Tag Archives: breaking habits

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Sacred Technologies Of Everyday Life

Leave a comment
Dream synchronicity…
-Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

When our ruler of waking life, the ego, surrenders its totalitarian grip on waking life, as it dies to sleep, we are released into the underworld of the dream.

We emerge newly born each morning from this birth canal of dream to an innocent moment of new life before ego suddenly and pervasively snatches our wonder and reconstructs its familiar definition of life once again.

Every day we profoundly experience this death/rebirth motif. When we die to the day each night, we journey through the shadow of the day just lived, frequently in exaggerated compensatory dreams that insist we see and experience that which waking ego defended against and kept at bay with its array of defensive tricks.

Beyond these shadows, our soul ventures into holotropic states where we commune with helpers, guides, predeceased loved ones, and subtle realms of deepening revelation. When we awaken, we are sent back from these near-death experiences to remember our lessons and bring them to life in the birth of the new day.

Waking up in the morning is a sacred technology. The awe of first breath and first light greets us with our existential opportunity to exercise our free will in birthing a new possibility that transcends the limits of ego’s working definition of self. Seize the moment. Deepen the breath. Relive the dreams. Let them be brought to physical life.

The other day, as we walked in a parking lot, Jan suddenly recognized the outline of a heads-up penny, mired in the dirt. As she bent down to pick it up, she was immediately transported to shiny copper pennies on a marble floor she had excitedly picked up in her prior night’s dream journey. This synchronicity bridged waking ego with Soul, with the clear instruction to be led by its signs that would bring magic into the day.

Everyday synchronicities are moments of numinous communion with our truest soulmate, our High Soul. Be thunderstruck with awe and love as these magical moments of divine resonance unfold. Suspend the judgment of ego’s downgrading of it into mere coincidence. Allow yourself a moment of silence in your inner temple.

The shamans of ancient Mexico discovered that we construct and enact our lives each day through sets of movements they called magical passes. Everyday life is an endless repetition of the same physical movements that give definition to who we are. These include basics, like our posture, our way of walking, the cadence of our speech, how we breathe, and the incessant repetitions of our internal dialogue.

The shamans developed a technology to break the fixated trance of the archetypes we identify with through a practice they called not-doings. Not-doings are simply movements that break the pattern of the physical movements or habits we typically repeat to affirm our ego’s familiar fixated identity.

We might introduce the magical pass of inhaling our breath exclusively through our nose, or consciously changing our pattern of breathing to a different rhythm. For instance, breathe in to a count of 3 and out to a count of 4. We might eat an unusual breakfast, leave home at a different time, drive or walk in the world on a road less travelled.

The options for shifting patterns are infinite and each one of them provides divine moments of silence before the familiar chatter of the internal dialogue reasserts itself. In Carlos Castaneda’s book, Magical Passes, he shares many magical passes that shamans have practiced since ancient times to recondition their physical energy to enter holotropic states of awareness in waking life.

Keeping it simple, just make spontaneous small changes in everyday habits and experience a momentary crossing of the bridge to heightened awareness, where the divine empowers us to be the new life we long for.

Rites of Passage are formalized rituals designed to help us mature into the deepening challenges of physical life and beyond. Not-doings are magical passes that build the foundation for these crossings through accruing energy with the execution of each magical pass.

The death and rebirth of sleep, dream, and awakening—the spiritual audience of synchronicity where spirit meets matter—and the not-doings of our ritual and habitual magical passes are all sacred technologies fully in our grasp and capable of being exercised in everyday life.

Grasp them, though not too tightly! All habits, even the good ones, must eventually be broken.

Not doing Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Magical Pass of You

Leave a comment
Change your movements, change your self…
– Artwork © 2022 Jan Ketchel

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered that by performing a specific sequence of physical movements, which they entitled Magical Passes, the embodiment of an intention could be supported and realized. An example would be achieving a state of Inner Silence, through performing a specific set of shamanic bodily movements.

In actuality, all of our physical movements are dense energy constructions of intents we may or may not be aware of. For example, if we approach a social encounter with mental trepidation our bodily movements will express this mental/emotional state. Sensitive people will easily detect someone’s true inner state by reading the physical energetic configuration they enact.

Ultimately, all there is is energy. Hence, the physical world is made up of infinite, unique patterns of flowing energy that give structure and movement to all objects in the world. One of those unique patterns of energy is you.

Did you ever notice that you need only the slightest hint of a person’s movement to recognize them? Each individual has their own unique pattern of energy, which is reflected in all of their bodily movements.

Though we cannot alter the unique energetic essence that we are, we can shift its configuration. For example, the psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich, discovered that people’s emotional defenses resulted in a character armor, which physically embodied in postures of rigidity and muscular tension.

Through the practice of a prescribed series of physical movements, called bioenergetics, patients are able to change their defensive energetic configurations to experience joy and pleasure.

The magic of a magical pass is being able to stir our latent ability to re-assemble our energetic essence in new, creative, and fulfilling ways. This is the true definition of change: having the fluidity to shift our energetic essence into new possibilities. The challenge to achieving our coveted changes lies in our habitual attachment to our familiar, energetically encrusted, state of self.

An alternative to focusing on the rigid mental definitions of self, to break up this energetic encrustation, is to change the current magical passes one performs on a daily basis. For example, rather than conform to a specific sleep/wake routine, break the mold. Go to sleep one night at 8 pm, the next at 11 pm, etc. Rather than type the usual texts to friends and family, withdraw into reading a book. Notice what new possibilities of feeling and creativity present in this void of routine.

If you have a breathing practice, do it many times throughout the day. The alpha breathing pass of a count of 8 inhalation, 8 holding, and 8 exhalation, followed by a no-breath pause of 4, can be introduced spontaneously throughout the day.

One may come to observe that interrupting the habitual shallow breathing pattern, or holding of breath for long periods of time, shifts one into a deeply calm reset of the central nervous system. This might actually generate its own trepidation, as the familiar definition of one’s self as a nervous person is severely shaken. We discover why we tend to cling to what we call bad habits, as we understand how they fortify our security in an unchanging personality, with known bodily movements that rigidly uphold that unchanging self.

To really become the full magic of you, observe the habitual patterns that have defined you. Focus especially on the physical movements that actualize these patterns. Change the movements, change the self.

No attachment to outcome, just persevere with light abandon. As Carlos Castaneda would excitedly express, “See what happens!”

From the magic of me, to the magic of you,

Chuck

Soulbytes

Soulbyte for Tuesday June 1, 2021

Leave a comment

A bad habit is hard to change, especially one that makes you momentarily happy, comfortable, and satisfied in body and spirit. But eventually a bad habit becomes a crutch, the spirit suffers, and only the greatest intent to change and the discipline to enact that change will work to unseat the unsavory habit. But why, you might ask, would anyone want to stop doing something that gives them comfort? When it’s bad comfort, the crutch is worse than the injury. A spiritual cure, though painful, is the best solution so that a new and natural state of fulfillment and balance may be achieved. A full spirit is a satisfied spirit, offering the perfect blend of sensation and balance. To truly love the self is to honor the self, in body and spirit.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Impressing the Subconscious

Leave a comment
Each new dawn is an opportunity to intend change…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The subconscious mind is command central for the human mind. Nonetheless, though it sets in motion the bulk of everything we think, feel and do, it itself does not think. The subconscious mind simply obeys suggestions. The intensity or accrued stress of the suggestion determines the likelihood of it being activated.

The subconscious is the programmed mind. All animals respond almost totally to circumstances with preprogrammed instinctive behaviors. Humans have the innovation of consciousness, which allows for the possibility of choice of response to any given encounter, over simply the automatic, unreflected action of the subconscious mind.

Nonetheless, the subconscious remains formidably dominant in human behavior. A person might choose to confront a situation that their subconscious mind’s program determines should be avoided. This program can be overridden by the conscious will, however, the subconscious might concurrently generate pervasive anxiety to freeze the intended behavioral action of the conscious will.

However, the proficiency of the evolutionary programs of the subconscious that have led to individual survival, and survival of the species for eons, tend to reassert themselves pretty easily over orders directed to the subconscious from the conscious mind. Anyone who has attempted to establish a new habit is well acquainted with the tendency of older, more established habits, to defeat conscious efforts to change.

The subconscious is comprised of evolutionary habits, as well as habits rooted in one’s outer socialization. The rules and expectations of significant others, in the impressionable years of childhood, are often internalized as powerful programs for behaviors that eventually operate unconsciously through the subconscious mind. These internalized programs are incessantly reinforced by the internal dialogue, which automatically judges self and other with predetermined prejudice.

The key to establishing a new habit in the subconscious mind is suggestion. When a hypnotist puts a subject into trance, they are essentially turning off the subject’s conscious mind. Next, a suggestion is made to the subject that goes directly to the subconscious mind and is then behaviorally enacted upon, as suggested.

Not everyone can be put into trance by a hypnotist, but everyone is put into trance by the many powerful programs that run daily, through suggestions operating at a subconscious level. Thus, if one has an internal dialogue that repeats the suggestion, “I am unworthy of love”, the entranced outcome will be a mood and behavior that reflects unworthiness and lack of lovability. These programs are often so powerful that even constant feedback to the contrary, from a loving partner for instance, cannot change this embedded suggestion.

Though a hypnotist might temporarily suggest a new program, creating change in a subject, the locus of control remains in the hands of another person, the hypnotist. This is why self-hypnosis is the preferred vehicle of change.

Saturation of suggestion during waking life definitely implants a suggestion to the subconscious. Thus for instance, if I want to remember my dreams, or become conscious while out-of-body during sleep, I might state this intention incessantly throughout the day.

Regardless of outcome on any given night, if I persevere with stating my intention, every day, that suggestion will reach subconscious action at some point. Every time we state an intent, we accrue energy toward a powerful suggestion becoming operational.

Unfortunately, we don’t know for certain how much energy must be accrued before it tips the scales to action. The guidance here: perseverance furthers.  As well, just as the hypnotist silences the conscious mind prior to implanting a suggestion, it is best to relax the body and mind prior to stating one’s suggestion.

Be of calm body and mind, state your suggestion many times a day, many days of the month. With the calm abandon of detachment, yet with the knowing certainty that the subconscious will be impressed, await the manifestation of your dream.

Suggesting,

Chuck

Soulbytes

Soulbyte for Wednesday March 10, 2021

Leave a comment

Lessons learned every day enhance the life experience, bringing clarity and knowledge about the self and the condition of being human. They also have the possibility of advancing one upon the chosen path of heart if one is ready and willing to let the simplest lessons in life be the biggest teachers. Look to the self, to the little habits and behaviors that teach the biggest lessons, for guidance. They tell you every day what to do and what not to do. You are your own greatest teacher. Can you be your own greatest student too?

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne