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: The Right Of Insatiability?

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Just keep it simple! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Just keep it simple!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In an economics class in my early undergraduate years of study, a professor stated that human needs were ever-growing, and must be met. This, he stated, was human nature and our economic system was structured to meet those demands. I challenged this unquestioned, sacrosanct commandment that growing needs and demands must be met.

How many parents would agree that their children’s ever-growing “needs” and “demands” are sacred rights that must be met? Needs are indeed a core element of human existence, but limitation is equally a part of life. Catering to needs without limitation is a recipe for disaster, in this case leading to sustained childhood and immaturity.

On the world stage, the impact of this recipe for disaster is palpable as the burning of fossil fuels pushes us ever closer to extinction. And yet I hear even Alan Chartock, the very intelligent President of and commentator on WAMC/Northeast Radio, suggesting that fracking in New York is inevitable given the endless demand for more energy. Again, I hear demand as an unquestionable, unstoppable sacred right that we will even let bring total destruction to the home of our physical bodies, planet Earth!

It is hard not to feel powerless and defeated as we watch the world melt before our eyes. However, as Laurens van der Post—Jung’s friend and biographer—once assured me, Jung was convinced that a monumental change in an individual would indeed change the world.

We are all holograms of the greater world. Cast a light on any of us individually and you will find the world; as within so without.

Following this axiom, we are all empowered to change the world by addressing the mirror of insatiability that reflects deep within our own lives. What is it that we are addicted to? What insatiable need and demand reigns unchecked in our lives? What is it we cannot get enough of or do without? Is it self-importance? Can we not help but check our Facebook likes and status? Can we not turn off our cell phones—even to sleep, shower, make love, eat, drive or watch a movie?

Are we addicted to the critic of failed perfection chanting away inside us? Does the voice of failure, doom and gloom dominate every waking moment and every night of sleeplessness, unchecked by limitation? Are we caught in the ceaseless throes of self-pity, itself a bottomless pit of tortured need, unchecked by any limitation? Are we driven by compulsive actions to fill our voids with substance, “love,” worry, and more and more stuff?

If we look hard enough, we will find insatiability in some form in all of us. Even extreme modesty can mask an insatiable need to control the self; even control requires limitation if it is not to secretly harbor an unchecked addiction to power.

Decide what our true needs are and flow from there? Sounds like a good idea! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Decide what our true needs are and flow from there?
Sounds like a good idea!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Deciding to use less power, to buy a fuel efficient car for instance, does not necessarily solve the energy insatiability issue. First of all, we must question whether an ego addiction to being “better than” or “smarter than” isn’t hiding behind the persona of environmental consciousness. If this be the case we are not advancing beyond a fixation at the level of insatiability. Truly conquering insatiability requires brutal honesty with the self. We must cut through all our self-illusions and face the truth of our habits. Why do we really do what we do? Are we ready to move beyond our addiction to insatiability?

Decisions and behaviors that flow purely from the true needs of the self will accept the limits necessary to maintain health and balance. Every individual who brings themselves into this alignment steps beyond the myth of the sacred right to insatiability. Every individual who achieves this maturity advances beyond illusion into energetic reality where insatiability is properly housed as the quest of spirit to journey into the unfathomable, into infinity, sober of spirit, unending in flight. Ready for that insatiable quest?

Going beyond,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Lives Within Lives

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Where did I come from? Where am I going? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Where did I come from?
Where am I going?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Many are challenged to reconcile the memory and experiences of past lives as they intrude upon life in this life. Many others go in search of the karmic origin of current life struggles through past life regression.

Emphasis on karma alone narrows the focus of the full challenge of integrating a past life, which includes allowing the self to feel deep love and attachment in all the critical relationships of that life. The challenge lies as well in releasing the self, and all the loved ones of that past life, to be free to fully open to new love in new lives in completely different roles.

The enormity of growth required to achieve such openness to new beginnings and endings, to truly live what it means to “go with the flow,” may be the deepest purpose of the concensus reality of this dimension we call Earth. Most humans born in this dimension experience a blank slate of origin. Our parents are experienced as our first and only parents of our infinite journey. Everything that might have come before, in lifetimes of transpersonal living, is checked at the memory gate before we enter this life. We are thereby freed to limit our attachments to this life without the complexity and confusion of prior lives.

This arrangement offers us a training ground to deal with attachment, love, and loss on a manageable scale. Rudimentary attachment is critical to passing the starting gate of this dimension. Failure to thrive and death are the consequences of primary non-attachment.

However, beyond this starting gate are many gates of deepening attachment that will determine how welcome we truly feel in this world and how able we are to come to full flowering. It is very possible to survive yet constrict our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves to survive in what is experienced as unwelcome, exploitative, rejecting territory. Much of the first half of life may be taken up by the challenge of finding a secure anchor in this world so that we may eventually begin a process of unburdening recapitulation to free ourselves to begin to truly thrive in this life. That anchor is the adult self I wrote about in last week’s blog.

Time to grow beyond the family tree... - Art by Jan Ketchel
Time to grow beyond the family tree…
– Art by Jan Ketchel

The ability to fully know and accept this life we were cast into, and to then shed its encasement in recapitulation, is a deep spiritual practice that teaches us to fully live and release the life we have lived, in this lifetime, so we can move on into new life now without constraints. Accomplishing this stupendous task prepares us to more fully encounter all the many past selves and past lives we have lived throughout our journey in infinity. In recapitulating this lifetime, we are freed of the need to constrict our cognitive and emotional knowledge and the need to have to hold ourselves together within some definite container.

To release one’s parents, siblings, spouses, and children to new lives and new roles within this lifetime frees them as well to experience endless possibilities within their own lives. All journeys have beginnings and endings.

In addition, all journeys—past and present—need to be equally honored with love and compassion for the self and all the intimate traveling companions of each journey. Such deep love and compassion open the gate to new and deeper journeys in infinity, unshielded by the illusion of limitation and unending attachment.

Continuing to flow,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Forging The Adult Self—Bearing The Tension

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Sometimes the ritual is as simple as shedding what we don't need so that who we really are can bloom... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Sometimes the ritual is as simple as shedding what we don’t need so that who we really are can bloom…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Ancient rites of passage championed the mature achievement of adulthood as the requisite linchpin to mastering life’s deepest challenges. Without the establishment of this mature adult self we are ill-equipped, or defensively overladen, to journey forward into life’s deepest needs and challenges.

The modern technological world has failed to collectively build the bridge to maturity that was once constructed by the transformative power of ancient ritual. Nonetheless, the modern world and life itself force us to forge an adult self. It is only the adult self that can take the journey forward, and that journey—if it is to be fulfilling—requires a recapitulation of life lived, with all its deficits, hurts, disappointments and traumas, to release frustrated energies and find renewal in deep connection with the greater self.

The adult self must ready itself to take the recapitulation journey. For this it must learn to be present to needs, feelings, and impulses, without collapse. Collapse here means caving to the demands of another part of the self that seeks release or relief in a compulsive, impulsive, habitual self-destructive behavior. The adult self must learn to stay still, to breathe and bear the tension of inner pressure in order to consciously choose the best course of action—that is, action that supports the true needs of the self.

Sometimes the tension must be borne for some time before the clarity on what is the right decision is achieved. Sometimes the adult self acts precipitously, only to realize it has been duped into traversing an old road once again. This is a critical juncture in the process, but one must not be swallowed in negative self-judgment or talk of failure, for that is the one-way highway to the helplessness of the child self, bemoaning its position, steeped in the powerlessness of self-pity.

The work is always for the adult self to stay present, both in the experience and as the detached observer, allowing for all the feelings, judgments, sensations and truths to be fully known. The adult self feels but does not get weighed down by its discoveries, though it can take some time, and repeated dives into the deeper self, to achieve this state of detached equilibrium.

The job of the adult self in recapitulation is to acknowledge, learn, and take forward into life the new awarenesses that are achieved, once and for all freeing the self of the need to cling to old habitual patterns and illusions. Resisting judgment, the adult self gradually molts into new life. Intense emotions and physical tremors are par for the course, bringing the necessary accompanying release of the multidimensional self as it frees itself of the past and moves forward to claim its innate potential.

It's all about sitting in the tension and growing right where we are planted... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
It’s all about sitting in the tension and growing right where we are planted…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In this powerful physical release the adult self loosens and releases a torrent of energetic waves, once again fully present but staunch observer as well. Here, bearing the tension is allowing for vulnerability; complete physical and emotional release without constriction.

The crux of forging the adult self to fully live, is to learn to bear the tension of being fully present to all that was and all that is. In full presence we reclaim our birthright, our higher potential, completely freed to enjoy new energetic life.

In ancient religions, the standard-bearers of this ability to withstand the tension is the image of Christ on the cross and Buddha beneath his tree. In each of these ritual dramas, bearing the tension led to freeing the self to higher vibrational energetic life beyond the body, into full enlightenment in complete awareness. We too can achieve this state. Recapitulation is one tried and true method of taking the journey.

Keep it simple. Bear the tension, stay fully present, release the old, and move forward into wholeness, breathing in new life and new energy.

Forging,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Multidimensional Living

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Here is Chuck’s blog for this week. The dreaming Soulbyte we published this morning on our Facebook page reflects one aspect of aligning with our multidimensional self!

We must strive to bring our multidimensional self together... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We must strive to bring our multidimensional self together…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I pause in this moment to connect with my multidimensional self. The sound of energy is steady in my ears. High pitched vibrational tones deepen and intensify as I give it my awareness. I intend it to spread. The vibration begins to radiate throughout my entire body, a unison of sound and vibration.

I reassert my physicality with a deep breath and notice my musculature at rest. The vibrational state recedes from my body at large but intensifies in my inner ears, reminding me of its ever-presence. At night the situation is reversed. The physical body goes increasingly dormant to a state of catalepsy, a temporary paralysis, as the higher vibrational self lifts off to worlds of adventure and discovery.

We are multidimensional beings with a variety of energetic possibilities. The physical world is the outer crust, the densest of our energetic possibilities. In that world our senses govern our experience. This is “in-body experience,” the full presence and sensory awareness of being in our body.

The mind is the energetic experience of abstraction. The mind operates in the field of thought, a non-substantial subtler energy that constructs its own world separate from the physical world. We indeed can find ourselves lost in the stories of our thoughts, worlds apart from the world of our physicality. Even thought completely focused on the physical world is still a mind of abstraction, creating models to approximate the denser physical world it observes.

Emotion is another dimension of our energetic being. Emotion is a magnetic energy that attracts and repels. It draws us to deep union, keeps us in seclusion, or mobilizes us to change. Emotion is a world of energetic intensity, the fuel of rapture. How often the world of emotion can misalign with the physical world! Emotional worlds of extreme intensity are often projected onto others who feel nothing in return. In this case, we are fully enraptured in our own emotionally vibrant world, devoid of actual connection.

Our evolutionary challenge in this life is to align with and deeply realize our multidimensional self. It is our higher vibrational self that journeys into transpersonal realms.

With intent we can extend our dreaming awareness, training it to stay present during those nightly journeys into infinity. When we write down our dreams upon return, we open the door to recapitulating those infinite journeys, good practice for future adventuring.

When we practice mindfulness in the waking state of the physical world we extend our awareness to be fully present in the journey of our physical everyday lives.

When we meditate we teach the mind to be calm, to allow for thoughtful presence that we can extend into other worlds, rather than stay encased in abstract stories.

When we bring our awareness into full alignment with our emotions, we allow ourselves the richest experience of life’s intensities. However, adult presence is required as we must learn to ride the waves with both awareness and detachment. Here detachment means being open to the fullest experience yet separate from it at the same time. We must become the observer who will not get overly attached to anything.

We burn from within... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We burn from within…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The common thread to deepening and aligning our multidimensional self is the intent of awareness. We must intend our awareness to be fully present in our physical body, as well as fully present in our thought body, emotional body, and ethereal body simultaneously. Once in alignment, we are set to fluidly experience the fullness of multidimensional living and we open to being fully present to our evolutionary journey as well, both in this world and beyond.

True multidimensional living is really all about preparing for the definitive journey when all of our energetic bodies consolidate for the last time, at death, and leave the physical realm. Death is the unifier of all those energies. As we take the journey into infinity we “burn from within,” as the Shamans of Ancient Mexico say, all our energy combining in a single energy of fire. On to new life!

Happy Beltane!
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Path Of Innocence

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First light, innocence of a new day... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
First light, innocence of a new day…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I am deeply appreciative of the pioneering work of others who have contributed to the clarity of my own unfolding path. As a result, I recently considered a major shift. The question that presented was whether or not to deepen my affiliation with the work of one of those pioneers, a major energetic commitment.

I’ve been at this kind of juncture many times in this life. I recall the moment when Jeanne and I looked into each other’s eyes after our first encounter with the witches of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage. In that moment we knew that this was it. Our lives energetically shifted forever as we aligned our intent with the intent of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, the intent of total freedom.

As I pondered this current potential shift, I threw the I Ching and received the guidance of hexagram #10, Treading [Conduct] with a moving line in the second place. Treading portrays the weak going to meet the strong, the weak literally treading on the tail of the tiger. In this case, the weak is innocent, not meaning harm but in fact seeking connection. And with that the powerful tiger is accepting; it does not swallow up the weak.

To me the tiger, the powerful, is the unconscious in all its deepest transpersonal manifestations including spirit, in all its mystery. The weak is consciousness, innocent but limited in its knowledge of the vastness of self. All healing requires a fluid relationship between the weak and the strong. The I Ching is speaking directly to my question: How best to approach this great mystery of spirit? In the nine in the second place, it refines its answer, as follows:

“The situation of a lonely sage is indicated here. He remains withdrawn from the bustle of life, seeks nothing, asks nothing of anyone, and is not dazzled by enticing goals. He is true to himself and travels through life unassailed, on a level road. Since he is content and does not challenge fate, he remains free of entanglements.“

This answer resonates deeply with my heart, mirroring the path of heart that Jeanne and I embarked upon on that day with the witches of Castaneda’s lineage. It was my head that questioned a shift, but the I Ching answered to my heart! The I Ching produces a future reflection as well, based on this charged second line, the hexagram of Innocence, #25. Here, the point is further driven home:

“When, in accord with this, movement follows the law of heaven, man is innocent and without guile. His mind is natural and true, unshadowed by reflection or ulterior designs. For wherever conscious purpose is to be seen, there the truth and innocence of nature have been lost. Nature that is not directed by the spirit is not true but degenerate nature.“

To underscore: Movement that flows from the head and not the heart loses its innocent connection to spirit.

Energy of true nature... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Energy of true nature…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Jan and I accept that we are lone wolves. We promote not; we seek not to affiliate. We attach no self-importance to our work. We strive to remain purely innocent journeyers, humbly offering our experiences that others may learn and grow. We open to the magnetic draw of spirit as it may choose to move through our works.

Jan’s latest book, Into the Vast Nothingness, published today, is another offering to those seeking the tools to take the deepest of soul retrieval journeys in this life. Our only intent is that her works may inspire and find their way to those seeking to unburden and truly align with their own path of innocence.

As for us, we remain lone wolves, navigating our own paths of innocence—quite happily, I might add!

Remaining on my path of heart,
Chuck

We are very excited to announce the publication of Jan’s new book. We energetically send it on it’s way with the aforementioned intent. Here is the link: Into the Vast Nothingness. The Kindle edition is soon to be published. Updates to follow.