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Messages from Jeanne

#659 Learning Detachment

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Today is Monday and we begin a new busy workweek. Although we are still in the middle of winter, spring is in the air. Over the weekend we awoke each morning to the songs of the birds and a small flock of bluebirds came by to inspect the bluebird house we have in our yard. The sun is just beginning to rise as I write this, touching the tree branches with its pink light.

During the night, I dreamed of setting intents and then detaching from them, both for others and then for myself. In my dream, you could purchase and send an intent to the universe regarding another person through Amazon. For instance, you could send intentions for the journey of another, such as intending that they be able to read the signs being offered and aware enough to be able to follow them. Then the sender could purchase their own intent to detach from that person’s choices, to let that person go with the intentions firmly set, but freed of attachment to worry about what the person would do with that intent. It was about being able to fully send another off onto their own journey while also being able to detach one’s own energy from even that intent.

I do know that learning to detach is a very big part of not only doing a recapitulation, but also of life in general, that learning what detachment really means is essential if we are to allow ourselves, and others in our lives, to truly take our personal journeys. Can you talk about the process of detachment again today?

The process of learning what detachment truly means as you progress in life upon that earth is indeed essential. Detachment comes only through experience, through the processes in life that show one how vital and important it really is to step back and allow another to take the journey that they must. However, detachment for self is perhaps the most essential process to accept and allow for. To learn to offer the self protection and private energy, in order to take one’s own journey, may not be easy, especially if one is responsible for many others in life.

It is essential to live your lives as responsible citizens, to make choices and decisions that are caring and mature, that do not leave others behind in the dust, so to speak, until it is time to do so. For there comes a time in every life when choices must be made to move on. In moving on, in making a decision to move on in one’s personal journey, it is inevitable that others may fall behind.

Decisions around family must be made in a mature manner. As your children grow out of your arms, they must discover the world on their own terms. Fully provided by your attention to their growth may they be well prepared for life as adults. Parents must allow their children to take on life, to begin to make choices and to learn what it truly means to be functioning human beings, separate from the parents and the family. Families must allow for the truth of separation and departure, for all must leave the nest.

As you speak of the return of the bluebirds, My Dear Jan, so is this a good example of growth and detachment, as eventually the fledglings will, each year, leave the family nest. The parents, after providing nourishment and housing, will leave the young to discover the world. Using their innate instinctual energy the bluebirds will separate and each take wing to whatever fate awaits. Although the birds do not assign deeper attachment to each other, as humans do, they nonetheless energetically portray valuable traits for comparison.

Their intent each spring is ingrained: to reproduce, to nurture, and then to separate, each bird fully provided and fully ready to take on life. Even though flocks may stay together there is no specialness among the individual birds, all must carry their own weight and follow their instinctual path. Many acts of kindness, and presence of one to another, is still acted out among the bird species, though I express, once again, that specialness of treatment due to family is no longer apparent once the nesting time has been completed. I wish to use this fact as a metaphor for a brief lesson in detachment.

What you are talking about today really ties in with Chuck’s blog on Saturday about the family archetypes and how we all must take our individual journeys.

Yes, the individual journey is what I stress as underlying all of this, for only in realizing the personal journey will one have reason for learning about detachment and be able to offer the self the opportunity to learn what it truly means. Detachment is often misunderstood as neglect or dismissal of another, though this is far from the case. Detachment is in fact the most considerate, compassionate, and loving of actions one can take when one is ready. For in the process of true detachment one has fully understood the meaning of a personal journey; one has fully grasped that each person upon that earth arrives fully loaded with life’s challenges that are ready to be explored and lived in order for that individual to evolve.

If one can arrive at the understanding that life is repeated until the evolutionary track is attained, then one can better understand the need for detachment. If one can gain an understanding of individual energy and the energetic necessities of the individual, as separate from all others, one may attain clarity on the meaning of life as an evolutionary journey. Many times, I have stated that life is a journey, that each person upon that earth has a personal journey to take and that each person has individual challenges that no other can attend to, especially once that person has reached adulthood and often before, depending upon circumstances. Each person has a childhood journey, as well, that is separate from the family, even though the family may be deeply involved. For all upon that earth take an inner journey, known only to that individual, while they simultaneously take the family journey or a collective journey of one sort or another.

Detachment is associated with the journey of the individual. It is a process of taking steps toward owning that individual journey, toward allowing the self to take it, but also to recognizing that all others are offered the same opportunity. All are offered moments of awakening. Although you each may see and recognize your own awakening, do you dare to proceed in the direction of your awakening? Do you see the awakenings others are offered too? And do you wish for them to take the necessary steps of change being shown?

It is quite challenging to take the awakening journey, is it not? All are challenged throughout life to take up the process of individuation. How many times have you personally been challenged? And how many times have you rejected the call? How long did it take before you finally accepted the fact that you would not progress in life until you finally made the move your self, alone, and because it was finally the right road for you to take? How many times do you look upon another with despair at the choices being made? But who truly has made the proper choices at all times? All must stumble through life and learn, in the process, what the meaning of their personal journey is. But how can they do that if they do not take up all the challenges that they must? How can anyone evolve if they do not live out the life they must?

These questions are meant to allow for an understanding of the individual journey as well as the responsibility that each individual has to take that journey. Turn to the self now and ask: Have I truly taken up the challenges of my own personal, individual journey? Am I learning what I must learn about the self, innerly and outerly? Am I taking the deeper journey?

In taking the deeper journey, the ideas of detachment and evolutionary growth will become clearer. But for now, I advise that to allow for detachment to become a familiar idea in everyday life, that you ask the self these simple questions, each day, when necessary: Should I be putting my energy here or there? Is this my journey to take, or is this the responsibility of the other? (Determining self from other is the first step in learning detachment.) Whose journey is this about? Who must take this step? Who is responsible for this action?

I could go on and on with many suggestions for determining the appropriateness of aiding another as they take their journey. But I believe that it is far more important for each one of you to confront the self at each step of your own journey and question the appropriateness of your actions based on the challenges you face. Are you choosing to take the evolving journey or are you choosing to continue avoiding that which clearly has revealed itself to you as the right path to take?

Each day you have personal choices to make. Tiny and insignificant though they may appear to be, they are being offered so that you may grow. Look upon the others in your life. They too are offered equal opportunities for personal growth. Acknowledge that truth, and then step back and let them take up the challenge while you challenge the self. That is allowing the self to learn detachment. And it is allowing the other to be responsible for learning how to guide the self through even the most minor of life’s tasks, learning to evolve and, eventually, to leave the nest, fully ready to take wing upon the individual energy, and this is good.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: 10 Steps in Inner Work & Recapitulation

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With today’s message, Jeanne gives us the tenth step in engaging in a process of inner work and recapitulation that I began channeling on January 29, 2010. The last ten messages have been around this process. To recap they are:

1. Patience
2. Perseverance
3. Kindness
4. Innocence
5. Maturity
6. Commitment
7. Fearlessness
8. Truthfulness
9. Responsibility
10. Letting Go

Each one of the topics above is linked to its original message so that you may more easily find each step and keep them together, valuable tools in the recapitulation process, which is really what inner work is all about. I will also add them to the sidebar, under Guidance, for easy access. Although I do not, at the moment, have the intention of continuing along this line of questioning when I resume our channeling sessions on Monday, you never know. There just might be more to come. But, on the other hand, having engaged and being engaged in the process of recapitulation myself, I think these ten steps are pretty detailed and offer quite a lot to work with for some time to come.

In my own process, which started in earnest about ten years ago, I can attest that I did in fact go through each one of these steps, and they are still useful, because each day as new challenges are presented the process of growth continues, if you choose to engage it. The process never really ends, but advancement is certain. As you do the work, you do change. I can attest to that too.

As I channeled these ten steps over the past several weeks I recognized them as very familiar and very challenging friends, friends that I grew to know intimately as I worked with and through my inner world in a very thorough recapitulation. That recapitulation consisted of removing the veils of time and uncovering and facing memories, fears, ideas, truths and untruths of who I was, who I had become, and why, but also gaining clarity on who I once really was behind the veils and who I had the potential to really become as I allowed the process to unfold. I can say that having taken that journey, having plunged ahead through some very difficult stuff, that you can truly change. I did. I would not be here, doing this today, if I had not dared to take the inner journey.

So, Good Luck as you undertake the deeper inner journey! Feel free to post comments below. There are a lot of people trying to figure out what their lives mean and you never know if by sharing some experience of yours you might help another.

Until next time,
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

#657 Letting Go

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
What would you like to discuss today? Is there another step in the inner process that would be valuable guidance for us at this time?

The inner process must include the very practical step of letting go, which entails not only physical and emotional release, but learning the process of detachment in such a way that makes personal and growth-oriented sense. In letting go one moves beyond the intensity of the mind, one learns how to progress and how to take steps that lead to real change. The opposite of letting go, holding, results in stagnation, pain, and forced anguish. In order to do inner work, leading to true integration, the process of letting go must be engaged.

What would be some of the steps in learning to let go? It is probably the most difficult part of the inner work.

If one is intent on changing the self and the circumstances of one’s life then one must not only cultivate the process of letting go, but one must become truly expert at it, for it is an invaluable tool. In learning what it means to let go, one opens the door to real change, and this experience of change is immediate. One does not have to wait months or years for the effects of letting go to manifest. In simply undertaking physical relaxation one feels what it means to let go on a very immediate and personal level. In physical letting go of muscle holdings, for instance, one may actually feel relief as tension and pain and stress leave the body. As one allows the self to experience physical unholding one begins the process of going deeper to other holdings, such as holdings within the psyche and the mind, within the unconscious and the conscious self.

Having engaged in the practice of yoga and meditation for many years I agree that simply achieving physical release is extremely beneficial and I know that once engaged it opens the door to inner release. How does one allow oneself to go deeper? I think that is a pretty difficult step for most people, since as they go deeper all of their fears arise.

Yes, you are most correct, the greatest block to unblocking and to letting go is fear. But as I have stated many times: what is fear but an imaginary aspect set up to challenge you. For in reality, fear does not exist except as you conjure it up, as you present it to your self, a most useful tool until you no longer need or desire it.

Fear is a habit like any other. You can choose to engage it or you can choose to ignore it and allow it to leave your system. You have all programmed yourselves to experience FEAR. You have used it as a tool to teach and guide you through life. You have found it to be extremely helpful and useful, and it does have its place in heightened states of awareness, but even so I prefer to teach release of it so that you may train your self to rely on your innate, instinctual abilities of awareness and inner knowing rather than your learned fear, for your fear is twisted. Your fear is related to what you have been taught in that world, to what you have taken on as routine and plodding behaviors that you do indeed seek to undo and change.

So, if you can accept that fear is attached to what you have learned is fearful in that world, conjured by the teachings of others, by judgments, criticisms, lies, and tactics of manipulation, then perhaps you can begin to put fear into an old category. Perhaps you can relabel fear as intuition, as instinct, as sensitivity to energy, as inner knowing. Perhaps you can take it out of the physical world and place it in the meta-physical world of energy and proceed to ask it what it is telling you, using your instinct, intuition, sensitivity to energy and inner knowing, rather than attaching immediately to it in the old way.

F-E-A-R. Spell the word, one letter at a time, slowly, and allow your physical body to relax as you speak the letters. As F-E-A-R leaves your mouth let it go. It is nothing more than letters, than sounds spoken, broken down into nothing more than individual pieces of nothing. F-E-A-R. Break it down, one letter at a time, until your body relaxes, until your physical self no longer recognizes it for what it used to be and hold. Use this technique to break down F-E-A-R, but also to break through your notion that F-E-A-R has any meaning at all.

This is a process of turning something of power, something that reigns over you and controls you into nothing more than breath leaving your body, air dissipating in air, released. You can do this with anything that bothers you and holds you captive. You can do this with W-O-R-R-Y, with A-N-G-E-R, with the name of a person. You can learn to let go in this very natural and easy manner, simply by spelling away the issues that hold you fast to old ideas and habits and the needs of an old world. If you are truly ready to grow and change then you are also ready to re-envision all that holds you now bound to an old world, to old practices. If you are truly ready to change then you will take on the letting go process with a fuller understanding that this is the step in your inner work that will allow for a real shift, a shift that you may feel immediately, physically, mentally, and emotionally, as you practice letting go.

The practice of letting go is manifold. It is multilayered and many leveled, but it is most beneficial to offer the self a simple manner in which to begin its incremental climb down into the deeper regions of the self, from the outside in. In learning a practice of physical letting go, by changing some old attachments with gentle release from their meaning and their power, by dismantling them one letter at a time, you will remove the blocks that hold you from greater release. And you will offer access to learning what true letting go, true detachment, and true inner work is really all about.

You have no idea what you have waiting inside you, until you dare to go looking.

Messages from Jeanne

#656 Responsibility

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Last night, I dreamed this question: Who is really in charge? In my dream I felt that it referred to integrating all the parts of the self, by first identifying those parts and how they operate. Is this the next step in our inner work?

My Dear One, inner work requires taking full responsibility for the self and, yes, that includes all aspects of the self. One must fully understand how one operates under many circumstances and in many different roles, taking full responsibility for each of these separate aspects of self, those who are known and those who are unknown. In order to more fully explore this process one must understand that this is very deep inner work. It is a process that is mostly played out innerly. As each part of the self emerges it plays its role, most assuredly innerly, having its way there before it ever emerges in the outer world, before it shows itself in an outer way.

The inner process is most intriguing in this manner. Your inner self may shift and a new self emerge long before you are aware of it. And, yes, it may be triggered by what is happening outside of you, but more often than not it is triggered by your own inner workings and this is where your task must focus: on determining who is really in charge inside you. This requires taking full responsibility for the inner self, for all the parts of the self, those who are most often present, those who slumber, and those who attempt to emerge and live in your worlds, both inner and outer.

Who is in control? Who is making you do what you do? Who is creating the havoc and the dilemmas that you face? Who is responsible for your attitudes, moods, feelings, emotional states, and your choices and challenges? Well, who do you think? You are, of course!

Being able to accept full responsibility for the self requires taking responsibility for the inner self as well as the outer self. It requires identifying and studying who you are and how you operate in the world, but more thoroughly how you operate inside of you. And you are really the only one who can do this because you are the only one who is present inside of you.

You may think that you are infected with energy of another, and for all intents and purposes you may be, but that does not relieve you of the fact that your own inner energy, of one sort or another, has been awoken by such an invasion. Do not dismiss any coincidences as merely that, as merely passing things of insignificance, for if you do that you will lose an important point that must be noted. Inner work requires just that, inner work. And who better to do such work than you, the inner you.

I suggest, in order to get to the bottom of the inner process, that you make note of all the parts of the self that emerge. Note how they appear, how they seep into your inner world, how they act once there, and how you feel as a result of their presence. Then you must find a means of acceptance, because this person you may suddenly find yourself to be is in fact you, as odd as that may seem.

You can have many parts without being crazy. You can have many parts and, unless you pay attention to them, you may not know they are there. But once you turn inward and investigate how they operate inside you, you will recognize them and know they are indeed part of you. This process is a process of taking full responsibility for all aspects of self. In so doing you are learning the first steps in integration of self.

I do not ask you to love all these parts of your self, for I do not find that possible until you really get to know them and allow then to speak up as to why they are there and what message they have for you. Only in fully understanding their role in your life will you one day be able to love them, but until then you might as well accept that you may not even like them, so loving then is not an option either.

Find out who you are inside the self. Take full responsibility for all aspects of the inner self by acknowledging the fact that you are really quite mysterious, especially to your self. Allow your self to investigate the true meaning of each one of your inner parts, their roles and their processes, how they work inside of you and what they are showing you about your self. Treat each part with reverence and wonder, for they have found ways to present themselves to you through all your defenses and pretensions, through your oblivion and your denial.

Be amazed at the process that you confront each day, for each day is different. You are different each day too, but you must find out just what that means and take full responsibility for being that new inner being and fully explore the possibilities and potential being offered as you do your inner work.

Messages from Jeanne

#655 Truthfulness

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
I channel again for all of your Readers. What message of guidance do you have for us today, either regarding our inner work or any other subject you wish to talk about?

The subject of inner work commands quite a bit of attention because, as you know, it is a continual process, if you dare to attend to it as a lifelong endeavor. You will never lack for interesting challenges and discoveries if you allow the self to proceed on the inner journey. In guiding the self forward, think now upon that self as knowing exactly what to do next. Allow your physical, mental and emotional self to show you what you personally must attend to next.

Use your awareness to guide you. Use your inner knowing and your outer presence to guide you to deeper self-contemplation, truthfully. Allow your awareness of self to be bathed in the light of truth. This is not only your next step in the process of inner work, but your constantly guiding light.

Truthfulness with self must always be your goal, and although you may be afraid to hear and see your own truths, so must you approach them, knowing that they wait for you within, in the dark caverns of your psyche, embedded inside you. Your inner work must uncover even that which lies so deeply hidden that you have not even found a hint of its existence inside you yet. Your inner work must contain an element of daring in order to dig ever deeper, unafraid to know your deepest secrets. In truthfulness will you not only discover that which is most dark about the self, but you will understand how darkness affects others as well, and you will grow, not only personally, but as a human being in the world.

As you truthfully explore the self, as you further discover your many-faceted reasons for doing things, as you discover your deepest desires and wants and needs, and understand them on newer levels, going beyond what is immediately apparent to make new discoveries about the self, you will further allow the self to bear not only your own truths, but the greater truths that all must bear. The darkest truths of the self are available to aid you in breaking down your defenses, your controls, and your demands of entitlement. For, as you break down, you will discover that you are the same as everyone else, that you are no more or less right or wrong, no more or less entitled, no more or less special, no more or less needy, no more or less traumatized, no more or less deserving than anyone else upon that planet. As you break down your doors and enter and explore new rooms of the self you will discover your self as equally energetically present upon that earth as all others. In truthfulness will you discover what it means to truly feel love and compassion, to truly be mature and responsible, and to truly live in that world and in your inner world as an evolving being.

In truthfulness lies the answer for all inner work. For the discovery of who you are and why you are there upon that earth at this time will only become known as you break through the barriers that now hold you back from knowing the truths of the self. In seeking truthfulness of self you will achiever greater understanding of self. You will become open to the energy of life around you, allowing the self to truly flow and truly find that your path will keep unfolding before you, rewarding you always with new direction, new ideas of self, and new growth opportunities.