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: Letting Grow

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When it’s time to leave the nest, it’s time to leave the nest! In this respect our ancient ancestors, much closer to inner nature’s wisdom, obeyed two major rules: the incest taboo and puberty initiation rites.

This handsome dude is off to make it on his own…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The incest taboo is nearly universal in our species. Perhaps its most important function is to create a limited situation that forces the child to leave home and grow up. If the option remained available to have all needs met at home, including sexual needs, a regressive potential in humans to stay in the family home, safe and satiated, would clearly result! The human animal must leave home to mature.

The puberty rites of our ancient ancestors survive mostly on a symbolic level today, in religious traditions such as confirmation and bar/bat mitzvahs. The difference between ancient initiation rites and those practiced today is that our modern practices end with the newly initiated continuing to remain in the family home as children, cared for by parents. In ancient times children returned to their villages as adults, often never to return to their family home, in many situations never to speak with their parents again. These children really became adults. The community recognized, treated and expected them to be adults.

Our modern world, with its lengthy process of education, often extending into the late 20s and early 30s, dissociates young people from nature’s deepest push to become independent citizens truly capable of standing on their own. Furthermore, with such emphasis on family ties and closeness throughout life, emotional ties are encouraged to deepen within the family, dampening truly independent maturity and self-sufficiency out in the world.

Letting go is painful, both for parents and children. Parents must suffer the terror that their children might get hurt or not be able to hold their own in the world. The guilt and fear that they didn’t do enough or did things wrong can be overwhelming, yet when it’s time for the children to go parents must be able to close the door and suffer the separation.

Children too must face life out in the world on their own, learning how things work through trial and error, for truly very few people navigate life unscathed. With our modern cultures so devoid of true initiation rites young people seek all sorts of self-imposed initiations. The tattoos and piercings so prominent in our modern world are such self-imposed surface symbols of initiation, images born from deep within the child’s own psyche of ancient practices now manifesting as mere outer stylings. Often young people go deep into the challenges of addiction, also reminiscent of the fierce challenge of ancient puberty rites, which sometimes ended in death.

Sometimes children find themselves arrested for drug related crimes, resulting in imprisonment, a situation that forces both child and parent to be initiated into a world where there can be no parental savior, where the young person is challenged to survive on his or her own inner resources on the road to separation and adulthood.

In my personal experience, the underlying loving connection and parental protection that I bestowed upon my children may have contributed to both of my sons challenging themselves with every parent’s greatest terror, heroin and crystal meth. It took years of rescuing, countless near-misses with death, and plenty of emotional exhaustion for me to finally cut the cord and let nature take its course.

With one son, I had no contact for three years. We are connected again; the addiction has passed and love indeed survives, but the separation truly was an initiation rite. I suffered inordinate amounts of pain but never backtracked, regardless of the fact that each moment might have been my son’s last.

What has emerged is a mature adult who stands on his own. I notice that we meet now as if we shared no past. There is no sentimentality of childhood. We meet as equal adults, beings who barely know each other. The emotional attachment of parent to child has transformed; it has completely evolved into mature love.

We cannot get away from nature’s archetypes. Eventually they will play out in some form of modern drama, even as we humans continue to ignore and confound our own deepest nature. Perhaps we will find our way back to the ancient imperatives within us, to new puberty rites that are better suited to our times. The whole issue around addiction might lose its grip if we truly submit to initiation by nature’s design.

Really letting grow ultimately means releasing all of our attachments in this world. If we can’t let everything go when we die, we sow the seeds of karma, because how can life proceed into new journeys if we refuse to let go and move on? Not an easy life challenge, but it must be why we are really here in Earth School, to love, to attach, and to allow love to mature and transform when it is time to grow and move on.

Honor thy parents, teach your children well, let go and let grow,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Look In or Lookout!

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We are all responsible for the world dream. We are all empowered to steer it to safety. Like the minutest slices of a hologram, we all encapsulate, within the borders of our individual selves, all the energies manifesting in the world.

Time to pull inward?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Like the Taoist rainmaker—who, sealed in his hut alone, brought forth the rains to the parched world when he calmed the energetic drought within himself, returning himself to the tao, to oneness with the natural world—we individually can calm the warring energies without ourselves, whereby delivering peace and calm to the world.

The shamans call it intent, Abraham calls it the Law of Attraction and  C. G. Jung called it synchronicity. No matter what you call it, the technique is the same: build a wall around the self, be with the facts of the self, achieve order within the self and thus manifest stability without.

The outer world currently mirrors our personal inner struggle. We seek safety, we want to be saved. In early societies the tribe would turn to the medicine man for cure. In our time the medicine man we manifested is Trump. Assigned the role of savior, the medicine man is granted far-reaching power and this can be dangerous for the tribe. Thus, in early societies there was dual leadership, a chief and a medicine man. The chief was the worldly leader, the medicine man the spiritual leader.

Jung viewed Hitler, in 1939, as a medicine man, looked upon by the German people as a savior. When posed the question by a reporter—what would happen if Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were locked together in a room for one week with only one loaf of bread and one pitcher of water?—Jung replied that Hitler would likely pout in the corner and refuse to eat while Stalin and Mussolini fought over the food and water. Incidentally, he felt that ultimately Stalin would win, the Russians having the strongest power motive. Gives one pause, with Mr. Putin in charge today!

The current outer manifestation of our psychic inner reality shows a child ego state seeking a world savior to deliver it from danger and provide the elixir to paradise on Earth. The medicine man thus manifested offers instinctive strong medicine, a cure-all to cure all. Meanwhile, the medicine man truly is not a chief, yet he is enjoying unprecedented power.

Meanwhile, beneath the surface are a couple of well-organized power drives, biding their time, awaiting their opportunity to seize control of the collective psyche. In a nutshell, a combination of bad medicine and partisan leadership that, in fact, unabashedly reveal our true shadow, the dark side, which everyone has. This shadow has covertly been in control, while on the surface it presents golden values and intentions. Perhaps the medicine man is outing the shadow? Which is good. However, should the shadow be the chief?

Bringing this discussion back to the individual—the slice of the hologram that we each are—we must first face our own child ego state, the part of us that wants to be rescued, protected, and made to feel secure. What medicines do we turn to? Substances, relationships, obsessions, making money, hoarding, etc., to rescue us from our fears? How attached are we to these medicines provided to us by our inner medicine man/woman? Are we willing to refuse the seductive trance of this inner figure and take responsibility for where we are, why we suffer, and what we really need to do?

Addressing this level of inner truth, we can face more honestly the hidden power drives that seek to rule the personality. If we look to the outer mirror, at the chiefs in the world, we see the motives of greed and dominance. These are the shadow ego states of the child ego state currently running the show.

In chakra terms, these impassioned shadow ego states are busily battling for control at the level of the solar plexus, the third chakra, the place of power and will. If we can identify these power drives, within the self, and bring stability to the personal psyche through achieving calm in the body, i.e. through conscious meditation breath, we become freed of the states of possession where these drives do nothing but feast for themselves. In effect, we tame the power drives within to serve the real needs of the self. This consolidates and raises an adult ego state to the status of chief of the personality.

Through dreams and active imagination our adult ego state gets to know, value, confront, and find the rightful place for all these characters within us, as they constantly vie to take control of the personality at the expense of a harmonized individuation, that is, becoming who we truly are.

These processes, of looking inwardly and taking responsibility for all that is there, reshape our slice of the hologram and impact the entire world hologram, life as we know it, the dream that we all uphold.

Look no further than looking in, for this is the source of our real power. Failure to look in will always manifest a world where, indeed, we must lookout!

“When you have the right relationship to yourself, that means freedom.” *

Working on it,

Chuck

* -Catherine Rush Cabot’s note from a session with Jung, December 1939 from Jung, My Mother and I edited by Jane Cabot Reid

Chuck's Blog, Jan's Blog, The Monogamy Dialogues

The Monogamy Dialogues: Sacred Sex

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Why is sex so unsatisfying?

At its animal core, sex is an instinct, a biological urgency that comes and goes at nature’s prompting, on nature’s time, toward nature’s end. Most sex in nature appears particularly fast and violent and rarely results in a lasting relationship, in fact, for most animals it results in no postcoital connection.

Create sacred time… consciously…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In contrast, the human animal, freed from its purely instinctual promptings can choose to engage in sex at will. Consciousness, what we refer to as spirit, introduces the possibility of choice as to when one might engage in sex.  For instance we might say, “I love you all the time, but sex is sacred. It needs its own time and space, sacred time.” Animals never have this choice.

Additionally, consciousness, when applied to sexual energy, enables it to be elaborated into a union within the self in the merging of physical and energy bodies—the two distinct human components: matter and spirit—as well as the possibility of a profound union with another human being, as well as a complete merger into the experience of cosmic oneness.

The word sacred means to set apart, to make holy, to consecrate. The decision to set apart, to regulate the sexual instinct for the holy purpose of consecration, that is, a transformation into a numinous experience of oneness with self  or with self and another being, is the intent of sacred sex.

To set aside a definite time for sexual union separates sex from its biological dominance, raising it to an honored, holy status. Hormones have their own timetables, but deciding the day of union is completely spirit based. Spirit says to body, “I invite you to be fully present, fully engaged, at this time and place. I am fully prepared to receive and join with you, this is my solemn commitment.”

Much of life can be dominated by the biological pressure and mental preoccupation with sex. That pressure in an individual may encourage frequent masturbation, in couples an ever-present expectation or burden. Setting aside a definite day within which sacred sex will occur relieves, ultimately, the individual or couple of this animal dominance of being.

At first, of course, the animal will resist. What horse or dog willingly allows itself to be tamed and trained? However, once the instinct sees that this is how it is, that it must wait, patiently, but that ultimately it will be rewarded with deep union and release, it will get on board.

Getting on board means accepting the set-apart time as the time, the only time, the sacred time of sex. All other time is not the time, hence, sexual thoughts, feelings and sensations must be stored to allow for mastery and refinement of formerly unbridled instinct.

And then, when it is time, it is time, sacred time. The commitment is to show up at the agreed upon, set-apart time, body and spirit. Just as the body had to submit to waiting, the spirit must submit to fully showing up, regardless of inner resistance. In the case of partner sex this is not about fulfilling an obligation to another, this is about honoring a sacred commitment to self. Marital duty, for instance, has no place in sacred sex.

Of course, the quality of each meeting is unique. Each partner must be extremely sensitive to the being it seeks to join with. Body has its definite needs, wants and desires, but spirit has its own intentions. To bring the two together in deep union requires a genuine meeting of both these bodies, physical and spiritual. The depth of each meeting depends upon how deeply each of these bodies is connected with, within and without. True connection requires deep knowing of self and other.

The practice of sacred sex is always unique, the growing closeness cumulative. The utter freedom and playfulness, in its sacred, set-apart time and space, allows for a merging with the divine that lives completely outside of time and space.

The rules are simple: deep respect, no coercion, plan with sincerity and openness, show up, see what happens. Obviously, sex needn’t be sacred sex to be right, but sacred sex is offered as a potential mature practice. Have fun with the planning too, make it special, allow no interferences in your sacred time and sacred space; keep it holy.

Even Reni Murez, a direct apprentice of Carlos Castaneda, Carol Tiggs, Florinda Donner-Grau, and Taisha Abelar, acknowledges that although shamans store and use their sexual energy for conscious dreaming and out-of-body travel they also must balance their humanness. After all, they are currently here in human animal form just like the rest of us. Reni agrees that setting apart a special time for sex, be it once weekly, monthly, yearly, or once a decade, provides a sacred opportunity for human union, but also allows for sexual energy to be used at other times for other spiritual work.

No partner? No problem! Either save sexual energy for future union, with the intention that the right relationship will come to pass and that the stored energy will not be taken or squandered but used as planned, or engage in sacred sexual union with self alone, merging spirit and physical body in love.

Physical limitations? With spirit involved nothing is impossible! Perhaps the playing field might move over into dreaming where energy body and physical body can experience the deepest sexual union. Here sacred sex asks the dreaming intent to take over and arrange the magical, sacred meeting outside of time and space.

To get back to the question with which we opened this blog—why is sex so unsatisfying?—we propose the following: it simply isn’t sacred enough! We offer the path of sacred sex as a path of heart.

Of course, if one is in the midst of traumatic recapitulation or a spiritual practice that requires sexual abstinence, the practice of sacred sex is one of sacrifice and abstinence, as the energy of union is deployed toward healing and spiritual transformation instead. Nonetheless, such deployment can be understood as sacred sex employed to the needs and intent of self for the highest good. Indeed a path of heart!

Keeping it holy,

Chuck & Jan

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Chuck’s Place: Can’t Find Me Love

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Too pretty…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The truth is, we all suffer from an inferiority complex. Those we admire and aspire to be like either hide their’s really well or have truly come to embrace it.

And what is an inferiority complex?

Most of us could start with our bodies: too short, too tall, too skinny, too fat, too big, too small, too much, too little, etc.

Then of course there are our moral shortcomings: too lazy, too shy, undisciplined, unfocused, deceitful, lustful, jealous, power-driven, power-avoidant, self-centered, etc., to say nothing of all our bad habits!

Then there are the workings of our minds: can’t think, can’t feel, can’t be in our body senses, can’t imagine, can’t remember, etc.

Beyond all this there are the warehouses of all the terrible things we’ve thought, felt, and done in our lives. These are the sins of confessions, the personal inventory, all that we seek to forget or blot out from the true history of our lives.

The law of attraction coaches us to become singleminded in our intentions, to draw to us that which we wish to manifest. Of course, there is practical wisdom in this guidance, as prayer and mantra throughout the ages bear witness to. However, no one can manifest real love until they can acknowledge and love their own inferiority, every last bit of it.

Often we seek, in the eyes and hearts of another, a savior to free us from the prison of our inferiority. During the initial spell of blissful romance all inferiority disappears, becomes cute, or simply doesn’t matter. We glimpse the wholeness of complete self-acceptance in the blissful oneness with another. Through this fullness of acceptance we desperately seek to lift the ever-looming feeling of inferiority that nonetheless lurks in the background, stealthily waiting to attack and destroy any sign of loving acceptance of the self.

Those who briefly feel the relief of another’s love assuaging the ever-present disappointment in self, soon discover a compulsive need for constant outer reassurance. Or they simply decide that they’ve merely fooled the other person, for they simply cannot believe that that other person accepts their inferiority.

C. G. Jung was adamant that we must find compassion for the imperfect person, the monster, the eternal skeleton in the cupboard, the ugliest part of ourselves.

He himself could not stand to lose a game. He was notorious for cheating at both simple card games and more elaborate games he’d invent and play with his children. He had an affair with an unofficial second wife for decades with his wife’s full knowledge and painful acceptance. He overtly accepted and included his inferior shadow self into his life, knowing that to ignore it would be a bigger disaster. He also fully bore the tension his decisions created and, in advanced years, was able to admit to finally feeling great pain for the pain his inferior side had created for his wife. He could accept his imperfect self.

True wholeness requires that we accept all of our inferiorities, like the body parts we try so hard to hide. Perhaps it would do us animals well to spend some time in a nudist colony, to overcome our shame of our unacceptable body parts!

Too scared…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In the deepest sense, love is acceptance of all that we are. We will not be able to find true, soulful love until we can fully accept all of ourselves. Until then we will secretly harbor unlovability, endlessly swamped in the mire of our inferiority complexes.

Accepting our inferiorities puts us on the path to manifest true love, within and without.

Accepting,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Fire in the Belly

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Heart chakra rising from the fire in the belly…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

With no judgment intended, simply honest observations, I see the world as currently being led by a force beyond reason. I call it ‘a force’ because it functions like an elemental being, a true force of nature, in this case: fire. Tweets and actions are like bolts of lightning that ignite sweeping havoc, leaving behind a whole new landscape.

I do agree with Donald Trump that if the election were held again today, he would win again. Reason is no match for this elemental being, the current ruler of the world. From the broadest perspective I ask, why has Gaia installed this conflagratory element at this time? I see the earth and humanity mirroring the same dynamic: fire in the belly.

From a chakra perspective, the belly, the solar plexus, is the birthplace of the ego. It is the place where personal power is established as it wages war with the fires and floods, the passions and emotions of the instinctual human animal. The rudimentary human spirit is born as a result of this contest, in the form of the ego. This is where Adam and Eve, with the birth of their personal egos, parted ways with the garden and ‘stole’ the power to create their own world.

Digestive issues, womb issues, intestinal issues, shallow breathing issues all reflect the challenge of fire in the belly—how to master it, how not to be consumed by it, and how to workably transform it. Psychologically this is the place of personal power, calling for the establishment of a self, a foothold in consciousness that can control and transform the deep instinctual forces within, as well as hold its own without, amidst the vast collective forces that inhabit the human jungle. The downside of this achievement is narcissism, the very narrow imperative of me and mine.

Humanity has been Gaia’s most recent catalyst of change. Who else beside humans has so drastically changed the face of the earth? I propose that Gaia is calling for a rise of kundalini energy from her third chakra to her fourth chakra, the heart center. The heart center is the true birthplace of the true spirit self, the self that extends far beyond the narcissistic wrappings of the third chakra ego center.

The way to the heart chakra is through the all-consuming fires of the belly. As kundalini rises the wrappings of consumerism, personal power, and advantage, at the third chakra ego center, burn off and what emerges, transformed, is consciousness of a higher self, what we know as the subtle body, the energy body, the spirit.

The spirit body at the heart center is attached to the gross physical body by its own umbilical cord that remains attached until the spirit embarks on its own definitive journey beyond physical life at the time of death.

While in this world, the spirit informs human life from its truer perspective. This is the Buddha/Christ consciousness that speaks the truth beyond the narcissistic wrappings of ego. This is the home of true compassion, not emotional highs and lows or romantic dances. This is the home of being able to see and act upon the true needs of self, the true needs of humanity, the true needs of Gaia.

The driving forces of human passion and emotion simmer gently at the heart center, which burns a constant flame, the steady heartbeat that maintains life. Compassion is natural love that embraces all life with true feeling, yet knows that the only true savior lies in the heart center of each individual. Each person must find their own way there and discover this for themselves.

Gaia insists upon this heart chakra development now. The crowning achievement of the solar plexus, the ego, with reason and its knowledge of the three dimensional world at the ready, has become too narrow a place to fully encompass and lead the fuller truth of the earth. This higher spirit at the heart center must be awakened, inhabited, and become the leader now.

Gaia’s methods can be harsh. All births are violent affairs. Contractions are no picnic for the birther or the one being born. Actually, preparations for discovery of the spirit within have long been appearing. One need only peruse Jan’s Recapitulation Diaries to see how the violence of sexual abuse can shake the ethereal/spirit body right out of the physical body.

Of course, such horrific atrocities as sexual abuse are completely, morally unjustifiable, but vast occurrences of such happenings have given countless thousands direct access to and experience of their inner spirit selves, as they often fly freely beyond the confines of the body during blunt trauma. What emerges on the world stage and in the personal lives of many humans at this time are the shocks, which though traumatic also open access to a consciousness that transcends the personal me and can align with the true needs of the interconnected we.

What has become completely apparent to me is that Gaia herself is in the process of shaking loose her spirit body, attempting to rise to the fourth chakra level of the heart. Gaia is prompting her own evolution, and humankind is the enzyme, the catalyst—rule without reason—that is providing the energy for this transition. It is a completely irrational and barely controllable catalyst that is the driving force behind this phenomenon, but nonetheless an obvious attempt to reach the heart chakra of Gaia and prompt human evolution as well.

The only hope to stabilize humanity and save the planet is to reach the heart-centered spirit consciousness of which we are all capable, and allow that spirit energy to lead us all forward now.

The heart center is the center that acts from objective truth. Reason and emotion that have passed through the proving fires of the solar plexus take up residence in their most purified form in the heart center, where they are freed to lead through love and truth.

Of course, there are higher chakras to be inhabited beyond the heart, but for now Gaia insists that we find our way, collectively, to settling in the heart. That quest is the priority of now.

And so, as we sit in the irrational fires beyond reason, may we allow ourselves to prove our worthiness to partake in Gaia’s initiative and settle calmly in the heart center of our being.

Stillness in the fire,

Chuck