Freedom is the unmasking of the petty tyrant and seeing it for what it really is… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
As a seeker and a therapist, I search for tools of freedom. Freedom is the ability to flow with life as it is. Life is flux—change—and with change always comes a wounding to that which once was. Woundings create fixations, protective shells of holding on, to that which was. Such fixations interrupt our ability to flow with life as it has become.
The shaman’s world accepts the inevitability of woundings and tracks the human tendency to fixate on judgment of the self for its woundings. These judgments take the form of self-blame or self-rage. Either judgment further infects the wound and alienates the self from the flow of life energy. The shamans are empathic to woundings but ruthless in their goal of freedom. Hence, they go to extraordinary lengths to uncouple from attachment to their woundings.
To break the fixation with wounds to self-worth, self-importance, or self-esteem, the Shamans of Ancient Mexico encouraged their apprentices to saturate themselves with the doings of tyrants who made their lives miserable. In order to free themselves from the effects of these tyrants, these shaman initiates needed to astutely study the tactics and behaviors of these petty tyrants to precisely plan and execute their defeat. If they allowed themselves to indulge in blame, shame, rage, pity, or self-defeat, they would lose focus, often to fatal outcome. Those shaman initiates learned to waste no energy on taking anything personally, but focused instead on staying present in objective reality. This was the path of freedom from their woundings.
Traumatic encounters are uninvited encounters with life’s harshest petty tyrants. Shaman initiates seek out the encounter with the tyrant, but innocent recipients aren’t given that choice. Whereas the shaman initiate is in an active playing field with the tyrant, in real time, the trauma recipient’s playing field is the field of recapitulation, the reliving of the trauma once lived.
The means of achieving freedom from traumatic fixation, however, is identical to the means of achieving freedom from all woundings. To complete the process, we must arrive at what the shamans call the “place of no pity,” for self and other. From this position, there is total clarity and total release, as the ability to be present for the full truth of what happened, and the full release of energies previously fixated by life interrupted, is achieved. This is the ultimate defeat of the tyrant: complete release from its grip and complete release from the protective shell of fixation. From this place of no pity we retrieve the journeying self. We shift and reengage in life, as it is. Freedom achieved!
We must go down into the murky depths of our own reservoir if we are to experience wholeness… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The clinical wisdom of our time highlights the role of the body in psychological healing. To resolve our deepest issues, we must go down into the depths of the body to discover our hidden truths and restore a fluid connection to the wellsprings of our life energy.
For many years, I have spoken about out-of-body experiences and energetic life beyond the physical. Soul retrieval journeys, such as the kind taken in recapitulation, are in fact intimately connected to our in-body reservoir.
When we reenter the scene of an earlier experience in life, we utilize the sensations in our bodies to lead us to the actual event. The body stores all experiences and once we arrive at their gate, in recapitulation for example, we are thrust full-body into what happened to us in the prior experience. In traumatic recapitulation, we may have a full in-body sensation and complete reliving of a long-forgotten experience.
Many visits to hospital emergency rooms actually result from unknown, unsupported, tripping into stored bodily memories of trauma, inadvertently triggered by some associatively related current life experience. Often, after exhaustive testing, physicians are clueless in diagnosing the disturbance, often assuming panic attack. For the patient, the physical experience has been so real and in-body that this explanation seems highly dubious. Nonetheless, what ensues is perhaps a trail of treatments to control panic, which misses the true nature of the symptom: the triggering of a dissociated life experience stored in the body seeking re-association through reliving and resolving the turbulence it holds.
Modern clinical wisdom and ancient shamanic wisdom point the way to the innate, archetypal bridge of bilateral body movement to enable the grounding needed to experience and integrate dissociated parts of the soul that lie in wait in the body reservoir.
In dreaming, we naturally experience bilateral rapid eye movement, commonly called REM, that clears and processes the remnants of the day just lived. In nightmares, we experience failed attempts to naturally resolve traumatic moments. When no resolution occurs, these traumas end up stored in energetically volatile and incomplete states in the body—often a cause of physically distressing symptoms. Chronic pain and debilitating symptoms, even anger and fear of intimacy or conflict, may in fact be trauma related.
Francine Shapiro advanced the instinctive bilateral physical movement that we all use when we dream, incorporating it as a direct method to facilitate the integration of traumatic experience, in a waking state, through the protocol of EMDR. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered the bilateral recapitulation breathing Magical Pass millennia ago, as a means to enable reintegration of lost parts of the self. These inherent and consciously facilitated practices provide the bridge to safely encountering and putting to rest the stored energies of unresolved traumas.
The body stores that which is incomplete, awaiting resolution when the time is right. The body equally holds the key to safely resolving that which it holds, through bilateral movement, whether exercised consciously with recapitulation or in EMDR, or unconsciously in dreaming. Only through fully accessing and resolving all that the body holds will we acquire the energetic wholeness to launch, with completion, out-of-body when it’s time to pass on into new life.
We publish Chuck’s blog today. Look for Jan’s later in the week!
Like the inevitability of the season’s change so too are there things we do not control… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The deepest truth of the human psyche is that we are only partially rational beings. There are forces within and around us that act upon and through us without our conscious awareness. Reckoning and reconciling with these forces lies at the heart of achieving balance, happiness and fulfillment in this life.
Modern sensibility seeks to reduce our struggle with these outside forces to chemical imbalance and structural flaw in our brains, largely correctable through psychopharmacological input. As valuable and supporting as these interventions might be, they cannot, by any means, address the intense emotionally charged feelings and thoughts that daily barrage our conscious foothold in this world.
Psychotherapy has been charged with treating the “mental illness” we see violently acted out in mass shootings that we witness almost daily. Thankfully, the tools of psychotherapy have been greatly enhanced over the past several decades by the influx of mindfulness practices introduced to the world as a result of the Tibetan diaspora. DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, owes its structure and methodology directly to mindfulness practice.
Mindfulness practice empowers us to gain control over our central nervous system and to generate neuroplasticity—a remapping of neural pathways—in the brain. The contribution of mindfulness and meditation practices, to our ability to stay focused and develop detachment from the destructive impulses and moods we experience, cannot be overestimated. Through the exercise of these tools we become grounded, able to function, and able to explore the deeper reality of who we are and who we are not. Without grounding, we are woefully ill-equipped to handle that deeper journey into our unknown selves.
Much more recent than the Tibetan diaspora has been the Shamanic diaspora of the teachings of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico through the published works of Carlos Castaneda and his cohorts and the public release of Tensegrity. Pragmatic tools have been introduced from these Shamans to enable seekers to journey into the deeper layers of self and reality.
In a recent Amazon book review of J.E. Ketchel’s The Man in the Woods, Gary Siegel, LCSWR states, “We have seen in recent times the integration of many concepts and approaches from Buddhist traditions into the mainstream of clinical work and psychotherapy. It seems to me that if techniques and awareness of Buddhism are especially well suited for things like acceptance, letting go, being in the moment, compassion and forgiveness, then the techniques and awareness of Shamanism – with their concourse with altered states of awareness, and dissociation would be perfectly suited for work with those very states that are the hallmark of trauma victims.”
Sometimes the crow of recapitulation rests among the tangled web of memory… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
In facing trauma, specifically, a seeker is challenged to reconcile with a highly emotionally charged event, or series of events, that has been stored in an altered state within the psyche. Consciously, the seeker may have little or no awareness of the contents of that altered state and may only feel the conscious tremblings or intrusions of this material through associatively triggered encounters in the flow of everyday life. From a Shamanic perspective, for healing to take place, a journey must be taken to retrieve and reintegrate the lost parts of the self encapsulated in that altered state. In addition, the journey entails the release of extraneous energy—outside energy, perhaps in the form of ideas and beliefs—that has held one’s personal energy captive in that altered state.
The Shamanic tool of Intent empowers the conscious self to engage the supports, dreams and synchronicities that initiate and lead the journey. Although stating one’s intent initiates the journey, the path will unfold outside of the control of reason.
Recapitulation is the very conscious reliving of past events. From a Shamanic perspective, reliving a past event means entering another world, a world one was once in but has subsequently left. The Shamanic practice of recapitulation enables the seeker to consciously—in the world of now—reenter an old world and take from it whatever part of the self splintered off while caught in an experience in that prior world. That energy is then brought forward and reintroduced into the self of now, where it belongs, freed of its prior entanglements. From a Shamanic perspective, this is total healing.
Shamanic journeying requires groundedness. As don Juan Matus put it, we need “nerves of steel,” if we are to journey into the unknown. Hence, the contribution of Buddhism, with its mindfulness practices, offers the perfect complement to the contributions of Shamanism with its journeying practices in healing. In fact, groundedness is a prerequisite to successful journeying. We must be able to stay present with that which once splintered us if we are to truly retrieve the lost parts of ourselves.
Meditation hones the mind, like the light seeking the flower… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The Shamanic journey of intent, however, is unpredictable. Sometimes it pushes us into journeys we feel ill-prepared for. At other times, it gives us long stretches of respite to shore up our groundedness. In reality, Buddhist mindfulness and Shamanic journeying are perfect complements, the yin and yang of wholeness and healing.
One day we must all take off and head into the great unknown… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
We must all take the hero’s journey. At some point in our lives it becomes imperative. When we stand on the threshold, about to take the first step into the unknown, we feel totally alone. No one has ever done what we are about to do. Our journey is our own to have, to experience, and to return from.
Perhaps our first journey is to leave our parents at the age of five and go off to school, to get on the school bus and return at the end of the day having had an experience that no one else has ever had. We must all do this at some point in our lives if we are to become mature, independent beings.
“Your real duty is to go away from the community to find your bliss,” writes Joseph Campbell. And it’s true, we all have to leave the known, the easy comforts of a provided life and experience the discomforts of life on our own.
There are many stages of the hero’s journey. There is that first stage of leaving home, of going off to college or moving far from where we grew up, to begin anew, as youth chomping at the bit for our own experiences beyond the world of our parents. Many never take another hero’s journey after that. We settle into our lives, become complacent, disillusioned, perhaps angry at the world for not meeting us in the way we expected. Our spirit, however, never gives up. It comes knocking, constantly asking us to please get up and do something to change ourselves!
Sometimes the call of the spirit is finally answered later in life. The journey is taken up again, when other duties have been met, when our maturity allows us to shed some of what has held us back in the past, when we are finally ready. Others continue the hero’s journey unabated, letting something else besides the dictates of society and family tradition guide them on their way, those free-spirited ones who never seem to settle in one place for very long. Others constantly refuse the call, even late into life; even upon their death beds they do not heed the proddings of their spirit to experience the bliss of life.
There is another journey… to the Deeper Within… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Besides the hero’s journey in the world, there is another kind of hero’s journey, the inner journey, the call of the spirit to encounter and experience the Deeper Within, as I like to call it. The journey into the Deeper Within is as frightening as taking that first step on the young hero’s journey, when leaving home for the first time and finding out what it means to be a fully responsible adult.
The Deeper Within calls to us throughout our lives. Calling and calling, it asks us to come closer, to hear what it has to tell us of the treasures and mysteries of the deeper self, like a deep well, the bottom of which is endless. The Deeper Within is where our true bliss lies, where our real transformation awaits. Once we heed this call, we are offered the opportunity to go on a journey that never ends.
To be ready to encounter and experience this Deeper Within we must allow ourselves to take the first part of the hero’s journey in the real world. We must leave home, grow up, create a life for ourselves on our own terms, as fully independent beings. We must gather experiences, learn what it means to face our fears and test our merits, to have gains and losses, to have love and to lose love, to build our egos and strengthen our spirits in a world that is often ignorant, disharmonious, and could care less.
Once we have had experiences in the real world, we might be ready to have experiences in the Deeper Within, where everything that we have learned from being in the outer world will be utilized and tested, proven to be useful or useless in our inner world. In the Deeper Within we will finally meet our spirit face to face, all that it encompasses, our light side and our dark side. We must be prepared for such encounters.
Our ego, strengthened by our life experiences, will prove its worth, showing us what we are really made of as we dive into the Deeper Within. The shamanic process of recapitulation is taking the hero’s journey into the Deeper Within. It entails facing what has controlled us and what has guided us, what has supplied us with our energy and what has drained us of our energy. Recapitulation is the hero’s journey to reconnecting with the spirit self. During recapitulation we surrender our ego to this spirit self, so that it may guide us to full transformation.
As we return to the real world from our hero’s journey through the Deeper Within, we must ease slowly back into society, quietly and humbly take our place again, transformed yet fully present. We return to life like a newborn, full of a new kind of knowledge that others cannot totally grasp. We return from taking the journey into the Deeper Within speaking a strange new language, having had visions and mystical encounters. We return with a new way of perceiving the world, with a new kind of awareness.
Complexities of the deeper self blissfully revealed upon taking the hero’s journey… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Everything is now so clear to us, life explained on so many levels, death faced and found to be nothing more than this life extended, experienced in another state. We return with a new kind of sober fearlessness, with a new kind of detachment, and yet we feel and experience life with far greater love and compassion than previously possible. We emerge fully aware of our universal interconnectedness and our energetic connection to all living beings. Yes, we return with blissfulness coursing through us, having experienced bliss, having fully known what bliss really is.
Our new self wants everyone else to experience the bliss of life in this manner, to take the hero’s journey to the Deeper Within and transform too! But we learn soon enough that not everyone is ready. “I can’t read all that spiritual crap!” someone said to me the other day. I was not offended, nor did I feel sorry for the person. I simply acknowledged the journey that was being taken.
There are millions of kinds of journeys being taken simultaneously. Some people are here, others there. But the thing to remember is that we all had to start somewhere. We all had to take that first step into the unknown at some point, whether in a past life or in this life. At one time we all had to, and have to, take the first step on the hero’s journey to the Deeper Within too.
Wishing you all well, wherever you are on your hero’s journey. Keep going!
Jan
One day our spirit comes buzzing, asking us to “see”… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
We watch a documentary. A small, insignificant moment in the film stays with me. I am struck by the scene in which a father, a Native American, holding his infant son in his arms, says that his child still sees all that the rest of us can no longer see, the spirits of the ancestors, the energy all around us.
While the father is speaking, the child repeatedly bats him in the face. At one point it looks as if he’s biting his father on the cheek or neck. The child laughs at something he sees. The father looks upon the child with love and tenderness, taking the swats and bites in stride, aware that his child is innocent, full of all that we are born with. How can he be angry or resentful; how can he take personally the assaults of his innocent young son who is so full of wonder?
The father is present as a mindfully aware observer. He is fully aware of all that his son embodies. He is tenderly and lovingly appreciative of this son so full of life and innocence, fully aware that his son is on his own journey. With this awareness the father is able to remain stable and loving, no matter what the child does. This is what Chuck wrote about in his recent blog, Synchronicities & A Tale Of Two Siblings. This is what we are all challenged to uphold, for the duration of the lives that we are privileged to be but a small part of. Our children are full of wonder. I have written about this myself in a previous blog—Who are you?—as a mother looking into the faces of my newborns, wondering who they might become.
We must remember that we are all innocent at our cores. We must treat ourselves with the same tenderness and calmness as the father in the film treats his son. We must stand present as the knowing adult self and allow ourselves to take our unfolding journeys. We must free ourselves of our emotional trappings, the things that hold us back, that keep us encapsulated in doubt and fear, in resentment and self-pity, that keep us from acknowledging the bigger picture that the father in the film so clearly sees.
This is what we do when we recapitulate. We allow ourselves to take the journey to retrieve our innocence, so that we may take up our true journey at the point where our innocence was interrupted. We are all seeking a reconnection with our innocence, with all that it knows, all that it sees. As we struggle through life, we are all asked, repeatedly, to wake up and return to this innocent, true, self.
Wake up to your own radiance, said the caller! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
In my own case, my big wake-up call came back in 1997, when I was granted a vision of my future. I have written about this in The Man in the Woods and elsewhere, indeed all my books encompass this theme, the call of my spirit and my own endeavors to respond, and to keep responding. I knew back in 1997 that if I did not answer the call that I would die. My spirit was calling to me because it was being smothered. But I was also aware that I would physically die as well if I did not excavate my buried spirit. This is the kind of call that comes only once. This is the call that must be answered.
The small snippet of a scene that I refer to with the Native American father and his infant son is from a documentary called Wake Up, the story of a young man who did one day wake up to discover that he had the ability to see, what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico call seeing energy as it flows through the universe. In opening up to discovering why and what seeing meant for him, the young man in the film began opening himself to the energy of life as it flows in the universe. Maturity comes in being able to balance the innocence of seeing within a meaningful and productive life, allowing it to seamlessly flow in waking and dreaming, always learning, always heeding the next call.
We often wake up in our dreams, knowing that we have woken up and yet knowing that we are still dreaming. Within this kind of lucid dreaming is the opportunity to experience ourselves as energy, as innocent as that infant in the film, seeing the same way the young man in the film sees. This same kind of waking up is available to us over and over again in our everyday world, in this dream of real life. The opportunities never stop, the wake up calls keep coming. Why is it so much harder to wake up in this life and experience it with lucidity, than it is to wake up in our dreams?
In our dreams, we are already in our energy bodies. We are in an altered state, flowing with the energy of the universe, already in the collective, interconnected energy that we all experience whether we are aware of it or not. At different times in our lives, however, we are given the opportunity to become like the innocent infant again, to truly awaken and see once again. These are the times when our wake-up calls come.
What do you see? I see two tree spirits passionately kissing! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
In order to be able to handle what comes to us, we must take in the bigger picture, as the Native American father in the film so easily does. We must let in what our innocence is trying to tell us in the context of lives lived and life still to come. During recapitulation we train ourselves to be able to do this. Keep in mind that recapitulation takes place on an energetic plane, just as dreaming does. We are fully in our energy bodies when we access a memory; we are like lucid dreamers. And yet we must also be the adult self, like the Native American father, who stands aside and looks on with awe.
We can always decide to go back to sleep; that’s our prerogative. But, as we recapitulate and achieve a new kind of balance in the flow of our lives, we must remember that our spirit will keep sending us wake us calls. That’s its job, to always remind us that if we don’t keep waking up we’ll miss out on the transformational!
