We can see change happening outside of us, but it’s happening inside too! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Today’s audio message is a great addition to the recent daily Soulbytes dealing with the changes that have been so apparent and which are affecting everyone in some way.
We are in the middle of some very important and powerful energy. Mercury retrograde, which we have been experiencing for some time now, and will continue to do so until June 11th, is a powerful time to discover what is still sticking around and keeping us stuck. The challenge is to face it in a new way and finally let it go! That’s one way to work with the energy as it winds its way through this time of retrograde. Today’s channeled message offers some great insight on the process! Change how you think and you WILL change!
I woke up contemplating the topic of my blog. The image of a turtle on a stump in the middle of Tivoli Bays, encountered on a canoe trip the other day, had stayed with me. I sat quietly and still while Jan channeled the Tuesday morning Soulbyte. The message she wrote sealed it, the topic of my blog became clear: change through stillness—the molting turtle.
Molting in progress… – Photo by Erica Ketchel
It’s early spring in the Bays. All prepare for new life. Our trip was somewhat disruptive to the busy beavers, hunting eagles, wading herons, and the nesting geese. Most astonishing was the sighting of a statuesque, prehistoric looking turtle, perched on a log barely peeking above the water at low tide. At first, the question was: Is it really what it appears to be? Or is it simply a projection, the mind’s misinterpretation of matter that frequently shape-shifts things in this magical place?
Sure enough, it was what it appeared to be. As we approached, the turtle’s head appeared shiny and alive. Amazingly, it remained frozen, so contrary to the escapist behavior turtles usually employ when encountering human curiosity. The canoe drifted closer and the turtle form became increasingly evident, but still the questions arose. Could it really be alive? Is it somehow impaled on the stump? Then the canoe bumped right into the log; I could not control it and was frozen myself, not wanting to push off from the log and disturb this perched creature.
It was an amazingly powerful scene. What sat before us was a turtle whose outermost shell was molting, the sun’s deep rays hastening the peeling and flaking of its outer crust. Unfortunately, our closeness eventually overwhelmed its powerful intent to submit to the sun and it dove into the water for its own protection, in search of solitude to continue its transformative process in privacy.
The turtle’s journey of change so simply and eloquently mirrors our own, though we humans must employ consciousness to enact this ancient archetypal program of change.
The sun is our spirit energy, the kundalini energy of our energy body that infuses itself in our physical spine. In the first half of life that spirit energy must find its footing in the physical world, first lodging in the sacrum.
As we grow and mature the kundalini energy rises to our reproductive center where nature claims it for its own survival needs.
As we make our way into the world we need the confidence of autonomy and so the kundalini funds our ego stability at the level of the solar plexus, where we experience confidence and the extreme challenges of power and competition in this world.
As we approach the chasm of midlife—or in many instances much younger in today’s rapidly changing world—we approach the great ocean that must be crossed to reach the level of the heart, where truth, love, and compassion extend to all interdependent life.
With each of these rising changes we are challenged, like the turtle on the log, to stay contained, as the heat of kundalini rises in its upward ascent. If we can provide a sealed channel to the rising energy, it will ascend to the next level. But this does require stillness and containment, especially when the energy of the full moon beckons us to release and attach to the pleasures of the world.
If, for instance, the sexual urge of the second chakra is always catered to as it demands and beckons, how can we advance a relationship dominated by the compulsion of more? How, at the level of personal power, are we to advance if we allow the kundalini to leak out and attach to more possessions or conquests, as it so desires? Without the choice of containment that the turtle exemplifies, our spirit remains imprisoned in the dense desires of this world.
Sun is kundalini rising… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
When we, as we must in our journey upward, explore and indulge in the kundalini attachments at the various stages, we are like the turtle that dives into the water, offsetting the drying-out transformation, as we binge in some form in this world. The process of absorbing and bearing the heat of containment, for our spirit to rise and change our focus, and for appreciation of our greater reason for being in this world, we must wait for another sunny day, beyond another Groundhog Day, when we are ready to steady for change.
I thank that turtle for so bravely bearing the tension of our intrusion, while also sharing one of life’s simplest yet most challenging of lessons: Activating change requires staying put and bearing the tension, as our defensive shell molts and sheds and our spirit rises to greater truth.
Allow some new thoughts to stir up your energy and see what happens! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Here is this week’s channeled message, brought to your from the astral plane by Jan and Jeanne. May it guide you for this day, and through the coming week, to continue the deep work of inner and outer change. If we all do it together there should soon be a big impact. Look at what happened in France over the weekend, the intent of change brought the masses together! Our own intent works the same way. May we all use it to our individual and collective advantage.
Is this squash really as vibrationally significant as we are? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Here is a channeled message for the week. May it offer insight into how to live in our changing world. The clicking sounds in the background of the recording are from the wood stove—hope they are not too disturbing! I am using an unsophisticated handheld device without capacity to edit, so you get whatever is happening in the environment I am sitting in.
We will be posting links to additional information later in the day regarding the recent messages that have been coming through, especially as we experience what is happening in the world around us, as we see resonance, and as feels appropriate to pass along. This feels right, as our way of participating in the time of gathering that Jeanne spoke of in this morning’s Soulbyte, passing along what comes to our attention. Feel free to share.
Offered in service to the expansion of our greater consciousness, Jan
Did our thoughts create this reality? – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
“You get what you concentrate upon,” channeled Jane Roberts on August 28, 1980. This is one of my favorite quotes from the energetic being, Seth, whom Jane Roberts channeled, stressing how our beliefs and attitudes create our world, both our personal world and the world we all share.
In the simplest of terms, Seth is saying, if we focus on something it will happen. If we are negative thinkers, negative things happen. If we concentrate on happy, positive things, we will get happy, positive things in our lives. What we choose to concentrate on can be to our detriment or to our advantage. This may sound simplistic and idealistic, but if we examine how thoughts create our reality we can learn how to change our thoughts to change our reality as well.
If you have a pimple on your chin and stare at it, it soon looms large. It turns red and ugly. It’s all you see when you look in the mirror and you are sure it’s all everyone else sees too. You apologize for it, try to hide it, or even refuse to go out in public. The pimple festers and grows the more you stare and poke and pinch at it. So is it with thoughts. The negative ones fester, causing us to weep that our lives are terrible, that we are unhappy, miserable, lonely, and that life is unfair. The positive ones grow as well. As we open to and accept new positive things into our lives, our lives expand; new experiences unfold as the world meets us on our positive terms.
The reality is, both negative and positive aspects of our lives are things we create for ourselves. They are our intentions, brought to us by our beliefs and attitudes—unconscious as well as conscious—that we decide upon and set for ourselves. For instance, does illness really exist or is there a part of us that has created it for some reason that we are perhaps unaware of?
There are definitely real reasons for illness. Aside from obvious diseases or injuries there might, however, be other reasons for the illnesses that plague us, for chronic pain and depression, for mental and emotional imbalances. Not everything can be fully healed by physical methods alone, but a more holistic approach offering psychological and spiritual attention as well might do the trick. The entire biological organism that we are must be taken into account, both that which is seen and that which is unseen. Some aspects of our reality are created unconsciously and thus need consciousness to bring them to healing.
We are a whole lot more than meets the eye… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
If we take into consideration that we are actually a whole lot more than we can touch and see; that we are energy as well as substance, ethereal as much as flesh and blood, we might begin to understand how powerful our thoughts, beliefs and attitudes really are. They are without form, so what else are they but energy? If we energetically create our own realities then we can energetically change them as well.
Perhaps our beliefs tell us that we are miserable and that we will always be miserable. Is that really true? Or is it only true because we think that way, because we have accepted that attitude? Did any of us really come into life intending bad things to happen, or to lead a miserable life? Were not our infant selves innocent of all that happened to us?
In fact, the lives we live have largely been created by what we’ve learned, believed, been told and continue to tell ourselves, or by what has been done to us. If we remain in that creation then indeed our lives will not change.
In truth, we are largely unaware of how we constantly retrench ourselves in our own predicament. It’s easy to blame others, and yes, others do cause great harm, but blame also keeps us stuck in negativity and there is little resolution to be found there. We become powerless victims of our circumstances, helpless and depressed, as we spin deeper into our darkness. In a sense we become our own worst enemies, our own abusers.
We all get to the point where we have to make a decision about how we want our own lives to unfold, and face that if we want positive experiences it’s up to us to give them to ourselves. No one else can provide what our spirit needs. It’s at that point that we might be ready to try something new. The simplest thing might be to change the ingrained, negative mantras we constantly repeat to ourselves, aborting the usual thoughts, inserting new positive refrains.
I had learned, at an early age, the devastating consequences of not acting on my own behalf, and by default the value of seizing an opportunity. I’d learned that one thing would lead to another, that things would happen, doors would open. Sometimes those doors were not the right ones, but as I grew up and made my way into the world I learned that behind some doors there were good people. I learned to accept that good things could happen and that good experiences were out there waiting for me to find them. Positive things happened when I took a chance on myself; things changed. My own lessons in creating a new reality for myself meant stepping out into life in a new way, navigating away from the old negative world, venturing into a new world of my own choosing.
There’s always a door waiting for us to walk through… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
If we are to create a new world in which we can all live in harmony we must get into harmony within ourselves. We must all face what might be behind the doors that appear in our own lives, all of them necessary, and all of them leading us on our healing journeys.
Our role is to take responsibility for our own lives, to heal ourselves as much as we ask others to heal us. We can do this by recreating our own world, fashioning it with positive intent, even as we face what pains us the most, even as we open yet another door that might not yet be the good one. We must do it anyway, concentrating always on the one that we know lies ahead, the one good door that will be the one that will finally lead us out of our old world of worry, fear and negativity into a more positive light.
If we can each do that for ourselves, then there is hope for all of us. Because, you know what? We are all energetic, magical beings—every one of us.
What is happening in your own current reality? What is it that you concentrate upon? How can you change it? As Seth also said: “Your experience will follow your concentration and belief and expectation. The mind is a great discriminator. It can use its reasoning to bring about almost any possible experience within your framework.” Now that is something to concentrate upon!
Creating anew for me and you, Jan
Excerpts from The Magical Approach by Jane Roberts, pp. 71-2.
