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: There Are No Advantages or Disadvantages

Leave a comment

From the perspective of the seers of ancient Mexico, we are all equal. Regardless of wealth, status, privilege, health, genes, family; we all face the same ultimate adversary: DEATH! Seers choose to face this truth directly; hence, they focus all their energy on preparing for this inevitable encounter.

The seers teach gazing at and breathing in the sun’s powerful rays, while protectively shielding the eyes from direct contact with the sun, to become energized. Similarly, yogis teach breathing in prana, vital energy from the sun for the same reason. Wherever we are, on a beach in Tahiti or a prison cell at Attica, the sun shines equally upon us all. We can choose to be present and soak in the sun’s energy.

In this moment, pause, look for the light. Is it refracted on a wall or perhaps emanating from a bare lightbulb? Focus on it; soften your gaze, and breath in the energy of the light. No light? Visualize the sun in your imagination and breathe in its energy. There are no advantages or disadvantages.

We might pine to live in a different home, with different people, in a quieter place. Yet, if we find our home on a sidewalk square on the streets of Calcutta, with no other option, we are afforded equal opportunity to focus our awareness on releasing our abdomen and breathing in deeply the prana in the air that surrounds us.

As I sit and write, my senses are assaulted by loud vibrating machines interspersed with thundering hammers. “More good news to break up my meditation?” states an old reggae song, or are these noises promptings to lose my self-importance—it’s not about me. Why spend my vital energy on resistance and resentment? No matter what environment you find yourself in at this moment there is likely something that feels offensive. Do we attach to feeling offended, disempowered and resentful, or do we liberate ourselves by storing our energy and learning to go with the flow?

Our Western world is measured by progress. Where am I in relation to my ideal job, educational goals, financial dreams, family plan? Of course, it makes sense to immerse ourselves in all these goals, but we do well to realize that it’s all really just playing house. In the final analysis, it’s not about how well we’ve lived or loved, it’s how prepared we are for our ultimate encounter with death.

The seers suggest that we indeed immerse ourselves fully in our chosen lives—to be impeccable in fully living them. They call this the Art of Stalking. For them, stalking is the acknowledgment that you can be fully present and alive in your life, in fact, any life, but at any moment that life will completely dissolve, and it’s on to the next adventure.

Are we prepared to open up to this adventure, or do we cling stubbornly to this world demanding to reincarnate? Stalking means living fully, impeccably, yet with no illusion of permanence. To forget that we are all mere stalkers of lives upon this earth, to attach to the notion of creating something lasting, is to take the eye off the ball of our true destiny: one of inevitable, complete, and total change.

Fulfillment, in this life, is about fully opening to experiencing all that we fear in the lives we have chosen to stalk. This might mean to face and depotentiate our deepest hidden truths; to laugh at ourselves; to drop our protective shields and open fully to deep love, to sexual ecstasy, to deep pain and sorrow; to full breath; to energetic life beyond the body; to utter calm. These are the potentials of human experience that challenge us to become fluid, to let go with abandon, to fully prepare for the final leap beyond death’s door. These experiences are available to everyone.

Remember, there are no advantages or disadvantages. We all face the identical door. We all have our individual appointment with death. We all have, within ourselves and the lives we are in, all that is needed to prepare to successfully move into new life.

Take advantage of your opportunity, available to all, to breathe and take in the energy of the light.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Beyond The Sprawl

1 Comment

On a road trip through America, struck by the metastases of stores, hotels and restaurants. “Each town looks the same to me,” carbon copies, endless chains of unchecked greed, growth and expansion, a malignancy from sea to sea, and across the seas. We are sold on the notion that economic recovery equals economic expansion, the only cure for our slump.

Meanwhile, as we self-soothe, bathing in our personal history of self-importance on Facebook, this marketing goldmine with its own metastases—tentacles penetrating every lead, refusing to let go of any attachment— is now deemed unstoppable and has not escaped the eyes of investment giant Goldman Sachs, now offering Facebook stock to its wealthy investors. Remember Goldman? One of the investment leaders responsible, through its greed, for bringing down the economy a few short years ago.

Our world reflects our most dreaded disease: cancer. This is so, not only because of the carcinogens we create and consume, but also because our governing modus of survival is unchecked expansion. In a nutshell: how can I generate, market, expand, and accumulate MORE!

The God of Now is MORE! The rational mind is firmly in control, and regardless of lip service to the contrary, death=lights out. The only heaven is accumulation in the now. This is The Matrix we live in and feed. And it’s not just the puppet masters of the evil empire who tweak the local ambience to feed our illusions of specialness in their big box wonderlands. If we examine the habits of our lives, we are sure to discover the dominance of more in some form, whether it be in electronics, food, spirits, romance, objects, information, etcetera, etcetera.

The modern world has lost its connection and respect for ancient wisdom. China, the land that gave us The Middle Way, the ancient cure for excess, has completely metastasized. Like a pancreatic cancer, it spreads its ravenous greed, consuming all that lies in its way, including Tibet.

We are indeed at the climax of a dying age, as the ancient Hindus, in their Vishnu Purana text wrote, describing our age with amazing accuracy: “It declares that men will know they have entered the Kali Age when society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth becomes the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion.”

On a global scale this age must burn itself out for new life to begin. Jeanne came to realize that sometimes cancer is the necessary remedy of transformation.

And lest I seem negative and hopeless, I am in fact quite optimistic. The seeds of a new era lie within us all. First, we must allow ourselves to see the truth of The Matrix, time for the red pill. Next we must disengage from the tentacles of The Matrix that feed upon and are supported by our vital energy.

Yes, we are free to reclaim our energy by facing all the truths, inner and outer; the stuff of recapitulation. As we filter through our experiences and reclaim our energy, we harmonize and achieve an inner calm, perfectly capable of sustainability outside The Matrix. We reclaim our birthright as energetic beings, freed to step outside the illusions of The Matrix, freed to live in infinity, NOW! Happy New Year!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTES: Each town looks the same to me is a quote from the Simon and Garfunkel song Homeward Bound. The Vishnu Purana text is from the book Tantra, The Yoga of Sex by Omar Garrison, p. xix. The Matrix refers to the movie of the same title, Chuck’s favorite movie, thus far and now.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Magical Books

1 Comment

Some books simply are magical. Every time I pick up any book of Carlos Castaneda’s—books I have read dozens of times over the past forty years—I encounter new knowledge. These books are alive with an energy that takes me deeper in my journey of awareness. They inevitably lead me into heightened awareness where my clarity of knowing is unparalleled. I experience directly the intent of the seers of ancient Mexico. Carlos channeled that intent in those living books by completely removing his self-importance from their pages. He reserves his words for precise descriptions of his experiences in the seer’s world.

Recently, while rummaging through the books at the local recycling center, I came upon the big book, AA’s “bible.” Though I’ve read countless works on recovery, I never actually read this book. This book is also a living book, a magical book. Unpretentious, blue, with no outer appeal, in fact, rather anonymous looking, it nonetheless called out to me.

As I began to read through its pages, I recognized the evolutionary intent it channels. AA is the most successful mass movement for evolutionary change on earth. The guidelines of that intent are clearly spelled out in shamanic terms. For change to happen one must beckon a power beyond the ego. The ego must then open to a shamanic journey with that power to experience genuine transformation. In preparation for that journey the guidance requires a complete loss of self-importance, in fact, in AA everyone remains on a first name basis only. No one is more important than the other—there is no hierarchy. No profit is to be made from the program and no one is rejected; all are equal. (I think Senator McCarthy was barking up the wrong tree when he was seeking out the true communists in America in the nineteen-fifties!)

Furthermore, the growth of AA was predicated on the energetic law of attraction, clearly spelled out in the book, attraction versus promotion. The guidance also strongly recommends one’s individual encounter with the truth in the form of a moral inventory and making of amends. This is a version of recapitulation that enables the seeker to put down old burdens, erase the constraints of personal history, preparing the ground for freedom and transformation.

In describing the magical origins of AA, the book chronicles the role of C. G. Jung. After failing to cure one of AA’s founders, the dejected patient pressed Jung for any glimmer of hope for what to do next to heal. Jung, offering little hope to this advanced alcoholic patient and without any further guidance, suggested he might experience a transformation through a spiritual experience. “Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences,” Jung told him. (p. 27 in Alcoholics Anonymous Third Edition.) He did indeed go out and have a spiritual experience that channeled the path to AA, and the rest is history, as chronicled in the big book, a living viable path for transformation.

Jung himself, the son of generations of protestant ministers, was faced with the personal experience that dogma and belief could not serve the needs of his soul. As Aniela Jaffé writes in C. G. Jung Word and Image: “In his eyes, the ability to believe was a gift of grace, one which he (Jung) and many others no longer shared. That loss justified the search for new approaches to the numinous.” This was the impetus behind Jung’s suggestion to his alcoholic patient to go out and seek a spiritual experience.

Jung himself recorded his own spiritual journey in The Red Book, another magical book. In this book Jung chronicles his personal confrontation with powers greater than himself, a series of numinous experiences that ultimately paved its own path to wholeness in the form of analytical psychology. This book, like other magical books, is bereft of self-importance and hints at a means for each of us to discover our own individuation.

The common thread running through the magical books of Carlos Castaneda, AA, and C. G. Jung is that they all channel the energy of transformation and evolutionary intent, offering access to a personal spiritual transformative experience. Whether the journey happens in the shaman’s world, supported by a nagual, or in psychotherapy under the guidance of a therapist, or in “the rooms” supported by the AA community, it is only a personal experience that will lead to genuine transformation and change.

These magical books speak to our time, where the grace of dogma and belief can no longer serve the spiritual evolutionary needs of a planet in crisis, in dire need of transformation. However, to go beyond dogma and belief and truly achieve transformation each one of us must individually take the journey, and see what happens!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Reincarnation in a Pear Tree

Leave a comment

The inspiration for the title and theme of this blog began with a story Jan told me as we talked about reincarnation this past week. Here, in her own words, is what she said:

My grandfather was a builder and developer. When he retired from major construction projects such as building skyscrapers, churches and apartment buildings in New York City he put his creative energy into building houses in the hills of the Hudson Valley where he had purchased an old farm in the nineteen-forties and where he maintained a second home. As I remember him telling the story, he was getting ready to bulldoze a new road through an old orchard of gnarly apple, pear and plum trees. Always sensitive to nature—indeed the homes he built were more than likely to be nestled among tall trees—his choice of where to build was always planned so as to do as little damage to the natural environment as possible. On that day, he attempted to push his way through a row of old fruit trees, but one small, dead looking pear tree would not fall before the powerful machine upon which he rode. He described it as standing as solidly as if made of steel, and although he had knocked off quite a few large branches, almost halving the tree, he felt that it deserved to live as long as it desired, so he moved his road slightly to the left in order to accommodate this most auspicious pear tree.

As he worked on his housing development he watched with delight as the little pear tree blossomed, grew leaves and bore fruit. Later he stood on the back of his truck and picked the ripened pears, marveling at the mystery of this half dead tree, as year after year it continued to produce the biggest, juiciest and sweetest pears he had ever tasted. Years later he would still drive by, stop and stand on the back of his truck and reach up into the branches, filling his hat with golden pears.

I too picked pears from this magical tree. When waiting for the school bus or walking past it I never failed to recall my Grandfather’s story of how it had survived the bulldozer. It was a story I heard him tell many times and always with the same bright sense of wonder in his voice as the first time I’d heard him speak of the sturdy little pear tree that refused death and always produced such succulent life.

Years later, my youngest brother, when he was about eleven or twelve, asked me if I believed in reincarnation and immediately an image of that same little pear tree came to mind. When this same brother died a few years after that the little pear tree again instantly appeared before me. In fact, whenever I hear or think the word “reincarnation” an image of that little pear tree immediately floats before me. I see it now, a little golden pear tree, its trunk, leaves and fruit bathed in glistening golden light, and I am reminded of my grandfather and my brother, and the energy of all life, never ending.

The old gnarly pear tree is our old soul that continues its journey through infinity, manifesting new lives, new adventures, in the fresh fruit of our current life, our current incarnation. Though this life, this incarnation, will end as all fresh fruit ultimately breaks down, the life of our soul endures, accruing all the experiences of our current incarnation, constantly evolving onward to new adventure.

On the evening of December 9th, Jan and I sat calmly watching the flames in our wood stove, drinking a glass of wine. This was a special wine we had ordered, having to wait weeks for its arrival. I had just picked it up before coming home. This wine is a fair trade red organic wine without sulfites from South Africa called “Live-a-Little” Really Ravishing Red. On the label is an illustration of a woman dancing freely among the stars and a man in the background hanging from a crescent moon.

The phone rang. It was my daughter, Erica. She shared how well she’d done on her finals, then asked: “Are you guys doing anything special?” I paused, thinking: Well, it’s a Thursday night, why would we be doing anything special? I replied: “No, not really, why?”

“It’s December 9th, Dad…”

Suddenly, I was transported back into another life, a prior incarnation. Nine years ago, Jeanne died on December 9th. And, for the first time in nine years, I had not relived our personal passion play, amazing as it was. So fully interwoven now is Jeanne in the fabric of my current incarnation as we face oncoming time, that I was totally living outside the caboose, which represents looking backward and living in a life we have already lived. (Refer to last week’s blog.)

Deeply sensitive to my daughter, and all my children, seeds planted from the fruits of my journey with Jeanne in this world, I journeyed back a bit into that life as I spoke with Erica. How tender and vulnerable the transition between lives after the death of a beloved parent. How necessary to visit and revisit the caboose of anniversaries, to never forget a past, precious life.

For myself, I am in awe at the seamlessness of my flow through December 9th, fully available to oncoming time. Someone had even recently mentioned a woman dying of cancer at age 47, such a young age. I thought, when I heard it: Yes, that’s how old Jeanne was when she died of cancer. Even this “trigger” had not the power to awaken me to the cusp of December 9th. Earlier in the day of December 9th, a client had asked me about Jeanne’s life and death. I shared in detail her deepest issue and how her death had led to its resolution. Even this had not the energy to awaken me to a past life of December 9th!

Jeanne flows through me and many others as I enjoy the fruits of my current life. My attachment to memory and the specialness of that past life recedes as new days—oncoming time—are freed of old associations and obligations. The only real obligation to be fully present to life is to merge all lives into a living whole that partakes in life NOW. This is life in the pear tree; life that can handle the full impact and integration of all lives lived, venturing forth to new adventure, next year’s crop.

The ultimate irony and humor of the universe is that the celebration of December 9th was well prepared for and pictorially presented on our bottle of “Live-a-Little,” with Jeanne still dancing in infinity!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Facing Oncoming Time & Recapitulation

Leave a comment

In his book The Art of Navigation Felix Wolf shares the following anecdote from Carlos Castaneda.

“The Nagual always maintained that the average man traveled through life in the caboose, always looking back, always keenly aware of his personal history, his experiences, and his identity as an accumulation of the past. It was one of his favorite analogies. A warrior who wants to become a man of knowledge, however, has to turn around and face life as it unfolds in front of him. Instead of facing receding time he has to face oncoming time, as he put it. Life in the caboose versus life in the engine.” (From page 60. *)

Isn’t the shamanic practice of recapitulation in fact living in the past, the exact opposite of facing oncoming time? Is there not a contradiction here? Doesn’t recapitulation strap us firmly to a seat in the caboose with a view out the back window, at life that has already passed us by? What about total presence in the NOW, the coveted goal Carlos describes as being seated in the engine, directly perceiving oncoming time, engaging life to the fullest? To answer these questions and resolve this seeming paradox we must first explore what it takes to truly live life in the moment.

Both the seers of ancient Mexico and the Buddhists place a premium on reaching a state of inner silence to become mindful, fully aware and present in the NOW. Toward that end Buddhist masters prescribe the practice of meditation where we learn to quiet our restless hearts and become keen observers of all that presents. The molding of this observing self that allows life to be known directly, without the interference of the thinking, judging mind, prepares us to be innocently present in the moment, freed of the cogitations of the mind that interprets versus lives in the moment. Achieving detachment from the ceaseless internal dialogue of the mind is certainly a major component of mindfulness. Like the Buddhists, the seers of ancient Mexico employ their own active meditation practice of magical passes to achieve this coveted state.

Another major component of mindfulness is access to a fully integrated self. How can we be fully present if parts of who we are remain fragmented, unknown and tucked away in the luggage compartment of the self? Furthermore, the legacy of our hidden baggage is the burden it places on life in the present. For instance, if we carry deep wounds of loss, abandonment, negligence, and violation, we will surely be limited in opening to all that life invites us to in the present moment. Recapitulation is the shamanic practice that frees us from these limitations and fully unites the self to be present in the NOW.

In recapitulation we allow ourselves to be taken on a train ride to all the stations of life already lived. We arrive at each of these old stations with our present self keenly observing, taking the journey with our younger self that has been stranded at the station, frozen in time. Our present self opens to the full experience of our younger self, and thereby faces fully the confusion and struggle that once froze our younger self. Often we discover in recapitulation that our younger self was forced to leave its body under the impact of overwhelming trauma and hence the full truth of that moment was never consolidated and made real. In recapitulation the full truth of the past becomes known, allowing its burdens to be released. The energy and innocence of the younger self is freed and united with the present self, firmly seated in the engine, facing oncoming time.

Part of what we encounter as we face oncoming time are triggers that take us out of the present moment. Meditation can help us to remain present in spite of a trigger, but it can’t help us to fully open to the moment if the trigger signifies a lost, frozen part of the self. Life often places triggers in our path to awaken us to discover our lost selves. We cannot simply transcend our triggers and fully open to life without recapitulating the truth that lies behind the trigger. We must be open to completing all our journeys, especially the train wrecks buried deeply within the self if we are ever to be fully available to life in the NOW.

Recapitulation, then, is actually a major component of being able to face oncoming time. Freed from the past we can allow life to approach us with all that it offers, unfiltered, without limitation. From this vantage point, firmly seated in the engine, we can read clearly the signs and synchronicities life presents us with to guide our evolutionary journeys, in infinity—NOW!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

* NOTE: The book mentioned in this blog is available through our Store listed under the category of Shamanism.