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Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Stalking A New Self

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In that dissociative fugue state... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
In that dissociative fugue state…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

It’s been in the news, a man wakes up from a coma speaking only Swedish. He doesn’t recognize his wife or family. A diagnosis called Transient Global Amnesia has been applied to his condition. Medical personnel assigned to his case have also decided that he’s most likely in a dissociative fugue state, wherein a person forgets their past and can sometimes take on a new personality. When I first read the headline I was intrigued, having had my own experiences with the Swedish language and inventing a new personality, wondering if the man had woken up in a past life.

The man, it turns out, had lived in Sweden as a child and for much of his adult life, so the fact that he spoke the language was no mystery. The mystery in his case was, how could he forget his current life so easily? The Shamans of Ancient Mexico would diagnose him as having suffered a jolt to the assemblage point, a shift in awareness into a totally new world.

My own first encounters with speaking Swedish came in a dream when I was in my early twenties. In the dream I was traveling across the United States by wagon train. I leaned against the back of the wagon, in which I was traveling with my husband and children, and wept. Great sadness had occurred, the death of our child, whom we had just buried along the trail. My husband came up to console me. We spoke a language I had never heard before. I spoke fluently and without hesitation.

My dreaming self observed the entire dream episode, saw what I looked like and heard myself speaking this strange language. I even understood what I was saying, even though I didn’t understand the specific words. I saw that I was a tall and strapping woman, with thick blond hair tied back in a long braid. I was dressed in neat, clean, but poor cotton clothing, a long dress and apron. My husband was taller and wore a hat. His pants were tucked into high boots. My dreaming self watched as he came over and embraced me.

We wept together and then he told me that we’d have to move on, keep going, that everything would be okay. The rest of the people traveling with the wagon train were preparing to leave. We had to stay with the group. Moving on was essential. It was a strenuous journey, but I knew we’d make it to our destination. I just needed time to gather myself together, I told him. I’d be alright. Then I felt myself pull inward, into deep inner silence. I felt a core of strength shoot through me, like a fire rising out of the depths of me, energy like I had never felt in real life. Then I shook off my sorrow. There was life still to care for, life still to live. Times were tough, but the tough keep going. I woke up as I shrugged off my sorrow, that core of strength burning brightly inside me.

Upon awakening, I was immediately puzzled by the strange language I’d spoken and the sense of connection I felt with the woman in the dream. I knew it really was me, had been me, and that I too had that fiery core of inner strength inside me. I suspected, at the time, that the dream was related to a past life, though I had little knowledge of how that could be possible.

Within a year of the dream, I met my Swedish husband-to-be and six months after meeting him I was living in Sweden. It didn’t take long for me to recognize the Swedish language as the same language I’d spoken in my dream. I took language classes and within no time I was speaking Swedish fluently, like a native I was told, like a native from the southern part of Sweden called Smaland that had been so devastated by drought that the vast majority of farmers left and moved to America during the 1800s. I spent considerable time exploring the country and always found this southern region extremely warm and inviting, the forests and thick-walled cottages so familiar. At the time, all of this reinforced the real possibility that I had indeed lived a past life in Sweden.

Who am I really? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Who am I really?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

At the time, however, I was dealing with my own deep issues, undiagnosed at the time. Indeed, I was living out my own dissociative fugue state. Many years later, as I write about in my books, I started working with Chuck. The first thing he did was give me a diagnosis of PTSD. The diagnosis gave me a sort of anchor, an anchor from which I could dive into the dark pool of the unconscious and do deep inner work, but it was not the answer. However, it was during that time that my past, including my decision to move to Sweden in the blink of an eye, all began to make sense. Unlike Michael Boatwright, however, the guy who woke up speaking Swedish recently, I had never lived in Sweden before, though I felt so at home there. I assimilated very quickly, learning not only the language but all the nuances of the culture as if I were, indeed, a native Swede.

Sweden offered me many opportunities. First, I got away from my past and, much like Michael Boatwright, I forgot what had happened to me during a certain part of my life, most of my childhood, in fact, as I write about in my books. I was also offered the opportunity to become a new me, and I did. I changed a lot while I was there. I stalked, as the Shamans of Ancient Mexico call it, a new personality. My introverted, shy self soon felt comfortable to become a new being. The distance really helped. I was so far from everyone and everything that had influenced me up until then that I felt really free for the first time in my life. And so I lived a new life for several years, until it was done, until it was time to return to what I had run away from, for I knew, instinctively, that I had run from something.

It would still be some time before I was ready to face my own mysteries. And, as I was to learn, a diagnosis, whether it be Transient Global Amnesia or PTSD, is not the real answer if one is to evolve. As Chuck likes to say, “Now let’s do the work!” The only thing that was going to help, was the work of recapitulation: facing the past, finding out why I was the way I was, and why I had to move so far away to begin with before I felt safe.

Upon return to the States, I had to reinvent myself once again, for the Swedish woman I had become was not appropriate for the life I embarked upon in New York City. Once again, I stalked a new personality, and I kept stalking different versions of who I thought I really was until I ran out of energy, until I finally collapsed and gave up. It was then that I met Chuck and began to learn about my own inner mysteries, the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, and the process of recapitulation. It was then that real change began and everything made sense.

It was then, as I embarked on a new journey of self-discovery, that I found I really did have within me that fiery core of inner strength that I’d experienced in my dream of the Swedish woman on the wagon train journey. For the most part, it had been deeply buried and inaccessible, as most of my life had been spent in a state of numbness, that dissociative fugue state. It was during my recapitulation that I saw my decision to move to Sweden in a different light. It became clear that it was a move on the part of my psyche to jolt my assemblage point.

With deep inner work, peace will come... - Art & Photo by Jan Ketchel
With deep inner work, peace will come…
– Art & Photo by Jan Ketchel

That journey to a foreign land had been pivotal in rediscovering some important things about myself, to not only awaken a past life experience in this life—and live it again in a sense—but more importantly to give me a hint of the possible self to one day look forward to in the future. For I now know that the free woman I became in Sweden was an immature model of my more mature, true self. I didn’t know any of this at the time, of course, but all of this and much more has been revealed as I’ve stayed on the trail of a life of change, the same kind of trail that my dreaming self was on.

The other thing that my time in Sweden hinted at, I understand in retrospect, was the first hint that I would have to go back in order to go forward. If I was to birth myself into a new woman and allow that fiery core strength to become a part of this life in a real way, I would have to go back into the darkness of my past and retrieve it. I would have to, singlehandedly, move it forward, out of my past life, into this life.

This is the real energy that moves through all of us, through our many lifetimes and many life experiences, but we must discover our own path to retrieving it. We don’t really have to go anywhere to do it, either, unless we have to. We can stay right where we are and do our deep inner work. But if we are to evolve we must take the journey of deep self-exploration so we can harness our energy, hone it, and utilize it as we travel along our life’s journeys.

Stalking new life, always,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Stalking The Raw Deal, Freeing The Grudge

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What does your Grudge look like? - Art by Jan Ketchel
What does your Grudge look like? – Art by Jan Ketchel

First, a shout out to a magical being who proposed that the “Raw Deal” be a blog topic, as a personal shift to a “New Deal” takes place. Thank you. You know who you are.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was a radical shift for America, one intended to shift the nation beyond entrenched victimhood into independence. This victim can be subtle and wily, as it can sneak in and bind our energy and take over our view through the character that I call “the Grudge.”

The Grudge is the repository of our accumulated resentments and entitlements, frustrated and fermenting in our chained bodies and spirits. The Grudge casts a negative, gray hue over our moods, thoughts, and interactions with the world. The Grudge gnaws on the raw deal of unmet needs such as betrayal, neglect, and abuse. The Grudge may dominate inwardly in powerlessness, isolation, and depression, or outwardly in open hostility and critical judgment, or both inwardly and outwardly simultaneously.

The Grudge is actually the warehouse for recapitulation. In recapitulation we sift through our accumulated grudge inventories and systematically free our energy for redeployment in a New Deal, beyond the confines of the Raw Deal.

Stalking, in the shamanic world, is learning how to live in any given world. In stalking the Raw Deal, we observe how our attitudes, behaviors and habits construct and uphold what we perceive as an unfair world, at least as we personally experience it. As we stalk the Raw Deal world we live in, we observe ourselves boxed into the corner by fate, circumstance, and choice—beings with clipped wings.

In recapitulation, we identify the building blocks of our raw deal world and follow through to their derivative roots. We discover, through recapitulation, the truths of our victimization; the deep-seated wounds to our innocence that have so restricted our joy and fulfillment. These wounds must be observed and fully felt. Equally, our response to those woundings—our defensive strategies to hide and protect our innocence—must be acknowledged and accepted. Herein lies the heart of the Grudge: the repository of unlived innocence.

The task at hand is to free our lost innocence from the protective hands of the Grudge, free it to come into mainstream life. Often the Grudge will hold on tightly, arguing that it is the job of the world, or those who failed innocence, to acknowledge their mistakes and compensate for lost time, lost life.

Though the Grudge often rightly points to those responsible for the Raw Deal to begin with—those beyond the self—the chance of outer compensation is fairly slim. Fortunately, the adult self that stalks the Raw Deal and elects to undertake a thorough recapitulation, is fully capable of freeing the Grudge, freeing the captive innocent self. Thus empowered, this adult self is then free to live out that innocence to fulfillment in this life. This is the adult self assuming full responsibility for its journey, its life, and whatever challenges infinity might have placed or continues to place before it. This is stalking the New Deal, a victimless life, fully freed from the protective custody of the Grudge, with energy redeployed for truly living.

Always stalking a New Deal,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Shifts of the Assemblage Point

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Intending a shift to a new reality

For the first time in ten years I decided to truly stalk the role of student. I’d selected an advanced seminar in Stamford, CT. My intent for the weekend was to clear the way for learning, to remove all the filters of identity and judgment that don’t allow for something new, that keep us frozen in the familiar.

I was driving a rental car with Rhode Island plates, our own car still in the body shop since a recent fender bender. I had a new trac phone with an unmemorized number. I arrived at my destination with the hope that I would know no one and that I would share nothing unnecessary about myself that might freeze me in an old identity or tug at my self-importance. “I’m simply a therapist here to learn.”

After parking my car a woman approached me on the walk to the college, obviously headed to the same seminar. After some smalltalk about the weather she asked me where I was from. I went to tell her, but drew a complete blank. I stumbled, slightly embarrassed, but actually quite fascinated. No matter how hard I tried, I had no idea where I was from!

I knew my name was Chuck Ketchel, as I easily picked out my name tag at the registration desk, but for several minutes I couldn’t swim my way back to the surface of Red Hook, NY. The best I could laughingly say to her, finally, was that I was from the Hudson Valley. She smiled and disappeared. I didn’t see her again for the duration of the seminar. Or, if I did, I didn’t recognize her.

My experience in the training was magical: I learned, my intent fully realized. Don’t have concerns about early Alzheimer’s for Chuck! This was a shamanic move—what the shamans would call using INTENT to STALK a different position of the assemblage point.

For the shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage, the assemblage point refers to a point on our energetic body where the energy fields that impact us are assembled. This assemblage of energy becomes our description of reality, how we see and define the world we live in.

When the assemblage point moves to a different position on our energy body, new energy fields are assembled and with that we experience a new world. A new world can mean something as simple as achieving a new perspective on life or as drastic a perception as encountering strange entities in a never-before experienced world.

Where did I come from and who am I now?

Engaging intent, as I did when approaching this seminar, is one way to shift the assemblage point. My intent to leave my old world behind, suspend judgment, and simply learn something new, shifted me and I became a stalker. In shamanic terms, stalking is maintaining the ability to calm the self and hold together when confronted with an unfamiliar reality.

Every time we recapitulate, we shift the assemblage point to a world of prior experience. When we dream, the assemblage point moves freely, allowing for experiences in many worlds, particularly outside the body. Many jolts in ordinary life can move our assemblage point as well, including traumatic incidences and subsequent flashbacks.

The other night, my daughter startled me awake with a phone call and a frightened voice, which she has given me permission to describe.

“Dad, I’m so upset! I feel so homesick,” she said. “I just watched a movie with Joel—Faces in the Crowd—about a woman who suffers from face blindness. Suddenly I looked at Joel and I didn’t recognize him! I didn’t want him to touch me. It was really freaky. I knew who he was and yet I didn’t! I feel in my body like I have at other times. I might be at a supermarket on the deli line when suddenly the voices around me seem very loud and my body becomes very light, like I’m disappearing.”

I assured Erica that these are normal events and that at such times we are being challenged to experience different worlds. Her experience describes that of being at the gates between worlds when energetically vibratory experiences and unfamiliarity reign and we might experience faintness, nausea, buzzing, fear, and a longing for home.

One foot in this world

In these states, infinity is beckoning to us. As the shamans say, we are experiencing a shift in the assemblage point, asked to assemble and enter a new world with a consistency of awareness far more heightened than normal. At such times we are challenged to hold onto awareness in two worlds at once, to not forget who we are, but to take in the far vaster knowledge that we are presented with as reality shifts. We are challenged to remain present and aware while we allow ourselves to have the experience of being infinite beings and take in the truth who we really are, where we’ve been, and where we are going.

The other night, while Jan was in trance—a shift of the assemblage point—I asked her to go to the place she was in just before she was conceived in this life. Her awareness took her to a vast ocean, accompanied by the sound of deep breaths, long inhales and long exhales, in concert with the amplitude and rhythm of the gently rocking waves of this unending ocean. She sensed her awareness shifting to a dark, contained space as I asked her to move on to conception, where a more constricted breath ensued.

Jan’s experience—her shift in her assemblage point to the vast sea of awareness before the stalking of a new life, that is, an identity to be constructed by the circumstances she was born into—reveals the true holographic nature of reality. No matter how many pieces you cut a holographic image into, under the right lighting conditions the original whole is revealed. Everyone of us is part of the same hologram—we all belong to the same vast sea of awareness.

When we enter this world, our awareness shifts from sea to container. We become a definite thing, born out of an infinite sea of interconnected possibility. And when we become that definite being, we forget our vast roots, our previously infinite lives.

Infinity beckons and I'm going!

Our task in this life is to solve the riddle—the specific challenges of the life we are in—and then to go beyond and recover all our truths, all of ourselves, and truly find our way home, back to awareness of the vastness of it all. This is the true essence of homesickness of which my daughter spoke. But oh, how we want to cling to the comfort of unchanging familiarity and the security of home in this life!

Shifts of the assemblage point, promptings from infinity to awaken to our true fullness, are rampant in our time. The familiar world is rattling us daily, as new worlds are finally being allowed to become known. We live in an exceptional time for mass evolutionary advancement, as the world continually bombards the fixation of our assemblage points, prompting them to move, and jolting us to awaken to a new reality as well.

As much as it may assault our senses, our feelings, and our sense of safety, we can now hear the words: “anal intercourse in the showers of Penn State between a coach and a child.” This is a real world that exists, spanning way beyond the walls of Penn State. The truth of that hidden world, with all its discomforts, is now a world we can know exists. We can live with the truth of that world. We can stalk that position of the assemblage point. By allowing ourselves to know and validate the truth of that world we can change, and indeed change the world we live in.

However, the process of allowing the truths of other worlds to be let in—shifts of the assemblage point—is indeed unsettling. Reactions range from nausea, dizziness, sadness, fear, homesickness, vibratory energy states, to yes, actually forgetting where you come from!

These are all transitory states. The real challenge is to achieve cohesion when you find yourself in another world. That is: calm yourself, recognize and actually be in awe of the experience while maintaining a dual focus.

As I stood in the lobby of the University of Connecticut last weekend—a man with no home—I knew who I was. I knew I had a foot in this world. I knew I’d return to it when the seminar was over. But, I especially knew that I was on an adventure to learn something very important—and that I did! We always do if we allow ourselves, or intend ourselves, into new or old worlds of discovery, what the shamans call shifts in the position of the assemblage point.

Chuck, from ???

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