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: Apple & ISIS

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Still playing the same old record, reflecting the shadow? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Still playing the same old record, reflecting the shadow?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I honor this Patriot’s Day by reflecting upon the deep opposition that rocked our world on 9/11/2001 and continues, in ever-changing forms, to deepen the divide in a world so in need of reconciliation. A true patriot loves and defends his/her country. Love and the ability to defend require facing the deepest truths so that action toward reconciliation can be based on what is truly needed; we must all be willing to face the devil within ourselves.

As within, so without. The forces mirrored on the world stage reflect the deepest opposition within the psyche of the human race. Recognizing these opposing sides of ourselves offers us the opportunity to bring to wholeness our individual selves and contribute to reconciling the fundamental challenge of our time. Let us take up the challenge of inner truth versus seeking relief of this inner opposition by simply projecting the evil upon the enemy in the battle cry of war. Such distorted attempts at resolution have never succeeded as they don’t address the true reality of the opposition that is seeking solution.

And what are the opposing forces? At the deepest level these forces reflect humankind’s greatest nemesis: obedience to nature at an unquestioned instinctual level in the Garden of Eden before the fall versus eating the apple of consciousness and choice from the Tree of Knowledge. These are the opposing forces within all of us, two parts of the wholeness of who we are as human beings: instinctive beings with freedom of choice. These two forces are completely out of step in the modern world, leading to violence and opposition.

Our modern Apple has just bedazzled us with the soon to be released iWatch. Apple is the apple of the eye of the modern technological world. For all its gifts it also symbolizes a hubris of mind and technology over the instinctive needs of the world. IPhones rule the world and they keep coming with more and more promise of Eden itself, the latest watch offering to, in a sense, become our personal doctor, monitoring our heart rate, as if this could really cure the true illnesses of humanity.

Meanwhile, ISIS beheads, cuts off the ultimate houser of intellect, the head, insisting upon blind adherence to extreme fundamentalist law. ISIS is so extreme in its fundamentalist opposition to modernity that even Iran covertly aligns with the US in efforts to stop its advance.

The terrorist here is the deeply alienated, instinctive unconscious that has turned terrorist in reaction to the hubris of modernity. On 9/11/2001 it targeted the towers of Capitalism, the World Trade Center, the seat of conservatism and adherence to an old order, the symbol of a world financial order that had for so long neglected, tricked or controlled the resources of the Third World.

Time to slow the pace and get back in balance and rhythm with nature... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Time to slow the pace and get back in balance and rhythm with nature…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I heard of a college student writing a paper comparing Google to God and the collective unconscious. The deep psyche is not a lifeless Akashic Record as Google represents but a primal force that reacts to the attitudes of consciousness that have broken ranks with its deeper nature and run away with Apple, Google and Facebook. If consciousness allows itself to be continually lured and led by its fascination with the speed and playthings of technology, it invites the collective unconscious in, whose timepiece stretches into time immemorial to produce the terrorist to slow down its pace and wind its way back to the rhythm of nature.

Individually, we must all take conscious responsibility for the direction of our lives. We must reconcile with our primal needs and instinctive wisdom as we consciously direct the course of our lives toward fulfillment of who we truly are, the seed of our individuality fully realized. If we stray too far from our instinctive needs and wisdom our lives will be sabotaged outwardly and inwardly. Paying attention to the wisdom, messages, and compensatory actions of our dreams is a good place to start to face the truth of who and where we really are.

The Dalai Lama, as the nagual, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, has suggested ending the lineage of Dalai Lamas. Carlos Castaneda did the same thing as the final nagual of his ancient shamanic lineage. Both leaders represent guardians of ancient traditions that fully reconcile with the truths of nature and the deeper unconscious.

The message for the modern world is to take full responsibility for evolving the self, keeping in alignment with our deepest truths. Indeed, develop your iPhones of modernity, but keep an inner eye on the care of your body, along with the true needs of our interdependent world and the planet we all share. Perhaps the Dalai Lama and Carlos Castaneda, two great foresighted masters of our time, offer a model of reconciliation for the opposing energies of Apple and ISIS that threaten to split apart the world as we know it.

We all connect with the beauty of nature... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We all connect with the beauty of nature…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Both the Dalai Lama and Castaneda, upon release of their attachment to the rigid traditions of their ancient practices, allow for the diaspora of their teachings to find their way in forms appropriate to modernity. These masters charge consciousness with assuming leadership now in taking life forward, the intent being that we all assume full and individual responsibility for addressing life’s deepest needs and truths. On this Patriot’s day, let us be true patriots and assume full responsibility for the truths: as within, so without.

Assume responsibility. Accepting the shadow ISIS within eliminates the terrorist ISIS without.

In honor and reconciliation,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Food As Mother

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Learning to feed the self is the first step in individuation... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Learning to feed the self is the first step in individuation…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Food sustains life, satisfies the tension of hunger, and protects the body from illness and death. Food is Mother. For all, in utero, food was delivered from mother’s body and for many, post utero, this continued in the experience of nursing at mother’s breast. Finding our way in childhood to the independent obtaining of food—e.g., through opening the refrigerator door—is a giant leap toward gaining control over one’s security of survival, relief of tension and protection—the beginning of becoming our own mother.

Ruptures in security with actual mother in the early dependency years of childhood heighten the significance of gaining control over one’s own access to food. Food may become the safer and much more reliable mother when contending with a depressed, indifferent, withholding, competitive or abusive actual mother in childhood. Secretly, food becomes the real mother, while the actual mother is experienced as marginal at best.

In such rupturing circumstances food takes on the psychological role of soothing and caring for the emotional wellbeing of the child. The child may discover the excitement and reward of relationship with sugar, the soothing of anxiety with excess food, as well as the protective, dissociative numbing provided by a very full stomach. Excess weight may gather with excess food, which can protect the self from the sensations and feelings of rejection, lack of connection, and ridicule from without, as well as fear and sadness from within.

A hyper attachment to food in childhood may be the saving relationship that protects one’s autonomy and very vulnerable self through deeply turbulent formative years. In adulthood, these patterns of attachment will prove anachronistic and become impediments to more deeply satisfying emotional relationships. At the same time, they must be valued for the survival and protection they once afforded our growing selves, as well as their incubational functions at extremely vulnerable times in our lives.

Food is life... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Food is life…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The task in adulthood is to free the innocent self—still held in body utero—of its private dependence on food for excitement, calm, and protection and birth into full life and real human relationship. The challenge for the adult self is to fully take on the role of mother previously delegated and attached to food. We are charged with becoming our own living mother to our tucked-away innocent self. This is a real human relationship that asks us to be compassionate, supportive, accepting, and encouraging to our shy, innocent self who has waited for decades to truly come out and play.

The defenses that have long sheltered our innocence, with their attachment to the secure food mother, are formidable and deeply challenging of the adult self’s attempts to assume parental leadership within the personality. Those defenses see no wisdom in freeing our innocence into a world where, once again, it will be exposed to rejection and possible annihilation.

The adult self is frequently undermined in its attempts to assume control by waves of deep terror and intense cravings that seem compellingly unquenchable by anything short of the sustenance of food. Perhaps these may be interpreted as labor pains of the birthing process, the innocent self questioning the readiness of the adult self to safely deliver it into life. Sometimes the proving process of the adult self, as it proves its readiness, requires many false labor pains, ending in a return to food. But be assured, each round of labor readies the mother more fully to become the perfect mother to her innocence, which she will someday deliver to the world.

The Empress in the Thoth Tarot deck, the archetypal good mother...able to equally give and receive...
The Empress in the Thoth Tarot deck, the archetypal good mother…able to equally give and receive…

This evolving mother knows full well the limitations of the outer world archetypal maternal matrix that in childhood had it creatively adopting food as the more reliable mother. This new mother knows there is vulnerability and rejection and loss to face in this world, but she also knows that she is fully capable of protecting and helping her innocence through the unavoidable woundings of life in this world. But this mother also knows the utter joy and necessity of bringing her deepest needs and desires into life in this world as part of the fulfillment, completion, and individuation so necessary for wholeness and enjoyment of life.

Food Mother will always have her place, but the living Mother of the adult self is the True Mother to full mind, body, and spirit living.

Let that True Mother be compassionate and supportive of wherever we are, as well as firm and encouraging as she takes full responsibility for birthing innocence into life beyond the old protectorate of Food as Mother.

Appreciating the journeys we all take,
Chuck

NOTE: Obviously we all have a True Mother inside us, men and women alike, and it is our challenge and charge to bring her to life, just as all of us have a True Father inside us too, but that is another blog!

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Meditation, Sensation, Intuition

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Meditation offers balance and detachment... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Meditation offers balance and detachment…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

We live in a time of information overload. We are saturated from without by a constant flood of communication, from the latest news of everyone’s experiences to world events and an environment rapidly and unpredictably changing. Inwardly, we are flooded with images, thoughts, feelings and sensations, all vying for our attention that they might share their own stories.

The challenge now is how to stay grounded and manage this high intensity flow of data while simultaneously figuring out what is real, meaningful, and deserving of our attention.

There is a growing consensus, from many fields, that the ancient meditation practices of the East provide a technique that enables us to manage this overwhelming flood of data that we perceive or generate in such a way that we are granted the freedom to decide where we will place our attention. The simple ability to notice a thought or news item but be able to then choose to bring our attention back to the present moment, to our breath without interruption or a further development of the thought, goes a long way toward calming our central nervous system and providing the grounding to navigate daily life.

Carl Jung long ago identified two psychological functions, intuition and sensation, that are relevant to deepening our ability to navigate the flood of stimulation we encounter from within and without each day. Simply put, intuition is a psychological function, a sixth sense, that perceives what might be behind a door we are about to open, for instance, or “sees” some event in the future. Sensation operates through the five physical senses; it perceives what’s “actually” here and now.

These two functions are extreme opposites; one focuses on concrete known reality, the other on a future reality, unknowable in concrete terms. Often our minds are inundated with thoughts, feelings or images that if left to run freely would generate a story we might then contend is real. Suddenly we imagine a look on someone’s face or a call not returned as a definite snub. We feel rejected. We become frightened, anxious, and worried and before we know it we are living out that drama as if it were real.

Meditation might aid us here to lift us from the intensity of this inner drama and ground us in the here and now through focus on our body and one of its physiological functions, breathing. Here meditation couples with the sensation function to ground the ego and enable it to take back its energy from the drama. Afterwards, once centered, the ego is in a position to determine whether the germ seed of the drama was an actual intuition—that is, an actual perception of a future reality for instance—or merely the spinning of an illusion by a thought or some other trickster character in the personality.

Sitting with sensation our minds eventually enter the beauty and calmness of pure intuition... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Sitting with sensation our minds eventually enter the beauty and calmness of pure intuition…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Intuitions generally occur spontaneously, presenting a definite picture, feeling, or knowing of something unseen. The experience might be compared to a flash of lightening. It’s powerful. Inner dramas, by contrast, though they might build in emotional intensity as the drama deepens in the mind, are more like soap operas spinning endless tales than sudden and powerful shocks of knowing. A grounded ego, detached from the drama, is in a good position to determine if it’s dealing with drama or intuition and can decide more clearly what to give attention to and what to discard.

Of course, even when dealing with a legitimate intuition there is still the possibility that a perceived future does not unfold along the lines intuited. Once again we do well to exercise the tool of mediation that helps us to stay grounded in the present moment, suspending judgment of what might happen as we watch life unfold as it will.

In developing a dedicated meditation practice we are provided with the grounding in sensation that enables us to delve into and explore the unseen without being captivated by phantom dramas that consume our vital energy and distract us from real life. Meditation provides the bridge to unite the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of sensation and intuition, allowing us to deepen our meaningful presence in life, in all its dimensions.

Sitting in calm sensation,
Chuck

Once again, I share a YouTube video of a very simple and easy Korean meditation method: Son Meditation.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Marrying Maiden & The Petty Tyrant

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Images in search of resolution... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Images in search of resolution…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

The Marrying Maiden, hexagram #54 of the I Ching, is a reading I’ve grappled with much of my adult life. The Petty Tyrant is a central theme in the training of the warrior in the shamanic world of Carlos Castaneda. I see the marrying maiden and the petty tyrant as mirror images of wisdom, pearls from two ancient traditions that reflect so relevantly in the world of now.

Contrary to a sweet, innocent image that the marrying maiden might evoke, hexagram #54 depicts an unchosen life, a woman forced into the role of second wife as she must enter the home of her marrying sister’s husband, an ancient Chinese custom. Not the chosen bride she nonetheless must accept her new station and all the duties it entails. Thus, hexagram #54 depicts an unchosen, unwelcome fate.

From a broader perspective this predicament captures a salient feature of the reality of life in this world. As Buddha concluded, “Life is suffering. There is no escaping old age, sickness and death.” This is our collective reality—we are all marrying maidens to forces we cannot control.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered that we spend the bulk of our energy fighting these deeper truths of our human condition. They saw this as absorption in self-pity. I understand this as absorption in the child state of resistance to the inevitable loss of paradise that we may or may not have experienced in our early childhood. Regardless, we feel entitled to have it restored or finally delivered, refusing to leave the garden, stubbornly demanding our due.

Of course, this is a very young hero that holds the world accountable, but this young hero is ill-equipped for the adult truth of old age, sickness and suffering, that which ultimately afflicts us all. The Shamans see humankind as fixated at the stage of this young hero, wasting most of its energy fighting fruitless battles. The marrying maiden is doing the same thing, bemoaning her fate. The I Ching guides her to see the reality of her situation and to position herself appropriately without self-pity. Similarly, the Shamans encourage us to identify our petty tyrants—those who ruthlessly show no consideration for our needs—as our teachers.

Rather than spend energy on fruitless anger and resistance, a warrior stares down any energetic spillage of self-pity. A warrior fully accepts the circumstances that life presents and with clarity and full energy acts in accordance with what is possible, with what is the best decision to make, and with what is the best action to take in the moment. To achieve this readiness one must be fully present without an ounce of energy spent feeling sorry or sad for the predicament one finds one’s self in.

Ahh...peace at last! - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Ahh…peace at last!
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

In a world currently dominated by violent opposition, where the opposites are dissociated and only seek resolution by destroying each other, we are confronted with being marrying maidens to these petty tyrants all over the world, most especially in our own country. It is challenging to not succumb to the self-pity of helplessness in such a state of chaos. On the other hand, we are gifted an opportunity to train in warriorhood.

A warrior pauses, examines the true nature of things and awaits decisive action in full clarity. A warrior spends no energy bemoaning his or her fate; all circumstances are equal opportunities to transform one’s position as fateful marrying maiden into that of decisive warrior. A warrior is grateful for all teachers, especially the petty tyrants.

Once broken of the fixation of self-pity and entitlement, we are truly freed to be leaders advancing into a new world beyond the filters of self-obsession into deeper truth, fulfillment and new balance.

Most humbly,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Safety

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One of the scary dogfighters in the sky... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
One of the scary dogfighters in the sky…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

As we drove past the Rhinebeck Aerodrome in the midst of a dogfight in the sky, a golden retriever with leash dragging scurried toward our car. I stopped, opened the car door, and the dog immediately leaped in and planted itself on my lap.

I could feel the dog’s terror and need for safety. He was at home with us and would have moved forward in life from that moment, never leaving our safety, never looking back. We diligently went in search of it’s owner and eventually discovered his whereabouts. He was deeply engrossed in the planes in the sky, with no consideration of his dog’s terror of loud noises. The dog was so planted in our car, clinging for dear life, that I ultimately and sadly had to lift its frozen statue frame from the car to send it back on its journey. We watched as it was led away, slunk low to the ground, peering to the right and to the left, seeking safety once again as the bombs went off overhead.

Domesticated animals are ultimately dependent on their “owners” for their safety and survival. This is the contract they make in domesticated form. Though their instincts are fully available to protect them, their survival is largely delegated to their owner.

Humans, in contrast, are charged with taking adult responsibility for achieving safety for themselves in this life. Many humans reach adulthood unable to fully achieve individual internal security due to lapses in milestones of emotional maturity, caused by trauma or compromised parents. The legacy of these lapses is a physically mature but emotionally insecure adult who anxiously seeks relationship attachments outside the self to feel safe.

These kinds of relationships may feel powerfully necessary for survival and the threat of losing them generates states of anxiety and panic similar to that of the golden retriever that anxiously attached to us and the safety of our car. Relationships driven by such anxious attachment often start off with intense love feelings—finally feeling “home”—but generally degenerate into worry, panic, and fear of abandonment.

Relationships at this level are often frozen at the level of dependency, control, and fear, leaving little opportunity for adult companionship and relatedness. This is inherent in the relationship’s initial underlying intent: safety. Until safety can be found within the self, relationships will be controlled by an over-dependency on the other person’s behavior as the locus of control for inner safety.

We must become the parent to our inner panicking child. If we allow the child’s anxiety to control our decision making and actions, we are sure to engage in external parenting relationships as we allow the child in us to go in search of a secure person to latch onto, just like the dog that leapt into our car. Our adult self must be in charge of decision making and self care. If our child self is frightened it might be time to pick it up and go for a soothing walk alone rather than desperately seek inappropriate attention elsewhere.

Blossoming as one united being... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Blossoming as one united being…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Eventually, the child will discover that the adult self is its one true parent, the one that can take charge of decisions for the whole personality, leading it to safety, play, and fulfillment. From this place, with the locus of control coming from a place of deep inner safety, relationships may be engaged in as adult partnerships, with everyone responsible for their own inner parenting.

Self care at the deepest level is the only adult ticket to true inner safety. Inner safety leads to outer blossoming and allows for flourishing in true adult relationship.

Embracing inner safety,
Chuck