Tag Archives: recapitulation

Chuck's Blog

#685 Chuck’s Place: Boroughs & Bridges to the Truth

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America eagerly awaits its new Idol: Will it be Crystal; will it be Lee? The Tea Partyers eagerly await the opportunity to “throw the bums out” in the midterm elections. We breathe easier because the solid Admiral of the Coast Guard is overseeing BP. Natural gas companies are seizing the moment; offering the “safe” alternative to oil. After all, they blast 7,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface; how could that possibly effect the drinking water, or the cows pasturing on the farms above? Meanwhile, somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, one mile (5280 feet) beneath the earth, the oil continues to flow, unabated. Fortunately, we are “right on schedule” for a final capping off of the pipe, some time in August. There is evidence now that the oil has caught the current and is showing up on the coast of Florida, the same current that flows up the eastern seaboard. Naturally, specimens are being “properly analyzed” to verify their point of origin. Thank God for science!

From a different perspective, I view this broadening, enveloping nigredo, as black gold, perhaps the real next American Idol; the one we will learn to appreciate the most. The tragedy to the seas, to the habitats of many, including our own, is now threatened at an unstoppable pace. Nature itself has taken over now, demanding that we embrace the truth. It is downright heartbreaking to see the amount of destruction to innocent sea life. The entire food chain will be poisoned as a result of this catastrophe and the impact will be felt by all living things. It is evident that the human race, left to its own devices, refuses to face the truth of its destructive behavior to the planet. I call the nigredo “black gold” because it represents, through the magnitude of its destruction, our path to redemption. It is not just a “good” thing that we check our greed, become humble, and assume responsibility for maintaining balance in this world; it is the only means of survival. It is not about convincing anyone or overpowering resistance. Nature has lost her patience; if we don’t capitulate, we perish.

The water, from which we are all born, which sustains all life, will now poison life, until we face the error of our ways and change our gluttonous attitudes toward the planet. But do not despair! Change is on the horizon. No longer must we sit idly by in powerlessness as the forces of greed dominate the show. Nature is on board now, in a big way. Stay aligned with the truth, your inner truth, and join your intent with this evolutionary process, facing and embracing all our planetary truths, which are, from an energetic perspective, “right on schedule.”

Keeping with the themes of water and nature, I turn now more personal, to dreams from my life around the Isle of Manhattan.

In countless dreams, I am lost in the Bronx searching for the bridge to Manhattan. Eventually, I find the bridge. However, it is generally at various stages of disrepair, or under construction, or being dangerously flooded with enormous waves crashing over it as it sways in the wind. Sometimes, I am lost in Brooklyn, unsure of the direction to Manhattan or which subway to take. Occasionally, the current is calm and I can swim across the river.

My psyche, the self, the spinner of dreams, has chosen New York City, with all of its boroughs and bridges, to show me both the fragmentation within my psyche, the location of untapped resources or possibilities, and the status of my ability to both tap into and integrate them.

Psychic fragmentation is often caused by traumatic experiences where parts of the self are cut off from the mainstream conscious self and forced to exist in unknown isolated islands, like, let’s say, Staten Island. Who even knows anything about Staten Island, or conceives of it as being part of New York City? So forgotten are they, complain Staten Islanders, that they have even considered secession from the union of New York City.

Psychic fragmentation can also be the result of socialization, where unacceptable parts of the self are repressed, never allowed access to conscious life; in the place Jung called the shadow. Perhaps these parts are stored in another borough of New York City, such as in Brooklyn or the Bronx.

Finally, there are parts of the self that have simply yet to emerge, yet to be activated, yet to be discovered in life. These resources may also be stored in the outlying boroughs, perhaps in Queens, a royal borough.

The process of individuation is the challenge to gain access to, to claim and integrate, all the boroughs of the self into a conscious unified whole. Integration requires a network of connections that allow easy access to all the boroughs, hence the significance of the condition of the bridges in my dreams. Psychotherapy is the process of building solid bridges to all parts of the self.

The seers of don Juan’s line introduced the process of recapitulation, of reliving one’s life, in order to reclaim all vital energy lost to prior experiences, or that which is lodged in the outlying boroughs. Furthermore, they introduced learning to shift the assemblage point, what they call our major point of awareness, to different positions within our energetic selves to access the fuller possibilities of our innate potential. Their techniques to create this shift are:

1. recapitulation, where we volitionally shift the assemblage point to a different place of awareness, that of forgotten or repressed aspects of life experiences;

2. dreaming, where the assemblage point loosens as the conscious ego relaxes its hold on our point of awareness;

3. stalking, where we shift the assemblage point through volitionally interrupting our habitual patterns by acting-as-if, or by practicing not-doings; and

4. intent, where we access the power of intent to shift our point of awareness simply through intending it.

Both psychotherapy and the practices of the seers offer tools to individuate and actualize the full potential of the self. But remember, union requires open bridges to all boroughs, access to all parts of the self. It requires truthfulness and clarity, without deception or hidden agendas; no cover-ups or idolizations, no capping off of any parts of the self that are spewing black gold until you get the message and take appropriate action. In order to stand in the fullness of self, we must allow nature itself to take over, inner and outer, integrating it with what we already know about the self. The natural flow of events and consequences in our lives, even the nigredo, are integral to this evolutionary process.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Dreaming the Eighth Step

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In Carlos Castaneda’s The Second Ring of Power, la Gorda tells Carlos that she learned everything in dreaming (pp. 159-160). “Everything for a woman warrior starts in dreaming,” she tells him. Having read that, I am not so skeptical about my own experiences in dreaming. Though I have no idea how I was able to dream with the women shamans last fall, my intent was pure, and it worked. Gorda had the same issue. She was unable to tell Carlos exactly how certain things happened, but after years of practice she was finally able to just do them. This may relate to the knowing of the womb that Chuck wrote about a few weeks ago, the direct knowledge that women have access to but men need to work so hard for. I continue to call to the women shamans, or seers, the new term that Chuck introduced in his blog last Saturday and which I too will adopt so we all know we are talking about the same things.

Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don’t when I call to the women seers and ask them to show me something, but I keep trying. The other night I found them again, but failed to write down the important (?) message I was getting. If it really is important I figure I’ll tap into it again sometime, when I am more available. Last night I met them again and, at my request to go to deeper and deeper levels, they took me down into utter blackness where the presence of another entity freaked me out and sent me skittering right back up to consciousness. When I told Chuck about this, he said: “Oh, you went into inner silence. That’s where Carol Tiggs took Jeanne at a Tensegrity workshop.” It was not an unfamiliar place, I must say, and I look forward to making another foray into its mysterious realms with a little more awareness. In the meantime, I proceed with writing today about my dreaming adventures from last fall.

Last fall, my consistent efforts to connect with the women seers paid off over a period of a couple of weeks. They do not have features or looks I could describe, because they do not have form; they are more like energetic presences, energy beings that I seem to recognize. Here is the instruction I wrote in my journal during the night of dreaming with the women seers on October 28, 2009: NO ATTACHMENTS! It is the eighth step in developing a practice with the intention of evolving as an energy being.

This is perhaps the biggest of all the steps. It involves detaching from and leaving behind all the stuff that we have spent our lives collecting and bringing to us, everything we consider so important. It involves questioning ourselves about everything we hold dear and asking ourselves, can I leave this behind? Do I really need this? Attachments also relate to things, to people, habits, comforts, family rituals, to needing to be special or important, to wants and desires of the human kind, that yes, are very important up to a certain point and then, when the time is right for us as individuals, we are asked to let them go. Sometimes this does not become apparent until the moment of death, but more often than not we are presented with this challenge much earlier in life. I once heard the Dalai Lama state that, as evolving beings, it is appropriate to spend the first fifty years of life learning how to live in this world and the next fifty learning how to leave it.

The question then becomes, will we? Can we let go of our pasts and all that has kept us caught there? Can we give love and remain utterly detached, not needing or wanting anything in return, just giving? If we can get to this point we will understand detachment, but we will also understand compassion. This eighth step has detachment, compassionate love, and utter simplicity as its goal, without attachment to anything that takes our energy. It is the whole point of recapitulation: to free ourselves of all that has kept us energetically bound and unavailable to pursue our spirit’s intent.

After I had channeled Monday’s message from Jeanne, I sat down to type it up and was bothered by a knocking at the glass door in the room behind me. I finally got up and went to inspect. A fat robin sat on the edge of a chair on the deck looking in at me. As I watched he flew toward the glass, pecking at it, perhaps admiring his bright red breast, his wide wingspan, or perhaps he was fooled by the brilliant blue sky reflected in the window. He fell back after several attempts, but remained on or near the deck throughout the day, occasionally flying and pecking at the window. He returned the next day and we wondered if he was guarding a nesting female nearby. I thought perhaps he was related to the robin at the other end of the deck, who I discovered building a nest in a little Japanese maple tree near my compost pile one day when I went to empty the kitchen scraps. Perhaps he was drawn to the red chairs at this end of the deck, or perhaps he had come to thank me for my silent and calm approach to the nest whenever I went to the compost pile. The mother bird and I have by now established a mutual respect and a desire to go about our business. I approach calmly and she remains alert but still, rather than fly off shrieking as she did in the beginning, trying to draw my attention away from her eggs.

While the robins were building their nest we noticed a phoebe putting her own nest in a very precarious place underneath the deck, also right next to the compost pile, but too close to the ground and too close to danger of water damage, we thought. Sure enough, one morning I found her nest had been attacked by something and two tiny eggs lay smashed on the ground. A third egg teetered on the edge of the badly tipping nest. I wondered if the mother would return to repair the damage and keep going, caring for her one little egg. The next morning the third egg lay smashed and the bulk of the nest lay on the ground. When I picked it up I saw that a strand of my long white hair had been woven into it along with some hair from our dog. I could not believe that mother phoebe would just abandon her nest, but that was exactly what she did. Talk about detachment! She moved on, without a backward glance, to a new nesting place perhaps, leaving the remains of her young to be licked and scraped off the concrete porch under the deck by some creature in the night, nature at its finest, showing us how to detach, how to move on, how to energetically just keep going, keep trying, how to let go and flow.

In another bird event my daughter came home the other night, her hand outstretched, showing us a blue jay skull she had found on the ground, able to identify it by the feathers that lay beside it. Its delicate bones were picked clean and white, its sockets empty, its sharp bill fully intact. In Ted Andrew’s Animal Speak I read that the energy of the robin is about spring and new growth and daring to sing your own song, to stay true to your inner voice. To me this means to keep speaking and writing about my adventures with spirit, to keep dreaming. The phoebe is not represented in his descriptions, but I suspect, as I write above, that it has to do with detachment, at least for this moment in time. The blue jay represents death in this instance, the place we are all headed, but it also, according to Andrews, links heaven and earth. Blue jay energy has the ability to tap into both, the very thing that we humans strive to do as well and what I have been seeking in my dreaming with the women seers. All of these bird totems ask us to be serious about our energy, about how we decide to use it, for what purposes, and to what end. What are we really seeking?

My forays into the world of the women seers are my own quests for understanding energy, seeking to tap into and truly utilize my strengths, daring myself to keep going, no matter what comes out of the darkness to frighten me. I think that is what we are all challenged with. Whether our power is represented outside of us in the kundalini energy of the robin red breast, in the psychic powers of the blue jay, or in the ability to detach, as the phoebe does, and move on without regrets, we must still dare to find those energies inside of us. We must dare to own them, to use them to advance our awareness, gain clarity, and have some pretty cool experiences in the process. Whether we use them in this reality or in dreaming, it does not matter, as long as we just keep going, letting go, and changing.

I have the tiny phoebe nest on a shelf in my studio, the long hair from my own head woven artfully into it, a wisp of it hanging down, reminding me to pay attention to the energy of the robins who guard so diligently in this world, who flow with the energy of this reality as I continue to watch and await the birth of their young. It reminds me as well of the ability of the phoebe to moved on, with no attachments. It reminds me of the death of the blue jay and that, yes, I too will die. When or how, I do not know, but I want to be ready for the moment, learning now what that might mean by exploring as much as I can.

Until next week, keep dreaming and keep going! On a final note, I want to mention that Chuck and Jeanne and I have all written extensively about detachment in the past. If you care to read more about it, simply do a word search in the search button in the upper left corner of the sidebar and see what comes up. The books mentioned are in our Store and many of the shamanic terms are described in Tools & Definitions.

Love,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Going Beyond the Ego

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Last fall, on the night of October 23, 2009, I asked the women shamans to give me guidance once again while dreaming. I placed the dreaming pillow on my lower abdomen, over the area of the uterus, and asked them to come to me in the night. “I would like to know the next step in learning to become a shaman,” I intended, as I went to sleep. When I woke in the morning I saw that I had written, in big cryptic dream writing, having successfully roused myself out of deep dreaming enough to pick up my pen, the following sentence: My own need to resolve must guide me to redemption beyond the self.

Upon awakening the next morning, I wrote this in my journal:

After I wrote that in the middle of the night I lay back down and thought: Oh, dissolution of ego self is the next step; resolution of all deeper issues related to the ego. Once again I wrote in a half-awake state, but this time there was no inner battle, no laziness. I simply said: Write this down, and I reached for my book, sat up, wrote it and then lay back down without the usual thoughts that of course I would remember it. This step is the recapitulation step. In recapitulating all inner issues all ego resolves as well, because during recapitulation the ego is dismantled. Redemption, true redemption, is completely ego-free. It is a spiritual state of being, of nothingness. Redemption lies beyond all earthly attachments, ego or otherwise, revolving around the self as special or important. To resolve all needs of self is really an inner desire to evolve. In recapitulation one is confronted with what the inner needs are, with what needs to be resolved. The challenge is to release the self to take the recapitulation journey. Getting beyond the self, both the inner needs and outer needs and desires, etc., to a place of utter calm detachment from self is redemption; it is freedom. (End of journal entry.)

Once again, I am struck by the synchronicity of this blog with what Chuck wrote about on Saturday regarding the warrior’s ultimate challenge, which is to lose self-importance. If we stay within the teachings of the shamanic world we are constantly confronted with this idea that, although we are taught to live our lives a certain way by everyone we encounter as we grow and mature into adulthood, once we get there we are often at a loss for what to do with our lives. It was not until I began the deeply challenging process of recapitulation that I began to decide that who I was really was totally up to me to determine. Until then I had lived within a code of acceptable behaviors, pursuing a life that I thought was right, by someone else’s standards, though at the same time I fought deeply within myself over this capitulation, telling myself that I was different, special, talented, creative, any number of attributes and qualities to keep my ego happy. However, once I entered the shaman’s world, under Chuck’s tutelage, everything changed. I began to see the world from a different perspective, but the funny thing was that I also immediately recognized it; it was somehow familiar. When Chuck talks and writes of the shamans he is referring to the shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s line. In the early seventies, when I first read Castaneda’s three early books, I had the same sense of familiarity with the experiences and worlds he entered, though I could not call up from my deeply buried unconscious what that meant. I knew I was not ready for it, though I had an inkling that someday I would come back to it in some form. Now I have been privileged to experience recapitulation and, as Chuck writes about the world of the warriors shattering as they leave their human form, I too have experienced that shattering. In the process of recapitulation, our own world, as we know it, is shattered.

I have also learned that the recapitulation process is a lifelong process, but, once willingly engaged in, it becomes fascinating. At least that has been my experience. Now, having already shifted my perspective on how I view and react to the world, I recall and relive events from my past with a different attitude, more detached and curious than frightened or ashamed. I would not have been able to achieve this had I not accepted the appointment with my unconscious and unrelenting inner self who, after fifty years of trying to tell me that I had to do an inner journey, was finally paid attention to. And what made me finally pay attention? Well, a lot of things, but mostly it was the restlessness that constantly drove me to seek change, to move, to do something, anything, to calm the unrelenting sense that there was something deeply wrong. Finally the restlessness broke through and I couldn’t stop it this time. I knew I couldn’t uproot my family and make one more drastic move. I knew that this time I alone had to change. I alone had to tackle what it was that would not leave me in peace. This was about me, I finally realized, no one else, and I had to have the courage to face myself. I alone had to enter into my hidden self and ask all the questions that needed to be asked, and to allow the answers to come from deep inside me, pushing aside the normal judgments and the flippant remarks that had sufficed up until then.

When I began my inner journey I didn’t even know what a journey was, much less what a recapitulation was. I knew what a life journey was, but I didn’t know what an inner journey, a spiritual journey was, though I had lived a deeply introverted, creative life. I didn’t really know what a shaman was, either. I was curious about all those words that held such mystery, but the true meaning of them was not to come easy. Until I took the journey that my unconscious self had been pushing me toward nothing would make sense in a real way. Everything would remain as illusive as the works of Castaneda until I elected to go beyond the world as I had always viewed it and lived it and decided to go on an adventure of a lifetime.

Thanks for listening to my dreaming and awake experiences. I offer my process, without attachment, I think, purely as an example of what can happen once the decision is made to go in a different direction. At one time, I was one of the most fearful people you could ever have met, appearing quite calm and advanced on the outside, aloof and flowing when comfortable, but utterly terrified on the inside, always aware that the world was not to be trusted, not safe. Facing my fears was quite a process. I know many who are in the midst of charting their way through their own fears now, and I know it is difficult, but I also know that at each step the burden lightens, the fears fall away, the judgments dissipate. Each step of the past and of the journey, the old one and the new one, become understood as totally valid and necessary. Each step is freeing. Each step leads to redemption of self, from attachment to ego. But the first step must, as the women shamans told me in my dream last fall, come from the inner need to resolve the issues of the self. That is the impetus that must finally be invited in to dismantle the old structures that uphold the old self, the old world, the human form that does not really want to live that way any more.

Until next week. Keep dreaming with intent!
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

#678 Seeds of Awareness

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Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Do you have a message of guidance for us today?

My Dear Ones, do not forget that you are the changing ones. You are the ones who have the ability to sway from the path, to choose a different route, to make new decisions outside of the natural flow of life. As nature goes so does man go is not truly meant to be how it goes. Yes, nature is what man must pay attention to in order to learn what it means to be an evolving being, but nature, in its repetitiveness, is but one teacher. The other teacher lies deeply buried inside each one of you, and that teacher is the desire of the self for new life, for new adventures, for something unknown.

Though you may often fear change, it is also the emergence of desire that creates fear. For fear would not arise is you were not being challenged to go beyond the comfortable self, the self who flows with the world as you interpret it. Today, I suggest that another energy lies deeply buried inside each of you that is different from the energy of nature as you see it and know it outside of you. As living energy you hold within something else that is not replicated in the world you see before your eyes. In the world that you see there is a limitation of process, though that world offers you the lessons in repetition that are necessary for understanding evolution, reincarnation, and growth.

You see, what I speak of today is that other aspect of man that allows for growth beyond what is presented. Each one of you has within the seeds of awareness and this is what I speak of as the catalyst for change. Your seeds of awareness lie buried until you dig them out of their bed of darkness by your intent; until you expose them to the light and urge them, with tenderness and prodding, to awaken and reach toward the light.

During your lifetime you are offered many tools that will provide the means of excavation and awakening. If you return to the world around you, living the repetitive life, turning outward for your examples of how to awaken, seeing only what is before your eyes, you will miss the true seeds of awareness within. Even nature has these properties of deep inner awareness, though you see only that which reappears in the cycle of life on the outside. Your human eyes take in only what lies before you, but your eyes of awareness see far more.

Your seeds of awareness must now become your new eyes of seeing. In order to evolve, a new process of growth must become your means of living. I ask that you break through your darkness, past the fear that arises to keep you conformed, and allow what lies beneath your fear to emerge and access the light of new energy. Your seeds of awareness may be very well known to you or they may be completely unknown. Perhaps you have glimpsed them, the urgings at your core, at your heart, and your deepest desires. Perhaps you have never noticed them as such, but something inside you tells you they exist. You are all creatures of nature, of the natural world, the natural process of birth and death, as you see it played out before you in nature and in the human physical living and dying cycles. But there is so much more that is being missed.

I know that even the word fear presents more fear. Everyone is afraid. But fear is the catalyst to change. If you can face your fears as they arise, question them, break through them to what is lying beneath them, the negative fears will turn to positive energy and your seeds of awareness will begin to sprout. Fear is the recapitulation companion waiting to take you on your inner journey. If you can begin to see fear as your greatest ally, your new journey beyond repetition, to access the self as energy, will begin.

You see, your seeds of awareness are the energy body, the self as comprised of energy alone, without physical composition and form, completely free. But fear must be burst apart for true energy to be accessed and released. Fear blocks access, as the dark earth blocks the seed from the light. How then does the seed emerge each spring from the dark earth? Sheer energy! And that is what you also have inside you, the sheer energy of life to continually re-emerge, to re-challenge itself to face the darkness, to burst through the fear and reach toward the light. That is the metaphor that nature offers each one of you.

Access your seeds of awareness by going into the inner darkness and bring forth into your lives your most precious selves, your energy selves. Allow your true energy to explore the world around you and you might begin to experience it differently. Life is meant to be challenging in order for you to wake up one day and determine that, yes, there must be more to life than that which I see before my eyes. And what is that for you? What are you missing?

The seeds of awareness are golden seeds. Keep that in mind as you seek them. They hold the light you will need as you make the journey into your darkness. They are awareness itself. They are energy and truth. They are you.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Dream Teaching

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I woke up this morning and said: “I was being taught all night long.”

“What do you mean, you were being taught?” Chuck asked.

“I was being taught something all night long in dreaming, the same thing repeatedly, but now I can’t remember what it was!” I whined. “Maybe I can call it up later, I’m pretty good at that,” I said, as I fought to hold onto what had vanished as soon as I opened my eyes. Synchronistically, this is exactly what happened last October when I was dreaming with the women shamans, asking them to teach me how to become a shaman and it is what I had been planning to write about today. So, wouldn’t you know, I had another experience to underscore the process of learning to become a shaman. Here is the experience I had last fall, as I wrote about it in my journal on October 23, 2009:

Dreaming was not as successful last night, though I asked for the next step in shamanic practice. Once again I put the dreaming pillow on my lower abdomen before I fell asleep. Whatever I got had something to do with the self, both the body self and the ego self, but it was not clear. Ironically, I fought with my body throughout the night, too lazy to sit up, reach for my notebook and write down what I was getting, clear or not.

“Write it down!” I commanded my sleeping self, but then I would argue: “It’s not clear!”

“Write it anyway!” I retaliated, but still I was too lazy to do so. I figured I would remember it, which I have failed to do, except knowing that it had something to do with the self. Perhaps it was about aligning the body self with the intent to do the work. The lazy body obviously got in my way last night. I will have to give it another go tonight and hopefully I will not have the same issue to contend with, my lazy self. Pretty interesting, I must say!

Later in the day I wrote the following:

Okay, so I get that I was confronted with my lazy self and that is my current challenge. This lazy self must be confronted in order to keep moving forward. This is the avoidant self, the reluctant self, the fearful self, but she is not as strong as she used to be. Now she is more like a slug in the way, not much energy, but still present and capable of sabotaging my progress. This sluggish self was, at one time, the depressed, traumatized self, immobilized by fear and unavailable to truly live until the trauma had been realized. In the old days, before I recapitulated, I remained caught in two worlds, never quite present in either, but now that I am awake I must remain awake and alert. The old sluggish self still tests me as she did last night while dreaming. I argued with her. Contending with this self is the third step in the practice of shamanic work, the whole physical self: the conscious mental self, the body self, the conjuring mind self, the ego self, but I see it as all related to the ingrained comforts of the physical body, the lazy self. (End of journal entry.)

My experience last night was very similar to that of last October. I still have my notebook open beside me as I sleep, a pen stuck into the page and all I have to do is lean over, pick up the pen and begin writing. I argued with myself again last night, thinking in dreaming that of course I would remember, I always remember, I’m good at that. All aspects of the physical self were present again last night, teaching me a valuable lesson; the conjuring mind, the ego self, the lazy physical self all in cahoots to show me that something else is necessary in order to truly do shamanic work, and that is: to get beyond the limitations of the physical self, which will always seek to remain dominant.

The other thing that strikes me today is that the two previous lessons that I learned in dreaming were also in play last night and in my dream of last October too. I was being shown again the workings of the two minds, the conjuring mind and the inner knowing mind that argue incessantly. I knew I should write down what I was getting on both occasions, but I could not get beyond the ego, which upheld its superiority. “Don’t worry Jan,” my ego self said, “you’ll remember!” The second lesson, the value of repetition, was also in action. In both instances I dreamed the same thing, over and over again, but since I also argued with my physical self, I failed miserably to recall what the lessons were. Once again, as I had done last October, I woke up this morning holding onto the fact that I was missing, because of my laziness, a very valuable lesson, but now I see the real lesson as being the repetitive, night-long fight between the two minds. The knowing mind was seeking to wake me up, asking me to shift out of the old lazy self and allow the new disciplined self to take over and push the ego, the conjuring mind, and the lazy physical self out of the way.

Alas! Now I understand the true value of repetition: to force a shift. But shift will only happen when we are ready; when we finally get just what it is that we are being taught or asked to do, when we have repeated the same lessons to the point of mundanity and boredom, until we say, hey, there must be more to life than just this same old stuff! And in the shamanic world the action of shifting is not an action of the conjuring mind, except in learning to know it, in understanding how it works to hold us in our old places, in our lazy body selves, in our comforts, in our egos, in our old places of trauma, until we have learned what they have been trying to wake us up to, in dreaming or in waking life. Pushing ourselves beyond the limitations of the physical, mind or otherwise, is the next step in learning to become a shaman.

Know your enemy. Know your mind, know your ego, know your limitations and then push beyond them. Wake up and remember! These are the real lessons in awareness that I have been taught by the women shamans. Whether you are interested in the shamanic world or not, awareness is the true key to evolving, in this world and in the next. Once again, this is all related to the practice of recapitulation too. The steps I have learned from the women shamans of don Juan’s line are steps in undertaking the process of fully understanding the self, because, in actuality, you have to understand and know the self in order to understand the shaman’s world and be able to maneuver in it. It is the same thing that we will be confronted with when we die. We must be prepared to maneuver in a world where we will no longer have a physical self to rely on, to blame, or to trust. No comforts of the physical will be available. Only our energy bodies will be available, and how will we fare if we do not know them?

Next week, I will bring you the fourth step in the process of shamanic work that I learned in dreaming with the dreamers. Until then, watch out for the conjuring mind! Pay attention to what the body is repeatedly attempting to say instead, as Jeanne suggests in her lessons in inner work; go deeper into the body self. Pay attention to the earthquakes within, as she mentioned in her message on Monday. The body holds more in its silent sinews than you know. And then go beyond to the energy that lives inside that lazy physical house of self and invite it to emerge from its sleepy state and enjoy a little of the energy of the spring with you!
With love and humble attempts to remain aware,
Jan