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: From Destiny To Choice In A Concubine World

Leave a comment
Zeus over the lake...

The lake rests in calm repose. Suddenly and shockingly, thunder blindsides the stillness. Zeus ravages once again; the lake is disturbed and shown its destiny. The marrying maiden is delivered to the threshold of her husband’s door.

In the case of Kuei Mei, the I Ching’s hexagram #54—The Marrying Maiden—this is not an auspicious event. This is the marriage of woman as concubine, indeed a destiny of suffering.

Buddha discovered that LIFE itself is suffering. As beings born into this world we are all stamped as concubines, and we only fully grasp this notion as we understand that the circumstances of our births, the stamps of our destinies, require us to fully suffer those destinies. We cannot escape them. Even if we refuse them through denial, delusion or death, we cannot escape the controlling hands of our destinies. We cannot change the reality of what or who we are. Our challenge is to fully discover, become, and accept that which we are. And then we are free to truly dream it forward, that is, to choose.

Once we embrace our destiny we are free to dream it into new worlds of possibility and fulfillment, untethered to the destiny of our origins. But, until then we must suffer.

It was my stamp, my destiny, to repeatedly suffer the ravages of rape and alcoholic violence foisted upon my mother as I lay in frozen stillness, incubating in the embryonic pool of her womb. Like the calm lake in hexagram #54, I had to withstand the sudden thunder and lightning that came from outside, in the form of my abusive father. My destiny was PTSD, PTSD in oneness with my pregnant mother.

My choice, after decades of discovering my destiny—who I am—has been to dream that destiny forward, as a therapist discovering an evolutionary advance for PTSD, dreaming it forward as a gateway to infinity. Arrival at that gateway—being released from the confines of destiny—through deep inner work, leads to choice and real freedom.

All worlds are multifaceted...

The journey from destiny to choice is multifaceted. Most prominent is the facet of recapitulation. Every day we are triggered by our spirit to recapture the deepest truths of our destiny. We are asked by our own fears and stumblings in everyday life to wake up to where we’ve been and who we are, right down to the elemental essence of our conception. That joining of genes is the stamp of our individuality, the formative journey of our material beings, sending us off on our destinies. Just as I was stamped in my mother’s womb, so are we all.

Until we can feel and know all that we are, all that we’ve been through, we suffer the limitations of beings not ready to fully know ourselves. Of necessity we are held back from the full truth of our heritage and personal history and remain caught in revisionist lives. We remain blinded by false beliefs of who we are, struck by the glare of the thunder and lightning of our lives. We remain stuck in a concubine world.

In recapitulation, we gather up and recondition our parts, the fragments of our destined selves. We reclaim and rejoin with our true selves, experiencing revitalized energy as we recapitulate. Along the path we are challenged to face our victim status, i.e.: None of it was fair. None of it was okay. We didn’t deserve it. It’s not supposed to be this way. They shouldn’t have been allowed to do that. All of this, and much more, is true. It must be acknowledged; yet, beyond that, the truth is that destiny is not fair. The world of the concubine is not fair. Destiny, however, is an experience seeker, a unique combination of energy—a “probe of awareness,” as the shamans would say—sent out in search of new experience.

Who are we? Victim or Fox?

Destiny has no morality. It just is. We awaken to our destiny and seek to make it pleasurable, meaningful, and fulfilling. That is our predilection, the stamp of our humanness. And so, as humans we naturally challenge ourselves to evolve our destinies beyond their victim, concubine, origins. To remain in the victim range is to limit ourselves to the concubine world, far from dreaming our destinies forward. But, the truth is, it’s a formidable task to release our destinies from the human judgment of victim. And, yes, “victim” is a human judgment, for destiny carries no such judgment. It simply is. It simply seeks to evolve, asking us to work with what we got in order to break away from the victim, concubine, world we find ourselves in everyday.

All judgments—though so humanly necessary, as we scrutinize and come to know ourselves and our world—are, ultimately, obstacles to full self-acceptance, as much of what we are, what we’ve done, and what we’ve been exposed to, is often truly unacceptable. To arrive at truth, we must release the human judgments of acceptability and unacceptability. We must fully open up to what is, and, most especially, to what was. Suspend judgment, Carlos Castaneda recommended, as the fundamental resource to discovering who we are and who we might fully become.

Destiny and choice, seeming opposites, are actually a pair of inseparable twins, though in this concubine world destiny births first, followed by choice. Allow the full birth of your own destiny, through recapitulation of the concubine world you now live in, and birth your choice.

Still choosing to dream it forward,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Dream It Forward

Leave a comment
So who says it's so? Embroidered by a Dreamer.

Each morning we awaken to our longest running dream, the world we live in. So compelling and consistent is this dream that we call it reality. In our reality dream, reason has come to be the guiding force, with magic and spirit really believed to exist only in other dreams.

Despite the limitations of reason, it has generated a dream we can count on, a safety net of order and continuity for us to build and maintain our lives on. Currently, our world of reason is under siege by a wily trickster who presents under the pseudonym of economics.

“It’s jobs, stupid; it’s the economy.” And with those words the world goes silent and is brought to its knees in servitude.

This past week I heard a music reviewer, on the eve of the American Idol finale, state that the show had become so formulaic and, despite some strong voices, that formula choked out new music. She herself felt the need to attend a rock concert that night, rather than be bored once again. The economic coup, the other “idol” of our times, has become equally formulaic and boring.

In our own American dream, currently dominating the world stage, a new economic American Idol was anointed this week, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. At age 28, he is now one of the twenty wealthiest people on earth. How did he get there? Well, his greed and speed launched Facebook initially. Despite dirty tricks at Harvard, he pulled it off. The recent Facebook IPO launch was filled, once again, with dirty tricks, with JP Morgan implicated once again, but Zuckerberg still landed at the top, and truly, that’s all that matters. Right?

Reason and fairness are no match for the “economic need” of the few. And, in the end, all dirty deeds are truly forgiven because, secretly, all is fair in the accumulation of wealth. What matters is getting there—at any cost. That’s the real dream of the economic dream.

We have to frack, to poison the water supply. Why? It’s jobs, stupid! We have to drill in the Arctic. We need more oil. Why? Homeland security and the economy, stupid! We simply cannot limit carbon emissions to forestall global warming, at least not now. Why? It just doesn’t make economic sense. How could we possibly shut down a nuclear industry in these times of economic need?

Ironically, such drastic economic delusions were created by the Zuckerbergs of the world, the Wall Street tricksters, the champions of finance and industry who continuously fool the world to their own wealth advantage. But truthfully, their power remains unchecked because, secretly, we’re all upholding the notion that the accumulation of wealth, through any means, is of the highest value and at the basis of our survival. That American dream, like American Idol, simply chokes out the possibility of other dreams, even one so simple as fairness, sharing, and taking only what you truly need. Or a dream that acknowledges interdependence, a dream that says, “no being left behind.” It takes all of us to uphold the dream.

Time to dream a new dream?

Our reality dream is breaking apart now because even rationality cannot uphold the logic of the economic trickster. Science, a most rational process, is severely checked under its influence. According to the economic trickster, science exists only for its money making potential and should only be funded to serve the market. Education is all wrong. Schools are markets now too; markets for iPads, markets for loans, for online degrees. It’s all about the economy—we need more to survive. Like cancer, that dream can only survive on the unchecked accumulation of more.

The good news is that new dreams are incubating to dream our world forward, as we begin to awaken from our current economic nightmare. Just watch Greece. They’re doing it. They’ll be damned, but that cradle of democracy is learning to just say no, as the trickster—the European/World economy—shakes in its boots. True reality is that there is no debt crisis, there is no economic crisis, there is more than enough to sustain all in this world.

The trickster’s crisis is the crisis of greed, with its insatiable need to have it all—that’s the true crisis of which we’re all deluded. The trickster’s dream insists that we dream its dream and pay homage to survival being based on feeding the insatiable need of its greed. That dream requires all of us, in consensus, to agree to it, to uphold that world. That’s why the markets are terrified at the implications in Greece and France. If Greece leaves the Euro, they break from that dream, and that dream begins a free fall into a nightmare that even the trickster can’t dream himself out of.

The other good news is that we are all dreamers capable of awakening from this dream that’s held us in its grip for so long. In our daily dreams, we can incorporate mindfulness practices to achieve a calm that allows us to dislodge from the frantic fears generated by the suggestions of the trickster hypnotist, found within us, as well as without.

We can dream our lives forward, beyond the constraints of the economic formula into new possibility. We can even dream a world of magic and fulfillment, freed of the delusion that we need to accumulate more. Come on, dreamers, let’s dream it forward!

Dreaming on,
Chuck

Note: A good follow up to Chuck’s blog and the economic dream we are caught in is to watch the movie I AM by Tom Shadyac. If you haven’t seen it, it offers a romp through where greed has taken us and specifically the director himself. In the end, he allows simplicity to take it’s modest yet most appropriate place. Available in our Store, under the movies category.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Hello Lucky!

Leave a comment
Evolving dream mandala...

Jan and I spend a full night in dreaming with the Dalai Lama. The actual practice incorporates waking and sleeping. With each waking, a quarter turn of the body into the next quadrant of the full circle of sleeping positions is made—from side to back to side to stomach—as the night goes on. With each turn there is a return to sleep for further dream teaching, as the unfolding mandala of our dreaming progresses.

At the end of the night the Dalai Lama is dying and I anxiously ask him who will be his successor, the next Dalai Lama. Secretly, I hope it will be me!

Finally, the dying Dalai Lama turns to me and says: “My successor will be LUCKY.” And with that he dies.

Earlier that evening, Jan and I had watched an interview with the Dalai Lama conducted by Arianna Huffington on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London as he celebrated the Templeton Prize, awarded to him for his decades of focus on the connection between the investigative traditions of Buddhism and science, seeking to advance the world.

In his somewhat challenged English, the Dalai Lama talked about the reality of neuroplasticity, the scientific validation of real growth and alteration in the brain directly caused by the practices of mindfulness meditation and compassion. The brain grows by developing new regulatory circuits leading to deep, contented calm through these practices.

The Dalai Lama downplayed religion as a catalyst of change, even suggesting that religions will never agree. On the other hand, science, he said, validates that we can change ourselves, and our planet, through the practices of mindfulness meditation and compassion for all beings. Through these practices, inner peace is achievable, with the added benefit of relieving the environment of the burdens of our over-consumptive attempts to soothe ourselves by other means; using drugs, alcohol, etc., combined with our desires for material goods and comforts that, in the end, have little real meaning but greatly impact our human potential and the earth.

Try a little meditation...it's not that hard

The Dalai Lama decided to award the 1.7 million dollar Templeton Prize to the Save the Children Foundation. He envisions a movement to teach compassion and meditation to children in school, at an early age, as a foundational way to balance young minds and change the world.

So, who is LUCKY, the next Dalai Lama?

In researching the meaning of the word “luck,” I was struck by the juxtaposition of two worlds—spiritual and scientific—in its meaning. The spiritual dimension suggests that luck is prescribed by supernatural or spiritual forces that cause fortuitous events. From a scientific perspective, luck is a random or fortuitous event that is willfully generated or logically explicable. Since spirits can’t show up for scientific method, they can exist only in science fiction, not hard science. However, the results are the same: something happens!

So, my dream Dalai Lama, as well as the living Dalai Lama, while acknowledging a spiritual dimension, lays emphasis on generating luck—LUCKY—through hard science. He points out that neuroplasticity is hard science. Neuroplasticity, with its contented neural pathways, generates GOOD LUCK! He tells us not to bother with spirituality but to instead engage in practical science: Change the brain through mindfulness meditation and compassion and bring LUCKY to life!

LUCKY is the end of a singular line of Dalai Lamas. My dream Dalai Lama tells me that we are all LUCKY if we are willing to engage in the practice of mindfulness meditation that leads to pure compassion. Compassion is first discovering the Buddha or Lucky One in the Self, then seeing the Buddha—or LUCKY—in everyone, using mindfulness-based meditation leading to compassion.

Just Mr. Potato Head or Lucky?

I am awestruck at how the ancient family trees of Tibetan Buddhism and Carlos Castaneda’s line of Shamanism have evolved from their homelands into Everyman’s Land. Castaneda ended his line of shamanism in its traditional format by launching the practice of Tensegrity and introducing the idea of the new Nagual in all of us. My dream indicates that the Dalai Lama’s exodus from Tibet, with Buddhism’s diaspora throughout the world, offers us all the opportunity to be the next Dalai Lama, if we follow the scientific practice to grow our brains through neuroplasticity into LUCKY, the compassionate beings we truly are. These are the offerings of the ancient roots of these traditions: we are all embodiments of Buddha, the Nagual, God.

Where these two ancient/modern traditions converge is in the practice of recapitulation, either through using the ancient magical passes or in a mindfulness meditation practice, as the present self takes the full journey to change through revisioning life lived. These evolutionary practices of change promote brain growth—neuroplasticity in action—offering the circuitry for the real experience of compassionate detachment with love. Ultimately, finding the pathway to true compassion means being able to find the Golden Buddha in even the cruelest of tyrants.

In the end, aren’t we all LUCKY?

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Emancipation Proclamation II

1 Comment

Don Juan called the White House “the site of power of today’s world, the center of all our endeavors, hopes, fears, and so on, as a global conglomerate of human beings—for all practical purposes, the capital of the civilized world.” *

In archetypal terms, from the deepest patterned level of our inherited collective unconscious, the American president is the KING of the World.

No More!!!

On Wednesday, the King of the World spoke and changed the evolutionary course of our species as he proclaimed that “same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

You can’t take back an evolutionary moment. The King has spoken! An American president has said the words. It matters little the reactions of a divided country or a divided world or the outcome of the next election. The die is cast. Humanity in evolution: gay marriage is proclaimed the norm.

Marriage, with its 50% failure rate, is no guarantee of anything. Marriage, like sexual maturity, is a process that must be worked at to achieve lasting, fulfilling union. However, what the King of the World, President Obama, has proclaimed, grants legitimacy to both homo- and hetero-sexual relationships to embark on a sacred path of true conjunctio versus being relegated to the shadows of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Whether President Obama seized the political moment, as my ego mind suggests, is immaterial. Whether Vice President Biden was dispatched, on some level, to be the advance guard, preparing the ground for the King of the World to make the proclamation, is immaterial. Obama—with strong support and likely urged by Queen Michelle—took the evolutionary leap, like his channeled mentor Lincoln, to stand for full legitimacy and the right for all people to marry, and for that he is, indeed, at this moment, the King of the World.

We, as a world, are moving at the speed of light now. The dark shadow of 12/21/2012, the proposed end of the Mayan calendar, looms large, but its counterpart, the evolutionary consciousness of humanity to right its course, looms bright.

Can President Obama, the King of the World, continue to seize the moment, to right the course of carbon emissions, nuclear development, fallacious and unnecessary wars?

May all who wish walk beneath the marriage bower in search of true conjunction...

Let’s see what happens. Me thinks we first have to complete the civil war, now reactivated—our country once again divided by an emancipation proclamation. But the first challenge is a tough one: Can we get beyond civil disunion to true marriage?

What a lovely epitaph this emancipation proclamation is to Maurice Sendak, the famed author and illustrator, who died a day earlier, a man who lived for 50 years with his gay partner, Eugene Glynn, in true conjunctio.

Thanking the King of the World, for moving us one step closer to emancipation for all,

Chuck

* Magical Passes, p. 37-8, Carlos Castaneda.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Path of Sexual Maturity

Leave a comment

It takes decades to climb the many stepping stones to full sexual maturity. Great effort is required. Aging without effort guarantees only old age. Deep sexual union may, in fact, be the opus of a lifetime with the failures of the first half of life actually being the necessary preparatory steps for true fulfillment beyond midlife.

Nature's imperative...

Those failures include the fertile years where nature, in a most impersonal way, secretly dominates the sexual drive, masking its demands for recreation in the inappropriate attractions that spellbind us into sexual union. Many of those unions, though they may achieve nature’s aim of procreation, lack compatibility, sustenance and duration.

Nature fully takes advantage of the naiveté of youth to romantically do its bidding. Beyond copulation, nature provides little to support relationship. Yes, it does provide bonding and nesting urges, on an instinctual level, but that doesn’t stop nature’s compulsion; it will not be limited. That’s its survival strategy: quantity of children over quality of relationship. And true commitment, true containment, is hard to submit to in the fertile years. All humans must reckon with this debt to their animal natures, with its exorbitant interest toll evident in relationship casualties. If we truly grasped the power of nature to commandeer even our minds during the fertile years, we wouldn’t take so personally our failures. We didn’t stand a chance against nature’s imperative.

Coexistent with nature’s biological dominance in the fertile years is the ego’s growing control over sexual life. These include encounters with adequacy, self-esteem, performance, power, and the ability to connect.

Can I do it?

Some of the ego challenges that men may encounter as they attempt to firmly establish their potency and power are questions such as:

Am I attractive enough?
Am I virile enough?
Am I worthy of this person?
Can I approach and hold my own in interaction?
Do I know how to seduce?
Is my penis adequate, large enough?
Can it get the job done?
How do I turn her on, what’s the best method?
What’s the deal with oral sex? Can I handle it?
How are you supposed to do it?
Where’s the clitoris?
Can I handle a real life encounter?
Can I stop shaking?
Can I get an erection?
Can I maintain an erection?
Can I handle the responsiveness of her body?
Will I ejaculate too soon?
How will I know if she’s satisfied?
Can I share my fantasies?
How did I measure up?
Why doesn’t she ever approach me?
How can I get more?

Am I sexy enough?

Women are challenged by many of the same ego and self-esteem questions, but their are others specifically female related, such as:

Am I pretty enough?
Am I smart enough?
Am I desirable enough?
Do I have an attractive body?
Are my breasts too little, too big?
Do I smell good?
Does he really like me?
Can I tell him my dreams?
Will it hurt?
Where is my clitoris?
Will I orgasm?
How do I tell him he’s not doing it right without hurting his feelings?
Is this love?
Will he come back or is this just a one time thing?
What if I just want to cuddle, will he be okay with that?
What if he comes first?
Do I have to fake an orgasm so his ego isn’t hurt?
How do I stop him, say no, if it doesn’t feel right?
Why do we have to do it so often?
What if I get pregnant?

These questions and thousands more, including a readiness and willingness to commit, pervade men’s and women’s thoughts during the fertile years. Concerns are largely self-centered, only marginally relational. True readiness to be with, take in, and merge with another person, in mature union, transcends the ego’s preoccupations during the fertile years.

Biological aims and ego insecurities dominate the fertile years and must be experienced and burned through to prepare the ground for the depth of spiritual union inherent in sexual maturity at midlife and beyond. Midlife crisis is actually the spirit’s call to recapitulate and complete the learnings of the first half of life’s lessons to prepare for deep union in later years, what the alchemists called: conjunctio.

A major component of recapitulation is reliving our complete sexual history, facing the full truth, releasing the myths as well as the myriad of feelings combusted and stored around all sexual encounters. In recapitulation, we retrieve our freed energy; we enter our bodies deeply; we accompany the free flow of libido with calm presence and openness, as we prepare for union without barrier.

Recapitulation itself is an arduous process. As we climb the stepping stones to full maturity we learn that it takes time, patience, and a deep yearning for, and commitment to, the truth and fulfillment of this life. During recapitulation, ego issues and traumatic underpinnings that once froze the free flow of sexual energy are discovered for what they truly are, dismantled and released. Recapitulation is conjunctio within the self, as energy previously separated is reclaimed and merged into a unified whole within the self. From this recapitulated place of wholeness, extraverted conjunctio, matured sexuality, is possible with an “other.” If the residual sexual issues from the fertile years are not resolved through recapitulation, these issues will be carried forward, interfering with conjunctio, both within and without.

Ecstatic union

After recapitulation, the physical changes of midlife, and beyond, matter little. With ego relativized through recapitulation, full spiritual, sexual union—at the deepest energetic level—is completely possible! After recapitulation conjunctio is no longer thwarted by such issues as body image or mechanics, for no physical limitations or ego limitations can stop true sexual, energetic union. There simply are no limitations! Two fingers alone can touch in ecstatic orgasmic union!

For those still in the midst of the necessary challenges of the fertile years, stay patient. Full sexual maturity awaits if you allow yourself to have your own necessary experiences and acquiesce to recapitulation when it beckons. For those with limited or deeply compromised sexual experience during the fertile years, recapitulation provides the necessary process of integration of self that will lead to openness to union in later years, when true union is really possible, offering the ability to fully actualize the sexually mature self, in true relationship!

The full realization of sexual maturity ultimately includes the biological, ego, and energetic or spiritual dimensions of our beings. It’s far more than nature just taking its course. It requires us, as conscious beings, to evolve as individuals to really meet each other.

From the nest,

Chuck and Jan