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A Day in a Life: Dreaming the Eleventh Step—Inner Calm Knowing

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Rely on the self
the inner knowing.

The above was written in the middle of the night of November 3, 2009 when I was dreaming with the women seers of don Juan’s generation. This is what I wrote in my journal upon awakening the next morning: I was in a place of incredibly balanced calm where I totally understood, intuitively, what inner knowing meant. I was tapping into it and thoroughly enjoying the peacefulness of it. It was a struggle to write down what I was feeling, and what I should have written was lost because I took a long time to alert myself to the fact that I should write it down. Instead, I wrote the above, knowing full well that it did not capture the experience I was having nor the greater meaning of it. The feelings I was experiencing encompassed compassion, detachment, balance, utter calm and complete knowing — a total knowing with access to all knowledge, including the state I was in at the moment. I was able to stay in that state of utterness, of knowing with access to greater knowledge, simply because I could access inner calm. It is a place I want to stay in. It appears to be quite accessible, and I can get there by intent. Once there, all mysteries dissolve; everything is clearly known. (End of journal entry.)

I had channeled ten elements of a shamanic practice and when I wondered if there would be an eleventh I went into this calm inner world, which I believe was showing me what is achievable if the ten steps of shamanic awareness are practiced. I do not think I could have so easily reached this place of utter calm knowing if I had not learned and thoroughly processed the preceding ten steps. Furthermore, had I not done a pretty thorough recapitulation, I would not have been able to truly take in and assimilate those steps either because, as it turns out, they are all very pragmatic steps of the recapitulation process.

When I began my recapitulation nine years ago, I did not have any steps to follow, per se, but followed my own process as it unfolded, day by day, seeing where my body took me, what triggers arose, what synchronicities, dreams and experiences appeared to guide me, and what came to pull me back into my past. That was the process of recapitulation as I undertook it, guided by Chuck in this world and Jeanne in her world. It lasted for three full years and, in fact, to be truthful, it did not begin with the word recapitulation even being spoken, until I was deeply into the process.

The process unfolded as I learned to flow with it, and, as Chuck began to introduce me to the shamanic world, it became very clear that we were fully immersed in a recapitulation process. I say “we” because, although I alone took the journey, I was fully supported by Chuck and Jeanne, by their knowledge of the shamanic and spiritual experiences I was having. As I allowed myself to go deeper and deeper into experiences from childhood that had been completely blocked the recapitulation took on a life of its own, showing me how to gain access to all parts of myself, spiritual, physical, mental and emotional, through memories, dreams, flashbacks, visions, and experiences in this reality, in the past, and in other worlds.

A thorough recapitulation leads to wholeness, to integration of all aspects of self, and that leads to the place of utter calmness that I experienced in dreaming with the women seers that night. I longed to stay there, but eventually I woke up and had to leave it, but only for the moment. I knew I had that place of calmness inside me. I am never far from it; I just have to go there.

Next week, I will write about the twelfth and final step in developing a shamanic practice that I learning in my dreaming with the women seers.

Until then, keep dreaming, keep setting intent, and keep recapitulating!
Love,
Jan

NOTE: The day after I had this experience I posed a question to Jeanne in the channeling blog regarding it, which I link to here. She, in turn, offered the first of three steps in learning detachment, in an evolutionary sense.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Take Action

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Take action knowing that it is your move.
No one else is present in your life to take action or move for you.
Everything depends on you.
Do not look to others to resolve your dilemmas.
Your life is totally up to you and your actions.
Take action.

This is the tenth step in learning a shamanic practice, a practice that is pragmatic and helpful in learning to evolve, to keep going, to grow and to change, but also to learn to live in more than just this fixed and rational reality. I wrote the above in the middle of the night of November 2, 2009, after intending again to connect and dream with the women of don Juan’s generation of seers.

A shamanic practice revolves around becoming totally responsible for the self, for the past self and the future self, as well as for the self who strives for each moment to be one of awareness. As I have been relaying these shamanic steps in my blog over the past few weeks, I have been struck each week by the relationship each step has to recapitulation, perhaps the most important step, according to the seers, in really electing to change and grow.

In doing recapitulation, in seeking to fully know the self, these steps that I learned from the women seers become more than just pointers, they become a way of life. Until one is in the process of learning about the deeper self these steps may simply come across as good ideas or thoughts that make sense in everyday life, but they blossom into true steps of growth when one begins the process of recapitulation with intent, with unbending intent. It is through experiencing each of these steps, through taking a personal journey into the darkness of the self, that these ideas ultimately make total, practical sense.

A recapitulation can take place through many means. One of them is to simply allow the self to go back into memories, to feel, see and experience them as if reliving them once again and then to go back again and again, going deeper and deeper each time. In looking from a different perspective each time, a personal experience may be revealed as it had actually happened rather than as it had been consciously remembered. When memories are revisited in a state of heightened awareness, new clarity and insight may be gained where before there may have been only vagueness or just a shadowy sense that something was not quite right, or there may have been no memory at all because it was effectively blocked by the psyche.

In memories, painful experiences may be replaced with less offensive stories. Safe or pleasant memories may be construed in order to alleviate the full force of the true and often brutal memories. In essence, selective memories can make us feel safe and okay, though they are not the whole truth. The truth often lies deeply hidden. In my own case, I was nagged by incessant feelings that something was wrong with me, but I was not able to fully access what that meant until I was ready and able to handle it.

Recapitulation, as Chuck mentioned in a recent blog, is a volitional action that happens when we are ready. Somewhere along our journeys, our psyche and our body determine that the time is now and prepares us for the moment. When we are thrown or drawn into recapitulation, some deeper part of us is ready, and it is asking us to shift.

In recapitulation, I did learn that I was totally responsible for everything about myself and that if I did not make a move to help myself then nothing would happen to change me or my life. And as I worked through what that meant, in light of where I was at the time and what I had to remember about my past, it empowered me, diminishing my reliance on others and my reliance on staying stuck in certain familiar modes, repeating the same habits and staying in a world that never changed. Although I considered that world to be rather safe, it was not until I was well into my recapitulation that I discovered that it was, in fact, a world of fear that I kept such control of by retreating, withdrawing and hiding, by making safe choices, so that I did not have to confront anything that made me afraid or uncomfortable. In spite of having lived a very full life in many ways, achieving a measure of success, I still had not resolved the inner dilemmas, of what was wrong with me, of why I felt so powerless and unsafe. What was I really afraid of?

So, I would have to say that I did not feel truly safe in this world until I had done a recapitulation of a world that lay hidden deeply inside me. It was purposely hidden so that I could grow up, maintain sanity, and mature into adulthood. I was protected from it long enough to prepare to return, when the time was right, and look with the eyes of an adult at what had happened to me in my past. In returning, I was afforded the opportunity to learn what it really means to take responsibility for the self, for the cards dealt, for the circumstances of life, and to regain the power that I had lost along the way. It took breaking many vows of silence, many pacts, and it also took facing the darkness within, the stuff that had followed me around for a long, long time, just waiting for me to return and remember what it was all about.

So, in the final lesson to “take action,” the women seers are also suggesting that it is our choice to evolve, to change, and to recapitulate too. We are all afforded many opportunities to practice such steps. We read our books and chant our mantras. We do our yoga and meditate ourselves into calmness, but until we really take action on our own behalf, and face our fears, we are just waiting for something or someone outside of us to change, when it is what is inside us that is asking for change. At least, that has been my experience.

Until next week,
Love,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: INTENT—The Ninth Step

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Hello everyone! Today I am keeping this super short.

On the night of November 1, 2009 I dreamed again with the women seers of don Juan’s line. As I mentioned in last week’s blog I recognize them by their energy. How do I know it really is them? That I can’t tell you, I just know it is. As soon as I put that little heavy dreaming pillow on my body I go into dreaming. I don’t know how this works either, but it does, immediately, so I am careful in how I approach it. I take it very seriously, and when I elect to place that pillow over my abdomen I know I must to be prepared to take a journey. Sometimes I am eager to take those journeys and other times I just want to sleep. The last time I used the dreaming pillow, a week ago, I stepped down into blackness, as I mentioned, and I haven’t gotten up the nerve to go back again — yet. But I will. And I’ll let you know what happens when I do, but for now I pass along the ninth step in developing a shamanic practice. Here is what I learned from the women seers and what I wrote in my nighttime dreaming handwriting on that November night last fall:

Use your intent to grow.
Learn by your mistakes.
Intent will find you.

Of course, I have been using my intent to connect with the women seers. So, as I also mentioned before, it really does work, if, as the seers say, it is unbending intent. So, I leave you today with a reminder that Chuck is fond of saying, and brings in last week’s step of no attachments: Set your intent; send it off; don’t attach to the outcome. And then, see what happens!

Thanks for reading!
Love,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: The Seventh Step

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Today, I will review the first six steps in learning to become a shaman that I channeled while dreaming with the women shamans of don Juan’s lineage, back in the fall of 2009, before going on to the seventh step.

First, however, I wish to address two points. Although I am writing, to a certain extent, about shamanism, I am really writing about having a spiritual, energetic experience. So, I ask that you suspend judgment as to the terms I elect to use, which, in my opinion, do not really matter. I could just as well have asked to dream with Jesus, or Buddha, or Jeanne, or any other guide and, if I had done so, I believe I would have gotten the same answers, though possibly in slightly different words, but maybe not. The steps that were offered to me are evolutionary practices, related to growth and exploration, daring me to let go of this world and enter another, the very thing that we will all be confronted with at our deaths, no matter what spiritual practice we elect to follow, and even if we don’t have one. I happen to be curious about what comes next. I have always been interested in reading and hearing about people’s experiences in near-death, out-of-body, comas and dissociative states. Where did you go? What did you encounter? Who did you meet? What did it feel like? How did you get back?

The second point I would like to stress is that, in my experience, as soon as I open the door, as soon as I send out an intent, I have an experience. I know that everything is possible because of the experiences I have had. Certain books have the power to take me right into an experience simply by cracking them open. The books that have this kind of power, for me, are any of the works of Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner Grau’s Being-in-Dreaming, Taisha Abelar’s The Sorcerer’s Crossing, William Buhlman’s Adventures Beyond the Body, and a charming book by Preston Dennett called Out of Body Exploring. By asking to dream with the women shamans I gave myself the opportunity to have an experience. I am most likely to receive an experience if my intent is “unbending,” as don Juan stressed to his apprentices. Carlos writes of Doña Soledad in The Second Ring of Power: “She wanted to know if I had correctly understood don Juan when he said that anything is possible if one wants it with unbending intent.” (p. 31)

So, having made those two points, I recount the first six steps of energy practice, previously written about in lengthier form, that I learned from the women shamans:

1. Know the difference between the two minds, the conjuring mind and the knowing mind. (Read about this step HERE.)
2. Understand the value of repetition. (Read about this step HERE.)
3. Contend with all the parts of the physical self. (Read about this step HERE.)
4. Allow for dissolution of ego. (Read about this step HERE.)
5. Wait for the right moment then shift. (Read about steps 5 & 6 HERE.)
6. Remember what transpires in dreaming.

Now I present the seventh step in learning to become a shaman. As usual, I slept with the dreaming pillow on my lower abdomen, just below the navel. During the night of October 26, 2009, I wrote the following in my journal: Abolish, get rid of, all energy glitches so that energy is not lost or siphoned off.

So what does that mean? First, I want to tell you a little story about a book that Chuck read last week and that he wrote about in his blog on Must be the Season of the Witch. The book is The Second Ring of Power. In his blog, he described the decrepit condition of the book and how he was reading it, taking each page out and placing it in a pile. By the time he was finished reading, the hard cover binding was empty and the pages were in a neat pile on a table in our den. I began reading it at this point and, as I read, I placed the pages back into the binding of the book. Now I am halfway through the book and it is halfway to being put back into its original form. I have just finished reading the chapter where Carlos meets La Gorda and learns about the biggest energy glitch of all time, the hole left in us by our children, which continues to drain us empty of energy until we die, perhaps long before we really need to. The only way to stop this drain of energy, this energy glitch, is to close it up by completely detaching from our children and letting them go off on their own journeys. I believe this is the main energy glitch that the women shamans instructed me to get rid of. This type of energy glitch appears as a dark hole in our sides, in both men and women, by those who can “see” such energy. These holes can be there because of children we have actually given birth to, biologically, and also children we have become deeply attached to for other reasons, because of marriage, adoption, fostering, etc. The more children we have in our lives the bigger the holes; one side for girl children, the other for boy children.

For me, and for most women, this may be the most difficult and painful energy glitch to close up. I use the analogy of Chuck reading the book, essentially emptying it, and me filling it back up again, one page at a time, as a process of detachment and reclamation of the energy we give away in raising our children. First the book must not be so special that it cannot be read in this way, that it cannot be allowed to change form. Our children must not be so special to us that we cannot allow them to become who they must become. We must be able to dismantle our old books, our old ideas of who we want our children to be, how we want them to be, and what perfect form we desire for them to fit into, especially the desires and fears we really have within ourselves but are projecting onto our children, and, finally, we must let them go out of our lives. Our children must become no more than the empty hard cover of the book once the pages have been ripped out, and we must allow ourselves to be the same.

Once we are empty, having dismantled the book, having let the children become separate beings, having detached ourselves from them, having let them go, we can now begin the process of putting the book back together for ourselves, taking back our energy. Once the pages of the book are replaced, once the energy that we had previously given over to the raising of our children —in the worrying, the wondering if they are making good choices, safe, doing what they should be doing, acting wisely and right; wondering if they are fearless and powerful, or depressed and sad; wondering did I screw them up, did I do everything for them, etc.— once this energy is replaced, we can then begin the process of closing up the holes in our sides. This is the task that La Gorda gave Carlos, and it is the same task the women shamans gave me. I now pass it along to you as the next step in learning to become a shaman, or in other words, learning to become energetically detached, spiritually whole, complete.

As Jeanne mentioned in her message this week, don Juan taught about energy, as does she. This is also what I learned about from the women shamans: energy. By using my unbending intent, I asked them to dream with me and teach me something. In all, I was given twelve steps. Next week I will move onto the next. In the meantime, watch for those holes and glitches and take back the energy.

See you in dreamland!
Love,
Jan

NOTE: The books I mention are available in our STORE.

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A Day in a Life: When the Time is Right!

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Today, I present the next two steps in learning to be a shaman that I learned last fall from dreaming with the women sorceresses of don Juan’s group. As I mentioned in my first blog regarding this process, I had been re-reading the books of Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner Grau when I decided to do some experimenting at night, wondering if I could, by setting my intent, contact the women sorceresses of that group in dreaming. Over the course of a few weeks, I did, indeed, succeed in receiving, through what I consider to be dream channelings, a pragmatic set of practices. Each night I placed the heavy dreaming pillow that Jeanne had gotten at a Tensegrity workshop on my lower abdomen and asked to be taken on a learning journey. After reading Chuck’s essay on The Womb I realize that I was offering myself the opportunity to access the “knowing” that he wrote about, the knowing that all women naturally have. Here is the 5th step, as I dreamed it during the night of October 24, 2009 and as I wrote in automatic writing in my journal:

I am an old woman bored with the excuses of others, unimpressed by laziness or other reasons for non-doing. I listen patiently and I cause SHIFT. I shift the atmosphere with a FLICK! I conjure up a storm to shake them awake.

I wrote this in my journal the following morning: When I wake up from this dream, having written the above during the night, I am aware that holding back and non-doing are important, until it is the right time to shift, then take quick action and SHIFT! This is the fifth step in the shamanic process. (End of journal entry.)

With a busy day of travel ahead of us I was unable to write more at the time, but I do remember processing this with Chuck as we drove. I was struck by the utter boredom that came over me in the dream as I listened to the empty excuses that people were giving for not evolving or changing. At the same time I knew that non-doing, not attaching, was also key, that being patient was proper because we will all have to shift at some point, whether by personal choice or for reasons that are totally out of our control. In the dream I am an old woman, and I seem to have some power, like nature itself. As an old sorceress I know it is not my place to force shift, until the time is right.

In this dream, I learned that by staying in a place of non-doing and detachment, patiently observing and waiting, we place ourselves in alignment with the flow of nature. There comes a point when we know it is time to shift. That moment is as instinctual as breathing. If we are in the right alignment, aware and in balance, then we are able to enact the necessary shift for ourselves. Otherwise the shift will be forced on us. In the dream, I knew the exact moment when this was right, it was time, and I took quick action, without hesitation, because I instinctually knew it was right. I was like nature in the dream, actively creating a shift with a swift flick of my hand, shouting: SHIFT! The process of non-doing, in this case, is actually achieving the place of no pity, the term from the shaman’s world, that Chuck has also written about. By non-doing, by withholding reaction and being patient and detached, by watching and waiting, I achieved this point of no pity, which also allowed me, in the dream, to know when the moment of shift had arrived. As a follow-up to this shamanic teaching dream, I dreamed the following the next night:

I dream about my mother, bored, boring, complacent, living in a nursing home, having resorted to childish behaviors, reverting to an infantile existence. I have no attachment to her. I am completely detached, merely an observer standing in her room at the nursing home. I turn from her lying in her bed and look out a large picture window overlooking ancient water gardens. There are many shallow pools and ornately carved fountains, sculptures, and benches surrounded by stone walls and walkways. I calmly enjoy the beauty of it as I talk to one of my brothers about the fact that I cannot help my mother. No matter what I offer her, no matter how many attempts I make to give her evolutionary life, she continually chooses infancy. (End of dream.)

I am struck by this dream underscoring the lessons of the night before, the place of no pity, of non-doing, and of detachment, but in this case leading to knowing that I cannot force a shift on a person who does not choose to evolve. By nature and her own choices a shift occurred in a person who was once an adult, but who now (at least in the dream) is living out her final years as an infant in a nursing home. In these two dreams, my instinctual knowing, stirred by dreaming with the women shamans, is in play. By remaining in alignment and flowing with the moment, with nature, I am fully aware of appropriate action.

After this dream, I fell asleep again and dreamed another shamanic practice. I swam up into consciousness briefly and noted: Remember what transpires in dreaming. When I woke up in the morning, I knew that this was the sixth step in learning to become a shaman and I knew this meant: remember what happens in dreaming life and in waking life, because you cannot always be sure which is the dream.

I humbly offer my dreaming experiences as examples of the power of intent. During the weeks I dreamed with the women shamans I received answers in fairly straightforward and easily decipherable language, and I am amazed, as I read back over the pages of my journal, how the process unfolded. I admit, I do trust the process of setting intents. If I am consistent I get results; partly, I think, because I trust that I will be responded to in some fashion. If I allow myself to trust; innocently but without attachment to the outcome, as the shamans say, the response I get will be the right one. I seek to keep my intent pure and good, to keep it evolutionary, without either negative or positive overtones, without hints of doubt, and I am consistent in repeating my intent daily until I get results. As a result of this practice, I do believe we can all, men and women, access the natural power within us to learn what it means to truly evolve.

I am struck, again, by the synchronicity of what I am writing about, what Chuck chooses to write about and how Jeanne’s weekly messages all seem to align. On Monday, Jeanne spoke about remaining aware of how shift happens, of the role of nature, and of your own energy. Honestly, we really don’t plan these things!

Keep dreaming!
Love,
Jan