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: Limiting Limiting Beliefs

Leave a comment

Beliefs originate in the mind. The mind is the outermost wrapping of the spiritual plane in human beings. In Hindu science the spiritual plane has many increasingly subtle dimensions or sheaths.

We all agree that the sun rises every morning, but what else are we missing…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Using the Hindu analogy, we can compare the familiar mind that we call the ego to a rocket booster of a spaceship, which propels the spaceship, but as it rises higher in the atmosphere sheds itself of the outer layers or sheaths surrounding its core. Hence, when we depart from this world at death, on our definitive journey into infinity, we will shed the outer wrapping, the ego mind we operated with in this world, and open to the more subtle, spiritual dimensions at our core. At this point we will become fully energetic beings, no longer sporting the outer casings of the human form. This is the energetic body from which Jeanne communicates her wisdom to Jan in daily Soulbytes.

The ego and higher levels of spiritual agency represent the Yang or  thought dimension of human existence. The body and all material manifestations in the world represent the Yin or material dimension of human existence.

Ideas, thoughts, beliefs, or intents are all non-substantial possibilities issuing from the spiritual dimension that require physical substance to become what we might call real, substantial, or manifested. Thus, spirit Yang lacking union with material Yin is simply a hot air possibility lacking substance.

Limitations are the necessary boundaries that birth a spirit into substantial reality. Thus, if I have an image in my mind it exists only as a spirit entity, a potential lacking substance. If I then draw and color the idea on paper, my spirit and physical selves have united to create a definite impression. Yang and Yin are conjoined in the process of creative manifestation.

For a Yang impulse to become real it must accept the limiting containment of physical reality. Without limits we don’t exist in a substantial, time and space, way. An idea lacking written or verbal expression is just a roaming, floating thought, a seed seeking earth to germinate in and become real.

Limiting beliefs are the basic building blocks of our world. If we did not collectively agree to believe similar things we could not manifest such a cohesive reality, i.e., the world as we know it. From a shamanic perspective all worlds are consensus realities. Consensus, meaning shared beliefs, is the intent that congeals matter into a specific world.

By exercising the shamanic technology of intent we can shift the world we live in, literally, into a new consensus reality or, put differently, into a whole new world. However, that new world also requires a new set of limiting beliefs to achieve the consistency necessary to become a substantial reality.

If I pick up my metal spoon and it suddenly bends in half my belief in the solidity of the world may be greatly assaulted, sending me into quite a spin. Fortunately, the very powerful belief that the world is rational might quickly reassert itself, providing probable explanations for the bent spoon that can then shore up the shaky assault to my sanity!

Of course, as much as we enjoy the calmness of a predictable world, well-constructed by limiting beliefs, the downside of limitation is limitation. Many more options of experience and manifestation may be available to us that might much more fully allow us to experience both our spiritual and material potential; things that we simply can’t access, as the guardians of our sanity that maintain the consistency of the world as we have known it vigorously encourage us not to stray beyond the boundaries of our limiting beliefs.

It really is a profound consideration to stray beyond the boundaries of rationality, which is currently (though greatly challenged by world events this past year) the major building block of human stability. In general, mental health has been predicated upon the security of a predictable world constructed by agreed upon limiting beliefs. Nonetheless, often at the spirit’s insistence to open to possibilities beyond the known, or as a matter of material necessity, we are compelled to take new spiritual/physical adventures beyond the known dimensions into the deeper interior of our fuller selves.

In fact, one thing is clear about the present state of reality in the world: the limiting beliefs that have defined the world at the highest levels are currently crumbling in full public view. Rather than calming and solidifying the basic tenets of our consensus reality, our leaders function like tricksters shifting gears with pure abandon.

The deeper reason for this dissolution is that our world is in the midst of major transformation. Fear not the transitory extreme new worlds we are confronted with daily; they are untenable as they do not support the deepest needs of our world as it undergoes its very deep and necessary transformation.

We are being pushed into a world that opens us up to our greater energetic potential, a world which greatly expands the limiting beliefs that have so long defined what we believe and experience as reality. This new world of greater entrée into our energetic potential  frees us from the limiting beliefs of fixation on materialism as the source for fulfillment. The technology of that limiting belief has clearly exhausted the planet and, despite its current escalation, has little future.

The  new technology of a metaphysical world, a world of energy beyond strict rationality, utilizes psychic powers, intent, inter-dimensional exploration and the experience of love as its guiding limiting beliefs. This is a far more stable and exciting consensus reality in the making. That is the New Frontier we are privileged to participate in beyond the boredom, frustration, depression, and hardship of this tumultuous time of transition.

The limits of that New Frontier are the kind of limiting beliefs I can sign up for!!!

To our greater energetic potential,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Tending The Magic From Within

1 Comment
Remember your magical beginnings…
– Artwork by Jan Ketchel © 2017

We are all Magical Beings, journeyers in infinity currently enjoying a life on Earth. Many are born into this life still actively connected to the memories of their soul’s prior journey through infinity or interactive with spirit essences invisible to the adult world. Many parents recognize the advanced wisdom of their young children, calling them Old Souls. Many children have very clear recollections of past lives, even able to tell their parents of their own roles in those past lives, as well as relay in elaborate detail events from those lives.

Young children live in this world of magical possibility and adults largely protect and promote this early magical stage of life. In fact we soon approach the consensus day of magic: Christmas. Regardless of religious affiliation there is general world agreement that this day is an open channel for childhood innocence to encounter the magic of infinite possibility.

For the adult world solidly ensconced in rationality the magic of childhood is a long-forgotten lost paradise. Many find vicarious compensatory solace in a child’s sparkle of surprise when opening a gift. Many need to shun exposure to any trigger linked  to  the vulnerability of expectant hope as the vicissitudes of a lifetime of disappointment seem to necessitate powerful insulation from the live wire of the thrill of anticipation.

Ultimately all children are led to the guillotine of disappointment, a process known as “growing up.” Parents may strive to protect their children’s innocence and connection to the magic as long as possible but ultimately must prepare their children to live in the “real” world.

This process is known as socialization and all adults knowingly or unknowingly collude to insure that children perceive and live in the world in a unified way. Not to do so might land their children in a psychiatric institution, labeled schizophrenic, for their hallucinations and delusions as regards communications with spirit entities and beliefs in other worlds.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico completely concur that this socialization that limits beliefs and perception is critical to being able to live and find stable grounding in this world. In fact they see it as a magical act that we are all capable of agreeing upon the same basic tenets of reality through the universal establishment of an ego-based rationality.

Nonetheless, the shamans do acknowledge that the fallout for this basic tenet of mental health, a strong rational ego, is as tragic as the magic of its creation: we become severely limited human beings cut off from our birthright, our magical connection to infinity. In a rational world magic is make-believe.

The dominance of rationality severely estranges us from our true natures. Though it serves us well in adapting to this world it leaves us deeply bored and unsatisfied. This is the ultimate reason for the profusion of substance abuse in our time. The use of substance dislodges the fixation on rationality and allows a fuller glimpse into human potential, unfortunately with often dangerous outcomes in dark or expansive journeys lacking the reasonable limits prescribed by rationality.

Truthfully, however, rationality alone rarely delivers fulfillment. Consider a relationship that appears perfect on rational grounds, and yet finds no attraction between its partners. Conversely, many relationships of attraction struggle with compatibility on rational grounds.

This dilemma reflects the deep split within all human beings, between their dominant rational ego and their deeper magical nature. Often we are really attracted to a partner, however inappropriate, that can deliver us from the stranglehold of our own rationality.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico suggest a different approach to resolve this inner quandary: tend the magic within. Shamans suggest that we accept the basic polarity of our beings: I am both a rational and a magical being. I am both a physical and an energetic being. Rather than pit these two sides of the self against each other their approach is more synergistic.

When I am in the world of everyday life rationality is dominant as the magical self continues in the background to inform the ego of intuitions and perceptions of a parapsychological nature. When I am in the magical or energetic world rationality can serve as a helpful discriminating and orienting function that also offers grounding via a connection to some needed familiar definition of self. These two parts of self can complement each other’s functioning while enriching the depth of experience and fulfillment of our true human potential.

The truth is, however, that we cannot afford to tend the magic within until we have achieved a strong enough rational ego to make us bonafide adults in this world. The paradox of course is that this accomplishment of adulthood severely alienates us from the magic. And yet, without a strong ego we are ill-equipped to take the journey to recover our connection to the magic.

We are living through a time in human history that is severely rattling our security in the stabilizing power of rationality. Now is the time to use inner rationality to navigate this alternative reality we’ve all been thrust into. In a dark way our current world situation demonstrates the magic of alternative realities that exist in infinity.

Use your rationality to stabilize the self, yet tend also to the truth of the magical self that we all share in common. Tend the magical self within, with love, as we weather the radical shifts of our time. Nothing can take away the magic, let it shine.

Tending the magic, with love,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Time of Saturation

Leave a comment
Time of Saturation…
– Art by Jan Ketchel © 2017

When we can absorb no more we reach a state of saturation where we essentially shut down, functioning on a kind of autopilot. This trancelike fugue state is prized in shamanic training where a practitioner is inundated with unexpected events to the point of saturation. This saturation defeats the ego’s ability to maintain its sense of normalcy and control. Deprived of its familiar fixation on order and predictability the practitioner’s awareness becomes pliable and open to new possibilities. Such are the conditions for all Earth inhabitants at present. Who knows what will happen today?

Our planet Earth, Gaia, is in her own process of becoming pliable and opening to new possibilities. We are currently being saturated with the effects of her labor through an escalation of fire, wind, water and earth upheavals. As Mother Earth rejects the burgeoning impact of the human species upon her body so does her human cohort, woman, challenge the practices of how mankind goes about spreading its seed.

We are currently saturated with the wildfires of Amazon Woman turning to ashes the careers of the sexually abusive power elite. Indeed there are innocent casualties in this massive conflagration  but, as with Mother Earth herself, a saturation of destruction is the necessary prelude to major reformation. Humankind must integrate its sexual instinct in a new, more balanced, compatible way. The time of unchecked sexually abusive behavior upheld by the silent collusion of woman is coming to an end.

In the world of governance we are saturated daily with radical shifts that evoke terror, deep insecurity, and panic. The calming father leader has been replaced by the wrathful Yahweh type, replete with emotional tirades and vindictiveness.

This same wave of incessant storm issues equally from Nature, MeToo, and leaders of governance. The common feature of all of these eruptions is saturation. We find ourselves confounded in our inability to absorb anymore. As with shamanic training our traditional hold on reality is being loosened. We are all being made pliable and open to new possibilities.

These possibilities include a reshaped Earth, a vastly different relation between the sexes and with the sexual instinct itself, and a governance far more acquiescent to the true needs of the planet. I caution getting too attached to the radical shifts being proposed and enacted by governance now. The greater intent behind this cascade of events is a loosening of our fixation on a world without change, the preparation stage for major transformation.

Onslaughts of saturation generate reactions of protest, numbing and dissociated indifference, until we arrive at the place of letting go of control, what the shamans call the place of no pity. From this position new worlds of possibility open to us as our allegiance to upholding old beliefs and attachments loosens.

Beyond the current fog of illusion driven by the saturation of fake news lies a world of transparency and acquiescence to the true needs of the planet. As we travel through the turbulence of these saturated times we do well to shield our light in the inner recess of the heart. All that is happening now is transient.

This time of saturation is the preparation or breakdown phase of major transformation. We do best, like Old Testament Job, to bear with patience the extremes of these times. Nothing can take away the sanctity of the self if we refuse the call to spend our energy attaching to half-baked solutions that avoid the fullness of real resolution.

Real resolution, post-saturation, is the birth of a new possibility. Imagine, for instance, a world where love and sex find their enduring union. Everything is possible.

Holding the candle within,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Sexual Abuse and The New New Deal

Leave a comment
What’s missing? Relatedness!
-Art by Jan Ketchel

Poised as we are for the juggernaut of The New New Deal we are simultaneously treated to the greatest exposure of aberrant male sexual behavior the world has ever known.

The New Deal was really Eleanor Roosevelt’s baby, the caring, warmly related mother who insured the health and well being of her progeny. The New New Deal is the return of Kronos, Zeus’s father, who ate all his offspring, except Zeus, to insure his unimpeded rule.

The seeming contradiction of these synchronistic events, the rise of divisive egotism and the downfall of the abuser, deserves careful scrutiny. What both events share in common is the absence of  relatedness.

Human relatedness is born of the feminine in both women and men. The feminine underscores the interconnectedness of all life: wholeness. The feminine is eros, the glue that congeals a relationship, a family, a nation, a world.

In its purest form the masculine is pneuma, the imperceptible breath of wind that shows its effect by breaking up clusters of coagulated debris upon a lake, for instance, home to ecosystems in transition. In this image the masculine can be seen as aggressive, though I think more accurately as active. In its purest form the masculine is the active principle, yang, that spreads its seed far and wide creating ever new permutations of life.

This dispersion, however gentle the breeze may be, is destructive to what is. The dismantling of the social welfare caring state marks a radical breakdown of the inclusiveness and maternal supports that have served as the governing principles of the world for many decades.

The takedown of sexually abusive male icons and idols is its own dismantling of the status quo, largely fueled by the active yang energy in women. All are being emboldened by the bright light of consciousness to shine the light on hidden truths that have allowed an unrelated sexual instinct, housed in the dark recesses of the human shadow, to dominate with impunity.

What is currently lacking in both The New New Deal and our modern inquisition into abuse is the feminine principle of yin, relatedness. Perhaps it was time for a world restructuring. Perhaps care for all was becoming too inclusive, but clearly a push to completely shift resource into the hands of the least in need is missing something essential.

Similarly, to destroy careers without trial, to lump all male sexual behavior into the same category is lacking in a feminine relatedness that can feel its way to the differentiated truths in these many abusive vignettes revealed daily.

The truth is that any sexual contact that is not related, meaning not mutually agreed upon and desired by each person, is an abuse of human power.  A purely instinctual sexual encounter that lacks any real human connection, if  mutually agreed upon, is not abuse. However, the quality of such an unrelated encounter is not fully human, as it lacks the inclusion of the highest human potential, the ability to love. Sex without love is not related. The deepest human challenge is to reconcile animal and spirit in true union.

As we move forward from the disintegrative stage of our current world transformation we do well to realize that both action and connection are the yang and yin of our world. All new deals, wherever they may lead, require an equal participation and inclusion of both masculine and feminine principles.

Sexual abuse, as well as the New New Deal, reflects a preponderance of yang and a paucity of yin. Structures that lack balance will have limited life.

May we find our way to love,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: OCD, ADD & the Energy of Manifestation

1 Comment

My daughter was 4 years old. Her nursery school class sat in a circle as they prepared for their Halloween parade while parents and spectators waited on the grounds of the Randolph School.

I arrived early and decided to put on a scary mask before entering the school. I was immediately accosted by two warrior women teachers who chided my innocence, insisting I remove the mask to not freak out the children.

In nursery school, and for most of childhood, children are socialized to a world of predictable, familiar, routine behaviors. This consistency enables a sense of security that fosters the building of a solid self capable of taking on the world. An unexpected adult wearing a mask, even on Halloween, is too shattering for a child’s fragile ego in its formative stages.

For many reasons our energy gets blocked in…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Taken to its extreme, a perfectly predictable world of supreme order is the intent of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). When we are in the OCD part of our being we are protecting ourselves from disruptive intrusions that threaten our security. Turning to habit and prescribed patterns of ordering our lives and environment promise to ward off danger.

When life becomes dominated by adherence to routine our entire energy reserves are deployed to uphold our familiar, safe, and secure world. In such times we have no energy available to manifest something new. In fact, regardless of what we might wish were different, our actual energy deployment is actively blocking any change. It continues to seek solace in the known and familiar, however unhappy that makes us.

Manifestation requires that we free our energy from our routines. The shamans teach us that all the energy we will ever have in our lifetime is the energy we were born with. If we want our energy for something new, we have no choice but to shift the way we employ our inherent  energy and point it in a new direction.

The greatest consumer of our inherent energy is self-importance. In modern times this translates into our relentless pursuit of attention and validation. Withdrawing our habits of seeking approval and validation for our appearance, be it our clothing choices, hairstyle, Instagram photos or Facebook comments, would provide a huge deposit of energy into our savings bank for manifestation.

Withdrawing our rigid attachment to our daily habits is another source of energy for redeployment in manifestation. Something as simple as getting up because you happened to wake up 10 minutes before the alarm can shift the entire day into new possibilities of manifestation. Of course such an occurrence should not become a habit; perhaps it will be equally important not to hear the alarm the next day and awaken to a whole new set of possibilities!

ADD, the acronym for Attention Deficit Disorder is at the exact opposite pole of OCD. When we are at our ADD pole we are completely at the mercy of our impulses, all our vital energy exhausted with what captures our attention in the moment.

Such a depletion of vital energy also precludes any energy reserve for manifestation. The challenge at the ADD pole is to actually invite routine and habit to provide a structure that conserves energy waste. Thus, the person who lives life completely spontaneously might benefit from rigidly setting the alarm and conforming to some level of routine. In this case routine supports energy conservation.

It remains for each individual to assess which pole they naturally favor and institute the necessary changes to conserve energy. With manifestation it truly is all about the energy. To hold an intent with no available energy for manifestation is to get caught in an energetic whirlpool of wishful thinking.

The winning formula: INTENT+ ENERGY=MANIFESTATION.

From an old energy miser,

Chuck