Tag Archives: recapitulation

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No Blame

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“[We] are in the world to train [our]selves to be unbiased witnesses, so as to understand the mystery of ourselves and relish the exultation of finding what we really are…” – don Juan Matus*

That anxious time of year again…

Every year since I was very little, probably before I started school, I attended the December birthday party of a girl I knew. Our mothers were friends. She did not live in my neighborhood but she did attend the same Catholic School I did.

A lot of kids got invited, girls from school and girls from her neighborhood. The basement rec room at her house was packed with kids, parents and siblings, grandparents and anyone else who showed up. It was always a big affair. There was a table for presents, another table for birthday cake and ice cream, drinks, plates, snacks, etc., pin the tail on the donkey on the wall, a semi circle of chairs upon which all the party goers sat to play the various guessing games that we played year after year, guessing how many marbles were in a jar, how many shoelaces in another, how many chocolate kisses in another, etc. My memories of these birthday parties were that they were anxious affairs.

Why such anxiety over a birthday party? Well, each year this same scenario played out: I’d get invited. On the day of the party I would get ready. Where was the present? There wasn’t one. My mother never provided me with a gift to bring to the party. Instead I’d make a card and 2 or 3 dollar bills would go into the card.

My mother did not drive so I would need to get a ride with another friend going to the party. There was one other girl in my neighborhood who usually attended the party too. Her mother, who also had seven kids, like mine, knew how to drive and never seemed to have a problem stuffing any number of kids into her car and driving wherever needed. I usually got a lift with this mother.

One year she forgot to pick me up. I waited a long time outside in the cold, standing in my driveway wondering where she was. I waited patiently, aware that this mother often ran behind schedule. I finally went inside to find out if my mother had indeed set up a ride for me. Just then the other mother drove up, greatly apologetic. They had headed off to the party only to realize they had forgotten me and then driven all the way back to get me.

I got into the car, clutching my homemade card and feeling bad for needing the ride, only to be greeted by my friend holding in her lap a big, beautifully wrapped gift with a pretty bow on it. I was immediately embarrassed. Why couldn’t my mother do something like that? I covered my meager card with my hands, wishing I had a better, more sensitive mother. Didn’t she know you brought gifts to a party? I don’t remember ever having brought a gift.

At the party, I snuck my card onto the table laden with gifts hoping that no one would notice. When present opening began I cringed, waiting for my card to be presented to the birthday girl, usually last, sometimes not even noticed. Sometimes I’d see it lying there on the table long after the presents had been opened, unseen. When the birthday girl did finally open my card she was always thrilled, “Yay! Money!” she’d say, with such enthusiasm I had to believe she meant it.

With the party over it was time to be anxious about getting home. I’d hope that the mother from my neighborhood remembered I was riding with her. One year she left without me and the party girl’s mom had to find me another ride. Another year I had to stay on for several hours for my father to pick me up on his way home from work.

I don’t blame my mother for any of this. She didn’t drive until I was much older and so it was necessary for us to depend on the kindness of our neighbors. I have so many memories of other people driving me places, even to the hospital in emergencies.  One time, when she was actually learning to drive, though I don’t think she had her license yet, my mother asked me to get into the car with her while she drove about 4 miles to the nearest little store to buy a few groceries.

She had me sit in the backseat with my littlest siblings while she bravely yet badly drove along the winding country roads to the store. She stalled the car, a stick shift, innumerable times, lurching down the road in gut-wrenching jolts, finally slamming on the brakes so hard as she arrived at the store that the car went into a long skid and we all went crashing to the floor. I remember thinking at the time—I was about 10 or 11—that when it came time for me to drive I would never drive like that!

When my mother did finally learn to drive she did so adequately enough, though she was a nervous driver and had numerous near misses. Several times while I was in the car with her she’d go off the shoulder on her side, veer over to the other lane, into oncoming traffic, and in just the last second somehow manage to swerve back into the right lane. “Well!” she’d say, and drive onward with a shake of her shoulders and a defiant aire.

One time she slammed on the brakes so hard I flew into the windshield and smashed it. I never knew why she’d done that, as we were about a quarter mile away from the car ahead of us. But this was the beginning of my ability to “see” and “know” things before they happened. I am convinced that this hard knock on the head activated my pineal gland and it has been active ever since.

As children we trust the adults in our lives to take care of us, to provide and teach us, to nurture and sustain us until we are ready to go off on our own. I vowed to myself quite often that I would do things differently from my mother, her bad driving and lack of party etiquette just two examples. But the truth was that for a long time I was depressed, felt deserted, abandoned, neglected by the mother I got, and I did blame her for a lot of things. Now I see the reality of her life, stuck in the country with a bunch of children, unable to drive and depressed, shy, and withdrawn herself. I have to admit, she did the best she could.

It wasn’t until I took responsibility for my own depression that things began to change. By taking on the challenges of my own life, I was able to release my mother from any blame and really go on to live my own life. And I discovered that: No Blame = Freedom. Freedom is truly releasing emotional attachment to what was, to what is. Freedom is pure acceptance of the truth, with judgments peeled away and lessons gained. Freedom carries no blame. Freedom is living as an “unbiased witness,” as don Juan suggests.

I learned how to do it right…

By the time I was in sixth grade there were no more big parties at my friend’s house. Instead there was a much smaller sleepover with just four girls that year. This was much more to my liking. The main point was to stay up all night. No problem, I couldn’t sleep anyway! Still anxious!

Oh, and at that party I brought a real gift, one I had paid for and wrapped myself, the kind of gift I knew you brought to a birthday party, tied in a big bow!

A blog by J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries

*The Fire From Within by Carlos Castaneda, p 152

Jan's Blog

Life is Change & Change is Life

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The Tao, nature,  is constant change…

I share a passage I was reading this morning from an old favorite of mine, Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He reminds us “that everything changes is the basic truth for each existence. No one can deny this truth, and all the teaching of Buddhism is condensed within it. This is the teaching for all of us.”

He goes on to say, “Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transiency, we suffer. So the cause of suffering is our non-acceptance of this truth.”

Those of us who have difficulty accepting our own truths may also find difficulty in accepting the transiency of life. Often we want things to stay the same so we don’t have to feel or re-experience what once caused so much distress, that which fragmented us and sent us into depression, dissociative habits, and any number of behaviors that we deemed necessary for our survival.

The truth is that life is all about change. Life would not exist without constant change. We know this to be truth in our own lives. If we don’t change nothing happens, we stay the same, and yes, we suffer. We aren’t able to more fully live and embrace life if we are afraid of making a move to change something in our lives. In the end we may even find pleasure in our pain and in our refusal to change; we elect suffering over change.

Recapitulation is all about daring the self to accept the changing aspects of life. It means we are saying that we are ready to face what holds us back so we can finally live in this world. Otherwise we remain entrenched in a world that is not real, a world where perhaps only fear and loathing exist, where change is given the boot, and we miss out on the true reality of this world. I spent most of my life in that other world. It’s what my books are all about, the rediscovery of my traumatic beginnings but also the discovery of just how entrenched I had become in the world I had created for myself in order to feel safe.

If we can dare ourselves to investigate just what it is that has us in its grip we slowly begin to find ourselves evermore ready to accept the changing aspects of life. And it’s then that we realize change is life, and that in daring to change ourselves, through the deep inner work of recapitulation, we offer ourselves footholds in new life, in a changing world. As we do deep work on ourselves we begin to trust and enjoy that changing world in previously unimaginable ways.

As we accept that life is change we begin to flow with all the changes that come our way, bidden and unbidden, knowing that this is how life is, and that this time will soon change too. Every time we accept that life is change we let ourselves experience more of living and eventually we are flowing right along, no longer afraid of change, no longer suffering in the way we once did.

Part of accepting that life is change and change is life is accepting that which we run from, that which we hide from, that which scares us the most. It entails turning and facing and finally accepting what once happened to us without judgment, without self-hatred, without fear but with compassion for our frightened self, with kindness for our traumatized self, with love for our noble and strong self.

We remember that those bad times in the past eventually changed too and that new things happened to us, so we see that we have already learned the lessons of change, but to learn those lessons in full awareness is what the process of recapitulation entails. To consciously elect change and allow ourselves the benefit of life in a new way is to readily accept what life offers us to help us grow and evolve.

Then we understand what Suzuki means when he says, “When we realize the everlasting truth of ‘everything changes’ and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana.”

The road to Nirvana—to composure and to acceptance of all that is as it changes, without attachment—is one well worth traveling. If I can do it, so can you!

-A blog by J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries

Jan's Blog

Acceptance

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Acceptance… there is beauty in the darkness…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

This morning I wrote a Soulbyte* in the early morning hours, just coming out of sleep and dreams, about forgiveness and love, about how they are the same thing, unconditional energies that guide us to acceptance of who we are. The Soulbyte was triggered by a dream I was having just before waking.

In the dream I was staring at a picture of myself at about age 10. I was dressed in my school uniform. I was focused on the face, saying to myself, “Yes, that’s me.” Chuck was next to me and I showed him the photograph. “See, that’s me,” I said, and then I took in the rest of the picture, looked at the full figure of my child self, sprawled out, looking groggy and stunned, perhaps drugged.

“It happened,” I said, as I saw that my clothing was messed up, my dressed pulled up and my legs spread wide, an obvious sexual assault having taken place. Here was a picture of the truth of my childhood. I could not deny that it was me and that I had been sexually abused.

“Yup, it happened,” I said without attachment, judgment, or emotional reaction. I took in the full picture as it was, an obvious fact, and accepted it.

A sexually abused person knows firsthand how hard it is to accept what happened, to forgive the self and to love the self. And so it is not unusual that both women and men who have been abused are reluctant to speak about what happened to them. They fear being judged and blamed, but the real challenge is to not judge and blame themselves. How can we speak of these things that happened to us publicly if we can barely speak of them to ourselves?

It can take years before a person is ready to even venture into memories, memories that may be so buried as to be completely blocked. It can take years before a person is ready to stop being so hard on the self, to stop torturing the self, and to begin a healing process of acceptance of life’s unfolding. It took me until I was almost 50 to begin looking at my life at a deeper level and to dare to remember. It felt like a brave thing to do, and to this day I know it was. It is the bravest thing I have ever done.

Sometimes things just happen to us. If we are curious we might ask ourselves why they happened. What did they mean in the greater context of our lives? What did we learn? How have we grown because of them, or in spite of them? What and who have we become because of what happened to us?

Often we regret what we lost, what we did not have the opportunity to become because of what happened to us. We feel cheated out of some aspect of life that could have and should have been. But at the same time we must accept that it is how our lives went, and what happened cannot be changed. Facts are facts, as I accepted in my dream as I looked at the picture of my abused child self.

In deep inner healing work, as we explore our sexual abuse in the context of our whole life, we are able to accept our pasts and move on into new life without attachment, self-pity, or regret. We can accept ourselves as strong beings, caring beings, compassionate and nonjudgmental beings, because we know something that many others do not know. We have been there, we have experienced the unimaginable.

As we grow and heal, through going more deeply into the darkness of our past, we are able to accept what happened to us without feeling like either a victim or a survivor because we know and experience ourselves are so much more than that. We are fully alive, energetic, spiritual, ever-evolving beings, not in spite of but because we have experienced both the light and the dark sides of life. We are more complete because of what happened to us.

Whether we’ve been abused or not, life challenges us every day to live a nonjudgmental, loving, and compassionate life, to learn to accept who we are so that we can fulfill the destiny of this lifetime. Perhaps it is to become just that nonjudgmental, loving, and compassionate being we have become. Perhaps it is to teach others how to become nonjudgmental, loving, and compassionate. Perhaps it is to prepare ourselves to finally live each day to the fullest, to be open to new experiences and new adventures like never before, to learn to trust that life loves us best when we dare to embrace it and fully accept its abundant offerings.

I dreamed my dream last night because I am working on the next book in The Recapitulation Diaries. As I have worked through each book over the past several years I have faced once again the things that happened to me, the things I recapitulated during the years 2001 to 2004, and I get to experience just how healing that process was. My dream shows my complete acceptance. This is what I wish and pray for everyone who has been abused, that they too begin the brave work of real healing.

No life is meaningless. No experience is meaningless. There is something of importance in everything that happens to us.

*Here is the Soulbyte referenced above:

Soulbyte for Thursday October 19, 2017

What is forgiveness but the ability to give unconditionally without attachment, without need for anything in return. What is forgiveness really? It is love. And what is love but unconditional forgiveness, for true love is ready and willing to be given unconditionally, for it attaches to nothing and needs nothing in return. Can you forgive yourself, love yourself unconditionally? That is the greatest challenge that love and forgiveness pose. Forgiveness=Love. Love=Forgiveness. They are one and the same.

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

-A Blog by J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries

Jan's Blog

Rascal!

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I am in third grade, a tiny spry little girl, quiet as a mouse. For some reason I get the idea into my head to play a trick on the bus driver who shuttles us back and forth to school and home again at the end of the day. He has been very friendly lately, chatty, ebullient almost, joking with everyone. I like him. I think he’s funny and that he’ll appreciate a good joke in return.

Sometimes I came out of my shell and did something bad!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

When I get on the bus at the end of the day the driver is turned sideways in his seat facing all the children as they climb onto the bus. He says something funny to each of us as we walk past him carrying our book bags and lunchboxes. He gets us all in a good mood and there’s an overall air of jollity to the whole busload of kids as a result of his jokey attitude. I’m happy, feeling mischievous. I walk to a seat and sit down. Suddenly an idea comes to me. I tell my friend what I’m going to do.

“Nooo! How are you going to do that?” she asks, looking quite incredulous.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “Just watch me.”

I study the driver. He’s preoccupied with the kids getting on the bus. I know exactly how long it takes for everyone to get on and how many kids are not here yet. I’m naturally very observant. I calculate that I have plenty of time to do the deed.

I sneak up to the front seat directly behind the driver’s seat. There’s only a shiny steel handrail separating the back of the driver’s seat from the rest of the row of seats behind him. The rail is about even with a kid’s head when sitting down. I know this because my older brother got tossed into the bar once and broke his front tooth against it when the driver had to slam on the brakes.

I slide into the front seat and sit down. The driver doesn’t notice me. He doesn’t see that I’ve wormed my way up from the back of the bus nor that I’m sitting behind him. He’s distracted, still chatting away to the students getting on the bus.

Carefully, as quiet as a little mouse, I slither down to the floor and along the left side of the driver’s seat. I’m small and thin enough to squeeze in there quite comfortably, crawling on my hands and knees. The upper half of the driver’s body is turned away from me, facing the other way, so he doesn’t see me. He’s got his feet planted squarely on the floor, the bus idling gently. I reach around to where his feet are and very carefully untie first one shoelace and then the other. Then I tie the two of them together, nice and tight. I slither back out as quietly as I went in and sneak back to my seat. I can’t believe how easy it was!

“I did it!” I announce to my friend.

We giggle softly, conspiratorially. I have no idea what’s going to happen when he discovers his shoes tied together but I have no doubt it will be funny. I sit and wait in high anticipation. I can barely hold back my excitement. The kids in the upper grades finally get on. It’s time! I watch the bus driver swing his torso around and face the front of the bus, pull the door lever toward him to close the door and…

“Whaaaat the!” he says, letting out a loud shout of dismay. I see him trying to figure out what’s going on with his feet. It takes him a moment.

“Who did this?” he finally yells and immediately looks into the rearview mirror, searching the bus for the culprit.

I am standing up in my seat, leaning onto the back of the seat in front of me, laughing into my hands. I just can’t help it. I am laughing hysterically.

I watch as the bus driver reaches down to untie his shoes and retie them correctly. He gets up and slowly walks down the aisle of the bus. Uh oh, I’m in trouble now! I sit down hard in my seat, hoping he won’t notice little quiet me, but I must look really guilty because he comes right over to me and leans down, his big round face so close to mine I can smell his bad breath.

“You’re the rascal!” he says in a loud voice, loud enough for everyone on the bus to hear. And then he struts back up to his seat with an air of command, no more Mister Jolly, just an angry bus driver who seemingly doesn’t like getting pranked by little girls. He sits down, glares at me in the rearview mirror, puts the bus in gear and off we go.

That’s as far as any sort of punishment went. He never told the principal and my parents never heard about it, but he never let me off the hook for the rest of the school year. If there was a commotion on the bus, I got the blame. Any shenanigans going on, I got the blame, even if I had nothing to do with it.

As with the previous stories I’ve been telling about the little imp inside me, as I write this story my heart is thumping with the same level of excitement that my eight-year-old little girl self experienced as she thought about what to do and as she stealthily carried out her plan. And I can’t help but laugh out loud too. It was a thrilling moment in my life, thrilling to carry out and thrilling to get away with, one I’ve never forgotten. So quick, so quiet, so dexterous! I was invincible! Rarely did I feel in such control!

It was, however, not thrilling at all to be branded a rascal, because normally I was a quiet little girl, but in hindsight I understand that the imp inside me was enticed by this friendly fellow, greeting us all at the end of a long day at school with a joke and a happy grin, and she wanted to reciprocate with a funny joke on him that she thought he’d naturally appreciate. Not so!

It’s often hard to gauge the reaction a person will have to a practical joke. Sometimes we laugh when we’re really nervous, or scared, or embarrassed. Sometimes we shout when our ego is bruised or envious, or when something gets triggered inside us. Sometimes we cry when we really want to laugh. Sometimes we know we’re doing something mean and sometimes we really do think we’re doing something funny and that it won’t bother anyone.

The imp, however, has a little bit of nice and a little bit of mean inside her; it’s who she is. And I can say now that she wasn’t just a nice quiet little girl on the day she pranked the bus driver. She was all imp!

A blog by J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries

Jan's Blog

Something Stinks!

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My elementary and middle school years were spent at a small Catholic school taught by nuns. There were eight classrooms filled with about 60 kids per room. We all knew each other, our families knew each other, the nuns knew us all. It was an environment where if you did something good everyone knew about it. Likewise, if you did something bad everyone knew about it too.

My beautiful blue squirt gun… it all started here…

I was a poor student for the most part, often bored, except when something interested me. Then I went from an uninterested slouch to a stellar performer, but such moments were rare. I liked hands-on learning but learning back then was rote memorization, the whole class of 60 kids repetitively shouting out loud, or quiet reading of textbooks where nothing was alive.

On more than one occasion I acted out and got into trouble. Getting into trouble could mean being humiliated in front of your whole class, being sent to the mean principal’s office, made to stand in a corner for a day, or getting sent to public school, this last being the most dramatic, but it did happen. Suddenly a student would be gone and we would be told that she or he had somehow sinned and been dealt the worst punishment this side of Hell, public school! I do clearly remember one girl once telling a nun to shut up, using an expletive, and she got expelled that very day, the little heathen. Her fate was, as we heard from the satisfied nun, public school!

It was my seventh year in this school when I did something really bad. It was the fall of 1964 and for some reason squirt guns were popular. It became a big fad, both boys and girls carried them around all the time, to school and home again, around the playground at school and around the neighborhood at home. We’d carry them loaded with water, ready to fire away at a moment’s notice. There was a little general store a few miles from where I lived and it was at this store that we bought our plastic guns. They came in various colors. Mine was blue.

The impish potion…

As I recapitulate I remember the thrill of pulling out that little blue gun, taking aim and squirting an unsuspecting someone, usually a boy. I remember that a big “fight” was planned and everyone was bringing their gun. The imp in me got the grand idea to fill my gun not with water, but with perfume, specifically my mother’s Chanel No. 5 Eau De Parfum. I carefully poured from the big glass bottle directly into my gun, not spilling a drop. Hee hee, you couldn’t tell it wasn’t water!

I could barely contain myself as I got on the bus and surreptitiously pulled out my gun and started firing away. Pretty soon the entire bus stank! Clothes reeked! At school, as we played outside in the morning before being called to line up, I continued firing. The air was filled with the stench of Chanel No. 5 Eau De Parfum as I aimed and shot yellow stream after yellow stream of the stuff. Two perfectly aimed shots hit a boy in my class right smack in the eyes. Thrilling! The pistol of perfume was in my hands, and I was a champ. All my girlfriends laughed as the boy started rubbing his eyes and went crying into the school. Pretty soon Sister Mary Bernard, the Principal, came marching out, dragging the weeping boy by his shirtsleeve.

“Who did this?” she demanded.

Everyone ran. I was the only one left standing. I had to admit that it was I; I did it.

“You knucklehead, where did you ever get such an idea?” she yelled, as I stood there shrugging my shoulders, unable to answer her because I thought it was a perfectly brilliant idea! “You hurt this boy! You’ll be lucky if he isn’t blinded by what you did!”

As I remember that day, I still experience the same thrilling jolt of numinous energy that coursed through me when I loaded that gun with perfume, slipped it into my uniform pocket with a giggle of delight, and when I pulled it out on the bus and started firing. Once everyone realized what I had in my gun, it was all over. No one else in the entire school had thought of what I had thought of! I was onto something good! And boy, it was good while it lasted! And boy, was it bad when it ended!

All guns were confiscated. Parents were called. The boy had to go to the doctor. The school stank all day of perfume, we all reeked of it. And I got into trouble, big trouble, though I did not have to go to public school. At the end of the day even the bus driver finally knew who had smelled up his bus that morning. He glared at me when I got on the bus in the afternoon and said, “I’m watching you, Troublemaker.”

Not only did I get into trouble at school and at home, but everyone in the whole world seemed to know what I had done. I was bad. Even my grandmother and her bevy of friends knew. People in my neighborhood knew. Kids who didn’t go to my school knew. Even the man who owned the general store knew. The next time I saw him, he grumbled at me.

“You’re the one! I had to deal with the Catholics! I had them calling me up, angry and yelling, and now I can’t sell squirt guns. Had to take them all off the racks!”

I had to apologize to the boy whom I might have blinded for life. He meekly accepted my apology when I saw him on the bus the next day. “It’s okay,” he said. I think he secretly wished he’d thought of using perfume instead of water, but he just wasn’t as inventive as I was.

I had to stand before my parents in the evening after my shameful adventure and explain to them why I had done what I had done. I remember telling them that I did it because it was fun. My father could barely contain himself, secretly pleased that he had such an impish daughter. My mother delivered the final blow, as usual. I was grounded.

“For how long?” I whined.

“Until I say, now go to your room!”

What can I say, there really was an imp inside me and she had to express herself. She was much more daring than shy me, or quiet me, or scared me. Without her, life would have been one long boring snooze! She knew how to kick up some energy and have a grand time. I never really regretted what she got up to because she brought me such exciting experiences, and the thrill of it all still vibrates through me today as I recapitulate what she did. When she showed up, it was time to have some fun!

A blog by J. E. Ketchel, author of The Recapitulation Diaries