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Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Buffalo Soldier

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I read in the news that a white buffalo calf has been born on a farm in Connecticut, a most promising omen in Native American culture. I remember a dream I had months ago, a dream that has sat in the back of my mind, a dream that I knew I had to sit with and wait for its meaning to be revealed. And so I put it away, knowing I’d come back to it at some point. Now is the time, for the meaning has been revealed.

I tell Chuck about the dream, in which I pull a bone out of my foot, a bone that grows larger and larger as I carry it around, sometimes giving it to him to hold, until it transforms into a white buffalo. The white buffalo is the size of a calf, yet it’s ancient, old and tired. It will not leave my side; everywhere I go the small white buffalo follows along. I confront issues of detachment and ego in the dream while the buffalo gets sicker and sicker. It vomits and keels over, exhausted, barely able to hold up, yet it will not leave me. It constantly gets back up and trods onward, its nose to the ground, its bony hump old and brittle, dutifully keeping pace with me. I worry about it, though I also accept its presence, for I recognize it. I’m aware that it’s been walking beside me forever.

I tell Chuck that as soon as I woke up from the dream I knew it was important, but I couldn’t make any sense of it at the time. With the birth of the white buffalo calf that I read about, I am spurred to figure it out.

What is the significance of my dream? As I begin pondering this question I feel the pull of outside energy, of ego telling me that I am special, though I know I’m not. I slow down and pull inward, knowing I have to investigate this in my inner world, to find out the significance and specialness of this dream omen as I progress on my personal journey. I’m certain this has nothing to do with anyone else, but only to do with some bone of contention that I still carry within. I’m aware that this white buffalo omen is prompting me to take the next step on my journey of growth and transformation.

Chuck and I discuss the dream. We discover that I have been like this buffalo, dutifully bearing up under all circumstances, always getting back on my feet and plodding along, nose to the grindstone.

“That’s it!” Chuck exclaims. “This is what I’ve been searching for, the answer to the question: Where is Jan’s ego? It’s not in inflation, I’ve always known that, but I just couldn’t get a handle on it. This dream is clearly showing that it’s in willfulness. Jan’s ego is a martyr!”

I acknowledge the truth of this. I see that my challenge is to shed the martyr archetype, to let the sick buffalo die, transforming its willfulness into energy that is useful, life giving, and healing. Pulling the bone out of my foot was the first step in this transformational process. Now it’s time to take the next step and shed the buffalo hide. And then Chuck gets up and plays Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier and it makes perfect sense to me. Chuck also suggests that I write about the white buffalo in my next blog, but I tell him that I’m not sure I’m ready yet.

We go to sleep. I wake up after an hour or so, this challenge of shedding the martyr-self, the buffalo soldier, running through my mind. I know I must be available to the people who need me, but differently now, not as a martyr dutifully carrying out her duties, but balancing kindness, compassion, and being available while fully standing in my truth. These are things I have worked at consistently for many years, always feeling like I was not quite getting over the final hump within that would free me of the deeply ingrained sense of duty that weighs so heavily upon my shoulders. As I lie awake, I think about shedding the bony carapace of the buffalo, the garment of the martyr that I have worn my entire life, now scruffy and old.

I fall back to sleep and into a dream. Someone is sick and must go to the hospital. I never see who it is, but it’s me of course. A nun meets us at the door of the hospital and takes my cell phone from me. I watch as she puts it into the deep pocket of her long black habit. No cell phones allowed; no outside interference. While we sit in the hospital room of the sick patient, I work on the blog for the next week, the one about the white buffalo, as Chuck suggested I do. It’s partly channeled, partly comprised of the dream I had about the bone in my foot, and partly about the new insight that Chuck and I came to. Every now and then Chuck screams and bolts upright, as if he’s having a heart attack. Clutching his heart he says: “My heart tells me it’s true! My heart tells me it’s right!” I tell him he’s freaking me out, but he keeps doing it.

At one point a woman artist walks into the room. She stays for a while, leaning over the bed of the sick person, and then leaves. Then a yogi comes in. He too goes to the hospital bed, says something, and leaves. The third person to walk in is a wine merchant. He too goes over to the bed of the sick person, speaks softly, and then leaves without saying a word to us. I see these characters as parts of who I have been in the world—the ego, the artist self who worked in the real world; the spirit self who worked in my inner world; and the self of pleasure and desire who fulfilled the needs of the human self—saying goodbye to the old self.

I get up, leaving Chuck to watch over the sick person, while I go for a walk out into the surrounding desert. I stand in the middle of the desert and hear a loud crack and then the sound of bones dropping to the ground. Standing up straight and tall, I easily release the garment of the martyr, the carapace of the white buffalo. At the same time, glancing to my right, I see a large snake slithering out of a clump of grass. It lifts its enormous head and looks at me with a huge smile on its face. I am filled with unbelievable happiness and delight at the sight of it. I walk back to the hospital with the snake slithering alongside me, just as the white buffalo had once walked beside me, but it doesn’t feel like duty now, there is only joy accompanying me.

The nun meets me in the lobby as soon as I enter the hospital. “She’s dead,” she tells me, glancing at the snake beside me. I go back to the room and tell Chuck that now I have to rewrite everything that I’d written earlier.

“Now that she’s dead, my blog won’t be true anymore,” I say, and I tell Chuck to sit quietly, to not disturb me. “I have all these parts out there floating around,” I say, “and I have to bring them together in a cohesive whole. I have to write a new story.”

I will not be distracted. I work intently on the story while Chuck reads quietly beside me, the snake curled at my feet. Eventually, the nun comes back to the hospital room and tells us that we have to leave, that we have to pack up the belongings of the dead person so they can clean the room. We carry a few boxes to the car. I see that the nun has laid my cell phone on top of the car.

“You have two messages waiting for you,” she says. “The phone has been beeping away every half hour, letting you know that someone is trying to reach you. You can listen to them now if you want, before going back to cleaning out the room.”

“No,” I say. “I don’t need to listen. They can wait.” I have a sense that they are calls from people who want something from me, demanding to know where I’ve been and why I haven’t been in touch with them, people calling the old buffalo martyr self who always responded. But she’s dead now and I will not be distracted or pulled away from the work at hand. The only duty I have is to return to the hospital room, pack up the belongings of the person who has died, and continue working on my new story.

I wake up from this dream feeling refreshed, lighter and freer. Reliving the moment of shedding the buffalo carapace again, I realize that I experienced the same transformative energy in this dream as when I stood up and faced the seagulls on Great Duck Island that I wrote about a few weeks ago. I shed the old bones of the martyr self and walked away, leaving them behind without attachment or regret, just as I had shed my fearful self and walked away from the seagulls. Death of the old self occurred in the action of shedding the white buffalo carapace and a new self, the snake of transformation and healing, was instantly born.

As Bob Marley says in Buffalo Soldiers: “If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from.”

And if you know that, I say, then you can change.

From all the worlds of dreams and reality, sending love and transformational energy,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

#726 Chuck’s Place: Active Imagination: Engaging Images in Action

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For the seers of ancient Mexico, our apparent perception of the world is, in fact, really our specifically human form of interpreting the energy of the universe at large. Those seers maintain that we take in very little sensory data, mostly through our eyes, which we then use to quickly call forth the intent of an object. This intent is what Jung would call the inner image or inborn archetypal representation of an object that then gets projected onto outer reality. The uniformity of human intent has generated a consensual reality populated by objects believed to definitely exist, as we project them in the outer world.

From this perspective extraversion can literally be seen as the extra version, the projected version of the preexistent inner image. In contrast, introversion can be viewed as the inner version of our dancing images. In either case, our primary relationship is with our own images—as projected in the world or within ourselves.

Jung stated that everything unconscious is projected. Translation: everything we don’t know about ourselves we project upon the world. Hence, our inner unknown images, or parts, are all projected upon the world. Active imagination is a technique Jung developed to directly discover and interact with the specific images active within one’s self. This technique offers a path to self-knowledge and wholeness.

If we are primarily extraverted, we meet ourselves, our inner parts, in the outer world of relationships. If we are primarily introverted, we are preoccupied with the images within ourselves that might present as fantasy images, thoughts, feelings, or moods. Most people are a mixture of both introversion and extraversion, therefore are confronted by their personal images both within and without.

Last Sunday, I awoke with the impulse to create a retreat structure in our backyard. I spent the better part of the day walking the grounds, envisioning a multiple array of potential structures ranging from a stone tower to a cave. I even engaged in Google, You Tube, and book research on various methods of construction. Finally, hours later, exhausted, I sat with my images and realized that my ego had concretized the energy of an inner part of my self. That part was using a series of images to communicate to me the need to retreat. However, in typical Western extraverted fashion, I ran with the image as a consumer to the virtual mall of retreat structures!

What a different Sunday I might have had had my ego sat with the image and talked to it. “Who are you? Why are you presenting yourself to me? What are you trying to tell me?” I’m quite certain that new images, feelings, or words might have emerged: a connection, a discourse, a relationship, a different day, energy conserved.

The other night, after a lovely, filling meal, Jan and I sat and watched an episode of “In Treatment.” An adolescent girl was eating a fresh pizza. Suddenly, I was hungry, wanting pizza. I couldn’t possibly be hungry, but the urge was compelling. The image of pizza had stimulated something inside me. I sat with it and discovered that it was my desire body, what don Juan would call “the nation of the stomach” masquerading behind the pizza image as the physical experience of hunger. In this case, my ego, through bearing the tension of apparent hunger, was able to intercept the secret plot of “the nation of the stomach” attempting to take control of the world of the self. Experientially, once exposed, the desire body released its illusion of hunger. My ego rather gently informed my desire body that there is nothing wrong with satisfying a desire, but really, not on a full stomach!

These two examples, I hope, demonstrate how images generated from parts of ourselves can control our perceptions, needs, and behaviors with our complete unawareness. I close today with a perhaps more universally recognizable image trap. First, I will admit to being a hopeless romantic. However, I have learned that in spite of the intoxicating draw of falling in love, the real magic is in love itself.

Under the influence of feelings of emptiness and lack of fulfillment, with a need and desire for love, connection, partnership, and wholeness, we set the intent to fall in love by evoking the archetype of romance. This archetype comes complete with a standard program and a specific soul mate image tailored to address our underlying needs. The next step is to locate a suitable energetic being upon whom to project this image. When two energetic beings meet with the same romantic intent, their soul mate images may be cross-projected onto each other and, Voila!, it’s love at first sight! When these images unite, the experience is indeed magical. However, as the night fades and as subsequent days fill in the shadows, slowly the images recede, as our apparent soul mate may be revealed as a human being no longer able to reflect the requirements of our specific soul mate image. Often these revelations result in the end of a potential relationship.

My closing question: Who is falling in love when we fall in love. Hint: Images in Action!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#693 Chuck’s Place: FATHER

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THE CONCERT

At Carnegie Hall, on a Tuesday night, a full day of work awaits, starting early the next morning. I make the sacrifice, my stepson is singing in Eric Whitacre’s Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. Paradise Lost is the story of a lost generation of angel children left behind by their dying parents, walled off, without their wings, in a deeply protective structure. Logos is the leader of the now grown up lost children. The Gospel according to John begins: In the beginning was logos (the word), and the word was with God. Logos is the word, the law, the blueprint, the archetype of God, the ultimate father. In Eric Whitacre’s story, Logos frequently imbibes “amber,” some kind of hallucinogen that opens, for him, the channel to his deceased father, who communicates the message that he must protect all the children, at all costs. The decree of the father is to protect, maintain the status quo, keep things unchanging within the highly guarded and protected walled-in structure.

The love of Logos’ life is Exstasis. Exstasis is the Greek root for ecstasy, which literally translates to going outside of the stationary or static walls. Their names, Logos and Exstasis, foreshadow the ultimate conflict between conservative protection and freedom. Exstasis, in her own amber journeys, discovers from her own ethereal mother that her wings are hidden and retrievable, but she must take up the journey and go beyond the walls to visit the Oracle in the sacred temple. The Oracle insists that she face the truth, only the truth, to be guided to her wings. She passes this test and ultimately discovers her wings. However, in her final confrontation with Logos in which he burns her wings, she is killed, as the secure and protective father principle cannot tolerate her flight beyond the known, into potential danger.

A DREAM: The Great Train Robbery

I am at a train station on Long Island, right next to the ocean. In the first half of the dream, dimly recalled, I am part of a well-planned and executed plot to rob a train/railroad station. I recall a knapsack full of bundles of money. The robbery is successful, and involves the use of packs of dynamite, placed in several places around the station, set off just at the moment of getaway.

The consequence of this robbery is the end of this railroad station being included along this train line. A nostalgia sets in, particularly from my father. I join him in a campaign to restore the destroyed station. My father becomes involved in the beautification effort, the landscaping. I, in turn, distinctly recall where the planks and stones from the explosion had landed, which I easily begin to retrieve and restore. The dream ends as a smart detective, who has been tracking my activity, confronts me on the boardwalk about the crime.

I immediately awakened from this dream charged with the energy to record it, as well as contemplate it, with my consciousness still between worlds. I suspended my ego’s judgment about being a criminal and instead asked myself: what was the true nature or meaning of the crime? Not all crimes are criminal. When Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, mankind gained in consciousness. When Adam, at Eve’s urging, bit from the apple of the tree of knowledge, the world advanced in consciousness. In both cases, God’s, the father’s, rules were broken and there were punishments, paradise lost.

To go out alone, without the protection and security of father’s walls is both a reward and a punishment. In my dream, the destruction of the train station was a boon for me, a backpack full of money, a tremendous pick-up of energy. The seers on ancient Mexico devised the practice of recapitulation as a means of freeing oneself of static behaviors, returning that energy to the self for new possibilities. The train line, with its familiar stops and fixed rails, which cannot be deviated from, is the security of known habits and routines in life, the protective walls of the father. After I had committed the crime of breaking the routine, freeing myself from a familiar, well-trodden stop (the train station), I was drawn back to the old familiar place, by father, in the form of nostalgia for the old, known, unchanging stasis; the old way.

Regardless of our formative experiences with our actual fathers, real or imagined, present or absent, supportive or threatening, we are all our own fathers now! Formative experiences with our actual fathers are merely awakenings to this father within, the true father, who will guide and protect us through life. The father within us guards and protects the status quo of our lives: our habits, whether good or bad; our rules for ourselves, however limited or open they may be. The guiding principle of the father is the protection of the family. Inwardly we execute this father function by upholding the familiar safe-place train stops of our daily lives. Familiarity breeds safety and security, a bulwark against the changing sands of time. Zeus’s father, Kronos, Father Time, consumed all his children at birth to ensure the longevity, the unchangingness of his rule, that is, until his clever wife wittingly exchanged a stone for baby Zeus, which ushered in a new era.

Sometimes, of course, the conservativism of the father within us is wise to clip our wings. Daedalus, father of Icarus, constructed for his son wings to fly, made of feathers and wax. He tried desperately to warn his son not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus, so enthralled with his freedom, refused his father’s warning and suffered the inevitable consequence of his inflation, a perilous fall. Obviously there is a need for this protective father function, at times, but more often than not the supportive protective arms of our inner father attitude is just as likely to keep us entombed, limited within the safe walls of our familiar selves, however dysfunctional that might be.

Father is the guardian of the familiar: our inner family of known habits, behaviors and attitudes. The true challenge of my dream was to let go of a tried and true habit, to eliminate it from the repertoire of the self, to take back the energy spent on it and take up my wings, untethered to the tracks leading to an old station in life. But alas, I succumbed to the reconstruction of the walls of Logos, the protective rule of the father, enticed by the safety of the old familiar way, resulting in paradise lost. Thank God I woke up!

P.S.: As I conceived of this blog today, moving through the experiences of this past week, it never dawned on me that tomorrow is Father’s Day. There was no conscious intent to write on this topic, to highlight Father’s Day. I take that to mean that I was moved in this direction by the collective energy that marks the celebration of that day. In keeping with the intent of what I wrote, I wish you all a Happy Father’s Day! Whether we are male or female, our true father is the powerful father within us all, who exerts a tremendous influence upon the blueprint of our lives. To become fully conscious of the operation of this father principle within us is a worthy exercise for Father’s Day.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#661 Chuck’s Place: Compassion is Ruthlessness

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Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy website.

Shamans define ruthlessness as the place of no pity. In their nomenclature, the place of no pity represents a shift of the assemblage point where one enters a different reality, which is far more comprehensive than ordinary reality. Shamans assert that the familiar world of ordinary reality is fixated on the position of self-pity. From this place of self-pity we cling to the archetypal roles of family, long beyond actual necessity. We fund these archetypal roles of mother, father, child, spouse, etc., with all our available energy, leaving no energy for life as a separate being on a solo journey of awareness; the journey we are all really on.

We pity the self that ultimately must die alone and so we cling to the illusions that spin what the Buddhists call the Wheel of Life. To quote Esther Harding, from her book Psychic Energy:

When, before his enlightenment, he was meditating under the Bo Tree, he [Buddha] asked himself: Why are there these endlessly repeated lives? Why do people, and animals as well, go on with the senseless round of birth and suffering and death? Why does life continue exactly the same—why do men not outgrow this barbaric and immature stage? His meditation grew deeper and deeper, until at last he had a vision that revealed the answer. He saw the wheel of life, consisting of the endless round of existences, of births and deaths and rebirths, of heavens and hells, and the earth with its many faces.

Buddha saw the illusions we cling to that construct and maintain the world of what the shamans call ordinary reality, a world that strictly adheres to an endless round of living our repetitive archetypal roles.

Buddha arrived at the place of compassion for beings who cling to their illusions. Compassion is not pity. Compassion is the acceptance, without judgment, that all beings must cling to their illusions and go round and round again in their cosmic Groundhog Day,* until they are ready to awaken. That is, to take personal responsibility to face the true nature of reality beyond the archetypal roles; to allow themselves to let go, to detach from the pity that clings to the illusions in a childlike grasp for safety and security. Buddha saw that all must arrive at that place individually. No one can take another’s journey. No one can give another enlightenment. That will always be an individual task. Only when an individual is finally ready will they take the journey, the solo journey, devoid of archetypal props. Compassion, then, is loving all who cling, but remaining unattached, fully stalking the place the shamans call ruthlessness.

Ruthlessness completely stares down pity. Ruthlessness fully allows all beings to be what they truly are: independent travelers on an infinite journey. Ruthlessness sees beyond; it detaches from all the archetypal bindings, lovingly allowing sons, daughters, parents, husbands, and wives, etc., to fully take their journeys. Ruthlessness is compassion. Ruthlessness remains unattached to the illusions; it gets out of the way of others taking the journeys they must. Ruthlessness is compassion without pity. With ruthlessness we stalk the position that lifts the veils. On the one hand, ruthlessness is a loving acceptance of wherever another may be on the wheel of life and, on the other, it is standing as a beacon to the evolutionary journey beyond the wheel.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

* Refers to the Bill Murray movie.

Chuck's Blog

#658 Chuck’s Place: Your Family is Not Your Family

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Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy website.

We are born with instincts ready to ensure our survival. A baby is preprogrammed to attach to its parents, to be nurtured and cared for, to ensure survival. Though our soul may choose the family we are born into to present a specific set of challenges necessary for its evolution, a baby has no choice over who its family members are. At the point of birth a baby is a blank slate with a psychic program, what Jung calls the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which are activated and direct the infant in the process of attachment. Hence, the deep emotional process of attachment, which is experienced so personally, is in fact quite impersonally driven. A baby will attach to any appropriate caregivers.

The same impersonal instinctive process is activated in parents when they have a child. Many a mother may exclaim: “I immediately fell in love the instant I saw my child!” An inner maternal archetype is activated in this mother, releasing powerful energy experienced as love, and projected onto her infant. However, in truth, this mother has no clue who this child really is. I am not intending to be offensive with this statement, as it can be argued that a deep relationship is already in place prior to birth. However, a relationship of consciousness with a separate being is simply not yet possible. There is as yet no real personal relationship; the child has yet to discover its personality separate from the mother. A separate entity with full consciousness of self will evolve over time.

Inborn, archetypal processes, quite impersonal in nature, are programs preserved and activated in the collective unconscious to exert a guiding influence and sufficient energy to form and stabilize a family unit. Our human process is no different from that of birds or any other species that instinctively carries out a set of inborn patterns to bring a newborn into the world, i.e., the building of a nest and the feeding of a helpless being.

Relationships and feelings within the family are prompted by specific archetypes. Hence, in truth, a child’s “love” for its parents is largely impersonal, not really a function of an actual conscious relationship. A parent’s love is also largely archetypally driven. Children are programmed to need, love, and idealize their parents. I do not mean to suggest that children and parents don’t get to know each other and love each other as real people; however, a large percent of the bond between parent and child is a function of a collective instinctive program. If the actual parents are what Winnicott * called “good enough” then children will have little difficulty following their instinctive archetypal imperative to “love thy parents.” If a parent is not “good enough,” there results an interruption in an archetypal developmental process that may result, ultimately, in the child growing into adulthood with deep issues of insecurity, anxiety, and depression. For this child/adult it is likely that adult life will be burdened with powerful concerns around parental failures in childhood. However, the actual issue resides within the psyche of the child/adult in its ego’s relationship with parental archetypes whose energies have yet to be harnessed by the ego in a positive way.

Although an adult may seek reparative relationships in adulthood to resolve this archetypal dilemma, this often results in the unfulfilled childhood needs being acted out in adult relationships, leads to endless confusion, and is rarely successful. Equally, an adult child may continuously seek to have its needs met by its family of origin, which in fact can become a lifelong problem, regardless of how old everyone becomes. In therapy, clients with these issues are encouraged to take the hero’s journey, the inner journey, to obtain their birthright in a new relationship with their inner archetypes, fully birthing into adulthood. At the adult stage, a relationship with actual parents cannot solve a grown child’s issues. As adults, we must assume responsibility for ourselves as adults, even when we really don’t feel like adults. That is what makes the inner journey a heroic journey: the journeyer takes on frightening tasks, seemingly beyond its ability, and in the process accrues successes that ultimately transform the hero into a genuine adult.

The truth is, there may in fact be little or no real relationship with actual family members. Real adult relationships can only happen between equals, not with people who use power and position, based of their archetypal roles, as the dominant feature of interaction. The truest relationship between a grown child and a parent would be one based on genuine friendship, affection, and appreciation of each other’s unique identities and journeys, not one based on need and expectation. If we want to have a real relationship with our parents or grown children we must shed the ancient archetypal roles that have become outdated and inappropriate to the essence of life: our soul’s journey. Nobody owes anybody anything. We are all adults with individual destinies to fulfill. Though we once may have shared a powerful bond, personally felt, impersonally driven, once necessary, our real reason for being here is to discover and master our individual challenges. If we can arrive at a place of mutual support and appreciation of each other’s challenges, assuming full responsibility for our own lives, regardless of what did or didn’t happen in the time when the family was deeply connected as a unit, then we can truly have relationships with family beyond the family, when the possibility for real relationship actually begins.

I close with Kahlil Gibran’s poem On Children taken from The Prophet, which captures the essence of what I have attempted to express today.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTE: Read about Winnicott in Wikipedia.