#553 The Life You Live is of Your Choosing

Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Do you have guidance for us today?

It is time to continue in the flow of your life, accepting that this is where you are now. The questions to ask the self are these: How do I elect to deal with the situation I find myself in? Do I acquiesce and remain aware of the ever-present energy as it guides me? Or do I resist the process of my journey and refuse participation for some reason? What are the deeper reasons for making the decisions and choosing the steps I take in my life? Why do I do what I do? Who is in charge of my life?

Ultimately, the challenges we all face in our lives upon that earth relate very specifically to us alone, though the challenges may be posed by those outside of us. If we keep ourselves isolated from society, with little human contact, that too presents us with our own inner dilemmas. Why must we constantly face challenges? Why can we not simply exist, free of such interruptions? Why must we constantly be making choices and determining what is right? Why must life be so difficult?

These are questions that I hear quite often among those of you who reside upon the earth plane. I can only answer from my own perspective and the journey I have taken thus far. Life upon that earth is full of challenges because it is the greatest feat, the greatest gift, and the greatest opportunity you will ever receive. Your earth time is your learning ground where you have the opportunity, during each lifetime, to assemble all knowledge, in an understanding of energy and the true journey, to reach a point of evolving beyond that place. It is truly a most exciting journey if you become aware of its potential and the possibilities that it offers you.

Do you find it difficult to grasp the ideas of energy and energetic discourse and connection? Is it too farfetched to speak of everything as energy and everything as meaningful? Is it too much to ask that you trust that your journey is, no matter how difficult or seemingly mundane, the perfect journey for you to take at this time?

I am full of questions today! The last one I will ask you is: Have you discovered what it is that you, as an individual entity, are supposed to learn from this life? Study your life intently for the answers. Each one of you has a core challenge to discover and resolve in that lifetime. It may be the same challenge that you have struggled with for many lifetimes, or you may have decided to return with a fresh challenge, having already completed others. The choices to face challenges and to elect to evolve are yours alone. With enlightenment (meaning gaining clarity, awareness, and access to all knowledge) you are also presented with options on what to do next with your energetic self. Whether to elect a new lifetime upon that earth, or to go on to the next level of being is your choice, and this is what I stress next. The life you live is of your choosing.

This topic has been touched upon by many upon that earth who have visited the upper realms of awareness. I can stress that this choice of life challenge is, most often, made in full awareness. It is made by your spirit because it is ready to take on such a challenge to further train the awareness that lies waiting, in each of you, for nurturance and cultivation.

Today, I leave you to ponder the many questions I pose. Only in deep inner questing will you discover who you truly are and why you are there. But remain equally certain that the life you live, the people you meet, the circumstances you are in, and the challenges you face are all part of your own plan for growth. You are the choice maker. You are your own ultimate challenger and teacher. You are your own greatest asset and partner. You are your own greatest gift, offering your self the answers you desire.

Close your eyes and go into your inner silent self. Find the answers to every thing you seek, ready and waiting for you to unearth them. For they have been but slumbering alongside you, waiting for you to recognize them again, as they appear to guide you on your journey. Every thing you encounter has been encountered before, set up by you. Now it is up to you to decide how to proceed, in actuality, based on all the decisions and choices thus far made. You are an evolving being, living an evolving life, unfolding each day toward clarity and growth.

See what happens next. See if you recognize the circumstances. See if you know exactly what to do, without thinking, but by the guidance of your inner self knowing what is right. Good Luck!

#552 Immerse in the Undercurrent of Calm

Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Do you have a message or some guidance for us today?

The energy now will continue to cause great stress, yearning, and even turn quite wild, but underneath it all lies calmness and a new energy of inner peace. Find this undercurrent. Do not simply dabble your feet or fingers in it, but fully immerse your selves in it, My Dears. For it is the energy you have been seeking for a long time. Little did you realize that it was present the whole time. It is always present and ready to receive you, but you must be ready to engage it, to become it, and to fully acquiesce to the fact that this calmness it affords, this clarity, is what you have been seeking.

In times such as these that now reign upon your planet, the calm undercurrent becomes more known and apparent to those with the right seeking mind. This undercurrent resonates with heart-centered knowing and will find its way to alerting you to its presence. It will also offer you access to itself so that you may find it. Your challenge is to finally acquiesce to its beauty, its stability, and its spiritual certainty, though it may not give you the highs and lows of the upper energy.

The upper energy may feed your ego’s desire to be fully engaged, while the lower calm undercurrent is fully available for your spiritual self and your spirit’s endeavors to become more firmly grounded. Even though the upper/outer energy may, at this time, seek quite forcefully to keep you attached to it, you cannot deny that the inner/spiritual self craves something different. Well, I am suggesting that you do not need to go looking very far for what that might be. It is present now. It is available.

How do you get to it? How do you disengage the outer energy that calls so needily, asking for your attention, as a baby calls in the night? How can you leave a helpless baby lying screaming in the night? It is a very difficult thing to do! But look at it this way: Is it really a helpless baby screaming in the night? Or, is it something else that is simply acting like a baby? Are you being called out to test something that the self must learn or do? If so, seek what that lesson is and find that, perhaps, you have passed its test already. If you are still trying to learn the lesson, you must determine why you are being brought to this testing center over and over again. What are you being shown?

Accept your challenges. You are not limited or bad in any way. You are not mean or selfish. You are merely being presented with issues that must be owned and utilized, to their fullest, so that you may move on, having fully learned what you, specifically, must learn from them.

Your detachment must come from fulfillment of your duties based on complete clarity and understanding of what you are being challenged with. Once clarity is gained and your lessons learned and fully owned, as necessary, then it is time to move on, no longer bound by the need to repeat the lesson, but by your spirit’s desire to move on to inner work, inner calm, and the underlying energy of support, love, and complete compassion for the self and others.

Does this make sense?

Yes, I think it does. What does it mean if the outer energy continues to batter us, asking more of us?

It may mean that you must look again and see if there really is something left undone. Or, are you being energetically teased out of your good standing by the entities that have long fed off you and do not like to be left behind? You may find that it is merely the last futile attempt by such entities to see if you have truly learned your lessons and truly moved on.

Remaining grounded in heart-centered inner calm, fully immersed in the energy of the undercurrent that I speak of, will help in discovering the truth of the outer energy. From this place of calm, right knowing will guide you, true resonance of self will come forth, and truth of each situation you are confronted with will be revealed.

Finding your own inner place of calm, your personal undercurrent of good and nurturing energy is what to look for now. It beckons you to find it, to bathe in its safety and protection, and to reside in its knowing, clarity, and stability. You see, all I am saying is that, within you, you hold everything you need and seek. You are complete. You just need to hold off the outer/feeding energy of the world around you, the conjuring mind, and the false presentations. Go innerly and listen to your inner spirit, speaking words of wisdom, telling you to let that outer world go for a while, as you rediscover and reconnect with this aspect of true self. That’s all.

#551 A Day of Reconciliation & Action

Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Do you have a Monday morning message for all of your readers?

My Dear Ones, today is a day of reconciliation. It is a day to realize your transgressions, issues, habits, denials, regressive behaviors, and the repetitive signs showing that you continue to be caught in old patterns, but it is also a day of punctuation and growth. Reconciliation comes to guide and to further you along your path. Do not regard the self as a failure when reviewing the actions and thoughts of the self, but accept the possibility that, individual though you may be, you are equally part of the collective whole.

In order to release the self now into a place of progressive recapitulation and spiritual growth, it is important to understand how the collective whole works to guide and challenge you. Though you may feel that your challenges belong to you alone, be certain that they are afforded you by the same energy that gifts so many others with their own challenges. Do not dismiss others as less challenged, or not in need of guidance as you may think you are, for that is not appropriate behavior for an evolving being. That is the ego delving into self-pity and self-immolation.

Today, this day of reconciliation asks several things of you:

1. Dismantle the aspect of ego that interrupts your evolutionary flow. For each one of you it will be a different aspect of the outer self, but it is nonetheless present to test and tease you. Perhaps it is so well trained in its testing ability that you don’t even know it as ego.

2. Use recapitulation of the ego self to shift from this place that continues to hold you captive. Use it wisely and truthfully to prove to your self, once again, that you have an issue that is most prevalent as a recycler of your energy, repetitively reclaiming it, feeding off it, and generally stealing it from you. This may be in the form of an emotional habit, a physical habit, a mental habit, a greedy habit, a passive habit, or any repetitive habit that continues to emerge as your buddy and your torturer.

3. Reconcile with the inner self on a continual basis in order to maintain a constant connection.

4. Do not reprimand the self for engaging or not attending to any of the above suggestions for growth, but do acknowledge that it is time to take the next step.

This step may come in any form that is personal and directly related to your most prominent issues. However, fully understand that the collective whole and the energy of the collective whole stand behind each and every one of you, and this energy pushes now for reconciliation, ego release, inner attention, and a new step forward; one that has long been procrastinated over, mulled over, pushed for, and held you long enough in a place of indecision.

This step is known. The action that is right has already been revealed. Now is the time to move on. Without regret must you make your next step, My Dears. That is what the energy of reconciliation, recapitulation, and the collective whole is asking of you. It is very good energy today, in spite of your idea that it may not be. Your fears will be allayed as time goes on, for you will experience release as you edge your way closer to this energy that is present to guide you. Ask it to help. Call upon the energy of the universe, the collective whole, and the inner self to guide you through this current moment of reconciliation with the ego self.

Step out now. Take the next step in becoming the true you. It is the right time to take some action that is truly transformative, ego busting, spirit building, and evolutionarily monitored and guided.

#550 Chuck’s Place: Recapitulation-The Boredom Cure

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.

It was don Juan’s contention that what human beings crave more than anything else is the experience of exploration beyond the narrow confines of the everyday world. From a clinical perspective the shaman’s would diagnosis boredom as the core mental health disease in this world.

All of our spiritual endeavors, be they mainstream or alternative, are attempts to shift beyond our rational fixation and experience magic: worlds within our world, worlds beyond our world. All addictions are similar attempts to experience life from a different perspective, to enter the magic. The trouble with addictions is the small print of this Faustian contract. The entity that grants us access to the magic forever holds the keys and we become its slaves, selling our energetic souls for a few moments of release.

In the area of relationship, the experience of falling in love transforms the mundane into the exceptional, another magical world. So powerful is the energetic transformation of “twitterpation” that, despite its transitoriness and lack of relational foundation, we go for it again and again, hook, line and sinker. Today with our technological wizardry there is no end to new possibilities for connection as we twitter, facebook, share, and match in abstract worlds that conquer the limits of space and time. The challenge of the web is its web. We must be careful not to get caught in giving over to this medium our inner ability to access other worlds. The world wide web can become another addiction, another Faustian permutation. We Americans are deeply challenged by this easy access as it so readily serves our dominant extroverted culture and makes it increasingly difficult to be satisfied with our aloneness and solitude.

The shamans discovered that the practice of recapitulation secures, for the individual, inner access to the magic. Every time we relive an earlier experience in our lives we are practicing entering another world, through our own volition. In this current moment I return to an apartment I once lived in. I feel the textures of the floor, of a golden cover on a pool table in the living room. I am seeing Jeanne in her slender long black dress, radiant. I move throughout the rooms encountering the furniture, the feel of the walls, the colors, as I gently move my head from side to side, breathing the recapitulation breath. I feel the mood of that apartment as I slowly encounter every detail.

Now, as I return to this world, I have experienced a minor shift of my assemblage point, having entered that prior world. The more we practice recapitulation, the more we learn how to volitionally shift into other worlds. The shamans suggest that, along with intent, recapitulation further enhances our dreaming abilities. In dreaming, our assemblage points are naturally dislodged, available to transport us into whole new worlds. Through recapitulation we sharpen our ability to become lucid and take charge of these journeys in infinity. The more we recapitulate, the more we enhance our ability to make these magical shifts in our waking life as well.

Recapitulation is a very pragmatic tool, available to everyone, in any moment, to begin the journey into the magic, satisfying our deepest needs to access our hidden potential, overcoming the disease of boredom. Try it!

As usual, should anyone wish to write, I can be reached at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com

Until we meet again,
Chuck

#549 The Moment of Clarity Will Come

Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Do you have a message for us today to guide us through the next few days?

Remain aware of the signs and symbols that appear to guide you. Though you may feel unattached to spirit at this time, so are you constantly being aided and attended to. Though your attention may be busy dealing with outer issues, so are you not left to deal with anything alone. Keep this in mind.

The energy now is forcefully present and revealing all that must be known at this time. Do not push for more than you can reasonably handle or push others to take on more than they can willingly handle either. This is a time of noticing details. This is a time of putting together all the pieces. This is a time of constant revelation. Though clarity may come in bits and pieces a clear picture will eventually emerge.

Whether you are in the midst of recapitulation, change in relationships, dealing with the needs of self or others, finding your way through choices and decisions of importance, or patiently plodding through your life expectantly awaiting the right moment to greet your time of transformation, so do I remind you, today, that this time of revelation may take a while, but eventually the pieces will all fit and the picture will be revealed. At that time your process will become quite clear and your choices will be made known without the foggy distance that now inhibits quick action.

The moment of clarity will come. To some of you it will arrive sooner than for others. To some it will dawn gradually; to others quite quickly, in a single moment’s notice. Your part in the process is to stay on track, to know your feelings, to find your heart-centered truth, and to speak it clearly so that others may know your position though the fog may envelop them. Your clearly stated intent will pierce through the fog no matter how thick or how unyielding it may appear.

Do not retreat from your truths or your knowing of what is right. This is your trial and your challenge during this time of foggy density that may feel as if it will never end. By staying connected to your truths and your right knowing you may even force a natural dissipation of the fog so that things will progress at a faster rate.

Do not get lost in the fog. Ground your self each day in your heart center. It is your beacon of light that will guide you through this time of duality that contains clarity beneath and beyond the density that may feel more apparent. Use your light, your inner light of knowing and truth to remain upon your path. Send your truths straight into the fog and let them land where they must. Follow them with the love of compassion that is your best asset in an evolving world.

Do not hold back, but do not push beyond what is necessary for each moment. You will see that, as each moment arrives, you will know exactly what to do. Keep this awareness present with you each day. You will know what to do as each moment of decision, choice, and challenge arrives, by your heart-centered truth and clarity, and by your inner knowing of right action and right choice.

So you see, My Dears, though you may be feeling somewhat lost in the tumbling energy that is upon you, in truth are you not lost at all. You are exactly where you need to be, living moment to moment, knowing exactly what to do when. Awareness of this is a great tool to carry with you as you confront the fog. Keep in mind that fog is nothing more than a foil, a trick of the energy, a teaching tool training you in awareness of your heart-centered truth. For if you cannot clearly see, what else do you have to fall back on? The answer is: heart-centered knowing, awareness, intuition, truth, and resonance of right action.

Use your inner light to pierce the foggy darkness. The guidance you need is right in front of you. You may not see it, but I know you can feel it!

Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR