Tag Archives: love

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Thoughts about Shame

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The gift of the movie Shame is the clear and brutal exposition of a path deeply hidden yet commonly taken, the path of sexual addiction.

At its heart, sexual addiction shares with all addictions the expropriation of an instinct, in this case the sexual instinct. Other addictions, such as food and chemical dependency, are more associated with the hunger instinct. Addiction numbs, soothes and keeps at bay the underlying challenges of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, integration, and true intimacy.

The sexual instinct, fully wrestled with and realized in maturity, brings in its wake bonding, union, love and new life. In addiction the sexual instinct is choked into compulsive release, offering little more than deepening alienation under the ever-present shadow of death.

Choked in shame!

The storyline of the movie gives us little history, but enough to know that life lived must be kept at bay, frozen and unprocessed. Human contact—seemingly at its most intimate in the sexual act—must be completely devoid of connection and feeling. Sex is completely severed from even a hint of love. The slightest hint of feeling renders the phallus flaccid, plunged into yet deeper shame.

And with shame comes the opportunity to be with the pain, to find the tearful circuits to emotional release, to begin to melt the frozen islands of fragmented self. But, as with all paths, sometimes the shock and pain of knowing the truth, and feeling it fully, sends us back into addictive behaviors and release, the wheel of groundhog days. Though this repetitive cycle appears to offer little resolution, in actuality, it allows us to engage in a truly instinctual/spiritual process, as we return to accrue more energy in the form of frustration and discontent, energy that one day will help us awaken and realize that we no longer need to stay on that wheel. We are fully prepared then to step beyond the path of shame into deeper connection and fulfillment.

The movie leaves us hanging, in an unresolved land with some painful truths revealed and many still deeply hidden. It leaves us uncomfortable, confronted with accepting the fact that we all face addiction of some sort in our lives, as well as some sort of shame.

Though addiction comes in many guises, at its core it nonetheless asks us to face the same things within ourselves as the protagonist in Shame is asked to face within himself: the uncomfortable truth.

Can we enter that land of truth? What do we stay addicted to that keeps us from not only facing our deepest pain but from going deeper into where it is instinctually guiding us? Can we allow ourselves to accept that in facing our truths we really will step onto a path of change? Can we bear the tension of that journey of change that seeks to lead us to true union?

Jan: Self-portrait at age 18—still asked by spirit to face truths in the light of day

Lift the veil of shame and see what’s beneath it. The ultimate realization is that we’re all on the same path; we’re all beings on our way to dying. Choosing addictions equals choosing attachments. How long do we really need to hold onto them? How long do we need to keep at bay the real truths of who we are, the truths of our lives lived and the truth of our lives yet to be lived? Can we stay open to our fullest potential—fulfillment in a life we can’t hold onto anyway? Because we do have to die.

The real question is: How do we want to live?

And the real crux of sex and love is: Can we allow ourselves to fully open to love in a life that will one day end? Can we join the spirit of love and fully merge with another human being? Can we love someone who may leave us and someone who surely is going to die? If love is spirit and sex is matter—which is transitory—can we allow ourselves to drop all addictions and attachments, and all our shame too, and truly merge the two?

Full union of spirit and matter is letting love in. There is no shame in that.

Chuck, with love and thanks for some expert editing by Jan.

Messages from Jeanne

#759 Right Direction of Change

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Written by Jan Ketchel with a channeled message from Jeanne Ketchel.

As I observe nature in spring unfolding, I feel the urgency to keep up, to keep changing and growing too, to not waste a second, but to continually evolve. This is not an urgency to go beyond nature, but to go more deeply into it, to learn from it, both how to live in better alignment with it, part of it, as well as how to better understand life and the meaning of human existence.

Today, I ask Jeanne: What guidance can you offer as I struggle to evolve in right alignment with nature?

Jeanne responds:

Do not look too far beyond your own intimate world for the signs and guidance you need in order to learn about the meaning of life. Each one of you have, within your home environment, the seeds of nurturance and evolution. Whether those are seeds of sustenance or seeds of decay, so are they seeds of change. Whether your tendency is to attach to a positive outlook or a negative outlook on life, so are you fully equipped with the tools you need to change.

Begin where you are, with what you have. State your intent to change, grow, learn, and then allow nature within the self to guide you on your journey.

Are you stuck in inertia? In complacency? Are you not sure? Or are you simply unaware of your true state?

It does not matter what your mind knows or does not know, so much as what the stirrings of your spirit know. True spirit knowing is often fear inducing, for your spirit is your greatest challenger, confronting you always with the truth of your situation.

You may wish to blame others or the outer world for your predicaments and circumstances, but, in truth, only you are to blame for your life, your situation in life, your health, your awareness, your clarity, your abilities to dare yourself to move on and truly live a full life.

Do not turn to others to resolve or solve your most urgent matters, but constantly turn inward and ask the self to show you the way. It may help to SLOW DOWN, even though you may feel the urgency of nature unfolding all around you. Slow down and OBSERVE how nature reacts to situations it finds itself in. Observe the SPIRIT of nature itself as unbending, unbreakable, unthwarted by what comes from the outside. Spirit leads to understanding LIFE itself, and this is where your most necessary lesson is—in learning to grasp what the energy of LIFE, that which you all hold within your personal world, really means to you as an individual and as a member of the society you live in.

The world is large and diverse, and populations are at different stages of life, yet each population and each individual within those populations around the world are living a life of meaning, potential, and purpose. It is up to you to find the true meaning for your life and act upon it with energy, daring, and in right alignment with the truth of all nature.

When Jeanne says this it reminds me of what the Buddhists say, that everyone has within them the true potential to be a Buddha.

Jeanne continues:

Within your personal permaculture must you each find your rhythm, your sustenance, your signs of growth. Within yourself must you seek your guidance.

When Jeanne said the word “permaculture” I immediately understand this to mean the physical body, that our bodies themselves are our total and complete world—that everything we need is embodied within the permaculture of our human, physical form. This is what she refers to when she speaks of our true natural world. We must keep it in balance, richly tended, attended to like a good organic farmer.

Jeanne goes on to say:

Look to nature at your feet, not at someone else’s, for your personal direction. Look for guidance in your own heart, not someone’s else’s, for your knowing. Look for the answers to your questions in calmness of self, knowing full well that your outer world is showing you that it is only within the self that truth and spirit lie.

The events outside of your inner world, even the events around the greater world, as they erupt daily, effecting everything about your life, are really only pushing you to confront your own inner events and conflicts, for that is where your life energy resides, caught in conflict.

Even as you work your soil, take in the sunlight, the moonlight, and connect to your natural world, dig deeper within, for that is your fertile ground where all the answers lie, seeds waiting for your mind to release them. They hold enough energy to burst open without your controlling mind attaching importance based on old, outer knowledge. That is done now. It is the inner knowledge of the ancient self that must come forth and guide each one of you now.

If you want to change your world—your personal world as well as your greater world—you must change the self, otherwise there will be no success. Lift your heavy mantles of intellect now, the mantles of rational thought, as great and powerful as they are. There is nothing so great and knowledgeable as the true knowing heart of each one of you.

The Ancient Circulating in Nature

Join in heart-centered energy and find the answers you seek. You will recognize them immediately, for they have always resided inside you. You have used them many times to guide you in the past. In all lifetimes, these are the answers you seek. Your ancient answers, your ancient knowledge—which has been circulating for eons—has always spoken, always been present in some form. You just have to hear it, recognize it, feel your true heart’s response, and get in alignment.

Watch out for the false words and the false heart’s response. Watch out for the ego’s alignment. Danger lies in this alignment. You know what I’m talking about: FEAR!

Yes, I must interject here, because I do know exactly what she means. Jeanne warns us earlier in this message that: True spirit knowing is often fear inducing. This is where we must face our greatest challenges because, indeed, fear shows us where we have to go to really change and grow. Normally fear makes us want to run back into our old comforts, but the true challenge is to confront the fear, go through it, and find out what it has been blocking us from. This is the challenge of recapitulation, to keep facing the fear rather than retreat into our old world, our old behaviors, and our old ideas of self. If we don’t face our fears we will never change our world.

Jeanne offers this final advice today:

Turn now toward LOVE, universally present inside all of you.

That’s enough for today. Find the difference between LOVE and FEAR, between the heart’s true alignment and the ego’s false alignment. This is where you will distinguish between right direction of change and old direction of complacency and no real change at all.

It takes daring to change. Watch Nature. It shows you all that you need to learn how to face the daring self who truly desires change, as the daring self challenges the fearful self.

Most humbly offered,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: From the Archives Again

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While Chuck continues a break from routine we offer another look at a post from the archive. Here is Impermanence, originally posted on February 21, 2009:

Several times last weekend my thoughts and feelings were energetically drawn to a dear woman I knew, though had not seen in some time. On Monday a voice mail from her husband, asking me to call, confirmed what I had already sensed: her passing; the reality of impermanence. I thank her for sharing her passing with me from her energetic form.

The Buddha, in deep meditation, discovered why we suffer: we cling to the false belief that things will never change. To be born in this dimension, on earth, we indeed reside in a physical form that will age and wither and we will die. Sorry folks, but that’s the truth! We will love, we will attach to those we love, we will decay, they will decay, they will die, we will die. Death, for the body, truthfully, is rarely a pleasant process. Morphine is, indeed, a godsend.

Personally, I have done that journey. My depth of love for Jeanne, in this world, knew no bounds. Her death, for me, truthfully, was utter joy. I was given the privilege of delivering her to the next step, at the right time, in alignment with her truth. For me, that was the ultimate fulfillment of our earthly love.

The gift I have been given by Jeanne leaving this world is the opportunity to experience the evolution of love beyond the body, beyond this world. This is not an instantaneous occurrence, but a long process, taking several years, perhaps a lifetime, as I make decisions and choices on my journey without her physical presence, learning to reconnect with her in infinity as a spiritual being. Part of this process entails learning to release myself from my old contracts that no longer work, such as upholding old ideas of the self, expectations of society, expectations of family, and mental constructs about love, about being a man, a father, and the nature of family, all illusions of permanence.

Furthermore, I am offered the opportunity to experience reincarnation without death. I have entered a new life, fully connected to and aware of my recent life with Jeanne. I have opened to new love, relationship, and marriage. I accept, from hard earned experience, that all love, attached to the physical form, is impermanent. Earthly love tempts us to grasp onto our physical form, to stay young, to keep things permanent. Like the young Siddhartha, we are barricaded behind the walls of our illusion that everything we see is permanent, especially our physical bodies and our loved ones. In fact, now, with the advent of Viagra, we are treated to the fountain of youth, offering eternal erections, undying physical love!

The denial of death abounds despite the overwhelming evidence of decay and death all around us. In spite of the underlying reality of our inevitable death, we live encased in the illusion of physical immortality. We are shocked when our dear friends and loved ones become ill and die. We cling to ignorance, it simply won’t happen to me! And so, we suffer. Not because of decay and death, but because we stubbornly live in the illusion of permanence. In order to complete the reincarnation cycle now, in this life, we must embrace impermanence. This requires releasing our illusions of physical immortality, which, in essence, is detachment from the illusion of permanence.

Most important is to remain fully open to life in a world of impermanence. This is the gift Jeanne has given me and presents to all of us. In practicality, this means entering a new life with no illusions. Fully opening to life without illusion is opening to infinite love, reconciling something that dies with something that doesn’t. Opening to new life, fully, requires a release from all prior contracts and grief, what Jeanne calls recapitulation. Through emptying our selves of the burdens of life lived, we are freed to enter new life, fully open, fully capable of loving, and fully aware and connected to the truth of our prior life. That is opening the door to infinity. There is no longer a need to reincarnate, as we have completed unfinished business, because, with truth, there is no need to remain attached to the illusion of permanence. We don’t have to hide from anything we have ever done and we are fully open to any experience. We are ready for the truth and full experience of energetic infinity.

From this stance, we can fully enjoy the impermanence of our life, in this world, as we reconcile the paradox of what we are, finite and infinite. What is finite is our body; it will end. What is infinite in us is that which attaches to nothing and continues to ride the eternal wave of energetic change, fully engaging, experiencing, loving, and releasing when it’s time to go, with full memory and love of where we have been.

Until we meet again, in one form or another,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#705 Chuck’s Place: Necessary Encounters

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We are here for a reason. I base that statement not on a belief but on experience: my own and that of the many people who have shared their journeys with me. We discover our reason for being here in hindsight. We have to be here for quite a while before we awaken to the core drama we have been starring in. The resolution of that drama is why we are here.

The process of waking up to our reason for being here is what sets the stage for our necessary encounters, knocks at the door of our awareness. Necessary encounters are the cast of characters and life circumstances that make up our many groundhog days in this world. We are necessary prisoners to our dramas. This point is critical in suspending judgment about ourselves, for the quagmires we find ourselves in.

Of course, we find ourselves in, put ourselves in, create and author the repetitive, redundant, dysfunctional circumstances of our lives. It is necessary that we do so in order to accomplish, through resolution of our core drama, our reason for being in this world. There is no blame for being in the dysfunction we are in. We need to be there and repeat it as long as we need to, until we are ready to awaken to the drama we are in, take responsibility for it, and resolve it.

Solution may or may not come in this lifetime. From my experience with past life regressions, our present life circumstances are the necessary dramas recast from unresolved past life issues. This, if I understand it correctly from a Buddhist perspective, is the essence of why we reincarnate.

If, upon death, there is no drama left in this world that we are attached to, we will no longer reincarnate. To incarnate is to hold onto an issue or a need upon dying, which then becomes the nucleus of a restructured life in this world, as it encodes the instructions to recreate life circumstances that provide necessary encounters with the unfinished issue. Hence, reincarnation is the process of gathering the necessary materials, people, and circumstances to be born into, in order to relive the drama in another attempt at resolution and completion.

Though our individual dramas may vary from person to person, I’ve come to the conclusion that the overarching drama or reason for being in this world, is to reconcile total love with total detachment. I come to this conclusion from the following facts:

1. We are born into this world and must, in infancy, attach to another through a love connection or we will die through a failure to thrive. Granted, that “attachment” and “love” may be severely twisted and dysfunctional, but there must be some taste of it, however dysfunctional, to stake a claim to life in this world.

2. At the other end, we must die and relinquish everything we have attached to, physically and emotionally, in this world.

Of course, we have the right of refusal to detach from our physical and emotional attachments upon dying, though we cannot refuse death itself. Yet, in a sense, since we can refuse to detach, which triggers reincarnation, we could view reincarnation as its own form of eternal life upon this earth. This is so because refusal to detach results in repeating old dramas in new lives, a cosmic groundhog day where we refuse to die and change form; we refuse to evolve into energetic beings.

There is no judgment here, as once again we must stay in the lives we are in, with their necessary encounters, until we are ready to awaken, take responsibility, completely detach and move on. This can only happen if we have also achieved the place of ultimate love. For short of it, we are left with longing—the essence of a need to reincarnate to find fulfillment and completion.

In the end, love and detachment are the opposites, the cross we bear in this world that we must reconcile to find completion on this plane. With completion we continue our journey in infinity, as energetic beings graduated from this lovely world of special love and attachments.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#701 Chuck’s Place: Love & Sex

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Love is of spirit; sex is of body. Our deepest challenge as human beings is to reconcile our ethereal, eternal spirit —that which precedes and succeeds our current life— with our corporal, animal, instinctual, physical body —that which has a definite beginning and a definite end. Animal/Spirit, Soma/Psyche, Finite/Infinite; these are the oppositions we are forced to suffer if we are to achieve fulfillment and solve the true riddle of life on this plane. Of course, there are those who would argue, with rational stamina and certainty, to the contrary.

At a recent dinner party, in a somewhat instigative and provocative mood, I posed the question: “What do you think happens when you die?” I got a quick: “Nothing, lights out!” I turned to another: “Lights out!” With this, I just let it rest. My reason wasn’t up to the argument. Lights out is simply a deus ex machina that doesn’t do justice to the paradox of a life fully lived.

I begin with the following paradox: Why, so often, are so many people so sexually dissatisfied with the person they are most secure and compatible with—spiritually in tune with? I suggest that this fragmentation of our spirit and animal selves begins with our birth into family. The family is the matrix we are born into and which ultimately forms the foundation of what we strive for: love and fulfillment. However, the incest taboo creates an impenetrable barrier to the animal that we are: sexual feelings for family members are strictly verboten. The place where we begin our lives, hopefully in unconditional love and security, does not welcome our animal, sexual selves.

I already sense a growing anxiety in my reader at this point, even the mere mention of sex and family can be alarming, such is the power of the incest taboo. Let me assure all, I am a firm upholder of the value and necessity of the incest taboo. The incest taboo is universal, a part of human culture from time immemorial. Some suggest it to be the humanizing instinct, a powerful archetype governing the behavior of the human animal. My focus here is examining its impact on splitting the psyche, the bearer of love, from the body, the bearer of sexuality. This universal fragmentation is a necessary consequence of being human, a wound that haunts the individual in acceptance of his or her instinctual nature. The consequence for relationship is the challenge of bringing love and sex together in relation to one person.

I stress that I am writing about the incest taboo and not incest. I have spent much of my professional life helping clients traumatized by familial violations of this taboo. My purpose here is to point out the inevitable consequence of the taboo: the splitting of love and sex. The incest taboo demands that family, as our first and often deepest experience of love, completely disallow our animal, instinctive, sexual selves from attaching to the same object of our deepest love. This most primal experience of love, rejects, denies, and repels the animal, which must be repressed, ignored, sentenced to the darkness and reserved for some future expression elsewhere, beyond the family. The byproduct of this most necessary separation of sexuality from family is the experience that love and sex are incompatible. This is the indelible primal imprint that we all take forward into adult life.

This is the incest taboo wound, the archetypal fall that we all suffer. Once man stole consciousness, that is, spirit, he was thrown out of the paradisal garden of instinctual freedom. In life, we strive desperately to return to the garden but are saddled with the split between our spirit and our body. We cannot return to the garden as full human beings —psyche and soma— if we cannot merge love and sex in a relationship with one person. We are granted respites in the garden when we mysteriously fall in love. In this bewitching time of falling in love, we reenter the garden, fully united in spirit and body: paradox resolved, psyche and soma as one. Our animal selves are fully released as we unite with our lover in carnal and spiritual bliss.

Unfortunately, the spell of falling in love is time-limited and soon we must return to the barrenness of life outside the garden, as we discover mother, father, sister, brother, in the eyes and behaviors of our lover. Once our lover becomes too familiar, the incest taboo is stirred, with the necessary consequence of the lifting of romance, as we return to the primal dilemma of the incompatibility of love and sex. Sex becomes labored, uncomfortable, avoided, or routine; the animal wants out of this incestuous cage, perhaps through secret fantasy or secret affair. Perhaps bliss can be extended until the arrival of a child in a family. With the addition of child, lovers must contend with a new role in their own relationship. They are now parents as well as lovers, which triggers the prohibitions of the incest taboo in their own relationship and can severely impact a return to a loving sexual relationship.

It was Freud’s bleak view that the achievement we call Civilization, with all its Discontents, is the sublimated byproduct of the incest taboo. Essentially, for him, ego, or spirit, is the psychic humanizing factor that substitutes civilization for its forsaken instinctive, unrealized, incestuous desires.

Jung, from a more positive perspective, viewed the frustrated libido as the birth of the imagination, which offers a venue for the human animal to reconcile psyche and soma, love and sex, and achieve wholeness.

For the seers of ancient Mexico, the resolution of this dilemma never went beyond the body, as they do not recognize a separation of psyche and soma. As I quoted Carlos Castaneda, last week, from The Wheel of Time (p. 199): “All the faculties, possibilities, and accomplishments of shamanism, from the simplest to the most astounding, are in the human body itself.” The seers’ path is to discover the body as solid and as energy, one in the same. For those seers, achieving the fluidity to alternate between these two states —one finite, the other infinite— solves the riddle of life on this plane.

For those engaged in relationship as a path to wholeness, I encourage containment and openness. For a detailed description of this process I refer the reader to The Book of Us, in particular to chapter three, A Jamaican Retreat, Our Alchemical Oven, where Jeanne and I undertook such a journey in this world. By containment, I mean commitment to a process within a sealed relationship. Interestingly, as I was preparing this essay, I opened the latest Psychotherapy Networker magazine. The picture on the cover is of a wedding cake with a bride flanked by two grooms. The title article is called: The New Monogamy, can we have our cake and eat it too? I quote from the article:

“Within the new notion of monogamy, each partner assumes that the other is, and will remain, the main attachment, but that outside attachments of one kind or another are allowed—as long as they don’t threaten the primary connection.” (July/August 2010 p. 23)

This direction in marriage essentially maintains the fragmentation of psyche and soma, as they remain unrealized and un-united in an individual’s relation to one other person. It’s simply another form of triangulation, where the tension of combining love and sex is dispersed, allowing for fragmentary visits to the garden in separate relationships.

With the container sealed there must be openness. By openness, I mean a gradual, but ultimately full revelation of all the truths of the self, including the deepest somatic fears and desires of the animal. This is the healing of the incest taboo wound, as we push beyond its taboos and allow for ultimate spiritual intimacy and animal sexuality to come together with our lover.

The riddle of psyche and soma, the core paradox and challenge of life on this plane can be resolved through many paths: a journey within the self, a journey of relationship, or a shamanic journey. The essential tools in all of these journeys to wholeness are containment of the opposing forces within the self and openness to all the truths of the self inherent in these forces.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

The books mentioned, The Wheel of Time under the Shamanism category and The Book of Us are available in our Store.