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Chuck’s Place: Trigger, Habit or Both?

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A sting can cause a trigger; gathering pollen is a habit!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

“That really triggered me!”  Here, a sore spot, a vulnerability has been touched by someone’s comment, setting off this emotionally explosive reaction. Typically, the wounded party expects that others should know and respect this sensitivity and refrain from going near it. One often feels entitled to an apology.

A trigger is anything that can cause one to remember and feel an unprocessed emotionally charged experience. If someone tries to forget being attacked by a dog, the mere mention of its name can arouse anger and terror. Inwardly, the experience of being bitten has been pushed out of consciousness, protecting one from the discomfort of the reactivated memory.

The psyche envelops overwhelming experiences with strong defenses to keep the dreaded event far away from consciousness. Traumatic events may be so far removed from consciousness as to render one amnesic of their existence, even for decades.

Though the need for distance from a disturbing event may be necessary to function, it comes at the price of wholeness. The psyche must employ a good amount of energy to contain the disowned, unwanted or unknown parts of its experience. Furthermore, relaxed functioning may be compromised, as vigilance may be needed to avoid encounters with triggers associated with the split-off experience.

Ultimately, all events of a lifetime must be reconciled. A shamanic recapitulation, in this life, emotionally neutralizes all experience, rendering the psyche fully cohesive and able to be open to life without concern for triggers.

The life review referenced in near-death experiences, or reported by spirits in the afterlife, is required before one can advance into new life. Problems we haven’t resolved will preoccupy our lives, regardless of what subtle plane we may transition to. Recapitulation in this life both frees one for fulfillment in this life but also advances one in preparation for new life in the afterlife.

Habits are automatic beliefs, programs or pre-programmed behaviors that lie dormant in the subconscious mind. Programs are connected to genetic coding, as well as instinctive and archetypal imperatives that are specific to the nuances of the human species.

When a need or suggestion is encountered, the subconscious automatically activates the relevant program to address the situation. Thus, if one is attacked the subconscious will automatically activate fight, flight or freeze in response to the event. These reactions are not reactions to triggers, they are purely instinctive reactions to an existential threat. An instinctive habit is objective, a trigger is subjective.

The subconscious is also filled with habits that are derived from one’s subjective experience in this life. Thus, a person who has been bitten by a dog may consciously choose to always avoid dogs. This intentional behavior becomes a suggestion to the subconscious mind that molds it into an automatic, unconscious habit.

Thus, for instance, our bitten subject may unconsciously find themselves only walking certain routes that are known to be dog free. Now, if, while calmly walking one of these routes, a bark is heard, the subject may be triggered into emotional distress via encounter with the unreconciled memory of the original bite.

While triggers require a successful recapitulation if they are to be neutralized, habits, to change, require new suggestions to the subconscious mind. Thus, if one’s habit is a belief that one is unable to dance, one must first eliminate the conscious restating of this long-held belief. The subconscious will only manifest the suggestions one states.

To change a habit we must routinely state the new instruction to the subconscious mind: “I am able to dance.” This is not a discussion with the conscious mind. No reasoning or processing is required. What is required is the statement of intended fact to the subconscious, without any discussion.

To avoid conflicting suggestions to the subconscious, which virtually nullifies the formation of new habits, it is critical that one have complete faith in one’s suggestion. If one can embrace the belief that anything is possible then one can mobilize the requisite intensity of suggestion most likely to influence the subconscious.

One is often tested by the subconscious by the activation of old programs, despite one’s new intent. Old habits will reassert themselves until the new habit is established. Be calm, patient and persevering until the subconscious automatically prompts the newly established program. Simply repeat the new intent with calm assurance that it will manifest.

Trigger and habit are frequently intertwined. A new habit will be blocked from formation if a defensive habit must be retained to protect one from a potential trigger. Triggers, which represent split off experiences, must be neutralized through recapitulation before a habit, used to keep triggers at bay, can be effectively replaced.

Though both habits and triggers may be permanently altered, their pathways to change are distinctly different. Triggers must be processed at a conscious level to be neutralized; habits require rote repetition of new marching orders to the subconscious to result in a changed habit.

When triggers and habits are intertwined it is necessary to first reconcile  the triggered event to effectively free the subconscious to take in the instructions for the desired change of habit. Change itself is always possible. Remember, anything is possible!

Peace,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Thrust of the Spirit

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Calcinatio in the retort of the body…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

My Spirit sees everything from an evolutionary perspective. Thus, even the sobering truth of Maureen Dowd’s editorial, Apocalypse Right Now,  is not a dealbreaker for my optimism.

All are encouraged to examine the truth, to the extent that that is possible, but then to exercise Carlos Castaneda’s number one dictum, Suspend Judgment, in order to reach the deeper truth of the soul’s fantastic voyage.

Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos sought to actualize achieving such a high level perspective in their respective launches into space these past couple of weeks. I see their journeys as transcendent attempts to free their spirits from the  gravity of the mess on the ground of planet Earth. 

Indeed, the thrust of the Spirit now is for the human race to up its Olympian game. This does not require that all go in search of transcendent out-of-body experiences. In fact, though I am impressed with the recent space adventures, they appear a bit compensatory to the truth on the ground. Good to be reminded of the potential of the human ego spirit to rise above the mess, but can it apply itself to the needed changes below?

We are all in this world on missions of growth. Most are born with a blank slate to protect those intended missions from confusion and interference from their Spirit’s prior journeys in infinity. Though the soul brings with it the fruits of its prior adventures in the form of its innate intelligence, it temporarily releases the memory of those experiences to be fully available to the life at hand.

Thus, the purity of Spirit’s intent imbues one’s life with purpose yet becomes clouded over by one’s material DNA and physical life circumstance. Nonetheless, one’s physical life remains the playing field for the Spirit’s intended growth.

We could say that the purity of Spirit becomes muddied and weighed down by the imperfections of material physical life. The journey then, in this earthly life, is one of working through the impurities of our physical trials to further add to our Spirit’s clarity, knowledge, and growth.

Carl Jung spent much of his adult life unearthing and studying ancient alchemical texts. Most modern psychological researchers question his sanity for having wasted so much time on such obscure nonsensical pre-chemistry texts. Jung, however, discovered that the alchemists were deeply engaged in a series of operations seeking to release the Spirit from its material impurities.

Psychotherapy, for Jung, was the application of a series of alchemical operations upon the psyche, seeking to free one’s Spirit from the bindings of illusion that overshadow one’s life and block fulfillment—the refinement of one’s Spirit.

The alchemists began their operations by choosing a substance to work on. In psychotherapy, one chooses a core stumbling block in one’s life to work on.

Alchemists used a retort, a vessel that the substance was placed in and then sealed, while they performed their operations upon it. In psychotherapy, the retort becomes the introspective ego that is asked to stay in body and be with the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, memories, sensations and dreams that arise as one works with an issue.

In psychotherapy, the sealed retort is equivalent to the body and psyche containing the intense energies of a conflict that has arisen, which is so tempting to release through blame, rationalization, a new illusion, or an emotional catharsis. Like the pot of water that never boils if we keep lifting the lid, we will never achieve the desired transformation if our retort is prematurely opened.

Planet Earth is clearly in the midst of its own alchemical processes of solutio, via flooding, and calcinatio, with fire. The retort of Earth is performing the necessary operations to reshape itself, and the lives of its inhabitants, and to cleanse itself of the illusions that have encumbered its Spirit.

Humans are simultaneously being asked to stay grounded and face the truths of their own lives, without opening the retort to the inflation of Icarus or the deflation of morbid depression. Containment of volatile emotion is a necessary precursor to transformative change. Acquiescence to necessary behaviors that reflect the truth is the ego’s greatest challenge.

These are the earthbound tasks for all humans now, as we individually and collectively seal the retort and are driven, by the thrust of the Spirit, to advance deeper into truth, survival, and evolution.

In solidarity,

Chuck 

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Divine Child

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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

Jan's Blog, Recapitulation

Abuser in the Afterlife

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It’s possible to communicate beyond the veils…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Several months ago, I found out that the man who had abused me during my childhood had died. A few weeks after his death he appeared in a dream.

Putting his arm over my shoulder, he hugged me gently and spoke some kind words. In the dream he was very loving, not at all how I knew him in real life. It was a little disconcerting to say the least. I was not sure what to make of it.

Then again, two months after that, he came in another dream. I am lucid, fully conscious of dreaming in this dream, fully aware of being with him. I have no reaction to being in his presence; I am as calm as calm can be.

We sit opposite each other, foreheads almost touching, looking directly into each other’s eyes. Once again he is kind, concerned, as he states: “SHE says I did this to you,” and he glances to the side, as if looking at someone standing offstage.

Then, he gestures with his hands and a scene from my childhood appears between us, suspended in midair. It’s like looking at an old movie; in the scene he is abusing me. I nod at him, and say, “Yes, it’s true, you did that to me.” I have no reaction; I am perfectly calm as I see the scene play out and as I tell him the truth, that it actually happened.

Again, he repeats, “SHE says I did this to you,” and once again he gestures with his hands, putting them together as if praying and then pulling them apart, and as he pulls them apart another scene of him abusing me materializes.

“Did I do this to you?” he asks, incredulous.

Again, I nod at him, and say, “Yes, it’s true, you did that to me.”

We sit like this, head to head, for a long time as he repeats, over and over again, “SHE said I did this to you,” glancing over his right shoulder toward the SHE whom I feel standing off to the side, observing, as he materializes yet another scene of him abusing me and which I acknowledge as truth. Again, I have no reaction to any of the traumatic scenes playing out between us. I do not wish to blame or shame him. I am perfectly calm and emotionally neutral.

As this plays out I realize that he has no memory of the life he has just lived, that he can’t remember anything that he had done. It appears that he’s going through a life review with SHE as his guide. He has total amnesia and appears flabbergasted every time I tell him that he did all those things to me. It’s as if he’s hearing about it for the first time.

We look squarely into each other’s eyes and I can see that he’s being honest, he simply does not remember; he’s a clean slate, with no memory whatsoever.

At first, I think I’m being challenged to recant my own life story, but then I see that this is not the case, that SHE is his teacher, helping him to recapitulate the life just lived. SHE appears to know everything about him. I sense that SHE brought us together, to help him remember.

I intuit that everyone must recapitulate at death, that all memory of the life just lived is lost and must be brought back into consciousness so that all can be reviewed and reconciled with in order to move on into a higher plane of existence.

The setting of the dream is desert-like, empty except for some low adobe buildings in the distance, which I intuit are spartan living quarters. Low dry brush, desert grasses and sand stretch in every direction as far as the eye can see. There’s a kind of dull light, not dark, not light, just kind of overcast, the temperature neither hot nor cold but comfortable.

After going through countless scenarios of the abuse he inflicted on me, we get up and he takes me over to a pile of long scrolls of tapestry lying on the ground, the frameworks upon which he must weave his just-lived life as he recapitulates, creating a large tapestry to study, learn from and evolve from.

“SHE tells me that everyone does it when they come over,” he says, and he suggests that I pick one up and create a tapestry too, but I tell him that I don’t need to do that, that I’ve already done it.

“I already did a recapitulation,” I say, “my books, you know.”

He nods, but I sense that he still doesn’t understand that he did all the things he’s been told he did. He’s an empty vessel, unable to grasp, totally clueless, but he understands from SHE that it’s his job now to remember and to weave the tapestry. It will take him a long time, he says, because he can’t remember a darned thing. He shakes his head in disbelief.

I sense how low his energy is, as if he’s depressed, stunned or traumatized by what he’s learning about himself. It feels as if he’s being slowly eased into knowing a little at a time about who he had been, not the kindly man I met in the first dream, nor who he appears to be now but a cold-hearted pedophile.

How interesting, I think, that his overall personality is gentle and kindly, that though he was a pedophile in his last life that may not be who he actually is in his spirit body, but that it was a persona he wore in order to learn something or challenge himself with.

Later, I tell him that I love him because I know that he is genuinely trying to fathom what he had done, and I sense that the work he has to do on himself is being attended to with diligence and honesty, that he really wants to get to the truth. And I can love him for that.

Recapitulation, I tell him, is the key to advancement. He nods when I say this, still muttering that he just can’t believe what he’s been told he did.

As I leave, I see him hanging up the framework, preparing to begin the job of building the tapestry with the truth. I am happy to have helped him verify that truth.

As I walk away, I am perfectly calm and at peace, knowing that indeed my own recapitulation of my abusive childhood is done. There will still be other things to recapitulate I’m sure, but that at least is fully done.

Sending love,

Jan

J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries and All The Gifts You Are Given

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Journey of Love

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All is love.
– Artwork © 2021 by Jan Ketchel

Love is the glue of Oneness. Ultimately, everything adheres as part of the Oneness, though in our journeys of separation, distinctions veil our underlying interconnectedness. Our soul’s evolution marks love’s stages of refinement, as we find our way home to the greater Oneness.

The journey of this life begins with separation from one’s most local oneness, what has been called one’s soul group. An analogy to this group might be the consortium of cells that make up an organ, say, the liver, in the human body. Though all cells in the body share an underlying similarity and interconnectedness, those of the liver share a more specialized cohesion that makes their grouping a unique cell group.

Similarly, one’s soul group has journeyed together in various permutations, as well as separately, to solve karmic challenges that impact the group. Individual successes contribute to group wholeness and preparedness to venture further into the ever-unfolding mystery of continued life.

The refinement of love through this life and beyond is the awakening and receptivity to the increasingly subtle dimensions of life and its greater interconnectedness. In journeying deeper into the ability to love all, one finds their way home to Oneness.

Entering a life on Earth, our individual soul begins a physical life through attachment to family. This is the first experience of love in this life, which is supported by many archetypal promptings to protect and nurture the young. Love at this stage is largely the meeting of basic needs, which allows development to proceed. Ruptures in family attachments are frequent and often provide the context for one’s karmic mission in this life.

For love to move beyond the narcissistic imperative to shore up the self, one must establish a well-grounded ego, capable of basic trust. To truly enter the world of relationship, one must be able to grant another their own existence beyond their ability to satisfy one’s personal needs. The refinement of love at this stage is the ability to authentically meet the soul of an other.

Love is further refined when one can value all life with equanimity. This is the love that values all peoples, in all cultures. This is the love that values the planet as a living being needing our loving support. This is the love that realizes that all beings, even our greatest enemies, are at various stages in their own refinement to love.

See all your worthy opponents as providing opportunities to refine your relationship with love. To love a petty tyrant, we must get beyond our attachment to experiences that rendered us victims. These are the greatest challenges of all, as they frequently result in confrontation with unresolved trauma that has been walled off by a moat of defenses.

These journeys of recapitulation and resolution take us into the core issue of love, within the self: total acceptance of all one has experienced, all that one has done, and all that has been done to one. This is the essence of soul retrieval, a total consolidation of self.

Full acceptance includes the knowing that we live in a predatory universe and that our pure innocent selves will be wounded in life. Retrieving and freeing the wounded parts of ourselves is followed by a matured innocence daring to venture back out into the world, despite the known and unknown dangers.

Perhaps the finest refinement of love is helping, as a way of life. The first impulse many get after a Near Death Experience (NDE) is to write a book, to share the good news of life after life with others. To gift others with the knowledge we have gained aids all in their personal journeys of love’s refinement.

Of course, no-one can ever carry nor solve the burdens of others, but one can offer love, patience and knowledge to another in their own encounters with the predatory universe. This is love freely given, no expectation or need for reciprocity.

All life journeys are journeys in the refinement of love. The greater the refinement, the greater the advancement in soul groups, as they join with fellow soul groups on that ultimate journey of Oneness, and then, of course, beyond.

In refinement,

Chuck