Tag Archives: synesthesia

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Explorations In Channeling

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Taking a break... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Taking a break…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Having taken a few months off from my book writing, I’ve had time to explore and try out some new channeling methods. I’d become very comfortable picking up my pen and notebook and writing whatever came through. I’d then type it up and pass it on to you, our readers. A few months ago, I decided I’d like to try speaking the channeled messages we post on Mondays. I found a nice little MP3 recording device and a new process was born. I didn’t hesitate but stepped up to the mic and gave it a whirl and I have enjoyed not only the challenge but the shorter amount of time I need to dedicate to getting that Monday message out!

We had done some experimentation with my speaking a few years ago, but I reverted back into my comfort zone and I have to say that I am still most comfortable writing, yet I have continued to challenge myself to let Jeanne’s thoughts, words, and messages of guidance come through my vocal chords. Over the past two weeks we’ve recorded a couple of conversations that we’ve been posting as Random Acts of Guidance, which you can find under the Categories listing on the lower left sidebar. I’ve noticed that my trance state deepens the longer we talk and that pretty soon I’m in the familiar deep trance that I normally achieve quite quickly when I write the channeled messages.

When writing there is rarely a pause. I write quickly in a large scrawl. I’m not aware of anything in this world, except maybe my pen writing, but sometimes not even that as I am more taken up with sorting through the pictures that appear. Out of those pictures I must grasp, as quickly as possible, the portion of the message that is coming through most strongly and get it down in words that make sense. I say “a portion” of the message because in the second that it takes me to view the picture I am given a multitude of messages, which I seem to be able to grasp on a deep intuitive level, on a knowing level. Somehow the perfect words always appear to describe the content of the picture/message.

As I write about in the introduction to my last book, Into The Vast Nothingness, I am a synesthete and seeing things in pictures is pretty normal for me. In fact, I see pictures all the time; it’s how I interpret, examine, and view the world. If I hear a word or if someone asks me a question a picture appears in my mind. Words and numbers are not abstract to me but visual. If I say the word “bed” to myself I immediately see the bed I had when I was a child, tucked into one corner of my tiny bedroom. I see it clearly. I see the dresser next to it and its twin on the other side of the dresser. The room was tiny and that was all that could fit into it. There was a closet behind the door and one window. Beneath the window there was a forced air heating vent through which I could hear my parents talking in their room which was right next to mine.

Filtering through to what is most important... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Filtering through to what is most important…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Basically everything filters through me in a similar manner. I usually see more than is needed and so I have had to learn how to hone in on what I’m looking for. For instance, if someone asks me a question and several visual options appear I have to pick out the option that best answers the question. It can sometimes be frustrating for the questioner when I don’t answer straightforwardly, but often I just don’t have a plain and simple answer. I am sent too much information!

I believe that this ability to sift through a visual bombardment has aided me in my channeling process. Often as I’m channeling, however, I feel that some of the messages that get pushed aside during this sifting process are important and that the rest of you will miss out, but Jeanne has always urged me not to worry, that they will come through again at another time.

When speaking during a channeling I have the sense of speaking quickly, but am astonished by how the words seem to come from such a long way away, as if I’m talking from the end of a long tunnel. I am always astonished, however, that full sentences that make perfect sense appear!

I’m working on finding a way to bring Jeanne’s voice closer, more into the room, getting my throat into an open and relaxed place, doing ujjayi breathing beforehand if it’s a planned session. But more often that not we just decide to do a channeling. Or Chuck will ask: How about doing a channeling? And then I gulp, a little frightened, and say “Okay.” The fear is a normal reaction to what I’m challenging myself to do. It’s not like I haven’t done it before, but I’m challenging myself to just open up and let the words flow.

All of this brings me now to the name thing. Is she Jeanne or is she Saleph? Well, she’s both and although she never said we should call her Saleph she did indicate that she would leave it up to Chuck to decide what name she should now be known by. When I channeled a recent message regarding her name, a great welling of emotion passed through me, as I sensed her love and appreciation for all Chuck does and continues to do in this triangular relationship that has totally changed our lives and how we live in the world. I knew she knew that she was challenging him to release her in a new way, on a deeper level, with no entitlement, no sense of ownership whatsoever really. She was challenging herself too and I sensed this as that wave of emotion went through me. It was love and sadness intertwined, not sadness of loss but recognition that there is always sadness in partings, even if the partings are the beginnings of phenomenal new life.

Chuck made the decision to call Jeanne “Saleph” now, and so we ask all of you to embrace this new name as we take this process forward into phenomenal new life too. I still think of her as Jeanne, but more often than not when we speak of her now we use her soul name, Saleph, the name that encompasses all of her many lifetimes, her previous lifetimes on earth and whatever she may be called as she ventures onward. We knew her as Jeanne, but I suspect she was known by other names even when we knew her as Jeanne. Ah, the mysteries of life!

Are we ready to contemplate who else we might be? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Are we ready to contemplate who else we might be?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The other day I caught a few minutes of an episode of Radiolab as I was driving, synchronistically aligned with my thoughts of Saleph’s statement about her all-encompassing name. In the episode, a woman who had a death experience returns to life to tell the story of how when she died she found herself not in heaven or having gone through a white light but as an old man, a vegetable farmer in Vietnam.

What other lives are we living now? I hope to ask Saleph some more questions regarding all of this, and more, as we continue our conversations.

I hope you’ll tune in!
Jan

Here is the Radiolab show: Who am I? The segment I am referring to starts 14:45 minutes into the broadcast—you can scroll ahead—and lasts until the 23 minute mark.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Impediments—Real Or Imaginary?

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There's always a reason for the wall! - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
There’s always a reason for the wall!
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

I channel a word, a word that sets in motion the challenges and inspirations for the day ahead. We see it reverberating throughout the day, its significance hard to miss. Sometimes we post these words on our Facebook page, as a Soulbyte, a simple and concise thought or idea that will hopefully be helpful, or sometimes we post words from other sources of wisdom. It has always been my intent to use my channeling ability in a way that is helpful to others, and so I have been looking into expanding what I am doing.

The process of learning to speak rather than write the channeled messages has lately been foremost in my personal exploration. Several impediments have arisen, one being my controlling mind, which by the way was yesterday’s word! Control is different, I learned, from discipline, which was the followup word to control. Control is what the mind does, making us think we are in control, but in reality we are not. Nature is really in control. How we work with what nature presents us with takes discipline. Today’s word, impediment, naturally arises as we consider what it means to give up on the idea that we are in control of anything. The truth is that we just can’t control what happens to us, but we can look at what is presented to us as a teaching tool, offering us the opportunity to change and grow.

As soon as I hear the word “impediment” a huge wall immediately appears in front of me. I am like the little mouse in the Leo Lionni picturebook, Tillie and the Wall, wondering what is on the other side. I am sure that I must get beyond the wall. My first instinct is to get over, around or under that wall, letting nothing get in my way. But if I sit and meditate, if I get calm, I begin to realize that the wall, the impediment is there for a reason. I’m supposed to learn something from it. It might just be that I’m supposed to take a momentary pause, not rush ahead but bide my time, sitting in the tension of my enthusiasm until the time is right. When the time is right, suddenly the wall disappears.

At other times, the wall is there for a very good reason. It’s saying Stop! Don’t go this way! It might also be there as a guide to learning discipline, the other word that is so helpful as we learn to navigate life with awareness. As we let go of control and face impediments we must utilize discipline. It takes discipline to enact intent, whether it’s intent that we set for ourselves or that has been set for us by nature and the unfolding of life. Sometimes we are fully aware of this intent, at other times it may take us a while to figure it out, even years or lifetimes.

Anyway, back to my own process. I intend to evolve my channeling into a new format. I’ve gotten so comfortable with the writing format, almost complacent, and my evolving self feels inhibited by it, wants to change, to become available in a different, more flowing way. Hopefully, in the not too distance future, you will be able to listen to the messages from Jeanne. In the meantime, I have some personal impediments to work through, so the wall I am facing at the moment is not just a pause wall, but also a teaching wall.

Discipline the wandering mind… - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Discipline the wandering mind…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

The problem is that, as a synesthete, my brain activates several senses at the same time, so that when I channel as I have been—by writing—more of my brain is occupied and thus happy. When I speak a channeling, that other part of my brain, normally busy with writing, wants to be involved. Often it offers helpful images, but lately this other part of my brain has been interfering, inserting its own agenda—thinking, assessing, and judging! It’s been annoying the heck out of me, so I’m devising new ways to keep it occupied so the messages come through totally pure and unadulterated. It’s a process and a good one for me to be challenged with. So, for the time being, I face my wall. I sit in the shadow of it, learn what I must, and bide my time, knowing full well that when the time is right that wall will disappear and the way will be clear to proceed.

If I could only discipline my synesthesia! But that, I have to accept, is just the way my brain naturally works! You see, nature is really in control, but there are ways to work around it! Oh, and by the way, the little mouse, Tillie? She applied discipline to her wondering, dug a hole under the wall, and discovered that on the other side were other mice, just like her. What once appeared so mysterious and foreign was really very familiar, but the work she had done in getting to that place was well worth it, opening a pathway to new interactions and expanded life. This is what we too learn as we face our own walls, our impediments and challenges, our inhibitions and complacencies. Once we slow down and face our fears and desires, in the true reality of life as a never-ending process, we discover that we are right where we need to be, surrounded by the energy of nature in constant motion, asking us to get busy and dig a tunnel to new life!

Learning to speak all over again,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Seeing

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This is how I see Jeanne's energy... - Art by Jan Ketchel
This is how I see Jeanne’s energy…
– Art by Jan Ketchel

I lie awake. It’s 2 AM and I can’t sleep. It’s the energy of now, I think, the restlessness of this time of transformation. My mind races. Thoughts swirl. An hour goes by. I still can’t sleep. I should get up, I think, go sit by the wood stove and meditate or read, but it’s too cold. I snuggle down in bed, pulling the covers up higher.

I say my mantra: “Look into your darkness until you see the eye of God.” I repeat it, looking into the darkness behind my eyes. As usual I see all kinds of eyes. Faces loom, strange and wonderful, eerily looking right back at me. I know that they are all eyes of God. God is in everyone and everything, whatever God may be. To me, God is the energy of all of us and of everything, not a being but simply who we all are. But I cannot still my humming mind.

I should be able to handle this, I think, I’m a hypnotist after all! I do self-hypnosis. I go to a calm place, a safe place, a beautiful place. I go deeper into my body, relaxing each muscle, calming my thoughts one at a time, dismissing them as soon as they arise. Without attachment, I let them go, knowing they will reappear again in the morning. Another hour passes. I still cannot fall back to sleep.

Now I open my eyes. Instead of looking into my inner darkness I peer into the night. This has always been a fascination of mine, another kind of mediative practice that I’ve always done. As I stare into the darkness of the bedroom I see energy, swirling, twirling, flipping and soaring energy that immediately comforts me. Yes, this is good, I think. And I wonder if Jeanne will come to me, for this is often how she appears, in her energy body, as a fluttering globe of white light, a white moth surrounded by an ethereal glow in the dark of night.

Once, when I told Chuck that this was how I saw her, we lay on our bed in the darkness one night and looked for her together. I am a visual person. I see things, actually see. I believe everyone can see the same way, see the same things, but I also know that we are all constructed differently and some parts of us are more dominant and more exercised than others. I’ve always been like this. I have a kind of synesthesia where I see numbers in designs; the days of the week, the hours of the day, the months of the year each with their own specific layout. When I do math, I see the numbers in their places on the spiraling pattern that always appears when I think of numbers. I calculate by visualizing. If I think of the days of the week, Wednesday for instance, there it is, right where it always is in the weekly design layout. I see words in shapes and colors. I thought everyone saw the same way, but now I know differently, that we all perceive the world in our own unique way.

I know that Chuck does not see the way I do. Where I am visual, he’s intuitive. So it stands to reason that his way of perceiving things is different. He was always a good hypnosis subject when I was doing my training because I could never ask him to visualize something, to see it in his mind’s eye. He challenged me to go beyond my own perception, to accept and allow for other possibilities. Everything is abstract to him, he feels things, while to me everything has shape and form, so I knew that when I asked him to look into the darkness with me on that night, I was asking him to come into my world, a very different world from the one he normally inhabits.

How I see the world... -Art by Jan Ketchel
How I see the world…
-Art by Jan Ketchel

“Don’t look too hard,” I said, “gaze the way the Shamans say to gaze. Notice that the darkness is not just one color. Notice that it’s not solid, that it’s in constant flux. Do you see that reddish light over there to the left?” I wondered if he could indeed see what I was perceiving. After a while, he said yes, and he described exactly what I saw.

“See how it moves?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “that’s energy moving in the universe. That’s what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico talk about. We are all that.”

The other night, when I looked into the darkness, I called Jeanne to me, as I often do. “Are you there?” Out of the darkness she came.

“I can’t sleep,” I said. “Help me to sleep.” Her white fluttering globe came closer and closer until I blacked out.

In the morning, I was grateful that I had gotten a few more hours of sleep, but I clearly saw the power of the conscious mind, how it fights for precedence and how insidious our thoughts are, never willing to release us. The conscious mind feeds off us all day long and if we wake up at night it’s there waiting to suck our energy again. I went through a few more nights like that before, finally worn out perhaps, I slept deeply and solidly. I’d wake briefly but, without attachment, fall easily back to sleep after staring into the energy of the darkness. This activity, as well as being in my usual world, has also provided me with inspiration, the basis of many of my abstract paintings, the seeing of energy, day or night. Anyone can do it. Try it, whether sleepless of not, it’s quite an exhilarating experience. Allow the solid world to slowly dissolve into energy— vibratory strings, lines, dots—not unlike the pixilation of a digital image.

Perhaps the energy outside of us will calm down soon, perhaps we’ll all ride it to a new level. Perhaps, as Jeanne suggested in her message the other day, you’ll “Learn to flow with what comes and your fulfillment will loom large before you.” That’s what it’s like when I stare into the darkness, my fulfillment looms large before me. It comes to meet me, to speak to me in a different way, in image and abstraction, in the clarity of intuition that has no basis in visual seeing, but only exists in seeing the energy that we all are.

May you all be well and keep flowing!
Jan