involution, where all that has been separated rejoins in the enhanced wholeness of ultimate oneness. At present, our journey of separateness is peaking, as expressed in the incessant clashes of nature’s storms and in polarized human interaction.

It is obvious that the solution to the warring elements of now is a movement toward oneness, where the true needs of the greater whole become the working intent of the world. How long this process will take, how much more destruction will be required, remains an open question, but be at peace in knowing that we move toward oneness.

The Age of Aquarius is upon us, a time of great spiritual advancement. The prelude to WW1 was the birth of Spiritualist and Theosophical movements, where the spirit world made physical contact with human awareness. WW1 brought forth a wave of channeling, with souls recently departed from human form sharing their experiences.

Current times are replete with Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE’s), further advancing human awareness to experiencing its foundational spiritual essence, with life in human form understood as simply a season of its soul’s continued life. Great calamities appear to be the necessary balance for advanced spiritual realization. Be at peace with it all.

Knowledge of self as a spiritual being completely shifts one’s relationship with the physical world. With it comes the ability to manifest one’s intent  through spiritual practice. The ability to heal and communicate at a distance, the ability to travel through mere thought, and the ability to transcend DNA programming through mastery of the subconscious mind are all human potentials coming on line. Be at peace with it all.

Knowledge of the underlying oneness of everything—which includes the bully who outrages us the most—equips us with a tool to hasten our evolution. Knowing that everything is a part of you, ask yourself: “Who is that being I can’t stand, or am so afraid of, inside of me?” Find the enemy within yourself. Value it and find loving compassion for it.

Reconciling a polarization within the self advances relationships outside of the self, as projection of the unwanted shadow ceases. This does not mean that the bully without may not need to be confronted, but when the shadow is reconciled within the self then the confrontation with the bully becomes only what is necessary, with an absence of malice. Be at peace with it all.

The title of this blog is from guidance attributed to Cochise, a powerful Apache leader, who battled with a changing world as Mexico and America encroached upon indigenous lands. May we all be such impeccable warriors, and, “be at peace with it all.”

In Peace,
Chuck 

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Collective Energy Burning Through Us All

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Trial by fire…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

An angry God once flooded the Earth in retaliation for broken laws. Afterwards, that God humbly promised to never destroy the Earth again in that way. That power was turned over to humans, which gave rise to  Oppenheimer’s world, the world we now inhabit.

Oppenheimer’s world is the reign of the human ego, with its power to both create and destroy. That great God in the sky transmuted into the High Self, the Spirit in everyone. The challenge today rests in the relationship between ego and its High Self. That relationship is in the midst of trial by fire.

Fire was originally the sole property of the gods. It took the hero, Prometheus, to steal it from the gods and deliver it to the human psyche. That deliverance was the birth of the human ego, in the form of the fire’s light of consciousness, with its ability to see and act beyond the dark control of instinctual unconsciousness.

With knowledge came independence and the ability to choose, create, destroy, dominate and be greedy. Ego has so dismissed its Spirit’s guidance that the Spirit of nature has been called in to adjust and refine the hubris.

The collective unconscious is creating fires in the passionate verbiage of pundits, who in turn are stirring the masses with similar aggressive passions. At the physical level, fires are raging around the globe.

The fiery energy of the collective unconscious is simultaneously burning through physical nature and human nature. This dual expression of fire, within and without, is what Jung called synchronicity, an expression of the psychoid level of reality, where psyche and nature similarly reflect a moment in time, as it reverberates through all of creation.

This is the same action that gives rise to an I Ching reading, where the physical action of throwing of coins creates an image that reflects one’s spiritual predicament, at that very moment in time. The oracle reflects the oneness of Matter and Spirit at a specific moment in time.

The collective energy of nature expresses this oneness, within and without, as it burns through the hubris of ego, which has abused its royal privilege, to restore the rule of the wisdom of the High Self. This is the refining action of the trial by fire we are all now living through.

On an individual level, it is important to notice that this current of collective energy is running through all of us. Be mindful to not get ensnared by this fiery energy, or take it personally, acting it out in your social interactions. Nonetheless, we must apply the fiery light of consciousness to burn through our own defenses and illusions.

All fires require fuel to continue burning. When we don’t throw more fuel on it, it won’t keep burning. When we don’t attach to an illusory story or feeling, we will not be consumed by it.

The fire is burning off all that stands in the way of Spirit truth. To attempt to defensively reason with fire merely fans its flames. Seek refuge in the truth; let others burn their way to it. Some just have to go deeper through the trial-by-burning to get to the truth.

Bring one’s ego into alignment with High Self. Understand that the trial by fire is really the proving ground to mature the ego by burning off its excesses and illusions, and shifting its attention to address the true needs of our Great Collective Spirit Self.

Transfiguring through trial by fire,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Quickening Is Now

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The opening is coming…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Quickening is active labor—rapid, thundering contractions with fetus squeezed in a sealed womb, cervix undilated. This is the current birthing stage of our world, reflected in the climatic, environmental, political and social dimensions of life in Gaia’s womb. This is planet Earth now. No exit, no escape.

The survival instinct defense of the human psyche normalizes these traumatic conditions to maintain stability, the way the body regulates its temperature to the ideal of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of external temperature. This defense automatically distracts us from the truth of our emotional reactions to the tensions of now, enabling us to carry on with a false sense of normalcy.

However, the law of compensation insists that the emotional energy we are spared must be converted and experienced somewhere else. One possibility is in an intense obsession, like a cause that consumes our attention with the energy equivalent to our unfelt feelings.

A variation would be a projection, where we might hate someone; again, with the same quantity of energy we avoid in our projected emotions. Perhaps the most common defense is repression, where the disavowed feeling takes up residence in the body and manifests as a somatic issue, like severe back pain. This is the root of psychosomatic illness.

For a time, Jan’s childhood doctor was Dr. John Sarno. Her grandmother revered him. He was a neighbor and Jan has memories of him making house calls. She still has warm feelings about this humble man to this day.

If you google the question: Who is America’s most famous back doctor, the answer you will receive is, Dr. John Sarno. This gentle, soft spoken, 5’3″ man healed Senator John Harkin, John Stossel, Anne Bancroft and Howard Stern of severe back issues by simply educating them about how the psyche distracts us from repressed feelings by creating physical symptoms.

Dr. Sarno’s main treatment was to have his patients read his book Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection. For 95% of Dr. Sarno’s patients the knowledge alone of this automatic defensive operation led to a cure.  The remaining 5% he referred to a psychotherapist to address repressed trauma. I would strongly recommend the documentary, All the Rage: Saved by Sarno for an in-depth exposition of his method.*

I emphasize Dr. Sarno’s work here to suggest that we, the people of the world, are most likely being spared the full impact of our emotional reactions to the hair-trigger, eve-of-destruction, state of the world we live in, through converted somatic distractions. This knowledge alone, as Dr. Sarno discovered, may be enough to relieve psychosomatic symptoms in many cases.

To enhance the effectiveness of this knowledge we can make the suggestion to the subconscious to not displace our emotions, but, to the contrary, to deliver us directly our feelings. To acknowledge the truth, and allow ourselves to feel, relieves the body of the tensions that generate the tightness and constriction in our muscles, tendons and nerves, giving rise to many medical diagnoses.

The deeper truth that we might consider is the condition I opened this post with, what Stan Grof has labeled Basic Perinatal Matrix II. BPM II is the no-exit stage of active labor, prior to cervix dilation. Gaia is birthing a new world and we are all part of it, cells of that fetus, currently feeling the terror of extreme contraction, constriction and annihilation. These contractions are real, but they are just that, contractions promising new life.

The impact of our extreme containment is actually facilitating the gradual opening that will birth forth a new world in harmony with the truth.

Best advice for this time is to be aligned inwardly with the truth of the heart and, as they teach in birthing classes: Just Breathe!

Breathing in truth,
Chuck

Please Note: As Dr. Sarno always advised, anyone dealing with physical symptoms should avail themselves of conventional medical consultation.