Tag Archives: inner work

#660 Times of Learning

Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Do you have a message of guidance for all of your readers today?

My Dear Ones, do not doubt your experiences in that life you now live, nor attempt to project too far beyond the present, for in so doing will you miss some vital signs that are ready to lead you forward, to guide you as you live each day. In order to truly progress and evolve upon that earth one must not reject the mundane aspects of each day in favor of spiritual enlightenment alone. For your life upon that earth is meant to teach you something of great value so that you may evolve as a human being, as well as in your spiritual pursuits. Today, I stress not only the balance that is so necessary in order to truly grow and gain clarity, but I also stress how necessary it is that you truly accept each moment of your life upon that earth as most necessary for you personally to learn from.

Do not dismiss your issues and problems and seek to run or hide from them. Do not pretend that they don’t exist or that you are above them in any way, but accept them as significant markers of your journey, lessons that you personally must learn something from. See your difficulties in life as the tools to learning what to do next, as the next steps along your path.

In order to get beyond anger and disappointment one must truly embrace life as it comes, every aspect as meaningful and not only to be gotten through, but as times of learning. And what is it you are supposed to be learning? You are learning how to balance the reality of your world with the truth of your innocent self, who truly wants to live but who must wait for you to prepare the way so that it will be safe for that innocent self to emerge and be with you in the world. You must prepare the way by becoming strong and thick-skinned enough to withstand all that life could possibly throw at you, so that your spiritual one may join you in life, knowing that you have prepared the way.

In preparing your life so that you may allow your innocent spirit self to join you in it, your goals become clearer. As you barge ahead and remove the obstacles to your true self, and the life your true self desires, you are actually setting your intent to merge your present self with the desires of your inner spirit self.

This process does take a lot of work as you determine what is right for you in your life, what you want in it and what you don’t want in it. As you prepare your future, holding firmly to your inner spirit’s desire for true emergence and mergence, you will more clearly see what you must do. You will more clearly see the choices as either progressive or detrimental. You will see the decisions as clearly defined, as right or wrong for the desires of your spirit self.

In order to truly grow upon that earth, to take a real journey of enlightenment, you must allow your spirit to accompany you. Even though that innocent aspect of self must wait patiently for the right time to join you in a more pronounced manner, so must you allow it to speak up as your outer self battles the world and takes on what gets thrown at you. To deal with the outer world is so important, but it must be done with the whispers of your innocent spirit self constantly in your ear, allowed to speak up, even though its emergence may be far off. Your innocent spirit self is your greatest guide, so do not neglect or dismiss it from your daily life. For even as you may wish to hide from what the world shows that you must tackle, so may you be equally ready to hide from what your spirit shows you that you must tackle.

Listen and pay attention to both the outer world and the inner world. They are both present to guide you and show you the steps that will lead you to a merger of these two selves in trustful, loving, appreciative partnership, together on a journey that is indeed quite amazing.

Can you get beyond this moment in your life, by totally taking it in and working it for what it is showing you about your self and your true desires in life? Can you brighten your day by taking command of the self and possessing the inner self as often as you possess who you are outerly? Can you take the next step in conscious contrast to the fearful self, no longer hiding, but fully exploding into owning the truths of the self? In other words, can you take the next step for the self?

That is your challenge today. And it will be your challenge tomorrow, and the next day. The challenge is to own the desires of the self by taking over the strengths of the self on your own behalf, wasted not on attempts to enlighten another, but spent on fully allowing the self to reach your own enlightenment, guided solely by you, the inner you and the outer you. You are in control at all times. But you must discover what that means each day, and how best to use it for true growth leading to balance and delight.

A Day in a Life: 10 Steps in Inner Work & Recapitulation

With today’s message, Jeanne gives us the tenth step in engaging in a process of inner work and recapitulation that I began channeling on January 29, 2010. The last ten messages have been around this process. To recap they are:

1. Patience
2. Perseverance
3. Kindness
4. Innocence
5. Maturity
6. Commitment
7. Fearlessness
8. Truthfulness
9. Responsibility
10. Letting Go

Each one of the topics above is linked to its original message so that you may more easily find each step and keep them together, valuable tools in the recapitulation process, which is really what inner work is all about. I will also add them to the sidebar, under Guidance, for easy access. Although I do not, at the moment, have the intention of continuing along this line of questioning when I resume our channeling sessions on Monday, you never know. There just might be more to come. But, on the other hand, having engaged and being engaged in the process of recapitulation myself, I think these ten steps are pretty detailed and offer quite a lot to work with for some time to come.

In my own process, which started in earnest about ten years ago, I can attest that I did in fact go through each one of these steps, and they are still useful, because each day as new challenges are presented the process of growth continues, if you choose to engage it. The process never really ends, but advancement is certain. As you do the work, you do change. I can attest to that too.

As I channeled these ten steps over the past several weeks I recognized them as very familiar and very challenging friends, friends that I grew to know intimately as I worked with and through my inner world in a very thorough recapitulation. That recapitulation consisted of removing the veils of time and uncovering and facing memories, fears, ideas, truths and untruths of who I was, who I had become, and why, but also gaining clarity on who I once really was behind the veils and who I had the potential to really become as I allowed the process to unfold. I can say that having taken that journey, having plunged ahead through some very difficult stuff, that you can truly change. I did. I would not be here, doing this today, if I had not dared to take the inner journey.

So, Good Luck as you undertake the deeper inner journey! Feel free to post comments below. There are a lot of people trying to figure out what their lives mean and you never know if by sharing some experience of yours you might help another.

Until next time,
Jan

#657 Letting Go

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.

#656 Responsibility

Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Last night, I dreamed this question: Who is really in charge? In my dream I felt that it referred to integrating all the parts of the self, by first identifying those parts and how they operate. Is this the next step in our inner work?

My Dear One, inner work requires taking full responsibility for the self and, yes, that includes all aspects of the self. One must fully understand how one operates under many circumstances and in many different roles, taking full responsibility for each of these separate aspects of self, those who are known and those who are unknown. In order to more fully explore this process one must understand that this is very deep inner work. It is a process that is mostly played out innerly. As each part of the self emerges it plays its role, most assuredly innerly, having its way there before it ever emerges in the outer world, before it shows itself in an outer way.

The inner process is most intriguing in this manner. Your inner self may shift and a new self emerge long before you are aware of it. And, yes, it may be triggered by what is happening outside of you, but more often than not it is triggered by your own inner workings and this is where your task must focus: on determining who is really in charge inside you. This requires taking full responsibility for the inner self, for all the parts of the self, those who are most often present, those who slumber, and those who attempt to emerge and live in your worlds, both inner and outer.

Who is in control? Who is making you do what you do? Who is creating the havoc and the dilemmas that you face? Who is responsible for your attitudes, moods, feelings, emotional states, and your choices and challenges? Well, who do you think? You are, of course!

Being able to accept full responsibility for the self requires taking responsibility for the inner self as well as the outer self. It requires identifying and studying who you are and how you operate in the world, but more thoroughly how you operate inside of you. And you are really the only one who can do this because you are the only one who is present inside of you.

You may think that you are infected with energy of another, and for all intents and purposes you may be, but that does not relieve you of the fact that your own inner energy, of one sort or another, has been awoken by such an invasion. Do not dismiss any coincidences as merely that, as merely passing things of insignificance, for if you do that you will lose an important point that must be noted. Inner work requires just that, inner work. And who better to do such work than you, the inner you.

I suggest, in order to get to the bottom of the inner process, that you make note of all the parts of the self that emerge. Note how they appear, how they seep into your inner world, how they act once there, and how you feel as a result of their presence. Then you must find a means of acceptance, because this person you may suddenly find yourself to be is in fact you, as odd as that may seem.

You can have many parts without being crazy. You can have many parts and, unless you pay attention to them, you may not know they are there. But once you turn inward and investigate how they operate inside you, you will recognize them and know they are indeed part of you. This process is a process of taking full responsibility for all aspects of self. In so doing you are learning the first steps in integration of self.

I do not ask you to love all these parts of your self, for I do not find that possible until you really get to know them and allow then to speak up as to why they are there and what message they have for you. Only in fully understanding their role in your life will you one day be able to love them, but until then you might as well accept that you may not even like them, so loving then is not an option either.

Find out who you are inside the self. Take full responsibility for all aspects of the inner self by acknowledging the fact that you are really quite mysterious, especially to your self. Allow your self to investigate the true meaning of each one of your inner parts, their roles and their processes, how they work inside of you and what they are showing you about your self. Treat each part with reverence and wonder, for they have found ways to present themselves to you through all your defenses and pretensions, through your oblivion and your denial.

Be amazed at the process that you confront each day, for each day is different. You are different each day too, but you must find out just what that means and take full responsibility for being that new inner being and fully explore the possibilities and potential being offered as you do your inner work.

#655 Truthfulness

Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
I channel again for all of your Readers. What message of guidance do you have for us today, either regarding our inner work or any other subject you wish to talk about?

The subject of inner work commands quite a bit of attention because, as you know, it is a continual process, if you dare to attend to it as a lifelong endeavor. You will never lack for interesting challenges and discoveries if you allow the self to proceed on the inner journey. In guiding the self forward, think now upon that self as knowing exactly what to do next. Allow your physical, mental and emotional self to show you what you personally must attend to next.

Use your awareness to guide you. Use your inner knowing and your outer presence to guide you to deeper self-contemplation, truthfully. Allow your awareness of self to be bathed in the light of truth. This is not only your next step in the process of inner work, but your constantly guiding light.

Truthfulness with self must always be your goal, and although you may be afraid to hear and see your own truths, so must you approach them, knowing that they wait for you within, in the dark caverns of your psyche, embedded inside you. Your inner work must uncover even that which lies so deeply hidden that you have not even found a hint of its existence inside you yet. Your inner work must contain an element of daring in order to dig ever deeper, unafraid to know your deepest secrets. In truthfulness will you not only discover that which is most dark about the self, but you will understand how darkness affects others as well, and you will grow, not only personally, but as a human being in the world.

As you truthfully explore the self, as you further discover your many-faceted reasons for doing things, as you discover your deepest desires and wants and needs, and understand them on newer levels, going beyond what is immediately apparent to make new discoveries about the self, you will further allow the self to bear not only your own truths, but the greater truths that all must bear. The darkest truths of the self are available to aid you in breaking down your defenses, your controls, and your demands of entitlement. For, as you break down, you will discover that you are the same as everyone else, that you are no more or less right or wrong, no more or less entitled, no more or less special, no more or less needy, no more or less traumatized, no more or less deserving than anyone else upon that planet. As you break down your doors and enter and explore new rooms of the self you will discover your self as equally energetically present upon that earth as all others. In truthfulness will you discover what it means to truly feel love and compassion, to truly be mature and responsible, and to truly live in that world and in your inner world as an evolving being.

In truthfulness lies the answer for all inner work. For the discovery of who you are and why you are there upon that earth at this time will only become known as you break through the barriers that now hold you back from knowing the truths of the self. In seeking truthfulness of self you will achiever greater understanding of self. You will become open to the energy of life around you, allowing the self to truly flow and truly find that your path will keep unfolding before you, rewarding you always with new direction, new ideas of self, and new growth opportunities.