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: A Christmas Present

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Innocent golden child Chuck

And so, what is Christmas?

Christmas is the archetypal birthday, a universal day to honor and give to the golden child. The golden child is our innocent child, the child we enter this world with, the child we lose touch with as we grow disillusioned in a world of suffering. It is the child we spend a lifetime seeking to retrieve from the shroud of protection we build to avoid further shame and the highly sensitive pain of not being met or received.

We learn to shut down our anticipation, excitement, wonder, and love. We will not be fooled into hoping again, into opening that sealed door of vulnerability to our innocent, golden child. We vow not to be disappointed again.

We never forget our innocent child. Often, though, we cannot go near it within ourselves, that is, we cannot allow ourselves to receive. We are able to project it outward onto our children or other’s children, or onto the puppies and kittens of our dreams. Somewhere in our lives, no matter how terrified or avoidant we might be of it, we project our innocence and are drawn to the renewal of contact with it.

We project our innocence but it's really an endless cat and mouse game

The real journey to retrieve our innocence begins with the journey of recapitulation. We cannot allow our innocence back into life until we go back and fully free it from the encounters and experiences that caused it to go into hiding in the first place. This is a delicate, raw, and tender process. Though it might be facilitated interpersonally, through some kind of relationship, the true healing relationship is within, between the adult person we’ve become and our lost, innocent child self.

The adult we’ve become, however disillusioned and defended, is still a wise self. The adult has learned that Santa Claus is a myth, that evil is part of reality, that things constantly change—people die and nothing is forever. The adult self knows about broken promises, abandonment, and betrayal. The adult self has somehow found a way to navigate the world, however impoverished it may feel, however cut off from the joy and renewal of its innocence.

And this adult warrior self is the one—the one true parent—who can find and help that golden child to return to life; a life of fullness and completion.

A Gift to the Self: Recapitulation

The adult self is the one who can be with the child as it shares the truth of its lost innocence. The adult can hear the truth, feel the truth, withstand the truth, bear witness to the truth, and fully accept the truth in solidarity with the child. The child is not alone. The child is worthy to be fully known on its own terms, not pushed away because its feelings are too much, not talked out of what it truly feels. The adult will stand with the child and hear the fullness of the truth.

Next, the adult can help the child broaden the picture. There are things that the seasoned adult can see that the child couldn’t possibly see at the time. Such things can help the child self unravel the mystery of “why,” clearing up misconceptions, such as: It was my fault; I wasn’t good enough or worthy enough.

The adult self goes on to help the child self express and release all the feelings that have been held back, perhaps for a lifetime.

As recapitulation proceeds, innocence is freed from its old trappings and a new self, a wise, innocent, fully integrated self is born into the world. This self knows about the ways of the world, it doesn’t need the world to change to live out its innocence. It no longer needs to suffer disillusionment, to be reminded of its lost innocence. It can choose wisely in relationship and accepts that nothing stays in one form forever. This is no longer a deal breaker for innocence. Innocence, with wisdom, can now flow with the changes.

At Dawn: Out of the darkness rises new life

This is the one true gift of Christmas, the one only we can give to ourselves. That is the gift of recapitulation, the adult that takes the journey of truth with its innocent self, ultimately merging with it. Born anew, there is now new life to live.

Merry Christmas,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: The Way of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

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He slipped through a crack...

Don Juan never would have chosen Carlos Castaneda as his apprentice. Carlos slipped through a crack in the wall of impeccability that don Juan, a master shaman, a nagual, had crafted to shield his energy from unnecessary encounters in the ordinary world.

Don Juan realized that his initial encounter with Castaneda had to be the work of the spirit and could only mean one thing: he was obliged to train an “imbecile,” as he saw Carlos, to become his successor. He acquiesced to this knock from the spirit and Carlos Castaneda became the sorcerer’s apprentice.

Don Juan, like all naguals of his lineage, knew that apprentices entered the shaman’s world with an interpretation system—a world view—wholly inadequate for understanding the shaman’s world of non-ordinary reality. There is no fault in this; we interpret the world as we have been conditioned and socialized—we know no other way. Shamans take advantage of this condition in their apprentices, systematically trapping their awareness around issues those apprentices believe to be important, indulging them, but really intent upon moving them along to perceiving the world in a vastly new and expanded way.

For example, don Juan knew that Carlos copied everything he did, and so he taught him many magical passes— movements from the shaman’s world used to recondition one’s energy—without Carlos being aware that he was actually learning these magical passes. In Carlos’s cognitive system he was simply doing “exercises,” while in the meantime he was unknowingly expanding his energetic capabilities.

Don Juan knew that if he told Carlos directly that he was teaching him magical passes, Carlos’s cognitive system would have been offended and he would invariably have argued and rejected the practice on rational grounds. Don Juan already knew that it was far more efficient to not challenge cognitive attachments directly, but instead to use them to move the trainee along.

Our spirit operates like don Juan, like a master shaman, as it nudges us along in our growth. When we set out intent to grow, we sign up to become the sorcerer’s apprentice.

As apprentices, we will be nudged along to discover the full truth of who we are, where we come from, and why—all that has happened to us in this life and perhaps beyond it. Like Carlos we enter this apprenticeship in good faith, but suffer from ignorance and a good deal of defensiveness. We naturally defend our sense of self, the self we know; after all, we’ve built our security upon it.

A gentle sign...

The spirit sets to work to move us along by trapping our awareness, sometimes gently, sometimes intensely. Examples of gentleness are signs and synchronicities placed before us daily, designed to awaken our awareness to a greater reality, one that exists beyond the limits of our rational interpretation of the world. More intense knocks of the spirit are the triggers that seize our awareness, immobilizing it, beckoning us to take the journeys into the realm of non-ordinary reality where we discover locked-away truths of our lives.

In such moments of trigger, fear dominates as we misinterpret a benign event as a mortal danger. Our awareness is completely trapped. Here begins the journey of recapitulation, as our current self is nudged to take the plunge into the world where the trigger originates from. On a recapitulation journey we face our hidden truths as we discover worlds within ourselves previously unknown to our conscious awareness.

An intense knock on the door...

As we accept the full truth and impact of the worlds we enter in recapitulation, we free our energy that has been locked away in those hidden worlds, perhaps for decades. We become revitalized, energetic beings, as we recapitulate; magical beings capable of experiencing the world in ways we never dreamed possible. We become capable of fulfillment in this life, no matter what age we are!

The path of the sorcerer’s apprentice is deeply challenging, but it is guided by the spirit, the master shaman within us all that nudges us onward—sometimes gently, sometimes in great haste and intensity—to the full realization of our intent for fulfillment and completion. And, in the end, it all makes sense in ways we simply couldn’t know when we began the journey as humble, eager, but necessarily ignorant apprentices.

Trust your spirit. Continue the journey and know you are being taken where you need to go,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: The Practice of Awe

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We are not all that we think we are. There is much to us that we don’t know about or that we find so unacceptable that we really don’t want to know about or deal with. It can be pretty scary to face the fact that there are parts of me that I simply don’t know exist. We utilize some amazing maneuvers to keep ourselves safe from disruptive intrusions from unknown parts of the self. Anna Freud, in her classic book, Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, outlines the variety of defenses we utilize to block, distort, or rid ourselves of unknown parts of ourselves. The important thing to know about our defenses is that they don’t really operate at a conscious level.

What are we reflecting?

We don’t say to ourselves, “I’m going to PROJECT a part of me that I’m afraid of onto my neighbor, and build a fence to keep him at bay so I can avoid that part of myself!”

We don’t say to ourselves, “I’m going to RATIONALIZE how I interpret this situation at work so I don’t have to see some part of myself that I’m unaware of that has just acted out and caused a problem.”

These defenses operate outside of full conscious awareness. They have to. If we were fully aware of our use of defenses they simply wouldn’t work, since we’d be directly confronted with the hidden truths of the parts of ourselves we seek to avoid! And so, it’s important to suspend judgment of our defensive egos. We’ll never get to know who we really are if we hate ourselves for using defenses to avoid scary things! On the other hand, we must take full responsibility for all that we are, even if we don’t know who that is!

If we can successfully suspend judgment—the shame of not knowing, the shame of feeling bad and unacceptable—and instead become archeologists and anthropologists of the soul, fascinated by and curious as we excavate, discover and trace the origins of the self, we arrive at a place of fuller knowing, accepting, and integrating all that we are. The shamans would call this a Practice of Awe: Awe for the Awesomeness of what is.

A comfy stack of meditation pillows and our breath...

A pragmatic process to support a practice of awe is meditation. In meditation we learn to be in stillness and calm as we are confronted with the cogitations of mind, emotions, sensations, and truths that come to greet us as we place our awareness on our breath. In meditation we return again and again to simply observing our breath entering and leaving our nostrils. We notice our awareness being taken to thoughts, reflections, feelings and sensations—hundreds, thousands of times. And each time, we simply acknowledge what has come to greet us, without judgment, without further attention or attachment, and gently return our awareness to our breathing, over and over—hundreds, thousands of times—without judgment, in gentle calm.

There is no failure; there is no success in a practice of meditation. There is simply being with and accepting all that is. As we practice we notice more of what we are. We withstand the knowing; we are not wiped out or thrown for a loop by what comes; we let emotions flow through us; we shift back to our breathing.

An old favorite...

Judgments are released as we shift constantly to our breathing, as we become observers of ourselves, in command of our awareness, in full acceptance, in awe of the awesome. We become curious travelers into the deeper self, no longer needing to defend an illusory self, because we have discovered instead, all that we are—perhaps for infinity!

In calmness, in awe,
Chuck

A special note on a special day: Today we honor Jeanne on the 10th anniversary of her departure from this world into the awe of infinity. Sending her love, as she continues her most amazing journey.

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Chuck’s Place: Parallel Lives, the Maze, and the Ego Self

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The Big Bang

In the beginning, so say the scientists, was the Big Bang, and the universe was born. In his seminal piece, The Trauma of Birth (1924), Otto Rank describes the Big Bang experience of human birth and its psychological impact throughout the life cycle.

On a soul level, many have retrieved their journeys through infinity; their lives lived before the big bang birth into their current lives in this world. These soul retrievals point to a parallel life, a soul of many lives that gives birth to the Self of this life.

The decision as to what life to be born into is made at that soul level, as part of that soul’s evolving journey and needs in infinity. Some have called this process Karma.

For most of us, the big bang experience of our birth trauma into the life we are in is a shock that severs us from the knowing of our soul and our many lives previously lived. We are born into a maze with huge walls that seal off the memory of prior life and our connection to our greater soul that continues to live in tandem with the self we become in this world.

A hint of previous lives

We are here on a mission, and that mission requires a blank slate maze-of-unknowing. A maze is a definite, constrained life: a family, a culture, a set of circumstances, a world within which to encounter specific challenges, and a world within which to develop an identity, a sense of self, an Ego—a point of consciousness.

That ego will become our working definition of who we are and also our engine to accomplish our mission in this world, that is: the reason we came here, the reason we were born into the circumstances we arrived into.

Had we the full awareness of our greater soul coming into this life, our mission would be compromised. We’d be unable to fully inhabit the role we need to experience in taking on the challenge of this life. However, the ego does, in its separated state from its greater soul, experience a deep underlying sense of insecurity and separation anxiety. The ego retains an awareness of its orphan state and part of its mission in this world is to reunite with its true birth parent, its greater soul.

The circumstances we are born into

Life for the ego is a fragmented self in a fragmented world—life in a maze—a neatly constructed world, but only a fragment of life at large.

Traumas beyond birth continue the fragmentation of ego self into Ego States. Ego states are separate senses of self that coexist and live in tandem—parallel lives in tandem, parallel lives within the ego’s life in this world.

Ego states may be hidden from or known to each other. Some ego states remain largely in the closet, holding frightening traumatic memories. Some ego states suffer arrested development, child states necessarily pushed aside or denied for adaptive reasons. We discover and live the parallel lives of our ego states in our symptoms—i.e.: ailments, diseases—hinting at and suggesting the truths of our parallel lives. We discover and live the parallel lives of our ego states in our mood states—i.e.: depression, elation, hope, hopelessness, fear, etc. We also discover our ego states in obsessive projections—those we are drawn to in admiration or those we abhor. Somewhere in those projections are the mirrors to our unknown, unloved, or forgotten ego states. We also discover our ego states and our connection to our greater soul in dreams, active imagination, and synchronistic phenomena.

Parallel lives

If we can suspend our rational judgments and explore the characters and messages of dreams, synchronicities, and other psychic phenomena, we begin to step outside the maze of our narrow selves and access the fullness and resource of all that we truly are.

This is the process of integration that unites the fragments of this life and potentially the fragments of all lives lived—our greater soul—within this life. This is a mighty task though, as it asks us to truly take in the Big Bang realization of all that we are: We are much more than our orphan ego clings to in its neatly defined maze.

Though the knocking down of the walls of our mazes may shatter our “known” selves, it is not without its rewards. We discover a-maze-ing resources and a life of magic now freed for fulfillment beyond the maze, a once needed but now much too small home.

Out of the many become one: Parallel lives united, beyond the maze, continue the soul’s journey in infinity.

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Practice Inner Silence

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In meditation we learn to master our awareness. The mind is a powerful thing, a think tank that never stops. When we meditate we are confronted with the products of this ceaseless mind engine: thoughts.

Thoughts approach our awareness like vendors selling their wares on Black Friday, sales people lobbying for our attention. And just like the freedom we exercise to buy or not to buy, we have the inner ability to attach or not attach to a thought. If we attach we spend our inner capital, our energy, on the thought by giving it our attention, letting it unfold and journeying with it wherever it may take us. If we don’t attach we store our energy in deepening silence. When we surrender our awareness to the activity of the mind, we drift along on a current of free association, floating from thought to thought, our awareness completely captured by a mind-constructed world of thoughts.

With mindfulness we learn to exercise our innate freedom to attach or not to attach to thought. We learn to simply notice the inner lobbyists of thought, and choose not to attend to their wares. We decide to bring our awareness instead to our bodies—to our breathing, or to the sensations we notice as we scan our bodies in this moment.

When thoughts of varying intensities vie for our awareness, we notice them. We don’t struggle with them; we simply bring our awareness back to our bodies. In an instant we feel the vibration in our fingers or lips, or hear the sound of energy deep within our ears. We breathe; we are present. We judge nothing; there is nothing to judge.

Judgment engages the mind. It quantifies, rates, categorizes, etc. With mindfulness everything is equal, the same—no judgment, no distinction. Everything just is and we are fully present with what is without attachment.

Mastering awareness is staying present with what is, and freely, consciously, choosing where to place attention. We are no longer adrift on the sea without a paddle; we volitionally place our awareness where we want it.

If we are eating, we are not reading or watching—we are fully present in eating, in chewing, in tasting, with awareness. If we are walking, we walk without purpose or destination—we are fully present in our bodies, slowly feeling the sensation of connecting to the earth beneath us.

The shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage practice magical passes to achieve inner silence. Fully mindful in their bodies, they engage the intent of inner silence and move in patterns discovered by shamans of antiquity during dreaming. These shamans don’t worry if they are doing the movements correctly. They suspend judgment and mindfully move. They know intent alone will correct the movements; they don’t fall for the tricks of the cogitating mind that seeks to interfere with the flow of silence.

Practicers of mindfulness and practitioners of shamanism alike are gentle but persevering in their practices. They know, as the I Ching so often states: perseverance furthers. Eventually, the mind desists and we become masters of awareness, fully engaged in our journeys. Without mind we experience total freedom.

Silence the mind, journey in infinity!
Chuck