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 Place: I Shall Please

The subconscious is magical…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

The word placebo is Latin for, I shall please. We have within us a power that literally fills our suggestions. This power is situated in what has been called the subconscious mind. In subtle anatomy, the subconscious mind is part of the soul, or astral body, that exists independently of its host, the physical body.

Specifically, the subconscious mind houses the desire body, the home base for Yin, the receptive feminine center of our being. If a suggestion is accepted by the desire body, it is true conception, and the miracle of creation begins. The desire body has the magnetic force to draw to it and assemble physical reality to please, or make substantial, that which we suggest to it.

Ironically, science has designated placebo as that which has no real effect upon physical reality, seeing its impact as a kind of mental aberration. Science uses placebo in experimentation as a control to determine whether a real agent has therapeutic value, or is merely a product of the mind, i.e., is a placebo effect.

So, if the mind alone is capable of eliminating symptoms and keeping one alive, it doesn’t count as real cure. The miracle of mental healing is simply placebo, not genuine healing. I find it rather stunning that the rational mind has completely forsaken and denigrated the subconscious mind’s power of creation and healing, even when directly confronted with irrefutable evidence of its benefits.

The shamans of ancient Mexico understood this loss of magic, and consequent polarization within our astral energy body, as the product of a predatory, inorganic entity that feasts upon the emotional dysregulation that this struggle generates. We are constantly in an inner battle between embracing our magical potential versus the limits of our dominating mental fixation of rationality.

This battle of bipolarity is everywhere apparent in our world, as the irrational has grown to outlandish proportions in its quest to unseat the controlling rationality of civilization. We are actually  on the cusp of seeing the irrationality of lies become the accepted ruling order of the world.

Reason is an extremely valuable tool for navigation, but when it strips us of our divine creative healing potential it can only generate sterility. This inner struggle for redemptive balance is the crossroads every human now faces, both within the psyche and without, in the outer world.

Author Sue Watkins published a memoir in 2001 that reviews her relationship with the psychic Jane Roberts (Speaking of Jane Roberts). In it, she reveals for the first time a miraculous physical healing she experienced in a self-hypnosis exercise undertaken with Jane and a few other people.

Back in late 1969, Sue had been suffering from an extremely irritating STD called Trichomoniasis. Putting herself in a calm alpha brainwave state, she gave herself the suggestion that the body would heal itself. Immediately the discomfort disappeared and, as she immediately discovered, upon self-examination in the bathroom, the physical evidence of infection had completely cleared from her body as well.

Sue’s battle with her own inner rationality, and fear of the rational critical police, had her actually cut this vignette, at the last minute, from her book, Conversations with Seth, published in 1980. It would take another 20 years for her to accrue the confidence to document this physical healing that had occurred solely through self-hypnosis.

The key to success with self-hypnosis is to just do it. Despite the limiting judgment of the rational mind, one is always free to get relaxed and present a suggestion to the subconscious mind. Say it many times and see what happens. At the same time, don’t attach to the outcome. Allow that center that says, I Shall Please, to do its job, as it sees fit, without pressure.

Obviously, with respect to medical issues, one should fully avail oneself of medical support. Also, realize that suggestions can be manifested that are not best for one’s personal evolution, nor for that of the world. Greed, for instance, can manifest just as well as altruism.

Always intend the greater good with all suggestions. Restore the magic to both the creative and rational minds of the soul.

I shall please,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Beyond The Competitive Solution

Digesting one’s life is the source of new life …
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Every person alive in this extraordinary time is part of a major world transition. The question is whether this is a nightmare that must be completed or whether it’s time to choose a new dream.

The gods have unequivocally made certain that world events reveal the truths for all to see. And so it appears that what’s being asked is for humankind to assume full responsibility for deciding what comes next. Nightmare or regenerative dream?

Behind it all is the very real clash of opposites, inherent both in wholeness and in all of us.

Jane Roberts, who delivered to the world the epochal teachings of Seth, spent the last year and a half of her life confined to a hospital, her body completely locked in a fetal position, incapable of independent movement.

Jane’s mother had suffered and died from rheumatoid arthritis. Jane never saw her mother walk and spent her childhood and early adulthood at the beck and call of her mother’s bedpan. In her very early childhood, Jane spent two years in a repressive Catholic orphanage due to her mother’s inability to care for her. Her mother largely blamed Jane’s existence for her own medical woes.

Similar to many other extraordinary psychic adventurers, Jane’s traumatic childhood dissociated her into the largess of subtle energy exploration. She published short stories, science fiction novels and poetry before she ultimately met, and channeled, the wise, evolved human being, no longer in human form, who called himself Seth.

The opposites that riddled Jane’s existence were the part of herself that she designated the sinful girl of her childhood, who needed to be punished, and the adult channel she became, with access to the wisdom, critical in our time, to keep the human dream alive and evolving into deeper balance.

Jane had compensated for her neglected and abused beginnings with a spiritual drive that was intent upon discovering the deeper truths beyond everyday existence. It was not until later in life, fully frozen in her hospital bed, that she was forced to recapitulate the experiences of her neglected younger selves, with their limiting negative beliefs that had driven her discomfort with being a woman in this life.

Her total dependence upon nurses, and her husband Rob, allowed her to experience maternal care at a near infantile level, challenging the deep-seated unworthiness of her childhood. In addition, by embodying her mother’s limiting disease she was able to experience deep love and empathy for her mother’s frozen self, freeing herself of the burden of resentment. 

Jane’s heroic journey of ego compensation for traumatic beginnings is the heroic journey of most human egos. It represents the competitive solution to the problem of the opposites. In this scenario, heroic compensation defeats the legacy of trauma, at least temporarily.

Many a successful adult can trace their current good fortune to the one-sided discipline they brought down upon themselves to escape the fate of their origins. As successful as one-sided solutions may be, eventually, often by midlife, the knock of the spirit insists we retrieve the opposites we have left behind.

The extremes of Jane’s life required that she literally experience her mother’s full body paralysis in order to relive her childhood and face the depths of her own self-hatred and the negative beliefs she carried about herself.

Throughout Jane’s hospital stay, as she encountered the fullness of her night sea journey, Seth guided and supported her healing. Her devoted husband, Rob, would often massage her arms and legs, and at times Jane experienced her steeled muscles softening, permitting significant movement.

Generally, however, the physical and emotional pain resulting from such  release of defensive tightness would rebound into redoubled resistance to movement by the next day.

This scenario is a reversion to a competitive solution to the problem of reconciling the opposites inherent in our wholeness. Given an opening, the habitual solution to go to defense to ward off the pain and fear of true freedom reasserts itself with abandon.

On a practical level, the use of self-hypnosis to introduce to the subconscious new suggestions to old habits was freely employed by Jane and Rob, often with great success. However, the resource of new beliefs cannot override the necessity of recapitulation. We can never fully progress beyond where we are if we are not ready to bring all of ourselves with us: the good, the bad and the ugly.

As Jane discovered, and as her story reveals, no one else can heal us. No one else has lived our life and no one else knows the depths of our most painful experiences. Only we know what truly needs to be reconciled. Thus, only through our own exploration of our opposites, through the process of recapitulation, by taking a deep and thorough dive into our darkness, can we succeed in bringing ourselves into the light of full regenerative healing.

Of the many gifts that Jane Roberts left behind, I appreciate the full transparency of her offering of the complete annals of her life to the Yale University Library. What they, and Rob’s uncensored notes of the last year of her life reveal, to all of us, is how tenacious the problem of reconciliation of opposites truly is. Even a direct confrontation with potential death itself can fail to avert the well worn habit of a one-sided defensive solution that precludes reconciliation with one’s whole self.

Beyond this competitive solution of opposites is the full acceptance of all of one’s life experiences. This advances one to full self love, as well as love for everything and everyone else.

Everything and everyone is part of our own wholeness. With that level of truthful acceptance we are freed from the bindings of competitive solution, freed to choose the regenerative dream. It’s the obvious right choice, and it includes the welfare of all.

Thank you, Jane, for pointing out the true depths of the challenge of recapitulation. Thank you, also, to all of you scouts, who have done the work and are stalking the regenerative dream beyond the eclipse.

Recapitulating,
Chuck

Suggested reading:
The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk
The Recapitulation Diaries, J. E. Ketchel
The Way Toward Health, A Seth Book, Jane Roberts  

Chuck’s Place: Learn To Think In Optimistic New Ways

Restore your innate optimism…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Seth, whom Jane Roberts channelled, spoke of an innate body optimism that we are all born with. Both Jan and I immediately had the thought of birth trauma, the body’s welcoming birth committee of perinatal challenges, that Stan Grof has so thoroughly delineated.

Almost immediately, our query was answered when Seth gave the analogy of a child’s birth being equivalent to the first opening of the petals on a flower.* Regardless of the effort or trauma experienced in arriving at new life, that innate impetus toward life propels us to open to it. We are born optimists.

Seth goes on to suggest that this innate body optimism always moves toward health and healing. What brings in disease, issues from the mental plane of existence in the form of thoughts that limit our inherent optimism and instruct the subconscious mind to generate feared states of being.

These limiting beliefs are derived from the overarching socialized belief in the inevitable breakdown of the physical body, which is marked by the occurrence of predictable medical conditions throughout the course of the life cycle. In fact, many diagnostic tests are indicated to be performed as one reaches certain ages, subtly reinforcing the inevitability of decline. These are the suggestions that often manifest disease.

Medicine has yet to discover the power of the mental plane to both generate and cure disease. In fact, it remains staunchly prejudiced by a material perspective in its healing prescriptions. A typical course of treatment requires some form of pharmacological medicine or surgical intervention to restore health.

Psychology suffers a similar prejudice in its approach to healing. For instance, no academic discipline for the mental healing professions teaches dreamwork. Dreams are the messengers of the soul, which deliver to us the cause and cure of our ailments. Psyche means soul in Greek. How can one learn about psyche if they don’t consult the soul?

The soul, like the body, is inherently optimistic. Dreams are the soul’s attempt to keep us in balance, as they take us deeper into our mystical journey of life. Our mental rejection of  the value of dreaming largely emanates from the ego dimension of the mental plane.

The mental plane is the spirit plane, and the ego is the part of that plane that is largely identified with the physical body, which it is primarily assigned to navigate. The soul, which issues from a much more subtle dimension of the spirit plane, views life from a far vaster energetic perspective, which includes both body and soul. Thus ego, though itself a part of soul, actually identifies itself with the body and therefore rejects its life on the spirit plane.

Learning to think in new ways begins with linking to our inherent optimism of both body and soul. The ego, through its internalized limiting beliefs, coupled with the ever-present drone of its internal dialogue, constantly bombards the subconscious mind with negative suggestions. For healing to progress, ego must align its intent with the optimistic healing powers of the body and soul.

The subconscious mind is also part of, and located in, the soul on the spirit plane, right at the crossroads of spirit intent and material energy. The subconscious is a magical factory. It transforms spirit suggestions into material objects and reality. Therefore, it might take a negative thought suggestion as its building plan, from which it emotionally manufactures a depressed mood that then registers in the body as physical inertia.

Negative thoughts, over time, become strong habits that are reflected in the posture and condition of the physical body. Dreams, in their unique symbolic language, offer commentary and solutions to overcome the detrimental impacts of these diseased mental habits. Dreams can restore the innocence of one’s inherent optimism, which is bathed in the energy that anything is possible.

When we open to our dreams and take responsibility for the quality of our internal dialogue, by presenting optimistic suggestions to our subconscious mind, we realign both our body and soul with the optimism of health and healing.

We must understand that, yes, when we came into physical incarnation we had an intent to explore a facet of life that would likely land us in adversive circumstances that would traumatize our body and soul. Trauma is a necessary entree into deeper life exploration, which must be transgressed. However, beyond trauma is the much greater energy of body and soul optimism, which always points toward the true north of health, growth and fulfillment.

When we view all circumstances in our life with the equanimity of an underlying optimism, that is sure of mastery and ultimate fulfillment, we indeed learn to think in new ways.

Value your dreams and optimize your optimistic suggestions. May this open you to pure innocence and awe, and one hell of a fulfilling life.

With great optimism,
Chuck

* The Way Toward Health by Jane Roberts, A Seth Book, p. 69

Chuck’s Place: How Are You Living Your Wholeness?

What’s the balance in your wholeness?
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

We are always whole. The question is not whether or not we are whole, but rather, how are we currently living our wholeness? Our lives might currently reflect balance or chaos. Each alternative generates its own configuration of our same inherent ingredients of wholeness. Whether in balance or chaos, we are always whole.

If I long for something that I don’t currently have, the suffering I feel, whether as sadness or anxiety, holds the emotional place for the wholeness I seek.  A depression might hold the place for a missing or lost relationship.

The law of compensation is nature’s law of wholeness. Elsewhere known as karma, compensation insists that we fulfill our wholeness by living the natural consequences of our actions. If, for instance, we attempt to keep a trauma at bay through repression or willful suppression, the compensation may express itself in physical symptoms or triggers, which now serve the function of holding space for the unprocessed experience.

Many communication issues in relationships reflect this imperative for wholeness. If one partner presents their interpretation of reality the other partner might automatically see and feel compelled to express the other side of the argument. Wholeness insists upon both sides being represented.

Of course, often couples, or friends who share one’s point of view, will need to project the opposite point of view upon a person or group, outside their personal circle, whom they fervently dislike. In some form, wholeness insists that a one-sided point of view be compensated for by its opposite, which is then lived and owned inwardly, through emotional attachment to one’s projected antagonist.

Hate is a powerful expression of emotional attachment. It’s often very hard to not be obsessed with thinking about someone one hates. Once we can accept that these projections actually reflect aspects of our own wholeness, we can take the first step in shifting the volatile state of balance that our wholeness is in.

Wholeness includes everything. We are riddled with pairs of opposites that comprise our wholeness. Once we outwardly withdraw and take ownership for a hated projection, we can begin the process of reconciling the oppositions that comprise that opposition within our wholeness.

First we must bear the tension of holding this opposition within. Once contained, we can appreciate the value of our formerly hated other. Perhaps, for instance, this hated other reflects our own disdain for the limitations authority figures have imposed upon our lives.

By acknowledging this part of our wholeness, our heavily rational prefrontal cortex can come to appreciate its aggressive limbic  counterpart, and those two parts might come to accept their complementary roles and find acceptance and room for each other. This is how we shift the balance in our wholeness.

Accepting and finding room for all that we are allows for a more fulfilling wholeness. When the Rainmaker went into his hut to restore the Tao in the village riddled with drought (see last week’s blogpost), his effort reflected a rebalancing of the oppositions within himself, which then triggered greater balance in the outer world.

Wholeness is the same wholeness, whether it be in drought or rainstorm; the difference is in how we do our wholeness. Finding a compatible relationship between the opposites within ourselves is the key to balance.

The difference in personalities among us is simply that which is emphasized within our wholeness that then results in the state of balance we live with. That which is not emphasized is still part of our wholeness and must still be lived in some form.

If I am a true introvert my wholeness requires that I include extraversion  somewhere in my life, even if it is only fulfilled by obsessively hating what I judge to be shallow extraversion in others.

Our journey in infinity, beyond this life, may comprise many lives, where different aspects of wholeness are emphasized. This allows for an ever-deepening knowing of wholeness by exploration of it from many different perspectives. In fact, this is how we truly change the past, which completely shifts the balance of our present and future selves.

Trauma freezes our perspective in the past. Beyond the release of previously frozen emotions in processing trauma is the greater perspective of the present self that frees long-held limiting beliefs and definitions of self. Our wholeness then has the opportunity to come into new balance, which allows for greater exploration and expression of our innate potential in the present.

Ultimately we are all part of the same wholeness. The separateness we experience in this life is all a journey to truly know the self and advance our personal and collective evolution through the achievement of a broader perspective, which can’t help but result in the attainment of refined love, for all.

In wholeness,
Chuck