Tag Archives: not-doing

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: A Very Magical Time

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It’s been a little challenging lately to detach from all the political hoopla and hype, all the name-calling, finger pointing, joking, judging, and ugliness going on. In an effort to go into deeper solitude I’ve decided not to post what I consider apropos articles and blogs, even though they may certainly contain messages in alignment with what Chuck, Jeanne, and I regularly write about, because I find that my energy tends to stay stuck on them. Instead, I’m weaning myself off my usual checking-of-what’s-happening-in-the-media morning routine. Often just a quick fix—”Just to see what’s happening!”—I’ve decided to remove all the links from my bookmarks bar and stay away. Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping! There they go! I just removed myself from the Internet. It’s so easy and really so freeing! From this day forward I am not doing, as the shamans say.

Not Doing what I normally do allows for experiencing everything differently, even if ever so slightly. My intent now can focus on what’s most important to me personally rather than on what is being thrown in my face according to someone else’s intent, greed, passion, fixation, penchant or desire. No longer bombarded by ads, pop-up windows, moving icons, and numerous other distractions, I can stay focused on nature—the magic of real nature—inside myself and right outside my window.

As I experience the early morning hours, before most people are out of bed, I offer myself the opportunity to connect directly with nature’s process. I stir when the birds stir. I listen to their morning chatter, the darkness of the night gently moving aside as the sky begins to lighten in the East and I’m happy to be alive, right then, at that moment. It’s a special time. Just waking from dreams, I’m often still connected to other possibilities. Still softened by the night, I don’t immediately jump to thoughts, but let my senses, my intuition, my spirit speak to me. It’s a magical time.

The opportunities to do something personally desirable and fitting are fully available at 4:30 a.m. I can meditate, channel, pray, write in my journal, jot down my dreams, or simply stand on the deck and watch the birds, the deer, smell the dew, catch glimpses of the last stars and breathe in the cool morning air. It’s a magical time.

As I continue working on the final draft of my book, The Recapitulation Diaries: The Man in the Woods—the first of three volumes—I’m struck by how intensely healing it is to be able to squarely face our traumas, to relive them, and excise them from our bodies, minds, psyches and spirits. In so doing, we offer ourselves the opportunity to return to a natural state of being, or perhaps even for the first time to experience what it means to be calm and contented enough to feel present in this world. It was all I ever yearned for, to feel like I really belonged here and to find out why I existed. I could not have achieved the place of calmness I now inhabit had I not challenged myself to go on a journey of a lifetime: into myself. In fact, I am certain I would be dead, eaten away by the stuff that festered inside me.

Electing to take a recapitulation journey was perhaps the greatest conscious challenge of my lifetime, which led to my discovering that I was indeed opening up to a journey of magical proportions. My experiences, as I took that journey, unfolded most naturally, as I relinquished my hold on the things that I had always counted on, much as I did today in excising the media links from my web browser. As I took that recapitulation journey I had to turn my back on a lot of crutches, habits, behaviors, safety measures, and even relationships, that I thought I could not live without and throw myself out into the unknown. I had to dare myself again and again to face life and my recapitulating process with nothing familiar in hand. I had to continually challenge myself to break through the barriers that kept me from fully experiencing myself in the world. And truthfully, just as I experience early morning as a magical time, my recapitulation process was also a magical time.

Deciding to take a recapitulation journey is deciding to truly live—on personal terms—unfettered by opinions, judgments, rules, pacts, secrets and lies. It is choosing to deconstruct, sort through the mess, and reconstruct the self with only that which is personally relevant. At first it may indeed feel like a death, because it is a dying process as the old self dies and a new self, mostly unknown, dares to push into life. The process is natural. Like nature we too have the capability of dying to old ideas and old selves and allowing for new life.

Now, during this growing season, I watch the seeds I’ve planted bursting forth from the earth, thrilled at the speed and energy of this new life. As I listen to the birds and taste the wild strawberries, I am reminded that recapitulation, that death to new life, is the most natural of processes. As I walk, I find the road littered with the critters hit by cars, yet I know that the crows will soon swoop down and feed off the carcasses, death leading always to life giving energy. If we choose to view it as such, we clearly see that this is a most magical time.

In choosing not doing, I choose to live on my own terms. I choose to continue recapitulating, going even more deeply into myself, questioning my actions, my thought processes, my habits, challenging myself to keep changing, to keep doing things differently, to face life and to face death, knowing that both of them are part of the cycle of nature. I find that in studying nature and the ancients—the Shamans, the Buddhists, the Hindus, etc.; teachings connected with nature, spirit, energy, and the experiences of being in all worlds simultaneously—I am not so fraught with concern about the changes taking place on the world stage. I am not so caught up in the frenzy or worry, but taking it all very seriously nonetheless.

I know that I must do my part to energetically stay in alignment with nature, to trust that Mother Nature (Pachamama, Gaia) is doing what is appropriate—perhaps she too is recapitulating because she knows it is time to do so. The Earth, as a living being, is most powerful and decisive and I must trust that her own process must be as destructive as my own recapitulation process was when I began it ten years ago. I must continue to accept that destruction is necessary for new growth and that the things happening in the world are all in alignment with a far greater process that none of us can fully comprehend. It’s a magical time.

I look forward to not doing today and every day, to seeing what else comes to greet me, what naturally unfolds as I set about my workday. It’s exciting to be alive during this magical time. The energy of change is powerful. I choose to ride it. I hope you do too!

Meet you out there,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

#681 Chuck’s Place: Must be the Season of the Witch

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This week, I was drawn to pick up my least favorite of Carlos Castaneda’s works, The Second Ring of Power. In retrospect, I now know why. I had had the audacity to write about the knowing of the womb last week and the witches came to repay the favor.

When I first read that book, thirty plus years ago, I hated it. I was horrified and confused by Carlos’s lethal encounters with the witches. These were encounters with women who had lost, or were losing, their human form and were capable of anything. When one loses the human form one becomes an energetic being untethered by human roles or conditioning.

The condition of my copy of The Second Ring of Power is decrepit, an old hard cover, still with its original jacket, but with a broken binding, whole chapters falling out, brittle pages that peel off as they are turned. I thought: Well, this is a perfect not-doing. As opposed to the normal pattern of reading a book by turning its pages and holding it together, as I read each page, I peeled it off and placed it in a separate pile.

At some point in the week, I was pulled to put on another of my wedding rings. I stared into a small dish of jewelry on the dresser and selected a ring. In keeping with the practice of not-doing, I placed the ring on the wrong finger on the wrong hand; my wedding ring with Jan snuggling up with my wedding ring with Jeanne. It never dawned on me that I was inviting in the energy of the second ring of power!

In The Second Ring of Power Carlos describes the winds of the four directions and how all female sorcerers draw power from the winds of one of these directions. The winds were wicked this week. Several times they blew open the consulting room door at the office. Sudden wild winds of tornado like intensity appeared out of nowhere, knocking out power lines and just as suddenly shifting back to utter calm.

As abrupt as a sudden wind, Jan and I had a forceful exchange. In an instant, the human form of our relationship dissolved. Reactions shot forth out of both of us like lightning bolts, completely unexpected and totally out of character. Our discussion was around our children. In The Second Ring of Power, the witches speak of completeness, for a sorcerer, as requiring the retrieval of their edge, their energy lost to the children they had borne. In fact, on an energetic level, these sorcerers see those children as their mortal enemies.

For years, I have known and written about the need for all to detach, to break the energetic bindings of the archetypal roles of the human form with its holy days of family obligation, specifically in Your Family is Not Your Family. I notice that I write today’s essay on the eve of the holiest of holies, Mother’s Day. This was completely unintentional. It’s either a synchronicity or the witch’s sense of humor. Ultimately, mothers, fathers, and children need to be freed of the energetic bindings of these human form roles, if they are ever to gather in their energy to individuate or become energetically complete.

Jan and I exchanged verbal blows, confronting each other around these energetic entanglements with our children. The power of these archetypal roles runs deep. As we each held our ground something else took over. Neither of us was prepared for what came through us; it was the energy of the witches, carried on the winds, blowing us out of the human form. This was a decisive shift. We became beings unrecognizable to each other. At the same time we each landed in a very personally familiar place of energetic calm and clarity, utterly detached. We shifted into a formless state without definition or attachment to any roles. For a good twenty-four hours we shifted out of the human form of our marriage with its own set of deep energetic entrapments. We became two warriors, solitary beings, well aware of each other’s power and utter willingness to deliver a lethal blow to the other’s desperate clinging to the human form. Synchronistically, this happened on the day Jan wrote her blog about guidance she had received from the witches of don Juan’s line in her dreaming.

The winds have subsided now. We have “safely processed” our experience. Rationality is restored. Our energy has receded back into the forms of contented husband and wife. We joke about it; we enjoy it, our experience of the human form and our shift beyond it. Neither of us has any illusions about our true formlessness and our ruthless intent upon energetic completion. Archetypal roles provide structure for human completion, but if we cling too tightly we invite the wicked winds of the season of the witch.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTE: We have nervously added The Second Ring of Power to our STORE under Shamanism. Watch out when you open this book! The witches will come to get you too! Also, listen to Vanilla Fudge sing Season of the Witch, my favorite version.