When in alignment with yourself, all things come to you: your memories, your truths, your answers. They all exist already in you, just waiting for you to discover them. With nerves of steel, with unbending intent, with sobriety and stability in mind, body, and spirit, you are in the good hands of your Self, your High Self, your Soul, the part of you that knows you so well and only wishes for your very best, for you to learn and grow, to come out of the fog and into the light. This, and more, is what the practice of recapitulation teaches. The first move on the part of every being is to align with Spirit, acknowledge its existence, its possibility, and to be open to its guidance. Begin there. These words I write are Spirit speaking through me. Without attachment, I pass them on. Spirit will find you too. Keep that thought uppermost in your thoughts and you will not be lonely or abandoned but only found, cherished, and loved. Spirit knows you. Do you know Spirit? It’s within you. It is you.
Sending you love,
J. E. Ketchel
Author of The Recapitulation Diaries
•Posted on The Recapitulation DiariesFacebook page on Tuesday January 7, 2020
Jeanne, our bodhisattva guide from infinity, has shared that there is no hiding in life beyond the shadow of this dimension. Encounters in infinity are fully transparent; when you encounter another you are both fully revealed to each other.
Life in this dimension is clearly evolving along that principle now as we experience a greater preponderance of public outings, exposing all the secrets.
From an astrological perspective this is reflective of the transition from the Piscean age of the past 2000 years into the dawning of the age of Aquarius where we are currently squarely situated. The Piscean was largely the age of Christianity that swept the world with its emphasis on raising the spirit and, while acknowledging the shadow, sequestering it to the private black box of the confessional booth.
The spirit is rising to new heights in the Aquarian age, shining an even brighter light upon the shadow. Trump has ushered in an unabashed expression of the life of the shadow, long operative but hidden beneath the persona of high ideals and perfection.
The current energetic wave of “me too” is instantly bringing down career politicians, actors, and pillars of the establishment with a force equivalent to nature’s hurricanes and earthquakes. Confession has burst fully into the public eye and instead of private penance we have crime and punishment.
How refreshing to have the truth revealed on such a massive scale. Perhaps at last this wave can finally overturn the stifling denial and “false memory” shutdowns of prior eras. Transparency, though it runs the risk of inquisition excess, is the necessary technology for needed evolutionary shift.
The consequence of sexual abuse upon the individual is generally PTSD, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome that guards the wounded personal spirit by freezing it out of life.
I have spent my entire professional career cracking the nut of PTSD, largely resultant from sexual abuse. I know that this interest issues from my personal journey with the violent abuse inflicted upon my mother while she and I were as one, when I was contained within her womb.
Curiously, the cure for PTSD is total transparency. This includes the total revelation to the self of the fullness of stored abusive experiences, as well as the ability to be transparent beyond the self, freed of shame and blame. A momentous undertaking, but totally doable, a totally healable journey.
Jan has offered her well-documented journey of total healing from Complex PTSD in her Recapitulation Diaries series of books as an example to all journeyers that complete healing is possible. Jan has no emotional attachment to judgmental reactions to her revelations; it is her gift to those intent upon healing. Her energy is concentrated on the fullness of life now, her energy freed from all the old frozen places.
Having discovered recapitulation as one road to healing from PTSD, I am now concentrated on the deeper dilemma of the human animal/spirit that generates the atrocities of sexual abuse. My current hypothesis: human consciousness (spirit) is largely dissociated from its animal self.
Truly, who really thinks of themselves as an animal. Who really knows what it means to be an animal? Thinking and reflecting are actions of spirit. To know thyself is a spirit function. The animal that we are has its own form of knowing that expresses itself through instinct and powerful emotion. Consciousness, as aware spirit energy, completely underestimates the power and wisdom of this archetypal substrate of animal being.
The rapid pace of technological, spirit-driven, advance has so seduced the Aquarian into the belief of the possibility of a totally rationally mastered world that it scoffs at the power of its animal core. Furthermore, it is deluded into the notion that body can be remastered and manipulated into spirit ideas of perfection and correction without dire reaction from its animal self.
These are the challenges the millennials of the Aquarian dawn face as they press for total transparency for our evolving species. A reconciliation of spirit and animal human requires an attitude of respect for the wisdom and needs for both of these sides of the self. An attitude that treats the body as a circuit board for manipulation certainly devalues the wisdom and knowledge of eons of evolutionary experience.
As well, as we move toward total transparency we must adopt the shaman’s central dictum: suspend judgment. We must become unbiased witnesses to the self and accept the parts of our spirit and animal selves that are generally riddled in shame and relegated to the shadows. This does not condone acting out, but it does reckon with the truth of the powerful forces that rage and hunger from within and must find a home in the wholeness of life.
Total transparency is total knowing, total acceptance, and total integration of wholeness of being. To eliminate the shadow we must transparently accept and live all that we are. Tall order indeed, but this is the calling of our time. Begin with self, see what you find!
When we are ready the path will appear… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
If you have read my first two books in The Recapitulation Diaries series, you know that the recapitulation journey that I undertook was often a painful process, peppered with memories and mental and physical anguish as I searched deeply within myself for explanations for why I felt so disconnected from and reluctant to experience life. I was really on a search for my spiritual self but also my authentic self, as I sought to live life on my own terms, fully safe in the world as my true self.
All of that might sound pretty esoteric, as it certainly sounded to me when I began my journey. I had only a vague idea what a true self might entail and I had no idea what it meant to do a recapitulation, and all of that esoteric talk frightened me as much as my memories did. It wasn’t until the journey was well underway that I began to embrace the esoteric lingo, for nothing else was available to describe what I was going through. Even the esoteric words I grasped at did little to convey the true depth of the mind-blowing experiences I began having.
In my next book, Into the Vast Nothingness, all that I had been working toward finally began to unfold. Ever-increasing and evermore intense episodes of breakthrough in both dreams and waking reality began to affect me on the deepest levels. By the middle of the second year of my journey, although still recalling and working through memories, experiences of the transcendent began to increase and often supersede the memory blitzes. The recapitulation went way beyond the recalling of a childhood of sexual abuse and revealed itself as the means to achieving true transformation.
I began to perceive of the recapitulation as absolutely necessary. More than just a deep self-study, the recapitulation transformed as I transformed. It offered the means to discovering not only who I was in this world, but who I had been for millennia. All of a sudden it seemed, I was granted access to ancient knowledge and a vast perspective that had I stayed my depressed and frightened old self I would never have experienced.
Who is really in control? – Art by Jan Ketchel
As I took the journey, I often stopped to thank myself for being so daring and brave, for doing the most frightening thing I had ever done: face myself. Facing myself meant dismantling myself down to the essence of who I really was, letting go of ideas and identities, rules and constructs that I thought I needed. It meant staying the course no matter what came to thwart me.
It meant withstanding the tensions and frustrations of what the recapitulation confronted me with, everything from painful memories and vivid dreams, to struggles and confrontations in daily life.
And yes, in dismantling the old self, in breaking down my ego, I finally did meet that spiritual self I had so longed to connect with. But far more importantly, I was granted access to experiencing myself as universal consciousness, as part of the oneness of everything, as simply energy taking a dip into this world for as long as I needed, in order to learn what I needed to learn. There’s all that esoteric talk again!
I learned that I had to live out the life of a sexually abused child until I no longer needed to, until I could say, “Enough! I’m done with playing that game!” It was at that point that reincarnation and the lives we live in this world became totally clear and acceptable to me. I “knew” that I had found the key to life in this world, the answer to the mystery: Why are we here? Well, I discovered that we were here until we don’t need to be anymore. And then a new kind of peace reigned and a new kind of motivation took over, and then the recapitulation and I were more perfectly aligned, for I had glimpsed the real truth and the real purpose of my life on this earth: to keep transforming.
Am I really connected to the worms and the water in this little stream? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
If one is truly ready to transform, the path will appear. I offer my thoughts, my books, my weekly blogs as incentives to the transformational being inside all of us.
May your path take you to your own truths and may you find your own answers to the meaning of your life. Good Luck!
Staying the course,
Jan
My next book, Into the Vast Nothingness, is in its final stages and will be published soon! Thanks for reading!
Are we all ready to face the real truths that are so obvious?
Jeanne was diagnosed with cancer in 1994 right in the midst of our move to Tivoli, New York. Simultaneously, Carlos Castaneda was launching Tensegrity, a modern format in which to pass on the knowledge of the Seers of Ancient Mexico. Around the same time Jan, living in the deep South, was also diagnosed with cancer while at the same time being energetically stirred to make the trek back to the Hudson Valley, called to a new potential destiny. All three of these energetic events, Jeanne-Carlos-Jan, were about endings and new beginnings.
For Jeanne and I, it was to mark the final stage of our life together in this world as we began preparing to meet again on new energetic terms after her death. For Carlos, also soon to die, it marked the end of his shamanic line. Carlos, a socialist at heart, broke all the rules of secrecy in shamanism and offered everyone equal access to the tools of his shamanic line with the launching of Tensegrity. Tensegrity offers practitioners the tools to discover the energy body and the opportunity to evolve to new levels of human possibility. Jan was to heal from cancer, move North, and discover the need to end her sixteen-year-long marriage. On a profound personal level, an old illusion of herself was to die and she moved deeply into energetic life.
The energetic cord that was to bind these three events together was the shamanic tool of recapitulation. Jeanne and I were introduced to recapitulation at a workshop we attended led by Carlos. Recapitulation aided Jeanne in leaving her human form, landing her in her energy body, like a bodhisattva—an evolved being available to guide others still in this world. I introduced Jan to recapitulation, the tool that allowed her to discover her unknown self, shed her attachment to a horrific past, and revamp her energy to become an energetic channel able to connect with Jeanne in her evolved energy body state. Through Jeanne’s channeled messages to Jan, Jeanne expanded the practice of recapitulation outside of the shamanic format, to include the triggers and synchronistic events of everyday life as energetic promptings to recapitulate.
Personally, the day I introduced Jan to the tool of recapitulation was the day of my full coming out. It was my transformation, as I dared to openly use a shamanic tool in my clinical work. Up to that point, though I was well aware of the value of recapitulation as a tool for healing deep trauma, I relied more heavily on EMDR, a therapeutic tool with some similarities to recapitulation. However, it was really a subset of the far more comprehensive practice of recapitulation.
I introduced Jan to recapitulation over a decade ago. As is evident from my writings and work over the past decade, I can’t say enough about the healing value of recapitulation as a tool to fully heal from the deepest and most horrific of life’s traumas. In a couple of weeks, Jan will be releasing the first of three books, The Recapitulation Diaries: The Man in the Woods. This book, almost three years in the making, is a detailed description of every important facet of her recapitulation process. With this publication we enter a new era in our work as Jan makes available, to anyone, guidance on how to do recapitulation, how to discover who you really are, how to release the self from illusions about life and life’s experiences, and how to revamp energy to enter new and fulfilling life.
Before he left this world, Carlos fully understood and appreciated the value of the internet as a communication tool. His foresight has proven true. We will be publishing Jan’s book first on Kindle, the wave of the publishing future. We discovered, with out last book, The Book of Us, that the old structures of the publishing world could not serve as a medium for our ideas and experiences. In fact, none of the old structures work for us. We find ourselves constantly being energetically led to new formats.
A bit of Carlos’s socialist heart has rubbed off on us as well. Jan’s Kindle book will sell for $.99 (yes, ninety-nine cents!) making it available to everyone. It isn’t about the money—it’s about the energy and evolution. On the other hand, you do have to pay. Carlos and the other seers of his line discovered that you have to pay, no matter what world you’re in. If you give it away, it simply is not valued. Perhaps it’s just the nature of evolution; without challenge we simply don’t grow. But there doesn’t have to be greed—the number one cause of our crumbling world.
The relevance of the shamanic tool of recapitulation for our rapidly decaying world is obvious. Don Juan predicted that for human beings to survive now, a mass redeployment of energy, such as occurs through a recapitulation, was critical. Human beings need to be willing to drop the illusions that can no longer sustain the world, face the real truths, and move forward in a new energetic configuration.
What the world needs now is recapitulation on a personal, interpersonal, national, and international level. We see the sentinels of illusion busily trying to guard and uphold a world that is crumbling around them. And then we see many brave seekers recapitulating and preparing to lead a new energetic possibility.
Everything is possible—and a new recapitulated possibility is happening!
Chuck
During recapitulation, dreams may act as guides taking us deeper into our inner world, revealing repressed memory, stimulating senses, signifying where we need to go next. While undergoing my own recapitulation—a magical pass used by the Seers of Ancient Mexico to reclaim lost energy—I encountered lost parts of myself in my dreams. They had been sitting and waiting for me for years, to return and bring them into life. By coming forth to engage me in dreams those parts got my attention, often in striking ways. But it wasn’t until I was ready to fully accept that I was on a journey of significance, as we all are, that I woke up to what those dreams were trying to tell me.
Dreams allow us to explore our inner world without the overriding dominance of the mind and the judging personality, without the ego sticking its nose into an experience that may be transformative. Pay attention to your dreams, they may hold more than you think.
I once dreamed a situation that was, in fact, laying out my entire recapitulation process, showing me very clearly what was at the core of my discontent, laying out the future as well. In that dream, I encountered an aggressive figure that I recognized as being long dominant in my life. I lost all of my identification and wandered through unknown territory until I finally reached a place of peace. In fact, that was what happened to me as I began the journey of recapitulation within a short time after that. Portending my future, that dream opened the door to deeper exploration of who I was. In fact, “Why am I the way I am?” was the question I continually asked myself. I couldn’t fully answer it until I fully recapitulated.
The door to dreaming...facing fear
During recapitulation we do lose our identity, as my dream suggested. We shed all that we carry, things that we take on in our efforts to grow, as we struggle to be in the world, as well as burdens placed on us by others. We find ourselves continually freeing ourselves from old ideas and perceptions of ourselves and the world we live in, as we recapitulate. As we take the journey into the deeper self, we discover a new self. We are offered the opportunity to work our way into filling this new self with new ideas, thoughts, and perceptions. We are offered the possibility of fully taking on this new identity, one that is truly us. This may be a dream identity that we never imagined we could fully own. This may be a spiritual self we had distanced ourselves from. This may be an absolutely strange and amazing self, a magical self. We all have the opportunity to transform.
In wandering the strange lands of our dreamworld, with awareness, we’re offered access to our greatest potential. If we can dare ourselves to take a dream journey, facing our greatest fears in both our dreams and in real life, we offer ourselves the opportunity to totally transform. Some of those amazing dream worlds we’ve encountered while asleep are actually available to us in our everyday world as well. In taking hold of our dreams as significant participants in our journeys throughout life, we find the dreams themselves to be our most remarkable companions. Our dreams may be where our fullest potential is accessed, where our deepest issues are revealed, and where our past, current, and future challenges and potential lie.
In experiencing our dreams as our innermost caring and supportive guides, we may more quickly wake up to our true journeys. What path is your dream pointing out to you? Who visited you last night to show you where to go next, what to do, and how to go about it? I find great meaning and pertinent information in my dreams. Indeed, by paying attention to them I gave myself the opportunity to change. And don’t forget, our dreams may approach us while we are awake or asleep.
The importance of the recapitulation process reveals itself every day, in the work Chuck and I do, in the communications we receive, and in our own lives. We personally use the practice of recapitulation constantly, in pursuit of our greatest potential; always more to learn, to explore, and access. Our journeys are endless, our spirits constantly nudging us to keep going. In fact, anything that appears in our lives may actually be trying to alert us to something special and important about ourselves and our true direction in life.
There are indeed many ways to transform, and indeed recapitulation is really a natural process that we all engage in all the time: in remembering, in experiences, in thoughts, in illnesses, in repetitive habits and behaviors, in our choices and decisions, in the kinds of things we elect to avoid or pursue and yes, in our dreams. Do we dare to call life itself “recapitulation?” Do we dare to fully embrace our spirit’s call and give it a structure with a name? Are we really so daring as to go all the way to transformation? That is what we are challenged with really. Our spirits ask us every day: “Are you coming with me? Are you ready today?
In a few weeks, I intend to have the first volume of my book The Recapitulation Diaries available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book. One does not need to have a Kindle device in order to download e-books. Free apps and tools are available for all kinds of devices including phones, computers, and ipads. We’ll have all of that info available when the time comes. We’ve decided that we won’t be publishing a paperback copy at this time as I intend to immediately jump into working on the second volume. That being said, my greatest hope is that my book will aid others, showing what it means to recapitulate in the context of everyday life, offering the tools to undergo a shamanic practice in full awareness.
Dream on. And remain aware: dreams are just waiting to be fulfilled. What dream do you have that is knocking at the door? May you find your way to it, in whatever way works. Recapitulation is only one way, I know that, but I can only say that for me, it is the only way. Nothing else works. I always knew there were other worlds available to me. I just didn’t know how to get into them. Recapitulation, as a tool to transforming myself and the world I choose to live in, offers me total access.
