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 Place: Stalking The Raw Deal, Freeing The Grudge

What does your Grudge look like? - Art by Jan Ketchel
What does your Grudge look like? – Art by Jan Ketchel

First, a shout out to a magical being who proposed that the “Raw Deal” be a blog topic, as a personal shift to a “New Deal” takes place. Thank you. You know who you are.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was a radical shift for America, one intended to shift the nation beyond entrenched victimhood into independence. This victim can be subtle and wily, as it can sneak in and bind our energy and take over our view through the character that I call “the Grudge.”

The Grudge is the repository of our accumulated resentments and entitlements, frustrated and fermenting in our chained bodies and spirits. The Grudge casts a negative, gray hue over our moods, thoughts, and interactions with the world. The Grudge gnaws on the raw deal of unmet needs such as betrayal, neglect, and abuse. The Grudge may dominate inwardly in powerlessness, isolation, and depression, or outwardly in open hostility and critical judgment, or both inwardly and outwardly simultaneously.

The Grudge is actually the warehouse for recapitulation. In recapitulation we sift through our accumulated grudge inventories and systematically free our energy for redeployment in a New Deal, beyond the confines of the Raw Deal.

Stalking, in the shamanic world, is learning how to live in any given world. In stalking the Raw Deal, we observe how our attitudes, behaviors and habits construct and uphold what we perceive as an unfair world, at least as we personally experience it. As we stalk the Raw Deal world we live in, we observe ourselves boxed into the corner by fate, circumstance, and choice—beings with clipped wings.

In recapitulation, we identify the building blocks of our raw deal world and follow through to their derivative roots. We discover, through recapitulation, the truths of our victimization; the deep-seated wounds to our innocence that have so restricted our joy and fulfillment. These wounds must be observed and fully felt. Equally, our response to those woundings—our defensive strategies to hide and protect our innocence—must be acknowledged and accepted. Herein lies the heart of the Grudge: the repository of unlived innocence.

The task at hand is to free our lost innocence from the protective hands of the Grudge, free it to come into mainstream life. Often the Grudge will hold on tightly, arguing that it is the job of the world, or those who failed innocence, to acknowledge their mistakes and compensate for lost time, lost life.

Though the Grudge often rightly points to those responsible for the Raw Deal to begin with—those beyond the self—the chance of outer compensation is fairly slim. Fortunately, the adult self that stalks the Raw Deal and elects to undertake a thorough recapitulation, is fully capable of freeing the Grudge, freeing the captive innocent self. Thus empowered, this adult self is then free to live out that innocence to fulfillment in this life. This is the adult self assuming full responsibility for its journey, its life, and whatever challenges infinity might have placed or continues to place before it. This is stalking the New Deal, a victimless life, fully freed from the protective custody of the Grudge, with energy redeployed for truly living.

Always stalking a New Deal,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Kill The Messenger?

Who is responsible for this death? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Who is responsible for this death? – Photo by Jan Ketchel

“$8 Million Bail for Kidnapping Suspect” read the New York Times headline on May 9, 2013. Once again the headlines shout out the most aberrant, deviant, chillingly evil of human beings. In this case Ariel Castro, the man accused of kidnapping, raping, chaining and beating three young women for a decade, now exposed and in captivity. A sentiment arises in reaction: Execute him by the cruelest of means, avenge the lost innocence, protect future innocence!

Though I hold no sympathy for the devil, I know this devil is but a symptom of our current human condition, a sign that must be fully read and owned if our species is to advance beyond our current rut. To simply kill the messenger is to fail to comprehend the real message.

I’ve spent the lion’s share of my professional life, almost 35 years, penetrating PTSD, journeying with survivors of abuse to retrieve their lost wings and ultimately fly with sheer abandon, finally freed of their trauma. Consistently, throughout the years, the question presents itself: Why? Why are there predators? Why do brothers rape sisters and brothers? Why do fathers rape daughters and sons, mothers their sons and daughters? Why do uncles rape their nieces and nephews, grandparents their grandchildren? Why do neighbors rape neighbors, men rape women, priests their brethren? The list touches every social construction, every relationship in our world.

The myth of our origin is a crime, our hubris—the Catholics call it original sin—our original decision to evolve on our own terms outside the laws of nature. Humankind decided to take nature and further it in its own way. This was the birth of consciousness, of ego at the control, alienated from its god—nature as it had evolved and run for eons based on what worked best, based on its own laws of balance. Then along came man.

Humankind quickly generated its own rule books to regulate and further itself, leaving nature to the animal world. Humankind developed taboos like incest, and instituted rites of passage to regulate and transform the powerful instincts of sex, hunger, and protection. Eventually religions arose to regulate those instincts. Religions were also charged with regulating and guiding the evolving spirit self, checking the tendency of ego self to proclaim itself a god.

Today, we have a world where religions largely do lip service to uphold the norm and support a social identity. Today, the human race has completely lost its real identity. The human race has forgotten that it is an animal. The human sees itself as a supercomputer, a technical wizard-god, capable of creating its own universe. The human being has long forgotten its animal roots. It has completely underestimated the power of its instinctive core.

For most of us, finding a healthy pathway to the instincts is barred. We human beings are either terrified of the disintegrating impact instincts have upon consciousness, or we have completely lost the ability to feel a deeper connection to those instinctive energies. If those instincts do emerge, there is little to guide and help regulate their flow and integration. At best we have a bunch of rules. Few can talk openly about their passionate needs. They stay hidden in the shadows. We are a species dissociated and in opposition to our instincts. They manifest as the sick and maimed ferocious animals of our dreams—our boxed up, imprisoned, disowned instinctive selves.

Under the guise of “civilization” lies the belief that we are an advanced species, and that we are in superior control. Not so! Our instinctive selves have become the predators that lurk within and without. They are the Ariel Castors, the disowned ones, freed to roam and prey outside of us because we refuse to take seriously the power of our dissociated animal selves. The Ariel Castors among us are not separate from us. They are our disowned instincts driven to deviance by our silence and refusal to speak about our sexual nature.

It’s not the animal that’s the problem. Animals DON’T rape. It’s the failure of the human animal to properly acknowledge and wisely integrate its own instinctive nature. That’s what causes the animal in us to become rabid; neglect and disownment are the culprits. The sexual predator lives in the shadow side of a species that has disowned its animal self.

If we squarely faced the animal within ourselves, we’d have no illusions about the predatory potential all around and inside us. We’d have no illusions about the predatory potential of every human being—including our so civilized selves—to do harm to others.

I do not mean to stir up paranoia—although I would warn to be extremely thoughtful before leaving young children alone with older siblings or relatives or a neighbor. Instinctual energies that have not been properly encountered are prone to be acted out in a deviant way where opportunity arises, most often against the innocent and powerless. Our challenge is to face more squarely the sexual instinct inside the self, inside growing children, inside everyone, not to underestimate its power or impact, but to talk about it, regulate it, normalize it, transform it, warn and protect against its excesses. I’m proposing that it’s time to step up to the truth of the monstrous predicament we have gotten ourselves into by our failure to address the topic of our own instinctive selves, now turned deviant due to neglect, an imbalance caused by a failure to address and take responsibility for all sides of our human nature.

In the case I cited to begin this blog with, that of Ariel Castro, this predator must be held accountable and properly sentenced for the crimes he committed against those young women, but the real message for all of us is not to kill the messenger, but to heed his most alarming message. This is what we have become! To kill the messenger is a micro management solution to a macro problem. Let’s get to the broader view of an endangered species that has lost its way. It’s a problem that effects all of us. It’s time to go straight to the management and complain, because if we simply scapegoat the messenger, the sacrifice offered by the innocent ones is lost and we don’t advance our human species, but simply remain entrenched in our current “civilized” illusion.

Who do we, as a species, want to be? Yes, we are spirit beings, but we are first and foremost animals. We will never realize our fuller spirit potential if we do not successfully integrate our animal natures.

Seriously,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: The Mind Is A Great Thing To Lose

Forced out-of-body... - Art by J. E. Ketchel
Forced out-of-body… – Art by J. E. Ketchel

The term out-of-body experience, also known as an OBE, is specific to an energy body state where consciousness is separate and away from the physical body. The physical body might remain in full view to the energy body during an OBE, or the energy body might travel away from the physical body to the ends of the earth, though remain tethered and fully capable of snapping back into it in an instant. This separation of energy and physical body is quite natural, especially in dreaming. It can also happen volitionally in waking states or involuntarily under the impact of trauma.

Traumatic separation of physical body and energy body is considered a dissociative psychological defense that occurs when overpowering physical or psychological events—events that are too much for the body to process—send consciousness into refuge away from the body.

As opposed to an OBE, dissociation can also occur within the body, in an in-body experience. In contrast to a separation of energy body and physical body, this dissociation involves a separation of mind and body where the mind dominates as an in-body energy center that preoccupies our attention—or consciousness—with an incessant internal dialogue that judges, critiques, and compares us to others without pause. This nonstop stream of chatter can so absorb our awareness that our bodies are completely rigidified and fatigued by the emotional energy generated by these internal messages. In fact, our internal messaging systems, like the texts and pings we constantly hear on mobile devices as we walk, sit, talk, sleep, and drive, completely dissociate us from the location and action of our bodies in space and time.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico called this dominance of the human body by the mind, a foreign installation—an aberration that grossly limits our humanness and the fuller realization of our true human potential. Pragmatic practitioners, those shamans realized that they could not fight the mind with the mind. They discovered instead that they could find inner silence, the shutting down of the incessant dialogue of the mind, by practicing bodily movements that required their full attention in order to be performed successfully. Toward this end those shamans saturated their lives with these physical movements, which they called Magical Passes. With full attention placed on doing these bodily movements, they were able to achieve increasing moments of inner silence that released access to their fuller potential as navigators of infinity outside the limited confines of the mind.

I encourage the practice of movements such as tensegrity, yoga, martial arts, or any physical activity that when practiced mindfully— with full awareness of the body experience—separates the practitioner from the meanderings of the dissociative mind.

Awareness, in full association with body, unleashes our true potential as human beings and frees us from the bondage of a mind-driven dissociated life, which is the current fixation of our species. The mind in this fixed state is a great thing to lose, as awareness is then freed to fully coordinate with the wisdom and action of the body in alignment with our unlimited potential.

Always moving,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: An All-Inclusive Dream

Old Dream
Old Dream

The Marathon of Energy cannot be stopped now, not by a psychotic youth, not by the NRA. We are in a new dream. Like the dinosaurs of old, who once pounded the earth intending to fly—and now do as birds in the sky—we too, as a species, are cracking the shells of our old mold intending a much more inclusive world of infinite possibility.

In this new world, we are witnessing a flood of inclusiveness as new elements flesh out the dream in the form of gay marriage, immigration reform, a new economic frontier—even marijuana legalization is but a blink away—to cite just a few.

The old guard of religious control, riddled with hypocrisy—actually retiring a Pope—is in retreat. Political dominance by a white elite is in permanent recession. Despite the hiccups of Tea Party or Old Confederacy protests, the now twice-born/elected black Obama stays at the helm and Hillary waits patiently in the wings.

There is no returning to an old dream. That dream, as John Lennon put it, “is over.” This new dream, seen clearly by Brother Martin on the other side of the mountain, is in full swing, and we can barely keep up with the pace of its unfolding.

We must understand that the world is literally on speed now, as it breaks down the old and ushers in the new. This is the deepest meaning of the momentous, traumatic events that flit through our screens in nanoseconds: the time of great change is upon us. It’s not about mass psychosis, though psychosis will captivate the vulnerable, and it is contagious, but it’s really about birth, the evolution/transformation of our species and world into a newly sustainable dream.

New Dream
New Dream

The fate of our species in this new dream is dependent upon our ability to be in alignment with truth—the true needs of a new balance. The earth is abundantly demonstrating its willingness to swallow us up and flood us if we continue to insist upon old world practices of pollution and reliance on non-sustainable fossil fuels.

The peoples of the world are increasingly demonstrating an unwillingness to live in a 1% world. Ironically, America, once the beacon of freedom, now lags, as it clings illusorily to a dream long finished.

The challenge of now is to appreciate the momentum of the masses that the interconnected movement facilitates by social media, but shift awareness away from the Me of it all. The new dream is not a “Me” dream, it’s an all-inclusive “We” dream. In the all-inclusive we-dream, no life is more important than another. In the all-inclusive we-dream, we acquiesce to the true needs of the self, each other and the planet. In the all-inclusive we-dream, it’s affection over profit. The all-inclusive we-dream is not a socialist regression but actually a responsibility progression.

If we all assume responsibility for the truth within ourselves and our planet, we launch our mass shared dream into unbelievable evolutionary journeys into infinity.

All aboard!
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Being Of No Importance

Still looking back? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Still looking back? – Photo by Jan Ketchel

Don Juan Matus told Carlos Castaneda that the view of human beings is frozen, fixated out the back window of the caboose of a train that is moving forward into oncoming time. Humans are not free to face life as it approaches, like the engineer who drives the engine car, but instead see only the rails of life already lived.

This fixated view is the product of our self-importance, which reigns supreme over our ability to assimilate and interpret reality as it funnels all events through the filter of “me,” thus depriving us of the fuller view of life, as it truly is, in real time. The sorcerers of don Juan’s lineage strove relentlessly to become beings of no importance; mindful shamans, fully present to life unfolding, in the engine car of life.

The shamans place no blame on humans for their narcissistic predicament, in fact, removing judgment is the primary mechanism to freeing all events from being rendered as a reflection of self. For example, I’m standing on line at a store, calmly waiting my turn to go to the register. Up walks a being who cuts the line and proceeds to the cashier. I see red. I’m offended, in fact I’m incensed! Who do they think they are? Do they think they’re special, that I don’t matter! It’s not fair; we all had to wait. This person must be stopped, confronted.

No one is saying anything, though obviously everyone has noticed. I’ll be the hero! I won’t allow my self-importance, my value, my significance to be undermined or negated. Not again. Not like when I was a powerless child. Why do I have to be the one to stand up? Why is it always me that has to take the risks and maybe get hurt? Am I afraid I’ll be hurt? Will my voice crack? Will sound come out if I open my mouth? Am I supposed to turn the other cheek? Isn’t that just a copout? Is it okay to be angry? Is someone noticing that I’m nervous? Etc., etc., etc.

LET ME OUT OF THE CABOOSE!!!

This is an example of the incessant internal dialogue of “me” that reports and constantly gauges all events in terms of my self-worth, self-importance, self-esteem, etc. If I, on the contrary, feel worthless, then the dialogue switches from offense to pity, and a stream of comments that construct and reinforce my inferior self spew out. Perhaps I’ll realize, as I stand on that checkout line, that I don’t have the right to exist and hence have no right to complain about any injustice perpetrated upon me. Either way, “me” is the common denominator of the internal dialogue. Feeling unimportant is equally attached to “me.” It’s still all about “me,” however diminished that “me” may feel.

Now that's more like it! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Now that’s more like it! – Photo by Jan Ketchel

Being of no importance is being mindfully present, without obligation to change, fix, or defend anything. Without importance there is no offense. How can I be offended if I have no importance to uphold? I might choose to act or not to act when standing on that checkout line, but my criteria for action will not be to defend offense to myself. I might indeed challenge the perpetrator, but won’t be offended by the outcome of my challenge—it simply doesn’t matter. There’s no self-importance to defend. I am not attached to the outcome; in no way is it a reflection on me. The mirror of self-refelction no longer mars my view when I lose my importance.

As a being of no importance, I cherish and have gratitude for all who might offend me. You give me the gift of breaking the mirror of my self-refelction, as I break through my attachment to being offended by you. So thank you! Through your gift, I further unburden myself of the weight of “me,” too cumbersome to carry on my journey through infinity. I’m ready to hop out of the caboose and move up to the engine car. Deep gratitude for helping me to lighten my load and to clarify the view—the view of a being of no importance facing oncoming time. And quite a clear view it is!

Figuring it out at the checkout line,
Chuck