Tag Archives: recapitulation

A Day in a Life: In the Tension of the Opposites

December 28, 2011 Jan Leave a comment

I dream all night of gaining serenity and stillness, of aligning spine and chakras and achieving inner peace. I dream this process over and over again, constantly turning inward throughout the night. I wake to hear that Chuck has dreamed the opposite: violent dreams of murder and rampage on a college campus that he cannot control. He did not lose his awareness, tried to alert people to the truth of the perpetrator, a professor, but could only minimally hold him at bay. Though he attempts to engage authorities, violence prevails. We realize that as we slept side by side throughout the night our dreams created a balance. We slept in the tension of the opposites.

I see our dreaming experience duplicating the energy of our times, the masculine being balanced by the feminine and vice versa. There is always going to be violence, just as there is always the capacity within us all to bring ourselves to inner calm.

As this year comes to a close, I note the tension of our times. The energy of discontent being spurred by a need for all people on the planet to be nurtured and cared for, the energy of the movements for change asserting a new kind of masculine energy so that the feminine may prevail. The energy of our times asks that the planet be treated in the same manner, the overbearing paternal energy of greed and power relinquished now to the nurturing energy of the maternal.

Art and Photo by Jan — This is our birthing time...

I see this energy of now and the energy that Chuck and I slept through last night as the energy of our birthing time, the energy of the universe righting itself as we go into 2012, perhaps long predicted, but definitely right. Though the Mayan calendar speaks of endings we must keep in mind that endings also mean birth into new life and new possibility. The quest we are now on as human beings on our planet, Earth, is the quest for balance, for fairness, for caring compassion so that all things, human and animal—nature in all its abundance—may prevail in a new manner.

My dreams say: Go inward constantly, realign, work your way through your personal issues as you go deeper and deeper into the calmness within. Find anchoring stillness within as you turn from the disturbances without. We are all capable of shifting ourselves into stillness, my dreams say. We are all capable of recapitulating ourselves to a new place, to a new era of self.

We are all capable of shifting the old masculine energy of control and domination into new alignment by letting our feminine energy bring us to a place of inner calm. We are all capable of becoming the maternal self we have long sought outside of ourselves, just as we are capable of changing the masculine self, toppling it from its place of power that we have long felt was so necessary. We are all capable of releasing ourselves from what we carry within as we bear the tension of the opposites, as we birth through the energy of our times, as we watch the old energy disperse in the ending energy that is now upon us.

We are in the throes of birthing to our new selves. Let us not get lost in despair or fear, but let us take advantage of the facts that are clear right now: We are all in turmoil of some sort. It is right. It is exactly where we need to be if we are to change.

We are all asked to do the ultimate balancing act, to constantly realign as we bear the tension of the opposites, as we take in the truth of the violence around us. As Chuck’s dreams tell us, violence is real, take it in, let it go through us, and then let us sit in the momentary stillness that even incremental release allows. Calmly align another chakra, strengthening the inner self in the truth, knowing that we are in perfect alignment with our times.

Keep going inward as the energy of this ending time pushes us into our next birthing. This is also the energy of recapitulation. It’s alright. It’s where we’re supposed to be.

Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: A Christmas Present

December 23, 2011 Chuck 1 Comment

And so, what is Christmas?

Christmas is the archetypal birthday, a universal day to honor and give to the golden child. The golden child is our innocent child, the child we enter this world with, the child we lose touch with as we grow disillusioned in a world of suffering. It is the child we spend a lifetime seeking to retrieve from the shroud of protection we build to avoid further shame and the highly sensitive pain of not being met or received.

We learn to shut down our anticipation, excitement, wonder, and love. We will not be fooled into hoping again, into opening that sealed door of vulnerability to our innocent, golden child. We vow not to be disappointed again.

We never forget our innocent child. Often, though, we cannot go near it within ourselves, that is, we cannot allow ourselves to receive. We are able to project it outward onto our children or other’s children, or onto the puppies and kittens of our dreams. Somewhere in our lives, no matter how terrified or avoidant we might be of it, we project our innocence and are drawn to the renewal of contact with it.

Photo by Jan — We project our innocence but it's really an endless cat and mouse game

The real journey to retrieve our innocence begins with the journey of recapitulation. We cannot allow our innocence back into life until we go back and fully free it from the encounters and experiences that caused it to go into hiding in the first place. This is a delicate, raw, and tender process. Though it might be facilitated interpersonally, through some kind of relationship, the true healing relationship is within, between the adult person we’ve become and our lost, innocent child self.

The adult we’ve become, however disillusioned and defended, is still a wise self. The adult has learned that Santa Claus is a myth, that evil is part of reality, that things constantly change—people die and nothing is forever. The adult self knows about broken promises, abandonment, and betrayal. The adult self has somehow found a way to navigate the world, however impoverished it may feel, however cut off from the joy and renewal of its innocence.

And this adult warrior self is the one—the one true parent—who can find and help that golden child to return to life; a life of fullness and completion.

The adult self is the one who can be with the child as it shares the truth of its lost innocence. The adult can hear the truth, feel the truth, withstand the truth, bear witness to the truth, and fully accept the truth in solidarity with the child. The child is not alone. The child is worthy to be fully known on its own terms, not pushed away because its feelings are too much, not talked out of what it truly feels. The adult will stand with the child and hear the fullness of the truth.

Next, the adult can help the child broaden the picture. There are things that the seasoned adult can see that the child couldn’t possibly see at the time. Such things can help the child self unravel the mystery of “why,” clearing up misconceptions, such as: It was my fault; I wasn’t good enough or worthy enough.

The adult self goes on to help the child self express and release all the feelings that have been held back, perhaps for a lifetime.

As recapitulation proceeds, innocence is freed from its old trappings and a new self, a wise, innocent, fully integrated self is born into the world. This self knows about the ways of the world, it doesn’t need the world to change to live out its innocence. It no longer needs to suffer disillusionment, to be reminded of its lost innocence. It can choose wisely in relationship and accepts that nothing stays in one form forever. This is no longer a deal breaker for innocence. Innocence, with wisdom, can now flow with the changes.

This is the one true gift of Christmas, the one only we can give to ourselves. That is the gift of recapitulation, the adult that takes the journey of truth with its innocent self, ultimately merging with it. Born anew, there is now new life to live.

Merry Christmas,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Solstice

December 21, 2011 Jan Leave a comment

I step out onto the deck in the early morning darkness. It’s balmy today and I’m comfortable standing there in the calmness before dawn. The world is quiet, not much stirring yet, though I hear a rustle of squirrel in the woods and I can just make out the broad, shadowy side flanks of two deer nibbling in the backyard. Today is the shortest day of the year and the longest night, a pivotal point for all of us as the season changes into winter. I wonder what this day will bring.

On one level we have already been feeling the intensity of this time, the build up to some kind of breakthrough, the feeling that something must give way prevalent for weeks now. Each of us must face within ourselves what that might be. Perhaps this is the day that we will be rewarded for our deep inner work, for our ability to withstand the tensions of our psyches, our bodies, our inner world being confronted by our outer realities.

Last week my 92-year-old aunt said to me: “I wonder why I’ve lived so long? It must be so I could relive my life and see it from a different perspective, because that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing a life review and as I go back into different scenes and phases from my life I now see myself as arrogant, judgmental, boastful, mean, and stupid when in the past I saw myself as right, smart, and having all the answers. This is meaningful. I’m being offered the opportunity to change, and that’s good. It must be what life is about.”

She realized, as we talked, that her life review, her recapitulation, was teaching her new lessons. In looking at every action and situation in her life from a new perspective she was shedding her ego’s need to be in charge, to control, to be right, and to judge. She softened as we spoke, the awe of her inner process clearly showing on her face and in the words she used. She understood how our self-righteous attitudes and our judgments hold us caught in old places for most of our lives, until we face them and soften, with compassion for ourselves and others, and finally let them go.

Although she is old now, her demeanor that day was refreshingly young, innocent and alive. As she talked she became lighter, her face glowed with new life as her awareness shifted. The next day she called me and told me that she had more energy than she’d had in months and that she was certain this recapitulation work was so necessary for her evolution into new life, so near that on some days she wonders if she’ll make it to the end of the day.

We talked about death as being no different than life, a day like today, a solstice, a passage into new life and new awareness. The ocean doesn’t end just because you can see the horizon, I said. The sky is not finite just because we only see a small part of it. Life is the same; the energy of life passes from one reality to another, from one phase to another, through solstices and seasons, through times of turmoil and conflict, through times of great understanding and revelation. Through recapitulation my elderly aunt was preparing for her death, preparing to ride the solstice and accept the energy of new awareness.

No matter how old we are, no matter where we are in our lives, what our circumstances are, we always have the opportunity to do a life review, to recapitulate our lives in a new way. On this day, on this solstice, we are offered transition to new life. As my aunt sees it, she has a great future ahead of her. We all do. We can face it with awareness, as my aunt is electing to do, or we can go fighting, resistant and resentful, but in the end we are all going.

We are offered moments of solstice every day, though we may not see them as such. It’s often easier to embrace them when they are pointed out to us, made significant by tradition, ritual, and feast, by predictability and seasonal alignment. But in reality, every day offers us moments to shift our awareness. It’s time to embrace all of those moments as significant, to make everyday life a sacred ritual, as if we are all 92 years old and facing our deaths.

I honor my aunt on this day. I honor all of you. I honor myself, and I honor those closest to me, as we all take our next steps on our journeys.

The dawn begins to lighten the dark sky as I finish typing this blog. I breathe in its first energy and send it out to you, wishing you all happy solstice, and happy holidays,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Way of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

December 16, 2011 Chuck Leave a comment

Don Juan never would have chosen Carlos Castaneda as his apprentice. Carlos slipped through a crack in the wall of impeccability that don Juan, a master shaman, a nagual, had crafted to shield his energy from unnecessary encounters in the ordinary world.

Don Juan realized that his initial encounter with Castaneda had to be the work of the spirit and could only mean one thing: he was obliged to train an “imbecile,” as he saw Carlos, to become his successor. He acquiesced to this knock from the spirit and Carlos Castaneda became the sorcerer’s apprentice.

Don Juan, like all naguals of his lineage, knew that apprentices entered the shaman’s world with an interpretation system—a world view—wholly inadequate for understanding the shaman’s world of non-ordinary reality. There is no fault in this; we interpret the world as we have been conditioned and socialized—we know no other way. Shamans take advantage of this condition in their apprentices, systematically trapping their awareness around issues those apprentices believe to be important, indulging them, but really intent upon moving them along to perceiving the world in a vastly new and expanded way.

For example, don Juan knew that Carlos copied everything he did, and so he taught him many magical passes— movements from the shaman’s world used to recondition one’s energy—without Carlos being aware that he was actually learning these magical passes. In Carlos’s cognitive system he was simply doing “exercises,” while in the meantime he was unknowingly expanding his energetic capabilities.

Don Juan knew that if he told Carlos directly that he was teaching him magical passes, Carlos’s cognitive system would have been offended and he would invariably have argued and rejected the practice on rational grounds. Don Juan already knew that it was far more efficient to not challenge cognitive attachments directly, but instead to use them to move the trainee along.

Our spirit operates like don Juan, like a master shaman, as it nudges us along in our growth. When we set out intent to grow, we sign up to become the sorcerer’s apprentice.

As apprentices, we will be nudged along to discover the full truth of who we are, where we come from, and why—all that has happened to us in this life and perhaps beyond it. Like Carlos we enter this apprenticeship in good faith, but suffer from ignorance and a good deal of defensiveness. We naturally defend our sense of self, the self we know; after all, we’ve built our security upon it.

The spirit sets to work to move us along by trapping our awareness, sometimes gently, sometimes intensely. Examples of gentleness are signs and synchronicities placed before us daily, designed to awaken our awareness to a greater reality, one that exists beyond the limits of our rational interpretation of the world. More intense knocks of the spirit are the triggers that seize our awareness, immobilizing it, beckoning us to take the journeys into the realm of non-ordinary reality where we discover locked-away truths of our lives.

In such moments of trigger, fear dominates as we misinterpret a benign event as a mortal danger. Our awareness is completely trapped. Here begins the journey of recapitulation, as our current self is nudged to take the plunge into the world where the trigger originates from. On a recapitulation journey we face our hidden truths as we discover worlds within ourselves previously unknown to our conscious awareness.

As we accept the full truth and impact of the worlds we enter in recapitulation, we free our energy that has been locked away in those hidden worlds, perhaps for decades. We become revitalized, energetic beings, as we recapitulate; magical beings capable of experiencing the world in ways we never dreamed possible. We become capable of fulfillment in this life, no matter what age we are!

The path of the sorcerer’s apprentice is deeply challenging, but it is guided by the spirit, the master shaman within us all that nudges us onward—sometimes gently, sometimes in great haste and intensity—to the full realization of our intent for fulfillment and completion. And, in the end, it all makes sense in ways we simply couldn’t know when we began the journey as humble, eager, but necessarily ignorant apprentices.

Trust your spirit. Continue the journey and know you are being taken where you need to go,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Peeling Away Fear

December 14, 2011 Jan Leave a comment

Each day as I wake up I must face who I am. I am not perfect. I am not special. I am nothing.

These words may sound like negative mantras, but in reality they are extremely freeing. In the context of the world we live in, it may be hard to understand what that kind of freedom means. It means that, as I do my inner work, I slowly free myself from ego, judgments, attachments, greed, etc. I free myself from the desire to be special and, in so doing, I can simply be. Largely, this kind of freedom means facing my fears, for really there is little else that keeps me caught. As I see it, fear is the biggest challenge to overcome in this life.

If I ask myself why I reacted a certain way in a certain situation, I will find that at the root of my reaction was fear. We all suffer from fear. There is fear of what others will think or say about us. There is fear of doing or saying something wrong. There is fear of making the wrong decision. There is fear of getting hurt or hurting others. There is fear of financial loss, of loss of our jobs, our homes, our lovers, and those closest to us. There is fear that we are not enough, that we have failed to live up to expectation, that we are unloveable, bad, not pretty or handsome enough, that we are too fat or too thin, that we are doing everything wrong. And finally there is fear of death.

When we look at all the things we fear we see only negatives; depressing truths or untruths, perceptions or judgments that keep us caught in an endless cycle of suffering. Fear is tied to being inadequate, unfulfilled, unevolved, imperfect. So how do we accept that we are not perfect, not special, that we are in fact nothing, and actually feel good about it?

The Buddhists say that we are here to suffer, that it is how we evolve. That evolution is tied to transcending suffering, but only by facing it. The Buddhist sitting in meditation confronts what arises, going deeper and deeper into the dark space that yawns wide open inside the self as fears arise. What we discover as we confront our fears is that they lead to truths, whether hidden and totally unknown or known and rejected, they all eventually give way to more fears and more truths. Each layer of fear and truth asks to be explored and reckoned with. This is the same process that the shamans engage in while doing recapitulation. Both meditation and recapitulation offer the means of facing fear, the means of finding out why we suffer, and they both offer the transcendent quality of nothingness that we reach as we go deeper and deeper into the self.

As we meditate or recapitulate with an open mind—letting loose those ideas and judgments that I spoke of earlier—we allow what comes from within to guide us. As we mediate or recapitulate with an open mind, we ready ourselves to face each fear and ask, over and over again, “Why do I have this fear?” And then, as we meditate or recapitulate with an open mind, we allow ourselves to explore deeply—until we hear an answer.

Our answers may be as varied as we are, but I guarantee that our answers will eventually lead to just another fear, another thing we are afraid of, lying just beneath the last thing we were so afraid of. As we face each fear, we peel away judgments and perceptions—some self-imposed, some imposed by others—and find a little bit more of Self, a little bit more of who we have the potential to truly be.

As fear after fear gets peeled away and the thick layer of our suffering selves begins to thin, we begin to feel lighter, better, less negative, less attached to the old self. We gradually become more and more intrigued by our process. We want to see how far we can actually go. We want to know what else there is to learn about us. We want to become as free as possible.

In undergoing this process of peeling away our fears we offer ourselves access to what it means to be imperfect, to not be special, to be nothing—and to be totally satisfied with being in this state. In fact, we might discover the joy of being in that state of non-attachment. We might discover that our suffering has a greater purpose; that it has the potential to lead us beyond the confines of this world, tapping into far greater freedom, enlightenment, new life, and wholeness than this world alone can offer.

In facing our fears we face our humanness in its entirety, and yet we also face our immortal, infinite selves, for in doing our deep inner work we face all of our fears, including our fear of death.

It may seem like a daunting task, but facing our fears will lead to the freedom of non-attachment and opening the door to greater exploration of our fuller potential now, while in this life, so that our death becomes just one more seamless exploration of our greater potential.

I am not perfect, I am not special, I am nothing,
Jan

Riverwalker Press