-Artwork © 2026 Jan Ketchel
I had the great good fortune to attend a heart centered retreat this past weekend at the Monroe Institute’s Robert’s Mountain Retreat, located on a mountaintop, in the former home of Robert Monroe.
The Monroe Institute employs the use of sound technology to facilitate participants reaching brainwave states that open them to experiences of non-ordinary reality, where they may gain clarity, guidance and connection, as well as an ability to journey safely in transpersonal levels of being, beyond the physical body.
Participants are sequestered much of the time in private units, where light is blacked out and they are freed to comfortably lie on their beds, listening through headphones while they take in sounds of different frequencies, often combined with music and verbal guidance and suggestions.
In between exercises, participants gather as a greater group where people may share their experiences. I liken this group component to a shared lucid dream and am amazed to see people’s individual experiences truly become components of a greater separate reality.
To support the sanctity of both individual and group experiences, outside contact is discouraged during programs. However, the nature of my work, as a member of a helping profession, does require that I occasionally open to the outside world during a program.
Here is guidance I personally received this weekend:
Listen to your dreams: In a dream on the first night of the program, I found myself, at night, on the shore, near a tenement complex of the Bronx, in New York City. I was interacting with a very elderly woman, who lived in a cottage by the water. She shared intimate information with me. Later, when others came, I freely shared her stories. She, in turn, acted as if she were in deep dementia and had never had a conversation with me at all, casting a huge shadow over the validity of what I said.
I awoke from this dream on Saturday morning to the news of the attacks on Iran. A pervasive sadness overtook me and I was moved to tears. It’s not so much that I was surprised but that I was struck with the deep knowing that the inevitable was unfolding.
I encountered our group facilitator early that morning and shared the news of this outside energy. She suggested holding that energy within and that our process during our program on the mountain might be helpful to the greater world. Her guidance touched, for me, on two principals: containment and the holographic universe.
Containment: In retrospect, my dream had already highlighted the necessity of not sharing outside information at this stage. Of what value would it be to excite the energy of others with the outside information I had received? I was already infected with the impact of knowing and the consequence of deep sadness. What was necessary was a genuine transformation that required a sealed container to achieve.
Water doesn’t boil if you keep lifting the lid. Cakes don’t rise if you keep opening the oven door. Chicks aren’t born if mother hen doesn’t stay put. This is alchemy. Seal the container, let the heat rise, let new life come forth.
Holographic Universe: Michael Talbot’s classic book explores this deeply. When you shine a light on the minutest part of a hologram the entire hologram appears. This metaphor speaks to the human condition: shine a light deep enough on any one of us and the whole of humanity—all of its parts—will be found. We, at a certain level, are all one. Therefore, change the self and that change becomes part of the whole.
Our group facilitator suggested just that: contain the energy, allow for a transformative process that will impact the whole.
Coexist: In the first exercise we did on Saturday morning, we were taken to different levels of consciousness. As I travelled, the intensity of my sadness magnified, until my consciousness was so far beyond my sleeping physical body that I reached a transcendent perspective and landed at peace. The sadness was present, but I achieved being at peace with being sad.
All that is must be loved: This guidance arrived immediately around a question of opening the heart. The heart can’t open if we maintain walls of hate. The heart can’t open if we dissociate. That which is kept separate won’t allow us to love our wholeness.
Love your neighbor as yourself: This goes beyond accepting your disowned projected shadow. This is loving exactly what is, without changing it, without giving it excuses; this is the only way to truly know it.
Sympathy: In one exercise, my consciousness noticed my heart racing, to the point of possible concern. However, I noticed that I was not a participant, that my heart was, of its own choosing, taking the ride of a frequency it had picked up on. I chose not to interfere.
My current mentor, P. P. Quimby, was a 19th-century healer who would sit with a patient and allow his body to feel the exact feeling his patient felt. He called this “being in sympathy”, or same feeling, with his patient. Having the feeling, he then knew the cause, or mental belief, that was made manifest in the physical complaint. If the patient could then take in the truth of their error the physical condition often disappeared.
As my consciousness relaxed with my heart’s sympathetic journey—I believe, with the current outside energy of the world—I came to peace. It is abundantly clear that many errors are manifesting current destruction, but I do know, at a deeper level, that we are in the cosmic season of Kali Yuga, the grand destruction that clears the way for new life, the rising of the Age of Aquarius. This deeper truth transforms the sadness into calm anticipation.
Anchor: In an exercise designed to shift one, on a dime, to heart-centered love and calm, the guidance came to me to use every disturbing thought as an immediate trigger to return to the calm of the heart. This paired association, or neural pathway, is deepened every time we make the shift, sometimes several times a minute!
As our weekend retreat ended, and the messages I received continue to resonate, I express deep gratitude to the Monroe Institute for preserving the core of Robert Monroe’s gifts for journeyers like myself, for his gifts still have relevance today. And I also express deep gratitude for the Monroe Institute’s continued evolving of those gifts, as they take their own journeys with Monroe Sound Science.
My personal and collective journey this past weekend greatly aided my internal process and enabled the simple guidance that I offer in this blog.
With Gratitude for all the gifts we are given,
Chuck