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: The Mastery of Terror

Leave a comment
How to transmute terror…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Terror registers in the body as uncontrollable heart-thumping anxiety. Mastery of terror is the resumption of voluntary control over the short-circuited nervous system. This mastery involves a transmutation of powerful energies that creates highly resilient nervous system circuitry to handle the emotional impact of the greatest stressors in life.

Voluntary control requires the participation of one’s conscious ego in directing one’s response to terror. Though the order of actions to be taken are unique to one’s personal experience, each of the following are likely to be part of one’s process.

Redirect the racing mind: Oftentimes, the mind responds to anxiety by projecting and imagining scenarios that invite intensified fear to the body. This can generate repetitive cycles of overpowering future projections and ever-heightening anxiety.

The mind, in an attempt to bring order into chaos, gets helplessly trapped on the mental plane, seeking a mental narrative that will extinguish the fire in the body. In so doing, the mind dissociates from the body’s experience, and actually contributes to its distress through its mental imaginings.

Shut down mental processing by redirecting attention to the body.

Direct the breath. Breathe into the abdominal cavity. Allow the stomach to expand, like filling up a balloon. Keep the focus on the breath; refuse to engage thought. Be accepting of any amount of breath that enters the lower part of the body.

Keep breathing into the abdomen, noticing its ability to take in more air. When possible, begin to introduce counting. Occupy the mind with this task: Breathe in to the count of 4. Hold the breath for a count of 8. Exhale to the count of 8. Repeat this cycle, incessantly. Gradually this breathing exercise will shift one’s brainwaves into a more relaxed alpha state.

The Recapitulation Breath. Turn your head as much as you comfortably can to the left. Fully exhale, then immediately begin a full inhalation as you turn your head, in pace with your breath, all the way to the right side. Pause slightly as you reverse direction and begin a complete exhalation, fanning your head back to the left side. Pause, ever so slightly, and begin again a full inhalation as you turn your head back to the right, then exhaling back again to the left. Repeat this pattern as long as you wish, adjusting the pace to what feels right.

Send direct commands to the subconscious. The subconscious is command central for the CNS and all the organs of the body. It operates with default programs on automatic pilot unless redirected by the conscious mind to do otherwise. Speak directly to the heart: “Heart, slow down your beating.” State this command with the cadence you intend it to beat at. Restate this suggestion rotely, adjusting the pace and intensity of the words to the needs of your experience.

Broaden attention and suggestions to the entire body. If possible lie down, allowing the body to be fully supported and able to release. Bring attention to the feet. State: “my feet are calming, my feet are relaxed.” Restate this suggestion. Notice the release of tension, the tingling of warmth in your feet.

Proceed to the legs. Bring present awareness to the sensations in the calf muscles. State the direction: “My calf muscles are calming, my calf muscles are relaxed.” Repeat this suggestion. Notice the body’s response. Move on to the thigh muscles, torso, stomach, heart, shoulders, arms, fingers, back, neck, head, face, eyes, and jaw. When finished, start over again.

At bedtime, direct the mind to place its concerns on the shelf of tomorrow. Now is the time for restorative sleep. Refuse thoughts that tempt reentry into processing. Trust the powers of deep restorative sleep to care for the overall needs of the self. Let go to the higher power of sleep.

If sleep is not possible, or if it is the time to be awake, direct the self to be fully present and engaged in the task it is undertaking. Refuse the mind’s slip into trancelike imaginative thoughts that reactivate fears. Decide when the time will be in the day to take the issue of concern off the shelf for consideration. Remind the self throughout the day to stay present to now, and that one’s appointment with thoughtful consideration of the issue will take place later, at the designated appropriate time.

Show up for your appointment. You have successfully strengthened your CNS circuitry through the above practices. Nonetheless, the completion of mastery requires that you reenter the experience that first generated terror. Valarie Kaur, in her book See No Stranger, presents many examples of successful entry into challenging encounters despite a somewhat accelerated heartbeat.

Oftentimes, terror occurs on the cusp of recapitulating an activated trauma from earlier in life. Mastery of that trauma ultimately requires that we reenter the fullness of that unprocessed experience and tame it. Armed with the above mentioned tools, as well as other needed supports, one’s present-self gradually calms the CNS and neutralizes the emotional intensity of the trauma.

This is mastery. The trauma becomes merely a fact of one’s life that no longer holds one captive to its terror. The energy of terror is now transmuted into the maturity of mastery.

Mastering,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Spirit In the Flesh

Leave a comment

Organizing…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Organizing my tools for easy access, I discover eccentric looking wrenches I may have used only once. Truth is, I don’t even remember what for. What to do with these valuable but perhaps once in a lifetime project savers, as well as the countless mini hex wrenches and screwdrivers that accompanied furniture projects to be assembled?

I soberly face the hidden truth of my tool hoarding, and perhaps all hoarding as well: eternal life parks its spirit in the material items of this life. The belief is that someday all items will be used. The someday of hoarding encapsulates infinity, life without end; never throw anything out.

Spirit is eternal life. Spirit is the intent that manifested our physical world to take material journeys with its infinite spirit. The Faustian small print of that agreement is the actual short life of all things material. We crave to live spirit in the flesh, yet spirit as trickster dares us to face our material mortality.

This bipolar human condition is the opposition of infinite spirit and mortal body. When we inflate we momentarily commune with infinity. This is the motive behind all addictions. The spirit to obtain unlimited more—be it the compulsion to pile boundless money, to ingest bottomless drug or food, to collect vast wardrobe and material goods, or to cling to relationship—is the quest to experience infinite spirit in material form.

Deflation and depression are the crash of Icarus: the material world is a world of limitation. Once spirit approaches material limits, it abandons its projected love object. The result is that we deflate into a spiritless morass. That which once glowed with transpersonal union is judged as both human ignorance and failure.

Sobriety is the path that intends acceptance of human limitation while maintaining a relationship with spirit. The shamans of ancient Mexico concluded each introduction of their personal names with the caveat: “…a being who is going to die.” This was their technology of sobriety. By constantly reaffirming their mortality they freed themselves to be fully present and spiritedly alive to every moment of life in human form.

This attitude of ultimate equanimity countered the misguided but powerfully embedded human attitude that we have forever. Hence, we needn’t acknowledge the shadow of death that stalks us all.

Yes, we may have forever in spirit form, but this appears to be our only opportunity to be in the specific human life we are in. If we languish in spirit identification without actualizing in human form, potential fulfillment will have to wait for another time, in another place, in a different life.

Without spirit we could not exist in the flesh. Yet spirit demands we take responsibility for reconciling the fact of our bipolar human condition. Spirit presents us with countless material false god trials onto which it projects itself. The inflations and deflations of human life lead us to stare down the trickster side of spirit and realize the possible in the life we are in.

With this, spirit is enhanced and fulfilled, both in this life and in its ultimate journey beyond.

May all find the fortitude to truly realize their Spirit in the Flesh.

Sorting my tools,

Chuck 

 

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Yesterday’s Last Stand

Leave a comment

Heading into the future of a bright new day…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

My Spirit informs me every morning that yesterday is a past life. Deeply appreciative of that life lived, now is the time to pay it forward by meeting new life without attachment. Attachment is actually an emotional investment in an outcome.

There is a governor’s race of significance happening in Virginia on the day this blog is published. I believe I know what winner would represent the better outcome for being in the Tao. I voted, yet intend to have no attachment to the outcome.

The challenge is to achieve equanimity. The shamans of ancient Mexico taught that to truly be open to what infinity presents we must be free of expectation and prejudice. They discovered that the best training ground for that level of receptive attitude was in one’s encounters with the petty tyrants of this world.

A petty tyrant disregards all the rules. A petty tyrant has no consideration for the needs of others. A petty tyrant uses and abuses to satisfy their own selfish needs.

When we encounter petty tyrants we may be deeply hurt and offended by their actions. Ironically, this helps us, as we are shown where our egos have become personally attached and identified with the actions of others. Our emotions flare, as we are thrown off balance, and are drained of our energetic reserves. Our egos become deeply offended, requiring palliative care.

Sidelined by deflation, negativity pours in and we become slaves to our wounded feelings. The shamans recommend that we refine our egos by releasing all attachment to expectations of fairness and the consequent reactive emotions.

Ego, freed of these attachments, becomes a highly tuned unit of navigation, capable of adjusting to anything it encounters. It needn’t spend any of its vital energy defending its self-importance. The refined ego identifies fully with the values and intents of its Spirit, and adapts itself to what is possible, in any given situation.

Thus, if ‘the other guy’ wins the election, the ego will waste no time feeling sad, frightened or angry. If ‘the right guy’ wins the election, the ego will not indulge in feeling happy or hopeful. Equanimity imposes no judgment upon what is. Equanimity says: suspend judgment, await guidance from Spirit as to the next right action.

At the soul level of being—that is, life beyond the physical dimension—it is evident that powerful influences are engaged in the current struggle upon this Earth. As evenly divided as the legislatures of this world are, so are the positive and negative energies impacting this world. We are all engaged in a multi-dimensional dance between the forces of good and evil, no matter how attached or detached we are.

The I Ching frames this as the time of Coming to Meet (Hexagram #44). We are warned of the danger of such powerful clashes. Nonetheless, if we use such encounters as opportunities for shedding the heaviness of self-importance, we advance in spiritual lightness.

Spiritual lightness is our evolutionary destiny now, as we release yesterday’s attachment to material obsession and ego importance. This lightness of being allows us to be supremely in the Tao, now, irrespective of the world’s dance. We simply go with the flow, with abandon.

The most oppressive petty tyrants we face reveal themselves in our own inner prejudices. Ironically, they are also our greatest blindspots. We tend too quickly to project them upon the many tyrants of the outside world.

Nonetheless, if we track and examine our passionate emotions we are sure to be led to inner attachments, those attitudes that resist the new life of each new day.

As we are all holograms of our subtler interconnectedness, know that all personal progress in detachment advances our greater whole along its evolutionary path.  Appreciate, as well, those who so tightly cling to yesterday. Yesterday’s last stand is but the prelude to today’s unfolding.

Going with the flow,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Co-Creation Via Voluntary Control

Leave a comment

Co-create your beautiful wholeness…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Victor Frankl gave us the freedom to choose the attitude we take toward any reality we are confronted with. Jack Schwarz took us to a subtler dimension, giving us the ability to alter our physical reality through the voluntary control of the mind.

Both Frankl and Schwarz were interned in the death camps of the Holocaust. Both were able to survive and refine their psychic abilities through their encounters with, and mastery of, the pain and suffering they endured. Their gifts are fundamental to healing from trauma and assuming voluntary control of the co-creation of one’s life.

Co-creation implies collaborating with creation. “I am” is a fact I can become conscious of. I might even have access to remembering my prior journeys through infinity. But how “I” was initially created appears to have originated from a source beyond myself.

With consciousness, however, I truly can become a co-creator in that life of “I”. Co-creation is conscious partnership with one’s created self in the evolution and fulfillment of one’s life. Co-creation is assuming full responsibility for one’s life.

The created self is instilled with inborn instructions that control the human psyche, through instinctual patterns called archetypes, as well as through physical laws governed by genetic code. We can live a full life of instinctual fulfillment and a biologically determined physical course without conscious participation, but this would be a life devoid of co-creation.

Under traumatic conditions the archetypes and laws of ordinary life are severely interrupted, leading to experiences of non-ordinary reality. These glitches in the expectations of normalcy awaken consciousness to latent, but previously unrealized, abilities. This is the birth of the potential for co-creation.

Thus, the ability to visualize a loved one or a pleasant scene, simultaneous with being in a condition of torture, can enable one to displace one’s consciousness into an energetic state separate from the physical body. This distancing of oneself into a separate reality allows one to survive one’s physical ordeal in an out-of-body state. The co-creation of this act is the voluntary control of where one places one’s attention.

Of course, the full reentry of consciousness back into the physical body may be delayed for decades, until the mental plane is ready to endure the truth of the emotional and physical pain awaiting it in its body. Nonetheless, the discovery of life beyond the body awakens one’s ability to voluntarily control the placement of awareness in more subtle dimensions beyond physical reality.

Jack Schwarz gained access to what Jung called the “psychoid” dimension, what I call the subconscious mind, where spirit meets matter and directly impacts it. Creation dictates the activation of subconscious default programs to manage the impact of one’s experiences. These might be fight/flight/freeze programs with hormonal releases, as well as physical and mental responses.

Co-creation is consciousness assuming responsibility for creating new programs, or the willful exercise of existing programs. Thus, consciousness might employ the breath and autogenic messages to calm the mind and body as it processes its experiences.

Under strict laboratory conditions, supervised by Elmer Green at the Menninger Foundation, Jack Schwarz was able to push a large sewing needle through his own arm, remove it, stop the bleeding and completely heal, with absolutely no pain. (See video link below.)

This extreme, if not bizarre experiment, demonstrated the potential power of the mind to direct the course of matter, the matter of one’s own physical body, in rationally unthinkable ways!

In today’s parlance, we speak of the the ability to manifest and the power of intent. We all have the latent ability to become co-creators of our lives. However, to access this heightened state of realization, in a balanced integrated way, we must first fully inhabit the body we are in.

To be fully in-body we must process all the trauma the body has held for us while we lived somewhat outside the body. This is the process of recapitulation that enables union of body and mind. This is the night sea journey where consciousness awakens to, suffers through, and gets comfortable with the fullness of all its prior experiences, inside and outside of the body.

Freed of our triggering shadows we are able to explore—without the limitations of blocking beliefs, self-depreciation, or the narrow limits of rationality—the extraordinary abilities of the mind to manifest the physical reality it intends. This is accomplished through intention, mantra, self-hypnosis, prayer, visualization, etc.

Our global reality is priming us for this next stage of evolutionary advancement. Our time is rampant with trauma. We all suffer from it, but we are also all free to assume a positive attitude toward the events we all encounter in our everyday lives, on a regular basis, by grounding ourselves in calmness.

In facing the full truth of necessary changes, we are freed to intend, visualize, and manifest those changes, as we co-create, via voluntary control, the seeds of new life.

Begin with the self. Choose to sow within, and then sow without.

Co-creating with Self,

Chuck

Jack Schwarz: Mind over Matter

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Weight of Being Offended

Leave a comment

To the summit!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

If we characterize spiritual advance as reaching the summit of a mountain, being offended is the weight of a leaden backpack we carry as we attempt to climb upwards. The more we feel offended the harder it is to climb. Frequently, the quest becomes like the fate of Sisyphus: repeatedly nearly reaching the top only to tumble back to the start.

The weight of offense is measured by the resentments and entitlements we harbor for the wrongs done to us. These heavy emotions and expectations poison the mood and spirit of everyday life. Though we may have little control over the things that befall us, we have total control over the attitude we assume toward the fact that they happened.

The shamans of ancient Mexico came to the realization that we live in a predatory universe. Objectively speaking, all life feeds upon other life. Even an advanced Yogi who lives through breathing in air alone takes from it and consumes its prana, the subtle ether that sustains the physical body.

Shamans accept the predatory nature of the universe as an energetic fact. They focus on how to navigate life to both survive and advance under these predatory conditions. They see the major hindrance to successful navigation as the human tendency to get caught in affronts to one’s self-importance.

When Jeanne Marie Ketchel was diagnosed with breast cancer, she struggled for years afterwards with resentment. “Why me, I don’t deserve this, I take extraordinary care of myself!” Eventually she came to, “why not me, I’m no more special than anyone else.” This loss of preoccupation with being offended was to free her energy and lead to her spiritual healing and advancement. When she left this world there was no need to fully reincarnate to work through issues of offended self-importance.

Shamans recommend that we use those occasions of feeling offended as opportunities to hone our souls. Though we may be hurt and injured by an attack, we can lighten our pain and sharpen our focus by not being personally offended by an event. The wisdom of martial arts is to never waste any energy at being offended by an attack but instead to have one’s full attention available to prepare the best response.

Shamans suggest we view our interactions with the antagonists in our lives as opportunities for spiritual advancement. This is not about treating our challenges as gifts but simply as necessary opportunities for growth. The task then becomes what we choose to do with our challenges. Our first task is to ruthlessly stare down any self-importance that would compromise our energy and effectiveness.

If we complain, we lose energy. If we get caught in self pity, we lose energy. If we shed offense, pity and judgment, we are free to mold ourselves into any being that would be a step toward ultimate success.

Thus, if I am unfairly treated at work I can allow myself to do grunt work calmly, without wasting energy on being offended, if I see that this will lead to my ultimate advancement. I can feel good that I am honing my energy for spiritual and career advancement by remaining calm while actually being treated unfairly.

Even if I never receive the promotion I deserve, I am significantly lightening the weight of being offended, and lightening my backpack, as I rapidly surmount the summit! That’s the best use of the predatory universe we live in.

Without attachment to outcome, release the weight of offense and you can’t help but spiritually advance.

Shedding,

Chuck