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Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: The Stubborn & The Curious

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Today, I switch from the subject of nature outside of us, which I have been writing about for the past few weeks, to nature inside, as it exists in its many forms inside our physical bodies. I define nature as that which is simply present, that which we are born with, and that which we cannot stop.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, while watching a doe and her fawn in my backyard, I see nature as unstoppable. It lives and it dies and it lives again. I also feel that we humans have this same unstoppable force of nature inside us. Much as the seasons recur, we are positioned, over and over again, to encounter things about ourselves. Often these are things we do not like about ourselves but know we must confront in order to change. They may be well known issues, perhaps already acknowledged but conveniently ignored until we are ready to go more deeply into them, or they may only exist in our subconscious, blocked, suppressed, and left to smolder. In either case, nature has a way of revealing them to us, in ways that are really quite personally relevant.

First I must state that I believe we are all born with a core issue, one core issue, and although there may be many surrounding and resounding issues, each of us is challenged in our lifetime to resolve this one issue. It may even be an issue or challenge that we have carried over many life times. I feel that nature, our inner nature, in collusion with the forces of nature outside of us, is bound and determined to challenge us to confront this issue, teach us how and why it belongs to us, and ask us to evolve beyond it. This is the basic tenet of recapitulation, to recognize the core issue that is holding us back in life, to confront it, to leave it behind without regret or attachment after being fully relived and resolved, and to move on to new life.

At this point, I must make note of Chuck’s recent blog regarding the contention of the seers of ancient Mexico that everything resides within the human body. This is what I write about today, how our bodies tell us, over and over again, just what our core issue is. We can find out everything we need to know about ourselves by contemplating, studying, and paying attention to our own natural state, our physical body. Our bodies contain all the answers, in our physical, in our psyche, in our energy. Our bodies can tell us where we are blocked, why we are afraid, what our spirit asks of us, and why we are here. Of course, it is much easier to see where others are blocked, to guess at their core issues, and wonder why they so stubbornly refuse to change. I will give some personal examples.

In my family, I am dealing with two very old women, one in her eighties and the other in her nineties, who are nearing the ends of their lives. One of them is in denial, stubbornly pretending that everything is fine; this has always been her way. The other is curious, eagerly attentive to anything she can find that may help her understand where she is going; this has always been her way. When I look at them I have to admit that I see myself in both of them. In the stubborn one, I see my own potential to dig in my heels and kick and scream that I don’t want to go; essentially I see my own fear. In the curious one, I see my enlightened self, eager for the adventure ahead, because this side of me has always known that there is something exciting beyond the veils of this world. In these two women, I see the duality of nature, two very powerful forces in a grand tug-of-war, and they are inside all of us.

It’s natural to be afraid, to fear the unknown, but it’s equally natural to be curious. As I watch these two women struggling through old age, maintaining their dignity while confronting their natural and inevitable physical deterioration in their own ways, I know that nature will win out, but I also know that nature is both sides of this process. In spite of the strong desire to remain in control, nature does not allow us to hold onto anything, it forces us out of the physical body. However, nature also gives us the option of capitulating to our energy body, to finally evolving beyond our need to continue reincarnating in the physical human form with our core issues. It offers our curious selves the option to remain alive, vibrant, and engaged in learning about the possibilities that lie ahead. Energy too is the natural way of things, if we care to engage it.

So who wins the tug-of-war? Well, that is up to each of us; it is an individual choice. Do we allow the tug-of-war to hold our energy in eternal conflict, or do we reconcile the opposing forces, confront our core issues this time around, and evolve? Once we recognize what our bodies are trying to tell us, in all our aches, pains, and tensions, and what our psyches are trying to tell us, in our fears, and embrace the experiences that these two opposing natural forces offer us on a daily basis, we come into alignment with nature, with the opportunity for the stubborn and the curious to finally be reconciled.

If you wish, feel free to share or comment in the Post Comment section below.

Sending you all love and good wishes as you take your journeys to reconciliation,
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

#692 Choice Matters

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Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Personally, I have noticed an increase in experiences of energy. About a week ago I had a profound out of body experience (OBE). I have also noticed that energetically speaking, in the outer world, there has been a lot of activity. There have been days when everyone seems to be angry. Other days everyone we meet seems caught in an old place, and other days everyone seems flowing and full of awareness. It feels as if this particular time in our lives, and in the history of the world, is offering us such power to change, to do things differently, and yet we hesitate. I am speaking of personal issues that arise to remind me to keep changing, but also of the issues of our own country and the signs of change that all of us are constantly facing. The main realization that I experience, energetically speaking and otherwise, is that we are not in charge, that a far greater force is asking us to acquiesce and flow with the true awareness that we are all energy beings. I believe this force is inside each one of us. When we slow down and experience it, as I did in my OBE, we feel enlightened, but then we go back to our daily lives, seeking to join that world of energy with the state of our crumbling world and we come up against so many impenetrable walls, walls of self-doubt, of judgment, of the need to be human, as well as the visceral memory of the experience and wonder of it all, of the magic.

I understand that acquiescence to energetic reality takes time. But I also wonder, are people really understanding that our energy experiences, such as an OBE, are the true reality that we seek and must turn to now? I don’t think I am making an uninformed assumption. I fully feel that not enough people are getting what it means to be energy beings, that which you speak of so often, what don Juan, Carlos and the women seers teach about, what quantum physics is about, and what the religions of the world sprang from: the fact that we are all energy beings caught in a fixed reality and that it is up to us to dismantle that fixation, whether by fault or on purpose, in order to “see” better. I believe we are now in the midst of that process of dismantling and it does not matter to God, or Mother Earth, or the energy of intent how we go about that. Our awareness must now shift so that we do not lose this opportunity to evolve, to flow with the earth itself, as change is more fully brought upon us. It is now imperative that we all make some drastic changes in our personal lives.

Can you comment on my feelings that, each day, we are being confronted with powerful energy alerts? Some days, we are asked to fight through them, to express our anger and discontent. Other days we are asked to gently flow, but, at all times, we are being asked to be aware of the energy around us and how it affects and guides us to evolve. We are, I believe, being shown, each day, what we must change about ourselves, whether those things are inner aspects such as judgments, prejudices, fears or denials, or whether they are how we choose to live in the world. I feel that it is time for all of us to face what we have created, both inside us and outside us. Can you offer your comments and guidance as to what we have become and where we should go now?

My Dear One, the world you inhabit, the world of everyday life, is but one reality, yet it is the playing field for your evolving self. I do not like to speculate because, as you know, choice matters and that is really the crux of everything that you speak of today.

Each one of you must choose how you will live. Is this lifetime dedicated to building a nice ego, to engaging in self-important behaviors of inflation, bullying, self-aggrandizing—all necessary aspects of learning what it means to be human? Is this lifetime dedicated to victimhood, to eternal big-babyhood, to sucking off the lives and energies of others? Is this lifetime a predatory life or a simple life of deflation and self-loss, or are those aspects simply building blocks to an evolving self in this lifetime? Have you presented your self with challenges that require you to take abrupt and mighty steps out of an old world and into a new one?

You see, you must first address your personal challenge. What is your personal challenge? Where are you caught? Then the next challenge is to discover the means of taking that giant step to a new level of self and awareness. You see, your assumption, My Dear Jan, that you and the world are one, on a similar journey, is correct. You would not be living at this time if the world did not reflect the challenges that you each, as individuals, face. Your world outside of you is your inner world vividly reflected, staunchly produced and accessible. It can be so easy to see how to solve the issues of that world and how everything is being done wrong, going too slowly or quickly, in the opposite direction from what you know is right, and, yet, can you turn your frustrations with that world innerly and accept the energetic consequences of the decisions you personally make each day?

Energy is energy. You are, each one of you, energy. What flows outside of you has the ability to flow inside of you and affect you greatly. You are in control of your own energy and everything about you is set up for you to learn this fact. You may not feel or admit that you are, though you so easily may see that the world outside of you is all set for change, and perhaps for total collapse. Energetically speaking, whatever happens to your outer world is good for it. Energetically speaking, the flow of life is being directed by the choices that have been made in that world. Your own life is flowing according to the choices you make.

I do not judge or hold attachment to that world or the choices of individuals, except to point out your teaching tools and your learning process. Abide by the laws of energy and you will learn about awareness, awareness as clear-seeing. Perhaps this may come to you in intuitive knowing so that your choices may be clearly shown to you. Perhaps your awareness may come in the form of puzzling experiences that you must need in order to better understand what you need in life. Perhaps you will only have full understanding by incremental learning, rather than bursts of knowledge too big to hold onto and fathom. Most humans need to learn in this incremental manner, for true energetic reality is too much to take in.

In answer to your queries about the energy around you in your world and the intensities you now feel, I suggest that you attempt a new measure of attention to what is happening around you, because it is indeed a significant time to be alive. But in your personal world, what are you supposed to be learning? What is your personal growth challenge at this moment? How can you change with the changing world?

Change is inevitable. Are you going to flow with it, or are you going to perish in the vast sea of darkness? Really, the choice is simple. You must ask yourself: What do I fear most, the energetic unknown or the old familiar darkness? In order to change, one must enter the darkness, but you must elect to take the journey. Oh, and by the way, no matter how you answer that question, the journey will be the same. You must face your fears and learn that they too are but energetic realities to be confronted and passed through on the way to the next level of awareness.

You must confront everything you need to confront, whether you elect to go willingly or kicking and screaming. Don’t you know that you are all going anyway? What else is there? You are all beings who are going to die. How do you elect to experience death? That is the next question to ponder. And don’t wait too long to decide. Get right on it; there is no time to waste!

Messages from Jeanne

#657 Letting Go

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
What would you like to discuss today? Is there another step in the inner process that would be valuable guidance for us at this time?

The inner process must include the very practical step of letting go, which entails not only physical and emotional release, but learning the process of detachment in such a way that makes personal and growth-oriented sense. In letting go one moves beyond the intensity of the mind, one learns how to progress and how to take steps that lead to real change. The opposite of letting go, holding, results in stagnation, pain, and forced anguish. In order to do inner work, leading to true integration, the process of letting go must be engaged.

What would be some of the steps in learning to let go? It is probably the most difficult part of the inner work.

If one is intent on changing the self and the circumstances of one’s life then one must not only cultivate the process of letting go, but one must become truly expert at it, for it is an invaluable tool. In learning what it means to let go, one opens the door to real change, and this experience of change is immediate. One does not have to wait months or years for the effects of letting go to manifest. In simply undertaking physical relaxation one feels what it means to let go on a very immediate and personal level. In physical letting go of muscle holdings, for instance, one may actually feel relief as tension and pain and stress leave the body. As one allows the self to experience physical unholding one begins the process of going deeper to other holdings, such as holdings within the psyche and the mind, within the unconscious and the conscious self.

Having engaged in the practice of yoga and meditation for many years I agree that simply achieving physical release is extremely beneficial and I know that once engaged it opens the door to inner release. How does one allow oneself to go deeper? I think that is a pretty difficult step for most people, since as they go deeper all of their fears arise.

Yes, you are most correct, the greatest block to unblocking and to letting go is fear. But as I have stated many times: what is fear but an imaginary aspect set up to challenge you. For in reality, fear does not exist except as you conjure it up, as you present it to your self, a most useful tool until you no longer need or desire it.

Fear is a habit like any other. You can choose to engage it or you can choose to ignore it and allow it to leave your system. You have all programmed yourselves to experience FEAR. You have used it as a tool to teach and guide you through life. You have found it to be extremely helpful and useful, and it does have its place in heightened states of awareness, but even so I prefer to teach release of it so that you may train your self to rely on your innate, instinctual abilities of awareness and inner knowing rather than your learned fear, for your fear is twisted. Your fear is related to what you have been taught in that world, to what you have taken on as routine and plodding behaviors that you do indeed seek to undo and change.

So, if you can accept that fear is attached to what you have learned is fearful in that world, conjured by the teachings of others, by judgments, criticisms, lies, and tactics of manipulation, then perhaps you can begin to put fear into an old category. Perhaps you can relabel fear as intuition, as instinct, as sensitivity to energy, as inner knowing. Perhaps you can take it out of the physical world and place it in the meta-physical world of energy and proceed to ask it what it is telling you, using your instinct, intuition, sensitivity to energy and inner knowing, rather than attaching immediately to it in the old way.

F-E-A-R. Spell the word, one letter at a time, slowly, and allow your physical body to relax as you speak the letters. As F-E-A-R leaves your mouth let it go. It is nothing more than letters, than sounds spoken, broken down into nothing more than individual pieces of nothing. F-E-A-R. Break it down, one letter at a time, until your body relaxes, until your physical self no longer recognizes it for what it used to be and hold. Use this technique to break down F-E-A-R, but also to break through your notion that F-E-A-R has any meaning at all.

This is a process of turning something of power, something that reigns over you and controls you into nothing more than breath leaving your body, air dissipating in air, released. You can do this with anything that bothers you and holds you captive. You can do this with W-O-R-R-Y, with A-N-G-E-R, with the name of a person. You can learn to let go in this very natural and easy manner, simply by spelling away the issues that hold you fast to old ideas and habits and the needs of an old world. If you are truly ready to grow and change then you are also ready to re-envision all that holds you now bound to an old world, to old practices. If you are truly ready to change then you will take on the letting go process with a fuller understanding that this is the step in your inner work that will allow for a real shift, a shift that you may feel immediately, physically, mentally, and emotionally, as you practice letting go.

The practice of letting go is manifold. It is multilayered and many leveled, but it is most beneficial to offer the self a simple manner in which to begin its incremental climb down into the deeper regions of the self, from the outside in. In learning a practice of physical letting go, by changing some old attachments with gentle release from their meaning and their power, by dismantling them one letter at a time, you will remove the blocks that hold you from greater release. And you will offer access to learning what true letting go, true detachment, and true inner work is really all about.

You have no idea what you have waiting inside you, until you dare to go looking.

Messages from Jeanne

#653 Fearlessness

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
What message do you have for us today? Would you like to continue discussing the process of inner work and the important factors and steps to focus on as we take our inner journeys? What else besides patience, perseverance, kindness, innocence, maturity and commitment must we keep in mind?

There is much to be said for taking the inner journey and it is crucial to keep in mind that it is not only a process, but also an investment in the self. To invest in the self requires patience, perseverance, kindness, innocence, maturity and commitment and all that each one of those words means, for as your process continues you will discover the greater meaning of taking such ideas into consideration, as you actually live what they mean.

Consider the self as a river flowing through a landscape, at once as tender and light, as gentle and soothing as water can be, but also as hard and destructive, as harsh and cruel as water can also be. For water soothes the gentle baby’s skin, yet does it also cut through rock. Such qualities are also found inside each of you, the ability to be as gentle as one drop of water or as powerful as a tumbling, mighty river. With such qualities in your awareness and acceptable to you, begin now a deeper exploration of your true capabilities. In your inner work, you must be able to be tender with the self, with your feelings and emotions, with your most painfully sore spots and your deepest wounds. Yet must you also be able to cut through all that arises to prevent your growth. You must be able to crash through the barriers that arise in fearlessness, for only in pushing beyond your present self will you grow.

In embracing fearlessness will you not only be able to attend to all parts of the self that arise while you do your inner work, but you will be able to push beyond them and discover new attributes, new creative talents, new aspects of self that lie hidden and buried by fear and its cohorts. Fearlessness, My Dears, is a most necessary aspect of inner work and you will not be able to take the deeper journey without it.

Look upon the self as a flowing river again. A river is fearless, for it cannot, once it begins its journey, stop itself. Once it has made a rivulet upon the earth it has begun its journey. That rivulet may soon dry up, but it has made its mark. It has scored a path, and when next the rains come, when next the ice melts, when next the stream overflows its banks that rivulet will soak up the waters of life and open to the flow of them again. A tiny rivulet will soon flow beyond its early beginnings and flow with fearless energy because it cannot do otherwise.

Once you begin your inner journey you will be as that tiny rivulet. Your approach may dry up, your energy for the journey dissipate, but you will have cut into the heart and soul of your psyche and your physical body, and you will not be able to rest long before you thirst for the flow of energy to go deeper into the self. Once begun, the inner journey will not let you rest long in a state of depletion, for the process, once begun, must be fed the energy of life.

As you take your journey, as your personal process reveals itself, one tiny drop or one rushing stream at a time, you will begin to understand the momentum of your own yearning to continue the journey, and you will learn what it truly means to be fearless, not in a haphazard or careless manner, but in a steady and knowing manner, as you become aware that confronting your fears is the only means of proceeding through life. Your barriers will become the challenges they are meant to be as you allow fear to be your guide, pushing you forward, rather than allowing them to become overwhelming blockages that you lay down before, pooling your energy in stagnant ponds of fear.

Your fear, as it guides you, will ask you, repeatedly, to flow like a river. For only in flowing like a river will you open up to the greater gifts in life. Fearlessness, combined with patience, perseverance, kindness, innocence, maturity and commitment to the journey, will guide you well as you take into consideration your soul’s purpose and your soul’s greater intent. What is it?

Why, indeed, are you there? You will only discover the answer by continuing your process. And that, My Dearest Ones, means you must tackle your fears. In becoming steadily, increasingly, lovingly, rightly, conscientiously fearless you will truly grow.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: What is Fear?

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Dear Readers,

I thought this portion of a message that I received from Jeanne today might be interesting and perhaps helpful as you do your inner work. She says the following:

As fears pop up to challenge you, take a look at them and know that they are just that, fears, and nothing more. And what is fear but an old habit of emotional baggage. But if you look into that bag you will see that it is empty because fear is invisible! It does not exist unless you attach to it and make it be important. The process of letting go is taking away the importance of that which has conjured itself before you. These can be many things that, in reality, do not exist unless you attach meaning and significance to them.

She went on to say that by letting go of fears and detaching from the conjuring mind, you free your energy to understand why you had the fears to begin with, and that the mind itself cannot fully achieve clarity because its habit is to focus on what it has conjured. She says:

As you learn to detach, to really let go of the conjuring mind, you will discover what has always been present in your life and in your self and in your destiny. But such clarity only truly comes when you are ready for it.

More from us tomorrow!
– Jan and Jeanne