Welcome!
Archived here are the blogs I write about inner life and outer life, inner nature and outer nature. Perhaps my writings on life, as I see it and experience it, may offer you some small insight or different perspective as you take your own journey.
With gratitude for all that life teaches me, I share my experiences.
Jan Ketchel
Our Daily Soulbytes and weekly blogs are on pause while we pull inward after a year of beautiful interaction with the many people we are privileged to be in contact with and as we enter into a time of deep, soulful contemplation. If we are right within ourselves then our world also has the opportunity to get right as well.
First postings in the New Year begin on Monday January 8, 2024. We look forward to reconnecting then.
Peace on Earth and Good Will to All.
Love,
Jan & Chuck
What is the spiritual purpose of the coronavirus? We ask this question as a new variant, given the name of the Greek letter, Omicron, descends upon us.
Spirit is the purest, most rarified subtle energy intent behind physical reality. Spirit intent is encoded in DNA and in the subconscious programs that attract and solidify energy into the physical forms that we are and know ourselves to be.
Nothing exists that is not, at its most subtle core, spirit. Spirit is housed in the subtle body called the soul, just as the soul inhabits the physical body during its earthly sojourn. As one spiritually progresses, one’s consciousness lives in evermore subtle bodies of spirit.
Spiritual evolution is accomplished through the successful passing of tests at various soul body stages. While in human form the soul body is symbiotically attached to the physical body, thus much of the spiritual tests in human form occur in relation to the physical plane. Someone may have to deal with a debilitating illness; someone else may have to overcome extreme shyness; someone else may have to confront rejection, abandonment, or deep loss.
The greatest test in human form, however, is to bridge spirit truth with physical life. Spirit truth, first and foremost, knows that everything that exists is part of an indivisible whole. At a physical level, we appear as distinct separate objects; at a spiritual level we are all one.
The spiritual challenge of our time is to raise our consciousness to a higher level of truth and embrace actions that bring our interdependent physical whole into harmony and balance. To accomplish this we must overcome our separatist illusions that deny our deeper spiritual truth of oneness.
While in human form we are all holograms of Gaia, Mother Earth. Our separatist behaviors, which have thrown Gaia into disarray, have been our own process of coming to know ourselves, enacted through a system of differentiation from each other, a necessary developmental step.
However, differentiation is but the prelude to union. That which has been distinguished must find its way back to its wholeness, filled with new knowledge of self, gained through self-exploration. Greater consciousness is then rejoined with its greater wholeness.
The appearance of Omicron is rocking our very fragile sense of freedom and mobility. Something greater is being asked of us than simply a return to normalcy. Yes, we so want our freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but we must raise these values to physical expression according to higher spiritual truth.
The freedom to travel and interact with the entire physical world is being transmuted to the spiritual level of truly caring for and loving everyone, and everything, in this world. Accepting physical limitation elevates spiritual connectedness.
Our collective spirit has landed in this physical world to bring the Earth into greater spiritual harmony. Symbiotically, our individual spirits are themselves being raised to higher soul body states, as we pass the tests presented in this physical world.
Progression is the ultimate law of spirit. Astrologically, both Pisces and Aquarius have Omicron stars in their constellations. For Pisces, it’s a big yellow star, for Aquarius a blue one. We have moved now from 2100 years of Pisces domination into the Age of Aquarius.
Pisces represents the goddess and god of love, Aphrodite and Eros, bound together as two fish in the sea, hiding out from the destructive shadow of Typhon, the personification of violent volcanic forces. Love has been safely protected in the time of Pisces but now is being challenged to rise out of the protective sea into the air of greater spiritual realization, into the water jug of Aquarius, the water bearer.
With such exposure, love cannot help but encounter its shadow in Typhon, cruel and power hungry. This is the collective test of our time, to overcome and absorb Typhon through the purest of rarified love.
Fear not this time of testing. Take full advantage of opening to loving all that you hate. Join with the water bearer in raising the spiritual level of self and world. It’s not about seeking love but all about being love. That’s the transformation that our times call for.
When you open your heart to loving, you become a loving being. And when you are love, you become fully available to love as well.
Let there be love,
Chuck and Jan
This past week we withdrew from Facebook. We are no longer posting on it. We were always of two minds about using it. We didn’t use it in the way that most people use it, never having engaged in searching for old friends or using it to connect with people we knew.
We used it solely as a platform for our work, sort of as an extension of our website, but even so, we didn’t really like what was behind it. Last week’s testimony by whistleblower Frances Haugen clarified for us the deeper truth about it and underscored our persistent uneasiness.
We offer tools for healing from abuse and trauma. Our intent in sharing our work and our lessons in life has always been to offer what we’ve learned without strings attached, freely given. That is not, nor has it ever been, the intent of Facebook.
After listening to Haugen’s testimony, it became clear to us that the Facebook corporation has been complicit in systematically grooming young children, and even adults, to adopt addictive behaviors that lead to harmful and even damaging mental, physical and spiritual trauma. Though not necessarily malevolent in its intent, Facebook has nonetheless been neglectful in its effort to correct these commercially driven destructive practices.
How could we utilize Facebook and piggyback off it, when we are all about healing? How could we use a platform that has done harm to the innocent? How could we allow our healing work to sit on a platform that doesn’t care about people, only about making more and more money, no matter who falls by the wayside while they do it?
The time had finally come. What we had talked about for months, became the action of the day: remove our energy from Facebook and no longer use it to promote our healing work.
Although our pages, as previously published, still remain accessible, we do not look at them and, at some point, when we feel that everyone who has been used to reading us via Facebook has become familiarized with accessing us directly through our website, we will fully remove them.
Facebook has become the major social network to empower all citizens of the world to connect directly with each other. That in itself is not a bad thing. The byproduct of such access, however, has also entrapped much of the world’s energy in the insatiable need to be liked, what the shamans call the trap of self-importance. Self-importance and insatiable greed have undermined our moral compass.
Recent revelations have clearly exposed the preeminence of algorithms for profit over the common good, as the operating principle for the publicly traded Facebook corporation. From the economic perspective that values maximum profit as a most legitimate goal, Facebook is no different than most corporations. The old axiom, “the business of America is business”, has become anachronistic, driving us, in the extreme, to the brink of destruction.
Our planetary and species survival is contingent upon a way of life that accepts modesty, limitation and equanimity as its guiding principles. The quest for unlimited profit has compromised our moral underpinnings and the common good. We are evolving into a species that must operate from the place of truth and true need to insure our survival on our rapidly changing planet. This, as the new algorithm, places the true needs of the planet and its inhabitants above the profit motive.
What is the alternative? Specific to our decision to leave Facebook we call to the intent that those who would truly benefit from what we have to offer will find their way to our offerings. In fact, this has been the overarching intent that has always controlled the unfolding events of our lives.
The overarching intent of the individual spirits of all human beings is that we mature in this life. This spirit intent is materialized at the center of the subconscious mind, that which naturally attracts to it the physical circumstances necessary to advance its maturity.
The marketing psychologists of the early 20th century discovered and exploited this attractive function in the subconscious, which they infiltrated with advertising suggestions to make a profit. This drove a wedge in the human species, between listening to the guidance of the inner spirit vs the outer promptings of the marketplace, with all its hypnotic suggestions.
Spirit intent never abandoned human life, but the challenge for ego to trust its guidance has greatly compromised its ability to choose wisely and trust its own heart and mind. Outside approval and likes have become the measure of personal value and has commandeered the direction of intent.
Take back your intent. Refuse the ruse and dependence upon a way of life that places the influence of heartless marketing above the truth of the heart. Trust that placing your intent upon your heart’s truth is all that is necessary to attract to you exactly what you truly need to advance your spirit’s maturity in this life. Advancing in maturity is the real solution to this world’s survival.
May the business of America become the Spirit of Maturity,
Jan and Chuck
Several months ago, I found out that the man who had abused me during my childhood had died. A few weeks after his death he appeared in a dream.
Putting his arm over my shoulder, he hugged me gently and spoke some kind words. In the dream he was very loving, not at all how I knew him in real life. It was a little disconcerting to say the least. I was not sure what to make of it.
Then again, two months after that, he came in another dream. I am lucid, fully conscious of dreaming in this dream, fully aware of being with him. I have no reaction to being in his presence; I am as calm as calm can be.
We sit opposite each other, foreheads almost touching, looking directly into each other’s eyes. Once again he is kind, concerned, as he states: “SHE says I did this to you,” and he glances to the side, as if looking at someone standing offstage.
Then, he gestures with his hands and a scene from my childhood appears between us, suspended in midair. It’s like looking at an old movie; in the scene he is abusing me. I nod at him, and say, “Yes, it’s true, you did that to me.” I have no reaction; I am perfectly calm as I see the scene play out and as I tell him the truth, that it actually happened.
Again, he repeats, “SHE says I did this to you,” and once again he gestures with his hands, putting them together as if praying and then pulling them apart, and as he pulls them apart another scene of him abusing me materializes.
“Did I do this to you?” he asks, incredulous.
Again, I nod at him, and say, “Yes, it’s true, you did that to me.”
We sit like this, head to head, for a long time as he repeats, over and over again, “SHE said I did this to you,” glancing over his right shoulder toward the SHE whom I feel standing off to the side, observing, as he materializes yet another scene of him abusing me and which I acknowledge as truth. Again, I have no reaction to any of the traumatic scenes playing out between us. I do not wish to blame or shame him. I am perfectly calm and emotionally neutral.
As this plays out I realize that he has no memory of the life he has just lived, that he can’t remember anything that he had done. It appears that he’s going through a life review with SHE as his guide. He has total amnesia and appears flabbergasted every time I tell him that he did all those things to me. It’s as if he’s hearing about it for the first time.
We look squarely into each other’s eyes and I can see that he’s being honest, he simply does not remember; he’s a clean slate, with no memory whatsoever.
At first, I think I’m being challenged to recant my own life story, but then I see that this is not the case, that SHE is his teacher, helping him to recapitulate the life just lived. SHE appears to know everything about him. I sense that SHE brought us together, to help him remember.
I intuit that everyone must recapitulate at death, that all memory of the life just lived is lost and must be brought back into consciousness so that all can be reviewed and reconciled with in order to move on into a higher plane of existence.
The setting of the dream is desert-like, empty except for some low adobe buildings in the distance, which I intuit are spartan living quarters. Low dry brush, desert grasses and sand stretch in every direction as far as the eye can see. There’s a kind of dull light, not dark, not light, just kind of overcast, the temperature neither hot nor cold but comfortable.
After going through countless scenarios of the abuse he inflicted on me, we get up and he takes me over to a pile of long scrolls of tapestry lying on the ground, the frameworks upon which he must weave his just-lived life as he recapitulates, creating a large tapestry to study, learn from and evolve from.
“SHE tells me that everyone does it when they come over,” he says, and he suggests that I pick one up and create a tapestry too, but I tell him that I don’t need to do that, that I’ve already done it.
“I already did a recapitulation,” I say, “my books, you know.”
He nods, but I sense that he still doesn’t understand that he did all the things he’s been told he did. He’s an empty vessel, unable to grasp, totally clueless, but he understands from SHE that it’s his job now to remember and to weave the tapestry. It will take him a long time, he says, because he can’t remember a darned thing. He shakes his head in disbelief.
I sense how low his energy is, as if he’s depressed, stunned or traumatized by what he’s learning about himself. It feels as if he’s being slowly eased into knowing a little at a time about who he had been, not the kindly man I met in the first dream, nor who he appears to be now but a cold-hearted pedophile.
How interesting, I think, that his overall personality is gentle and kindly, that though he was a pedophile in his last life that may not be who he actually is in his spirit body, but that it was a persona he wore in order to learn something or challenge himself with.
Later, I tell him that I love him because I know that he is genuinely trying to fathom what he had done, and I sense that the work he has to do on himself is being attended to with diligence and honesty, that he really wants to get to the truth. And I can love him for that.
Recapitulation, I tell him, is the key to advancement. He nods when I say this, still muttering that he just can’t believe what he’s been told he did.
As I leave, I see him hanging up the framework, preparing to begin the job of building the tapestry with the truth. I am happy to have helped him verify that truth.
As I walk away, I am perfectly calm and at peace, knowing that indeed my own recapitulation of my abusive childhood is done. There will still be other things to recapitulate I’m sure, but that at least is fully done.
Sending love,
Jan
J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries and All The Gifts You Are Given
Dear Reader,
At some point in life, I decided I was not going to be a victim of my circumstances, but I had to question, what could I do to understand the circumstances that life had led me into? That was the beginning of my shamanic journey of recapitulation. The Recapitulation Diaries tell the story of that journey of change.
A new book, All The Gifts You Are Given: Re-imagining the life you are in, from a higher spiritual plane, gives further insight into how to question and evolve in the life circumstances we find ourselves in. This is not based on my own life but comes from a higher plane of knowledge, which we all have access to.
This new book could not have been written had I not taken the arduous journey of recapitulation, a journey to retrieval of my own soul and the journey it had thus far taken, understanding it all from a new and deeply satisfying perspective. Horrible and beautiful in its unfolding, that journey nonetheless brought me back to my true self and connection to the knowledge of the greater Universe of which we are all a part, that which we all sense and so long for.
This knowledge of and connection to the true spirit within all of us are what Chuck and I write and speak about, and with which we seek only to inspire others.
One of the biggest lessons I have learned from spirit is to have patience.
“Don’t push,” Spirit says, “if you wait, what you need will come to you in the right way.”
Sending you love,
Jan