Tag Archives: recapitulation

Chuck’s Place: I Feel The Earth Move…

Unshaken

I had a break early Tuesday afternoon. I turned off the lights, sat calmly in a lotus position and began the sweeping recapitulation breath. Within moments the earth beneath began to rumble. I felt the solid old factory building sinking, the sure-footed earth turning to liquid.

That’s how it is, with recapitulation. The surety of the structures we’ve built a self upon, a lifetime upon, begin to crumble, no longer able to support the solid illusions of our lives. It’s a free fall, and one not to be undertaken lightly, but only out of necessity.

We, as a world, are in the time of recapitulation now—and we must take the journey because the intent has already been set and there is no turning back.

The earthquake shook the capital of the modern world, Washington D.C. It left a four-foot crack in the Washington Monument and brought down several pinnacles of the National Cathedral—Church and State—the foundational structures of society, rocked and rattled by the energy of change.

Synchronistically, the Martin Luther King Jr. monument, recently installed at the National Mall, had just opened to the public and emerged unscathed from the quake. Can the old structures of our society handle the true impact of such an agent of change? Apparently not, and we see the realization of Martin’s dream, President Obama, confronted with the crumbling structures of our changing world.

I see Obama as an agent of change, ironically aided now by the forces intent upon his destruction. Those forces are quite willing to grind government and economy to a halt, to turn back the clock to some romantic vision of blissful conservativism. Destructive as that might be, it is having the effect of bringing down the long-dominating economic structures of the world. Had those forces not acted so rigidly, Obama would have been forced to bolster the status quo. He’s been relieved of that burden, the status quo is being irradicated and there is no turning back. And even should Obama be ousted in a desperate collective attempt to restore security, there’s no way to turn back the wheel of time to the good old days. Those structures are falling down, even the wealthiest cannot stop it. We are being forced into a time of waking up, facing the truths, and building fluid structures for a changing world. And nature is making sure that that world changes!

On a personal level, once the agent of change calls, the knock of the spirit to discover the full truths of the self, we do best to heed the call with the knowing that we have Spirit behind us. When spirit instigates changes, spirit also provides the supports to take the journey. Free fall is inevitable, and it can indeed be frightening.

Feeling the earth move under my feet was quite an awesome, humbling experience, but it’s also a reminder that the only real choice we have is the attitude we take toward that inevitable journey. When I felt the earth tremble and loosen its solid illusion, I said, “Wow, is this it! This is a ride I want to take with eyes wide open and calm breath.”

Onto the next agent of change, Hurricane Irene!
Chuck

A Day in a Life: A Little Bit of Magic

Spirit knocks at the door. What do we do? Answer it! Where will it take us this time? Who knows, but can we allow ourselves to go? Can we hold onto our awareness and go, with fluidity? Can we accept that we really have no choice in the matter and find the beauty and the magic in every journey our spirit invites us to take? These are the questions that come up often in life. If we are aware of spirit and ready to take a different kind of journey, ready to accept a different viewpoint, we may just find that the door we open is indeed a magical door.

Facing the darkness

During my recapitulation I was constantly confronted with knocks from my spirit inviting me into the depths of my own soul. Did I really want to face what loomed up out of the darkness every time I heard those knocks? For a long time I didn’t. I ran away as fast as I could, the darkness and the shadowy scenes that popped up too frightening to contemplate. Eventually my spirit told me, in more ways than one, that it was dying, that it just didn’t want to do life the way I’d been doing it for almost fifty years. That was when I knew it was time to face the darkness.

As I tentatively took my first peek through that door into the depths of my soul, my first discovery was that the darkness, and everything else that had bothered me throughout my life, was actually inside me. I understood that, until I faced it, I would continue to bear the burden of it and all the stuff that was naturally piling on top of it. I saw that I was carrying a tremendous, depressingly heavy load. So, when the darkness called again, I didn’t run. This time I knew that if I didn’t face it I would die under the weight of it, and I wasn’t really ready to call it quits. I knew, as I’d always known, from the time I was a young girl, that I had to do something important with my life. I just could never get a handle on what that was.

I made the decision to face the darkness, circumstances leading me to the inevitable necessity of finding out what was wrong with me and what was wrong with my spirit. Once I set that intent, the universe took up my cause and one day I found myself sitting across from Chuck Ketchel. And that was the beginning of taking the next step into the darkness. He taught me how to face the darkness. He introduced me to the shaman’s world. He taught me magical passes, and a new perspective from which to view my life and all life, from a magical perspective.

The first little bit of magic that Chuck handed me was very simple. He said: “You’re on a spiritual journey.”

At first I wanted to spit it right back at him: “Yeah, I’m on a hell of a journey!” But something made me pause and in that pause I dropped into the depths of my soul and I knew he was right. That was enough to keep me on the path that I knew lay ahead of me, dark as it was and impossible to see.

Next he said: “You’re going back to find out what you missed the first time around. What are you supposed to find out about your child self?

In constantly revisiting my child self I learned how fierce she was, a warrior without even being aware of it. She not only survived years of sexual abuse, but she transcended it again and again. As I recapitulated, I was constantly reminded that I had once been a magical being. The challenge then became to find the means to accept this fact, for my adult self, but mostly for my child self, to allow her full integration into my life, magic in its rightful place, inside me; now replacing the darkness that had once loomed so frighteningly.

We are all magical beings!

With this shamanic, magical perspective as my anchor, I traveled back in time and met my child self and relived her journey over and over again, in great detail. As I took that journey I gained knowledge of the shamans world, of reality as illusion, of everything as meaningful, of everything as leading to awareness. A little bit of magic in the beginning was enough to cut through the darkness and give a little bit of light and hope, enough to traverse the darkness in its entirety. Eventually, I learned that I was nothing special, that everyone is equally magical. And that too was a magical lesson.

It was hard work. Facing the darkness inside the self is perhaps the most challenging and frightening encounter we can undertake. But, in truth, it is where the outer world and the people we encounter, where our relationships and everything else is reflected. It’s where all our challenges really lie.

The inner world may appear as darkness to the uninitiated, but I found out that every time I poked my head up out of the darkness I was totally amazed at where I had been and what I had experienced. I knew then that I had to keep diving into the deepest, darkest self in order to evolve, to change myself and the direction of my life. My spirit showed me exactly where to begin.

We are all magical beings. Sometimes our journeys present us with our magic early in life, and then we must go and retrieve it from the past. Reuniting with the lost self is a magical journey. As tough as it is, it leads only to more moments of magic, if we let ourselves open up to the possibility that magic is indeed meant to be part of life. And yes, I still have my inner darkness—that never goes away—but now, with a little bit of magic in hand, I’m not afraid to venture there. I continue to challenge myself to dive in there and face what my spirit shows me I must still face. I find the inner process to be the most important, fascinating, and magical part of life.

I wish that all might find the magic within. It’s just waiting, the golden nugget inside that darkest hunk of coal. The next time spirit knocks, answer the door. Look into the darkness and contemplate it with the magical self. That too is there waiting within.

Sending a little bit of magic and love,
Jan

#773 Know the Ancient Self

Written by Jan Ketchel with a channeled message from Jeanne Ketchel.

I sometimes wake in the middle of the night, the weight of the world on my shoulders. I toss and turn worrying about how this crumbling world is going to end up, how everyone is going to survive and thrive. The nighttime is often a difficult time to slough off such worries. I turn to dreaming, setting the intent to resolve my attachment to such issues as I drift off to sleep, asking the universe, Jeanne, and my higher self to guide me to resolution. Sometimes I just end up entangled in fear, my mind racing, knowing I’m personally being challenged but unable to gain clarity.

Last night, in the middle of tossing and turning, I heard the following admonishment: Stop projecting! Face your own fears and challenges. Let others take their own journeys, including humanity itself!

In the light of day, I understand how pragmatic and sensible this guidance is, but in the middle of the night it appeared as daunting and even somewhat cold-hearted. Often the frightened child in me simply chooses to turn away, wanting sleep instead, but in reality I am far from a scared child. However, I know I must constantly turn to my child self to guide me to face my fears, for they reside with her. There are always new challenges to face as life unfolds, and who, but my child self, the knower-of-all-things, would be able to show me where I need to go?

Today, I ask Jeanne to give us all guidance on how to face our nighttime, and daytime, fears. How do we turn our fears into deeper inner work? Do you have guidance for all of your readers about how to keep going ever deeper into inner work, how to face our fears and find our way to new levels of awareness?

Here is how Jeanne responded:

Deep inner work requires awareness that there is work to be done, first of all. You acknowledge your fears—GOOD! That is step-one in going deeper. One must be humble and open to the facts of human imperfection and struggle. All human beings are imperfect; it is the nature of being human. Your lives are meant to be lives of struggle, conflict, and challenge. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but, in truth, it is just so. That’s why you are alive—to work through core issues so that you may evolve beyond them.

If one constantly pushes fears and difficulties aside one will fail to grow. Imagine a child, an infant who never evolves beyond infancy, who never meets the challenges to grow physically or mentally, though it is perfectly formed and fully capable of doing so. Would it not be frustrating if that child did not take up the challenges in life, even the physical ones, though it is perfectly fine and more than capable of doing so?!

In turning from their true challenges in life, many people are like such an infant. In pushing aside fears, in not facing or accepting the horrors in life, one remains infantile, in a state of paralysis. In such a state one does not really relieve the self of any of the fears and horrors but simply becomes entrapped in them. They gain power and control and thus there is no release for the true spirit self, lying entwined in such powerful stuff.

Turn to the ancient self and face all your fears

At the core of each one of you is an ancient self—the all-knowing self—who requires more than paralysis and acquiescence to the infant who refuses to budge. This ancient self is the one calling to you at night, using your childhood fears, asking you to go inside and find your way ever deeper.

This ancient self has already faced every fear there is; yet it asks you to review what is most important for you to review in this lifetime. The fears you face in this lifetime are the challenges your evolving spirit self must face in order to grow. It asks you constantly to face them, often using your child self to alert you to what they are, asking you to resolve them, and gain awareness of the self as an evolving being, fully capable of meeting all your challenges, in that world, and in other worlds as well.

It’s easy to think that life in that world is all there is, to believe that one cannot change circumstances. But, in truth, each one of you has more power than you think to change your circumstances, both your outer circumstances and your inner ones as well. You just need to remind yourselves, fairly often, that your ancient self has all the answers. Having already faced everything you are now facing, this ancient self is present to guide you through your reliving. Your reliving will lead you to a new place this time because you are awakening to the fact that you have been here before, done this many times, in many other lives. You sense the déjà vu of life in all its aspects. You know, at your core, that your real challenge this time is not really to face your greatest fears, they are just the premise from which to launch. Your greatest challenge this time is to become more fully aware of this ancient self and what it has to tell you beyond your fears.

Accept your fears as necessary steps to learning about the ancient self. When you desire to turn away from your next moment of fear, I suggest that you stand your ground. Ask your ancient self to take your hand and guide you through that fear, so that you may find the root of it. It may not at all be what you think!

Thank you, Jeanne!

Chuck’s Place: What the World Needs Now is Recapitulation

Are we all ready to face the real truths that are so obvious?

Jeanne was diagnosed with cancer in 1994 right in the midst of our move to Tivoli, New York. Simultaneously, Carlos Castaneda was launching Tensegrity, a modern format in which to pass on the knowledge of the Seers of Ancient Mexico. Around the same time Jan, living in the deep South, was also diagnosed with cancer while at the same time being energetically stirred to make the trek back to the Hudson Valley, called to a new potential destiny. All three of these energetic events, Jeanne-Carlos-Jan, were about endings and new beginnings.

For Jeanne and I, it was to mark the final stage of our life together in this world as we began preparing to meet again on new energetic terms after her death. For Carlos, also soon to die, it marked the end of his shamanic line. Carlos, a socialist at heart, broke all the rules of secrecy in shamanism and offered everyone equal access to the tools of his shamanic line with the launching of Tensegrity. Tensegrity offers practitioners the tools to discover the energy body and the opportunity to evolve to new levels of human possibility. Jan was to heal from cancer, move North, and discover the need to end her sixteen-year-long marriage. On a profound personal level, an old illusion of herself was to die and she moved deeply into energetic life.

The energetic cord that was to bind these three events together was the shamanic tool of recapitulation. Jeanne and I were introduced to recapitulation at a workshop we attended led by Carlos. Recapitulation aided Jeanne in leaving her human form, landing her in her energy body, like a bodhisattva—an evolved being available to guide others still in this world. I introduced Jan to recapitulation, the tool that allowed her to discover her unknown self, shed her attachment to a horrific past, and revamp her energy to become an energetic channel able to connect with Jeanne in her evolved energy body state. Through Jeanne’s channeled messages to Jan, Jeanne expanded the practice of recapitulation outside of the shamanic format, to include the triggers and synchronistic events of everyday life as energetic promptings to recapitulate.

Personally, the day I introduced Jan to the tool of recapitulation was the day of my full coming out. It was my transformation, as I dared to openly use a shamanic tool in my clinical work. Up to that point, though I was well aware of the value of recapitulation as a tool for healing deep trauma, I relied more heavily on EMDR, a therapeutic tool with some similarities to recapitulation. However, it was really a subset of the far more comprehensive practice of recapitulation.

I introduced Jan to recapitulation over a decade ago. As is evident from my writings and work over the past decade, I can’t say enough about the healing value of recapitulation as a tool to fully heal from the deepest and most horrific of life’s traumas. In a couple of weeks, Jan will be releasing the first of three books, The Recapitulation Diaries: The Man in the Woods. This book, almost three years in the making, is a detailed description of every important facet of her recapitulation process. With this publication we enter a new era in our work as Jan makes available, to anyone, guidance on how to do recapitulation, how to discover who you really are, how to release the self from illusions about life and life’s experiences, and how to revamp energy to enter new and fulfilling life.

Before he left this world, Carlos fully understood and appreciated the value of the internet as a communication tool. His foresight has proven true. We will be publishing Jan’s book first on Kindle, the wave of the publishing future. We discovered, with out last book, The Book of Us, that the old structures of the publishing world could not serve as a medium for our ideas and experiences. In fact, none of the old structures work for us. We find ourselves constantly being energetically led to new formats.

A bit of Carlos’s socialist heart has rubbed off on us as well. Jan’s Kindle book will sell for $.99 (yes, ninety-nine cents!) making it available to everyone. It isn’t about the money—it’s about the energy and evolution. On the other hand, you do have to pay. Carlos and the other seers of his line discovered that you have to pay, no matter what world you’re in. If you give it away, it simply is not valued. Perhaps it’s just the nature of evolution; without challenge we simply don’t grow. But there doesn’t have to be greed—the number one cause of our crumbling world.

The relevance of the shamanic tool of recapitulation for our rapidly decaying world is obvious. Don Juan predicted that for human beings to survive now, a mass redeployment of energy, such as occurs through a recapitulation, was critical. Human beings need to be willing to drop the illusions that can no longer sustain the world, face the real truths, and move forward in a new energetic configuration.

What the world needs now is recapitulation on a personal, interpersonal, national, and international level. We see the sentinels of illusion busily trying to guard and uphold a world that is crumbling around them. And then we see many brave seekers recapitulating and preparing to lead a new energetic possibility.

Everything is possible—and a new recapitulated possibility is happening!
Chuck

A Day in a Life: Who Are You?

When my children were first born I stared at them intently as they lay in my arms, wondering who they would become.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Where have you come from? Why are you here? Why did I get you? Where are you going? Who are you going to be?”

I was fascinated by those tiny, helpless creatures who seemed to know everything, yet who could do nothing for themselves. I sensed they held all the mysteries of life, yet it was my responsibility to teach them about life. How could I teach those complete little beings anything! I could only offer them utter respect and love, knowing they held memories of things I had long ago lost touch with. New to the world, I saw them as fully in touch with all knowledge, so recently coming from the wellspring of all life.

Who are you?

From the moment of birth, I saw them as miniature adults, intelligent, intuitive, beautiful beings that I was charged with launching into life. While preparing them for whatever life held in store for them, I rarely stopped to think about the daunting task that it really was. With my intent already set, I plowed ahead, carrying them forward, aware most of the time that I was challenging them; that I was doing what they needed me to do. Now they’re both freshly graduated from college, looking for jobs, and they are indeed those intelligent, intuitive, beautiful beings I always saw them as. And yet, I still look at them with awe and wonder who they will become in the future.

Why did I get them? Why does anyone get the children they get? I no longer wonder why.

I believe our children are our opportunities to transform. We are constantly asked by them to face our fears while at the same time we are challenged to free them of us. We are challenged to free them of everything we hold onto, both that which we hold sacred and that which we fear, so they can become thoughtful, aware, evolving beings. We are charged with unburdening them so they can move on, totally free, unencumbered by our darkest secrets, our inhibitions, our rules, our agreements, and yes, our fears. I was conscious of this from the very minute I first set eyes on my children. Even if we don’t have children we are asked to face these challenges in all of our relationships, whether with partners, parents, siblings, co-workers, etc. We are all offered opportunities to transform.

When I whispered to them that I would do the best I could, I was promising them that I too would transform. Perhaps that was the moment when I set my intent to do a shamanic recapitulation. I don’t know for sure, because I was far from embarking on that journey, but something inside me knew that I must not burden those kids with me. I knew my biggest challenge was going to be setting them free of me, so they could become the beings they had the potential to become and the only way to do that was to face who I was. And I have indeed had to face my own fears as I raised my children.

My two children don’t even know it, but they have always been the impetus behind my own healing journey. I see them now for what they truly are: they are beings of recapitulation, having brought me to this point in my life, for they have constantly challenged me as much as I challenged them, and as much as I challenge myself.

When I worry about them, I know I must turn my eyes inward and work on my own reasons for that worry. I know I must ask myself to take the worry off them and use it to cleanse myself, sending them off with the freedom from me that they deserve. I refuse to burden them with me. Even so I know they will have to do their own work on shedding the mother they got, and in the meantime I give them permission to do so, to go out into the world and truly become who they are.

In continually facing who I am, in reflecting back onto myself what I project onto them, I ask myself to become who I truly have the potential to become as well. We are all here for many purposes, for many reasons, and for many challenges. We are all imbued with the potential that I first realized in my infants, when I first allowed that they did not really belong to me, but only to themselves. I knew my job was to bring them into life in the best way I could. I chose to do that with awareness.

When I see them sad, I ask myself: what is it in me that is sad? When I see them angry at the world, I ask myself: where is my anger? When I feel their disappointments, I must ask myself where my own disappointments are. I know I must resolve those issues in myself so we can all be free.

I ask only that they go into life and embrace it as their own, for life is ready to embrace them in return. I ask that they let me go, accepting me as a separate being on a separate journey, as much as I accept this truth about them.

As Jeanne suggested in Monday’s message, I use heart-centered breathing to send them on their journeys into the next stages of life—I use heart-center breathing and Tonglen too. I breathe in my worries and breathe out their full potential. I breathe in my fears and breathe out fearlessness for them. I breathe in my maternal instincts and breathe out their own maternal instincts and abilities to care for themselves.

I unburden them of me. I feel it is my greatest duty as their mother, to set them free, of me especially. I don’t own them. I love them and cherish them for who they are. I watch with awe as they launch into the world, as I once watched with awe as they first learned to roll over, to sit up, and as they stumbled through their first walking steps.

When people tell me I have great kids, I know they speak the truth.

“Yes, they are great kids,” I say, “because they are themselves!”

I still whisper the same words to them each day that I once whispered when they were infants: “Be yourself, be who you are. I can’t wait to see who you will be!”

I’m still fascinated as I watch them take their next steps—I’m just as fascinated by all the people I know and meet. I wonder: Who are you going to be?

Love to you all,
Jan