Tag Archives: recapitulation

#772 Proceed With Awareness!

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

My Tattered Peace Sign—reminds me of the inevitability of constant change

Dear Jeanne,

Today, I ask for guidance that all of us may navigate the coming week with awareness, that we may not get caught, but that we may flow—the energy within and the energy without synchronized, in balance, yet still moving forward in growth. I ask that we may all learn something transformational as we go through our week and that we are aware enough to grab onto our moments of enlightenment and ride them into a new place. I ask that you guide us all throughout the week, answering the calls of the many who seek you out and trust you, and the many who are learning that we are indeed guided through life. I ask that your readers not be too hard on themselves or full of blame, but that they look inward at why they are the way they are and find greater understanding of themselves through your guidance.

In general, I ask that you continue to stay beside us all as we continue our journeys. Our intent to grow is already firmly set—I believe we all made this decision a long time ago, before we were conscious of our present life’s journey. I ask that you offer each one of your readers a sure sign that they are on the right path as they go through their week, and the assurance that they will find what they need in whatever way is most meaningful. I ask all of these things on behalf of all your readers, as we enter another work week in a world that is spinning out of control, so far from connection with the true nature of kindness, compassion, and love for all, including self.

Here is Jeanne’s response:

My Dearest Ones,

Find solace in your own seeking hearts. Remain deeply introverted during this time of recapitulation, for this is indeed a time of questioning, of controversy, of falling into an old familiar place. Yet is it also a waiting period for a new phase of growth, for self, and for humanity as a whole.

In such times, the best process to engage in is the inner process. But the inner process must be clearly stated and clearly utilized for a final sweep of old issues. Rather than getting trapped in old places, as many are apt to do, this time of return to the deeper issues of self must be done with awareness.

Do you find yourself stuck, spinning your wheels, rehashing the same old issues and finding no resolution in your old methods of attack? If so, then you are caught.

In that case, step back. Look at the process you are engaging and note that it isn’t working. Don’t repeat it nor return to the same old self-judgments, but tell the self: Enough!

Shift away with awareness!

Ask the self to look in new directions for new answers. Pry the self out of the doldrums with heart-centered breathing, asking the self to breathe out the old stale air of familiar self and breathe in new air of change and enlightenment.

Do this throughout the day, as soon as you find yourself slipping onto an old habit, an old place of remorse, regret, resentment, anger, fear, judgment. Immediately shift away—literally turning your body—abruptly shifting and breathing out the old self and breathing in the new self. This is my guidance for this week.

As you breathe, you will discover exactly what you need. You will be tapping into the underlying intent of the energy of the world you now live in. Though it may seem out of control in so many ways, the truth is that it’s so necessary for change to happen. Your decisions, personal and otherwise, must now be in greater alignment with that ancient intent if you are to shift out of the places you have been stuck in for so long.

Align with the underlying current of inevitable change and begin to see progress. This means taking the personal inner journey of change, flowing along with the outer energy of change. The truth is that it is unstoppable.

The secret is that the inner energy and the outer energy are already in synch. You really have to do very little except wake up to the fact that this is true and get on board. In some way, everyone is being pushed now to change. Can you do it? Can you flow with the inevitable? Can you bear the tension of letting go of the old and flowing with all that is already in motion?

You just have to acquiesce to the available potent energy and take the ride it offers! With Awareness!

Thank you, Jeanne!

Chuck’s Place: Tricksta!

What happens when we’re tricked? We’re trapped, caught in illusion.

The game of peek-a-boo is both exhilarating and terrifying for the baby. Suddenly you, the adult trickster, are gone—evaporated, disappearing into thin air. For the child, a moment of excitement, anxiety and anticipation ensues, and then joyful release at the sheer magic of you popping up again, out of nowhere! “Do it again! Do it again, and again!” More fear, anxiety, excitement, and utter exhilaration, please!

The trickster is magical, playing a mercurial game. The encounter with the trickster leads us onward to higher awareness. Eventually, we figure out the game: when you leave, when I can’t see you, you still exist, and your reappearance is no longer magical. This achievement is called object constancy. Peek-a-boo is no longer a game the child wants to play. Trickster can’t catch the child now. It’s boring. On to new tricksters—illusionists who both excite and terrify, but ultimately pose a challenge to move on to greater consciousness. In the broadest sense, trickster is the boundary-crosser, a being that challenges our complacency and security, and forces us to confront the deeper truths of reality.

And what are those truths? That life isn’t fair! That all kinds of possibilities exist in the universe, both good and evil and, ultimately, nothing can protect us from encountering those forces in some form. We must reckon with them, master them, and go deeper into life, deeper into the mystery.

Trickster or Tricksta?

Tricksters come in all forms, some are gentle and playful like the rabbit, the monkey, the fox, and the coyote, all found in legend and folklore. These are the tricksters we seek to adore, encounter, and learn from in childhood.

The truth is, tricksters come in many forms, and some may deliver lethal blows, to adults and yes, to children as well. Tricksters appeal to our innocence, that curious, open part of ourselves that trusts and seeks fun, play, attention, discovery, and love. Our innocence is drawn to the excitement the trickster brings, along with the tension of being caught, once again, by the trickster’s illusion.

Life without the trickster is too boring, stagnant, predictable, and routine.

The predatory trickster—what I here term “Tricksta,” following the slang term for gangster as “gangsta”—is the most challenging of all tricksters. Trickstas trap the innocent to feed their own predatory appetites. Trickstas are the most formidable of tricksters. Trickstas don’t care “if you live or if you die.” Each time I contemplated Tricksta this week, these lyrics triggered in my mind, an incessant replaying of the 1968 Steppenwolf version of The Pusher: “The Pusher don’t care, if you live or if you die.”

Innocence gets caught in addictions. Perhaps the innocence of exploration, adventure, or the innocent push of inflation, to be a hero—take the heroin plunge. Perhaps it’s the regressive push to soothe lost innocence in a chemically altered calm world where the demons of intense feeling are kept at bay. The pusher is the Tricksta that lures this innocence, then ensnares it, imprisons it, and feeds off it while it sleeps unknowingly in the poppy field. It’s always scary with addiction because Tricksta really doesn’t care if you live or if you die. If you’re to live you must awaken and release the self from the clutches of Tricksta. Free the self from the slumber of inertia and numbness. Tricksta drives a hard bargain. It’s all on you whether you resume the journey or perish.

That same predatory energy goes in search of the energy of children, trapping, tricking and manipulating their innocence. No child is a match for Tricksta’s trappings, though it might take a lifetime to stop blaming the self for the encounter. Tricksta is a deeply impersonal energy that challenges whomever it chooses to touch at the deepest level. Tricksta is indeed the darkest side of trickster. Tricksta has no mercy. Often the only defense is to forget childhood encounters with Tricksta. The benefit of forgetting is survival, the cost: lost innocence and guarded living.

At some stage in life, spirit knocks and announces to our adult selves that it’s time to resume the journey. This is the beginning of recapitulation, where the illusions of a lifetime, especially the past, are released along with Tricksta’s ancient grip.

Innocence is restored, older and wiser, with truth fully in hand. Time to go onto deeper, fuller adventures—real life adventures and fulfillment.

Don’t take it personally,
Chuck

A Day in a Life: Dream Guides

During recapitulation, dreams may act as guides taking us deeper into our inner world, revealing repressed memory, stimulating senses, signifying where we need to go next. While undergoing my own recapitulation—a magical pass used by the Seers of Ancient Mexico to reclaim lost energy—I encountered lost parts of myself in my dreams. They had been sitting and waiting for me for years, to return and bring them into life. By coming forth to engage me in dreams those parts got my attention, often in striking ways. But it wasn’t until I was ready to fully accept that I was on a journey of significance, as we all are, that I woke up to what those dreams were trying to tell me.

Dreams allow us to explore our inner world without the overriding dominance of the mind and the judging personality, without the ego sticking its nose into an experience that may be transformative. Pay attention to your dreams, they may hold more than you think.

I once dreamed a situation that was, in fact, laying out my entire recapitulation process, showing me very clearly what was at the core of my discontent, laying out the future as well. In that dream, I encountered an aggressive figure that I recognized as being long dominant in my life. I lost all of my identification and wandered through unknown territory until I finally reached a place of peace. In fact, that was what happened to me as I began the journey of recapitulation within a short time after that. Portending my future, that dream opened the door to deeper exploration of who I was. In fact, “Why am I the way I am?” was the question I continually asked myself. I couldn’t fully answer it until I fully recapitulated.

The door to dreaming...facing fear

During recapitulation we do lose our identity, as my dream suggested. We shed all that we carry, things that we take on in our efforts to grow, as we struggle to be in the world, as well as burdens placed on us by others. We find ourselves continually freeing ourselves from old ideas and perceptions of ourselves and the world we live in, as we recapitulate. As we take the journey into the deeper self, we discover a new self. We are offered the opportunity to work our way into filling this new self with new ideas, thoughts, and perceptions. We are offered the possibility of fully taking on this new identity, one that is truly us. This may be a dream identity that we never imagined we could fully own. This may be a spiritual self we had distanced ourselves from. This may be an absolutely strange and amazing self, a magical self. We all have the opportunity to transform.

In wandering the strange lands of our dreamworld, with awareness, we’re offered access to our greatest potential. If we can dare ourselves to take a dream journey, facing our greatest fears in both our dreams and in real life, we offer ourselves the opportunity to totally transform. Some of those amazing dream worlds we’ve encountered while asleep are actually available to us in our everyday world as well. In taking hold of our dreams as significant participants in our journeys throughout life, we find the dreams themselves to be our most remarkable companions. Our dreams may be where our fullest potential is accessed, where our deepest issues are revealed, and where our past, current, and future challenges and potential lie.

In experiencing our dreams as our innermost caring and supportive guides, we may more quickly wake up to our true journeys. What path is your dream pointing out to you? Who visited you last night to show you where to go next, what to do, and how to go about it? I find great meaning and pertinent information in my dreams. Indeed, by paying attention to them I gave myself the opportunity to change. And don’t forget, our dreams may approach us while we are awake or asleep.

The importance of the recapitulation process reveals itself every day, in the work Chuck and I do, in the communications we receive, and in our own lives. We personally use the practice of recapitulation constantly, in pursuit of our greatest potential; always more to learn, to explore, and access. Our journeys are endless, our spirits constantly nudging us to keep going. In fact, anything that appears in our lives may actually be trying to alert us to something special and important about ourselves and our true direction in life.

There are indeed many ways to transform, and indeed recapitulation is really a natural process that we all engage in all the time: in remembering, in experiences, in thoughts, in illnesses, in repetitive habits and behaviors, in our choices and decisions, in the kinds of things we elect to avoid or pursue and yes, in our dreams. Do we dare to call life itself “recapitulation?” Do we dare to fully embrace our spirit’s call and give it a structure with a name? Are we really so daring as to go all the way to transformation? That is what we are challenged with really. Our spirits ask us every day: “Are you coming with me? Are you ready today?

In a few weeks, I intend to have the first volume of my book The Recapitulation Diaries available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book. One does not need to have a Kindle device in order to download e-books. Free apps and tools are available for all kinds of devices including phones, computers, and ipads. We’ll have all of that info available when the time comes. We’ve decided that we won’t be publishing a paperback copy at this time as I intend to immediately jump into working on the second volume. That being said, my greatest hope is that my book will aid others, showing what it means to recapitulate in the context of everyday life, offering the tools to undergo a shamanic practice in full awareness.

Dream on. And remain aware: dreams are just waiting to be fulfilled. What dream do you have that is knocking at the door? May you find your way to it, in whatever way works. Recapitulation is only one way, I know that, but I can only say that for me, it is the only way. Nothing else works. I always knew there were other worlds available to me. I just didn’t know how to get into them. Recapitulation, as a tool to transforming myself and the world I choose to live in, offers me total access.

Much love,
Jan

A Day in a Life: Freedom

What is freedom? What does it mean to be free? As I work on my book, The Recapitulation Diaries, I feel as if I’m writing about someone else, as if the experiences of my child self happened in a different lifetime. I’m no longer attached to her story as my own. The things that happened to her no longer personally affect me.

Even the adult I was a few years ago no longer exists. I no longer feel the way she felt. I no longer perceive the world as she did. I no longer fear the way she did. I no longer hide or withdraw the way she did. I no longer interact with others the way she did. I no longer even think the way she did. I am a completely different person. That is freedom!

To transform is a choice. Going deeply into the personal is a choice. To achieve the impersonal is transformative and freeing. What do I mean by the impersonal? Well, in the old days, when I was that other person I took everything personally. I trusted no one. I felt misunderstood, bad, ignored, neglected, mistreated, angry, and fearful. The world was not my oyster, but instead a place to withdraw from as often as possible. In fact, the truth is, that was how I perceived the world, not how the world perceived me.

At the time, I was still attached to feelings and issues that had been part of my life from earliest childhood. By the time I was a grown woman those issues had me in their clutches. I was in a critical state of discontent, just holding onto reality by a thin thread. Nervous and afraid, getting angrier and angrier and more depressed than ever, I’d often force myself to make changes. I knew change was good; it had worked often enough in the past to break the deadlock within, at least for a time. But the truth is that the changes themselves never led to anything because they were predictable, fairly safe changes, totally under my control.

Seeking transformation? How?

It wasn’t until I felt death breathing down my neck, clearly knowing that I would die if I didn’t make a real change, that I dared myself to begin a different kind of journey. At the time I didn’t know it would lead to a total transformation. It wasn’t until I met Chuck and began a shamanic recapitulation that the idea of transformation appeared as something even remotely possible.

I know I write about recapitulation a lot in these blogs, as does Chuck, but I just can’t help it. During my recapitulation, I met Jeanne, first in real life and then as an otherworldly entity. She told me, in the early days of my recapitulation when she came to me in her energy body, appearing when I was in the middle of recapitulating a horrific traumatic event, that I had a three-year journey to complete. She told me that I’d already made a good start, and that at the end of that time I would understand everything. She said I had to stay focused on the recapitulation, without being distracted by other things.

“Let everything else go for now,” she said. “Don’t worry about anything. Life will unfold as it should and all that is right will come to pass as you take this journey. Stay focused. It’s crucial that nothing distract you from this most important task. This is your work now.”

This is your work now?! What the heck did that mean? I had no clear idea at the time, but here I am ten years later and I know exactly what that means. My recapitulation did become the central focus of my life then, and the shamanic practice of recapitulation continues to be a central focus.

Once again I’m in a unique position, being offered another transformative opportunity as I prepare my book for publication. The process of writing about recapitulation has been transformative as well, as I realize just how thorough a job I did in recapitulating a brutal past. I am no longer attached to it in any way. I am totally free.

Transformation is possible, but it takes work. There’s no doubt about that, but I would not trade those years of deepest recapitulation for anything in the world. I had more experiences during that time and learned more about life than I could have learned anywhere else. I learned more about everything. And all I had to do was go inside myself. It was all there waiting for me.

Remembering to stay connected to the path of transformation, until next time,
Jan

Chuck’s Place: Nothing But Fluff

I sat this morning editing the final version of Jan’s soon to be published The Recapitulation Diaries—Year One: The Man in the Woods. I encounter this dream. With Jan’s permission I include that dream here followed by her reflection upon awakening.

Talking heads

October 21, 2001
“I dream a strange dream about a bodiless head that rides on a small electronic platform that looks something like a large gray plastic model of an aircraft carrier. The features on the face are hard and set, metallic looking, the eyes glaring. I’ve stumbled into a large empty apartment building, unaware of its presence and apparently I’ve disturbed it while wandering around in this vast space. The head on the platform bolts out from underneath a pile of debris where it has lived for a long time and skims along the floor, the face mean and angry. It pursues me around the empty building for some unknown reason. Eventually I turn and attack it and the head falls off the platform. It crashes to the floor and explodes. I’m surprised to see that it’s no more than a pile of fluff, nothing but bits of paper and plastic.”

“In the morning I wake exhausted, tired of feeling so empty, so hollow. The crazy head chasing me doesn’t make me feel any better, but it does make me think that perhaps the praying mantis picking at my head [an earlier dream] was trying to alert me to something besides just the memories. Perhaps I’m not supposed to go after the head, not just supposed to dig through my head for the memories, after all. The head doesn’t really hold anything inside, as this dream shows; it’s just a lot of stuffing. Where do I look then? Where do I go for the memories if not into my head, into my brain, to the place where memories are supposedly stored?” [End of excerpt from book.]

Moments after reading this I opened Carlos Castaneda’s The Wheel of Time, in anticipation of writing my weekly blog, to the following:

“The internal dialogue is what grounds people in the daily world. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so. The passageway into the world of shamans opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off his internal dialogue.” — p. 117

Jan’s dream and subsequent reflection illustrate that the mind, the home of the internal dialogue is merely fluff. The internal dialogue upholds the world that we all agree upon, with the consequence being, the creation of a consensus reality. To create a world is indeed a magical act, however, the truth is that it’s just an interpretation of energy spun by the internal dialogue.

Internally, Jan had upheld a world through an internal dialogue that created a story about her past that did not represent the truth of her experience in childhood. She was at a stage in her recapitulation where she needed to free herself of her mind. In order to do this, she had to confront her fear, which had allowed her internal dialogue to spin reality to protect her from painful truth. By confronting her fear and shattering her mind she was soon to free-fall into deeper truth. To discover these truths, as she reflects in this excerpt, she had to go outside the mind and allow her body to reveal the truth unfiltered by the mind. As Carlos points out: the passageway opens once the internal dialogue is silenced.

What keeps us attached to the internal dialogue is fear. We must be willing to confront our fears to get to deeper truth. Confronting the fear does not mean that the fear goes away. What it does mean, however, is that we insist upon pursuing the truth regardless of the fear. Fear continues to be present but it doesn’t stop the journey.

In recapitulation we intend to learn the truth. We don’t attach to the internal dialogue but go directly to the body for a full accounting of life lived.

The mind is a wonderful thing to lose,
Chuck