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.
Carlos Castaneda looked out at us and said: “Suspend judgment and see what happens.” That was in July of 1996 in Los Angeles. Fifteen years later, I can report that through suspending judgment a world of magic has revealed itself to me.
I am no longer restricted by the conclusions of the rational mind to interpret life and make decisions. I comfortably see that all things are interconnected and that guidance for my next move might equally come from a flip of the coin, from a song in my head or a pain in my body, or who I next encounter.
Suspend Judgment...
As I wrote this last sentence, a call came in from someone flabbergasted by a dream that literally sent them flying out of the dream into a bedpost. I see, in this synchronistic event, spirit affirming my intent in this blog to validate the magic and action of its intent. This is how I read energy, this is how I track spirit. My point here is that I let my life be guided by these occurrences; rationality is simply no longer comprehensive enough to reveal the full truth of the world.
This orientation may be my advantage as a therapist. Though I respect convention and state-of-the-knowledge, I find them way too limiting in their tools of healing. I find spirit’s guidance the true winning ticket.
I know that everyone who sits before me is guided by their spirit. I totally trust that. In fact, I am certain that spirit has had them encounter me at this time because I welcome spirit and validate its guidance. Much of what I do is help those who consult with me to recognize and appreciate the action and intent of their spirit for their own healing.
To arrive at this place we must first clear the debris of judgments that blur or misrepresent the facts in life. My flying dreamer questioned their sanity and wondered about the need for a psychopharmacological assessment. I helped them experience the awe of their spirit’s literal knock to awaken to change.
All that stands between you and the magic in you is the cloak of judgment sealing off the treasure within.
I had a break early Tuesday afternoon. I turned off the lights, sat calmly in a lotus position and began the sweeping recapitulation breath. Within moments the earth beneath began to rumble. I felt the solid old factory building sinking, the sure-footed earth turning to liquid.
That’s how it is, with recapitulation. The surety of the structures we’ve built a self upon, a lifetime upon, begin to crumble, no longer able to support the solid illusions of our lives. It’s a free fall, and one not to be undertaken lightly, but only out of necessity.
We, as a world, are in the time of recapitulation now—and we must take the journey because the intent has already been set and there is no turning back.
The earthquake shook the capital of the modern world, Washington D.C. It left a four-foot crack in the Washington Monument and brought down several pinnacles of the National Cathedral—Church and State—the foundational structures of society, rocked and rattled by the energy of change.
Synchronistically, the Martin Luther King Jr. monument, recently installed at the National Mall, had just opened to the public and emerged unscathed from the quake. Can the old structures of our society handle the true impact of such an agent of change? Apparently not, and we see the realization of Martin’s dream, President Obama, confronted with the crumbling structures of our changing world.
I see Obama as an agent of change, ironically aided now by the forces intent upon his destruction. Those forces are quite willing to grind government and economy to a halt, to turn back the clock to some romantic vision of blissful conservativism. Destructive as that might be, it is having the effect of bringing down the long-dominating economic structures of the world. Had those forces not acted so rigidly, Obama would have been forced to bolster the status quo. He’s been relieved of that burden, the status quo is being irradicated and there is no turning back. And even should Obama be ousted in a desperate collective attempt to restore security, there’s no way to turn back the wheel of time to the good old days. Those structures are falling down, even the wealthiest cannot stop it. We are being forced into a time of waking up, facing the truths, and building fluid structures for a changing world. And nature is making sure that that world changes!
On a personal level, once the agent of change calls, the knock of the spirit to discover the full truths of the self, we do best to heed the call with the knowing that we have Spirit behind us. When spirit instigates changes, spirit also provides the supports to take the journey. Free fall is inevitable, and it can indeed be frightening.
Feeling the earth move under my feet was quite an awesome, humbling experience, but it’s also a reminder that the only real choice we have is the attitude we take toward that inevitable journey. When I felt the earth tremble and loosen its solid illusion, I said, “Wow, is this it! This is a ride I want to take with eyes wide open and calm breath.”
Onto the next agent of change, Hurricane Irene!
Chuck
Are we all ready to face the real truths that are so obvious?
Jeanne was diagnosed with cancer in 1994 right in the midst of our move to Tivoli, New York. Simultaneously, Carlos Castaneda was launching Tensegrity, a modern format in which to pass on the knowledge of the Seers of Ancient Mexico. Around the same time Jan, living in the deep South, was also diagnosed with cancer while at the same time being energetically stirred to make the trek back to the Hudson Valley, called to a new potential destiny. All three of these energetic events, Jeanne-Carlos-Jan, were about endings and new beginnings.
For Jeanne and I, it was to mark the final stage of our life together in this world as we began preparing to meet again on new energetic terms after her death. For Carlos, also soon to die, it marked the end of his shamanic line. Carlos, a socialist at heart, broke all the rules of secrecy in shamanism and offered everyone equal access to the tools of his shamanic line with the launching of Tensegrity. Tensegrity offers practitioners the tools to discover the energy body and the opportunity to evolve to new levels of human possibility. Jan was to heal from cancer, move North, and discover the need to end her sixteen-year-long marriage. On a profound personal level, an old illusion of herself was to die and she moved deeply into energetic life.
The energetic cord that was to bind these three events together was the shamanic tool of recapitulation. Jeanne and I were introduced to recapitulation at a workshop we attended led by Carlos. Recapitulation aided Jeanne in leaving her human form, landing her in her energy body, like a bodhisattva—an evolved being available to guide others still in this world. I introduced Jan to recapitulation, the tool that allowed her to discover her unknown self, shed her attachment to a horrific past, and revamp her energy to become an energetic channel able to connect with Jeanne in her evolved energy body state. Through Jeanne’s channeled messages to Jan, Jeanne expanded the practice of recapitulation outside of the shamanic format, to include the triggers and synchronistic events of everyday life as energetic promptings to recapitulate.
Personally, the day I introduced Jan to the tool of recapitulation was the day of my full coming out. It was my transformation, as I dared to openly use a shamanic tool in my clinical work. Up to that point, though I was well aware of the value of recapitulation as a tool for healing deep trauma, I relied more heavily on EMDR, a therapeutic tool with some similarities to recapitulation. However, it was really a subset of the far more comprehensive practice of recapitulation.
I introduced Jan to recapitulation over a decade ago. As is evident from my writings and work over the past decade, I can’t say enough about the healing value of recapitulation as a tool to fully heal from the deepest and most horrific of life’s traumas. In a couple of weeks, Jan will be releasing the first of three books, The Recapitulation Diaries: The Man in the Woods. This book, almost three years in the making, is a detailed description of every important facet of her recapitulation process. With this publication we enter a new era in our work as Jan makes available, to anyone, guidance on how to do recapitulation, how to discover who you really are, how to release the self from illusions about life and life’s experiences, and how to revamp energy to enter new and fulfilling life.
Before he left this world, Carlos fully understood and appreciated the value of the internet as a communication tool. His foresight has proven true. We will be publishing Jan’s book first on Kindle, the wave of the publishing future. We discovered, with out last book, The Book of Us, that the old structures of the publishing world could not serve as a medium for our ideas and experiences. In fact, none of the old structures work for us. We find ourselves constantly being energetically led to new formats.
A bit of Carlos’s socialist heart has rubbed off on us as well. Jan’s Kindle book will sell for $.99 (yes, ninety-nine cents!) making it available to everyone. It isn’t about the money—it’s about the energy and evolution. On the other hand, you do have to pay. Carlos and the other seers of his line discovered that you have to pay, no matter what world you’re in. If you give it away, it simply is not valued. Perhaps it’s just the nature of evolution; without challenge we simply don’t grow. But there doesn’t have to be greed—the number one cause of our crumbling world.
The relevance of the shamanic tool of recapitulation for our rapidly decaying world is obvious. Don Juan predicted that for human beings to survive now, a mass redeployment of energy, such as occurs through a recapitulation, was critical. Human beings need to be willing to drop the illusions that can no longer sustain the world, face the real truths, and move forward in a new energetic configuration.
What the world needs now is recapitulation on a personal, interpersonal, national, and international level. We see the sentinels of illusion busily trying to guard and uphold a world that is crumbling around them. And then we see many brave seekers recapitulating and preparing to lead a new energetic possibility.
Everything is possible—and a new recapitulated possibility is happening!
Chuck
What happens when we’re tricked? We’re trapped, caught in illusion.
The game of peek-a-boo is both exhilarating and terrifying for the baby. Suddenly you, the adult trickster, are gone—evaporated, disappearing into thin air. For the child, a moment of excitement, anxiety and anticipation ensues, and then joyful release at the sheer magic of you popping up again, out of nowhere! “Do it again! Do it again, and again!” More fear, anxiety, excitement, and utter exhilaration, please!
The trickster is magical, playing a mercurial game. The encounter with the trickster leads us onward to higher awareness. Eventually, we figure out the game: when you leave, when I can’t see you, you still exist, and your reappearance is no longer magical. This achievement is called object constancy. Peek-a-boo is no longer a game the child wants to play. Trickster can’t catch the child now. It’s boring. On to new tricksters—illusionists who both excite and terrify, but ultimately pose a challenge to move on to greater consciousness. In the broadest sense, trickster is the boundary-crosser, a being that challenges our complacency and security, and forces us to confront the deeper truths of reality.
And what are those truths? That life isn’t fair! That all kinds of possibilities exist in the universe, both good and evil and, ultimately, nothing can protect us from encountering those forces in some form. We must reckon with them, master them, and go deeper into life, deeper into the mystery.
Trickster or Tricksta?
Tricksters come in all forms, some are gentle and playful like the rabbit, the monkey, the fox, and the coyote, all found in legend and folklore. These are the tricksters we seek to adore, encounter, and learn from in childhood.
The truth is, tricksters come in many forms, and some may deliver lethal blows, to adults and yes, to children as well. Tricksters appeal to our innocence, that curious, open part of ourselves that trusts and seeks fun, play, attention, discovery, and love. Our innocence is drawn to the excitement the trickster brings, along with the tension of being caught, once again, by the trickster’s illusion.
Life without the trickster is too boring, stagnant, predictable, and routine.
The predatory trickster—what I here term “Tricksta,” following the slang term for gangster as “gangsta”—is the most challenging of all tricksters. Trickstas trap the innocent to feed their own predatory appetites. Trickstas are the most formidable of tricksters. Trickstas don’t care “if you live or if you die.” Each time I contemplated Tricksta this week, these lyrics triggered in my mind, an incessant replaying of the 1968 Steppenwolf version of The Pusher: “The Pusher don’t care, if you live or if you die.”
Innocence gets caught in addictions. Perhaps the innocence of exploration, adventure, or the innocent push of inflation, to be a hero—take the heroin plunge. Perhaps it’s the regressive push to soothe lost innocence in a chemically altered calm world where the demons of intense feeling are kept at bay. The pusher is the Tricksta that lures this innocence, then ensnares it, imprisons it, and feeds off it while it sleeps unknowingly in the poppy field. It’s always scary with addiction because Tricksta really doesn’t care if you live or if you die. If you’re to live you must awaken and release the self from the clutches of Tricksta. Free the self from the slumber of inertia and numbness. Tricksta drives a hard bargain. It’s all on you whether you resume the journey or perish.
That same predatory energy goes in search of the energy of children, trapping, tricking and manipulating their innocence. No child is a match for Tricksta’s trappings, though it might take a lifetime to stop blaming the self for the encounter. Tricksta is a deeply impersonal energy that challenges whomever it chooses to touch at the deepest level. Tricksta is indeed the darkest side of trickster. Tricksta has no mercy. Often the only defense is to forget childhood encounters with Tricksta. The benefit of forgetting is survival, the cost: lost innocence and guarded living.
At some stage in life, spirit knocks and announces to our adult selves that it’s time to resume the journey. This is the beginning of recapitulation, where the illusions of a lifetime, especially the past, are released along with Tricksta’s ancient grip.
Innocence is restored, older and wiser, with truth fully in hand. Time to go onto deeper, fuller adventures—real life adventures and fulfillment.
Life is a flow of energy. Judgment is a freeze frame of that flow of energy—an attempt to understand and value it—but clearly, judgment is not life. Life flows; judgment is static.
Life flows... and flutters...
Don Juan Matus pointed out that human beings are perceivers, perceivers of the flow of life energy. He hypothesized that human beings went on to become judgers because it was an efficient way to manage the challenging dimension of life energy. Don Juan believed that the ability to quickly interpret and categorize energy in solid form gave our ancestors an advantage in defending themselves.
We can experience this today by simply walking in the road. We might see a flutter of movement in the distance. We then quickly judge that movement to be a skunk or possibly a rabid raccoon. With this in mind we plan our approach. Funny how many treacherous leaves and fallen pieces of bark I’ve encountered as I’ve approached these flutters in the distance—the dangerous jungle of the street I live on!
Carl Jung, like don Juan, agreed that human beings are perceivers who perceive through the functions of sensation and intuition. Don Juan would likely call these functions organs of direct knowledge—knowledge obtained independently of the mind.
For Jung, the ego, or the mind, develops the discriminatory functions of thinking and feeling to decide what things are and what value they have. These are the freeze frame functions of judgment, the solid interpretations of energy that don Juan spoke about. With judgment we create exhaustive categories of what life is, how it works, and also assign all this knowledge a place in our lives.
In the modern world, the judgment functions and their host, the mind, have become so dominant that the channels to direct knowledge are lost, devalued, and even ridiculed.
How often do we ask our bodies directly what they need using our innate sensation function? More likely we must research the latest study or be told by a professional what our bodies need. How did our ancestors ever know what to eat before we had science and Science Diet!
Intuition is vision into that which can’t be seen—a direct tapping into the flow of life energy. Intuition completely bypasses the mind. The rational, judging mind has little use for intuition, as it only deals with solid facts—the freeze frames of life’s flow of energy.
What I observe is that life continues to flow regardless of how we judge it. Life is, forever and anew, approaching us with both challenge and support. Challenge may come in the form of loss and deep trauma and support may come in the synchronicities of guidance and encouragement, presented in signs all around us.
Most of the time, life energy is moving us along in the most amazing ways. Unfortunately, because we are dominated by the judging functions of the mind, we miss the magic always active in our personal lives.
I constantly notice how bogged down we become in feeling bad about ourselves. We miss how the daily events of our lives unfold in such a meaningful and helpful way. Even more amazing is how we are continuously supported in our growth and evolution, in spite of the negative judgments we daily place upon ourselves.
Life continues to both challenge and support us regardless of how brutally we judge ourselves or how low our self-esteem. The real problem is not in our flow of energy but in our judgments. Often our judgments are so fixated that they refuse to take in the reality of the life we are actually living. Our judgments generate a negative interpretation regardless of the facts.
It seems as if we fear that if we truly accept ourselves as acceptable to life, we will invite the wrath of some higher power to level us. The fact is that bad things happen to good people and bad people alike. Life happens as it will. Energy will flow regardless of our judgments.
Judgment has no control over life. Judgment does, however, have control over what we allow ourselves to see and know about the lives we are actually living. Judgment is the ultimate spin-doctor.
If you judge yourself to be bad or a failure today, life will still bring you supportive energy tomorrow. Life is deaf to judgment. The real question is whether you will be able to be aware of the wonder of the day and the amazing gifts being offered. All that judgment does is fog the screen, but beyond the fog life continues to both challenge and embrace without judgment.
Can you suspend judgment and show up for the real show? And, even if you can’t allow yourself to get too close to the real show yet, life continues to challenge and embrace you anyway. The truth is, you are wanted by life to live and explore fully. It’s why it brought you here, as the eyes and soul of ever-evolving infinity.
