Chuck's Blog

#665 Chuck’s Place: Black Gold

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When challenged with the question, “Why so much focus on alchemy in your writing, Chuck?” my truthful response is: Carl Jung, that Master Shaman, spent decades of his life unearthing and sifting through the rich black earth of this ancient system to empower us to decipher the gold in our thoroughly modern dreams. Modern Alchemy 101: sift through the nigredo, the blackness in your dreams, and you will find your gold. Before I elucidate on a dream from last night that Jan is allowing me to “expose,” I first need to discuss a homework assignment I was given this week.

A client, who was reading an early blog I had written on blackness, America Chooses the Black Doll, assigned me to read Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison. For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of tackling Ms. Morrison, I assure you, she is as dense and playful in her writing as Jung is when writing on alchemy. In this work, she makes a compelling argument for the need to shed light upon the cultural context of blackness in America, to fully realize its unconscious influence upon all American authorship.

Morrison reflects upon Marie Cardinal’s autobiography, The Words to Say It, where Cardinal describes her initiation into madness, triggered in the midst of a jazz improvisation at a Louis Armstrong concert. Morrison questions the automatic, uncontested assumptions of this encounter with blackness and the onset of madness. Morrison draws attention to the automatic acceptance of these things —black people—black music—mental chaos—madness— as being associatively linked and the unconscious projection of them into American literature.

Taking it beyond literature, I would argue that we are absolutely stymied in America by this dilemma. Is there not a very strong attempt to play upon this automatic unconscious assumption with blackness by associating Obama with madness, as the devil incarnate? If we don’t shed light upon these projections we become a country paralyzed by apocalyptic fear.

The issue here is to separate the ancient symbol of blackness from its projection onto people of color. The contrasting symbols of white and black, day and night, light and dark, visible and invisible, yin and yang, are so ancient that they long precede awareness of race. These symbols exist in the depths of the collective unconscious and present themselves in dreams, impervious to political and social correctness. It remains for the conscious individual to decipher the true meaning and personal relevance of these symbols in dreams. Blackness, or the nigredo as the alchemists named it, symbolizes unknown material; black is in the dark, where things are unseen and therefore unknown. In order to arrive at the highest value, always considered to be gold, one must go into the unknown, the darkness of the self and redeem that which lies there, either because it has been rejected or because it has, more significantly, yet to be discovered. The nigredo, in this context, is that which lies in the darkness. The nigredo is universal to all races because all people have parts of themselves hidden in the dark and, similarly, because it is unknown, it is equally unsettling for all races. Racism is a collective attempt to escape this inner tension of reckoning with one’s unknown self, the nigredo, by ridding oneself of its threat, by assigning it to and projecting it upon another race, and maintaining power over that race to keep one’s fears in check.

One can hardly escape the current obvious, unabashedly, in-your-face attempt to seduce white America into avoiding facing the truth of what lies hidden in its own darkness by projecting its nigredo upon Obama and ridding itself of its own curse. Toni Morrison is right to draw such attention to the archetypal implications of blackness being automatically and unchallengingly projected upon human beings. The symbol is not the object. The symbol in the dream is ancient, archetypal, and personally relevant. Own it, and take the personal journey with it. We use Jan’s dream to illustrate this.

In her own words: I am standing on 42nd Street outside Grand Central Terminal in New York City talking to a woman who says she has just won the Lottery, a winning of several million dollars. “So, I didn’t win?” I ask. “Oh well, I guess it just wasn’t my turn.” And with that I turn and walk into the cavernous main hall of Grand Central Terminal where the vast space is lined with row upon row of black toilets, with no lids. The toilets are packed tightly together and there are perhaps fifty or so rows of them interspersed with black metal folding chairs. I have to go to the bathroom, “a crap,” so I begin walking up and down the aisles of toilets looking for a place where I can comfortably sit down and do what I have to do, but there is absolutely no privacy here. People are sitting on some of the toilets and I can hear farting and peeing sounds. They are reading, smoking, and talking to others sitting next to them or opposite them, as if it were nothing unusual, but I just can’t allow myself to be so exposed. I think up all kinds of reasons why I should not just sit down on a toilet like everyone else, such as: There is no privacy here! There are too many men sitting in this row! How can that woman sit there like that! Don’t people have any sense of privacy? This is too intimate! Finally, I decide that I will “just hold it” and, upon deciding this, I walk out of the terminal. As soon as I walk outside I get into a car with Chuck and our daughter Erica, who in the dream is a happy and bubbly thirteen year old. I am driving. We travel into the countryside over winding, hilly snow and ice covered roads. People are driving way too fast for the conditions and several times I have to make some quick maneuvers so we don’t have collisions. Erica is very impressed with my driving skills but even so we are eventually forced off the road by an oncoming Cadillac that sideswipes the driver’s side mirror and sends us hurtling into a snow bank. We exit the car, leaving it stranded in the snow, grab three round flying saucer sleds from the trunk and begin walking up a steep ice and snow-covered road. We arrive at the top of the hill and decide to sled down the other side, but the snow is so wet and sticky that we are unable to slide down without getting stuck repeatedly, so we abandon our flying saucers and walk the rest of the way. At the bottom of the hill, Erica points to a blurry picture of a nutcracker painted on the road —like a logo of the nutcracker from the ballet The Nutcracker Suite— barely visible beneath the thick ice that is covering the road. As we continue walking along, I see that a railroad bridge crosses over the road far ahead and that there is a railroad station off to the left. “Look, a train station!” I say with great relief. “We are taking that train!” Chuck says, firmly. As we get closer I see that the station name is Warwarsing. I joke repeatedly into Chuck’s ear, saying that we are in “War-Washing! War-Washing! Get it? We are in WAR-WASHING!” I know that we can take the train back to Grand Central Terminal, and as we walk into the station to buy our tickets I wake up.

Jan does not win the lottery, i.e. the gold! No, you have to work for it. The work begins at Grand Central—an allusion to a directive from the SELF. “Grand” suggests something greater than the ego; “Central” shows it to be at the center of the personality. Grand Central is also the meeting place of many old tried and true paths. Evidently the SELF is directing Jan into a scene that captures many people’s worst nightmare in dreams, a vast public unisex restroom without partitions. The nigredo is identified by the black toilets, the black chairs, and, obviously, that which is concealed inside the body! The nigredo points to that which is unknown or concealed, and requires work. The work here means exposing oneself to the truth of that which is unsettling and unknown. The dream is placing obvious emphasis on EXPOSURE. The SELF wants the nigredo exposed, not discretely flushed away. Jan balks at this request, choosing instead to take her own heroic journey, symbolized by the accompaniment of the innocent, bubbly, youthful Erica, avoiding the blackness and going off into the white snow.

As it turns out, all of Jan’s efforts at transcendence in pure whiteness fail, including the flying saucers—an inflated attempt to win her wholeness, symbolized by the round saucer that flies. The nutcracker, beneath the ice, is a reminder that the real nut has yet to be cracked. Ultimately, we end up at the Warwarsing station, where I, representing Jan’s inner masculine guide, as animus, insist we take the train back to Grand Central. The WAR symbolizes taking on the tension of exposure within the self, encountering internalized judgments, inhibitions, unacceptable facts, etc., symbolized by all the characters hanging around the terminal in this dream. The WASHING symbolizes separating out the elements of nigredo, sifting through “the crap” and discovering that which has been hidden. In this dream, the path to be taken is an ancient one leading back to Grand Central. An inflationary avoidance, however heroic, could not achieve reconciliation.

Thank you, Jan, for fulfilling your dream’s request: exposure to the world! Through this act Jan owns her own nigredo, which becomes the source of acquiring her own gold through facing her own inner truth. I hope that this dream illustrates the symbolic meaning of blackness with its golden potential, which is the alchemical process, obviously relevant in understanding the dream of a modern person. Additionally, along with Toni Morrison, I hope that this article furthers an appreciation for the archetypal symbol of blackness, in all its richness, that must be differentiated from unconscious projections onto outer objects.

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 Shadow Lurks

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I seem to do a lot of my inner work in dreaming. It has always been this way. My psyche seems to like to work on issues of importance while my mind sleeps and luckily, more often than not, especially if I intend it, I wake up with good dream recall. I have also discovered that if I present a dreaming intent my psyche readily obliges, giving me just what I need. Over the past few weeks I have made some decisions, one of which, as you know, was to change my name to my married name. This is not as easy at it may sound. Any woman who has faced this prospect upon marriage knows this. Suddenly, a well-known identity is challenged and the big question of “Who am I?” arises. During my recent process of making this life changing decision I had the following dream.

I am having a funeral for Jan Hughes. I am burying her in a field on a hill, under the spreading limbs of a tall tree. As the funeral progresses I have an inner dialogue with this “old Jan,” as she is lowered into the grave, as dirt is thrown onto the casket, and as she is put to rest. I tell her that I am not abandoning her, that I am not rejecting her, but that she has done her life’s work and it is time for her to recede while a new me takes over. I am thankful for the life we had together. I thank her for accompanying me this far and for taking me on my recapitulation journey. I tell her this as her grave is covered, as a headstone is put in place, and as I walk away and leave her buried under the tree, knowing that something is not quite resolved, but I am not sure what it is yet. Even so, every day, in the dream, as I pass by the spot on the hill where she is buried I see her headstone and know that I have made the right decision.

Three days later, I have another dream related to the same theme. In this dream I am approached by a woman who I recognize from my past. When I knew her I was in awe of her and admired her for many reasons. She was beautiful. She wore her hair in a short pixie cut and I once cut my hair like hers, wanting to be like her. She was tall, not exceedingly thin, and she had perfect posture and moved with definite grace, totally in her body, while I am short and in the past tended to hunch my shoulders more than I do now, totally not in my body. She carried herself with such confidence and seemed totally relaxed with who she was, both in her work and in her personal life. In the dream, she is old, her hair is longer and very scraggly, thin, hanging in her face, her expression is withdrawn and dark, her eyes sunken and haunted looking, her skin wrinkled and her cheeks, once so plump and rosy, are cavernous. She comes very close to me and peering into my face says in a harsh whisper: “I love you. I have always loved you. I want to be with you. I want to be your lover forever. Don’t leave me.”

“Oh, yes,” I say, “I remember you came to me in a dream once before and told me the same thing, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, “but you wouldn’t pay attention.”

“But I’m married now,” I say. She looks devastated when I say this and I am not sure what to do with her. She looks sad, sick, lifeless, and I feel her love for me as well as her pain at being rejected. I don’t want to make her feel any worse, but I can’t figure out what to say to her. “I’ll keep it in mind,” I say, referring to her desire to love me forever. And at that she disappears and I wake up.

As I write down this dream upon awakening, I begin to see this woman as my shadow. She tells me that she loves me and is asking me to integrate her. She is my extraverted self whom I have kept hidden for so long, unloved and uncared for, as I have lived most of my life as an introvert. I chose the life of a freelance artist and writer so that I did not have to be in the world or interact in the world, except minimally. She is asking me to take her as my lover, to give her life, to be what I once projected onto her and in so doing restore her beauty. It is my personal challenge, in this life, to be extraverted. I know this. I am totally at ease in introversion, in doing inner work, it is all I have ever done, but being in the world is and always has been my challenge.

It is interesting to note here that I did recently bump into this woman from my past, several months ago, and I was struck by how much she had changed. She did in fact look quite haggard. Her hair was longer and rather thin and, I thought, rather unattractive compared to the way she looked with a shorter cut. She looked almost unhealthy, whereas ten or so years ago when I last saw her she looked beautifully ageless, with that amazing posture and self-assured presence. When I saw her recently I felt that we had almost exchanged personas. She looked the way I did ten years ago, before I did my recapitulation, before my real inner work started. Now I have long thick flowing almost white hair, I am softer and more glowing, and my hunched shoulders are pulling back, my posture exhibiting more self-confidence, and my haunted look is gone.

When she comes to me in the dream, this woman from the past is asking me to embrace her as she is now. The last time she came in a dream, I rejected her, and she mentions it. I was not ready at that time, but now I am. She, the shadow, wants me to love the old self now, to embrace the woman I have buried, but also to not reject her. I must not only love what this woman, this shadow once represented and what I projected onto her, but I must also love what she now carries, the old me. And I must do so without feeling sorry for her, but fully embrace her with compassion and love for our unfolding journey together, in real life and in dreaming life. And I must also accept her admiration of me, as I have changed and evolved, for that would complete the picture. As I take back the long ago projection, and love all these parts of myself, I am accepting the challenge.

This is the kind of stuff that the psyche presents to us, whether in dreams, in daily life, or in what happens to us. We are always, in some way, presented with our issues; in problems that arise and in the people we meet and interact with. When we are ready to make some changes and move on, embracing our evolving selves, we are given the opportunity to integrate, to take back our projections, and to embrace the totality of who we are and who we have the potential to still become. I guess I would just like to stress that, in looking to the workings of the psyche, I was able to see how these two dreams were meaningful in my own process of change, and how, as I looked deeper, I was presented with what really lurked below the surface, asking for resolution.

Even though I feel like I have done nothing but deep inner work for the past ten years, I am still being challenged to keep doing it, to go deeper and deeper, into my own shadows. You never know what or who might be lurking there!

Until next time, may your dreams take you where you need to go!
Love,
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

#664 A Biosphere of Self

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Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Today we start our new channeling schedule, as I wrote about last week in A New Intent. Spring is soon upon us in the Northeast, a time for all of us to embrace new beginnings, changes, and practices. With today’s channeling, I ask that you address your readers with a message for the week ahead. What is the most important and meaningful guidance you can offer us at this time?

I suggest again, as I have in the past, that you look upon nature and take your guidance from the reality before your eyes as much as you take guidance from my words, for nature itself is doing what I suggest all of you do each day. And that is: to awaken with conscious awareness that you too are driven by energy, the same energy that drives nature and the animals, that conducts nature’s research and experimentation, each day, as the sun rises, as the darkness recedes, and life awakens to proceed on its merry way, unfolding in a process of growth and evolution.

Each one of you, in order to become part of the greater evolving energy must find your connection to it in some fashion that resonates. Find connection not only to your own inner spirit self as a most vital step in growth, but do not forget to live fully in that world as one of the creatures of nature, guided by the energy of that which lives connected, driven, and enhanced by the pure energy of life in motion. Today, as you begin a new week in your lives, stay connected to the fact that you are energy in motion too, that you are nature itself, that the world belongs to you, you to it, and that, in symbiosis, all is possible.

You live in an environment that is perfectly set up for your habitation. Everything you could possibly need exists in nature. You are provided with the air you need for breath of life, the water you need to survive, the sun and the moon to regulate your sleeping and waking states. You are provided with food; the raw ingredients for sustenance and healing are available in that which is provided by nature. You live in the perfect biosphere, the perfect balanced environment. Accept that fact. Treat the earth with respect and it too will return the favor. Find out who you are supposed to be as a natural member of that biosphere. What is your true role? What are you supposed to be contributing to its health and nurturance?

Even as you seek without what you are supposed to find for your own health and nurturance, look to the earth around you for the answers to your inner issues too. In pollution, exploitation, defilement and waste of the earth will you discover your personal issues replicated before your eyes. For all who look upon the earth and see destruction and decay, overuse and greed, and the destruction of the fine balance that is so necessary for healthy and sustained living, and wish for healing, must turn inward to the natural inner environment and seek equal purity, respect, and balance there too.

With each new spring upon that earth nature stirs in each of you. You cannot deny it. And what is it that stirs, but your ancient selves, your ancient wisdom and knowledge, and the deepest truths of the human race that are revealing that, as big and powerful as you have gotten, as large and synthetic, as wasteful and greedy, so are you nothing more than that which you feel stirring in you on a beautiful spring day after a long, cold, dark winter. And what is stirring? It is energy itself; it is life; it is nature at its rawest, the essence of life.

Return now to thinking about the self as energy.
In energetic form you are compatible with man,
with nature, with the heavens and the earth,
with the pull of the planets and the flowing of the rivers.
In energetic form you are whole, you are complete.

The challenge comes in holding onto this basic truth that you are,
first and foremost,
one with nature.
Within this truth hides many other truths.
Within this truth lies darkness and light,
the known and the unknown,
good and evil,
the highest of ideals and the lowest of instincts,
the loftiest thoughts and the thinnest of veneers of self.

For you are all that you see,
all that you perceive,
all that you love,
all that you despise,
all that you fear,
and all that you cannot yet see.
You are behind the veils and you provide the veils.
You are goodness itself,
yet are you the darkness that lurks in the shadows of life.

You are not only a natural biosphere,
but you are also an energetic biosphere,
a spiritual biosphere,
a mental biosphere,
a physical biosphere.
You are wholeness,
oneness,
complete.

This is your life challenge, you know, My Dear Readers; to find this out, to discover what it means to be complete, to discover the truths of the self, on all levels. Who are you now, this moment, as you read these words? Who will you be five minutes from now? Who will you be five hours and five days from now? You may notice that you have the ability to shift and change from moment to moment, depending on the situation you are in, that you are multi-personalities, that you act and react and determine your journey based on so many factors, all existing within as well as without. You have choice, opportunity, the option to change, at your fingertips, each day. These are the things that must be utilized. They must become your tools of nature, your tools for use in your biosphere of self.

I do stress, quite often, that it is important to remember that you are energy, that you are responsible for every action and decision in your life, that you are whole, that you are in charge of your life. Now, as change comes to you in many forms, I ask that you reconsider all of these thoughts and reapply them to your life, to your journey through that life, to both your spiritual journey and to your journey upon that earth. Look to nature for guidance. Study it in its raw state, driven by the energy to live, to evolve, to change. This is the message I leave you with today: Seek to find your true place as one, as nature.

Chuck's Blog

#663 Chuck’s Place: The Hen, the Egg & the Golden Psyche

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The alchemists, like the ancient Chinese sages who created The I Ching, studied nature to discover the fundamental process at the heart of transformation. They focused on the hen and the egg. Within the egg lies a composition of primordial liquid. Encapsulating this liquid is a tough boundary, a shell. Sitting upon the egg and providing the heat for transformation rests the hen. Thus, the combination of these three elements —prima materia, a sealed container, and heat— yields a transformation of life from liquid prima materia to a solid living chick.

Modeled upon these principles, the alchemists set up their personal laboratories in an attempt to transform prima materia into gold. Jung discovered that the procedures and findings of the alchemists mirrored his own discoveries of the inner workings of the human psyche in its quest for wholeness.

In his own research, through psychotherapy, Jung discovered that the boundaries of the human psyche far exceed that which our conscious personality is aware of. In fact, he discovered that most of what we truly are is largely unknown or unconscious to us. What we know inside ourselves as I, is but one fragment, albeit important (!), of a much greater whole. For Jung, the major purpose in human life is to seek and unify our fragments, to become whole in a complete sense; joining known and unknown parts in a process he termed individuation. Individuation is the alchemical equivalent of creating the gold and, like alchemy, has the psychic equivalence of prima materia in the form of fragments, a sealed container in the form of a clearly defined psyche with boundaries, and heat, which is generated through the containment and amalgamation of one’s fragments into a unified whole. The heat is the intense emotional pressure generated through containing the oppositions inherent in our fragments. Individuation is the outcome of this transformative process where these fragments peacefully coalesce into a unified whole in full consciousness.

The first step in the process is to know our parts. What are they?! Where are they?! The part we know the best is our ego self. It consists of consciousness, attitudes, beliefs, skills, and psychic functions that come most naturally to us, and that we find most acceptable to the world. Then there are those parts of us, those tricksterish parts —feelings, thoughts— so unacceptable to our egos and the outside world that we repress them into the shadow, the darkness within. Then there is our deeply instinctual self —sexual and aggressive energies— that, in our highly refined, civilized self may remain deeply inaccessible to our conscious life. Beyond this, we house the burdens of our families and ancestors and the traits of our genetic line, as well as the archetypal patterns common to the entire human race, at its core. All these parts, many of which we are completely unaware of, exist and influence our moods, thoughts, actions, and reactions in daily life.

Then, of course, there is the multitude of projected aspects of our self, lodged in people, places, and things in the outside world to which we are fully unaware. The first challenge of individuation is to sift through the prima materia, to collect and own the elements of the self, both within and without. We must distinguish the I from the Not I if we are ever to arrive at the boundary of the self, which is our psychic container, our egg, our hermetic vessel.

As we develop the moral courage and psychic stamina to take ownership of our parts, however shameful, frightening, fragile, or unacceptable they may be, we contain them within and clearly define the circle around the self. This is the process of sifting through the prima materia as we withdraw our projections and shed light upon our shadow, holding firmly to what is truly ours. In the process, we may discover “alien parts” that have found their way into our psychic structures, clearly not I. These may be the archetypes, which have so much energy that they can burst through our boundaries and take possession of our egos. These represent forces that we can and must interact with, be schooled and nourished by. However, we must clearly not allow them to take up residence within the boundaries of the self, as they are liable to create distorted ideas of who we are, or create compulsions that we cannot understand, or terrify us with frightening thoughts and images.

In honor of the Lenten season, I refer here to the process Christ underwent in the desert, drawing his line or circle in the sand, casting out the devils, the Not I, from the boundaries of his Self. The shamans teach a magical pass called the lifesaving pass where you stand with feet shoulder width apart, arms extended straight down at a forty-five degree angle away from the body, and swinging from side to side, with hips remaining facing front, allow the upper torso and arms to swing back and forth in a circular motion, using the downward pointed hands to carve a complete circle around the self, which seals in one’s energy. One can also create a circle by sitting calmly on the floor or the ground and make a circle around the body with whatever seems resonant. Within that circle bring objects that symbolize all the known parts of the self, including the most contentious. Representations of compulsions, emotions, beliefs about the self that do not belong within the self should be cast outside of the circle. One might include as well a candle within the circle, representing both the heat and the light of consciousness, which sits like mother hen upon her egg. The psyche itself presents images of circles in dreaming to indicate prima materia that should be included within the boundaries of the self for our contemplation. Watch for those discarded pennies in the streets of your dreams!

The containment function of our hermetic vessel is completed with a seal, a hermetic seal. We seal our psyche by holding onto our parts in full awareness, despite, at times, our excruciating discomfort with the emotions they might generate, such as deep sadness, shame, rage, hate, and, yes, even love. Love often escapes our hermetic seal in a projection of weekend blissful love, spent upon our newly discovered god/goddess, only to have us wake up Monday morning, once again disappointed and deeply disillusioned. We might have been better served containing this energy, which seeks unification within the psyche, in our internal alchemical process of transformation, resulting in deeper self-love.

The containment of the powerful emotions of our opposing parts seek to burst apart the container through the outlets of projection, distraction, acting out, and general self-delusionment. The ability to hold the truths, with all their energies within, is the key here. Let us appreciate the patience of the hen sitting calmly upon her egg.

Finally, the heat. The heat is generated by our ability to keep the container sealed, following the guidance of mother hen. To accept and retain the unacceptable in the self, perhaps choosing not to open another kind of bottle to soothe the tension within, or perhaps to decide not to gossip with a friend about an “unacceptable other,” is to remain calm and patient, presiding over and containing within the facts and energies of the self. This process of bearing the tensions of those inner oppositions results, and here is the magic, in the transformation of our inner fragments into psychic gold.

And what might that gold look and feel like?: True self acceptance, calmness, compassion, removal of another veil as the crutch of another illusion is dismissed, a deeper alignment with and knowing of the true self, and the readiness to enter a relationship from a position of wholeness. This hermetic transformation is the birth of the chick, the inner child of innocence, freed of the tensions of the old oppositions, ready to enter new life.

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: A New Intent

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Dear Readers and Fellow Inner Journeyers,

Today begins a new day in our process and routine together. It is time for me to pull my energy inward. I am deeply involved in work on my book, in my clinical work, and in my personal explorations of energy. I have thoroughly enjoyed and grown from the process of giving to you and to this website over the past four years, but I have lately felt a great need to deepen my work as a channel and psychic, and to really learn what it means and how to better use it. The challenge is to track the energy, always in flux, and to flow with it, and this is where my energy needs to go now.

As part of this process of change and transformation I am now permanently and professionally taking my married name, Ketchel. So as you come to this website each week you will be dealing with the partnership of Ketchel, Ketchel & Ketchel, and appropriately so, for we are truly a partnership. You will see this name change reflected on the website over the next month or so as we update it.

We do intend to continue the channeling, but now just once a week, each Monday morning. It seems right to begin the week with a message from Jeanne. I anticipate writing during the week and keeping in touch through this blog, A Day in a Life, and on Saturdays Chuck will continue to post his writing in Chuck’s Place, always such a treat.

Today, in lieu of a longer channeled message from Jeanne, I offer this poem of sorts that I got from her this morning when I communicated with her regarding the changes we are instituting in our own lives, impacting many of you too, as we are very aware that the messages three times a week have been extremely valued. Here is what she says:

Give a little, take a little.
Share a little, receive a little.
Spend a little, earn a little.
Use a little, plant a little
so that new growth may always be possible.

Nurture and guide,
but also protect and treasure.
Be available, but be private.
Be innerly and be outerly.
Be creative and be also attentive to the fires
of inner work, inner energy, and rejuvenation.

Be whole, but be balanced.
Be in the world and not in the world.
Be who you are, but allow for change.
Be afraid when you must, but discover the reason why.
Be happy, but do not forget how to be sad.
Be safe, but not at the expense of daring.
Be adventurous, but do not forget to be connected,
at all times, to the desires of the spirit self.

Jeanne went on to say: Listen to your hearts at all times and follow the guidance of good, of resonance, and of right. The more inner work you do, the more clearly will your path be revealed and you will learn not to question so much, but to proceed with truth, knowing, and instinct as your natural companions and guides. Always do good work. Always finish your processes as they arise. Do not shirk your duties, but do save enough time for the self. This must now be the most important thought as you awaken each day: “Yes, I must spend some time alone today and do my inner journey.”

I look forward to the next unfolding of this journey with you.
Love,
Jan

Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR