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: Programmed For Love

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We arrive in this world fully programed to receive the love, attention, and nurturance that will support the unfolding and maturation of our human selves. We are preprogrammed to bond with our primary caretakers, the parents entrusted and programmed to respond with loving nurturance to our deepest needs for safety, food, and emotional affirmations.

Those archetypes... about as solid as stone... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Those archetypes… about as solid as stone…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

These preexistent programs are what Jung called archetypes, nature’s tried and true wisdom encoded in instinctual patterns to ensure the survival and thriving of a human life. Despite the robustness of nature’s guiding archetypal programs, something has to happen to turn them on. With infants, a simply smile is often sufficient enough to trigger deep emotional bonding with adults. Humans, however, are fallible. We left the archetypal Garden long ago and often find ourselves deeply estranged from reading the environmental clues that activate nature’s bonding program. Winnicott, the English psychiatrist/pediatrician, softened the blow of this reality by stating that parents only had to be “good enough” for these innate growth programs to be activated in children.

The important detail to be gleaned from this powerful interaction between parents and children is its impersonal nature. Innate programs are not personal, they are the same for our entire species. We are all born with them. When caretakers respond to our archetypal programs we attach and love them. This has nothing to do with who personally our parents are, it has to do with how well our programs line up with each other.

When they align we experience deep love, but again, that love is impersonal. It’s the running of nature’s program and the powerful energetic and emotional response we have to it. Again, this powerful emotional response is not because of who the parent is, but only because of their ability to engage in an archetypal drama being activated between child and parent, a drama in which they both have starring roles.

The same kind of impersonal archetypal “love” ignites in adult romantic relationships. Nowadays, with the advent of instant connection between romantically inclined adults through internet dating sites, we can observe the rapid activation of innate mating programs running full cycle over the course of just one day.

Saying the right words, paying attention at the right moment can activate the most powerful feelings of ultimate soulmate through cyberspace. A hit on a dating site in the morning could result in a phone call at noon, a shared evening dinner, and a night of ecstasy. Of course, by the next morning, the personal reality of who this other being is begins to appear under the brightening light of the rising sun. One begins to face the power of having been swept away by an instinctual archetypal pattern to merge and mate. The being before us is truly a personal mystery, the depth of our emotional and ecstatic experience the result of having performed in an archetypal drama, of having participated in a deep mystery of nature, summoned from the hidden depths of our being.

However, if we are completely honest with ourselves, there is nothing personal in the relationship. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to call it a relationship at all if we define relationship as being truly consciously related to another. To be truly connected to another we must truly know them as people beyond the archetypal projections that ruled the night. However instinctually satisfying the encounter may have been, we can hardly call it a real relationship.

Conscious relationships require time and true knowing and acceptance of another as they truly are. Though our archetypal blueprint predisposes and pressures us to partake in powerful dramas to truly feel alive, needed, and loved, the paradox remains: deep, instinctual bonding and love is not in the least bit personal love.

It is our human challenge to reconcile instinctual and personal love. Our evolutionary trajectory is pressuring us to find instinctual satisfaction in a consciously related personal relationship.

All too frequently, that which draws us instinctively is completely opposite to what we feel consciously companionable to. That is our current cross to bear as a species. At present, we are a civilization struggling with the old archetypal patterns of blind tribalism and loyalty of blood and action vs a consciously related world that puts the true needs of the world over the self interest of the archetypally bound tribe.

In our most basic relationships, where impersonal love and obligation bind us, we must ask ourselves whether the actual relationships we are in, even with our most intimates, are in fact personal relationships at all. Sometimes primal relationships must end. They may have served their primal need, nature’s imperative, but they may never have taken root in a personal way, which is the only way we can grow and fulfill our modern evolutionary imperative: the reconciliation of nature and consciousness, animal and spirit, the full truth of who we are.

We are programmed for love, but are we truly able to advance that program with consciousness?

Personally,

Chuck

 

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Transparency

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Both Jeanne and Robert Monroe report that journeys in energetic infinity are completely transparent. Thoughts and feelings are immediately known to self and other—no place to hide. This in no way implies moral superiority or perfection, simply the absence of shadow—all is revealed.

In our solid dimension, shadow, the ability to hide from self and other, is, and has been, the nemesis of our evolution. At this moment in time, we witness a dramatic acting out of disowned shadow as it is projected and killed throughout the world.

It's really all about transformation... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
It’s really all about transformation…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

As horrific as such outbreaks of violence are, they reflect our own evolutionary movement toward transparency. Videos  abound, blatantly revealing violence and murder perpetrated by individuals projecting evil onto others. The truth is being revealed, and though reactions to those truths wreak havoc, in the end, the truth is being revealed in greater transparency.

Mother Earth has mandated evolutionary advance and humans are the agents of her intent. The rise of Donald Trump is another reflection of this urgency for change and transparency. Ironically, his flippant, ignorant, off-the-cuff reactive style appeals to a certain populace fed up with lies. He is actually supported by a wave of sentiment that seeks easy truth and simplicity vs the diplomatic complexity of seeking real solutions.

I remember, when I first started in the field of counseling, how some seasoned therapists would meet with a patient, analyze their problem, and provide them with a very clear prescription to solve that problem—very clear, rational, and black and white. The trouble was, most of those patients were ultimately labelled as defensive because they didn’t act on their prescriptions.

The one dictum I held onto from graduate school was to start where the client is at. This requires complex diplomacy—suspending judgment–and gradually helping a client to reckon with, own, and make their shadow transparent.

Trump mimics a quick prescriber that attracts the hunger for greater transparency and fairness, yet, ironically, Trump himself has led a business career of manipulation and dishonesty. What’s striking is the willingness to overlook these facts, so great is the desire for change.

As much as I am concerned about the current generation’s obsession with social media, which I see as a widening dissociation from our human animal selves, I can’t help but validate the same drive toward greater transparency that the internet and social media offer. It’s getting harder to hide and lie in this modern world!

We are in a cauldron of monumental change where phenomena like the rise of Donald Trump are likely to occur as an aberrant permutation of transparency. These are significant but transient events. The deeper, more fundamental event here is the realization of Mother Earth’s intent to evolve us to the next level of energetic transparency. And with that transparency the human will will have little choice but to acquiesce to the truth and the necessary actions to insure survival and the flourishing of our evolving dream and, ultimately, our transformation.

Transparently speaking,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Why So Long, Mother?

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[I will be going into retreat for the next few weeks, so this is my last blog until the week of July 18, 2016. Enjoy it. May it bring you some new things to consider as the world situation heats up. Do look for our daily Soulbytes on the channeling page, as they will continue to be posted even during our retreat. Until we meet again.]

 

Old Man River... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Old Man River…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Dejectedly, Tom Harmer muses with his shaman teacher over the stilted fate of the Columbia River, riddled with white man’s dams. Tom’s mentor laughs at his hopeless mood.

“Well, you stuck then,” he says. “But not me. Maybe all you can see is what’s wrong. What bad things are happenin’ to the earth, to all of us. Maybe just stuck on that, what you don’t want to see happenin’, eh?”

“What’s the alternative?” Tom asks. “They seem to be the ones who have the power, like nothin’ can stop ’em from eating up the world!”

“The big river, that’s alive,” the old shaman says. “The river, that’s forever… Those dams, they not gonna last. The river is old, old as time, and will run free again someday… And so, that dam not make me bad in the heart, not make me feel hopeless. See, to hold the river in my heart, that dam not have any power over me.”

The question does arise, however, as to why all-powerful living Mother Earth, the feminine side of God, waits so long? Why so much pollution, destruction, and desecration before you act, Mother? Yes, the river will run free again one day but upon a vastly changed body. Those of us who really care are drawn to pity for you, for your victim body. We, like Tom Harmer, are drawn by powerlessness and hopelessness as the fires rage and the ices melt. How do we not see you as a defenseless victim, Mother? How do we stop blaming ourselves for allowing your demise?

Perhaps we do well to remember the Garden. Wasn’t it your incarnations, the snake and Eve, who instigated breaking away from your natural instinctive self? Wasn’t it your move that threw us into this desert of discontent, Mother? For the truth is that your move threw us into our mental body, freed us to tinker with your body, to bring to consciousness your secrets, all of which have led us to a Frankensteinian restructuring of your body.

The spiritualists contend that you intended to raise the vibration of your dark planet, Mother, that you invited in spirit beings to merge with your flesh and raise its consciousness to new heights. Don Juan Matus and his shamanic line see humans as those spirit beings, wings clipped, merged into the material human animal, the stuff of  your substance.

Human identity confusion and the desecration of the Earth have escalated, reflecting the severe animal body/energy body split of the human race. Many humans have exercised their mental prowess and freedom to exploit the material world, and each other, for their own exaggerated human pleasure. This was an inevitable permutation of freedom. This is where we find ourselves now, at the highest level of exploitation, clearly a state too unbalanced for your body to bear, Mother.

On the other hand, those who have found their way to some form of recapitulation are gaining access to the fuller truths of who they are, energy/spirit beings temporarily inhabiting finite material bodies. This realization of our dual nature both frees the fuller potential of who we are, as well as elevates our human lives from mere inhabitants of your body, Mother. As spirit beings we cannot help but appreciate the energetic interconnectedness of all life. We cannot but move beyond greed to a governance of truth.

There is no doubt that this quantum leap of consciousness will reshape our relation to your body, as well as your body itself, Mother. We are in the midst of cataclysmic reshaping as we speak. All of our actions are the stuff of your pregnancy, of your transformation.

So, ultimately, it would seem, Mother, that you are the ultimate trickster, primed to evolve us forward. In true form of the total passivity and receptivity of yin, your magnetic draw of our spirited yang has resulted in the quantum leap we are all taking right now. It is a most chaotic birthing, yet we do well to not attach too much to the rapidly shifting psychotic underbelly of our time.

Like the old alchemist with his retort, you, Mother Earth, now contain in your womb all the charged elements needed to complete your transformation into your new golden world, Columbia River restored to its full grandeur!

We’ve waited so long,

Chuck

Excerpts from: What I’ve Always Known by Tom Harmer

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Unconditional Love

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The highest form of love is love without condition, the total embracing acceptance of all that we are.

This is the welcome that we all seek as our birthright into life in this world, loving acceptance of all that we are, simply because we are. This is the love the child longs to see mirrored in its parent’s eyes to help fortify a deep sense of worthiness, confidence, and lovability that encourages the journey to individuation, to becoming all that we truly are in this life. This is the love we seek in partnership, a loving embrace of all of our body self, all of our virtues as well as all of our sins.

Shadow partners... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Shadow partners…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

In our time, the longing for unconditional love has come to be felt as an inalienable right, an entitlement. If one does not experience unconditional love immediately one feels empowered and righteous to end a relationship or marriage rather quickly. However, relationships are cauldrons where confronting the unacceptable, in both self and other, is part of the process of growing. If one exits a relationship due to unmet acceptance too prematurely the opportunity to experience the coveted “unconditional love” may be missed.

The first challenge in achieving unconditional love is to unconditionally love the self. The process of socialization we all encounter growing up leaves us with a huge shadow self, a rejected part of the self that we are taught must be forsaken due to its unacceptability.

Do we know that shadow self? Do we hate it as it has been hated? Do we expect a partner to remedy our disdain for a part of ourselves that even we do not love, expecting another to lovingly accept all of us?

Can we actually turn over that unwanted shadow self to another to make it wanted? We can try, but we’ll never fully believe the outcome. Even if a partner claims love for that which we hate in ourselves, it will not be redeemed. We will either need constant reassurance to silence our inner doubt or we simply won’t believe our “naive” partner. We will retain the “true knowledge” of our unacceptability.

In other ways, it might just be that parts of ourselves deemed unlovable might indeed be immature, with a limited capacity for relationship. Young children are far more concerned with themselves—primary narcissism, it’s called—than the needs of others. This may be quite appropriate at an infantile stage of development, but it is hardly adaptive to adult relatedness, which requires a fuller knowing and appreciation of another, as well as of self.

Our challenge might be to love that very infantile part of ourselves but realize that it is also anachronistic, non-adaptive to adult life, and unacceptable when acted out in adult relationship. This may be a case where we need to access the loving but firm adult/parent within ourselves that sets boundaries upon the demands of an infantile part of ourselves. This may allow for adult connection with another where we can share the fullness of ourselves but don’t burden the relationship with expectations that need to be grappled with within the self.

When Buddha speaks of loving compassion he speaks equally of detachment. Unconditional love—acceptance of all—does not mean attachment to all. (Attachment in this sense meaning having to engage in the acted-out entitlements of another.) In detachment, we can fully love and accept another yet insist that they manage their own infantilism.

Unconditional love is not unconditional license. Unconditional love is full acceptance of what is, while assuming full responsibility for integrating it into the self and into life at a level where life can receive it and help it to grow. Ironically, the key to unconditional love is complete loving acceptance of self while facing the conditional reality that we must grow up!

If we have been failed by those entrusted to connect us with unconditional love we must pick up the mantle of finding our way there on our own, beyond blame and bitterness. Our truest parent, Mother Earth, entrusts us with this journey as she evokes a healing process that requires deeper connectedness and love for that which has been rejected. If we are here we have been invited to partake in this great healing crisis, our own and that of the world now. It all begins with the journey of unconditional acceptance of the self.

Lovingly,

Chuck

 

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Chuck’s Place: Beyond Story

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“I remember the moment in my recapitulation when I realized that the story I’d always told myself about my life was utterly false. That’s the shattering moment of surrender to the truth.” Quote from Jan Ketchel during a recent morning discussion.

Beyond story, simply perceiving what is... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Beyond story, simply perceiving what is…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

We are a story loving species. Can’t get enough of a good story. Our days are spun into archetypal dramas that draw us like moths to a flame. And when we encounter the unknown in our daily lives, our thoughts rapidly fill in the blanks, hand us a plausible explanation, a reality to uphold, the fictional novel of our life and times.

In 1931, in one of his Vision Seminars, Jung described a patient’s vision: “I looked into his eyes and saw therein a great river full of writhing bodies. A few men stood upon the bank and called with a loud voice to the struggling masses in the rushing water. The water cast a few souls upon the bank. Then the men who stood there lifted them up and showed them a star and a sun. This I saw in the eyes of the old man. The old man said: “You have perceived” and he sank into the earth.”

This vision reveals the possibility of true perception, simply what is beyond the veils of our stories. Jung interpreted the river of writhing bodies as, “Like the wheel in Buddhistic philosophy, death and rebirth, the curse of that eternal illusory meaningless existence. In this vision we find the same principle as in Buddhism, the consciousness of what is happening as a redeeming principle.”

Jung goes on to say: “…that river only makes sense if a few escape and become conscious, that the purpose of existence is that one should become conscious. Consciousness redeems one from the curse of that eternal flowing on in the river of unconsciousness.”

Jan’s opening quote about her detachment from the novel of her life, as it devolved into the collapse of the world she had always known, landed her into the bowels of truth that ultimately released her from the current of unconsciousness, spitting her out upon the shore to become a riverwalker, one who walks along the river’s edge consciously grounded in the truth.

Consciousness is pure perception. Consciousness is life outside the story. Total acceptance of what is, of what was, is the bridge beyond the confines even of the story of time. Timelessness is infinity, and freedom from story releases us to perceive all that is beyond story time. In Buddhism this state is known as diamond mind, the true nature of mind.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico called this state inner silence, the springboard to infinity. For them the storyteller within is the incessant internal dialogue that interprets, that is, puts into story format all that we encounter. Freedom from the mesmerizing spells of the internal dialogue is both simple and the hardest thing to achieve.

Suspend judgment, the Shamans recommend. You don’t have to stop the story, but with consciousness you simply acknowledge what it is—a story—and cease to give it attention. You step outside the river, the current of thought, label it for what it is, and like Buddha, don’t attach. Simply perceive what is, beyond story.

Riverwalking,

Chuck