Tag Archives: maturity

Beyond Facebook: The Spirit of Maturity

With spirit’s intent there are no limits…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

This past week we withdrew from Facebook. We are no longer posting on it. We were always of two minds about using it. We didn’t use it in the way that most people use it, never having engaged in searching for old friends or using it to connect with people we knew.

We used it solely as a platform for our work, sort of as an extension of our website, but even so, we didn’t really like what was behind it. Last week’s testimony by whistleblower Frances Haugen clarified for us the deeper truth about it and underscored our persistent uneasiness.

We offer tools for healing from abuse and trauma. Our intent in sharing our work and our lessons in life has always been to offer what we’ve learned without strings attached, freely given. That is not, nor has it ever been, the intent of Facebook.

After listening to Haugen’s testimony, it became clear to us that the Facebook corporation has been complicit in systematically grooming young children, and even adults, to adopt addictive behaviors that lead to harmful and even damaging mental, physical and spiritual trauma. Though not necessarily malevolent in its intent, Facebook has nonetheless been neglectful in its effort to correct these commercially driven destructive practices.

How could we utilize Facebook and piggyback off it, when we are all about healing? How could we use a platform that has done harm to the innocent? How could we allow our healing work to sit on a platform that doesn’t care about people, only about making more and more money, no matter who falls by the wayside while they do it?

The time had finally come. What we had talked about for months, became the action of the day: remove our energy from Facebook and no longer use it to promote our healing work.

Although our pages, as previously published, still remain accessible, we do not look at them and, at some point, when we feel that everyone who has been used to reading us via Facebook has become familiarized with accessing us directly through our website, we will fully remove them.

Facebook has become the major social network to empower all citizens of the world to connect directly with each other. That in itself is not a bad thing. The byproduct of such access, however, has also entrapped much of the world’s energy in the insatiable need to be liked, what the shamans call the trap of self-importance. Self-importance and insatiable greed have undermined our moral compass.

Recent revelations have clearly exposed the preeminence of algorithms for profit over the common good, as the operating principle for the publicly traded Facebook corporation. From the economic perspective that values maximum profit as a most legitimate goal, Facebook is no different than most corporations. The old axiom, “the business of America is business”, has become anachronistic, driving us, in the extreme, to the brink of destruction.

Our planetary and species survival is contingent upon a way of life that accepts modesty, limitation and equanimity as its guiding principles. The quest for unlimited profit has compromised our moral underpinnings and the common good. We are evolving into a species that must operate from the place of truth and true need to insure our survival on our rapidly changing planet. This, as the new algorithm, places the true needs of the planet and its inhabitants above the profit motive.

What is the alternative? Specific to our decision to leave Facebook we call to the intent that those who would truly benefit from what we have to offer will find their way to our offerings. In fact, this has been the overarching intent that has always controlled the unfolding events of our lives.

The overarching intent of the individual spirits of all human beings is that we mature in this life. This spirit intent is materialized at the center of the subconscious mind, that which naturally attracts to it the physical circumstances necessary to advance its maturity.

The marketing psychologists of the early 20th century discovered and exploited this attractive function in the subconscious, which they infiltrated with advertising suggestions to make a profit. This drove a wedge in the human species, between listening to the guidance of the inner spirit vs the outer promptings of the marketplace, with all its hypnotic suggestions.

Spirit intent never abandoned human life, but the challenge for ego to  trust its guidance has greatly compromised its ability to choose wisely and trust its own heart and mind. Outside approval and likes have become the measure of personal value and has commandeered the direction of intent.

Take back your intent. Refuse the ruse and dependence upon a way of life that places the influence of heartless marketing above the truth of the heart. Trust that placing your intent upon your heart’s truth is all that is necessary to attract to you exactly what you truly need to advance your spirit’s maturity in this life. Advancing in maturity is the real solution to this world’s survival.

May the business of America become the Spirit of Maturity,

Jan and Chuck

Chuck’s Place: The Divine Child

Divine potential lies within all of us…
Artwork © 2021 by Jan Ketchel

Qualities that spring to mind when one associates to the child include innocence, purity, vulnerability, love, new life and divinity. From the shadow side come qualities of dependency, immaturity, neediness and entitlement.

Contemplating one’s inner child often evokes tender and sad feelings, as one is transported to crushing moments of lost innocence and shame when the child self retreated from life into the safety of a well-guarded inner fortress. Often the adult ego colludes with this life sentence, preferring an unfulfilled life to one of a potential lethal re-wounding of its precious innocence.

The challenge to the adult ego is to partner with its inner child and, through a shared journey of recapitulation, enable the child’s innocence to emerge from isolation into current life. The adult ego must fully experience and accept the emotional, physical and cognitive dimensions of its younger self’s frozen traumas.

Most important, the adult ego teaches the child that wounding is a normal part of life and that, although all indeed seek to avoid it, the reward of openness to life is worth the necessary wounds that may accompany such exposure. With resilience, fortified with self-acceptance and awe, one is freed to branch deeper into real life. Further, one knows that all wounds can be healed.

Sometimes the ego avoids a recapitulation and becomes a defense attorney for its wounded child, seeking retribution for its lost innocence. Certainly this has a place in validating the impact of abuses upon a child.

Often, however, the ego—out of guilt, sadness or anger—elevates the child’s sense of entitlement to its own marching orders. This tends to burden it with negative resentful feelings that do little to advance the freeing of the child. Retrieval of the lost child and bringing it into life requires the transformation and evolution of original innocence into matured innocence. This requires the acceptance and the letting go that is characteristic of a thorough recapitulation.

Jung writes, in The Red Book: “He who still has his life before him is a child.

Thus, the child, as an expression of life continuously growing, open to the ever-unfolding mystery of infinity, is indeed the ultimate symbol of divinity. To be divine is to be one with the Spirit of infinite growth, regardless of one’s age or dimension of being.

To embody the excitement, the anticipation of the new life in each moment of every new day is to fully live one’s divinity. This is life lived beyond all the usual worries and attitudes that level the soulful experience of unfolding time.

Unfortunately, the ego, charged with the rudiments of survival while in human form, quickly dampens the spark of discovery with its well-established routines of daily life. The ego’s crowning achievement is the meeting of its established goals versus indulging the spirit of discovery.

The divine child is hardly childish, resentful or entitled. The divine child, having resurrected from its wounded traumas, has freed itself from the full body cast of victimhood. Fully engaged in life, the divine child shines its radiant innocence upon the ever-deepening mystery and fulfillment of its infinite life.

A humble ego, accepting the stewardship of the divine child, is the essence of the biblical suggestion that one must become like the child to truly enter heaven. Heaven, in this context, is a locale of advancement, from which that ever-curious child will someday launch again on its infinite journey of becoming.

To become the divine child is indeed the true elixir of immortality. All are gifted the opportunity to quench their thirst with its spirit every humble day of mortal life, and then beyond.

To the spirit of the divine child,

Chuck

Soulbyte for Friday June 25, 2021

You are not your mother and your father, nor their fears or desires. You are your own self and in full control of your life, with the capacity to live your own life to the fullest. Let the fathers and mothers recede into the background now as you leave them behind and take over your own life, with your own dreams in the forefront, and with your own inspirations guiding you. No one needs a mother and father except when a child and no mother or father should keep their children close for life. Let them be and let yourself, the once child, fully be as well. All beings are spirit entities having a physical experience, wishing only for fulfillment, doing what they came to do without interference and with the independence to live life according to their own spirit’s plan.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Thursday April 15, 2021

Stop doing things that are bad for you and start doing things that are good for you in mind, body and spirit. Empower yourself with new and positive thoughts, actions and practices. Practice being a changed being until you are, until there is no doubt that you are being true to yourself in every way that makes you feel good about yourself. Formulate in your mind how you want to be so you can be happy. Visualize it, and then begin to enact the plan that will get you there. It may be hard at first, but keep the vision in your mind and soon it will be effortless; you won’t have to think about it anymore, you will just be doing it. In this way make yourself happy, healthy, and whole. It’s all in your hands.

Sending you love
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Monday March 1, 2021

Being responsible means taking full responsibility for the self, for choices made, even the most harmful and self-effacing, even those made in concert with another, for in the end, if a choice effects you it’s up to you to own it and resolve it. Being fully responsible for the self may mean rethinking choices and deciding to go in a new direction, or it may mean hunkering down and making the most of any given situation that still has merit. In the end, however, responsibility comes without blame or shame but full ownership if it is to be a truly fulfilling, honest and mature responsibility that is going to help you evolve. For in taking responsibility for your part in life’s activities you truly do grow and evolve.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne