Chuck’s Place: Beyond The Sprawl

January 8, 2011 Chuck 1 Comment

On a road trip through America, struck by the metastases of stores, hotels and restaurants. “Each town looks the same to me,” carbon copies, endless chains of unchecked greed, growth and expansion, a malignancy from sea to sea, and across the seas. We are sold on the notion that economic recovery equals economic expansion, the only cure for our slump.

Meanwhile, as we self-soothe, bathing in our personal history of self-importance on Facebook, this marketing goldmine with its own metastases—tentacles penetrating every lead, refusing to let go of any attachment— is now deemed unstoppable and has not escaped the eyes of investment giant Goldman Sachs, now offering Facebook stock to its wealthy investors. Remember Goldman? One of the investment leaders responsible, through its greed, for bringing down the economy a few short years ago.

Our world reflects our most dreaded disease: cancer. This is so, not only because of the carcinogens we create and consume, but also because our governing modus of survival is unchecked expansion. In a nutshell: how can I generate, market, expand, and accumulate MORE!

The God of Now is MORE! The rational mind is firmly in control, and regardless of lip service to the contrary, death=lights out. The only heaven is accumulation in the now. This is The Matrix we live in and feed. And it’s not just the puppet masters of the evil empire who tweak the local ambience to feed our illusions of specialness in their big box wonderlands. If we examine the habits of our lives, we are sure to discover the dominance of more in some form, whether it be in electronics, food, spirits, romance, objects, information, etcetera, etcetera.

The modern world has lost its connection and respect for ancient wisdom. China, the land that gave us The Middle Way, the ancient cure for excess, has completely metastasized. Like a pancreatic cancer, it spreads its ravenous greed, consuming all that lies in its way, including Tibet.

We are indeed at the climax of a dying age, as the ancient Hindus, in their Vishnu Purana text wrote, describing our age with amazing accuracy: “It declares that men will know they have entered the Kali Age when society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth becomes the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion.”

On a global scale this age must burn itself out for new life to begin. Jeanne came to realize that sometimes cancer is the necessary remedy of transformation.

And lest I seem negative and hopeless, I am in fact quite optimistic. The seeds of a new era lie within us all. First, we must allow ourselves to see the truth of The Matrix, time for the red pill. Next we must disengage from the tentacles of The Matrix that feed upon and are supported by our vital energy.

Yes, we are free to reclaim our energy by facing all the truths, inner and outer; the stuff of recapitulation. As we filter through our experiences and reclaim our energy, we harmonize and achieve an inner calm, perfectly capable of sustainability outside The Matrix. We reclaim our birthright as energetic beings, freed to step outside the illusions of The Matrix, freed to live in infinity, NOW! Happy New Year!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTES: Each town looks the same to me is a quote from the Simon and Garfunkel song Homeward Bound. The Vishnu Purana text is from the book Tantra, The Yoga of Sex by Omar Garrison, p. xix. The Matrix refers to the movie of the same title, Chuck’s favorite movie, thus far and now.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Intending Change

January 5, 2011 Jan Leave a comment

I have been practicing intent as prescribed by the seers of ancient Mexico to enact change. Every day I state my intent and let it go out into the universe. I shout out or silently speak the word: INTENT! Sometimes I don’t even feel that I have to keep repeating each personal intent that I have set, I just shout the word INTENT and ask that my already prescribed intent bind with the intent of the seers of ancient Mexico, with the intent of the women seers, with don Juan, and with the intent of good, because I feel that it is important to imbue my intent with pureness of heart.

In the old days, before I did a recapitulation of my childhood and learned about the seers of ancient Mexico, I would take drastic measures to force change in my life. My favorite method of enacting change in those days was to move, sometimes across the country or even sometimes across the ocean to another country. I once counted eleven moves in seven years, from state to state, city to city, apartment to apartment. Sometimes I moved alone, sometimes with a partner or with a husband. When it was impossible to move house I would rearrange the furniture in every room, shoving and pushing sofas, beds, dressers, bookshelves around until I got just the right feeling that I was seeking. Often I was seeking a sense of contentment, peace of mind, inner quiet and if my outer environment could reflect that I could calm down.

Restlessness was more often than not the catalyst for these moves, a restlessness that I bore my entire life but never quite understood as a deeply inner restlessness. I thought I just needed to keep moving all the time, that I was innately a person who sought experience and adventure, but it wasn’t until I sat down with Chuck and began to explore that restlessness that it revealed itself as something else. It took a while for me to fully grasp that with all of that moving and rearranging I was trying to run away from none other than myself.

During the recapitulation of my early childhood I understood just what it was that I was running from, devastatingly frightening memories of experiences of near annihilation that would have sent anyone fleeing. I learned to sit in one place and bear the tension of those memories as they reappeared, not to haunt me this time, but to teach me something about myself. I learned that, even though I wanted to get up and run, sell my house and move to another town, another city, another country, I did have the courage to stay and face the demons, as I had once done so strikingly well as a child.

In facing my demons, both my old abuser and my personal inner demons who had stood by me for the first fifty years of life, becoming increasingly more familiar as each year passed, I learned not only about how useful they had always been to me, but also how well I had utilized them to keep going, to stay not only alive but to grow up and eventually be ready to recapitulate. I learned that my inner demons were not all scary beings, that many of them helped me, that in fact I controlled many of them for my own purposes. I learned how powerful I had become, mostly in order to keep them quiet and to feel safe.

Now after having learned the lessons of recapitulation, one of them being that we hold everything inside us, I no longer feel the urge to run when I feel the need for change in my life. I know that in simply sitting, by intending change on an energetic level, I can profoundly impact my life and the lives of those around me. When restlessness hits me these days, I acknowledge its powerful intent. I thank it for alerting me to the fact that I am perhaps stagnating again and that, yes, I do indeed need to shift, but then I sit with it. I ask it what it wants, why it came at this moment, and I look for the deeper meaning inside myself now, rather than focusing it outside of myself.

When the universe sends me a sign asking me to change I know that it means I must re-examine where I am and why I am here. Perhaps it indicates that an inner course correction is necessary, or that I am not fully present each day, or that I have slipped a little too far from what is most meaningful in my life. Perhaps it indicates that I have fallen back into an old pattern of behavior that no longer works for me, that I am doing something to myself that is harmful or just plain old boring. Perhaps it is pointing out something as simple as an old idea or judgment of myself that is simply not true, but perseverates along an old path of thinking, a trench long ago traversed and worn deep, a trench that I actually got myself out of a long time ago.

Perhaps when restlessness arises now it is time to reenter that trench one last time and look more closely, with eyes wide open, at the false images and ideas of myself that I once had, to now fully grasp how wrong they were and are. Then it is time to turn my eyes upon the truth of where I am now, who I am now, and more fully embrace that changed being that I have worked so hard to become.

Perhaps when restlessness comes knocking now it is just telling me that it is okay to be me. It is okay to intend change, to keep going, to want to grow and to evolve. It is okay to leave the past behind, but only when it is fully revealed and done. It is perfectly acceptable to move into life more fully whole and present, truths accepted, self accepted. It is perfectly acceptable to fulfill even more of my personal potential in a more meaningful way, without fear that someone will be offended or that I have to carry old burdens or demons that are no longer useful.

Intending change, by sending our intent to the universe that is so ready to help us, is perfectly all right and perfectly right. It is perfectly acceptable to keep seeking to be all that we can be. After all, what else are we here for?

INTENT! INTENT! INTENT!

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

Sending you all love and good wishes,
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

#740 On Becoming a Person of Awareness

January 3, 2011 Jan Leave a comment

Written by Jan Ketchel and including channeled guidance from Jeanne Ketchel.

When I began my recapitulation journey, a life changing journey, I easily identified Jeanne as a main guide in my life when she appeared before me in a numinous experience that I could not have conjured up, nor fully comprehend, at the time. From that first appearance and as she reappeared again and again, I began to trust the experiences of her, whether in visionary or energetic form. Later I was able to identify other helpers as well, sometimes just unknown guiding voices that spoke clearly and soberly, offering me straightforward and pragmatic advice as I journeyed onward. But what I learned from Jeanne at the very beginning was the importance of continually allowing myself to trust the guidance I was receiving.

It was not an easy process. It entailed not only learning to trust the truth of the memories that were triggered and resurfacing almost daily, but also to trust the universe as a whole, learning that it was all I really needed in order to evolve. This was a major step in both learning how to let go and how to become more aware.

Jeanne says: All wisdom lies within. As a New Year begins it is time to more fully accept this fact, that you alone are enough, that you have within you all that it takes to learn to trust, to learn awareness, but also to learn what it means to truly love both the self and others. Only in learning these things will your wholeness be fully available to you.

She often told me, as I elected to go on a journey of total personal transformation, that all I had to do was trust, be open to the signs that appeared before me, but that to fully trust I had to learn how to let go of the old me. This meant letting go of my need to control everything in my life, in my everyday world, but also releasing control of my thoughts, emotions, feelings, and what came out of my unconscious. I had to learn to let the universe become my guide. This letting go was often as painful as the reliving of memories, but it was equally freeing and necessary.

Jeanne says: In learning to let go of the controlling self—both the known controlling self, the everyday self who acts and sees and relates to the prescribed world, and the unknown, hidden, controlling self who sits upon an inner throne and dictates and directs life as if it were a play—one begins to not only act and relate differently but one begins to perceive differently too. One becomes gradually more aware; aware that in letting go of controls one receives new life and new energy.

Letting go of the old self is part of the process of learning to trust, as I learned from my work with Chuck as my shaman guide in this world and Jeanne as my shaman guide in the world where awareness counts above all else.

Jeanne says: Awareness means being present in an uncommon way, in the form of heightened alertness to the world around you, fine tuning all your senses, but also the innate ones that all of you have buried deeply within. These innate senses are rejected by most Western cultures and thus become dormant, often never revived in a lifetime. In becoming a person of awareness, one asks these innate capabilities to awaken and guide one’s progress through life. In becoming a person of awareness, life will be perceived in a different manner, but this must become acceptable and that is where I stress learning to trust all that comes to greet you from outside and inside. It is only in learning to trust your experiences that you will understand what I am talking about. Life is meant to be experiential. And I do not mean only in the world you perceive every day, but in the worlds that you may not notice except only occasionally.

I learned to trust the guidance I received during the process of recapitulation, over time, as I plodded along one step at a time. I learned, by doing, to let go of preconceived ideas, of judgments, expectations, and really everything I thought was so important, indeed everything I had learned since infancy. I learned to reinvent myself in my own image.

In teaching the process of awakening and awareness, I must fully agree with Jeanne that the most important step is learning to trust your personal experiences, the experiences that life and your body offer, whether they are physical, mental, emotional, paranormal, numinous, psychic; any experience that shifts you, that jolts you out of yourself and your world, that unexpectedly throws you, exposes you or presents you with experiences of the sublime, the magical, the fearful, the darkness, God, the angels, clarity, enlightenment, etc. These are the experiences to pay attention to. They teach us how to trust and how to let go, so that we may have the opportunity to evolve if we so choose.

Another important lesson in learning to trust the universe in a process of transformation is learning patience. “All good things will come,” Jeanne always used to tell me, “just wait.” Sometimes that meant waiting patiently for years, holding onto the truth of time, keeping the inner light honed on moving forward, knowing that eventually everything would work out just fine. “When the time is right, when you are ready, when the universe is in the right alignment you will evolve to a new stage of life.”

As we begin this New Year I am going to be allowing the Monday channeling session to evolve, without preconceived format, to be open to what feels right to offer—conversations, tips, experiences, etc.—as each week brings something new. It’s a New Year, so it’s time for something new!

Please feel free to post comments or respond to this message in the post/read comments section below.

Most fondly and humbly offered.

News and Notes

Keep Passing It On

December 25, 2010 Jan 1 Comment

Dear Readers and Fellow Journeyers,

Today, we end this year’s blogging with a note of love and appreciation to all of you who read our work, who seek personal transformation, who pass on the messages from Jeanne, the contents of our writings, and the spirit imbued in this website: energetic intent, freed of commercialism and monetary gain.

How we elect to live our lives effects everything else. How we choose to challenge ourselves sends a message to the universe that we are or are not open to the energy that is seeking us in return.

Gift the self by seeking change. Challenge the self to be honest, truthful, open and impeccable in the face of personal confrontation. With gentleness and love go into the New Year. It awaits, prepared to be evolutionary, revolutionary, energetically charged with opportunity, possibility and guidance.

Happy Holidays! Be safe. Be strong. Be tender. Be loving with the self and others. Life is meant to be what it is: energy in action. Pass it on.

We take a break over the next week and will return on January 3, 2011 with something new.

Love and good wishes to all,
Jan and Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Magic & Insight

December 22, 2010 Jan 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, I began reading a book called Anastasia, the first book in The Ringing Cedars Series, that someone had mentioned to me over a year ago. It is another “magical” book—series of books really—infused with powerful energy. I finished reading Anastasia and one night last week, before bed, I picked up the second book in the series and laid it on top of my dream journal as I prepared for bed, intending to read it next. That was all I needed to do to have a profound dream experience, touch the book with intent. Here is the dream I had that night:

I give birth to a girl child although I am not pregnant. In the dream, I go to the bathroom and, sitting on the toilet, I begin to feel and intuit that I am having a baby. At first it feels like a log, like I have a huge log stuck in my vagina. I try to feel with my hand if the baby is in fact down the birth canal or if the cervix is dilated. I move off the toilet after I see blood and go to look in a mirror. In the mirror I see the head has already emerged and so I know for sure that I am giving birth. I also know, from experience, that once the head is out the hard part is over and that the baby will come fast now. I have a moment of panic that it will get stuck like this, halfway out, and that I will have to walk around with a half-birthed baby protruding from my crotch. But in the next instant the baby pushes out. I catch her easily and bring her up to my breast. We bond immediately. She smiles up at me, looks deeply into my eyes, and snuggles against me. I hold her close, knowing that the warmth of our two bodies is enough to keep us safe, even in the coldest of climates.

I remember the book Anastasia at this point in the dream and the title character who contends that a child can survive in the world, even naked, as long as it is held close. I don’t know if she actually says this in the book, but this is what I get in my dream and she herself had survived in the Siberian Taiga through close nurturance and care by animals.

At this point, I take the baby to my parents who are sitting at a cafe table talking to my brother who died. I tell them I have had a baby and I show her to them, but they do not even look at her or show the least bit of interest. They say nothing and just stare blankly, gazing right through me, as if I don’t even exist. My brother looks at me tenderly and shrugs as if to say: “What did you expect?”

I walk away from them and bump into a few other people I know. I am aware that I have dried blood on my legs and that the baby and I are almost naked. I am wearing a short white shift, similar to what Anastasia is described as wearing, and I have the baby wrapped in a shawl. The people I meet acknowledge her, but only in uneasy glances. She is not well received or given any attention. I accept this, even though at first I am puzzled by the lack of interest, because I am having a most amazing experience, full of insight and intuition and I feel totally calm and at peace with this baby in my arms. I also know that she belongs only to me, that she is my responsibility and that I do not really need acknowledgement from others.

The details of the dream get fuzzy at this point, but the child grows almost immediately into a small thin creature, more doll like than human. I watch her running and skipping around. She can talk from the moment of birth like a well educated, spiritually evolved adult, full of wisdom and insight. I know that I must watch her carefully, not let her stray too far from me, and that I must keep her warm so that she not only survives, but also thrives.

As time goes on, I realize I have been forgetting about her more and more, that I forget to warm her against my body, that I am neglectful of her. When I notice she is looking cold I grab her, hold her against me and apologize for my lack of attention, but then I let her go again. At one point I see her lying in the shawl on the ground, not moving, and when I pick her up I see that she has dried up and that her right arm has cracked and broken off, as if she were made of clay. I feel terrible because I forgot all about her and let her get cold and dehydrated to the point of partially crumbling into dust. I am worried that she is dead. I am aware that I must take better care of her, that I must never forget about her again.

The dog woke me at 5:30 in the morning and I immediately forgot this dream. After I let the dog out I returned to bed, feelings of the significance of the dream staying with me, but still unable to recall it. The only thing I could remember was that I had dreamed of a log. As I lay in bed I felt a heavy feeling, almost a soreness in my pelvic floor. I heard a voice say: “Do a Kegel exercise,” which any woman knows is an exercise to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles, especially recommended after giving birth. As soon as I squeezed the muscles I immediately recalled the dream. I had indeed felt like I had given birth in the night and my body held the memory of it until I recaptured it! From that point on the dream reemerged and as the day went on more details became clearer.

Immediately I noted the significance of having set the intent to read the second in that magical book series. I won’t go into details, but the series is based on the experiences of a Russian man who, in 1995, meets a woman, Anastasia, living in the forests of Siberia. She is energetically alive and evolved. His experiences in her company remind me of Carlos Castaneda’s experiences in the company of don Juan, and of my own experiences with Jeanne. Anastasia tells him things that he cannot imagine ever happening and yet they do, similar to my own experiences with Jeanne. Anastasia is directly connected to and channels energy and insight related to the planet and the environment. Whenever I have asked Jeanne questions about the environment, she has always stated that there are other soul groups working on that and that it is not her expertise. Jeanne is connected to a soul group that is involved with soul advancement. This distinction struck me, as I read the first book and thought that perhaps Anastasia is connected to this environmentally concerned soul group energy.

Anyway, that was my first insight as my dream unfolded, that I had set the intent. The second insight I got was that this dream was about my personal transformation. When I recapitulated my childhood, when my abuser did in fact molest me with wooden objects, I rid them from my body as I relived each memory. In the dream, perhaps I feared that this was just another wooden object, another memory to be removed, but then I see life, a real baby instead of a log. I see this as indicative of the transformational process; having released the trauma I can now allow myself to give birth to new life within myself.

When I attempted to show the child to my parents and other acquaintances neither it nor my transformational process was given any attention. In every attempt to introduce this innocent child to the world, the old world, there was no resonance. My personal experiences did not matter in that world. I received the insight that I must further detach from that old world now and more fully embrace this new world that the child represents. Anastasia’s story influenced my dream experience: I knew that the child must be nurtured to thrive. It was pretty clear and simple. All I had to do is keep her with me at all times. I am enough; I am all she needs.

However, I seemed to still need reminding of something, some piece was missing, because every time I laid the child aside, apart from my physical body, something happened to her. She got cold or brittle, and eventually dried up. When I discovered her all dried up and with a broken arm, I immediately felt deep remorse, regret, sadness and extremely guilty for leaving her to fend for herself. I realized that I had not been doing something right. I was killing her by forgetting about her. In the dream, I instinctively knew that I had to keep her close to me, that we did not need anything else, we were enough; that we were done with the old world, had already left it behind. We had already done the work of transformation. I was reminded, as I picked up the broken child in the end of the dream and held her close once again, that she is my innocent self, and that I must stay connected to her at all times, not just when I feel like it. I must remember that this is what my wholeness feels like, and yes, that I am enough. I also knew that if I stayed connected, bonded with her, that everything else would take care of itself, that life would unfold, as it should.

As the day went on and this dream stayed with me, I received a final insight. Pictures of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child kept popping into my head, paintings from my art history books that I’d studied a long time ago. Each time one of these paintings came to me, I re-experienced holding that child in my arms in the dream, nestling against my chest, snuggling in, totally trusting me, totally calm, knowing that she was exactly where she belonged. As I re-experienced these feelings throughout the day—utter calmness, contentment, wholeness—I saw the significance of these paintings; virgin and child, maturity and innocence; appropriate symbols of giving birth to the Self and to true spirit innocence, which, in my case, I worked so hard to reunite with and nurture into life during my years of recapitulating my traumatic childhood, a time when I was mostly concerned with simply surviving. With this insight I now clearly understand the symbolism of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child as Whole-Self, complete. I had gotten it right, finally the missing piece was found.

We are all the Virgin and we are all the Christ Child in her arms. No matter if we are male or female, we are all totally capable of giving birth to the total Self. This is not the wounded child self, but Christ as innocence within, Self and God-Self fully merged. I know I must not be afraid to embrace this wholeness. I must not put her aside again or depart from the path. I must stay connected to this magic within. I know she was not damaged throughout the whole childhood journey; she remained whole, waiting for me to reconnect.

I know how hard it is to stay connected to this spirit self at all times. We must all deal with the reality of our lives and remain connected to this world, but I also know that the magic is available to us, reminding us that this is really the biggest challenge, to keep turning toward it. Once we have connected to the magic of our true spirit self, whether through our experiences, dreams, processes of inner work, through our intent to change, or through the books we elect to read, our challenge then becomes to never put it aside again, but to hold our experiences as close as a child in our arms, remembering why we are here and what we are really seeking. The magic is really inside each one of us.

I humbly offer these intent-dream-book-insight-magical experiences as we enter a new phase of winter magic. Happy Holidays! May they be magically meaningful, personally, by intent.