Messages from Jeanne

#655 Truthfulness

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
I channel again for all of your Readers. What message of guidance do you have for us today, either regarding our inner work or any other subject you wish to talk about?

The subject of inner work commands quite a bit of attention because, as you know, it is a continual process, if you dare to attend to it as a lifelong endeavor. You will never lack for interesting challenges and discoveries if you allow the self to proceed on the inner journey. In guiding the self forward, think now upon that self as knowing exactly what to do next. Allow your physical, mental and emotional self to show you what you personally must attend to next.

Use your awareness to guide you. Use your inner knowing and your outer presence to guide you to deeper self-contemplation, truthfully. Allow your awareness of self to be bathed in the light of truth. This is not only your next step in the process of inner work, but your constantly guiding light.

Truthfulness with self must always be your goal, and although you may be afraid to hear and see your own truths, so must you approach them, knowing that they wait for you within, in the dark caverns of your psyche, embedded inside you. Your inner work must uncover even that which lies so deeply hidden that you have not even found a hint of its existence inside you yet. Your inner work must contain an element of daring in order to dig ever deeper, unafraid to know your deepest secrets. In truthfulness will you not only discover that which is most dark about the self, but you will understand how darkness affects others as well, and you will grow, not only personally, but as a human being in the world.

As you truthfully explore the self, as you further discover your many-faceted reasons for doing things, as you discover your deepest desires and wants and needs, and understand them on newer levels, going beyond what is immediately apparent to make new discoveries about the self, you will further allow the self to bear not only your own truths, but the greater truths that all must bear. The darkest truths of the self are available to aid you in breaking down your defenses, your controls, and your demands of entitlement. For, as you break down, you will discover that you are the same as everyone else, that you are no more or less right or wrong, no more or less entitled, no more or less special, no more or less needy, no more or less traumatized, no more or less deserving than anyone else upon that planet. As you break down your doors and enter and explore new rooms of the self you will discover your self as equally energetically present upon that earth as all others. In truthfulness will you discover what it means to truly feel love and compassion, to truly be mature and responsible, and to truly live in that world and in your inner world as an evolving being.

In truthfulness lies the answer for all inner work. For the discovery of who you are and why you are there upon that earth at this time will only become known as you break through the barriers that now hold you back from knowing the truths of the self. In seeking truthfulness of self you will achiever greater understanding of self. You will become open to the energy of life around you, allowing the self to truly flow and truly find that your path will keep unfolding before you, rewarding you always with new direction, new ideas of self, and new growth opportunities.

Chuck's Blog

#654 Chuck’s Place: The Heart of Romance: Solutio

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Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy website.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, the day of ROMANCE! Romance is an innate, quick-acting solvent, capable of dissolving boundaries, with the promise of blissful union. Ultimately, romance engages us in a process of projection where we encounter both our inner blockages and ideals in the reflection of our beloved. The challenge in romance is to truly individuate, that is, to overcome our inner resistances and be available to love, versus seeking resolution through changes in our projected reflection in the other, for instance, trying to overcome a deep sense of unlovability through our lover’s convincing us that we are lovable, by their unrelenting, adoring attention, yet never truly believing this within, remaining compulsively bound to our lover’s reassurances.

We are all born from solution. Our bodies gradually coagulate and differentiate as we float blissfully in the ocean of the womb. Leaving the womb is hardly a blissful experience. Some have suggested that birth is indeed the primal trauma. Like the expulsion from the Garden, nature forcefully separates the babe from its creator. Our search for love as romance, throughout life, is our deep craving to recapture our primal oneness, wholeness with nature and creator.

The opus of the alchemists was to restore matter, the stone, to its prima materia, solution, the womb, where it could coagulate and be reborn as gold, wholeness. Our challenge in life is to discover and dissolve our hardnesses, our stones: our traumas, defenses, resistances, fears, that we might be reborn a unified whole, capable of true love.

Romance is the most powerful human solvent. In romance, all boundaries dissolve as we merge in magical oneness with our beloved. Most of the images of romance depict solution: champagne, wine, hot tubs, warm pools, clear lakes, waterfalls, ocean waves, warm sandy beaches, cruises, etc. These images of solution return the couple to their womblike origins as they are swept into blissful union. Or at least that’s the promise!

There are some drawbacks to this most desirable and rapid solvent, romance. The morning after often tends to not be so blissful. Aside from a potential hangover, the light of day and the differentiated clarity it offers can shed incredible doubt upon last night’s beloved. Nonetheless, the underlying drive for union is so great that romance eagerly and rapidly projects its golden glow upon yet an other, this time, hopefully, the right other. There is a vast pool of others, many fish in the sea, to project upon.

Often the chosen other reflects an old blockage, a stone in the heart, a frozen experience from the past where great expectation resulted in deep disappointment that shut down the heart. In this case, the golden lover, an obvious wrong choice to the eyes of objective friends or family, is the necessary mistake, the necessary obsession, an attempt to project, encounter and dissolve the old blockage, to once again allow love to flow. This strategy rarely succeeds, as union with this beloved other, in reality, is often most inappropriate, i.e., they are too old, too brutal, too immature, incapable of commitment, incapable of loving, etc. After many successive romantic failures we might, through a depression, be ready to turn inward and begin the opus of dissolution of the stone at its source, within the heart, in the process of recapitulation and individuation. Despite its promise, romance cannot supply a quick fix for necessary deep inner work.

The other major concern with solutio is drowning. The difference between finally being able to cry, to grieve over a loss and break down a long held blockage versus drowning in a pool of tears protesting birth and change, is the difference between floating in preparation for rebirth and clinging to and drowning in the womb, seeking wholeness only in primal unconscious union and oblivion. This is the difference between the child finding nurturance in new life versus the child clinging to the placenta, union through conscious individuation versus unconscious union. The object of the opus is rebirth, to dissolve and resolve, to be born anew, whole. This is the birth that includes consciousness, separateness, and the ability to be whole as separate, to drop separate boundaries and unite with another, yet be able to return to “separateness in wholeness.” Isn’t this the ultimate romance, love without possession, love without clinging; partners, separate and whole, together on a journey?

And so, Happy Valentine’s Day. Whether it be a time of hope with a New Valentine or a time of rebirth with an Old Valentine, just remember to find the greatest love of all, inside of me!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Messages from Jeanne

#653 Fearlessness

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
What message do you have for us today? Would you like to continue discussing the process of inner work and the important factors and steps to focus on as we take our inner journeys? What else besides patience, perseverance, kindness, innocence, maturity and commitment must we keep in mind?

There is much to be said for taking the inner journey and it is crucial to keep in mind that it is not only a process, but also an investment in the self. To invest in the self requires patience, perseverance, kindness, innocence, maturity and commitment and all that each one of those words means, for as your process continues you will discover the greater meaning of taking such ideas into consideration, as you actually live what they mean.

Consider the self as a river flowing through a landscape, at once as tender and light, as gentle and soothing as water can be, but also as hard and destructive, as harsh and cruel as water can also be. For water soothes the gentle baby’s skin, yet does it also cut through rock. Such qualities are also found inside each of you, the ability to be as gentle as one drop of water or as powerful as a tumbling, mighty river. With such qualities in your awareness and acceptable to you, begin now a deeper exploration of your true capabilities. In your inner work, you must be able to be tender with the self, with your feelings and emotions, with your most painfully sore spots and your deepest wounds. Yet must you also be able to cut through all that arises to prevent your growth. You must be able to crash through the barriers that arise in fearlessness, for only in pushing beyond your present self will you grow.

In embracing fearlessness will you not only be able to attend to all parts of the self that arise while you do your inner work, but you will be able to push beyond them and discover new attributes, new creative talents, new aspects of self that lie hidden and buried by fear and its cohorts. Fearlessness, My Dears, is a most necessary aspect of inner work and you will not be able to take the deeper journey without it.

Look upon the self as a flowing river again. A river is fearless, for it cannot, once it begins its journey, stop itself. Once it has made a rivulet upon the earth it has begun its journey. That rivulet may soon dry up, but it has made its mark. It has scored a path, and when next the rains come, when next the ice melts, when next the stream overflows its banks that rivulet will soak up the waters of life and open to the flow of them again. A tiny rivulet will soon flow beyond its early beginnings and flow with fearless energy because it cannot do otherwise.

Once you begin your inner journey you will be as that tiny rivulet. Your approach may dry up, your energy for the journey dissipate, but you will have cut into the heart and soul of your psyche and your physical body, and you will not be able to rest long before you thirst for the flow of energy to go deeper into the self. Once begun, the inner journey will not let you rest long in a state of depletion, for the process, once begun, must be fed the energy of life.

As you take your journey, as your personal process reveals itself, one tiny drop or one rushing stream at a time, you will begin to understand the momentum of your own yearning to continue the journey, and you will learn what it truly means to be fearless, not in a haphazard or careless manner, but in a steady and knowing manner, as you become aware that confronting your fears is the only means of proceeding through life. Your barriers will become the challenges they are meant to be as you allow fear to be your guide, pushing you forward, rather than allowing them to become overwhelming blockages that you lay down before, pooling your energy in stagnant ponds of fear.

Your fear, as it guides you, will ask you, repeatedly, to flow like a river. For only in flowing like a river will you open up to the greater gifts in life. Fearlessness, combined with patience, perseverance, kindness, innocence, maturity and commitment to the journey, will guide you well as you take into consideration your soul’s purpose and your soul’s greater intent. What is it?

Why, indeed, are you there? You will only discover the answer by continuing your process. And that, My Dearest Ones, means you must tackle your fears. In becoming steadily, increasingly, lovingly, rightly, conscientiously fearless you will truly grow.

Messages from Jeanne

#652 Commitment

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Last night, as I was preparing to sleep, I asked you to visit me in dreaming and work with me, to communicate something that was important for me alone to learn. I slept fitfully, waking often out of dreams and falling back into them many times throughout the night. In spite of that it was a good night for dreaming, but not for remembering. The last dream ended with the words “embrace commitment” falling out into my waking moment. I wondered if perhaps these words were not meant for me alone, but perhaps for all who are doing inner work? Is commitment the next step in the process, and is this idea something to discuss today?

My Dear One, commitment to the inner process is already well established if you are this far along, but the idea of further embracing it must be confronted as you take your inner journey. I do not necessarily need to ponder this idea with you today, except to say that in order to truly take the journey you must be committed to it. That being said, if you are now living in that world, having been born into it again, your soul’s intent is committed to taking a journey of evolutionary growth. Your underlying intent is to take the journey, to establish that your life is meaningful and necessary, that it is presented as it is for every reason you can come up with and many more besides.

Your soul’s intent to reincarnate is thus firmly established. You, each one of you who are born into that world, are challenged with discovering this fact. Your soul does ask you to fully embrace this intent, established long before you were consciously aware, long before childhood presented you with your core issues, and long before you had figured out that your journey upon that earth does matter. It matters to you and to your soul that you fully embrace the journey you are on and that you explore it as if you were an adventurer, without limitations, with daring, excited to discover just what lies beyond the next ridge, the next ocean, the next planet, or the next idea.

To awaken to your truths is to understand the commitment your soul has made to you. To awaken to your truths is to reciprocate that commitment, to say to your soul in return: “I am fully committed to taking this journey you have laid out for me and I am ready to explore this life with you. Let the journey truly begin!” In taking such a stand in your life you offer your self the possibility of resolution, resulting in evolution, so that you may choose a different outcome and a different reincarnation in the future.

All who reside upon that earth will leave it, when life is done, with a new opportunity to face new challenges in a new form, either to reenter that earth plane or to move to another plane. This process may not truly be recognized or discovered until that life passes through the gate at death, leading to awareness, but all will go through the process whether the commitment to the soul’s journey has been embraced or not. But to go through that gate to new life and possibility having aligned with the soul’s intent means that your next choice for life may be clearly one of evolutionary opportunity, far beyond the issues you now contend with.

In taking the evolutionary path, committed to inner exploration while in that world —the earth plane— you will actually allow for your soul to enact change, both in its personal choices and in evolutionary changes reaching far beyond the personal. You see, as each one of you choose to evolve energetically, so does everyone else because you, by your work on the self, produce a more aware being in each reincarnation, thus enabling progress in greater human awareness.

Right now it seems that we have reached a standoff almost between those who are energetically and spiritually aware that we do impact far more than just this world with our choices and actions and those who are fully committed to this world alone, with no vision or enticement to look beyond what the eyes can see. It is almost as if the metaphysicists and the scientists are in a tug of war over who is right and what it means to the earth itself. Are we at a crucial point now, the human race, or is this no different than any other moment in human history?

The human race, vast and convoluted as it is, is quite divided in its pursuit of the meaning of life. Is life simply a moment of physical reality or it there something else? Who is right? Truthfully, it does not matter. What matters is that each one of you upon that earth decides, for the self, if you are ready to evolve. Do you hear your soul calling to you? Do you see the signs, hear the words, and smell the reality of its intent leading you onward? If you have heard its call you are ready to take the journey it has prepared for you, but once committed you must be prepared, with the tools available to you, to take what comes to teach you about the self.

I have been offering you many tools, messages for many years now, and each time you assimilate the news that you are indeed supposed to learn you evolve a little further. An evolutionary journey can be very slow and methodical, but it can also speed up simply by your intent to commit to it with greater awareness. This is what you have been asking for over the past few weeks in your requests for simple words of wisdom: how to speed things up. In learning what patience, perseverance, kindness, innocence and maturity truly mean for the self as an evolving being, you further commit your self to your process and your greater journey based on your soul’s intent.

So, although I did not intend to stick to the idea of commitment today, we did indeed need to explore it, for it requires acknowledgement and embracing in order for you to reconnect with your soul’s intent, My Dear Jan and all my Readers. By recalling that you are part of a greater self, may you offer the self this tool of commitment, or recommitment, to your soul’s intent. May you reestablish that your journey through life is meant to teach you that everything you experience is prepared so that you may mature with your greater self, so that you may meet your soul on the river of intent, personal intent flowing through the world you live in, and venture onward together, fully committed to discovering and resolving the age old questions: Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? What am I meant to learn? Who am I truly meant to be? And so on.

Reconnect with your soul’s intent and you may, through working with the tools provided by your soul itself —in the life you were given— coupled with learning the many self-supportive gifts of patience, perseverance, kindness, innocence and maturity, more fully awaken and more fully embrace the self, your journey, and your evolutionary possibilities.

Does that sound like an interesting enough reason for your life? Are you truly ready to recommit —for you all did commit at one time— to fulfilling the commitment you made with your soul, your greater self? You are your soul, and you set your intent a long time ago. Think about that.

Messages from Jeanne

#651 Maturity

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Today I continue with a question regarding our inner work. You have previously suggested that our inner process must be guided by Patience, Perseverance, Kindness, and Innocence. What is the next step?

My Dear One, all my Readers, and those who doubt that there is anything beyond the world you see: you know full well that without maturity you will not evolve or grow, but also that even life in that world will not be fulfilling, for maturity is the cornerstone in all life, the anchor within the self that holds you firmly in balance. It is the next step in your process of inner work, but, even if you are not currently doing your inner work, it is perhaps the most valuable characteristic to embrace in your outer work as well.

Maturity leads to balance. If I were to suggest that balance were the next step, I would likely point out that maturity was the necessary component, for without it balance would be impossible. So you see, maturity must be achieved, firmly rooted within the self in order for balance to be maintained, in order for innocence to be received in a proper manner, and for all aspects of self to be in alignment.

Maturity requires that you become the mature adult within, fully responsible, fully aware that you have within all that you need, desire, and subscribe to in others as necessary for true growth. Maturity is the process of taking control of your life with certain rules, expectations, and guidelines to keep you safe, healthy, and aware, but also to open you up to experiences and adventures with a measure of daring that lead to growth. Maturity means offering the self access to all that is necessary with a measure of firmness connected to knowing just how much you can handle and how far you can go before you lose your equilibrium.

Maturity is true knowing of self. It is being in charge of self at all times. It is asking the self to stay upon the path of awareness, to seek inner growth in whatever world you exist in. Maturity asks that you always consider the greater meaning, that you find the reason but also the purpose for all that challenges you, confronts you, befalls you, or comes to frighten you. Why must you have such distress in your life? Well, by remaining in your mature position of balance, your ideal adult self, you will be in the place of openness and awareness, but also safety and comfort, so that, with your adult self firmly in control and leading you forward, you may further explore your deeper issues.

In maturity, you may successfully explore other worlds and return more balanced and centered. In maturity, you may trust the self more fully and allow the self to move beyond the world before you to the possibilities that each new day offers. With maturity your intuition may open up to you, your doubt may sink away and your truth be clearly heard. By the mature self may you be self-guided, knowing that the universe is supporting you because that is already a given to the mature self, just as it is to the innocent self.

In balance of maturity and innocence will you open new doors within the self, and your progress will manifest in new doors opening outside of you as well. In full maturity will you finally understand your purpose and the greater meaning of life in general, but your own life most specifically. For you will not be afraid of your own truths, and you will no longer run and hide from your fears but confront them consistently and concisely; clearly aware that they are steering you to where to go, to what to confront, and to how to live your life.

With maturity you will grow more certain that your life is most meaningful, that you have nothing to fear, that you are good, capable, knowledgeable and that you are fully outfitted for greater work beyond the self. With maturity you will evolve.

Find, today, your maturity within. Anchor your innocent self to this adult self and, locking hands, proceed on your journey in the safety of self. You know how to be mature, just as you know how to be innocent, even if you are not practiced in either aspect. You just have to step into the role and be what you know are the true actions of maturity and innocence, in fairness, compassion and love, with an eye always on evolving in that world, centered on inner work manifesting in outer work. That is maturity in balance: accepting that both worlds, and the work in both worlds, is legitimate and absolutely necessary in order to change and evolve the self and the world outside of you.

Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR