Chuck's Blog

#685 Chuck’s Place: Boroughs & Bridges to the Truth

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America eagerly awaits its new Idol: Will it be Crystal; will it be Lee? The Tea Partyers eagerly await the opportunity to “throw the bums out” in the midterm elections. We breathe easier because the solid Admiral of the Coast Guard is overseeing BP. Natural gas companies are seizing the moment; offering the “safe” alternative to oil. After all, they blast 7,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface; how could that possibly effect the drinking water, or the cows pasturing on the farms above? Meanwhile, somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, one mile (5280 feet) beneath the earth, the oil continues to flow, unabated. Fortunately, we are “right on schedule” for a final capping off of the pipe, some time in August. There is evidence now that the oil has caught the current and is showing up on the coast of Florida, the same current that flows up the eastern seaboard. Naturally, specimens are being “properly analyzed” to verify their point of origin. Thank God for science!

From a different perspective, I view this broadening, enveloping nigredo, as black gold, perhaps the real next American Idol; the one we will learn to appreciate the most. The tragedy to the seas, to the habitats of many, including our own, is now threatened at an unstoppable pace. Nature itself has taken over now, demanding that we embrace the truth. It is downright heartbreaking to see the amount of destruction to innocent sea life. The entire food chain will be poisoned as a result of this catastrophe and the impact will be felt by all living things. It is evident that the human race, left to its own devices, refuses to face the truth of its destructive behavior to the planet. I call the nigredo “black gold” because it represents, through the magnitude of its destruction, our path to redemption. It is not just a “good” thing that we check our greed, become humble, and assume responsibility for maintaining balance in this world; it is the only means of survival. It is not about convincing anyone or overpowering resistance. Nature has lost her patience; if we don’t capitulate, we perish.

The water, from which we are all born, which sustains all life, will now poison life, until we face the error of our ways and change our gluttonous attitudes toward the planet. But do not despair! Change is on the horizon. No longer must we sit idly by in powerlessness as the forces of greed dominate the show. Nature is on board now, in a big way. Stay aligned with the truth, your inner truth, and join your intent with this evolutionary process, facing and embracing all our planetary truths, which are, from an energetic perspective, “right on schedule.”

Keeping with the themes of water and nature, I turn now more personal, to dreams from my life around the Isle of Manhattan.

In countless dreams, I am lost in the Bronx searching for the bridge to Manhattan. Eventually, I find the bridge. However, it is generally at various stages of disrepair, or under construction, or being dangerously flooded with enormous waves crashing over it as it sways in the wind. Sometimes, I am lost in Brooklyn, unsure of the direction to Manhattan or which subway to take. Occasionally, the current is calm and I can swim across the river.

My psyche, the self, the spinner of dreams, has chosen New York City, with all of its boroughs and bridges, to show me both the fragmentation within my psyche, the location of untapped resources or possibilities, and the status of my ability to both tap into and integrate them.

Psychic fragmentation is often caused by traumatic experiences where parts of the self are cut off from the mainstream conscious self and forced to exist in unknown isolated islands, like, let’s say, Staten Island. Who even knows anything about Staten Island, or conceives of it as being part of New York City? So forgotten are they, complain Staten Islanders, that they have even considered secession from the union of New York City.

Psychic fragmentation can also be the result of socialization, where unacceptable parts of the self are repressed, never allowed access to conscious life; in the place Jung called the shadow. Perhaps these parts are stored in another borough of New York City, such as in Brooklyn or the Bronx.

Finally, there are parts of the self that have simply yet to emerge, yet to be activated, yet to be discovered in life. These resources may also be stored in the outlying boroughs, perhaps in Queens, a royal borough.

The process of individuation is the challenge to gain access to, to claim and integrate, all the boroughs of the self into a conscious unified whole. Integration requires a network of connections that allow easy access to all the boroughs, hence the significance of the condition of the bridges in my dreams. Psychotherapy is the process of building solid bridges to all parts of the self.

The seers of don Juan’s line introduced the process of recapitulation, of reliving one’s life, in order to reclaim all vital energy lost to prior experiences, or that which is lodged in the outlying boroughs. Furthermore, they introduced learning to shift the assemblage point, what they call our major point of awareness, to different positions within our energetic selves to access the fuller possibilities of our innate potential. Their techniques to create this shift are:

1. recapitulation, where we volitionally shift the assemblage point to a different place of awareness, that of forgotten or repressed aspects of life experiences;

2. dreaming, where the assemblage point loosens as the conscious ego relaxes its hold on our point of awareness;

3. stalking, where we shift the assemblage point through volitionally interrupting our habitual patterns by acting-as-if, or by practicing not-doings; and

4. intent, where we access the power of intent to shift our point of awareness simply through intending it.

Both psychotherapy and the practices of the seers offer tools to individuate and actualize the full potential of the self. But remember, union requires open bridges to all boroughs, access to all parts of the self. It requires truthfulness and clarity, without deception or hidden agendas; no cover-ups or idolizations, no capping off of any parts of the self that are spewing black gold until you get the message and take appropriate action. In order to stand in the fullness of self, we must allow nature itself to take over, inner and outer, integrating it with what we already know about the self. The natural flow of events and consequences in our lives, even the nigredo, are integral to this evolutionary process.

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: Dreaming the Eighth Step

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In Carlos Castaneda’s The Second Ring of Power, la Gorda tells Carlos that she learned everything in dreaming (pp. 159-160). “Everything for a woman warrior starts in dreaming,” she tells him. Having read that, I am not so skeptical about my own experiences in dreaming. Though I have no idea how I was able to dream with the women shamans last fall, my intent was pure, and it worked. Gorda had the same issue. She was unable to tell Carlos exactly how certain things happened, but after years of practice she was finally able to just do them. This may relate to the knowing of the womb that Chuck wrote about a few weeks ago, the direct knowledge that women have access to but men need to work so hard for. I continue to call to the women shamans, or seers, the new term that Chuck introduced in his blog last Saturday and which I too will adopt so we all know we are talking about the same things.

Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don’t when I call to the women seers and ask them to show me something, but I keep trying. The other night I found them again, but failed to write down the important (?) message I was getting. If it really is important I figure I’ll tap into it again sometime, when I am more available. Last night I met them again and, at my request to go to deeper and deeper levels, they took me down into utter blackness where the presence of another entity freaked me out and sent me skittering right back up to consciousness. When I told Chuck about this, he said: “Oh, you went into inner silence. That’s where Carol Tiggs took Jeanne at a Tensegrity workshop.” It was not an unfamiliar place, I must say, and I look forward to making another foray into its mysterious realms with a little more awareness. In the meantime, I proceed with writing today about my dreaming adventures from last fall.

Last fall, my consistent efforts to connect with the women seers paid off over a period of a couple of weeks. They do not have features or looks I could describe, because they do not have form; they are more like energetic presences, energy beings that I seem to recognize. Here is the instruction I wrote in my journal during the night of dreaming with the women seers on October 28, 2009: NO ATTACHMENTS! It is the eighth step in developing a practice with the intention of evolving as an energy being.

This is perhaps the biggest of all the steps. It involves detaching from and leaving behind all the stuff that we have spent our lives collecting and bringing to us, everything we consider so important. It involves questioning ourselves about everything we hold dear and asking ourselves, can I leave this behind? Do I really need this? Attachments also relate to things, to people, habits, comforts, family rituals, to needing to be special or important, to wants and desires of the human kind, that yes, are very important up to a certain point and then, when the time is right for us as individuals, we are asked to let them go. Sometimes this does not become apparent until the moment of death, but more often than not we are presented with this challenge much earlier in life. I once heard the Dalai Lama state that, as evolving beings, it is appropriate to spend the first fifty years of life learning how to live in this world and the next fifty learning how to leave it.

The question then becomes, will we? Can we let go of our pasts and all that has kept us caught there? Can we give love and remain utterly detached, not needing or wanting anything in return, just giving? If we can get to this point we will understand detachment, but we will also understand compassion. This eighth step has detachment, compassionate love, and utter simplicity as its goal, without attachment to anything that takes our energy. It is the whole point of recapitulation: to free ourselves of all that has kept us energetically bound and unavailable to pursue our spirit’s intent.

After I had channeled Monday’s message from Jeanne, I sat down to type it up and was bothered by a knocking at the glass door in the room behind me. I finally got up and went to inspect. A fat robin sat on the edge of a chair on the deck looking in at me. As I watched he flew toward the glass, pecking at it, perhaps admiring his bright red breast, his wide wingspan, or perhaps he was fooled by the brilliant blue sky reflected in the window. He fell back after several attempts, but remained on or near the deck throughout the day, occasionally flying and pecking at the window. He returned the next day and we wondered if he was guarding a nesting female nearby. I thought perhaps he was related to the robin at the other end of the deck, who I discovered building a nest in a little Japanese maple tree near my compost pile one day when I went to empty the kitchen scraps. Perhaps he was drawn to the red chairs at this end of the deck, or perhaps he had come to thank me for my silent and calm approach to the nest whenever I went to the compost pile. The mother bird and I have by now established a mutual respect and a desire to go about our business. I approach calmly and she remains alert but still, rather than fly off shrieking as she did in the beginning, trying to draw my attention away from her eggs.

While the robins were building their nest we noticed a phoebe putting her own nest in a very precarious place underneath the deck, also right next to the compost pile, but too close to the ground and too close to danger of water damage, we thought. Sure enough, one morning I found her nest had been attacked by something and two tiny eggs lay smashed on the ground. A third egg teetered on the edge of the badly tipping nest. I wondered if the mother would return to repair the damage and keep going, caring for her one little egg. The next morning the third egg lay smashed and the bulk of the nest lay on the ground. When I picked it up I saw that a strand of my long white hair had been woven into it along with some hair from our dog. I could not believe that mother phoebe would just abandon her nest, but that was exactly what she did. Talk about detachment! She moved on, without a backward glance, to a new nesting place perhaps, leaving the remains of her young to be licked and scraped off the concrete porch under the deck by some creature in the night, nature at its finest, showing us how to detach, how to move on, how to energetically just keep going, keep trying, how to let go and flow.

In another bird event my daughter came home the other night, her hand outstretched, showing us a blue jay skull she had found on the ground, able to identify it by the feathers that lay beside it. Its delicate bones were picked clean and white, its sockets empty, its sharp bill fully intact. In Ted Andrew’s Animal Speak I read that the energy of the robin is about spring and new growth and daring to sing your own song, to stay true to your inner voice. To me this means to keep speaking and writing about my adventures with spirit, to keep dreaming. The phoebe is not represented in his descriptions, but I suspect, as I write above, that it has to do with detachment, at least for this moment in time. The blue jay represents death in this instance, the place we are all headed, but it also, according to Andrews, links heaven and earth. Blue jay energy has the ability to tap into both, the very thing that we humans strive to do as well and what I have been seeking in my dreaming with the women seers. All of these bird totems ask us to be serious about our energy, about how we decide to use it, for what purposes, and to what end. What are we really seeking?

My forays into the world of the women seers are my own quests for understanding energy, seeking to tap into and truly utilize my strengths, daring myself to keep going, no matter what comes out of the darkness to frighten me. I think that is what we are all challenged with. Whether our power is represented outside of us in the kundalini energy of the robin red breast, in the psychic powers of the blue jay, or in the ability to detach, as the phoebe does, and move on without regrets, we must still dare to find those energies inside of us. We must dare to own them, to use them to advance our awareness, gain clarity, and have some pretty cool experiences in the process. Whether we use them in this reality or in dreaming, it does not matter, as long as we just keep going, letting go, and changing.

I have the tiny phoebe nest on a shelf in my studio, the long hair from my own head woven artfully into it, a wisp of it hanging down, reminding me to pay attention to the energy of the robins who guard so diligently in this world, who flow with the energy of this reality as I continue to watch and await the birth of their young. It reminds me as well of the ability of the phoebe to moved on, with no attachments. It reminds me of the death of the blue jay and that, yes, I too will die. When or how, I do not know, but I want to be ready for the moment, learning now what that might mean by exploring as much as I can.

Until next week, keep dreaming and keep going! On a final note, I want to mention that Chuck and Jeanne and I have all written extensively about detachment in the past. If you care to read more about it, simply do a word search in the search button in the upper left corner of the sidebar and see what comes up. The books mentioned are in our Store and many of the shamanic terms are described in Tools & Definitions.

Love,
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

#684 The Simple Road to Growth

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Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Do you have a lesson for us this week, some guidance that might be especially appropriate for where we are right now in these changing times? I communicate with you through my heart center.

Look into the self now, into the pool of stillness, into the utter calm of knowing clarity inside you, and listen to my words of warning and of knowing, for you are all sentient beings, full of awareness, though you may not want to realize this. Your progress upon that earth, both personal and collective, is garnered upon knowing the inner self more intimately than you know any other. Your progress, as human beings in a world that does not wish to sustain its own destruction, hinges upon your ability to go deeper inside the self and find connection to all of nature, the natural world, the planetary systems, the energy of the universe that you are part of.

The world around you, and your own world, may at this time appear to be in quite dire straits, but I beg of you, as energy beings, to utilize this time for inner work. This is the energy that is needed for shift on a universal scale and it is coming to greet you in profound ways, asking you to use it to grow, to change, and to pursue new options based on old ideas of humanness. The ancients lived with the earth, with and in alignment with nature, with the natural flow of life as it proceeded around them, learning from its cyclical unfolding process what they themselves required. They lived in synch with the flow of all energetic life. Modern man has departed from his natural roots, from his nurturance based on the earth, and plasticized his life. Life is now based on finding the next step away from what the earth itself speaks so loudly as the true steps to take for recovery and renewal.

Although there is great greed upon that earth, the greedy ones do not own the power of nature. This is what must be accessed by the multitudes, who do know that energy unseen is more powerful than the gold spilling out of the coffers labeling one man rich and another poor. There is no poverty if inner energy is fully discovered and utilized, if nature is accessed and given its power again.

If each one of you turns inward and walks the earth with slow and measured steps, taking in the energy of the earth through the soles of the feet, the deeper secrets of the earth will be revealed to you. Meditate not upon the desires of the ego self, but upon the desires of the hungry inner self, thirsting and striving for sustenance that cannot be bought, but can only be nurtured from within. What is that desire inside you, My Dear Reader? What inner desire is your greatest? And why are you not pursuing it? Why are you not following your spirit and the energy of your inner being? Why do you insist on playing old games when you so clearly know they do not sustain you?

Even though you cannot see the new path before you clearly yet, you know it is there. I ask you all, My Dear Ones, to consider the darkness of the unknown as the light unrevealed. It is not dangerous or frightening, but only the place of the inner self, known and familiar, though it has been a long time since you visited.

In the next few weeks, I would advise turning more intently toward nature. Watch how the earth itself instructs, how it shows you at every moment of every day the proper path to take. There is great satisfaction in taking the simple road to growth. You need few things for such a journey: your physical self, your spirit self, and your intent. That is all. Align those three aspects of life and you will learn what it means to flow with the energy of the earth and of all things, interconnected and whole.

Do not look so hard for answers. The answers will come when the time is right. Ask for help. Be open to what comes to guide you and dare the self to act upon the guidance offered.

Wake up to the fact that the energy of life is all the riches you will ever need. The energy of life is what you seek, in its pure state. And that, My Dears, is readily available, inside each one of you in infinite amounts. In sustainable terms this means that you are energy itself. Tap into that and you will know what I am talking about when I say that you are life itself, in all forms, capable of everything.

Seek connection with the truth of what the earth offers and allow your energy to align with that. Find the peace you seek in nature, but find it also inside you, already waiting for you to open the inner door so that the proper connection may be made to awareness and knowing, to truth and growth, to change in the natural flow of life. This is your true challenge. By your intent, in alignment with self, may you accept this challenge and see where it takes you. Your true journey awaits.

As you grow, at each step toward wholeness, there awaits a new journey. Each day that you accept the challenge to change who you are in that world, you accept the challenge to keep going, to keep changing. This is what infinity is, the unending ability to change, to evolve, to keep going, to keep accepting your fate as it unfolds before you, to keep moving forward, guided by your true inner spirit, always in alignment with what is right! And what is right at this moment?

Chuck's Blog

#683 Chuck’s Place: Lions & Tigers & Bears, Oh Yes! Sorcerers & Witches & Shamans & Seers!

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Words have power. Terms like sorcerers and witches conjure shady if not evil purpose. It was not until his final works that Carlos Castaneda decided to use the term “shaman” to describe his teacher, don Juan. Don Juan himself referred to his lineage as Seers. Seers are men and women of knowledge, who, through their unbending intent and ability to achieve inner silence, are capable of seeing energy as it flows in the universe.

The intent of don Juan and the seers of his lineage is total freedom, freedom to perceive, explore and live in infinity as energetic beings. These seers have no interest in malevolence or power over others. They view those kinds of practices as a fateful waste of energy, energy fixated on self-importance. These seers contend that total freedom requires impeccability and the purest of intent. To claim our full power as energetic beings requires utter sobriety, humility, and balance.

As a young boy, I inadvertently experienced myself as an energetic being when I used intent, through prayer, to have a direct experience of God. This experience was so shattering that I barely escaped total disintegration. There were no religious guidelines for this experience. Once I opened that door to experiencing myself as energy I could not control it, and I was terrified for years by its unexpected visits. I gradually devised ways to survive the onslaughts, but never felt comfortable.

I know, today, that I was led to Carlos Castaneda’s world as a teenager because the seers of don Juan’s lineage had amassed a comprehensive set of practices, through thousands of years of experience, to comfortably manage living as energetic beings, the possible but mostly unexplored essence of our beings, and this was what I needed.

Exploring our energetic essence is, for me, our true evolutionary potential. The world we live in, of solid objects, is in peril because of human being’s fixation upon self-importance with the resulting dominance of greed. Opening to our energetic potential requires a total revamping of our energy, first and foremost a total release of self-importance. The use of petty tyrants in the practice of detachment is a method the seers developed to aid in this process. In the practice of recapitulation we are led to energetic wholeness as we lift the veils and face our inner truth in its entirety, recapturing our dispersed energy. This practice does not allow us to hold on to illusions that result in a life of self-importance and greed.

What I see happening in the world of finance, politics, and religion, under the guise of solution, is actually malevolent sorcery practices, new permutations of greed; new trickery to exploit and gain power over others. Centuries ago, the seers of don Juan’s lineage exposed the limitations of those practices. Their practices have the true intent of total liberation from self-importance and the conjuring illusions, the current fixations, of our world. The survival of our fragile world is wholly dependent upon our evolutionary advance into a world of energy.

To avoid any confusion, to allay any fears, in my future writing I will refer to Carlos Castaneda and the teachers of don Juan’s lineage as seers, whose intent is total freedom, whose gift is knowledge on how to achieve it. But, all must discover this for themselves. Freedom is not an entitlement; it must be earned. It is not about faith. It is not about belief. It is about experience!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTE: Words in italics refer to terms coined by the seers of don Juan’s lineage.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: The Seventh Step

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Today, I will review the first six steps in learning to become a shaman that I channeled while dreaming with the women shamans of don Juan’s lineage, back in the fall of 2009, before going on to the seventh step.

First, however, I wish to address two points. Although I am writing, to a certain extent, about shamanism, I am really writing about having a spiritual, energetic experience. So, I ask that you suspend judgment as to the terms I elect to use, which, in my opinion, do not really matter. I could just as well have asked to dream with Jesus, or Buddha, or Jeanne, or any other guide and, if I had done so, I believe I would have gotten the same answers, though possibly in slightly different words, but maybe not. The steps that were offered to me are evolutionary practices, related to growth and exploration, daring me to let go of this world and enter another, the very thing that we will all be confronted with at our deaths, no matter what spiritual practice we elect to follow, and even if we don’t have one. I happen to be curious about what comes next. I have always been interested in reading and hearing about people’s experiences in near-death, out-of-body, comas and dissociative states. Where did you go? What did you encounter? Who did you meet? What did it feel like? How did you get back?

The second point I would like to stress is that, in my experience, as soon as I open the door, as soon as I send out an intent, I have an experience. I know that everything is possible because of the experiences I have had. Certain books have the power to take me right into an experience simply by cracking them open. The books that have this kind of power, for me, are any of the works of Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner Grau’s Being-in-Dreaming, Taisha Abelar’s The Sorcerer’s Crossing, William Buhlman’s Adventures Beyond the Body, and a charming book by Preston Dennett called Out of Body Exploring. By asking to dream with the women shamans I gave myself the opportunity to have an experience. I am most likely to receive an experience if my intent is “unbending,” as don Juan stressed to his apprentices. Carlos writes of Doña Soledad in The Second Ring of Power: “She wanted to know if I had correctly understood don Juan when he said that anything is possible if one wants it with unbending intent.” (p. 31)

So, having made those two points, I recount the first six steps of energy practice, previously written about in lengthier form, that I learned from the women shamans:

1. Know the difference between the two minds, the conjuring mind and the knowing mind. (Read about this step HERE.)
2. Understand the value of repetition. (Read about this step HERE.)
3. Contend with all the parts of the physical self. (Read about this step HERE.)
4. Allow for dissolution of ego. (Read about this step HERE.)
5. Wait for the right moment then shift. (Read about steps 5 & 6 HERE.)
6. Remember what transpires in dreaming.

Now I present the seventh step in learning to become a shaman. As usual, I slept with the dreaming pillow on my lower abdomen, just below the navel. During the night of October 26, 2009, I wrote the following in my journal: Abolish, get rid of, all energy glitches so that energy is not lost or siphoned off.

So what does that mean? First, I want to tell you a little story about a book that Chuck read last week and that he wrote about in his blog on Must be the Season of the Witch. The book is The Second Ring of Power. In his blog, he described the decrepit condition of the book and how he was reading it, taking each page out and placing it in a pile. By the time he was finished reading, the hard cover binding was empty and the pages were in a neat pile on a table in our den. I began reading it at this point and, as I read, I placed the pages back into the binding of the book. Now I am halfway through the book and it is halfway to being put back into its original form. I have just finished reading the chapter where Carlos meets La Gorda and learns about the biggest energy glitch of all time, the hole left in us by our children, which continues to drain us empty of energy until we die, perhaps long before we really need to. The only way to stop this drain of energy, this energy glitch, is to close it up by completely detaching from our children and letting them go off on their own journeys. I believe this is the main energy glitch that the women shamans instructed me to get rid of. This type of energy glitch appears as a dark hole in our sides, in both men and women, by those who can “see” such energy. These holes can be there because of children we have actually given birth to, biologically, and also children we have become deeply attached to for other reasons, because of marriage, adoption, fostering, etc. The more children we have in our lives the bigger the holes; one side for girl children, the other for boy children.

For me, and for most women, this may be the most difficult and painful energy glitch to close up. I use the analogy of Chuck reading the book, essentially emptying it, and me filling it back up again, one page at a time, as a process of detachment and reclamation of the energy we give away in raising our children. First the book must not be so special that it cannot be read in this way, that it cannot be allowed to change form. Our children must not be so special to us that we cannot allow them to become who they must become. We must be able to dismantle our old books, our old ideas of who we want our children to be, how we want them to be, and what perfect form we desire for them to fit into, especially the desires and fears we really have within ourselves but are projecting onto our children, and, finally, we must let them go out of our lives. Our children must become no more than the empty hard cover of the book once the pages have been ripped out, and we must allow ourselves to be the same.

Once we are empty, having dismantled the book, having let the children become separate beings, having detached ourselves from them, having let them go, we can now begin the process of putting the book back together for ourselves, taking back our energy. Once the pages of the book are replaced, once the energy that we had previously given over to the raising of our children —in the worrying, the wondering if they are making good choices, safe, doing what they should be doing, acting wisely and right; wondering if they are fearless and powerful, or depressed and sad; wondering did I screw them up, did I do everything for them, etc.— once this energy is replaced, we can then begin the process of closing up the holes in our sides. This is the task that La Gorda gave Carlos, and it is the same task the women shamans gave me. I now pass it along to you as the next step in learning to become a shaman, or in other words, learning to become energetically detached, spiritually whole, complete.

As Jeanne mentioned in her message this week, don Juan taught about energy, as does she. This is also what I learned about from the women shamans: energy. By using my unbending intent, I asked them to dream with me and teach me something. In all, I was given twelve steps. Next week I will move onto the next. In the meantime, watch for those holes and glitches and take back the energy.

See you in dreamland!
Love,
Jan

NOTE: The books I mention are available in our STORE.

Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR