#704 Stay Centered, Focused & Detached

July 26, 2010 Jan Leave a comment

Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
What is the challenge that we must all face this week? We seem to be energetically dealing with a lot of restless energy and although I know very little about astrology I do know that the full moon, a phase we are in now, generally offers some intense energy shifts. So, what advice do you offer us as we step into this new week?

The challenge that all must face this week will be to stay centered, focused, and detached while outside energy attempts a major coup.

You note, correctly, the restlessness of this time, and although it may attempt to draw the impatient side out of you, I advise closing the doors of the self to the impact of this draw. Restlessness itself must not become a motivator, but it can be used wisely if centered balance is maintained. In order to use such energy for betterment, I suggest turning inward to a reminder of your personal plan, your greater purpose, and your eventual goal in life.

Restlessness may be used creatively. It may be channeled into meaningful activity if it remains focused inward, but such practical usage of it requires turning away from that which comes from outside, for it carries upon its back much that you do not need.

Be aware of your inner focus now as you begin this week. Find your calm center and return to it often. Within this calm center place your mantras, your intentions for the week, and anchor yourself in them today, and continually throughout the week, in order to remain firmly set in your personal energy.

For all practical purposes, outside energy is to be avoided at this time. That is my firm contention at this energetic time. Inwardly you will find all you need, especially if you find yourself greatly attached to the outside energy for whatever reason. If this is so in your case, understand that you are attached to it because you are being strongly urged to turn away from it! By turning inward you will not be avoiding anything, but in fact using its restless power to more forcefully anchor yourself, allowing it to push you more firmly in an inward direction.

Practice detachment throughout the week. Go with the flow of your inner energy rather than the pull of the outer energy. Find your true calm flow, attach to it, and do not let go of it for long, as you ride the energy of this, indeed, restless time.

There are many storms brewing. There are many enticing outer activities planned, presented, and popping up for your entertainment, but I suggest that you attend to your inner self in asking for guidance. Your inner energy will tell you how to handle it.

Do not feel obligated to honor non-growth oriented activities. Of course, play is always a necessary aspect of life, but I suggest, in this coming week, that a more serious attitude be adopted. A time of confrontation, if successfully handled, may lead to a much-needed shift and this is what you must attempt. This is what you are always attempting: to gain in awareness of energy, and to learn how the self handles it, so that you may shift and gain a new perspective on your personal life and your world at large. This is what you are being presented with now: the option to remain innerly attached to the energy of self and outerly detached from being drawn into restless and non-productive activities, using the energy to advance.

It’s not really that hard to do. It just involves staying focused on the one task at hand and that is, as always, inner growth.

Chuck's Blog

#703 Chuck’s Place: The Power of Experience

July 24, 2010 Chuck Leave a comment

“I only went downhill skiing once in my life, Chuck, many years ago,” states a client who has graciously given me permission to share her experience. “I was with a friend who kept telling me to lean. Every time I did, I fell. I just couldn’t get what her words meant. Eventually, I shifted my weight and didn’t fall. I realized, oh, that’s what she means by lean! You’ve been telling me I need to detach for years; I think I’m finally getting it.”

Next she shared what she described as a very powerful dream. “I’m with my son, (currently twenty-four years old, incarcerated in the New York prison SHOCK program) only he’s eight years old, at a summer camp, yet it’s also the SHOCK program. He seems removed. He’s playing with other kids. I’m furious and confront him. There is no outlet for my anger. The scene changes, I’m with an old best friend and her husband who moved down south years ago. I want to vent my feelings to her, but she doesn’t want to listen. Her husband has started a small fire behind a door. I fan the flames of the fire. He gets angry and chastises me. His wife tells him to leave me alone, but he forces his knuckles against my throat so tightly it cuts off the air and I begin to suffocate. I awaken, deeply sobbing, gasping for air. My first thought: my son will die in my arms; I can’t cope with the pain.”

She went on to explain that she realized that she’d been holding onto her son, frozen in time at eight years of age, and felt terror that he’d never stand on his own as a man in this world; that he would die, a boy, in her arms.

Since the dream experience she has received two letters from her son and noticed a marked shift in her own attitude as she read his words. “I finally am experiencing what you mean when you tell me to detach,” she said. “Something is definitely different. I love him, he’ll always be my son, but I’ve let go.”

I went on to suggest to my client that she had been approached by her dream shaman, in the form of the friend’s husband. Her preparatory work of long-suffering having been completed, she was ready to be grabbed, killed, and reborn, and ushered through the rite of passage where parents release their children to be adults in their own right. This rite transformed her inner experience, a transformation far more comprehensive than a rational understanding of letting go. She is changed. Our work together had been part of her necessary preparation for this rite, but this mystical rite was performed by her own unconscious, which had determined the time and the method for this terrifyingly necessary ritual.

Jung pointed out how the modern rational world had stripped away the ancient rites of passage that once ushered humankind through the stages of life. These rites had a social context where the entire community participated and acknowledged the shifts and new roles in the community for the newly initiated. Inwardly, the initiate experienced a profound and permanent change, a recasting of self. No one in the community was exempt from rites of passage. What is left in the modern world are mere vestiges of these rites, watered down and nearly meaningless, in the form of sacraments in our various religious institutions. Jung realized that the collective unconscious inside all of us had become the home of these necessary rites of passage and, when activated, provide an experience so powerful that we can’t help but be changed by them. This is why the rational mind fears the night and sleep, where conscious control can be usurped by the powers of the deep; yet this is the healing power of the instinctual psyche, which, if held back, results in psychic disequilibrium and unpreparedness for the unfolding journey of life.

In truth, the loss of the collective rites of passage leaves the vast majority of people emotionally unprepared for adulthood, especially since a living relationship with the unconscious has been subsumed by a modern scientific focus on brain chemistry as the solution to psychic disturbance. In the absence of genuine transformative experiences, we move into adult roles faking maturity and preparedness or dallying in a prolonged adolescence of lawlessness, irresponsibility, and addiction. Ironically, my client’s son has been participating in the SHOCK program, a program within the prison system where participants are ushered into adulthood along the lines of an ancient rite of passage. Participants are taken out of society and forced to submit to an arduous period of suffering where they are subjected to the whims and irrationalities of those in control. There are no mommy and daddy protectorates, and life is not fair. If you are to succeed, you must die to your infantile fixations and become an adult, prepared to take responsibility for self in the real world.

Amazingly, as my client now reads her son’s letters, she sees a maturing man behind his words. He is no longer her eight year old boy. She has released him and he has released his dependence upon her. In the truest sense, he is completing the “graduate school of life” and despite the fact that he will be saddled with a mark on his record, much like a scarlet letter, it pales in comparison to his solid maturity, hard won, as he is fully capable of taking on the challenges of adult life. This “degree” is far more valuable, in my judgment, than a graduate degree from Harvard in the hands of an immature, uninitiated personality. Of course there are no guarantees of success in life, but if I was a betting man, I’d put my money on him.

We must all go through our own SHOCK program. Unfortunately, there are far too few societal institutions capable of providing the necessary rites of passage. However, as my client’s experience demonstrates, the collective unconscious will come forth and perform the necessary rites. However, the prerequisites for a successful transformation are often a long period of suffering, including many groundhog day experiences, as well as a softening of ego control, as ego often alienates or devalues the deeper instinctual psyche. This experience of my client’s was well prepared for, and thus was transformative. I ask that we all energetically congratulate her!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: The Stubborn & The Curious

July 21, 2010 Jan Leave a comment

Today, I switch from the subject of nature outside of us, which I have been writing about for the past few weeks, to nature inside, as it exists in its many forms inside our physical bodies. I define nature as that which is simply present, that which we are born with, and that which we cannot stop.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, while watching a doe and her fawn in my backyard, I see nature as unstoppable. It lives and it dies and it lives again. I also feel that we humans have this same unstoppable force of nature inside us. Much as the seasons recur, we are positioned, over and over again, to encounter things about ourselves. Often these are things we do not like about ourselves but know we must confront in order to change. They may be well known issues, perhaps already acknowledged but conveniently ignored until we are ready to go more deeply into them, or they may only exist in our subconscious, blocked, suppressed, and left to smolder. In either case, nature has a way of revealing them to us, in ways that are really quite personally relevant.

First I must state that I believe we are all born with a core issue, one core issue, and although there may be many surrounding and resounding issues, each of us is challenged in our lifetime to resolve this one issue. It may even be an issue or challenge that we have carried over many life times. I feel that nature, our inner nature, in collusion with the forces of nature outside of us, is bound and determined to challenge us to confront this issue, teach us how and why it belongs to us, and ask us to evolve beyond it. This is the basic tenet of recapitulation, to recognize the core issue that is holding us back in life, to confront it, to leave it behind without regret or attachment after being fully relived and resolved, and to move on to new life.

At this point, I must make note of Chuck’s recent blog regarding the contention of the seers of ancient Mexico that everything resides within the human body. This is what I write about today, how our bodies tell us, over and over again, just what our core issue is. We can find out everything we need to know about ourselves by contemplating, studying, and paying attention to our own natural state, our physical body. Our bodies contain all the answers, in our physical, in our psyche, in our energy. Our bodies can tell us where we are blocked, why we are afraid, what our spirit asks of us, and why we are here. Of course, it is much easier to see where others are blocked, to guess at their core issues, and wonder why they so stubbornly refuse to change. I will give some personal examples.

In my family, I am dealing with two very old women, one in her eighties and the other in her nineties, who are nearing the ends of their lives. One of them is in denial, stubbornly pretending that everything is fine; this has always been her way. The other is curious, eagerly attentive to anything she can find that may help her understand where she is going; this has always been her way. When I look at them I have to admit that I see myself in both of them. In the stubborn one, I see my own potential to dig in my heels and kick and scream that I don’t want to go; essentially I see my own fear. In the curious one, I see my enlightened self, eager for the adventure ahead, because this side of me has always known that there is something exciting beyond the veils of this world. In these two women, I see the duality of nature, two very powerful forces in a grand tug-of-war, and they are inside all of us.

It’s natural to be afraid, to fear the unknown, but it’s equally natural to be curious. As I watch these two women struggling through old age, maintaining their dignity while confronting their natural and inevitable physical deterioration in their own ways, I know that nature will win out, but I also know that nature is both sides of this process. In spite of the strong desire to remain in control, nature does not allow us to hold onto anything, it forces us out of the physical body. However, nature also gives us the option of capitulating to our energy body, to finally evolving beyond our need to continue reincarnating in the physical human form with our core issues. It offers our curious selves the option to remain alive, vibrant, and engaged in learning about the possibilities that lie ahead. Energy too is the natural way of things, if we care to engage it.

So who wins the tug-of-war? Well, that is up to each of us; it is an individual choice. Do we allow the tug-of-war to hold our energy in eternal conflict, or do we reconcile the opposing forces, confront our core issues this time around, and evolve? Once we recognize what our bodies are trying to tell us, in all our aches, pains, and tensions, and what our psyches are trying to tell us, in our fears, and embrace the experiences that these two opposing natural forces offer us on a daily basis, we come into alignment with nature, with the opportunity for the stubborn and the curious to finally be reconciled.

If you wish, feel free to share or comment in the Post Comment section below.

Sending you all love and good wishes as you take your journeys to reconciliation,
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

#702 The Road to Fulfillment

July 19, 2010 Jan Leave a comment

Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Do you have a message for your readers today?

I must repeat some of the things that I know you might find redundant, but until they are fully embraced they will continue to be the most pressingly important aspects of living a life of fullness upon that earth. These ideas that I propose are meant to aid in evolution of humankind, leading from focus on the things of that world, as one grows, to a shift in focus as the issues of that life point out the road to fulfillment.

Each one of you must take the personal road to such fulfillment. However, the issues that must be addressed along the way are the same, no matter who you are and where you come from. All of you must:

1. address the self as separate, as I, as one;

2. find your core issues but also your core self, your center within your physical self;

3. know your negative self and your positive self;

4. embrace the self, the many-faceted I;

5. engage in undertaking life as a single human being, alone on a journey of fulfillment that only you can take;

6. accept your challenges;

7. meet your accomplices, your teachers, your companions and partners head on, without fear or regret, accepting your role in your own life;

8. be fully responsible for every action, thought, deed, issue and challenge that is posed, presented, or forced upon you;

9. find the means to align with your darkness. For even as you must accept the many-faceted self, so must you fully love all aspects of the self as well. Love the self;

10. allow the self to flow with life without judgment and without needing to change anything that comes to teach you; just flow;

11. practice deep self-study. This embraces everything I have already said. Do not turn away from the self, except as is necessary as you learn who you are. But I suggest that in order to truly evolve, you must always return to the self;

12. begin a process of preparation for where you desire to go next in life. By this I mean in your present life and in your next life as well. Always plan ahead. Look forward to the unknown, for it holds your gold, but also prepare for your death, for that is your ultimate unknown, but it is also your next place of life.

How do you choose to live? And how do you choose to die? These are the most important questions you can ask yourself each day as you take the road to fulfillment. Do you choose to change or do you choose to dig in your heels and stay the same? Do you choose to go into the unknown with openness and curiosity, completely detached of fear and sadness, or do you choose to confront your issues again? Do you choose to fully live or do you choose to resist life?

I must not pose too many questions, for you must each find your own questions, phrased as you need them to be, but then you must stay in the realm of those questions. You must pose them again and again as you stay present, aware, seeking awareness of self, each moment of each day. You must allow the self to accept this truth and that truth, and then find the means to move beyond the truths you achieve, by not only accepting them, but by embracing and loving them. For they are what makes you be you. Your truths are who you are and that is what you ultimately seek: You!

Chuck's Blog

#701 Chuck’s Place: Love & Sex

July 17, 2010 Chuck Leave a comment

Love is of spirit; sex is of body. Our deepest challenge as human beings is to reconcile our ethereal, eternal spirit —that which precedes and succeeds our current life— with our corporal, animal, instinctual, physical body —that which has a definite beginning and a definite end. Animal/Spirit, Soma/Psyche, Finite/Infinite; these are the oppositions we are forced to suffer if we are to achieve fulfillment and solve the true riddle of life on this plane. Of course, there are those who would argue, with rational stamina and certainty, to the contrary.

At a recent dinner party, in a somewhat instigative and provocative mood, I posed the question: “What do you think happens when you die?” I got a quick: “Nothing, lights out!” I turned to another: “Lights out!” With this, I just let it rest. My reason wasn’t up to the argument. Lights out is simply a deus ex machina that doesn’t do justice to the paradox of a life fully lived.

I begin with the following paradox: Why, so often, are so many people so sexually dissatisfied with the person they are most secure and compatible with—spiritually in tune with? I suggest that this fragmentation of our spirit and animal selves begins with our birth into family. The family is the matrix we are born into and which ultimately forms the foundation of what we strive for: love and fulfillment. However, the incest taboo creates an impenetrable barrier to the animal that we are: sexual feelings for family members are strictly verboten. The place where we begin our lives, hopefully in unconditional love and security, does not welcome our animal, sexual selves.

I already sense a growing anxiety in my reader at this point, even the mere mention of sex and family can be alarming, such is the power of the incest taboo. Let me assure all, I am a firm upholder of the value and necessity of the incest taboo. The incest taboo is universal, a part of human culture from time immemorial. Some suggest it to be the humanizing instinct, a powerful archetype governing the behavior of the human animal. My focus here is examining its impact on splitting the psyche, the bearer of love, from the body, the bearer of sexuality. This universal fragmentation is a necessary consequence of being human, a wound that haunts the individual in acceptance of his or her instinctual nature. The consequence for relationship is the challenge of bringing love and sex together in relation to one person.

I stress that I am writing about the incest taboo and not incest. I have spent much of my professional life helping clients traumatized by familial violations of this taboo. My purpose here is to point out the inevitable consequence of the taboo: the splitting of love and sex. The incest taboo demands that family, as our first and often deepest experience of love, completely disallow our animal, instinctive, sexual selves from attaching to the same object of our deepest love. This most primal experience of love, rejects, denies, and repels the animal, which must be repressed, ignored, sentenced to the darkness and reserved for some future expression elsewhere, beyond the family. The byproduct of this most necessary separation of sexuality from family is the experience that love and sex are incompatible. This is the indelible primal imprint that we all take forward into adult life.

This is the incest taboo wound, the archetypal fall that we all suffer. Once man stole consciousness, that is, spirit, he was thrown out of the paradisal garden of instinctual freedom. In life, we strive desperately to return to the garden but are saddled with the split between our spirit and our body. We cannot return to the garden as full human beings —psyche and soma— if we cannot merge love and sex in a relationship with one person. We are granted respites in the garden when we mysteriously fall in love. In this bewitching time of falling in love, we reenter the garden, fully united in spirit and body: paradox resolved, psyche and soma as one. Our animal selves are fully released as we unite with our lover in carnal and spiritual bliss.

Unfortunately, the spell of falling in love is time-limited and soon we must return to the barrenness of life outside the garden, as we discover mother, father, sister, brother, in the eyes and behaviors of our lover. Once our lover becomes too familiar, the incest taboo is stirred, with the necessary consequence of the lifting of romance, as we return to the primal dilemma of the incompatibility of love and sex. Sex becomes labored, uncomfortable, avoided, or routine; the animal wants out of this incestuous cage, perhaps through secret fantasy or secret affair. Perhaps bliss can be extended until the arrival of a child in a family. With the addition of child, lovers must contend with a new role in their own relationship. They are now parents as well as lovers, which triggers the prohibitions of the incest taboo in their own relationship and can severely impact a return to a loving sexual relationship.

It was Freud’s bleak view that the achievement we call Civilization, with all its Discontents, is the sublimated byproduct of the incest taboo. Essentially, for him, ego, or spirit, is the psychic humanizing factor that substitutes civilization for its forsaken instinctive, unrealized, incestuous desires.

Jung, from a more positive perspective, viewed the frustrated libido as the birth of the imagination, which offers a venue for the human animal to reconcile psyche and soma, love and sex, and achieve wholeness.

For the seers of ancient Mexico, the resolution of this dilemma never went beyond the body, as they do not recognize a separation of psyche and soma. As I quoted Carlos Castaneda, last week, from The Wheel of Time (p. 199): “All the faculties, possibilities, and accomplishments of shamanism, from the simplest to the most astounding, are in the human body itself.” The seers’ path is to discover the body as solid and as energy, one in the same. For those seers, achieving the fluidity to alternate between these two states —one finite, the other infinite— solves the riddle of life on this plane.

For those engaged in relationship as a path to wholeness, I encourage containment and openness. For a detailed description of this process I refer the reader to The Book of Us, in particular to chapter three, A Jamaican Retreat, Our Alchemical Oven, where Jeanne and I undertook such a journey in this world. By containment, I mean commitment to a process within a sealed relationship. Interestingly, as I was preparing this essay, I opened the latest Psychotherapy Networker magazine. The picture on the cover is of a wedding cake with a bride flanked by two grooms. The title article is called: The New Monogamy, can we have our cake and eat it too? I quote from the article:

“Within the new notion of monogamy, each partner assumes that the other is, and will remain, the main attachment, but that outside attachments of one kind or another are allowed—as long as they don’t threaten the primary connection.” (July/August 2010 p. 23)

This direction in marriage essentially maintains the fragmentation of psyche and soma, as they remain unrealized and un-united in an individual’s relation to one other person. It’s simply another form of triangulation, where the tension of combining love and sex is dispersed, allowing for fragmentary visits to the garden in separate relationships.

With the container sealed there must be openness. By openness, I mean a gradual, but ultimately full revelation of all the truths of the self, including the deepest somatic fears and desires of the animal. This is the healing of the incest taboo wound, as we push beyond its taboos and allow for ultimate spiritual intimacy and animal sexuality to come together with our lover.

The riddle of psyche and soma, the core paradox and challenge of life on this plane can be resolved through many paths: a journey within the self, a journey of relationship, or a shamanic journey. The essential tools in all of these journeys to wholeness are containment of the opposing forces within the self and openness to all the truths of the self inherent in these forces.