Here is Jeanne’s guidance for the week. Have a great one!
It’s a struggle, but keep going! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Keep doing what you are doing to change yourself. If you are trying to do too many things, pick one and stick with it. Pick what feels most resonant and conducive to you, your life, and your inner process.
Simplify your practice and simplify your life. Remain committed to the path you have chosen. Do not get drawn too far afield. Return always to your path and continue onward. Only in a focused and concerted practice will you find what you seek. It does take work, but let it be joyous work. Let it be loving, kind and compassionate work on the self, even as you care for and about others.
Work on the self is the greatest challenge and the greatest adventure of life upon that earth. You will find the answers you seek in the land of the self. And those answers will apply to everything you encounter outside of the self as well. Make your inner work count by simplifying and committing to an ever-deepening practice, a practice of change. This is how to evolve.
A note from Jan and Chuck along the lines of change and evolution: Here is a great time-lapse film about the cicadas by Samuel Orr. It’s really quite an amazing little film. We posted this yesterday on our Riverwalker Facebook page, so some of you may have already seen it, but for those who don’t do Facebook, here it is the link to this short film.
Seasonal change is inevitable…ice on the deck this morning…
Change is good. This is one of my favorite mottos. Change is good. Back in the days before I had done a shamanic recapitulation I had another, similar, motto that went like this: Always change. Back then I was suffering from PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), though I didn’t know this. But even so I knew that change was good, I just didn’t really know why, not on a deeper level anyway. Now I know that it was something at a deeper level that was stirring me to always change, PTSD acting as a catalyst that eventually led to self-discovery and real change. The form that change takes under the auspices of PTSD, however, is very different from change that takes place once freed of PTSD.
Back in the PTSD days, change came knocking in uncomfortable stirrings to move, to always change, to change my environment in some way, whether it be changing the furniture in every room of the house every few weeks or uprooting and moving to another apartment, another house, another city, another state, another country, another relationship. I did all of these things, under the auspices of always change, restlessness my constant companion. But something at a deeper level was always asking me: Why do I do this? Why do I have to keep moving and changing? Why can’t I just settle down?
I felt like I was running from something, that if I stopped in one place long enough whatever it was would catch up with me and that would be the death of me. For at some deeper level, I knew that death was what was chasing me—death in one form or another.
Now, on one level, this is true, for death is pursuing us all the time, reminding us that in the end it will get us. In my case, I sensed death differently, the stench of it deep inside me already. Although I didn’t know it, that smell of death—that I could never run far enough away from—was trying to alert me to what I carried inside me: a dying spirit, a dying innocence, a dying sense of hope, for these are some of the things that PTSD robs us of. Until we stop and face what the stench of death is trying to alert us to, we will constantly seek change in our outer world, to find just the right place where we will feel comfortable, safe, and at ease. I went into my late forties always changing before I stopped and faced what was pursuing me, the past that was embodied in that diagnosis of PTSD, a past I had no memory of.
Fires of change like kundalini energy burning through us…
When I first met Chuck, he presented me with those four little letters—PTSD. Oh, so that’s what’s wrong with me! At last I had a name for all that had driven me in so many unsettling ways, a name that felt right. “Yes, I get it, I suffer from PTSD,” I said to myself, “I just never knew it.” Now I had a home, a slot to fit into in the world, I had PTSD. But I would not stay there. I could not settle for long. I refused to be categorized, tagged and diagnosed, for always change was still my motto after all. And so I told myself to change, that change was good, that it was what I needed in order to heal. And so I began a changing, healing journey out of PTSD and into new life. Long and painful though that journey was I would not, in a million years, wish to live the way I used to live.
Now when I say that change is good, I’m talking about the deepest kind of change, change of the self at the deepest level, from the inside out. This involves letting go of everything that has upheld the world we’ve lived in—everything we’ve been taught and taught ourselves, everything we’ve believed and couldn’t bear to believe, everything we’ve created and controlled in order to be safe. This involves learning to let go of our judgments, resentments, fears, and regrets, opening instead to the truth of our infallibilities, our frailties, our imperfections, and our inflations. It involves discovering what it really means to be humble, to live simply, in balance with all of nature, taking only what is necessary. It involves learning to love ourselves so we can one day be available to love another, so we can understand what it means to be loved, and how to give and receive love on a far more expansive, interconnected level of consciousness, far beyond the needs of the self. It involves letting go of our ego selves, detaching from that which has held us in our defended states for so long, making way in the process for a new self. It involves allowing this new self to emerge out of the stench and fear of death that has encapsulated us in all of its forms and fully acknowledge that yes, death is the ultimate catalyst to evolutionary change. It involves discovering for the self what it means to be an evolving being, here in this lifetime to discover and resolve an evolutionary challenge, given another opportunity to get it right.
Opportunities abound, coming at many times throughout our lives. Our challenge is, indeed, to always change, to go with the flow of our lives, accepting full responsibility for where we are at all times, accepting that we are not perfect, that we are human beings, but also that we are evolutionary beings as well, spiritual beings seeking something higher, something far beyond our PTSD, our boredom, our fear, our self-pity and our hopelessness.
Seeking always a higher evolved self…
The deepest kind of change means facing who we’ve become and daring ourselves to become someone far more evolved, far more connected to life on this planet while striving always to become far more aware of the spiritual possibilities of all things, and far more aware of all life as sacred.
The creative, urging us on one level to do something about ourselves or our environment, stirs in us at all times. Perhaps we project it outwardly as I did, as an artist constantly creating something new, some new picture, sculpture, dance, play, music. But after a while a deeper creativity comes knocking, asking us to channel the ultimate creation: a new self. And you know what, it’s really okay to do that, to totally change and become someone new, for after all, in the end, it’s the evolution of the self that we’re all here to spur on to a new level. This is why, I believe, we’re all here—to always change—and such change is always good.
Here is today’s channeled message from Jeanne, offering us guidance for the changing times that we experience every day.
Seek always the Higher Self…
Consider the possibility of real change. What would it mean to let go of long-held ideas of the self, of old habits and old desires? To hold the self fully accountable and responsible for changing the self is all that is required.
Consider the evolution of the self as your main goal in life. Consider the necessity of change in order to evolve. What must you do today to honor your desire for change?
Make one decision today that promotes change and healing, that evolves the self one step further on your journey. Be mindful of your life as an ever-evolving and ever-changing process. Yet, also keep in mind that as a human being you are also equipped with far greater meaning and purpose than simply that. There is much more to take into consideration when working with the human situation, for there is the energy of the spirit to take into account, as well as the journey of the eternal soul.
Deepen your journey by accepting that there is a greater meaning and purpose to your existence than you have yet to experience. Take into consideration that your trials are leading you somewhere as of yet unknown, for a higher purpose. With that in mind at all times, reach beyond your daily lives, striving always for connection with that Higher Self. Seek always this other adventure, the unknown life of change that asks you to take one more step in its direction each day.
Each one of you who reside upon that earth is charged with the same mission: to seek to know the Higher Self at all times.
You will be shown what direction to take each day as you set your intent to grow. Be alert to the signs that come to you, and discover their meaning. Choose always growth. Though it may dare you and challenge you beyond measure, in your heart you will know what is right. Can you accept your heart’s knowing and leave something behind in order to move one step closer to its fulfillment? That is the ultimate challenge.
What are you being asked to leave behind today? Whatever it is, if you let it go you will move more swiftly forward on your journey and your path will widen, your vision clear, and your spirit enlighten. Good Luck!
Thank you to Jeanne and all of our guides. Most humbly channeled, with love for all of you as you take your individual journeys.
Like a leaf on the autumn breeze this is where I have landed…
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place. So goes a Zen expression. If I think about that statement in relation to where we are now in our evolutionary process as human beings, as spiritual beings, as Americans, as Citizens of the World, I immediately go calm. As I ponder my own process of growth and those who are closest to me, I go calm as well. For I sense that we are all in perfect alignment for evolutionary advance, that we always are, and when we are ready we will know what to do, in calmness.
Evolution is defined in Webster’s Ninth as: a process of change in a certain direction: UNFOLDING; the action or an instance of forming and giving something off: EMISSION; a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state: GROWTH; a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social, political, and economic advance.
I define evolutionary advance in my personal life in the same manner: I must allow life to unfold, letting go and giving off that which is unhealthy or unproductive, and get myself into a better state where growth, gradual and peaceful, can take place.
Just as no snowflake ever falls in the wrong place, so are we constantly falling into the places we need to be. Life, the force of the universe inside all of us, by its very nature is in constant flux, and so are we. If we allow ourselves even a few minutes to sit quietly and meditate, we will find that life force calmly waiting inside us to take its next natural step on the journey that awaits us.
The other night I woke at 2 a.m., worry spinning through my head, and being that it was night the worry spun its crazy web, as worry does in the dead of night. It spun and spun until I found myself helplessly caught in its sticky web, thought and intrigue, and more thought and more intrigue tightening around me. Shifting away in disgust, I turned onto my back, opened my eyes, and stared into the darkness of the ceiling above me.
“Please help me stop this worry!” I called out to the universe. “I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to be free of it. Help me to be free!”
The next thing I know I’m dreaming. I wake up in the dream, fully alert, and clearly see that worry does not exist in my dreaming state. I see that worry is nothing more than thoughts conjured by the mind, but now the mind is asleep. I see that it does its thing because it’s programmed that way, but as I look at it from my dreaming state I see that it really has no power at all, it’s simply a machine. And I can turn it off as quickly as I can flip a light switch.
“No worry,” I say, “how nice,” and I fall right back into my dream.
In the morning, I wake up totally refreshed, the worry of the night totally shed, and again I see it for what it is, a spinning machine. But at the same time I accept it in my life, for I know its value in teaching me.
Worry is like the snowflake that never lands in the wrong place. A petty tyrant of the highest magnitude, it comes to teach us. If we attach to it, it will swoop us up like leaves on a brisk autumn day and take us traveling on many adventures. I find, however, that the biggest lesson worry teaches is how to let go, how to become calm and detached. Worry by its very nature asks to be switched off, just as life by its very nature asks to be lived. Worry teaches us how to get ourselves in alignment with where we have landed. By flipping its switch to the OFF position, we are free to sit in calmness, to find our bearings, and know what’s right for us to do next.
Practice shifting…
I know that switching off worry is not that easy to do, but trust me; it just takes a little practice. The first step is to see it for what it is, to redefine it as I did in my dream. If we can separate ourselves from the thoughts in our head and give them a name, such as spinning machine or petty tyrant, we begin a process of change and we learn the real lesson of worry: detachment. Redefining things in this way offers not only a fresh perspective, but empowers us to begin taking action on our own behalf.
Was my worry of the night justified? Would it solve any problems, for me or others? Would it help in any way? Absolutely not. It had no impact on anything in reality. The only impact it had was on my energy and my sleep. It was a machine that I decided I did not want in my life anymore, and so I found a way to turn it off, kick it out of my bed, and get some sleep and dream insights instead—much preferable to the sticky web of incessant worry!
In these times of political, social, and personal energetic turmoil, I find that this simple Zen quote—No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place—is as calmly shifting and direct as my shift away from worry and into dreaming. In repeating it to myself throughout the day, I find myself calmly accepting of where I am, of where the world is, of where those closest to me are.
I believe we are all exactly where we need to be at this moment in time, in our lives, and in the evolution of our world. If we can accept this, then we can begin making choices in alignment with growth. Perhaps we see that where we are is necessary, that our next move in life is evolutionary, that we are in fact being shown what it means to be in alignment with our spirit, that where we have landed is leading us toward a gradual, peaceful unfolding of a life truly worth living.
I have landed where I have landed. Each day I wake up and remind myself of this, that I am where I should be, where I need to be, learning what I need to learn for my personal evolution. And then I dare myself to calmly take the next step, in alignment with where my heart tells me to go. I let my worry about this or that go; I let my fears about this or that go too. And I remember my dreaming self clearly perceiving worry as outside of myself, not mine, but conjured by the energy outside of me seeking attachment, wanting to feed off my energy, like the good petty tyrant that it is.
Don Juan called the White House “the site of power of today’s world, the center of all our endeavors, hopes, fears, and so on, as a global conglomerate of human beings—for all practical purposes, the capital of the civilized world.” *
In archetypal terms, from the deepest patterned level of our inherited collective unconscious, the American president is the KING of the World.
No More!!!
On Wednesday, the King of the World spoke and changed the evolutionary course of our species as he proclaimed that “same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
You can’t take back an evolutionary moment. The King has spoken! An American president has said the words. It matters little the reactions of a divided country or a divided world or the outcome of the next election. The die is cast. Humanity in evolution: gay marriage is proclaimed the norm.
Marriage, with its 50% failure rate, is no guarantee of anything. Marriage, like sexual maturity, is a process that must be worked at to achieve lasting, fulfilling union. However, what the King of the World, President Obama, has proclaimed, grants legitimacy to both homo- and hetero-sexual relationships to embark on a sacred path of true conjunctio versus being relegated to the shadows of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Whether President Obama seized the political moment, as my ego mind suggests, is immaterial. Whether Vice President Biden was dispatched, on some level, to be the advance guard, preparing the ground for the King of the World to make the proclamation, is immaterial. Obama—with strong support and likely urged by Queen Michelle—took the evolutionary leap, like his channeled mentor Lincoln, to stand for full legitimacy and the right for all people to marry, and for that he is, indeed, at this moment, the King of the World.
We, as a world, are moving at the speed of light now. The dark shadow of 12/21/2012, the proposed end of the Mayan calendar, looms large, but its counterpart, the evolutionary consciousness of humanity to right its course, looms bright.
Can President Obama, the King of the World, continue to seize the moment, to right the course of carbon emissions, nuclear development, fallacious and unnecessary wars?
May all who wish walk beneath the marriage bower in search of true conjunction...
Let’s see what happens. Me thinks we first have to complete the civil war, now reactivated—our country once again divided by an emancipation proclamation. But the first challenge is a tough one: Can we get beyond civil disunion to true marriage?
What a lovely epitaph this emancipation proclamation is to Maurice Sendak, the famed author and illustrator, who died a day earlier, a man who lived for 50 years with his gay partner, Eugene Glynn, in true conjunctio.
Thanking the King of the World, for moving us one step closer to emancipation for all,
