Category Archives: Chuck’s Blog

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.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Face, Feel, Absorb

Leave a comment
Face the self and find the light... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Face the self and find the light…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

After the death of Alyce, his wife of fifty-some years, Elmer Green set about a recapitulation journey, revisiting many of the actual places they had journeyed to in their life together. He called this journey “encountering his Nostalgias,” a process of reliving previous experiences that he now fully faced, fully felt, and fully absorbed in energetic essence. As he neutralized each nostalgia in the process, putting it to rest, restoring the various landscapes of prior experience to their objective, present reality, he reclaimed the fullness of his energy in the process.

In fact, when invited to give a lecture in Philadelphia at Temple University, he refused the offer of a plane ticket and instead insisted on driving the distance from his home in Kansas in order to experience the nostalgias connected with a trip he and Alyce had taken along the same route in 1971.

“I don’t want to short-change those memories by…flying overhead,” he wrote in The Ozawkie Book of the Dead. As he explained further: “…I searched for and interrogated, and absorbed, nostalgias. Thus freeing Alyce from personality bonds and weight from me, and freeing me to live in the present rather than in the past.”

The shamanic practice of recapitulation does not require that one revisit the actual landscapes of one’s life experiences, as they are all deeply impressed in the subconscious landscape and body self anyway and can be accessed through shifting one’s focus to the details of those prior life experiences within, accompanied by the side-to-side sweeping breath of recapitulation. Nonetheless, as Elmer discovered, there is great value in returning to actual settings. The triggers of nostalgias brought on by travel provide an immediate opportunity to shift into a recapitulation, to relive and retrieve the golden energy entwined and ensnared in places and experiences of the past.

The emphasis on a willingness to FACE—to allow the self to open to the fullness of emotionally charged experience—is the first challenge. The adult self must take charge, exercise its volition and willingness to be fully present to what it might encounter as it takes the journey with its younger self.

Feeling: energy seeking release... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Feeling: energy seeking release…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The journey into memory requires the fullness of FEELING—this is what distinguishes recapitulation from mere memory recall. Reliving means fully feeling the emotional energy stored in and attached to a nostalgia or memory, pleasant or traumatic.

Interestingly, nostalgic and traumatic memory can be equally potent in emotional charge, and equally split off and protected from conscious realization as well. It’s the intensity of the energies contained in the nostalgias and memories that we are protected from, until the adult self achieves the grounding and willingness to face and feel those emotional intensities. They are transmuted in recapitulation, disentangled from the persons and places of the past as they are relived.

In shamanic terms, this disentangled energy is freed to come home to the self, as Elmer points out, while also freeing others from being entangled with it as well. And in Kundalini terms, it is freed to rise to the higher chakras. It is cleansed, smoothed over, through the taming of the energies in the recapitulation process.

As the adult self withstands the impact of reliving past experiences, a light is shown upon the objective truth of those experiences. This includes a fuller view of who the players truly were in the experience, as the archetypal energies and dramas fall away, and only the truth remains.

The confusions, beliefs, and incomplete processing of a prior experience is finally allowed to be fully digested as the defensive casings fall away. What emerges is a factual knowing of the full experience, now devoid of emotional/energetic charge.

ABSORPTION is the next phase of the journey. Perhaps a child self, a child’s innocence, is finally freed to join the personality and enjoy its rightful place in the life of the personality.

Perhaps a nostalgic experience with a loved one, long held at bay because of withheld emotions of sadness connected with loss, will finally be allowed to be absorbed as ethereal love, which sends one deeper into a Cosmic journey. Fully absorbing the intimacy of a prior love frees one to go deeper into love, in this life and beyond.

Absorb: soak up, soak in, be absolved of... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Absorb: soak up, soak in, be absolved of…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In either case, the energy once trapped in an experience is returned to the self in a living, unified way, as an outer experience becomes a neutral fact laid to rest, no longer an attachment that binds one’s energy to this world or to another being.

To Face, Feel, and Absorb all our nostalgias and traumas is to find the wholeness that will allow us to take our next journey in infinity, beyond our prolonged reincarnation journeys on this magnificent planet Earth. We are then ready to launch into new experiences and adventures in infinity, fully imbued with and capable of giving the deepest love.

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Attachments Anonymous

Leave a comment
We are all students in Earth School! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We are all students in Earth School!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Earth is the Planet of Attachment. Earth School teaches us to securely attach our spirit selves to our physical animal selves—with its myriad of physical needs and desires—and, ultimately, to relinquish all our physical attachments as we return to our pure spirit selves enriched with the fruits of our earthly journey.

The crown jewel of achievement from that Earth School journey is attachment refined, transformed into its highest vibration: love.

Attachment and detachment are the themes of the curriculum of Earth School. Once we master those themes we graduate to new adventures, graduate schools of our liking in greater infinity, enriched and fueled by compassionate love in its eternal form, having been prepared, through our hard work in Earth School, to accompany us on our continued expansive journey in infinity.

Given these considerations, I feel justified in assigning Earth School the title of Attachments Anonymous, extending the twelve-step model to all sentient beings, as we are all on the same journey, seeking to achieve loving kindness, compassion, and detachment.

I recently consulted the I Ching around this issue and received hexagram #24: Return, the Turning Point. In this hexagram, one yang line sits beneath five yin lines. This preponderance of yin is the Earth, the dark solid planet of attachment, all things physical. Emerging from below is thunder, spirit that rumbles beneath the Earth.

The hexagram depicts the cyclical challenge of Earth School, life lived in the patterns of the seasons. We see in our own lives and behaviors the cyclical patterns of our attachments, such as to food, drink, sex, money, power, security, shopping, texting, fear, anger, sadness, carnal and dependent love, to name but a few.

All of our attachments manifest in cyclical patterns of seeking, obtaining, consuming, or lamenting. Even refusing is its own addictive adventure of control, as the “dry drunk” syndrome illustrates.

Spirit always finds a way to alert us... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Spirit always finds a way to alert us…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

There is no escaping addiction, which is really a frenzied state of attachment that we all suffer from and are dominated by at some point in our lives. Addiction provides the core course material of Earth School. Save all guilt and self-blame; if you are here you are in it! Even Christ and Buddha had to go through Earth School.

Hexagram #24 teaches us that the cyclic pattern of attachments NATURALLY gives rise to one moment in the cycle when spirit, on its own, makes an appearance and shakes us from our attachments. Here lies the opportunity to advance beyond compulsion of attachment—this is the Turning Point.

The usual course of all habits is like the seasons, as they too return to the same patterns. But the spirit side of ourselves, in consort with our consciousness, through collaboration, can actually transform an attachment into spiritual advancement. For example, a compulsion might find a new home in loving compassion.

This is why the twelve-step program suggests turning to one’s higher power for help, to enrich one’s struggle with grace and lift the compulsion to a positive level. The I Ching describes this process in the moving line in the third place in hexagram #24, as follows:

“There are people of a certain inner instability who feel a constant urge to reverse themselves. There is danger in continually deserting the good because of uncontrolled desires, then turning back to it again because of a better resolution. However, since this does not lead to habituation in evil, a general inclination to overcome the defect is not wholly excluded.”

The suggestion here is that the usual course of affairs—becoming buried in hungry desirousness—has the possibility of being transcended, if one can access one’s spirit at the turning point.

We can all rise up! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We can all rise up!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The turning point offers the opportunity of renewal through rest (compulsion lifted), tender care (compassion for all parts of the self), and flowering, as the spirit of kundalini energy naturally rises to the level of the heart. This is not hungry heart, but a heart full of loving compassion.

Spirit rising to the heart center is the spiritual refinement of the earthly self, the body self, which is granted enhanced life beyond its time in earthly form, in the formlessness of pure spirit love.

This is graduation from Earth School with the highest honors!

Studying hard,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Activating Change-Staying Put

Leave a comment

I woke up contemplating the topic of my blog. The image of a turtle on a stump in the middle of Tivoli Bays, encountered on a canoe trip the other day, had stayed with me. I sat quietly and still while Jan channeled the Tuesday morning Soulbyte. The message she wrote sealed it, the topic of my blog became clear: change through stillness—the molting turtle.

Molting in progress... - Photo by Erica Ketchel
Molting in progress…
– Photo by Erica Ketchel

It’s early spring in the Bays. All prepare for new life. Our trip was somewhat disruptive to the busy beavers, hunting eagles, wading herons, and the nesting geese. Most astonishing was the sighting of a statuesque, prehistoric looking turtle, perched on a log barely peeking above the water at low tide. At first, the question was: Is it really what it appears to be? Or is it simply a projection, the mind’s misinterpretation of matter that frequently shape-shifts things in this magical place?

Sure enough, it was what it appeared to be. As we approached, the turtle’s head appeared shiny and alive. Amazingly, it remained frozen, so contrary to the escapist behavior turtles usually employ when encountering human curiosity. The canoe drifted closer and the turtle form became increasingly evident, but still the questions arose. Could it really be alive? Is it somehow impaled on the stump? Then the canoe bumped right into the log; I could not control it and was frozen myself, not wanting to push off from the log and disturb this perched creature.

It was an amazingly powerful scene. What sat before us was a turtle whose outermost shell was molting, the sun’s deep rays hastening the peeling and flaking of its outer crust. Unfortunately, our closeness eventually overwhelmed its powerful intent to submit to the sun and it dove into the water for its own protection, in search of solitude to continue its transformative process in privacy.

The turtle’s journey of change so simply and eloquently mirrors our own, though we humans must employ consciousness to enact this ancient archetypal program of change.

The sun is our spirit energy, the kundalini energy of our energy body that infuses itself in our physical spine. In the first half of life that spirit energy must find its footing in the physical world, first lodging in the sacrum.

As we grow and mature the kundalini energy rises to our reproductive center where nature claims it for its own survival needs.

As we make our way into the world we need the confidence of autonomy and so the kundalini funds our ego stability at the level of the solar plexus, where we experience confidence and the extreme challenges of power and competition in this world.

As we approach the chasm of midlife—or in many instances much younger in today’s rapidly changing world—we approach the great ocean that must be crossed to reach the level of the heart, where truth, love, and compassion extend to all interdependent life.

With each of these rising changes we are challenged, like the turtle on the log, to stay contained, as the heat of kundalini rises in its upward ascent. If we can provide a sealed channel to the rising energy, it will ascend to the next level. But this does require stillness and containment, especially when the energy of the full moon beckons us to release and attach to the pleasures of the world.

If, for instance, the sexual urge of the second chakra is always catered to as it demands and beckons, how can we advance a relationship dominated by the compulsion of more? How, at the level of personal power, are we to advance if we allow the kundalini to leak out and attach to more possessions or conquests, as it so desires? Without the choice of containment that the turtle exemplifies, our spirit remains imprisoned in the dense desires of this world.

Sun is kundalini rising... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Sun is kundalini rising…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

When we, as we must in our journey upward, explore and indulge in the kundalini attachments at the various stages, we are like the turtle that dives into the water, offsetting the drying-out transformation, as we binge in some form in this world. The process of absorbing and bearing the heat of containment, for our spirit to rise and change our focus, and for appreciation of our greater reason for being in this world, we must wait for another sunny day, beyond another Groundhog Day, when we are ready to steady for change.

I thank that turtle for so bravely bearing the tension of our intrusion, while also sharing one of life’s simplest yet most challenging of lessons: Activating change requires staying put and bearing the tension, as our defensive shell molts and sheds and our spirit rises to greater truth.

Seeking a new log for molting,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Buffalo Soldier

Leave a comment
Life reflects the dilemma of our energy body... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Life reflects the dilemma of our energy body…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

The human body is an animal. The human animal is the host of the energy body, the mental and emotional part of ourselves that generates the thoughts and desires that largely determine the fate of our physical, animal body.

It is the energy body that leaves our physical form upon physical death. Yet, while in physical form, this separate energy body—or soul—controls, like a dog on a leash, the activities of the physical body in daily life, determining its health and care.

Our food choices are not made by the physical body; they are made by the desires and rules of the energy body. Our sleep patterns too are largely determined by the wants and interests of the energy body.

Our obsession with pets is largely a projection of empathy and love for our animal physical body selves, largely dominated by the whims of our energy body. Our energy body is a more subtle body that tends to use the physical body to experience its wants and ideas through the sensory systems available in the human body, thus the pleasures of excitement can be played out in the sweets and spices we consume in our food and drink.

Left to its own natural predilection, the human animal self might select food that it really needs to remain in optimal health. Mental constructions, however, result in behaviors that often override the body’s true needs, either through restriction or overindulgence. Rarely is the human animal body ever included in decisions that reflect its wellbeing, rather it simply goes along with the dictates of the subtler energy body.

Last week, fifteen buffalo herded together and broke through the confines of a ranch in Rensselaer County in upstate New York. They swam across the Hudson River and then sauntered across a major interstate highway until they were finally slaughtered in nearby woods. They utilized the power of their innate archetypal herding instinct to break through their condition of servitude. I can’t help but applaud those buffalo soldiers as they danced their final dance in this world in utter freedom.

Two days later, Gaia herself violently shook her body self as thousands were swallowed in Nepal, that most ancient holy country. What is the message here, in these two recent examples of energy gone wild?

We are all energy beings entwined with physical animal bodies, our hosts while in physical life, charged with treating the earth with spiritual leadership. When we tyrannize the earth, the animals, and even our own animal selves, treating them as playthings for our ethereal pleasures, then Gaia, the buffalo, and our own physical bodies rebel and refuse to be partners on our spiritual journey.

Our mission as energy bodies entwined with our animal host selves, on a spiritual level, is to resolve our karmic challenges with the materials that life on earth offers us. Our gift to the earth in exchange is to enliven the spirit potential of this physical world to evolve itself in new directions.

The sketch Jan made in her journal as she contemplated her dream...
The sketch Jan made in her journal as she contemplated her dream…

The problem for humans is that their purest spirit intentions, as they come into physical life, get clouded over in the rich darkness of earth’s soil. It’s our journey in this life to release our karma as we journey from the darkness to find our way back to the light of spirit—pure consciousness of the truth. This morning Jan awoke with a dream that clarifies and illustrates the drama of this dilemma.

Here is Jan’s dream as she described it to me: “Come on, I said, let’s take a walk. I thought I was walking with another person. My observer self, who hovered behind and above me, however, pointed out: It has no legs! As I turned to look at the being beside me, I saw that I was walking beside a large paper-thin black square out of which hung a tendril of root. The root almost touched the ground as the sheet of blackness floated beside me. I realized that this black shadowy figure was my ego. Then I realized that everything that I am and seek to be is inside me; I am all I need. Ego was a shadow entity that inhabited me, clearly not human. I realized I no longer needed it. I knew that I just had to follow the Tao.”

The shadow square of Jan’s dream is a mandala, the representation of the spirit embodied in the energy body who then projects its ethereal self into the physical body as an ego. The ego is the spirit, or energy body representative, rooted in the physical body. But the truth is, it has no legs. It’s really an empty shadow. However, in human life it becomes the active force, the ruler of life. In its shadow state it is not oriented to spirit and uses the energy body for its own desires and appetites. This exploitation has resulted in the protests of Gaia and her buffalo, who bravely contest our inferior leadership.

The resolution of our human karmic dilemma is for the spirit’s energy body representative in human form, the ego, to find its way and eventually acquiesce to the dictates of the heart chakra, where the true intent of the spirit resides in what Aurobindo called the Psychic Being.

The quest for freedom requires that the ego self, like the buffalo, must lead itself out of the confines of servitude to the physical and into the light, graciously giving up its life for the evolution of the spirit. In the final analysis, the march for freedom is always death of the physical, ego included.

The heart chakra center of the energy body is grounded in the Tao and knows only truth, compassion, and right action. The Tao elevates everything to a spiritual level. Humanity elevated to this level sheds its shadow ego and aligns with the light of spirit, burning through its karma and leading earth into proper balance and evolution. It is the goal of all our spirits.

Chuck dancing with the spirit of the buffaloes... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Chuck dancing with the spirit of the buffaloes…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Our dear animal friends, the buffalo, teach us that tyranny is wrong action and that the quest for freedom is all that matters. This is spirit lived at the highest level, life shedding the tyranny of illusion, marching forward into the unknown, bringing light into new frontiers.

I honor those mighty Buffalo Soldiers, as did Bob Marley: Buffalo Soldier.

Dancing with the buffalo soldiers,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Finding The True Heart

Leave a comment

Don Juan’s fundamental guidance to Carlos Castaneda was to choose a path with heart, for “a path with heart is easy—it does not make a warrior work at liking it; it makes for a joyful journey; as long as a man [or woman] follows it, he [she] is one with it.” *

We all have a two-part heart... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We all have a two-part heart…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Here don Juan speaks to what Sri Aurobindo called being in alignment with the Divine Spark, the Psychic Being hidden in the cave at the center of the heart chakra. To realize the truth of this Divine Spark as one’s path in this life is to truly find and traverse one’s path with heart. And yet, the heart is of two parts, its emotional side offering “an obscure and often uncertain and misleading power,” as Aurobindo states, as well as behind that emotional heart, “a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition…has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer the Divine that the human intellect in its pride of knowledge.” ** This second, mystical heart, is the heart that is hidden in the cave at the center of the heart chakra, this is the true heart that seeks and recognizes a path with heart.

On a physical level the heart is the center of life and vitality in the body. There is no physical life without a heartbeat. The movement of the heart distributes energy to every cell of the body to enable all cells to act. This action extends to emotional life, where feelings spur human action and interaction.

Aurobindo states: “…there is in front in men a heart of vital emotion similar to the animal’s, if more variously developed; its emotions are governed by egoistic passion, blind instinctive affections and all the play of the life-impulses with their imperfections, perversions, often sordid degradations,—heart besieged and given over to the lusts, desires, wraths, intense or fierce demands or little greeds and mean pettinesses of an obscure and fallen life-force and debased by its slavery to any and every impulse.” **

Here Aurobindo refers to the heart’s action capacity as being under the dominance of the three lower chakras, animal instincts ruled by the archetypal governances or gods of the planetary being at its purely survival mode, as well as a mixture of ego-willfulness supplanting nature’s imperative to its own self-serving ends. (See last week’s blogpost for further explanation: Beyond Archetypal Bondage)

Here arises confusion at the heart center, for though the emotional heart dominates through much of life this irrational emotive center is incapable of guiding the true needs of the Self, the higher being that we all are. This part of the heart chakra, with all its powerful emotionality, provides the justification for the rise to order and reason of the rational mind, as it insists on its superiority and hegemony over the vagaries of the feeling heart.

Rationality is like a predator, constantly swooping in to reassert its presence... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Rationality is like a predator, constantly swooping in to reassert its presence…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Aurobindo comments: “This mixture of the emotive heart and the sensational hungering vital creates in man a false soul of desire; it is this that is the crude and dangerous element which the reason rightly distrusts and feels a need to control, even though the actual control or rather coercion it succeeds in establishing over our raw and insistent vital nature remains always very uncertain and deceptive.” ***

Unfortunately, attempts at rational control over emotive behavior, or cognitive behavioral therapy, rarely quell the base impulses raging in the heart. More often than not they are sentenced to the prison of the shadow unconscious where they lie in wait, scheming their next disruptive moves. The apparent calm after the storm is generally short-lived.

How many times couples find themselves immediately reignited in a conflict, after a voluntary break for calming and cooling, reflects the thin veil of control reason holds over the fiery energy of an ignited heart.

Though reason might offer a pause, it cannot settle matters of the true heart. For don Juan, reason would be a false path, not the path that could be guided by spirit. How then does one go about achieving the quiet heart, of locating “the true invisible heart hidden in the luminous cave” *** of the heart center, and truly find a path with heart.

Tibetan Buddhism has developed the practice of Tonglen breathing where the fire of emotion is allowed to burn off and transform in the heart center, through breathing in the fire that wants to attack or attach outwardly and breathing out a cooler breath of compassion. This is an alchemical process of transforming emotional heat into the steady flame of cool luminosity utilizing the heart chamber as the retort, or flask, to burn off the impurities of the lower chakras to arrive at truth and compassion. Once we find our way to true compassion, compassion that is not tainted with sympathy, empathy, or guilt, we’ve entered the cave of objective truth where the cool Divine Spark glows in all its luminosity.

Behind the known heart lies the cave of the luminous heart... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Behind the known heart lies the cave of the luminous heart…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The I Ching in the hexagram Ken, the Mountain, hints at the practice of yoga as a method to still the restlessness of the heart, another alchemical process. Regardless of methodology, the essence of an alchemical practice is to contain the energy of the lower chakras that would drive the heart to outbursts of emotive activity. Through containment of this emotional energy a transformation takes place whereby the cave of the hidden mystical heart appears. Then the Psychic Being, the true higher Self, is available to come forth and take the reins in right action.

In opening access to the true heart chakra where the Psychic Being resides, that inmost link to Divine Soul, only truth and compassion flow. As Aurobindo states: “It is as this psychic being in him grows and the movements of the heart reflect its divinations and impulsions that man becomes more and more aware of his soul, ceases to be a superior animal, and, awakening to glimpses of the godhead within him, admits more and more its intimations of a deeper life and consciousness and an impulse towards things divine.” ****

The path to unveil the hidden heart is truly the path with heart.

With compassion,
Chuck

References:
* The Wheel of Time, Castaneda, p. 19
** The Psychic Being, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, p 26
*** The Psychic Being, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, p 27
**** The Psychic Being, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, p 27-28