Welcome to Chuck’s Place! This is where Chuck Ketchel, LCSW-R, expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Currently, Chuck posts an essay once a week, currently on Tuesdays, along the lines of inner work, psychotherapy, Jungian thought and analysis, shamanism, alchemy, politics, or any theme that makes itself known to him as the most important topic of the week. Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy page.
As 2025 comes to an end and the New Year begins, we would like to thank everyone who has traveled with us, those who are new to our work and those who have followed our work for a long time. We are full of gratitude for the journey we have all taken together.
Some of you have accompanied us from the very beginning, when we first created and launched our website, and others have found your way to us through word of mouth or happenstance. Riverwalker Press has been around now for twenty years! Wow!
It is always our pleasure to share what we learn about life, to make some small but hopefully meaningful contributions as we figure out the worlds we inhabit, our mysterious inner world and our equally mysterious outer world as well.
As we step into 2026, we bring you a new offering. Our Soulbytes will be published every day of the week, including Saturdays and Sundays, so there will be no interruptions in guidance from the Universe. The Universe is always ready to communicate. So are we!
As we all pull back into the quietude of the season, we wish everyone a calm and peaceful holiday season, ringed round with joy and permeated with love. May the New Year bring the gift of good fortune and good will to everyone, at home and around the world, in all worlds.
A Christmas story. Like Jung, Jeanne and I had no heartfelt attachment to any spiritual tradition but, with raising children, felt the responsibility to embody the magic of life through participation in some spiritual tradition. Like many befuddled parents we brought Spirit to life in living the myth of Santa Claus with our young children.
One of our sons was so deeply living the myth of Santa that he was impervious to the inevitable growing doubts of his peers, who were experiencing the primal wounding to their innocence, that right of passage, that ushers in the ascendence of the rational mind with its logical protection of the self from future deceptions and woundings.
As I recall, after a Tae Kwon Do class, when the truth of Santa had broken through to my son, he pointblank asked his mother why she had lied to him? Without skipping a beat, Jeanne explained that, though Santa was a myth, the magic was real, and that Christmas honored the truth of that magic, through Santa, for children, until they were ready to take charge of the magic within themselves.
So what is the magic? Christianity projected a divine savior for humanity onto the God/human personhood of Jesus Christ. The New Thought philosophical tradition came to understand this story as the awakening in humanity to the fact of our own divinity, ready to be claimed by taking charge of the relationship between our conscious and subconscious minds.
The human mind is divine. The magic is that everything we believe becomes suggestions to the subconscious mind, which then has the power to manifest those beliefs into the actual ‘flesh and blood’ of our lives. What we believe always serves as the architect of our ongoing lives.
To take conscious command of those beliefs is the key to abundance, in all areas of existence. To exercise that ability for the greater good of self, and all, is to fully ground one’s divine potential in truth.
Whatever we believe, good or bad, is an exercise of our divine power and will lead to actual manifestation. However, to fully benefit, one must be in alignment with truth; versus the errors of illusion that manifest in chaos, such as is grossly evident upon the world stage of now.
Last week, my blog pondered the question, “What is the matter with me?” The answer was, and is, the spirit, or thought, that is behind the matter, or current physical manifestation, of my life. The answer to this week’s question—”What is right with me?”—is the prescription for positive manifestation.
Every time I answer the question—”What is right with me?”—I define for my subconscious mind the fullness and brightness of self that I intend to manifest, via suggestion, to my magical subconscious mind. It is equally possible to reinforce a more limited version of self, through reciting and reinforcing negative beliefs about myself, those which I might habitually repeat daily. We are indeed magical beings, capable of manifesting either our heart’s desire or our greatest fears.
The trick is to consistently convert those limited habitual thoughts of self into expansively positive and life-enhancing thoughts of unlimited possibilities. Best to exercise the magic in emphasizing what is truly right with me! In this way, the magic still lives on in Santa’s gifts to self!
Ultimately, it’s all good. We will grow from all we manifest, and eventually find our way home to the fullness and magic of self.
Spirit and Matter are inseparably One. Yang, the creative, finds its physical expression in Yin, the receptive. In this moment, as I write, a son of mine texts me that while driving his car last night the word star unthinkingly escaped his lips, and suddenly, a falling star appeared before him!
Every word we say, positive or negative, is spirit, which is then physically expressed, like my son’s falling star. The star is the radiant spirit of pure truth, expressed through the matter of the star, the anima mundi, or the soul, of the world.
Everything that happens in our lives is of divine origin, that divinity being both the mental thought and the subconscious substance that brings it to physical life. We might indeed object to the suggestion that we intend negative events in our lives. In fact, we might argue that we consciously intend only positive occurrences. Yet, we must face the fact that like attracts like, and only what we attract will materialize in our lives.
This brings us to the question, when things materialize not as we intend, “What is the matter with me?” The matter, of course, is what we physically manifest.
If we begin by suspending the judgment of blame and instead assume the innocence of Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, we next pull back the curtain within and identify the true wizard/spirit behind our current manifestation in matter.
Very often, we may then discover that a very old thought that we have long forgotten has taken up residence in the habit section of our subconscious mind, and continues to automatically shape our physical lives according to the instructions imbedded in its belief.
This now unconscious belief acts as interference to the conscious suggestion we are currently seeking to manifest in our lives. Once we are aware of this blocking belief, we become enabled to defy it!
One approach to defiance is to engage the old belief and express gratitude to it for its necessary role in our past, when it shaped our reality to best protect us and secure our growth, however constricted. This belief is then awakened to the changed circumstances of now, where we are ready to advance beyond an old construction of self into new vistas of creative fulfillment.
This approach may neutralize the energy of the blocking belief, which now excitedly joins in the present suggestion of change to the subconscious mind. However, if it remains reticent to change, the conscious mind might aggressively flood the subconscious mind with emotionally charged positive suggestions that, once the energy accrues to the necessary level, causes the subconscious mind to abandon the old habit and manifest the new.
Beyond the issue of blocking belief, is a more basic relationship issue, what I call the Gemini Challenge, as Geminis foundationally confront reconciling polarities, particularly the ultimate relationship between spirit and matter. This is, of course, a challenge presented to all of humankind, but for Geminis this may be the central challenge of a lifetime.
If we favor the spirit personality in the fundamental bipolar oneness of spirit and body, we tend to be dominated by mind, and can tend to live outside the body, in illusory states of inflation or, at the opposite extreme, in deflated states of mental rumination. At times this can devolve into a state of intense mental cruelty, where the spirit weeps for its supposed failures in physical form.
When identified more with the material side of the dual personality, we might be drawn into obsession with physical concerns, or imagined limitations generated by spirit thought. These, of course, are very likely to physically manifest, as body is governed by thought. The Gemini challenge is heightened by, at times, abrupt shifts to opposite perspectives that question what is real and right.
The resolution to this unsettling marital relationship between mind and body lies in mutual respect and equanimity. Spirit is not superior to body; they are full equals, reflections of each other. Matter exists and is real, even if it is ultimately but an interpretation of energy. Beneath a solid interpretation of matter is simply free-flowing energy, without definition. Divinity is dormant if it can’t be experienced in the adventure of form.
The answer to the question, “What is the matter with me?” is ultimately the question of, “What spirit am I manifesting?” If I am under-appreciating or negative toward either my spirit or physical self, I will constellate the spirit of aggression and the matter of an inner civil war.
If I direct my spirit’s attention outwardly, toward the star, and engage my spirit for the greater good of self and other, my physical manifestations will happily reflect such love, for self and other. The matter with me is then confidence, contentment, and fulfillment in the full radiance of physical form.
One of the truths that will leave its permanent mark upon the human mind, as the Aquarian Age we are currently in matures, is that divinity is an inside job.
We all possess a divine directive conscious mind that wields the power of suggestion, as well as a divine receptive subconscious mind that exercises the power of physical creation itself. The conceptive intercourse between this divine couple, more than any other factor, will determine the course of the life we manifest.
The divine conscious mind, given the name ego, is hardly aware of its royal heritage and power, yet it nonetheless exercises its divine prerogative of free will in the expression of its thoughts, beliefs and desires. In response, the divine subconscious mind dutifully manifests these suggestions while independently managing the operations necessary for the survival and growth of the human body.
From the place of transcendent truth, the state of our personal lives, as well as the current state of the world, is wholly the result of ego suggestions to the subconscious mind, both individually and collectively. From the knowing of transcendent wisdom, these suggestions are largely in error, as they threaten absolute destruction of self and all.
Why then, would our divine progenitors, our inner divine parents, allow such dangerous choices? Furthermore, why would these divine parents fund—that is, provide the energy for—such errant decisions?!
In the recent George Clooney movie, Jay Kelly, on Netflix, Timothy, the child therapist character, makes the tragic point about parenting that, “We are only successful once we’ve made ourselves irrelevant.” In order to become irrelevant to our children, they must truly not need us, even if, from a wisdom perspective, they still do.
To not need us means they are assuming full responsibility for their lives. It truly matters not what their choices are, good or bad; it matters that they learn to assume responsibility for them.
How could any of us learn to think and grow if we simply obeyed all the rules? The rules, great and small, are all products of the habitual mind passed down from others’ experiences. They don’t truly become meaningful until they become alive as a consequence of our personal experiences.
Parents do well to defer to the ultimate parent of all, the Law of Cause and Effect or the Karma of our actions. All decisions, good or bad, have their consequences. We grow by suffering the consequences of our decisions.
Our divine progenitors are interested in us becoming truly mature. Hence, they remain present but dormant, unless earnestly consulted by our student ego, at which time they will tell us the truth, from their perspective. They always allow us the full freedom of our choices and the consequences of those choices.
Even in a Near Death Experience (NDE), many souls are, at the ego level of consciousness, asked to assume responsibility for their choice to continue in their current human life or to move into life beyond the human form. Sometimes it is Karma that commandeers that decision.
We are the judge and jury of our own lives. We are not punished for our actions. Karma is simply the natural consequence of our decisions. Of course, if we solicit the guidance and feedback from our inner divine parents, they will respond with their thoughtful wisdom. However, they will not assume responsibility for our own answers to life’s challenges—this is an impossibility.
As Kahlil Gibran, the Persian mystic, clarifies in The Prophet, regarding our children: “For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” [p. 21]
To be sure, our children must forge the virgin territory of their future with support, but, ultimately, on their own. And we must let them go, even to let them suffer the inevitable woundings of life.
Truthfully, we are all forever divine children. And if we abandon the innocence of curious openness to the unknown, our journey ends. And then we must live in the boring prison of “knowing it all”, until we are ready to resume the hero’s journey of new discovery, now, and beyond this life.
All journeys involve woundings, those of our children and our own as well, but those woundings are the doors through which we change and grow, allowing us to mature into our full potential.
The challenge, through our repetition of our many errors, is to comfortably retire our illusions, and allow our ego to become the mature child that lives its innocence while it also serves the truth of the Divine Self, which funds all its whims, that it may more fully awaken to the splendor of the truth of its divinity.
No shame for any and all sins. They are all divine errors, way stations on our definitive journey. And there is no one, or nothing, to forgive, except perhaps the ego, for all its divine errors. Our ultimate challenge is to assume responsibility, with equanimity, for it all.
Our time will surely be remembered as one of a rapid shift in ruling beliefs. The shamans of ancient Mexico characterized civilization as a fixation point of assembled beliefs that are agreed upon by the collective human race and hence deliver us to the consensual reality we live in.
At present, that fixation point has been dislodged, as the world currently reflects The Tower card of the Tarot deck, where an all-consuming fire burns away all previously established order. As we live through this time of great transition, we are shown daily how rapidly new beliefs can materialize into physical reality.
Beliefs are the prime movers and building blocks of reality. Tremendous efforts are evident in social media to fixate our attention upon new beliefs that support living in a new reality. Television stations incessantly present points of view that justify their version of a new reality. All these influences upon the mind of the consumer seek to enlist its divine power of creation to build and fixate upon this new proposed reality.
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a healer in Maine during the 1860s, came to the understanding that humans were gifted with the godly power of creation in the thoughts they attach to as core beliefs, which then, from the center of the magical subconscious mind, materialize into physical reality.
Quimby never questioned the truth of a patient’s symptoms or physical ailments. Belief does generate physical reality. Nonetheless, he realized that one could potentially become dislodged from a belief that generated ill health, and become attached to a new belief of health, that would, in turn, generate a cure. This is evident in the power of the placebo effect.
Quimby once worked with a soldier, who suffered from the phantom pain of an injured arm despite it being amputated. When the soldier was cured of his disbelief that he had lost his arm, the phantom pain disappeared. His initial belief that he still had his arm required the very real experience of its continued physical pain. Once in acceptance of the loss of his arm, he was freed from the need to create the pain that had accompanied the injured arm.
Our core beliefs are formed in early childhood, where we are largely socialized by our family units. Although, as we enter adolescence we begin a powerful period of individuation, defining ourselves as individuals separate from our families, many earlier beliefs about ourselves, lodged in the subconscious mind, become foundational and influence us throughout life, despite our later maturity.
The other day, I was assigned the task of dismantling a kid’s Hot Wheel’s Track. I was left completely alone to complete the task and then join up for other activity. Within a very short period of time, I was recapitulating my young self, feeling abandoned, overwhelmed, and frustrated by a monumental task I felt inadequate to perform.
These beliefs generated an anxiety and sadness that overshadowed my effort, though my present self was quite present to the struggle and determined to have a different experience of mastery. Then I broke a piece of the structure, which nearly sent me into a familiar childhood depression. Nonetheless, I stayed present, with patience and persistence.
Eventually, Jan appeared and I shared my experience. Sure that she would know immediately how to dismantle it, she in fact became more befuddled than myself and suggested we just throw out the cheap piece of sh..! We then went on to Google the problem, only to discover that dismantling that track was a major human challenge!
This experience brought to the surface a childhood belief of inadequacy with regard to physical reality, which was suddenly challenged in a big way. In fact, I had managed, with my own intelligence, to successfully separate several difficult pieces.
While recognizing a lack of early childhood parental support and collaboration, I nonetheless am able to dislodge an earlier belief of inadequacy. In fact, a new belief has emerged. Though my expertise is in the science of the soul, and not one of a physical engineer, I nonetheless have basic competency in figuring out the basics of physical life.
I was fascinated and grateful for this opportunity to further grow out of a long-buried limiting belief. Often, we are treated with opportunities for recapitulation that bring to consciousness the power of old beliefs in generating our present physical reality.
Many people struggle with manifesting their dreams, despite ardent efforts at positive suggestions to the subconscious mind. I suggest trusting that the subconscious mind will provide synchronistic guideposts and triggers to the elixir of transformation, recapitulation of fixations in negative beliefs from past life. Be okay with them and use them to your advantage. It’s all part of the journey!
