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.

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#703 Chuck’s Place: The Power of Experience

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“I only went downhill skiing once in my life, Chuck, many years ago,” states a client who has graciously given me permission to share her experience. “I was with a friend who kept telling me to lean. Every time I did, I fell. I just couldn’t get what her words meant. Eventually, I shifted my weight and didn’t fall. I realized, oh, that’s what she means by lean! You’ve been telling me I need to detach for years; I think I’m finally getting it.”

Next she shared what she described as a very powerful dream. “I’m with my son, (currently twenty-four years old, incarcerated in the New York prison SHOCK program) only he’s eight years old, at a summer camp, yet it’s also the SHOCK program. He seems removed. He’s playing with other kids. I’m furious and confront him. There is no outlet for my anger. The scene changes, I’m with an old best friend and her husband who moved down south years ago. I want to vent my feelings to her, but she doesn’t want to listen. Her husband has started a small fire behind a door. I fan the flames of the fire. He gets angry and chastises me. His wife tells him to leave me alone, but he forces his knuckles against my throat so tightly it cuts off the air and I begin to suffocate. I awaken, deeply sobbing, gasping for air. My first thought: my son will die in my arms; I can’t cope with the pain.”

She went on to explain that she realized that she’d been holding onto her son, frozen in time at eight years of age, and felt terror that he’d never stand on his own as a man in this world; that he would die, a boy, in her arms.

Since the dream experience she has received two letters from her son and noticed a marked shift in her own attitude as she read his words. “I finally am experiencing what you mean when you tell me to detach,” she said. “Something is definitely different. I love him, he’ll always be my son, but I’ve let go.”

I went on to suggest to my client that she had been approached by her dream shaman, in the form of the friend’s husband. Her preparatory work of long-suffering having been completed, she was ready to be grabbed, killed, and reborn, and ushered through the rite of passage where parents release their children to be adults in their own right. This rite transformed her inner experience, a transformation far more comprehensive than a rational understanding of letting go. She is changed. Our work together had been part of her necessary preparation for this rite, but this mystical rite was performed by her own unconscious, which had determined the time and the method for this terrifyingly necessary ritual.

Jung pointed out how the modern rational world had stripped away the ancient rites of passage that once ushered humankind through the stages of life. These rites had a social context where the entire community participated and acknowledged the shifts and new roles in the community for the newly initiated. Inwardly, the initiate experienced a profound and permanent change, a recasting of self. No one in the community was exempt from rites of passage. What is left in the modern world are mere vestiges of these rites, watered down and nearly meaningless, in the form of sacraments in our various religious institutions. Jung realized that the collective unconscious inside all of us had become the home of these necessary rites of passage and, when activated, provide an experience so powerful that we can’t help but be changed by them. This is why the rational mind fears the night and sleep, where conscious control can be usurped by the powers of the deep; yet this is the healing power of the instinctual psyche, which, if held back, results in psychic disequilibrium and unpreparedness for the unfolding journey of life.

In truth, the loss of the collective rites of passage leaves the vast majority of people emotionally unprepared for adulthood, especially since a living relationship with the unconscious has been subsumed by a modern scientific focus on brain chemistry as the solution to psychic disturbance. In the absence of genuine transformative experiences, we move into adult roles faking maturity and preparedness or dallying in a prolonged adolescence of lawlessness, irresponsibility, and addiction. Ironically, my client’s son has been participating in the SHOCK program, a program within the prison system where participants are ushered into adulthood along the lines of an ancient rite of passage. Participants are taken out of society and forced to submit to an arduous period of suffering where they are subjected to the whims and irrationalities of those in control. There are no mommy and daddy protectorates, and life is not fair. If you are to succeed, you must die to your infantile fixations and become an adult, prepared to take responsibility for self in the real world.

Amazingly, as my client now reads her son’s letters, she sees a maturing man behind his words. He is no longer her eight year old boy. She has released him and he has released his dependence upon her. In the truest sense, he is completing the “graduate school of life” and despite the fact that he will be saddled with a mark on his record, much like a scarlet letter, it pales in comparison to his solid maturity, hard won, as he is fully capable of taking on the challenges of adult life. This “degree” is far more valuable, in my judgment, than a graduate degree from Harvard in the hands of an immature, uninitiated personality. Of course there are no guarantees of success in life, but if I was a betting man, I’d put my money on him.

We must all go through our own SHOCK program. Unfortunately, there are far too few societal institutions capable of providing the necessary rites of passage. However, as my client’s experience demonstrates, the collective unconscious will come forth and perform the necessary rites. However, the prerequisites for a successful transformation are often a long period of suffering, including many groundhog day experiences, as well as a softening of ego control, as ego often alienates or devalues the deeper instinctual psyche. This experience of my client’s was well prepared for, and thus was transformative. I ask that we all energetically congratulate her!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#701 Chuck’s Place: Love & Sex

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Love is of spirit; sex is of body. Our deepest challenge as human beings is to reconcile our ethereal, eternal spirit —that which precedes and succeeds our current life— with our corporal, animal, instinctual, physical body —that which has a definite beginning and a definite end. Animal/Spirit, Soma/Psyche, Finite/Infinite; these are the oppositions we are forced to suffer if we are to achieve fulfillment and solve the true riddle of life on this plane. Of course, there are those who would argue, with rational stamina and certainty, to the contrary.

At a recent dinner party, in a somewhat instigative and provocative mood, I posed the question: “What do you think happens when you die?” I got a quick: “Nothing, lights out!” I turned to another: “Lights out!” With this, I just let it rest. My reason wasn’t up to the argument. Lights out is simply a deus ex machina that doesn’t do justice to the paradox of a life fully lived.

I begin with the following paradox: Why, so often, are so many people so sexually dissatisfied with the person they are most secure and compatible with—spiritually in tune with? I suggest that this fragmentation of our spirit and animal selves begins with our birth into family. The family is the matrix we are born into and which ultimately forms the foundation of what we strive for: love and fulfillment. However, the incest taboo creates an impenetrable barrier to the animal that we are: sexual feelings for family members are strictly verboten. The place where we begin our lives, hopefully in unconditional love and security, does not welcome our animal, sexual selves.

I already sense a growing anxiety in my reader at this point, even the mere mention of sex and family can be alarming, such is the power of the incest taboo. Let me assure all, I am a firm upholder of the value and necessity of the incest taboo. The incest taboo is universal, a part of human culture from time immemorial. Some suggest it to be the humanizing instinct, a powerful archetype governing the behavior of the human animal. My focus here is examining its impact on splitting the psyche, the bearer of love, from the body, the bearer of sexuality. This universal fragmentation is a necessary consequence of being human, a wound that haunts the individual in acceptance of his or her instinctual nature. The consequence for relationship is the challenge of bringing love and sex together in relation to one person.

I stress that I am writing about the incest taboo and not incest. I have spent much of my professional life helping clients traumatized by familial violations of this taboo. My purpose here is to point out the inevitable consequence of the taboo: the splitting of love and sex. The incest taboo demands that family, as our first and often deepest experience of love, completely disallow our animal, instinctive, sexual selves from attaching to the same object of our deepest love. This most primal experience of love, rejects, denies, and repels the animal, which must be repressed, ignored, sentenced to the darkness and reserved for some future expression elsewhere, beyond the family. The byproduct of this most necessary separation of sexuality from family is the experience that love and sex are incompatible. This is the indelible primal imprint that we all take forward into adult life.

This is the incest taboo wound, the archetypal fall that we all suffer. Once man stole consciousness, that is, spirit, he was thrown out of the paradisal garden of instinctual freedom. In life, we strive desperately to return to the garden but are saddled with the split between our spirit and our body. We cannot return to the garden as full human beings —psyche and soma— if we cannot merge love and sex in a relationship with one person. We are granted respites in the garden when we mysteriously fall in love. In this bewitching time of falling in love, we reenter the garden, fully united in spirit and body: paradox resolved, psyche and soma as one. Our animal selves are fully released as we unite with our lover in carnal and spiritual bliss.

Unfortunately, the spell of falling in love is time-limited and soon we must return to the barrenness of life outside the garden, as we discover mother, father, sister, brother, in the eyes and behaviors of our lover. Once our lover becomes too familiar, the incest taboo is stirred, with the necessary consequence of the lifting of romance, as we return to the primal dilemma of the incompatibility of love and sex. Sex becomes labored, uncomfortable, avoided, or routine; the animal wants out of this incestuous cage, perhaps through secret fantasy or secret affair. Perhaps bliss can be extended until the arrival of a child in a family. With the addition of child, lovers must contend with a new role in their own relationship. They are now parents as well as lovers, which triggers the prohibitions of the incest taboo in their own relationship and can severely impact a return to a loving sexual relationship.

It was Freud’s bleak view that the achievement we call Civilization, with all its Discontents, is the sublimated byproduct of the incest taboo. Essentially, for him, ego, or spirit, is the psychic humanizing factor that substitutes civilization for its forsaken instinctive, unrealized, incestuous desires.

Jung, from a more positive perspective, viewed the frustrated libido as the birth of the imagination, which offers a venue for the human animal to reconcile psyche and soma, love and sex, and achieve wholeness.

For the seers of ancient Mexico, the resolution of this dilemma never went beyond the body, as they do not recognize a separation of psyche and soma. As I quoted Carlos Castaneda, last week, from The Wheel of Time (p. 199): “All the faculties, possibilities, and accomplishments of shamanism, from the simplest to the most astounding, are in the human body itself.” The seers’ path is to discover the body as solid and as energy, one in the same. For those seers, achieving the fluidity to alternate between these two states —one finite, the other infinite— solves the riddle of life on this plane.

For those engaged in relationship as a path to wholeness, I encourage containment and openness. For a detailed description of this process I refer the reader to The Book of Us, in particular to chapter three, A Jamaican Retreat, Our Alchemical Oven, where Jeanne and I undertook such a journey in this world. By containment, I mean commitment to a process within a sealed relationship. Interestingly, as I was preparing this essay, I opened the latest Psychotherapy Networker magazine. The picture on the cover is of a wedding cake with a bride flanked by two grooms. The title article is called: The New Monogamy, can we have our cake and eat it too? I quote from the article:

“Within the new notion of monogamy, each partner assumes that the other is, and will remain, the main attachment, but that outside attachments of one kind or another are allowed—as long as they don’t threaten the primary connection.” (July/August 2010 p. 23)

This direction in marriage essentially maintains the fragmentation of psyche and soma, as they remain unrealized and un-united in an individual’s relation to one other person. It’s simply another form of triangulation, where the tension of combining love and sex is dispersed, allowing for fragmentary visits to the garden in separate relationships.

With the container sealed there must be openness. By openness, I mean a gradual, but ultimately full revelation of all the truths of the self, including the deepest somatic fears and desires of the animal. This is the healing of the incest taboo wound, as we push beyond its taboos and allow for ultimate spiritual intimacy and animal sexuality to come together with our lover.

The riddle of psyche and soma, the core paradox and challenge of life on this plane can be resolved through many paths: a journey within the self, a journey of relationship, or a shamanic journey. The essential tools in all of these journeys to wholeness are containment of the opposing forces within the self and openness to all the truths of the self inherent in these forces.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

The books mentioned, The Wheel of Time under the Shamanism category and The Book of Us are available in our Store.

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#699 Chuck’s Place: In-Body Experience

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“All the faculties, possibilities, and accomplishments of shamanism, from the simplest to the most astounding, are in the human body itself.”
-Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time (p. 199)

Today, I explore the value of achieving the full energetic potential of the human body by learning to breathe. As Castaneda suggests in the above quote, the gateway to the energy body is the physical body. In Hatha Yoga, and all yogas, the breath is the most important factor. In fact, yoga is all about breathing. In the asana called Savasana the body is calmed to its energetic vibratory state. This is the result of deep relaxation and full breathing, no obstructions. Full breathing entails breathing deeply into the abdominal cavity and filling the lower, middle, and upper parts of the lungs; it is also commonly called the three-part breath. Typically, most people limit their breathing to shallow breathing that only fills the upper lungs, leaving the abdominal area, in particular, unfilled and dormant.

The tensions of modern day life and the inner instincts are borne in the rigidity of the body, in what Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst from Freud’s inner circle, called character armour. Reich, whose main area of focus was on the body, theorized that most of what the human race accepts as climax or orgasm is incomplete, as the natural involuntary movements of coitus are generally restricted by the ego’s inability to let go to full body release. His most famous student, Alexander Lowen, founded the Bioenergetic School of Psychotherapy to address the rigidities in the body that inhibit the full realization of physical pleasure in modern day men and women.

Fear, whether it be generated by the ego’s discomfort with the instinctual animal self or by trauma, or simply by the conjuring mind itself, often registers in the body as a constriction in the throat, resulting in shallow respiration. Deep instinctual impulses or psychic complexes may also be held back or stored in the stomach and abdomen, as well as in other parts of the body. Shallow breathing results in a numbness, or lifelessness, a virtual disconnect from the body below the head. Cultural norms that insist upon flat stomachs further rigidify the midsection of the body, forcing it to be held in. As a consequence of these types of bodily restrictions, middle and lower lung breathing is rarely accomplished in daily life, creating an in-body state of dissociation.

In-body association is critical to both wholeness and furthering our evolutionary potential in the energy body state. Many people who have had out-of-body experiences (OBEs) as a result of trauma must first re-associate their physical body to further their OBE exploration. This requires opening up the connection between the head and the rest of the body, which includes full breathing without obstruction. In fact, shamanic recapitulation, which is the practice of re-associating all of life’s experiences on an energetic level, includes a deep breathing magical pass.

I suggest, in addition to other practices involving healing and wholeness, that a focus be placed on learning how to naturally breathe into the abdominal area. Bringing awareness to the abdominal area, relaxing it, allowing it to begin filling with air while breathing in through the nose, and contracting the abdomen while exhaling through the nose, is a good first step in learning to connect with and discover the full energetic benefits of deep breathing. This can be practiced regardless of constriction that might be felt in the throat. Consistent practice may allow the rest of the lungs to fill, flowing from the abdominal area in full three-part breathing, eventually allowing the head to release its fear and constriction to this deeper connection.

Breathing is our most natural bodily instinct and our greatest bodily need. Our first and most important act is to take the breath of life. So, breathe fully! Breathe with awareness, allowing for deep in-body experience, the gateway to everything!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

The following books are available in our Store: The Wheel of Time under the Shamanism category and Yoga and Health under Resources.

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#697 Chuck’s Place: Independent Action

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In the last year of his life, Carl Jung took on the project of expressing his core ideas and discoveries at a level comprehensible by the general public in his final book Man and his symbols. Ten days before his fatal illness, he completed his chapter to this work, which includes chapters written by his closest associates. In what were perhaps some of Jung’s final written words, he states:

“As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be anyone of us. Nobody can afford to look around and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it might be worthwhile for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us. Certainly the conscious mind seems unable to do anything useful in this respect. Man today is painfully aware of the fact that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seem to provide him with those powerful animating ideas that would give him the security he needs in face of the present condition of the world.” (p. 101)

Last week in my blog, Why BP?, I suggested that the core conflict expressed by the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico is the battle between two primary instincts: hunger and self-preservation. Reason, the hallmark of consciousness, is colluding with and actually possessed by the unchecked, insatiable greed of the out-of-control hunger instinct in all of mankind. Esther Harding states, reflecting upon the hunger instinct, in her book Psychic Energy:

Modern man has sought to compass the whole of life with his conscious intellect, only to find that the power of the irrational life force has not been overcome, but has retreated to the unconscious and from that hidden stronghold exerts a powerful and often baneful influence on his life. The power of his primitive greed bursts forth in wars of aggression and manifests itself in asocial business practices, while the exclusive concern with outer satisfactions leaves his soul hungry and starving. For man cannot live satisfactorily, cannot be whole, unless he is living in harmony with the unconscious roots of his being. Yet, how can he be at one with himself while the barbaric impulses of unredeemed instinct continue to hold sway in the unconscious? It is just because the ideals we hold up before us do not represent the truth about mankind that the hopes of peace and progress they embody so constantly elude us. Yet we fear to admit this obvious fact and to relax our efforts at self-improvement, lest we fall again into chaos and barbarism.” (p. 84)

Bringing Jung’s challenge to the “single individual” to change and solve the problem of greed, requires that each and every one of us identify our own relation to greed within our psyches and in daily functioning. If we understand hunger broadly, as the instinct to consume, especially in great quantity, we might automatically associate it with the addictions: food, drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, shopping, etc. I suggest that we extend this energetically and ask ourselves, how do we spend the bulk of our energy? From this vantage point, we might ironically look at an obsessional disorder, such as anorexia, as an out of control hunger instinct, considering how much life energy is consumed by not eating.

We might view a fixation on reading as an insatiable hunger to consume words, facts, or fantasies to the exclusion of all other needs in life. Similarly, the insatiable attachment to constantly checking facebook, email, text messages, etc, is an addiction to consuming electronic connection, a barbaric dominance of the hunger instinct. We might view preoccupation with our physical appearance as a greedy monopoly on our daily energy for life. We could view dominating habits of complaining, being cynical, or judging, as acts of avarice feasting upon our energetic storehouse.

The possibilities for greed in our daily functioning are endless, and it requires conscious reflection on our part to take an honest energy inventory and face the truth of how we allow greed to dominate and control our lives. If we can reel in our attention from the greedy mirrors around us and tackle the shadow of our own greed, we can energetically change the world. This is the essence of Jung’s final guidance to us in how to change the world, which he acknowledged was in a very dangerous place. From the same chapter in Man and his symbols, he writes:

“Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so indubitably useful that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or our subservience to them. Man is bound to follow the adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, his genius shows the uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide.” (p. 101)

As I stated last week, Mother Nature has taken the lead to restore balance now, and there is inevitable and obvious destruction in this healing process. If we can cap the greed in our own lives, we put ourselves in alignment with nature’s cure, and change the world!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#695 Chuck’s Place: WHY BP?

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Mother Earth, that mighty sentient being, has resorted to that ancient healing practice of leeching, or blood letting, to cure her wounds. Her BP, her blood pressure, has risen and blown a gasket, as her blood spews forth, poisoning the seas. With all our advanced technological know-how, we cannot cauterize or clot this flow. Bleeding, as all women experience, is nature’s way of cleansing.

The Earth poisons now our food supply. Why? And why won’t she stop? Why is she destroying herself? Frankly, I see no other way for Mother Earth to save herself, other than to create unprecedented destruction.

Mankind has been unable to evolve beyond greed, the true culprit of the wounding of the Earth. Mankind’s most prized possession, his reason, is but a puppet in the hands of his greed. Even in the midst of this unprecedented environmental disaster a judge has lifted the ban on offshore drilling. Our Mother realizes that the destruction must be vast and must impact us at a level we cannot ignore, at a level that forces us to change, to cap our greed, in order to survive.

Mother is providing us with a cure now, a flow, to move us forward. Mother is correcting the imbalance in mankind. This is no longer a problem solvable by reason; reason is no match for greed. Mother is forcing our instinct of self-preservation to confront our out-of-control hunger instinct, which has been allowed to consume and destroy, in the form of hoarding, accumulating, and exploiting the Earth. As this quote from a Wintu woman, in T. C. McLuhan’s Touch the Earth suggests, modern man has lost his connection to balance as reflected in his practices toward the Earth:

“When we Indians dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the White people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The tree says, ‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up… They blast rocks and scatter them on the ground… How can the spirit of the earth like the White man? Everywhere the White man has touched it, it is sore.”

This is now a battle of instincts, instigated by the Great Mother Earth. Man, with his reason, is being put in his proper place, as Mother instinct takes over, with her menstrual flow, to clean things up and reassert natural balance. It’s not in our hands anymore. Mother Earth has taken over her own body. All we can do now is acquiesce to the facts of the destruction and what we need to do to survive. If we choose to continue to manipulate and spin reality, allowing reason to continue to feed our greed, Mother Earth will continue to spew toxins, her own chemotherapy, to bring us to truth. It’s an illusion for us to really believe that we are in control now.

That’s why BP. Mother has sent us a sign, using an acronym we can recognize: BP. Her blood pressure will no longer tolerate our greed. It’s pointless to blame BP; Mother has chosen BP for her own cleansing purposes, offering our consciousness the acronym BP to contemplate. Despite the destruction, Mother does have a sense of humor!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck