Tag Archives: earth school

Soulbyte for Thursday June 20, 2024

-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

When entering a new phase, a new season, a new moon, a new day even, notice how the inner self knows and automatically sets itself to the new phase, no matter what it is. The inner self is the natural self, affiliated with All That Is. It likens itself to the flow of energy throughout the universe, because ultimately that’s what it is. Within you, now captured in physical form, the inner self strives to help you learn the lessons of Earth School, to make good decisions that are appropriate for each new phase of life, to learn to be intuitive and connected to All That Is too. Each new day and in each new phase of life as it guides you, you in turn understand it a little bit more, how the inner self works, how it loves you, understands you and wants only the best for you.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Friday June 14, 2024

-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Legions of souls have gone before you,  trying to figure out the mysteries of life, how it works and why. True answers don’t arise until one is done but in the meantime curiosity can lead to experiential processes that are beneficial and give a taste of what true reality really is. Remaining fully conscious and aware that life is more than meets the eye is one good attitude that aids in the search for meaning and purpose. Keeping an open mind and heart is equally helpful, as is a keen desire and curiosity to learn and gain knowledge. Focus on being open and engaged in the wonders of life, without judgment.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Thursday May 9, 2024

-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Whenever you feel despair, or the burden of too much, remind yourself that you are a being in Earth School, there to learn, to grow, to give and to receive, to understand life in a greater way with each cycle through life. Return to your roots, to your spirit, and try to remember your mission, your core reason for being in physical form beyond the above mentioned universal reasons. Each being has their own personal mission. Search deeply within to find your answer, even as you seek it without, for the answer lies in both worlds, within and without.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck’s Place: True Healing Of The Child

Healing the child self…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Alice Miller’s books, on the impact of child abuse and neglect, evoke deep compassion for the wounded inner child. Healing from childhood trauma requires deep sensitivity and respect for dissociated child parts, along with their experiences of abuse and neglect.

Ultimately, complete healing requires full acceptance of everything one has experienced in life. With trauma, this includes releasing the full sensory and emotional discharge of stored reactions to the traumatic experience. With healing, those memories are no longer traumatic; they trigger no emotion or sensation. They are completely neutral.

Mentally, one is challenged to dispel beliefs that one was responsible for causing the traumatic encounter. Here one truly needs to accept that indeed they were a victim in an experience that was not of their making.

Healing also includes a vastly enlarged perspective of the experience, which includes the motives and circumstances of others involved in the traumatic experience. Ultimate healing also requires complete emotional neutrality toward one’s perpetrator.

To acknowledge one’s victim status is critical to healing and, yet, one cannot heal if one holds onto the victim status as an enduring identity. An enduring identity as victim reflects a personality construction with the wounded child in control of, what Winnicott called, the false self. This self is seen as false because rather than mature through the normal developmental stages of childhood, it mimicks adulthood while secretly dedicating itself to adaptive behaviors that protect the child from anxiety.

The false self is a commandeered adult ego state whose charge is to defend the child from any discomfort. The false self employs its resources to bury, in the physical body, the memory and impact of trauma, as well as to develop a rigid body armor to stave off the challenge of the outside world.

The false self often develops competency in a profession, which provides security for the child, but behind this seeming successful adaptation to life is a sense of self as a phony, threatened to be discovered at any moment.

I refer to this child state that controls the false self as the uninitiated child because it has failed to complete its rite of passage to advance beyond its victim status. Rites of passage are purposeful traumatic practices that societies once used to help children successfully advance into real adulthood. All trauma requires full recapitulation to complete passage into real adulthood.

Failure to advance can fixate the child in a narcissistic worldview of entitlement, protection and revenge. In her book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence, Alice Miller describes Hitler’s horrifically abusive childhood, that, left unprocessed, was projected outward in a ruthless quest for revenge.

These same dynamics are blatant in the cult of the child that serves the power drives of uninitiated charismatic leaders, who promise revenge upon the reigning adult authority figures in the present world. These extreme childish expectations of entitlement and protection have opened the floodgates of legitimization for the uninitiated, who blindly support these irreverent child heroes.

These extreme examples simply underscore how this developmental challenge of achieving true adulthood is the salient issue for the human race today. The hallmark of true adulthood is the acceptance of full responsibility for one’s entire life, including all experiences of victimization.

This in no way takes responsibility away from those who have victimized others. They must and will be held accountable for their actions. They will never be able to advance spiritually unless they fully feel the pain they caused and recapitulate all the pain of their own lives. These are the prerequisite rites of passage.

Ultimately, like Job, we are faced with accepting the fact that life is not fair, despite the echoes of our childhood socialization.

Ultimately, we are challenged to accept Buddha’s assessment that life is suffering. Earth School is a playing field for the suffering of attachment and loss.

The full mastery of Earth School is to arrive at the place of love, most especially for all those who had roles in our traumatic rites of passage.

Become the child acorn that advances beyond its protective shell, delivering its vitality to the mighty adult oak it was always destined to become.

Ultimately, the child’s destiny is to grow up and into its adult self, who awaits beyond its rites of passage. To that adult, bring a matured innocence, willing to journey freely in and, perhaps someday, beyond this predatory universe.

Mature the self, mature the world,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: You Never Disappoint Your Soul

The wisdom of many lives…
-Artwork © 2023 Jan Ketchel

The question arises: “Who is the You, that never disappoints your Soul?” That you is your personality. And what is the personality?

The personality is a combination of the ego self, which is largely identified with life in the physical body; the subconscious mind, which stores the wisdom of many lives lived; and the High Self, which supports the intention for growth in this life.

The Soul itself is the subtle body that has spawned many lives and many personalities. Each of these has collectively gathered experience and knowledge that contributes to the Soul’s growth. Those prior lives are all connected to the subconscious mind and are reflected, as well, in various ego states and characteristics of the physical body.

The personality’s life in a physical body is the Soul’s investing of its energy in the quest for growth. For growth to happen, the personality must have the free will to set up its own experiments and make its own discoveries in the life it is in, all of which ultimately contribute to the growth of the Soul.

The Soul grows through life experience, not through a personality seeking refuge in simply being good, whereby suppressing into its shadow the fuller spectrum of life’s desires.  Although, even such an attempt at a virtuous life is a life of experience that benefits the Soul.

In this case, the Soul discovers that such a one-sided life creates the karmic necessity of another life  that can more fully experience the shadow held in abeyance. The Soul does not judge any life to have been a wasted or failed life. All experience is golden and treated with equanimity by the Soul.

Critical judgment issues from the personality. Perhaps its value is to create a restlessness that spurs the personality to stay on point with its core mission in this life.

The ego, however, with its limited knowledge of, and limited connection to, the subtler dimensions of its being, as well as its reason for being in this life, tends to overly judge itself in the context of its achievements and failures in this life. It lacks the richer perspective of its Soul, which appreciates equally all experiences in life.

Growth for the personality requires the maturation of its judging function. The shamans of ancient Mexico were particularly helpful in this respect, in their dictum to suspend judgment. They discovered that self-criticism had the effect of immobilizing one’s vital energy, which is  essential to achieve expanded awareness.

It’s not that shamans don’t face the truth of their actions and their consequences; they are in fact ruthlessly insistent upon facing the truth. However, shamans do not define themselves as failures, or as good or bad people. They acknowledge their faults and mistakes and make adjustments in their life to avoid repetition. Or they continue to repeat the same behaviors, accepting the need to finish with a “bad” behavior so that they can then be freed to move on.

Shamans laugh at themselves and are in awe of their blind spots and sheer stupidity. Shamanic wisdom knows that the key to spiritual advancement is complete acceptance of self in every action, thought, and feeling experienced through an entire life. How can we advance to new life if we cannot fully accept ourselves and our entire lives lived?

That acceptance must equally extend to every person who has harmed us in our life. Refusal to accept anything that has happened to us will automatically generate a seed of karma that will attempt acceptance again in another life. Refusal to accept freezes our energy and blocks our advance.

To advance we must free ourselves of any notion of victimhood. Although we may have been victimized, the key is not to freeze ourselves in the self-definition of victim. Acceptance requires full mastery of every fact of our life, however tragic. The Soul does not judge. The Soul values every experience equally. May the personality be guided by this wisdom.

Carl Jung established that there are two ego functions that judge in order to navigate this life: thinking and feeling. Thinking employs the rational mind, and logic, to determine the truth. Feeling uses feelings to actively determine the worth of something. Both of these functions support the ego’s understanding and valuing of life experience.

To exercise these evaluative functions is necessary to navigate life with objectivity. But the emphasis in these functions is to understand and make decisions, not to condemn and define the self with judgments of  inferiority, inadequacy, and unworthiness.

The Soul is never disappointed with us. Can we internalize this insinuation from above, and rise to the level of never being disappointed in ourselves and others? This erases no facts or responsibility but does advance us fully in love, through total acceptance of everything.

From a path of heart,
Chuck