Lift your mood with a walk in nature, with a few breaths of fresh air, with a stroll down your street. Listen to the sounds around you, how quiet or noisy, how busy or calm, how nature is always awake in some fashion no matter the season. A mood is just emotion stuck on replay, spinning inside you, seeking a way out. Let it release in a breath and then turn in a new direction. Pay attention to why it’s there, and note what it means, but let it go. Make room for something new as you breathe and notice how beautiful the sky is, how happy the birds. A short walk can make all the difference.
Many shifts are required in seeking the deeper self...
One of the most important things that I’ve learned in my life and continually utilize is the process of shifting. Shifting might mean deciding not to get drawn into someone else’s drama, even when I feel I might be helpful. Shifting might mean something as simple as making the decision to drive in a different direction from the usual route. Shifting might mean breaking a comfortable routine, allowing the self to encounter something new, even if that something is potentially disturbing or challenging. Shifting might mean asking the self to forego a habit or an emotional attachment, nurturing or otherwise. Shifting might mean asking the self to turn inward rather than project onto another person or situation that which is creating turmoil or incident within. Shifting might mean asking the self to take a big leap into new life, or acquiescing to the inner process, or beginning the process of recapitulation.
The main thing about learning to become a shifter is that it requires action, and action comes from making a decision that, for better or worse, will lead to change. Sometimes shifting means going back and revisiting something that we haven’t quite finished, such as a relationship, an emotional attachment, a fantasy, until we get what we need or learn that what we thought we needed never existed there to begin with. It might mean finally accepting that our dreams are in our own hands, not in anyone else’s, and then making them reality. Shifting—asking the self to move out of one place and into another—offers us the opportunity to experience life differently and more fully.
During my recapitulation process, I discovered that in physical shift, by actually moving my body, I could aid my process. I could cut through stagnancy, repulsive thoughts, physical paralysis, and repetitive behaviors. I could shift out of memories that took over and consumed my energy. But what I also learned was that shifting took work. It required grounding and alertness so that I could maintain enough awareness to know exactly when it was time to shift. It meant daring to allow myself to take back control in situations where I felt I had no control. It meant that I had to forge a steady adult presence that could appear when necessary and make a decision about how to proceed.
This was a growing process that ran parallel to the recapitulation process. So that while I was breaking down and breaking through old stuff—disassembling the protective, defended self I had become as a result of trauma—I was simultaneously building up a strong and independent self, an evolving self. This evolving self gradually learned that it was okay to say no at the proper times, to take back as well as nurture fragmented parts of myself. This evolving self allowed the recapitulating self to have the necessary experiences, even some very difficult and frightening ones, but this self never abandoned the recapitulating self. Even when it was just in the beginning stages of being forged, it had an underlying sense of what was necessary. And so it learned to stand aside so I could have the experiences I needed to have, but at the same time it was busy capturing lost energy, strengthening each time an experience was recapitulated.
Recapitulation affords us the opportunity to become a shifter, in a shamanic sense to know immediately how to act, how to move, how to speak, and how to protect our energy without having to even think about it. For that is the ultimate goal of recapitulation, to recapture our lost energy in the healing process it affords, so that we may have it for impeccable use in this life and in the next. However, to get to that place of being able to act so succinctly and impeccably, we must train ourselves during our recapitulation to become fully conscious and to stay conscious.
Although recapitulation may take us on a journey we had not anticipated, we must forge a self willing to take the journey, not be a slave to it, but a fully accepting participant. Indeed, there are times when in the midst of recapitulation we might feel overwhelmed, taken places we don’t want to go. We might even allow ourselves to go places we know we shouldn’t go. But we must train ourselves to pull our heads up out of the muck long enough to remember that we are recapitulating for a reason, and we must be ready to face whatever that reason is. It might be clear or it might be a mystery, but we must remember that once we begin recapitulation we are surrounded by the ancient intent of recapitulation.
Emergence of a new self...
As we take our journey, we must become conscious of how the unconscious guides us, how intent works, and how we are guided in all sorts of ways through our trials. It is in times such as these, when we might feel helpless, that our shifting abilities are honed. In our darkest hour our greatest challenges come to teach us.
Becoming conscious requires acquiescence. Acquiescence may be the most difficult part of the recapitulation process, but once we clearly speak the words of acquiescence—Okay, take me on this journey, I’m ready to do it—consciousness will naturally arise and lead us to hone our skills. In acquiescence, we will gradually experience that which we thought we might never experience, that which we projected onto others or rejected out of hatred for ourselves, thinking we were unworthy of love, of happiness, of a life worth living.
In acquiescing to our recapitulation journey, we accept that a new self is going to emerge, in fact in acquiescing we intend a new self. We become braver and more daring as we recapitulate, as we hone our fragmented self into a new stronger self. As we dare to face what comes to greet us, we hone the ability to shift out of any potentially harmful attachment or experience. We might suffer a few failures at first, but that is just to awaken our consciousness to the reality of the recapitulation process, letting us know how it will steer us along, helping us to see just where our greatest work lies. Whatever our greatest work is—whether getting beyond self-hatred, self-pity, self-doubt, inflation or deflation, negativity or inertia—our final oath of acquiescence offers us a major tool in honing our ability to shift.
In acquiescing to our recapitulation journey we are accepting that we are part of something bigger, far beyond the world as we experience it on a normal day. We are accepting that there is good energy available to us too, and as we take our journey we find it making its way toward us more often than ever before.
Once we decide to take our recapitulation journey we discover that in conscious awareness, in honing ourselves as shifters in both waking and dreaming states, we become aware of the truth of interconnected energy, aware that we are all part of it, that it flows to us and through us. Such energy exists for all of us, but we must work at achieving such awareness and the means to accessing it. The tools are within.
Simultaneous self experiencing darkness and light...
The biggest and most ready tool is what our unconscious brings to us, and the next tool is our conscious decision to go deeper into our unconscious, into our darkness and our light, for they reside side by side, just as our recapitulating self resides alongside our evolving self.
We are all offered, many times in a lifetime, the choice to either go on a journey with our spirit or to reject it. If we make the choice to reject it, I can state that—based on my own previous life lived during the first 50 years of this lifetime—we will suffer. If we make the choice to join our spirit, we will free ourselves of our suffering and reconstruct ourselves according to our deepest truths, our spirit alive in us, taking us into vibrant new life. This I can state from my own decision to do so, and my own experience since then. As always, it’s a personal choice. Do I stay the same or do I evolve?
There is always support as we take the recapitulation journey. Support comes from without and within, from our guides in this world and beyond, from our spirit’s intent and the intent of the shamans, from our unconscious and conscious selves, from our memories as they challenge us to recapitulate and our evolving selves as they challenge us to trust the journey, to sweep away doubt and judgment, the old voices and the old fears, and to keep going. And that is my intention today, to pass on the energy that urges us all to evolve. Keep going! You’ll get there! Life awaits!
Sending love and energy as you dare to take the full journey to freedom,
Jan
There are many worlds awaiting our discovery, but first we must discover those closest to home, inside the self, in the body. Discovering a new world requires breaking through a barrier of perception formed by walls of the familiar world we’ve come to know and love, or hate, but in either case cling to, for the comfort of the known, the consistent, the people we can count on, the things our sanity and security can safely rest upon.
When we encounter a trigger we are really being offered an invitation to discover a new world, close to home. Triggers are ushers, potential awakenings, stirrings from the Spirit to explore beyond our known world. This is the journey of recapitulation.
To leave the world of the known is always a challenging affair. We are confronted with having to assemble the details of this unknown frontier into a graspable world. Then the challenge is to remain cohesively in it, allowing ourselves to experience the reality and full truth of it. Ultimately we are challenged with merging the world of everyday life with that of our newly discovered experiences.
When, for instance, we turn our awareness to sensations or pains in our body, and suspend the familiar judgments of the known world that identifies them as indigestion, infection, or muscle fatigue, our body might suddenly be ushered into the memory of another time and place filled with frightening images, powerful emotions and painful sensations. Can we allow ourselves to stay in that world and discover the full story or will the energy of this encounter be so overpowering that we quickly shut it down and return to the security of the known world, dismissing the journey as but a strange daydream? So powerful is the pull to stay confined within the familiar walls of everyday life that we may not only never discover the fullness of who we are and where we’ve been, but we may never tap into the fullness of our potential, the world where everything is possible.
When we shift worlds and remain cohesively in them we discover hidden treasures. In recapitulation we reunite with lost worlds of the self. Beyond recapitulation we tap into the magical potential of the self. In The Second Ring of Power on page 106, Carlos Castaneda asks don Juan how he might help a mortally ill dear friend in the hospital. Don Juan replies:
“…You can cure her and make her walk out of that death trap,” he said.
“How?” I asked him.
“It’s a very simple procedure,” he said. “All you have to do is remind her that she’s an incurable patient. Since she’s a terminal case she has power. She has nothing to lose anymore. She lost everything already. When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can cling to.”
Don Juan offers advice to free this woman from her attachment to this world, and her disease, using the boost of her pending death as a catalyst to enter another world where everything is possible, where she has the potential to completely heal.
Once we have learned the art of shifting into other worlds—through recapitulating and discovering the magic of the unknown self—and are able to maintain cohesion in those worlds, we are further freed to explore infinity. Ultimately, the treasures and magic we uncover and integrate, as we follow our triggers and ushers into unknown worlds, provide the skills that enable us to volitionally travel freely into ever-new awakenings in infinity.
If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.
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!
Dear Jeanne, Yesterday, in my blog, I wrote about being bored with the mirrors theme. I think it’s a great visual to work projection from but, personally, I want to move onto another part of the inner work process. When you ask us to do our inner work it’s nice to have a variety of visual tools, at least that’s what I think. As I wrote about yesterday, in a dream, Jung presented me with a huge stone, a big gray boulder, and for some reason I don’t find that as boring as a mirror. Do you have some advice or guidance around enacting a shift in our inner work, which is really all that I was desiring?
My Dear One, you asked for a shift and you got a rock! Now that is quite funny! But seriously, in order to do inner work one must accept what comes to guide you and this is what you must remain open and alert to. It is not in the act of peering into the mirror or studying the boulder that you will grow but in taking what you find into your inner world and using it in a new manner that will aid you.
In spite of what is outside of you, all inner work requires an investigation of how you operate both inside and outside. In comparing these two selves you may arrive at what you need to do each day in order to shift in your progress.
I do not mean to bore you by suggesting that a mirror is appropriate to use at all times, but you cannot get away from the fact that mirrors exist whether you like them or not. Your own big boulder is also quite a mirror, for in some manner will you find your self in it, your diligent and curious self to begin with. I have no doubt that you will find your boulder as boring as mirrors after a while, and then what will you need in order to shift?
You see, the shift you desire is for deeper work and, yes, the challenge is to take the next step into a new part of the self, but how will you know where to go if that self is not yet revealed? In her dream, Jan has been shown the next part of herself. But in order to find it she had to be ready, and to ask for it. This is the process I suggest that you all attend to when you are ready to move beyond your current position. Just remember the following two things:
1. You must progress at your own rate.
2. You must learn to read the signs in your own life, for they will arrive to guide you in the most individually pertinent way, for you alone.
Look not for what someone else receives as guidance, but wait patiently for your personally meaningful gift. It will arrive in a most particular way to show you what to do next. And you may not understand it at first, but just wait, eventually you will, and it will hit you over the head with a big AHAAAA!
NOTE: When I had finished with this channeling Chuck decided, since today is his thirty-sixth wedding anniversary with Jeanne, to “pull a card for our anniversary,” as he put it, referring to the satin bag from their wedding day, in which Jeanne had stored many of the cards they had given to each other and received from others over their years together. Hoping to receive a “special” anniversary message from Jeanne, Chuck instead pulled a card with a picture of the Peanuts dog Snoopy on the front, wearing a sad expression, saying, “You’re leaving!” It was a good-bye card from the people Jeanne had worked with at Kenneth Clark’s research foundation as she prepared to go on to grad school. So, I guess, in keeping with Jeanne’s message of today she is giving Chuck just the message that is right for him to receive on this day. She is saying that, once again, she has left to go on to new learning and that you can’t go back to old familiar nostalgic places. It’s not where new life is. And you know what, it is exactly where he himself is; ready to move on to new learning! AHAAAA!
