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: 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

 

Chuck's Blog

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

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Being Somebody

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The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered that the real culprit undermining humankind’s survival is the unshakeable quest to be important. In modern terms, this manifests as how many friends we have, who likes our postings, our pictures, tracks our tweets, wants our attention at any moment, day or night.

While the lion’s share of our vital energy is trained to hear the crystal sounding ding on our cellphones, announcing that “I am wanted! I am important!” a predatory dark force rapes the earth of its vital energy and relegates its human inhabitants to being, as don Juan Matus called it, “chickens in a chicken coop.”

Nothing but a little island grounded in the vast everything... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Nothing but a little island grounded in the vast everything…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

For years, I strove to be somebody by cracking the nut of the truth of our existence and sharing it with other seekers. I discovered early on that this naive romance with stardom was barred to me. Advertising generated nothing. Mainstream book publishers had no interest. I had traveled so far from the mainstream that the mainstream had no interest in my “good news.” Perhaps what I was really being taught was the foolhardiness of my own self-importance.

Side by side with self-importance is yet another energetic path that has ruthlessly hemmed humankind in, the path of inaction. Carl Jung noted that the yin and yang of our world are expressed in two different energetic systems: animal and plant.

Animal energy is the energy of action, it is masculine energy. It derives its sustenance from outside of itself, in the world at large. This is extroverted energy. A dominance of animal energy in humankind has led to power, control, and dominance games—that which rules the world at present. This dominance of extroverted Western values has also infected the greatest spiritual strongholds of the East, India and China.

Self-importance, on a global scale, is typified in the likes of Donald Trump who unapologetically mirrors the flippant, egoistic male action reaching, in comic crescendo, for world dominance.

Contrasting animal action is the rooted plant. The plant world, the feminine yin of our planet, is self-contained, deriving its energy receptively from the rays of the sun. Like any pregnancy, it produces from within, needing not to travel about and dominate for its substances and metabolic processes but requiring only nurturing stillness.

In human terms, plant spirituality is the Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, Christ upon the wooden cross tree. Both exemplify rootedness, stillness, the patience of the immobilized tree. In this deep groundedness, in this stillness, comes detachment from the grasp of illusion, detachment from extroverted action, detachment from the actions of needing to be somebody.

By withdrawing energy from attachment to the action of self-importance—the energy of definition and meaning through hierarchy and dominance—we are freed to see beyond the veils of self-importance, retaining our energy to truly evolve, not as being somebody but simply being and becoming what we truly are.

The energetic antidote to the one-sided dominance of human animal energy is human plant energy, the energy of yin, now uprooted from Tibet and planted throughout the world, particularly in America. Even the most prized Western brain science now embraces the technology of mindfulness as the key to neuroplasticity—real change.

Ultimately, the Taoist rebalancing of yin and yang, plant and animal, action and inaction, will evolve us into a new chapter in this Earth dream that we are all sharing. But for now, we must burn through the deluge of self-importance that is exhausting us in our need to be somebody. The ground is prepared to receive our planted energy and the seeds of genuine, needed change.

Becoming nobody,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Fear & Play

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Bunny munching... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Bunny munching…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

This year, a bunny has set up refuge in our backyard sanctuary, affectionately called Camp Ketchel.

As we descend the hill and go into our screened abode Bunny sits totally still in the grass save for its mouth, which always seems to be munching, food or not. Bunny lets us pass within a couple of feet, clearly relaxed with our energy; we are not the danger.

The danger is all around, however, be it the fox family that lives very near, or an owl, or perhaps even the occasional eagle that makes its rounds. Death is but an instant away. This is nature. This is nature’s deepest truth: we are all stalked by the greatest predator of all: death. No one escapes.

In the meantime, Bunny eats, ears perked, always alert as it forages food for survival. Bunny has a friend, perhaps its mother who no longer accepts the role; all must take responsibility for their own lives.

Bunny engages friend in play. They pause in their eating and spring several feet into the air, jumping over one another in pure abandon, their customary alertness to danger momentarily relaxed. Play is part of nature, as important as eating and protecting. The bunny’s playful moment might indeed be the predator’s opportunity but that doesn’t matter, nature’s imperative to play must be enacted, regardless of cost.

Humans are animals as well. Though we hide behind a mote of reason and civilization, the truth is that the predator is always stalking. Despite all our medical genius no one and nothing can change our ultimate appointment with death.

At a primal level, the animal within us is well aware of this truth. On a primal level we are no different than the bunny, always watching, waiting, listening for the predator’s knock. Hence, anxiety is, at least on some level, a normal primal feeling in everyday human life. To think this shouldn’t be would be to deny our human animal reality. We may indeed be spirit beings who will live in infinity, but our animal selves will most assuredly die.

But let us learn from Bunny as well. As important as it is to be on our guard, it is equally important for us to completely release our guard and relax into pure play. Nature absolutely demands this of us. We must play with abandon to fulfill our animal nature.

We must allow ourselves to breathe deeply into the abdomen and break the constriction of rigid fear. We must completely relax our muscles, going deeper into calm and utter joy in our animal being. And when we are called back to alertness and fear, we must acquiesce and be present to it.

This opposition within our primal selves, of fear and play, can only be resolved by allowing ourselves to oscillate between each pole, flowing in accord with the true nature of each moment.

Playing,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Healing Ticket

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In the mystery play of our time, Donald Trump is emerging as Helios, the sun god, a golden redeemer. The stronghold of reason is crumbling and the hunger for divine renewal appears to be landing upon his golden locks.

A religious fervor is stirring in the masses, in all of us. The renewal we really crave is transcendent ecstatic experience. The problem with Donald’s solution is his complete identification with ego as divine Self. In other words, total exaltation of the ego with divine imperative. “Make America Great Again,” as catchy as it is, is complete ego coronation, as it solves the destruction of the world through a restoration of the myth that America is God’s chosen one whose grand imperative is purification and masculine power domination.

The mystery play denies the necessity to take the journey into the depths of the earth to face the truth of the destruction and neglect of the feminine, of its divinity and source of healing and renewal.

How high can we go before we suffer the fate of Icarus? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
How high can we go before we suffer the fate of Icarus?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Trump reflects the ego in all its might—Helios the sun god obliterating all the darkness in its one-sided enlightenment. This is a very personal story for all earth inhabitants. We all have ego selves, that which governs our decisions and actions in life. Ego of our time is dominated by reason. But reason, for all its order, is deplete of body experience. Reason is localized in the head; it is abstract, dissociated from our true animal aliveness.

Our modern religions are dominated by reason, they don’t link us to the living substance within ourself. This is why the modern world is addicted; addiction is our hidden pagan compensation to partake of the divine substance so critical to sustain life. Of course, addiction is equally as one-sided as reason—it knows no limits, like Icarus, who imagined himself as Helios and melted from getting too close to the heat of the sun, falling to his death upon the earth.

Trump is the ultimate symbol of the addict: we can have it all, he says, there are no limits! This is the collective masculine ego’s last stand and it is empowered by ego identification with divine energy, with God, but like Icarus it is really just ego unleashed and if I am reading it correctly, it can only go so high before it is doomed to go down.

This hunger for divine experience has been burgeoning beneath the rule of reason for too long, and the charismatic Trump advantage lies in its fervor. This truly is what happened in Nazi Germany. The irrational fervor latent in the German Volk was galvanized by a charismatic leader who extolled purification and masculine domination, overtaking their cultured humanity and sending them, and the rest of the world, into the darkest time in recent modern history.

To learn from history would be to not repeat it. Collective energy, including all that fervor, is made up of the energy of individuals. To separate the individual self from the collective is Step One, while at the same time accepting the truth that as individuals we are still a microcosm of the collective. The advantage of individuality, however, is one of manageability. For however vast the challenge, it is possible for the individual to take the plunge into the full truth of the many-sided self, where all the ancient mysteries and transformations are possible, without harm to the collective.

Individuals can assume responsibility for themselves, and must, as historical fact shows that collectives are largely impossible to control. Unfortunately, there is now a curious total absence of individual responsibility, in fact, things are devolving into something of a mass blood thirst. The time is ripe for the individual to take responsibility, one person at a time. Let’s hope we are not too late!

Squaring with the divine within the fires of the self... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Squaring with the divine within the fires of the self…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

To begin immediate and active participation in becoming responsible, each individual can square with the divine masculine and the divine feminine within the self, each finding their own unique and individual way to the Middle Way, the ultimate goal within and without. It is impossible to define that Middle Way on a collective level, for all must find legitimate balance and reconciliation within all that one is made up of, within the self.

If enough people can make the effort to find their way to this Tao within, the world will find its way to the healing ticket too!

Squaring with the divine,

Chuck