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.
“What we’re really seeking is…the rapture of being alive in our bodies…” -Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth*
This quote comes from the man who said, “Follow your bliss.” He directs us to the essence of our human pursuit, to experience energetic vibrance and conscious awareness in our physical bodies. That feeling state of bliss is composed of physical sensation, emotion, and cognition.
This is an in-person experience, the full realization of aliveness in physical form, though it might be experienced in consort with another.
I recently encountered a provocative poem by Sharon Olds that captures the essence of this state of unprojected bliss, in other words, the state in which one takes full ownership of his or her own internal human experience.
Here is the poem, Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds:
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health—just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
Though unstated, this poem, for me, points to the highest love: love without illusion, full embracement and celebration of life within the confines of the self. Of course, our humanness requires that we partake of the sensuous other, that we find deep connection and sharing, reveling and revealing, in another. But at the deepest level we must respect the truth of the separateness of all others, and take up the full realization of our own individual being while in our human form.
The kissing tree… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
This experience of exhilaration in aliveness leads ultimately to feelings of calmness and contentedness, in concert with the awe of aliveness as it pulses through our veins and warms our hearts. This full experience of aliveness is our wholeness that so frequently gets projected outwardly—in being with, having or loving another. This is the trickster nature of our world. It’s really a world of projection where our missingness is reflected all around us, outside of us. How can we help but be compulsively drawn to consume our projected wholeness in some form?!
And pursue we must! It’s imperative that we fully experience our wholeness! But once we’ve burned through the disappointments of unrequited illusive wholeness projections, we are freed to fully embrace our untethered energetic wholeness within ourselves. At first, we might experience this in short spurts, while taking a brief walk in nature or in an encounter with the moon where the euphoria of aliveness waxes through our beings—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
At some point, we might discover the exhilaration of our aliveness in attenuated calm, in every moment, in every encounter—complete wholeness achieved. Ironically, that wholeness in self is, in fact, the most loving interconnected experience with all—no boundaries to love or self.
Intending aliveness,
Chuck
*This quote opened and closed a weekend workshop that I attended with Robert Miller on addiction and feeling states. This blog is, in part, inspired by his message that addiction is our seeking of the rapture of being alive in our bodies. I am in gratitude to him for his work.
Let your intent shine through the burdens of unconscious intent… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
“Saying something aloud is mysterious and magical… The loud and clear voicing of your intent is the secret of secrets. Do it… Assume responsibility to stand in front of the boundless. It isn’t weak; it doesn’t respond to supplication…” -Carlos Castaneda, December 1993, from a lecture at The Phoenix Bookstore in Los Angeles, California.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico contend that we are magical beings. Our magic is to manifest ourselves through stating our intent. It is true that we feel stuck and weighed down in our lives by burdens outside of our control. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico acknowledge this fixation but explain that we find ourselves so burdened because we’ve yet to consciously assume responsibility for our true intent.
We enter this world with a powerful set of inherited programs, what Carl Jung identified as the collective unconscious. The social systems—family and culture—heavily influence which programs become activated, whereby shaping the intent we have manifested in the creation of ourselves.
We internalize the tactical commands of our socialization and repeat them through our internal dialogue, dialogue that daily reconstructs the familiar burdened self that we feel so encrusted in. This is our intent unconsciously manifested.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico recommend that we carefully examine the repetitious patterns of our lives as a first step towards assuming responsibility for our link to our true intent. Unless we can begin to disrupt the commands we give our intent unconsciously, through our internal dialogue, we will not be in a position to state a clear unambiguous, non-contradictory intent.
Finally, Carlos advises that the greater intent of the universe does not respond to supplication, that is, to begging. We must be firm and definite, stating our intent out loud, with true conviction. Do this daily to continuously renew the link to intent, stating it loudly and boldly, while simultaneously observing and discarding the old intents of the molting self. Then we should go on with our lives, knowing that our intent will be realized, in its own time, in its own way.
For the past several months I have enjoyed a major infatuation with a delicious variety of chocolate from The Grenada Chocolate Company. It’s simply the best chocolate I’ve ever eaten. It’s organic and it’s affordable! This past week, I discovered its true energetic origin and now know why it has resonated so deeply with me, for its creator was a man of integrity, energetically aligned with what’s right, with the same spirit of intent that I fully embrace in my own life and work.
Unfortunately, I am sad to say, Jan sent me the obituary for Mott Green the other day, founder of the Grenada Chocolate Company, who recently died a tragic death at the age of 47. This man lived and actualized the values of our world to come, a master stalker of needed change. I encourage all to open to his journey—it’s an inspiration.
Here is the New York Times obituary for Mr. Green:
Mott Green, a Free-Spirited Chocolatier, Dies at 47
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: June 9, 2013
Mott Green, who emerged from a hermitlike existence in a bamboo hut in the jungle of Grenada to produce a coveted Caribbean delicacy — rich, dark chocolate bars that he exported around the world with the help of sailboats, bicycles and solar-powered refrigeration — died on June 1 in Grenada. He was 47.
He was electrocuted while working on solar-powered machinery for cooling chocolate during overseas transport, said his mother, Dr. Judith Friedman.
Mr. Green was born David Friedman, and grew up on Staten Island. He became Mott over the course of many years of visiting and eventually living in Grenada, where residents had a distinctive way of pronouncing his nickname, Moth. He later took Green as his surname to reflect his environmental interests.
Mr. Green tended to flit about as a child, but with focus: he built go-karts using lawn mower engines; he ran the New York City Marathon when he was 16; he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania just months before graduation — accepting a degree, he felt, would be capitulating to a corrupt social structure — and he spent much of his 20s squatting with a community of anarchists in abandoned homes in west Philadelphia, where he “rescued” food that restaurants had planned to throw away and distributed it to homeless people.
He was eventually drawn permanently to Grenada. When Mr. Green was a boy, his father, Dr. Sandor Friedman, the director of medical services at Coney Island Hospital, taught there each winter, often bringing his family along.
Mr. Green founded the Grenada Chocolate Company in 1999. Its slogan was “tree to bar,” but that did not capture the breadth of the endeavor. Working with small cocoa farmers in Grenada and as many as 50 factory employees during peak operations, all of whom earned the same salary — and probably more than he did — Mr. Green dried cocoa beans in the sun; built, maintained and powered the machinery to make chocolate; packaged the finished product; and cobbled together an international network of distributors, including volunteer cargo cyclists in the Netherlands.
In 2011, the company received recognition the State Department for its “contribution to the sustainable growth of rural economies by establishing Grenadian products in international markets; pioneering agrotourism; outstanding environmental conservation efforts; and promotion of organic farming.”
In 2008, 2011 and 2013, the Academy of Chocolate in London awarded silver medals to Grenada’s dark chocolate bars. A documentary film about the company, “Nothing Like Chocolate,” directed by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, was released last year and has been shown at film festivals.
Human rights advocates have long criticized the treatment of small cocoa farmers, and, particularly in Africa, the exploitation of child workers by buyers and exporters who sell cocoa to big chocolate companies. Despite international protections put in place in 2001, a 2009 survey by Tulane University found that nearly a fourth of all children ages 5 and 17 in cocoa-growing regions of Ivory Coast had worked on a cocoa farm in the previous year.
Mr. Green set out to address such issues by dealing directly with small growers and by keeping the processing and packaging of chocolate within Grenada. In the process, he appears to have created the only chocolate-making company in a cocoa-producing country.
“My progression,” he told D magazine in Dallas for a 2012 blog post, “was activist, love Grenada, love cocoa, love machines and tinkering, making chocolate, and doing it all without hurting the land.”
David Lawrence Friedman was born on April 15, 1966, in Washington. His family moved to Staten Island shortly before he turned 2.
He was the valedictorian of his class at Curtis High School. He was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but chose Pennsylvania instead. He dropped out in the spring of 1988, his senior year.
“He was repulsed by the prison of privilege,” Tim Dunn, a friend, said in an interview. “He was looking for real life. And he found it.”
Mr. Green spent several years after college as a kind of master tinkerer, forager and activist among homeless anarchists in Philadelphia. He helped route electricity into abandoned houses for squatters, and he converted a Volkswagen bus to run on electricity. He helped develop a free lunch program that is still in place. He later moved to the East Village in Manhattan and made solar-powered hot-water showers for a group of squatters there.
By the mid-1990s he had moved to Grenada, where he initially lived in a remote hut he had built himself. It, too, relied on solar energy, in part to power Mr. Green’s passion for music.
“You’d hear Ella Fitzgerald coming out of this bamboo house in the rain forest,” his mother recalled.
Mr. Green developed a taste for cocoa tea, a local favorite, and that helped draw him out of the jungle and into the concerns of cocoa farmers and workers. Joining with a friend from Eugene, Ore., Doug Brown, he studied chocolate production in San Francisco. Working in Eugene, the men restored old machines from Europe and built new ones themselves. By the late ’90s they had shipped everything to Grenada. Mr. Brown died of cancer several years ago.
The company struggled for many years even as it won recognition. Mr. Green lived at the factory the whole time, sleeping in a workroom.
It moved into profitability just a few months ago, thanks in part to its recent opening of a shop in Grenada that sells treats made from its chocolate. Grenada’s chocolate bars are also sold online and at stores in various countries. In the United States, they are sold at Whole Foods stores in Manhattan and other retailers scattered across several states.
Last year the company delivered tens of thousands of chocolate bars to Europe on a sail-powered Dutch ship, the Brigantine Tres Hombres, operated by a company called Fairtransport. A team of volunteer cyclists in Amsterdam helped handle distribution on the ground.
Mr. Green called it “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.”
In addition to his mother, a clinical psychologist in New York, Mr. Green is survived by a brother, Peter. Sandor Friedman died in 2004.
Dr. Friedman said she and several other people involved with the company were meeting this month in Grenada to develop a plan for keeping it operating.
“A lot of people now talk about paying for the actual cost of food or fair food and stuff like that,” said Alexis Buss, a friend from Mr. Green’s days as a squatter. “He wasn’t doing it to be trendy. He’s always been that way. He was just doing it because it made sense.”
So ends the obituary. As I pondered Mr. Green’s death, I found myself caught in a moment of crisis of meaning, a glitch, which granted me access to a deeper truth: We are all beings who are going to die. Our life’s work, no matter how good and valuable, is but a castle on the sea shore, soon to be washed away by the waves of infinity.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico encourage us to indeed choose a path of heart, and to live it to the fullest, to live it impeccably, but not for a moment to be fooled by the self-importance of permanence. No structures can withstand the impermanence of change. Our structures or casings are vehicles to dip into life and gather experience and lessons, but in the end, the real trick is to learn to ride the ever-changing waves of infinity, and that requires learning how to let go when the gig is up and be ready to catch the next wave.
What we carry with us is the experience and love of all life lived, but beyond that we take nothing. And what we leave behind will blend forward into new life, perhaps an even better blend of chocolate, done right, impeccably, with care for all involved, energetically resonant with what’s right. Thanks for your gift Mott!
Sincerely,
Chuck Ketchel, LCSW
If interested in knowing more about Mott Green, here is a detailed article published in SideDish.
Jan references the archetypal imperative of the cicada’s seventeen year journey in her blog this week, a poignant exposition of nature’s hardwired programming. Our human species has toyed with its own archetypal imperative, seeking to escape from our boring repetition of the same old same old. So far have we strayed from our natural roots that we scurry about daily, reinventing the wheel of survival, while eons of inherited wisdom lies fallow at the intuitive core of our beings.
I sit on my deck as I write, the vibratory energy of infinity flowing into my ears and coursing through my veins. The sound of the cicadas lifts me into my energy body. If I allowed myself, and fully followed the call, I think I could leave now. I know the sound of the cicadas from my earliest youth, from my first encounter with infinity when I was certain that I would disintegrate if I didn’t find a casing to hold myself together. I remember my young boy self settling on the structure of a race car traveling at great speed, navigating the racecourse with me at the wheel and in control. Today, the call of infinity makes me calm and joyous.
So, what about 17, the limited cycle impervious to change? If you add 1 and 7 together you get 8—the symbol of infinity! 17 may signal limitation, but it houses infinity.
I am reminded here of the hexagram of Limitation in the I Ching that cautions us humans to respect the limitations of our own life cycle. We are beings who are going to die! At least in our human form! This archetypal program of living and dying is not likely to change anytime soon. The I Ching counsels that if we are wise, we will accept our limited time, acquiesce to our mortality. It is through acquiescence to our mortality that we, in fact, open the door to infinity. If we live the illusion that we have forever, we never take life seriously enough—in fact, we get caught in the spins of toying with the archetypes—creating some new fountains of youth for our eternal carcasses. In accepting limitation, we protect our energy and direct it toward our true task of fulfilling our lives as fully conscious beings, preparing to lift off into infinity with the cicadas in full awareness when it’s our time to leave.
Even with broken wing, the journey is the same… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
In her message on Monday, Jeanne spoke of birth being the hardest challenge. From there we are provided our own archetypal wings to complete our human journey. Like the cicadas, many of us are bruised at the starting gate and our subsequent journey must first detour to find and repair our lost wings. But, even then, the archetypes of the dream world and synchronous waking world are provided to guide the way. Jeanne’s guidance was to keep it simple; follow the direct knowledge of the archetypes. So difficult to hear sometimes, in a world that generates new guide books for profit each day.
As I finish writing my blog, my attention is drawn back to 17 again, to the vibrant and stirring song of the cicadas that drowns out even the loudest of manmade motors. Keep it simple, I think, how perfect that guidance is. Keeping it simple is listening to the knowing voice within, following its program, deepening the preparations to take that final journey in infinity with eager, joyful abandon.
Welcome Cicadas! Thank you for sharing the journey of your seventeen-year itch. All around us now, we witness you slowly step outside your casings, head for the trees and open your wings to perform the vibrant sound of infinity. As I sit and write, I hear your song blaring in my ears. It stirs my vibrational core, ever-loosening the casings of rigid definition.
We too are beings encased in the hard crust of our human form. Our casings are comprised of the definitions, descriptions, judgments, and incessant internal dialogue that molds us daily into the encased beings that we cling to. Yet, we too are beings slowly releasing our own casings as we move through the life cycle and energetically open to the song of infinity.
All of our cravings in this world are stirrings to loosen our rigid encasements and release our own wings of freedom. Drugs, sugar, caffeine, passions are agents that offer to stir our vibratory energy to shake loose the bindings of our human form. No wonder they are so addictive; we are bored to death with the limitations of our crusty encasements. Unfortunately, all these supposed roads to freedom lead to bindings—bondage and limitation of another kind.
True freedom lies in freedom from the interpretations of our internal dialogue—that which establishes the definition of our world, but most especially the definition of who we are as individual beings, as unlovable, undervalued, and inadequate. We are creatures obsessed with self-importance, the greatest casing to our true energetic nature. The truth is, we are infinite beings filled with infinite possibility.
This week, I offer the sound of the cicada as the song to obtain inner silence. We needn’t wait for the cicada to sing; its vibratory song can be heard at any moment by merely turning our awareness to the vibratory music inside our ears.
Call your intent to hear the vibratory song inside your ears. Then let it vibrate throughout your entire body. This is the song of energy, of your energy body. Allow it to dull the monotonous encasement of the internal dialogue. Hear it; gently allow it to vibrate as it loosens the attachment to the bindings and limitations of the human form.
Find your wings… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
These limitations are the encrusted beliefs, socializations, interpretations, internalizations that have defined our solid, habitual selves. However, within this encasement lies our true energetic body, which we will all encounter when we leave this world. But we needn’t wait! Our human form can become permeable to our energetic selves to allow deeper fulfillment—NOW!
