Here is today’s message from Jan and Jeanne. May it assist you in achieving some much needed balance and calmness today and throughout the week. In mindfully breathing, one stays more fully present and open to the magic in life. Enjoy breathing!
I sit, sun pouring through the window. I absorb its heat and the glow of the light. I know we’re at the precipice of a major shift, but in this moment I bask in the awe of the sun’s rays. This week has been about changing dreams, minor shifts of focus that take us into other worlds, worlds of rejuvenation and awe, worlds that take us deeper into the magic.
I open The Eagle’s Gift by Carlos Castaneda, to a moment in time when Carlos and la Gorda were caught in powerlessness and gloom. “One day, in order to alleviate our distress momentarily, I suggested that we immerse ourselves in dreaming,” Carlos wrote. “As soon as I voiced my suggestion, I became aware that a gloom which had been haunting me for days could be drastically altered by willing the change. I clearly understood then that the problem with la Gorda and myself had been that we had unwittingly focused on fear and distrust, as if those were the only possible options available to us, while all along we had had, without consciously knowing it, the alternative of deliberately centering our attention on the opposite, the mystery, the wonder of what had happened to us.” (p. 127)
In this moment, I am thankful for the coming uncertainty, the forced interruptions in the continuity of routine. These are the wake-up calls to change the dream. These are those moments in a dream when we are invited to lucidity, when the absurdity of circumstance stirs our awareness to wake up and realize this can’t be real, we must be in a dream. If we awaken to that truth, without waking from the dream, we are freed to enter new dreams of possibility in full awareness.
In waking life, as well, we can find or create glitches to awaken ourselves from the trance we are induced into from the habits we mostly inhabit through the routine days of our lives, through the repetition of our behaviors, and the slumps we find ourselves so often stuck in. These trances of habit so define our actions as to shape our needs and daily outlook into fear, distrust, and boredom.
Yet, at any moment we can intentionally pause and reclaim our awareness! In the moment we skip outside the mundane—the routine, the expectations, the pain, the frustration, the sadness, the shame, the fears, the disappointments—and choose instead to occupy “the wonder of what has happened to us,” we offer ourselves the opportunity to enter a new reality, a new dream entered in full waking consciousness.
We are beings on magical journeys, fully capable of shifting our lives in an instant, making ourselves available to love and enjoy every moment of our magical lives, simply by, as Carlos says, willing a new dream.
Enjoying the magical momentary pause,
Chuck
I grew up in an emotionless household. I write about this extensively in my books, as I faced the truths of my family of origin as well as the truths of my long-repressed childhood sexual abuse. And when I say emotionless, I really mean that.
Emotions were forbidden. Neither crying nor elation, and everything in between, was staunched. Evenness of temper, implying that nothing was ever wrong within the family unit, was critical. Imperfections, if present, were denied and suppressed as appearance was everything. Underneath the facade of perfection, however, the emotions of seven children and their parents bubbled and frothed, seeking outlet. It’s no wonder that all my siblings and I went into creative careers, as writers, musicians, artisans and fine builders. Within all of us, emotion sought release in some form of creativity.
When I was a child, at seven o’clock on Sunday nights Walt Disney presented an hour long television show. Simultaneously, WOR—channel 9 out of New York City—aired the movies of Shirley Temple. My five brothers and I fought over which show we’d watch. They usually won. They’d sit by the new TV upstairs watching the Disney show while I went downstairs into the basement to turn on the old television. I’d fiddle with the rabbit ears until grainy reception came through. The snowy picture would suddenly cut out with loud static and I’d have to get up repeatedly to readjust the antenna. I didn’t give up. It was my private time away from everyone. Sometimes my little sister, seven years younger, would sit with me, though mostly I remember being in the dark basement alone, staring into the eye of the old TV set, weeping.
You see, Shirley Temple let me cry. She never asked me to hold back my emotions. She let me be ecstatically happy and deeply sad too. She let me live beside her, feeling her emotions. In every pouty mouth and every delightful glint in her eye, I was allowed to live from a place that normally I had to keep shut down. And so, I thank Shirley Temple Black, who died this week, for offering me that emotional outlet, for all the movies she made and all the moments of release that my child self received from her child self.
She was making those movies in the thirties and forties, years before I was born, but they carried forth into the fifties and sixties all that I needed in order to connect with my deeply emotional self, a natural self that found little outlet otherwise.
Thank you, Shirley Temple, you saved my emotional life,
Jan
Today, Jeanne asks us once again to face our fears. Just so you know, I faced my own fears to bring you this message today, so when she suggests that everyone we meet is as fearful as we are, take it from me, it’s true! That being said, here is this week’s channeled message:
Thanks for listening! Sending you love, good wishes, and good luck!
Wednesday’s storm wiped out creative time to conceive a blog. Between consultations with people in faraway lands and snowplowing, I had only enough energy to take in the final episode of Downton Abby, courtesy of iTunes’ release of the full UK season.
That night I dreamt of visiting a heroin-addicted son in prison. A foul smell permeated the visiting room, fumes from a bathroom, reminiscent of the third floor of a nursing home, where those in the most disabled states reside.
The next morning I pulled the Prince of Swords from the Tarot, clearly charged with the task of cutting through limiting beliefs and thoughts that impede the intuitive exposition of where things really are.
The persona is cracking. That’s where things really are. Literally, the actors and directors who wear the personas—Philip Seymour Hoffman and Woody Allen (and don’t forget Roman Polanski!)—deemed by many to be the greatest of this generation, are revealing their shadows, the foul smelling shadows of addiction.
I refuse to enter the debate as to what Woody Allen did or did not do. That is a question that must be answered in one world, but in the scope of our multidimensional, interconnected, many-world-beingness there is meaning for all of us in the specter of addiction, be it heroin or pedophilia.
We must cut through, as the Prince of Swords suggests, the pervasive limiting stigmas and beliefs that refuse to see and accept the truths of our current consensual reality. The walls of the collective persona that uphold that consensual reality are cracking and greater truths are being revealed. The shadow of addiction is pervasive; no matter how hard we try to hide it or put blame “over there,” it is everywhere. I bear the tension too, as a father who has publicly acknowledged the impact of addiction on his own family. I carry no stigma. But what is the deeper issue here?
The shaman don Juan Matus made it very clear that for humankind to survive now, we must enlarge the confines of our consensual reality to incorporate energetic reality. He went on to suggest that the profusion of drugs in the modern world is symptomatic of the need and hunger for expansion. On one level, addiction is about refusing to grow up—choosing in heroin the embryonic return to wholeness, or the seeking of the fountain of youth, eternal life, in pedophilia. These aberrations must be outed and stopped so that a deeper, more meaningful expansion may become acceptable.
And so, we must pay heed to the deeper collective bursting at the seams of our current consensual reality. Addiction is a symptom of a world drastically in need of changing its course. Yes, addicts are aberrant; they are destructive casualties of that need for change, driven without consciousness to seek a means of breakthrough to energetic reality. But it is a failed course of action.
The only viable alternative is to take hold of the wheel of change and drive onward with full consciousness. On an individual level, we must face the fallacy of the masks we wear to feel acceptable. With fortitude we must face the truths of the shadow self—all the repressed unacceptable behaviors, thoughts, desires, that lie in our darkness. We must cut through what holds us back from experiencing our own energetic reality. The process of recapitulation clears the channel for the emergence of the true spirit that heralds new energetic possibility—the much needed change that don Juan talks about.
Let the heralding of the cracking of the persona by the actors and directors of our time not go to waste, but lead us into the real life changes that will take us beyond the projective screens of Hollywood into a new energetic reality. May we all be bearers of the sword!
Cracking through,
Chuck