
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Here is a channeled message to begin this new week. May it bring you insight and ideas as you continue your journey toward balance of body self and spirit self. Have a great week! Offered with humbleness and gratitude.

I dreamed last night. In the dream I was waiting for something to arrive, a delivery was going to be made. Suddenly I heard loud knocks on the front door, two vigorous raps as loud as gunshots followed by two more, equally loud. When I heard the first two knocks I imagined that it was the delivery that I was awaiting, but as I heard the second two I woke up, sure that it meant something else.
I lay awake in bed wondering if someone was indeed outside the front door in the middle of the night. I waited to hear more rapping but none followed.
As I dozed off again I remembered that loud knocks in dreaming are often an indication of spirit calling, such knocks the precursor to going out of body. I also sensed that the dream was a premonition of something to come, that some news would come in this manner.
I acknowledge that my spirit is preparing me for something. Perhaps it’s asking me to allow myself to go out of body, to not get startled by the knocks in the night but to allow them to take me to a higher level of dreaming. Perhaps it’s letting me know that change is coming, or that I will be startled by the arrival of something, expected but unexpected as well, for the loudness of the knocks was startling.
I’m not too concerned. I refuse to let myself worry over something that is only fiction at this point. Instead I’m determined to let life unfold as it will, for I know I have no control over what happens, in fact I believe that it’s wrong to interfere with life’s unfolding. I am, however, focused on maintaining my awareness of this dream message, for I believe it is a message. It might not be at all what I think though, and so I am open to what unfolds over the next few days and weeks.
I have had premonitions many times before in dreams, things that eventually unfolded just as I had dreamed. Sometimes our dream messages are very specific and sometimes they are metaphorical. It’s hard to know which they are until life’s unfolding shows us the answer.

Training our awareness, reminding ourselves to remember and to document our experiences, is a good way to connect our dreaming experiences with our living reality. They are connected, but we only realize this as we dare to ask ourselves to remember and stay alert, to value our dreaming experiences, allowing them to enhance our waking experiences.
In the end, I choose to take my dreaming experience as true on all levels. Yes, it’s a premonition, but it’s also a call from my spirit because I know that my spirit is always calling. It called me to do my recapitulation, and it continues to challenge me to be fully present and aware, whether I’m dreaming or awake.
Awaiting the delivery,
Jan

I don’t really know that much about astrology. I follow a few blogs, but I get lost in the planets, in the alignments and polarities. I find the details mind-boggling. It’s often like reading a foreign language. But even so, I know what I feel.
I woke up in the middle of the night. I was awake during the moment of the cardinal grand cross, a rare four planet pattern that occurred last night. As I lay awake, I knew it was time to make further inroads into the changes that I’ve been instituting over the past several years. “Now,” I thought to myself, “is the time to fully make the shift.”
Life challenges us all the time. Life asks us to make decisions, to face our difficulties, and to keep growing. I just have to look out the window and I know that facing my challenges is in alignment with nature, planetary or otherwise. Nature dies and then pushes through. The grass grows, the flowers bloom, the leaves appear once again.
I notice the signs that come to greet me, underscoring this time of shift. A butterfly flies over our heads as we sit in the yard, a little early we think. Two moths appear at the window, right in front of my eyes. I cannot fail to take in the significance; spirit is calling.
Spirit is always calling. As Chuck and I were discussing this morning, we are all born equipped with it. Then we lose it. We lose touch with our innocence, our connection to the wonder and the magic, but then we spend our lives looking for it. Sometimes we are doing this with purpose and at other times we do it unconsciously. But spirit calls out to us in so many ways, asking us to come back to our equipment again, that which we were born with, our connection to the energy of everything. In answering the call, we are declaring that we are ready, knowing full well that changing ourselves will take work. We put on our warrior self and we fight alongside our spirit self as we break through old worlds and old behaviors, old patterns that have kept us in bondage, so that we can achieve our own perfect grand cross.
When I began my recapitulation, it was really because my spirit was calling so loudly that I could not ignore it. Following that call meant the collapse of everything, but it also meant the beginning of new life. In shift, in change, there is death and rebirth, breaking apart and building up. Endings and beginnings are bundled up, tangled up in the process of change. Gradually the destruction turns to construction, as new structures based on spirit begin to take over and the new world that we’ve been working on for so long finally begins taking shape.
The feeling is that now is the time to implement that which has been taking shape, to not only notice the signs of spirit but act on them. We all have something inside of us, some goal, some desire, some creative urge, our spirit calling out to us in some way. My spirit once called out to me because it was dying, but now it is alive and well, living a full and productive life, but still it calls out to me: Time to go deeper still! And so I pay heed. “Yes,” I say, “time to go deeper still!”
It’s time for all of us to let spirit take us more fully into experiencing just what “deeper still” means. I’m game!
Change is good,
Jan

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison. His ability to find contentment and meaning throughout those years prepared him to come to power in his seventies and transform a nation.
We are all in our private prison, contained within the four walls of our private karma, the central meaning of our life. The limitations imposed by our deepest challenges may prevent us from experiencing joy, safety, freedom and love. Our private prison, like Mandela’s prison, may severely limit our fulfillment through the most fruitful years of our lives.
We may find ourselves caught in swirls of sorrow, doubt, depression and deep self-pity. These are all necessary encounters, reminders of the transpersonal spirit that seeks to fly freely beyond the prison walls of our discontent. Our deepest sorrow is the song of the bird of freedom that beckons us to sing its tune.
When we recapitulate, we squarely face our karmic fixation. What happened in life that separated us from our spirit, that sent us into the desert of our discontent? Reliving, recollecting, and reprocessing the experiences of our lives ultimately releases us to the freedom of our spirit’s fulfillment. And this process, like Mandela’s, might take decades; no easy road to freedom.
But we needn’t attach to the outcome of our recapitulation process. Instead, we can focus on contentment in this moment, in every moment, through the breath. Buddhist meditation uses the breath. Yogic meditation uses the breath. Shamanic recapitulation uses the breath.
Simply focus awareness on the breath in this moment. Passively observe it without interference. Direct it at will. Gently deepen it. Focus it on the throat, on the solar plexus, on the perineum, on the big toe!
Count, to rhythmically align with the breath. Hold the breath; release it. Bring it to the tensest part of the body and allow it to gently penetrate and soften. Breathe rapidly if that feels right, fully releasing energy that has long been held in. Or breathe ever so softly, with loving tenderness.

Placing awareness on the in-breath, on the inhalation of air—prana/life force/spirit—allows it to fill the body with its energy and vibration. Releasing the old stuck energies deeply stored in the body as we exhale brings contentment to each moment of our lives. The more we breathe with awareness, the deeper we breathe with awareness, the more we realize our deepest intent—to advance our spirit beyond its karmic containment into new life, full of contentment!
Simply breathing,
Chuck
As Bob Marley sings in Redemption Song: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.