Where did I come from? Where am I going? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Many are challenged to reconcile the memory and experiences of past lives as they intrude upon life in this life. Many others go in search of the karmic origin of current life struggles through past life regression.
Emphasis on karma alone narrows the focus of the full challenge of integrating a past life, which includes allowing the self to feel deep love and attachment in all the critical relationships of that life. The challenge lies as well in releasing the self, and all the loved ones of that past life, to be free to fully open to new love in new lives in completely different roles.
The enormity of growth required to achieve such openness to new beginnings and endings, to truly live what it means to “go with the flow,” may be the deepest purpose of the concensus reality of this dimension we call Earth. Most humans born in this dimension experience a blank slate of origin. Our parents are experienced as our first and only parents of our infinite journey. Everything that might have come before, in lifetimes of transpersonal living, is checked at the memory gate before we enter this life. We are thereby freed to limit our attachments to this life without the complexity and confusion of prior lives.
This arrangement offers us a training ground to deal with attachment, love, and loss on a manageable scale. Rudimentary attachment is critical to passing the starting gate of this dimension. Failure to thrive and death are the consequences of primary non-attachment.
However, beyond this starting gate are many gates of deepening attachment that will determine how welcome we truly feel in this world and how able we are to come to full flowering. It is very possible to survive yet constrict our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves to survive in what is experienced as unwelcome, exploitative, rejecting territory. Much of the first half of life may be taken up by the challenge of finding a secure anchor in this world so that we may eventually begin a process of unburdening recapitulation to free ourselves to begin to truly thrive in this life. That anchor is the adult self I wrote about in last week’s blog.
Time to grow beyond the family tree… – Art by Jan Ketchel
The ability to fully know and accept this life we were cast into, and to then shed its encasement in recapitulation, is a deep spiritual practice that teaches us to fully live and release the life we have lived, in this lifetime, so we can move on into new life now without constraints. Accomplishing this stupendous task prepares us to more fully encounter all the many past selves and past lives we have lived throughout our journey in infinity. In recapitulating this lifetime, we are freed of the need to constrict our cognitive and emotional knowledge and the need to have to hold ourselves together within some definite container.
To release one’s parents, siblings, spouses, and children to new lives and new roles within this lifetime frees them as well to experience endless possibilities within their own lives. All journeys have beginnings and endings.
In addition, all journeys—past and present—need to be equally honored with love and compassion for the self and all the intimate traveling companions of each journey. Such deep love and compassion open the gate to new and deeper journeys in infinity, unshielded by the illusion of limitation and unending attachment.
Sometimes the ritual is as simple as shedding what we don’t need so that who we really are can bloom… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Ancient rites of passage championed the mature achievement of adulthood as the requisite linchpin to mastering life’s deepest challenges. Without the establishment of this mature adult self we are ill-equipped, or defensively overladen, to journey forward into life’s deepest needs and challenges.
The modern technological world has failed to collectively build the bridge to maturity that was once constructed by the transformative power of ancient ritual. Nonetheless, the modern world and life itself force us to forge an adult self. It is only the adult self that can take the journey forward, and that journey—if it is to be fulfilling—requires a recapitulation of life lived, with all its deficits, hurts, disappointments and traumas, to release frustrated energies and find renewal in deep connection with the greater self.
The adult self must ready itself to take the recapitulation journey. For this it must learn to be present to needs, feelings, and impulses, without collapse. Collapse here means caving to the demands of another part of the self that seeks release or relief in a compulsive, impulsive, habitual self-destructive behavior. The adult self must learn to stay still, to breathe and bear the tension of inner pressure in order to consciously choose the best course of action—that is, action that supports the true needs of the self.
Sometimes the tension must be borne for some time before the clarity on what is the right decision is achieved. Sometimes the adult self acts precipitously, only to realize it has been duped into traversing an old road once again. This is a critical juncture in the process, but one must not be swallowed in negative self-judgment or talk of failure, for that is the one-way highway to the helplessness of the child self, bemoaning its position, steeped in the powerlessness of self-pity.
The work is always for the adult self to stay present, both in the experience and as the detached observer, allowing for all the feelings, judgments, sensations and truths to be fully known. The adult self feels but does not get weighed down by its discoveries, though it can take some time, and repeated dives into the deeper self, to achieve this state of detached equilibrium.
The job of the adult self in recapitulation is to acknowledge, learn, and take forward into life the new awarenesses that are achieved, once and for all freeing the self of the need to cling to old habitual patterns and illusions. Resisting judgment, the adult self gradually molts into new life. Intense emotions and physical tremors are par for the course, bringing the necessary accompanying release of the multidimensional self as it frees itself of the past and moves forward to claim its innate potential.
It’s all about sitting in the tension and growing right where we are planted… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
In this powerful physical release the adult self loosens and releases a torrent of energetic waves, once again fully present but staunch observer as well. Here, bearing the tension is allowing for vulnerability; complete physical and emotional release without constriction.
The crux of forging the adult self to fully live, is to learn to bear the tension of being fully present to all that was and all that is. In full presence we reclaim our birthright, our higher potential, completely freed to enjoy new energetic life.
In ancient religions, the standard-bearers of this ability to withstand the tension is the image of Christ on the cross and Buddha beneath his tree. In each of these ritual dramas, bearing the tension led to freeing the self to higher vibrational energetic life beyond the body, into full enlightenment in complete awareness. We too can achieve this state. Recapitulation is one tried and true method of taking the journey.
Keep it simple. Bear the tension, stay fully present, release the old, and move forward into wholeness, breathing in new life and new energy.
You never know where the path might lead… Art by Jan Ketchel
There are many paths to take, many healing journeys. We must find what suits us best and stick with it if we are to overcome our issues and anxieties and evolve.
As Deng Ming-Dao* writes: “We are increasingly aware of the many different spiritual practices all over the world. And new practices are being created out of the resulting diversity. That is right. It only stands to reason that all, even the most tradition-bound practices were originally created at one time. There should be no stigma attached to spiritual practices that evolve in our lifetime—methods don’t have to be from dead people in order to be valid. But once we find a way, we should stay with it resolutely and not have anxieties about other people’s paths.“
He goes on to say: “It is healthy to explore other disciplines. If nothing else, the elements in common can give you fresh and interesting perspectives on your own practices. But we should not flit from one discipline to another. Ecumenical explorations are fine, but they are best done from a firm base of the practices that best suit you.“
No other psychotherapist that we know of has linked the ancient practice of recapitulation in a clinical setting the way Chuck has, a process that naturally evolved as he studied the Magical Passes of Tensegrity as introduced to the world by Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda, for his part, released them to the public, to anyone who was interested. In so doing, he sent them on their way, energetically, into new life. Recapitulation has found new life in a clinical therapeutic setting, even though Castaneda’s group distinctly stated that recapitulation was not psychotherapy. As Chuck discovered, however, it surely does have its place within the context of a holistic therapeutic setting.
We are all spiritual beings, made up of energy. As we are born, grow up, and live our lives in human form we gradually lose touch with the essence of who we truly are. From birth we are indoctrinated with the idea that there is only one reality—this one on earth—and that when we die, if we do things right, we will go to heaven. That’s pretty much the standard fare offered by all religions around the world. But who are we really? What are we really?
We are multidimensional beings. We are thinking, feeling, conscious beings as Chuck wrote about in his last blog. We know ourselves, however, most commonly as dense matter. We can get caught there and forget that we are vibrant energy, awareness eager to escape the confines of the human condition, open to exploration beyond the body and beyond the confines of our indoctrination. Though we all have access to this energetic self in out-of-body exploration as we sleep and dream, our experiences often do not cross over into daily awareness. They lose their magic upon awakening, for the most part lost to conscious consideration. Some people are peripherally aware that there is something else to life, others more so, actually exploring, while still others just can’t quite go there yet, wanting surety, scientific proof. But that kind of proof can only come in daring the self to continually explore and to hold onto the experiences as the truth of who we really are.
The real path is the journey within, into the complexities of the dark and the light of the deepest inner self… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
As I write about in my books, I suffered well into adulthood thinking that there was something wrong with me. Indeed there was! I was caught in my human form. All that it had been through weighed on me like a ton of bricks. I believe we all feel the same way, that we all feel isolated, afraid, ashamed and vulnerable. It wasn’t until I found my way to the process of recapitulation, within that clinical setting that Chuck had realized was possible, that I also began to experience exploration beyond the body in a totally new, acceptably healthy way.
So what is this path of recapitulation? It is a pathway to going into the body self to explore and resolve all issues and beliefs so that seamless, unattached transcendence from the physical self may occur. It is, simply put, a means of shedding the physical form—in all its multidimensionality—so that we may gain access to our awareness, our spiritual essence, the truth of who we all really are. This essence has no form, no belief system, no agenda; it simply is. That might sound pretty abstract, but once the shedding begins all of that starts to make a lot of sense. The big step along the path is the first one, to simply let the self begin the journey, to be open to where it leads.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico did recapitulation in a cave or other remote dwelling, isolating themselves from the world so they could be undisturbed as they recapitulated. Taisha Abelar,* a cohort of Carlos Castaneda’s, used a cave and then a tree house, writing a fascinating book about her experiences. Victor Sanchez, a controversial progenitor of Castaneda’s works, suggests constructing and sitting in a box. I, on the other hand, believe that we ourselves are the cave, the tree house or the box, that everything we need is inside us, that our human form, that which we seek to transcend, is also the gateway to our transcendent experiences.
It’s pretty impractical for most of us to disappear into a box for any length of time, or to find a cave to repeatedly return to. And, much as we might like to, how many of us are really ready to climb a tree and live in a treehouse for months on end. We may not have been chosen to train in the traditional fashion, but that does not mean that it is not our path as well. We are still free to choose the path of recapitulation if we come upon it and it feels right.
In fact, we recapitulate all the time, in the course of living our everyday lives. We recall memories, get triggered, have sensory experiences. If we think about it, recapitulation is really a natural part of life, flowing through us daily. How often have we sat, lost in a memory, really there, sensing and feeling it again. Recapitulation asks us to do just that, but this time to be the observer as well as the participant, to look at everything from a new and fresh perspective. Over time we begin to see our past experiences as part of the network of our lives, fitting neatly into the fabric of who we are, what has made us the beings we are today. As we weave that network together from a new perspective, a bigger picture develops, and we begin to experience ourselves as more than just our human self and our experiences. We actually begin to experience ourselves as energy.
We all have the capacity to bloom! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
As Deng Ming-Dao states, there are many spiritual paths and we must choose one that suits us. Then we must resolutely walk it. I personally have found my deepest and most rewarding path out of the physical to indeed be recapitulation. I use it daily so that my practice of meditation—my cave/tree/box—takes me beyond the body with ease and gentleness. The physical human form that we all reside in on this plane is our transformational vehicle, yet how can we sit and meditate if we are tormented by a mental state that does not let us sit still for very long!
In my experience, recapitulation offers a most valuable tool. It is the first gateway to accessing our energetic essence. Beyond that, with practice, resolutely walking the path of our choice, we can and will achieve our energetic essence. It’s just a matter of daring ourselves to take the journey, that first step the hardest and most frightening, and then sticking with it!
On the recapitulation path, Jan
*Notes and Quotes: Deng Ming-Dao’s book is Everyday Tao and Taisha Abelar’s book is The Sorcerer’s Crossing.
Seeking the road to wholeness and freedom… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
We are born with ancestral baggage. We are attached to and burdened by the energy of our ancestors, our families of origin, and our life’s circumstances. We pass this burdensome energy onto our children and all who come into contact with us. We will suffer until we free ourselves. Others too will suffer until we free ourselves.
When spirit calls, it is asking us to free ourselves of our emotional baggage, our physical attachments, our mental constraints, and our spiritual limitations. It asks us to methodically unburden ourselves, to face the truths of our lives with utter honesty and humility. It asks us to question who we truly are, why we think the way we do, and if our thoughts really reflect the deepest truths of who we are. In 2001 I finally paid attention to that call from my spirit. I met Chuck and began the process of reclaiming my true self, the person I always knew I really was but was so afraid to be. I kept this person hidden.
As an artist I found a means for her to live, as I discovered I could covertly reveal her personality, her innocence and her darkness alike. In expressing myself as an artist anything was acceptable. Over the years I knew there was a lot more, a deeper level that even my artist self was not willing to enter. In the caverns of my soul lay the untouchable self. Alongside her lay the wretched remnants of that which could not be spoken.
Although this self was unknown to me, she flashed up every now and then, freaking me out, sending me deeper into the river of depression that flowed through my life. Eventually, I knew I would need to address her, or at least the feelings that I could not handle and the crumbling of the world I was trying to uphold. That was the beginning of my recapitulation process.
When I first met Chuck, he and Jeanne were deeply immersed in the shaman’s world, specifically that of Carlos Castaneda and the practice of Tensegrity, going to workshops around the world on a regular basis. When Chuck learned the recapitulation sweeping breath he noticed that it’s bilateral movement was similar to the bilateral aspects of EMDR, a trauma treatment process that he’d been studying. Quick intuitive that he is, he immediately saw the clinical potential of recapitulation. His hunch was to prove true.
I have just published the third volume in the Recapitulation Diaries series, Into the Vast Nothingness. This is the continuation of the recapitulation journey that I unknowingly embarked on when I met Chuck on that fateful day in 2001. I say “unknowingly” because I didn’t know that it was what I was going to be doing. As we worked together the process unfolded, the journey took us, though Chuck was deeply aware of it, always patiently waiting for me to find my way. Eventually, the word “recapitulation” became synonymous with the work I was doing; there was no other word to describe it.
I reveal just about everything about myself in my books. I see no value in holding back because I know there is someone else out there with similar baggage who might be helped. I offer my books as incentives to unburdening, even if only privately and in the safety of one’s own inner world.
The shamanic practice of recapitulation, however, comes with its own powerful energy. It has a habit of infiltrating into life. It asks us in a myriad of ways, just like spirit, to examine ourselves minutely. It asks us to face our deepest selves, presenting us with new ways of seeing, asking us to deal with what we no longer need in our lives. As we shed the old baggage, we discover that there isn’t really that much of our old world or our old self that need accompany us forward.
Just as I reveal my deepest self in my books, I don’t hold back about the difficulties of the journey either. Recapitulation is a difficult road, a solitary and lonely journey, but it’s a thorough means of achieving the great unburdening that our spirit asks of us. It’s a choice that we make or refuse, but it’s really only a choice if we know exactly what it is that we are choosing or refusing. Do we take the journey to freedom and wholeness or do we continue to carry the baggage of our lives, ancestral and otherwise? As Chuck always told me: When you are ready the journey will meet you and if you are not ready then wait, it will catch up with you soon enough!
At one point during my recapitulation, I realized I was carrying more than just my own depression. I was carrying the depression of generations of women in my family, that ancestral baggage! I no longer wanted to be the bearer of it. It did not belong to me! And furthermore, I did not want my children burdened by that which did not belong to them either, but I knew I could only free them by freeing myself. In freeing myself, I am able to free them to face life on their own terms, free to be who they are truly meant to be. They do not need to uphold the ancestral world, at least not because of me.
There are many tools to spiritual awareness. Recapitulation is a deep and lasting tool to unburdening the self, not only of that ancestral baggage that we all carry, but everything else that holds our spirit back from truly living.
Cover of Volume 3 of The Recapitulation Diaries
I send another book out into the world. In publishing Into the Vast Nothingness, I free myself of attachment to it, even as I hope that others will find it and read it, because I wish for others to be free too. I hope you will read the books and learn that everything can be spoken about, everything can be talked about in the right, safe setting, and everything can be let go of.
Should you feel inclined, I invite you to write reviews of the books, as what you say may help others as they seek not only to heal from their traumas, but to heal from the ancestral traumas we all carry too. May your own journeys be journeys of freedom.
Is it really spring? The last vestiges of the old season will soon melt away… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I lived in Sweden in the 1970s. One day there was a knock at the apartment door. I answered it and saw three little girls standing there.
Dressed in long skirts, with kerchiefs around their heads and brightly painted red cheeks, they held out copper kettles, singing something indecipherable in lilting voices. It looked a lot like Halloween to me, but it was Pink Thursday, the day before Good Friday.
Luckily, I was baking cookies for the guests who would be arriving the next day. I couldn’t speak Swedish very well at the time, so I held up a finger—wait a sec—and went into the kitchen to grab a handful of warm chocolate chip cookies, a rarity in Sweden at the time. (I’d had the chocolate chips sent to me by my parents as they were not available there.)
“Kakor?” I asked, reappearing with cookies in hand.
“Ja!” they replied, quite happily.
Grabbing the cookies they gobbled them down, making pleasing sounds while I smiled at them and nodded, saying, “Ja, ja,” or something like that. We waved goodbye as they turned to knock on my neighbor’s door. I shut the door and ran back into the kitchen, just in time to rescue the next batch of cookies from being burned in the oven.
Those little girls were enacting a tradition, playing the witches who supposedly cavorted with the devil on that day; all part of the springtime rituals, I was to learn. Usually coins were placed in the tea kettles but, as I told my husband, those little girls didn’t mind the cookies at all!
A few weeks later, at the end of April, another spring ritual was enacted. We’d traveled to spend a few days with my in-laws at their summer house on the West coast of Sweden. A bonfire ensued, the natural consequences of doing winter cleanup of the yard, but this too had significance. It was Walpurgis Night, the annual ritual to greet spring’s arrival. Many bonfires were lit that night along the coast, songs were sung and a lot of alcohol, another part of the tradition, was consumed.
It was the first time I was being exposed to ancient traditions outside of those of my Catholic upbringing. I found them intriguing. It was an eyeopener that nature itself was not only leading the way, but was actually being celebrated as the most significant guide in breaking through to new life. It made perfect sense to me, but I’d never encountered it before. Everyone knew the ritual, and everyone participated. Without judgment, it was a tradition that just was, nature allowed its place in a celebratory, honest, and most practical manner. As that Walpurgis Night fire burned, the ritual of the witches cavorting with Satan made perfect sense too. All of a sudden, I understood that nature was a real and powerful ally and entity, and it needed to be paid attention to, honored, and reckoned with.
Light the ritual pyre… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I’m ready for my own bonfire now. It’s been on my mind that we should have a fire soon in our outdoor pit. The idea has been stirring for weeks, as we’ve waited for the snow to melt so that we could actually see the fire pit! It’s time to intentionally enact the ancient ritual of shedding and burning that which we no longer need. It’s time to begin anew.
Last night I dreamed. My skin was cracking and peeling away. Not like skin that has been sunburned and peels in thin layers. No, this skin was about an inch or two thick. It was old crusty skin. I knew, as I dreamed, that it symbolized that which is no longer necessary, a protective layer that no longer has any use. I was wearing it for no good reason, only out of habit. Beneath the thick old skin lies new pink skin, the tender, innocent and true self. It’s time to fully expose her, to let her live all the time, not just when it feels safe or appropriate, because I suddenly understood that it is always appropriate to live from the tender and real self.
My dream reminded me of a dream I’d had when doing my recapitulation. At that time I’d dreamed of removing a layer of the same kind of thick crusty skin from the soles of my feet. I still cringe as I recall peeling it off only to find beautiful pink soles underneath. In that dream, I put the crusty soles back on because I still had a lot of recapitulation work to do. But it was enough to know what lay in store for me, the innocent and pure self revealed by those tender pink soles. I wasn’t ready at the time to do more than hold the secret of this true self, but last night’s dream tells me that I’m more than ready now. I’ve been walking on the soles of that tender self for a long time now, but as my dream tells me, it’s time to shed everything else I’ve used to keep her protected and let her fully live!
And so, in celebration of spring, I intend to shed the trappings and ideas of an old self. I intend to set upon the altar that which is no longer necessary or desirable. In lighting the pyre, I intend to sacrifice that which oppresses and keeps me from experiencing my fuller self, all the thoughts and ideas that no longer belong in my life. I also set the intent to no longer hide the pure tender soul of who I am. I will be burning that crusty old coat of skin that I no longer need to wear!
In the melting away of the last coating of ice and snow… the true beauty, struggling to fully live… is revealed… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I will allow nature to be my guide, both through this ritual burning and in the next steps. I have no idea where I’m going, but in this shedding and burning process I declare that I am open, willing, and ready for new life.
We’ve all come so far in our lives and in our work. Let us not be held back. Let us light the fire on the altar and raise a glass to nature and to spring, to renewal of the true self, and many happy new beginnings.
As I light the fire and raise a glass to spring, I hope you will too,
Jan
