reflecting this time of waiting…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
May today’s channeled message offer you the guidance you seek!
Readers of Infinity: Patient Waiting
reflecting this time of waiting…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
reflecting this time of waiting…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Chuck’s Place: Contentment
– Art by Jan Ketchel
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.
– Art by Jan Ketchel
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.
A Day in a Life: Taking The Changing Journey
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
All night I dreamed. The theme of my dreams revolved around finding and maintaining balance. It’s necessary, my dreams told me, to experience the extremes, but it is far more productive to gain balance and let experience come to you in the flow of everyday life. In constantly reaching out for experience, one misses out on that which is—the moment one is in that is full of meaning.
I dreamed that I owed a debt. I put cash into my purse and set out by car to deliver it. I was driving fast. I turned left into a city street and slammed on my brakes! The road was blocked off, under construction. I quickly assessed the situation. On the right I saw a passageway, but I would have to get out and walk. I parked the car and walked to my destination. I delivered the money to the woman I owed it to, a good friend of mine whom I knew when I lived in Sweden, a witch. I left her house only to discover that I did not have my purse. There was still a lot of cash in it and I wanted it; it was a lot of money to lose. I went back to the witch’s house, but I couldn’t find the purse. I knew I would have to let it go. Although it was a lot of money, I knew I didn’t really need it. It was not what had value. Paying my debts and accepting a changed journey had value. And so I walked away without attachment.
I woke up puzzled by the loss of the money, as it seemed to just disappear in my dream, but I didn’t bother trying to solve the mystery of it. Instead, I awoke feeling in good balance. I felt deep contentment with the lessons in my dream, that what once held value may no longer really have meaning, that things of this world are not as important as being open to the constantly changing journey.
My Swedish witch friend showing up in my dream was also significant to me. She had once been hospitalized in a mental institution, right before I met her, for unexplainable occurrences in her life that her husband could not handle. She started a fire simply by staring into the fireplace where no fire or embers existed. She was psychic, able to walk into a house and tell the stories that the house held. She and I had a deep bond that lasted for the few years that I spent with her. She told me I was her infant sister who had died when she was eleven, right about the time I was born. I admired her for her psychic prowess, though it scared me as well. It had hints of my own psychic abilities and I worried that I’d end up in a mental institution too. I wasn’t ready to encounter those abilities more fully at the time, I know that now. But what makes us ready?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Change takes work, the work of changing the self at a very deep level. No matter how that kind of change comes about there is suffering to endure. Many people have profound experiences that quickly catapult them into enlightened beings. Near death experiences often have this affect. Upon return to life, such survivors immediately live from this new place, changed beings forever. Others have to work hard to achieve that enlightenment even though they may have had previous experiences of it. Others seek it out their entire lives, aware that there is more to life than the daily grind. A changed reality, however, will only have significant impact when we are fully ready for it.
I had a near-death experience in my teens when I jumped into the churning waters of a lake after an exhausting 50 mile bike ride. The roughness of the water, the result of a tremendous storm that was blowing through, was too much for my tired body and I sank beneath the waves into the calmness below. I left my body and experienced utter calm bliss, but knew I couldn’t stay, that it wasn’t my time. Some kind of energy that was not my own shot me back up to the surface and back into my heavy human body. I knew at the time that death was nothing to fear, but I couldn’t take the experience forward. Indeed, it would take me another few decades to discover that at the time of that near-drowning I wasn’t even done with the traumatic childhood experiences that would impact me so deeply for most of my life. It wasn’t until I was 50 that I was finally ready to face the painful work that had to be done. That painful work liberated me in the most profound ways, more deeply than that near-death experience did.
In the brief episodes and glimpses of another self, in the near-death experience and the projections of my psychic self in my witch friend, I was being shown a future possibility. In my dream I finally paid the debt to my witch friend, thanking her for the part she played in my evolving life, showing me that future self, telling me not to be afraid to face her, for her own experiences in the mental institution only solidified her commitment to fully living as her true psychic self. I had to be ready to meet that future self and fully live her too, and when I was finally ready recapitulation appeared as the main path.
The hard work of recapitulation offers liberation from our traumas and subsequent mental, physical, and emotional issues. It allows us the means by which to arrive at a new place, finally freed to flow with our changing life, freed of what once held us back from fuller experience. In accepting our changing journey, facing our suffering in the flow of everyday life, we achieve deep healing and we are able to maintain the kind of balance that my dream spoke of, balance that is achieved by facing the extremes within us as part of the healing journey.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
So, if you looking for balance in your life, I suggest looking at what’s really important. What in your life is showing you the way? There is work involved, and everyone’s journey is unique, but I guarantee that if you allow yourself to take the journey, leaving behind what no longer is necessary—by resolving the past—your future self will thank you!
The work of suffering is liberating. It is the changing journey in the flow of everyday life.
Staying open to always accepting the changing journey,
Jan
Readers of Infinity: Pause
Even the birds pause.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Here is today’s channeled message from Jan and Jeanne. Good luck as you take your journey today!
Chuck’s Place: Dominion
– Art by Jan Ketchel
How do we establish our domain? How do we achieve dominion over our domain? I refer here to the domain of self, a room with four strong walls, the square of self.
We are beings of the circle, the infinite. We arrive at the gateway to this world through a triangle, the offspring of two, as two become three at our birth. From the circle of infinity we become finite. Born into a triangle, we are challenged next to carve out the four walls of our domain of self, as beings separate from the triangle of our birth.
If we are to fully mature into our four-walled self, we must all experience the disbanding of the original triangle. Freud spent his career focusing on the original triangle and its dominion over us. Only with the phallic power of the sword, male or female, are we afforded the clarity and power to cut through that triangle—with its myths of the nursery, the residual failures, broken promises, and legacy of expectations of those gods who bore us—and establish a new domain of self. Incredible clouds of sorrow hover over our lives as we experience the abandonment of and disconnect from those primal energies that conceived us, themselves tricked by the blissful myths of the garden or the raging energies of power and lust.
So powerful are the energies of the triangle that the ancient world literally used the sword to circumcise the self from the triangle and free it to new fraternity in the greater tribe. The sword of the modern world shines largely in the penetrating impact of awakening consciousness that can cut through the dated myths of attachment that cloud our true selves.
Sorrow is the underlying, overriding emotion that we must bear yet transmute. Sorrow pulls us backward into the deep abyss of what was or wasn’t, as we seek to forever hold onto that which once was, or finally find that which never was. Sorrow is an endless whirlpool that draws us deeper into a morass of bottomless emptiness. It may be necessary to traverse that journey, but beware, there is no bottom, and sorrow renews itself with equal potency at each visitation.
The transmutation of sorrow is the willingness to sit in the aloneness of the room of the four-walled self, to breathe, to feel the integrity of self without censoring thoughts or feelings, but indulging none as well. In this space of the four-walled room of the self we accept that we are participants in an unfathomable mystery. We accept that we have no control over the changes nor the inevitable losses and gains in our lives. We discover that we’re travelers with invitations to participate in this world, but never to stay.
knowing full well that our time is as limited as a blossom’s?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Can we grant ourselves the dominion to show up and fully participate, knowing full well that it will all change and that our one true traveling companion is the self in the four-walled room?
Can we allow ourselves to release even that self when it’s time to once again journey in the circle of infinity? Can we step into that circle of infinity now, while we still ride the chariot of our four-wheeled self? Can we live in both worlds now? Freely? Ah, what will we see!
When sitting alone within the four-walled self, it’s beneficial to establish a reliable practice to support the sword-cutting process of separation, individuation, and exploration. As we face our four-walled self what sharper technique is there than meditation to cut through the sorrows that are sure to plague us?
Here is a link to a simple and direct meditation practice, offering first steps, as well as deepening techniques dedicated to the process of sitting within the four-walled self: Son Meditation. I encourage you to give it a try as you seek to establish your domain of self.
From within my domain,
Chuck