Category Archives: Jan’s Blog

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

A Day in a Life: Explorations In Channeling

Taking a break... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Taking a break…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Having taken a few months off from my book writing, I’ve had time to explore and try out some new channeling methods. I’d become very comfortable picking up my pen and notebook and writing whatever came through. I’d then type it up and pass it on to you, our readers. A few months ago, I decided I’d like to try speaking the channeled messages we post on Mondays. I found a nice little MP3 recording device and a new process was born. I didn’t hesitate but stepped up to the mic and gave it a whirl and I have enjoyed not only the challenge but the shorter amount of time I need to dedicate to getting that Monday message out!

We had done some experimentation with my speaking a few years ago, but I reverted back into my comfort zone and I have to say that I am still most comfortable writing, yet I have continued to challenge myself to let Jeanne’s thoughts, words, and messages of guidance come through my vocal chords. Over the past two weeks we’ve recorded a couple of conversations that we’ve been posting as Random Acts of Guidance, which you can find under the Categories listing on the lower left sidebar. I’ve noticed that my trance state deepens the longer we talk and that pretty soon I’m in the familiar deep trance that I normally achieve quite quickly when I write the channeled messages.

When writing there is rarely a pause. I write quickly in a large scrawl. I’m not aware of anything in this world, except maybe my pen writing, but sometimes not even that as I am more taken up with sorting through the pictures that appear. Out of those pictures I must grasp, as quickly as possible, the portion of the message that is coming through most strongly and get it down in words that make sense. I say “a portion” of the message because in the second that it takes me to view the picture I am given a multitude of messages, which I seem to be able to grasp on a deep intuitive level, on a knowing level. Somehow the perfect words always appear to describe the content of the picture/message.

As I write about in the introduction to my last book, Into The Vast Nothingness, I am a synesthete and seeing things in pictures is pretty normal for me. In fact, I see pictures all the time; it’s how I interpret, examine, and view the world. If I hear a word or if someone asks me a question a picture appears in my mind. Words and numbers are not abstract to me but visual. If I say the word “bed” to myself I immediately see the bed I had when I was a child, tucked into one corner of my tiny bedroom. I see it clearly. I see the dresser next to it and its twin on the other side of the dresser. The room was tiny and that was all that could fit into it. There was a closet behind the door and one window. Beneath the window there was a forced air heating vent through which I could hear my parents talking in their room which was right next to mine.

Filtering through to what is most important... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Filtering through to what is most important…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Basically everything filters through me in a similar manner. I usually see more than is needed and so I have had to learn how to hone in on what I’m looking for. For instance, if someone asks me a question and several visual options appear I have to pick out the option that best answers the question. It can sometimes be frustrating for the questioner when I don’t answer straightforwardly, but often I just don’t have a plain and simple answer. I am sent too much information!

I believe that this ability to sift through a visual bombardment has aided me in my channeling process. Often as I’m channeling, however, I feel that some of the messages that get pushed aside during this sifting process are important and that the rest of you will miss out, but Jeanne has always urged me not to worry, that they will come through again at another time.

When speaking during a channeling I have the sense of speaking quickly, but am astonished by how the words seem to come from such a long way away, as if I’m talking from the end of a long tunnel. I am always astonished, however, that full sentences that make perfect sense appear!

I’m working on finding a way to bring Jeanne’s voice closer, more into the room, getting my throat into an open and relaxed place, doing ujjayi breathing beforehand if it’s a planned session. But more often that not we just decide to do a channeling. Or Chuck will ask: How about doing a channeling? And then I gulp, a little frightened, and say “Okay.” The fear is a normal reaction to what I’m challenging myself to do. It’s not like I haven’t done it before, but I’m challenging myself to just open up and let the words flow.

All of this brings me now to the name thing. Is she Jeanne or is she Saleph? Well, she’s both and although she never said we should call her Saleph she did indicate that she would leave it up to Chuck to decide what name she should now be known by. When I channeled a recent message regarding her name, a great welling of emotion passed through me, as I sensed her love and appreciation for all Chuck does and continues to do in this triangular relationship that has totally changed our lives and how we live in the world. I knew she knew that she was challenging him to release her in a new way, on a deeper level, with no entitlement, no sense of ownership whatsoever really. She was challenging herself too and I sensed this as that wave of emotion went through me. It was love and sadness intertwined, not sadness of loss but recognition that there is always sadness in partings, even if the partings are the beginnings of phenomenal new life.

Chuck made the decision to call Jeanne “Saleph” now, and so we ask all of you to embrace this new name as we take this process forward into phenomenal new life too. I still think of her as Jeanne, but more often than not when we speak of her now we use her soul name, Saleph, the name that encompasses all of her many lifetimes, her previous lifetimes on earth and whatever she may be called as she ventures onward. We knew her as Jeanne, but I suspect she was known by other names even when we knew her as Jeanne. Ah, the mysteries of life!

Are we ready to contemplate who else we might be? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Are we ready to contemplate who else we might be?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The other day I caught a few minutes of an episode of Radiolab as I was driving, synchronistically aligned with my thoughts of Saleph’s statement about her all-encompassing name. In the episode, a woman who had a death experience returns to life to tell the story of how when she died she found herself not in heaven or having gone through a white light but as an old man, a vegetable farmer in Vietnam.

What other lives are we living now? I hope to ask Saleph some more questions regarding all of this, and more, as we continue our conversations.

I hope you’ll tune in!
Jan

Here is the Radiolab show: Who am I? The segment I am referring to starts 14:45 minutes into the broadcast—you can scroll ahead—and lasts until the 23 minute mark.

A Day in a Life: When Suffering Is Appropriate & Taking Back Our Energy

There is beauty in the darkness too... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
There is beauty in the darkness too…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

It can sometimes be difficult to know what to do when someone we care about deeply is suffering. We want to rush in to help, to fix or to alleviate the suffering in any way we can. We often have a clearer perspective, looking in from the outside, and so we might want to advise or prescribe what we think needs to happen. It’s hard not to judge, criticize, or blame others and think that only we are right. In some cases, however, it’s pretty obvious that help is needed, that immediate attention is called for, and it is appropriate then to give it, but more often than not our input rarely helps. This is a hard fact to accept.

How many times have we told so-and-so that if they don’t stop their destructive behavior they are sure to suffer irreparable damage, even death? Have they really listened, taken in our advice, and changed in any way?

How many times have we been confronted by the dear one who can only whine and blame others for their difficulties? Does it really help to point out to them their own part in creating their suffering situation?

How many times have we sent a needy individual money, only to be called upon again and again with increasingly unrealistic reasons for the monetary need? We have to wonder if we are only enabling them, keeping them in a state of infantile entitlement for our own purposes. We might find it hard to let them fail, but in so doing we are holding them back from creating their own fulfilling life, far beyond anything we could ever provide.

When we rush in to help we often alleviate only our own discomfort and in the process take away from the loved one the full responsibility for taking control of their own lives. We take away their joy in accomplishing what once seemed impossible, what they dream of. We take away their opportunity to encounter what lies deep inside them too, the issues that produce their difficulties and their suffering, what they must face to become mature beings in the world.

Doing the busy work of taking responsibility... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Doing the busy work of taking responsibility…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

If we attempt to solve or fix the lives of others without their full participation, we take away their own responsibility for creating their own lives and taking their own journeys. Often they will fail to fully launch into life. They will remain dependent and needy and thus in our rush to help we have in fact done them a disservice. We deny them the opportunity to experience and face their own troubles as we have had to experience and face ours, for these are the things that help us mature into responsible human beings.

In looking back over our own lives we can track where we too had moments of suffering or crisis and how in dealing with them maturely we have moved beyond them. We had to learn the hard way that if we face what comes to greet us each day, with maturity, sobriety, and pragmatism, we learn that we can handle anything. And that is empowering!

In reality, we are personally better off letting others sit and contemplate their own dilemmas until they get to the moment of decision and determine their own course of action. This can be a tense time, but pretty soon all of our patient waiting pays off.

We might notice how life itself tends to the issues at hand in a most natural way. This natural process may arrive as a perceived disaster, but as things unfold we see that what once was thought of as disastrous is actually the very thing that offers the biggest and most lasting change. How many times have we heard people say that their worst experiences have led them to their most amazing experiences: to the meeting of their true love, to the discovery of their true profession, their true talents? Often our most painful experiences are our most enlightening, leading us into previously unimaginable new life.

If we remain stuck in our role of enabler then our energy remains stuck too. In serving others to the extent that we become energetically depleted, we allow them to take priority over ourselves, and that is not good business nor a good position to be in. If we are drained we have little to keep us going and even less to give. Our spirits recede, our involvement in life decreases and our motivation dies. If we are to remain vital, active, and fully participatory in life, we must take care of how we use our energy.

Energetically freed to really bloom! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Energetically freed to really bloom!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

As we free our energy from perceived duties—duties that we have given ourselves for whatever reason—we are free to live our own lives. If we free our attachment to people, places and things that are no longer useful or important in the life we live now, our energy is returned to us in abundance.

In simplifying our lives by clearing ourselves of both inner and outer encumbrances, we also free others from having to be encumbered by us, by what we think they need or want. And then we are all freed to take our journeys to fulfillment!

There is always some energy-freeing to be done!
Jan

A Day in a Life: The Bardos & The Reality We Create

The consensus reality we all uphold... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
The consensus reality we all uphold…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

“The earth will never be destroyed,” said Chuck to me last night. “It’s a consensus reality.” What he meant was that there are millions of people upholding the idea of earth and everything in it as real. Each person now alive would have to drop their projections, lose their belief systems, free their minds, and release their attachments for the earth to suddenly fade from sight. It would be like taking a mass psychedelic trip or a giant thick fog rolling in, hiding from view all that we consider reality.

Does that idea send shockwaves of fear through you, the idea of having nothing to hold onto, nothing familiar in your life? Personally, I find the idea utterly freeing, the notion of all of this disappearing and there being nothing but the ethers: defined as a formless, infinitely elastic medium, also known as the space above the atmosphere of earth, the heavens composed of the moon, the stars and planets. Imagine the energy we’ve all projected into creating this reality, that we’ve spent our lives upholding, finally released, to be used for something far greater.

The bardos, negative emotional states, beliefs that we project within the consensus reality of this world, are always right next to us, ready to snag us and pull us back, away from such ideas as the one I postulate above. The bardos make up not only our consensus reality, the world we inhabit, but the world within as well, the world of thoughts and ideas that keep us caught in the repetition of our behaviors, habits, beliefs, stuck in the core issues that keep us from evolving, such as rejection, abandonment, entitlement, victimhood. The bardos are where worry, fear, indolence, strife, and negativity reside, popping up to defeat us in endless battles with the projections of this world. We turn to them more often than we turn to our spirits, which seek to be freed of all that is in this world so that we can enjoy “All That Is” in the ethers of infinity.

Our projections keep us bound to the bardos. I create my reality by that which I project. My needs, fears, and worries create my reality. If the consensus reality says that my symptoms indicate a certain condition, then I get sick. If I project my fears into the world, those fears come to haunt me. If I am certain that something bad will happen, then it will happen. In the bardos of my projections, in the thoughts I create, the ideas I uphold and the fears I hold onto, my world is created. If I am aware that I am doing this, however, I can change how I attach to the consensus reality. I can decide that no, I am not sick, I am not afraid, and only good things will happen to me. Suddenly, my reality shifts.

Detail of the Indolence card, the 8 of Cups from the Thoth Tarot Deck...
Detail of the Indolence card, the 8 of Cups from the Thoth Tarot Deck…

I also know that if I project my needs, fears and worries outwardly onto others then other people in my life will not advance either, even if I hold onto them with my deepest love. My sense of owning or entitlement to another human being only holds them back. We must let all beings go. Others will not move out of my sphere if I hold onto them with negative thinking either, with jealousies, hatred, or even with perceived brilliance, with adoration or worship. I must own and learn from all my projections if I am to free myself too to move on.

We have the power within us to change our reality, but do I really want to see the world obliterated? I don’t believe, as Chuck suggested last night, that it will ever happen at this worldly level, but it is what we are all charged with doing at an individual level. We must accept also that the world we have created is here for us to fully engage and learn from. We must fully live in this world—do our time so to speak—if we are to be at a point of detaching from it for the last time.

To fully live means that as we grow up and seek to make a mark in the world, we must encounter all that we project, all the challenges that belong to us in this lifetime. It’s so easy to fall back into the slumber of the bardos, but the true work of individuation is to journey through life becoming increasingly awake and aware of how things really work, and that takes work.

As we do our deep inner work, as we attempt to free ourselves of our personal projections and issues—in a process such as recapitulation, for example—we do free ourselves of this consensus reality in a step-by-step process of eliminating from our psyches all that once held us bound to the bardos. In the bardo states of this world we churn away overdoing, over indulging, over eating, over drinking, over stimulated to the point where our energy reserves are depleted and our spirits sunk to the depths, far from contact. In this depleted energy state we no longer contribute any energy either to the advancement of this world. As our own energy flags, we become nothing more than entities draining the energy that others contribute to a changing world.

Do I really want my world to disappear? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Do I really want my world to disappear?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

If we are to be part of a changing world we must constantly contribute new energy to that change by changing ourselves. It is not healthy to stay in the bardos, dulling our energy and the energy of the world. If we are challenged to do anything during our lives, it is to keep the flame of change burning by adding to its potential by challenging ourselves to constantly shift into states of higher awareness.

Just as the bardos are there always ready to grab us, to sabotage our progress, so too are our spirits right there too, ready to connect with us. Our true work of individuation is the work of gaining knowledge of our spirits, of learning to trust them as we allow ourselves to drop our projections and have experiences of the ethers, of our energetic selves, even while we are living in this consensus reality. It is the work of the human being who is aware of reincarnation to live up to the challenges of each lifetime and gain the momentum to move beyond continuous cycles of reincarnation.

In pulling our heads up out of the bardos long enough to grasp the possibility of the disappearance of this consensus reality as we know it, we offer ourselves new energy and new momentum. Without fear that we are missing out or losing something, as we grow into later adulthood we must learn how to let go of our attachments to all that is in this world, knowing full well that each of us, even those closest to us and whom we love the most, are on the same journey.

Each individual is challenged to move out of the bardos and advance to a higher level of consciousness. In so doing, at our death we do not leave this world a more depleted place but a brighter place, our evolving energy feeding the fires of change. I feel this kind of vibrant energy every time I communicate with Jeanne. Her evolving beyond this consensus reality has left a brightness in my own life, and I have learned more from my connection with her than had I not dared myself to trust her and take up the challenges she gave to me during my recapitulation.

We are all as separate and individual as each drop of rainwater on this leaf... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We are all as separate and individual as each drop of rainwater on this leaf…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

And I am aware now too that my true purpose extends far beyond this life and this reality. And so I am not afraid to imagine the world disappearing and all that is in this reality releasing—as it will upon my own dying—because I know that all of us are part of something greater, just as Jeanne and her soul group are.

Just trying to add to the energy flame of changing consciousness,
Jan

A Day in a Life: Everything Is The Journey—The Journey Is Everything

Reflections are found everywhere, like this tree of life in a leaf of Swiss chard... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Reflections are found everywhere, like this tree of life in a leaf of Swiss chard…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Our lives unfold a day at a time. A week goes by and then another. Months pass, years pass and suddenly we find that we have lived for decades. I remember being thrilled to say that I had lived for a decade when I was ten. How incredible that I could look back over a decade of my own life and see the journey I had taken! That wonder stayed with me as another decade passed and then as I reached 25, my first quarter century. I still look back in wonder, fascinated by where I have been, by everything I have experienced, all the people I have encountered, all the things I have been drawn to, all that has crossed my path, everything a part of my journey.

I have always considered life to be a solo journey, and I still believe that, that we must take our own journey through life and learn what we as individuals must learn. But I also know that we are never alone, that everything in life is accompanying us on our journey.

When I looked back at the age of ten I felt ancient, as if I had indeed come far, on a long journey that no one else had ever taken, and for the most part that was true, for all of our journeys are unique, as unique as we each are. At the same time, I could not imagine being alone in the world. I still needed my parents, my family and the social world I lived in to nurture me and prepare me for the rest of my life.

Even in less that ideal situations we receive something from our families of origin, whether it be determination or strength of character, tenacity to survive or the will to move on. Although I thought many times about running away as a child, and once did attempt it at fifteen, I realize now that in staying in place and bearing the tension of my life as it was I was preparing myself for something greater, a future I could not even imagine at the time.

In order to understand our journey we must first know who we are, what lies inside us, in our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual self. Only in traversing that journey, the inner journey into the vast unknown self, will we be ready to understand the deeper meaning of our lives. We can take this deeper journey guided by trained professionals, by spiritual and intuitive helpers, but the real work lies in going always deeper within, in facing what only we know lies in our depths. No one else can take our deeper journey for us, just as we cannot ride on the coattails of the journey of another. If we are to live fulfilling lives as both physical and spiritual beings, we must dare ourselves to take the solo journey, even as we let it take us.

As we look back over our lives, over the years and decades we have traveled thus far, it is important to note that everything was meaningful. Even a seemingly insignificant encounter holds some note of import. People journey with us, for instance, some encounters more fleeting than others, but all of them are significant. Perhaps the time comes for parting, the journey together done. Sometimes it is up to us to decide to move on, at other times others leave us.

Sometimes the mirror shatters... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Sometimes the mirror shatters…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Everyone who is, or has ever been, part of our journey has something to teach us. People mirror things to us; they point out our core issues, our fears, our vulnerabilities. They tell us the truth, though it is often hard to hear and even harder to accept. When we are finally ready, we somehow discover the truth on our own. What has been pointed out to us our entire lives—by others, by the choices we have made, by the things we have kept at bay—finally makes sense. All of this is part of the journey, the solo journey that we must all take through life.

The real truth is that whether we are consciously taking the solo journey or not, we are taking it anyway. If we are alive, we are on that journey. Over time, as our egos have nothing to gain and our spirits nothing to lose, we comfortably take off.

Taking the journey,
Jan

A Day in a Life: In Retreat

Dear Readers,

I am taking a week’s retreat from the usual blog writing schedule, enjoying the heat, the cooling waters, the air, the earth, the stars and moon. Back next week as usual. In the meantime enjoy our daily Soulbytes, posted early each morning on our Facebook page, a reading of the energy of each day as it comes to us.

Staying in the Tao. Hope you are too!
Jan