If allowed, compassion knows no bounds. If practiced, love has no limits. If started, kindness spreads like wildfires. The human potential is unlimited and yet it is often not even given a chance. Begin with the self to turn on kindness, love and compassion. A little more each day goes a long way. One person’s input into making the world a better place really does matter.
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
This much I got right from my second grade religious instruction: God is everywhere. God is everything. Nothing that is, is not God. God is, simply, All That Is. Everything and everyone in our world is part of All That Is. We are all one. All includes both good and evil, in everyone.
We are a holographic universe. Shine a light on any one of us and all of us will appear. As within, so without. As above, so below. Our supposed individuality is simply what we emphasize in All That Is. Though we may emphasize the good, we are all equally, latently evil.
When we rigidly identify with the good, we project our evil outwardly, where someone else must vicariously live that side of our wholeness for us. This is the stalemate of extreme polarization: We hate our disowned shadows yet remain hopelessly, negatively bound to them, as they reflect in the faces of our supposed enemy.
To become whole beings we must include all that we truly are. Our personal drama for the life we are in reflects our attempt to reconcile the particular constellation of All That Is that we chose to experience in this lifetime. The ideal is a union of all our discordant parts into a balance that best serves the greater good.
Truthfully, sometimes the balance achieved is extremely volatile and destructive, as is quite evident in the greater world, particularly in America this very day. Nonetheless, for all of its unsettledness, our current world is fully an equal member of All That Is: All With Equanimity (AWE).
This wholeness does not mean that boundaries and limits are not to be exercised. As the Dalai Lama once answered when questioned, yes, he would use a gun to stop another from killing him. His caveat, however, was that he would not shoot in anger but with total loving compassion for the person trying to assassinate him.
To love everyone, we must begin with ourselves. We are tasked with loving every aspect of ourselves, even the body parts that we try so hard to hide. We must even love the part of ourselves that hates and judges ourselves and others. We must love that part of All That Is. Through loving that part we bring better stability into the dream we are in.
Can we love the greedy, unforgiving, entitled, self-serving, bitter part of ourselves that seeks release through vengeance and retribution? Can we allow ourselves to know and accept that part of our being that is so consciously rejected and buried alive within?
Can we love the mercenary, deceiving, selfish, power hungry materialist within that we dress over with generosity and random acts of kindness? To face the truth of, and love this part of self, we must remove its stigma and find its rightful home within, refining the personality to reflect its greater wholeness in better balance.
Outwardly, we are tasked to reclaim ownership of the parts of ourselves that we project onto others, those whom trigger us to rage and embroil us in a battle of opposites. Can we have compassion, even feel gratitude, for those who play such a vital mirroring role in our own journey of self discovery?
And yes, we may need to stop them or ignore them, but can we do it from a place of love versus hate? When we hate, we reject a vital part of All That Is. Short of full acceptance, that which we hate becomes our karma and our destiny.
When we can be in love, we raise our energetic vibration to a frequency that gives us direct access to our subconscious mind. The neural networks in our brain expand with harmonious neuroplasticity, as our emotions are elevated and calmed with in-body dopamine and serotonin.
Our brainwaves flow cohesively as our thoughts are calm and collected. Outwardly, we manifest positive vibrations that invite greater social cohesion. Even when all opportunity for outer connection is denied, we rest contentedly within, knowing that all things will pass.
I am particularly grateful to be able to participate in the leela, or Divine play, of now. I hold all epochs in AWE, but truly appreciate the unique opportunity of now, in this Age of Aquarius, to refine love to such subtle levels, as we manifest the next stage of our evolving dream.
With love and gratitude,
Chuck
*NOTE: I threw the I Ching, asking for a reading for America with respect to the outcome of the election today. I decided to suspend interpretation but share the hexagrams obtained, for review by anyone interested: Hexagram #12, Standstill, with the 9 in the 5th place highlighted. The future of this reading is #35, Progress. Do be sure to explore the 9 in the 5th place, which is the key to the whole reading. There are many I Ching interpretations, including the classic Wilhelm translation. A search online will reveal many options.
Keep your heart still and your mind clear, and remain open to all that life offers. With a calm heart everything is more acceptable, easier to assimilate and more likely to have a positive outcome. A calm heart is a meditative heart, and a meditative heart is open and available to love. Keep your heart on the loving channel. Meditate on being open and available and loving. There is nothing better than that!
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel
I, like all of us, have been challenged in this life to ascend another rung on the infinite ladder of love. I call that ladder infinite because love forever broadens as it rises to embrace the infinitude of all.
The challenge of reopening to love, once you’ve experienced love, as we all have, regardless of its level of fulfillment, is to grow that love forward. Love can only build upon the plateau of love you have already accrued.
We accrue love in many of our relationships in life, be they with humans, animals or trees. Letting go of a physical relationship can never erase the fact of that love, regardless of its ending in the materiality of this plane of life.
If you are to love again, you must include all the love you have ever experienced as the foundation for new love. However, that growing love must be separated from attachment to the nostalgic familiarity of forms and habits already lived. Love cannot grow if it remains tethered to a past life. And yes, one can have many lives in one physical life.
A sense of undying loyalty to a relationship that has physically ended binds love’s evolution and hinders maturity into new life. Successful mourning ultimately frees everyone to continue their journey into new possibilities. Allowing oneself to be vulnerable in a new encounter, while knowing through experience the disappointments of failures or missed opportunities in love, is a major growth point.
Jeanne and I had a contract in our earthly marriage that insisted we never impede each other’s growth. As our wedding song honestly stated, “our love will grow for all we know.” Vows simply do not guarantee that love will grow. If it’s not right, love insists you set each other free. It’s the truly loving thing to do.
We launched that contract to new levels when Jeanne left this world. She has since been an impeccable warrior; and she has almost completely refused to grant me a moment of familiar connection to our once-treasured earthly existence.
Our love grows now on the premise that we independently assume total responsibility for our lives and exercise total freedom in the different planes of existence that we currently reside upon. For Jeanne, that is life in the formless plane; for myself, it remains the continued life in physical form.
Of course, I must admit that Jeanne is a magical trickster, whose maneuvers upon the earthly plane have offered me enormous growth opportunities. But these gifts always come with the insistence that I assume total responsibility for the decision to live and realize the possibility in the seed of the offering. Our loved ones in infinity often challenge us to evolve in ways we’d prefer to avoid.
Jeanne was instrumental to the possibility that I might grow love forward in my relationship with Jan. To achieve this, I needed to fully embrace the love I’d accrued with Jeanne but then totally take it into new frontiers with Jan, completely detached from Jeanne in a personal sense. Yet that growing love is fully given to all, as we mature into beings who love with equanimity.
Jeanne, Jan and I are fully aware that we are part of the same soul group, whose goal—similar to the goals of all soul groups—is for all its members to fully master their individual challenges so that their group, as a whole, can ascend the infinite ladder of love.
Ultimately, there is only one soul group, the soul group of infinite Oneness. Ultimately, all soul groups will merge into that Oneness. An analogy would be the human body, which consists of countless soul groups, such as the soul groups of the liver, the heart, the kidneys, etc. All these distinct organ soul groups ultimately merge into the oneness of a human body.
I would venture to assert that all lives that currently reside upon this Earth plane are members of the same soul group. Yes, I concede that within that group are smaller more intimately connected groups, but we are all extant at this time to both challenge and support each other to advance the Earth dream we all reside in, to rise another rung on the infinite ladder of love. Clearly, to love is the only way to keep that dream alive.
Each of us have the opportunity to ascend the infinite ladder of love in this life. It begins with releasing attachment to the past life of our family of origin. While cherishing its memory and foundation in love, we allow all the members of our nuclear soul group family to shed their previous forms, as they grow their individual lives forward, whether it be upon a plane of form or a plane of formlessness.
Perhaps most significantly, we must allow our evolving selves to molt, to shed the skins of completed life, in the form of attachment to old ideas of self, and to be fully present to new possibility, as we bring life and love to the unlived sides of our soul’s potential.
To love the many lives of self through the developmental stages of this life, as well as all the people with whom we’ve shared those lives, while at the same time releasing all to their new lives, is the foundation to build new love upon, as we take another step upon the infinite ladder of love.
Love is all around you,
Come on and let it grow,
Chuck
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel
It begins with deep calm in the body, the soul’s physical extension into this life. The true father of all modern somatic therapy, Wilhelm Reich, brought intimate attention to the opposition between natural impulse and defense in human musculature.
The suppression of sexual and aggressive energies, as well as powerful emotions such as sadness, is executed through what Reich called body armoring, the tensing of muscles that freeze the free flow of instinctive and emotional energy.
A tense throat constricts the vocal expression of emotion. A tense belly and solar plexus create a wall that short-circuits the natural energetic current of tender emotion, natural reflex, and instinctive movement that issues from the lower half of the body.
Love is the energy of union and wholeness, the glue that binds together all of creation. To embody it we must soften our armored muscles.
The standoff between impulse and defense creates pools of charged energy, which in turn generates fears of an uncontrolled tidal wave of chaos and eventual loss of control. Indeed, a cathartic release, such as a deep cry or scream, might be necessary before a natural balance between expressive and receptive energies can be established.
One can directly speak to the body and receive a response. “Stomach, relax and release tension,” or “Shoulders, let down, release tension,” are suggestions to the body subconscious that result in immediate relaxing of rigidity.
Be gentle and accepting of small increments of release with each suggestion. Allow the body to gradually let go and adjust to the influx of freed energy. As the body musculature releases, invite and allow the breath to flow gently, expanding and opening new channels. The key word here is gentle. Follow each gentle breath with a slightly more deepening next gentle breath. Force nothing; gently widen the channel over time.
On the mental plane, Carlos Castaneda’s suggestion to suspend judgment is foundational. When we judge we create separation; this is good, that is bad. Thoughts, feelings, sensations and intuitions that are ‘bad’ are suppressed, and the body responds by rigidifying against them; they are not allowed.
In a shamanic recapitulation, or in an end of life review, as reported consistently by many who have experienced near-death experiences (NDE’s), the salient feature is total acceptance of every experience and every person one has experienced in life, regardless of their abuses and failures. This is the mood of love embracing everything with equanimity.
Boundaries may be absolutely necessary in this life but love knows no boundaries, all is accepted. Love and boundary can coexist. That was Christ’s golden message: Love All!
Total acceptance of self and other, of every aspect of life lived, and lost, is the path to embodying the mood of love.
Release, breathe, and accept,
Chuck