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

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: It’s Time To Live!

October 10, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

I am with a person who is angry, her anger like a brittle encrusted shell. I note how grumpy she is, having overslept, and now she is angry at the world. Nothing is right. In everyone there is something to criticize. In every situation there is something to be angry about. In every idea there is something to condescend to. Every attempt to be positive is negatively dismissed.

During my time with her, I wonder if I should say something, as her anger becomes increasingly uncomfortable to those around her. The Buddhists say that one should not interfere with another’s process in life, that everything they encounter is necessary for them to encounter, even if one sees the foreshadowing of great difficulty or even death. It is not right to alter another’s path. I also know that we cannot tell another what is so clear to us, for they will not get it until they are ready and, as the Buddhists point out, this may take many lifetimes. I encountered my own states of anger, denial, and unawareness, during my recapitulation, as I wondered over and over again why I had never been able before to understand my own psyche and what it was trying to tell me. It was only then that I understood what it means to be ready to face ourselves and our deeper issues. And so I elect to study this angry woman instead of saying anything to her.

I see how she holds her anger back, keeps it under her hard shell, but there comes a point when she just can’t retain it any longer. Suddenly, she lets loose a barrage of angry words, stunningly harsh and mean, directed at a person whom has asked a simple caring question. Again, I want to point out to this angry woman that she is being inappropriate, that she is hurting the other person, yet I hold back, for I know that my pointing out her mood will have no effect, and may perhaps incite yet more anger. I also know that there is something to be learned in such a situation, for all involved.

As I observe this angry woman, it becomes very clear that her anger has nothing to do with the person she spews it at, but that it has only to do with what is brewing and stewing inside her. Projection is clearly illustrated here. This woman woke up angry. Perhaps she went to bed angry too. Perhaps she has always been angry. But what is so clear to me, as I observe her, is that she is blaming people and situations outside of her. They are making her angry! She even says this to me later: how angry such people make her, how angry such ideas make her, how angry certain platitudes make her.

Later, as I ponder my time with this woman, as I again feel her anger boiling inside her, I wonder how long she will allow herself to be controlled by this fire within. For I saw how it consumed her, as she was unable to enjoy a moment of reality. Encased in it, everything just made her angrier. She fed this fire within constantly, giving it enough fuel to last a long time, and yet she confessed to me how tired she was.

It was clear that she desperately needed something to shift her out of this fire zone that she had parked herself in, yet I knew I could offer nothing. I am sure she was receiving many signs that might help in that shift, yet so consumed by the flames was she that she could not see. She could not see offers of kindness, she could not hear words of concern, she could not accept gentleness. Nothing that was offered was going to change how she interpreted the world, or how she projected her inadequacies onto the world, and the people she encountered there. Until she was ready…

She has to be ready to withdraw her projections from the world and face the angry fires within, and find out why she is being consumed in this manner. She has to ask herself why she is so angry all the time, why so rude and condescending, why so unhappy. Just as we all must do, at some point in our earthly existence, she too has to ask herself when she is going to stop blaming everyone else for her misery and face the reasons for it within. When she is ready…

And so, I too, must ask myself to find that angry woman inside myself and find out what she has to tell me. I do a little inner work around this angry woman as I go about the rest of my day. I find that my angry inner woman is pretty well known at this point. I’ve dealt with her many times over the years, dismantled her bonfires over and over again, put out the flames, and taken her aside to have a chat. I could only do that when I was ready, when I no longer wanted to be ruled by her, when I no longer wanted the world to be a place of fear and misery. And when I was finally ready to take back my projections, the world did change.

And so yesterday, as I did my angry woman inner work, I discovered that she has softened to a mere inkling of her old self. She carries very little fuel these days, for she has learned over the years of deep inner work that anger is nothing, that it only exists when fueled. Instead, I have learned to face the fires of anger as they flare up and question them on a deeply personal level. Is this anger justified? Does it help me? Is it worthwhile, does it help my evolution as a spiritual being? Is anger ever appropriate?

In the past I have used anger, a good friend to me at one time. It often helped to shift out of a bad situation, as I would get angry at myself for staying stuck. And so I can truly say that anger can be useful, but only if utilized on the self in a positive fashion, not to remain stuck in blame, but to catapult to a new place along the path of life. If directed outwardly, in projection, as the angry woman in my encounter used it, it does nothing positive, for anger burns up good energy, keeps the focus on blaming others rather than asking the self to be a fully responsible evolutionary being.

What I finally found out about myself yesterday, as I faced that old angry woman inside me, now shrunk to the size of a teeny tiny specimen of her old self, was that she has very little to complain about these days. In fact, I turned to her and told her that I didn’t need her anymore at all, that I only want to live and embrace the life that she held me back from fully living and enjoying for so long.

As I took back my projections and used my energy to learn how to live the life I had decided could never happen—because I was too angry at the world to engage it—I changed, life changed, the world outside of me changed, inner and outer reality changed. Now my energy is my own, and freed of old issues, such as anger, that energy just wants to live! I am no longer willing to be held back. This is what I encourage my children and those closest to me: Don’t let your fears or your anger hold you back. You are alive now and there is so much to explore and experience. Find out who you are and don’t ever hold that true self back. Live!

I see anger rising across America, falsely taking its place in the minds of so many. As we go into the next month of preparation for big changes in our country, and the world, perhaps we should all look within and find out what makes us so angry without. In so using our anger and our energy differently, we may impact the results of the election.

As the Buddhists say, all energy is interconnected and every decision we make about how we use our energy affects everything and everyone else around us. If our energy is directed at changing ourselves, we change our reality—our personal present life and that of our world. I did it—in recapitulating my childhood—and it worked and continues to work for me.

Now I intend that my inner work energetically impact the world outside of me as well. I may not be able to directly influence every angry person I meet, but I sure as heck can rev up my energetic intent to do so!

I’ve set my intent to live totally unafraid, open to life in a different way, energetically connected.
Love,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Choice

October 3, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

The other day, as Chuck and I walked in the early morning, a strange sight greeted us. We had just arrived at a “T” intersection when to our left a commotion arose.

Out of the treetops a strange creature appeared. Squawking and flapping, it came towards us, a phoenix or some other mythical beast. On second glance it appeared to be some manmade object, whirring and clunking along in the sky, much like a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine. As it drew nearer it changed again, into a hawk with two small birds clutched in its claws, the birds flapping and shrieking wildly in an attempt to free themselves from the clutches of this, indeed, mythical beast.

As we watched, one of the birds did free itself. Somehow able to wriggle out of the grip of the sharp claws, it quickly flew off into the woods with nary a backward glance. The hawk flew over us, and though its tasty meal still struggled frantically, it seemed that its fate was sealed.

Much startled by this sight, we turned to the right and continued our walk, our thoughts and discussion turning too. We had been talking about our deepening practice as spiritual beings on a journey in this world, of constantly having to balance the magic of other worlds with the duties and needs of this world. And thus, we could not help but wonder what this sighting could possibly mean.

Our kind hearts immediately projected onto the poor little birds. And two of them! We thought in terms of loved ones. Who was at risk; who would be confronted with some terrible trauma today or in the near future? What did it signify for us, the first thing to catch our attention on this day, and so early in the morning? What did it portend in our own lives?

As we watched the hawk fly off down the road ahead of us, the siren cries of blue jays—the birds I interpret as the police force of the skies—alerted other creatures to be aware that a predator was in their midst. But there was really nothing to be concerned about, for the hawk had gotten what it wanted; its only intent now was to consume it.

My thoughts turned away from my projections and fears, for self and others, and instead began to look at the reality of what had occurred. The hawk began to lose its predatory role and take on the role of life itself, doing what it needed to survive in this world, much as we all do in our own lives, consuming and taking what we need. The two birds lost their roles as poor creatures of circumstance and instead became the choices we all make each day: the choice to live one way or another, the choice to do one thing or another, the choice to come into this world at all.

“You know,” I said to Chuck, “one bird is going to live and it looks like the other will die, but who’s to judge which one got the better deal. Do I feel sorry for the one that’s facing death? Perhaps it’s being given the opportunity to go deeper into its evolutionary experience? The very thing we seek all the time.”

As I pondered the significance of the event, I realized that we all get carried away by predators in our own lives, by our compulsions, addictions, attachments, our fears, our psychological makeup, by our very nature, and by the very energy of life that is as unstoppable as the predatory hawk simply searching for sustenance to survive. We are all both the hawk and the two birds. Often enough, we are caught unaware, taken from our perch and thrown into turmoil, forced to fight for our lives, to make a choice that will take us on a new journey. Even in the most mundane of circumstances our choices matter. As we plod along in our daily lives it becomes increasingly necessary to train our awareness to stay upon the path of growth, intent upon a life of meaning and evolution, no matter what our circumstances.

I could not judge the outcome of the event, for I saw the potential for growth in both life and death. I see the potential for growth, for going deeper into the life we are in, no matter where we end up. I cannot judge another for where they are in their life, just as I do not wish to be judged for the choices I’ve made in my own.

We all have the same choice to make: How are we going to deal with where we are now? Are we going to be the evolutionary beings we are meant to be, conserve our energy for our journey and go deeper into our experience, no matter what it is? Or are we going to succumb to the predator, our energy consumed by another, by everything from worry and fear to mental illness and disease?

As the shamans of Ancient Mexico point out, we are beings who are going to die. I see death as offering as much choice as life. As I saw what was happening to the two birds, I knew that one chose life and the other chose death, but also that both were worthy choices, both presenting evolutionary opportunities. The opportunity—and this is what we are training ourselves for as we recapitulate, and as we seek connection with our deeper spiritual selves—is to remain aware of our evolutionary potential at all times.

Recapitulation offers us the opportunity to practice the skills necessary to maintain our awareness. Each time we recapitulate we experience a little death, a loss of our perceived self, while we simultaneously regain a part of our lost energetic self. This involves remaining aware that we are in two worlds at once, both in the energy of the predator and simultaneously the victim of our circumstances, like the two birds in the claws of the hawk that flew over Chuck and I the other morning. Recapitulation is as much practice for how to live this life as it is practice for facing the moment of death from this life, two evolutionary paths of equal value and potential.

We all stand at a “T” intersection every day of our lives—we have choices to make, and those choices matter. No matter what our fate, whether we are the little bird that gets away or the little bird that goes to its death, we always have the opportunity to go deeper, or not.

Love,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Crossing The Bridge

September 26, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

Sleep is a time of rejuvenation, of quieting the mind, but also of spiritual exploration in dreaming. And so, for the past two nights I have set my intent according to the advice of the channeled message on Monday, which you can read here. I ask my body to acquiesce to sleep as a healthy and invigorating necessity, to accept the cyclical nature of it. I ask my mind to shut down but my awareness to keep tabs on the lessons of my dreams. And then I allow my spirit free reign to take me on journeys.

The first night I dreamed of being in old places, in the house I grew up in, but I was there with Chuck. Men were outside the door, telling us we had to leave for 24 hours while new gas lines were installed in the street and into the house. It was demanded that we leave immediately so they could get on with their assignment. There was an infant in the house with us. We were not allowed to take her with us, and so we prepared to leave her to her fate, to be euthanized by the gas that would surely leak into the house and kill her. It was simply taken for granted that we must do as told; without question we simply acquiesced. We did give the baby a sedative though, to soften the blow, and arranged for one of the men to give her another in a little while. As we prepared to leave the house, I saw the gas men standing outside in their white lab coats, with their clipboards and their hoses ready to hook up, and suddenly I knew we couldn’t leave.

“No, this is wrong,” I said. “We have to go back in, we can’t let this happen, it’s wrong. It’s also wrong to leave the baby to this fate.”

And so we turned back into the house, roused the baby, and sat down with her in our laps, both of us realizing that we had almost done the unthinkable; we had almost let our baby be killed because someone told us she could not live. Magically the gas men disappeared at this point, no more outside pressure was applied, no need for us to comply.

As I pondered the dream, I began to understand that everything in the dream was about changing from an old to a new way of listening, thinking, acting, and reacting, and for taking full responsibility for what we know is right. New methods of energy must be invested in if we are not to kill our spirits—individually and collectively—the spirit of our earth, as well as our inner spirits. I understood that what we do with our minds and our bodies, what we allow our governments to do, as well as what we are doing to our planet, is at a crucial point. If we are not alert, everything we care about will be destroyed. On many levels, my dream was telling me that we must think differently now; we must refuse the missives of the petty tyrants, and move forward in completely new directions. Nothing that is old is acceptable anymore. It just isn’t going to cut it.

I refused to be sabotaged by outside energy in this dream, and in refusing it so abruptly it turned away without further incident. We were no longer bothered; the petty tyrants of the world could not budge us. At the end of the dream, Chuck and I were left holding a happy baby, eyes bright and focused, letting us know we had made the right decision. All that matters now, in the dream and in reality, is that we continue to focus on our spiritual selves, making decisions that are right in advancing the vibrant life force in all of us, so full of real potential.

The next night, last night, I set the same intent, to let my body rest while my spirit took me dreaming. I dreamed all night long and when I sensed it was just about time to wake up I asked my awareness to tell me of my dreams, for even while still asleep I sensed no recall. Suddenly I found myself standing on a bridge, a small bridge that crossed a desolate gray landscape, murky and swampy. I knew that my dreams of the night were out there in the swampy landscape. I could see them, including some wooden wagon wheels, sticking up out of the mud. I knew that the details didn’t matter at this point, that everything I had dreamed, the messages of the night, were already inside me. I knew that the only thing that mattered was the bridge I was on.

“This is the only awareness you need,” I said to myself. “You’ve learned what you need to learn, it’s all inside you. It’s time to take it forward now, to cross the bridge, to leave everything else behind and make the crossing.”

I had no view of where the bridge was leading me, into darkness as far as I could see, but I had no doubt of the necessity of crossing the bridge. It’s time to cross the bridge. This was the imperative of my awareness, as it instructed me to leave the details behind and go forward.

As I took my first step across the bridge, the horizon lightened, and in the next step it lightened some more. By the time I woke up I had walked to the middle of the bridge and the sun was just beginning to rise. I could see that I was making the right choice. It is time to cross the bridge!

We’re all standing on the same bridge, it’s 2012 after all, and the energy of this time of change is undeniable. It’s our responsibility as beings of awareness, as seekers of what is right, to take what we’ve been learning, in waking and dreaming, and cross the bridge, knowing that everything we need is inside us. Our teachers have taught us well, our inner teachers and our outer teachers. Now they are asking us to become all that we have worked so hard to become, to become the teachers now too and lead the way to a new world. It’s time to stop listening to the gas men, to the pundits and the old guard knocking on the door, telling us that we must do as they say. We must listen instead to our hearts. We must refuse the old ways, the old thoughts, the old ideas that are no longer viable in today’s world, and turn to what is right for now. We must all accept responsibility for moving us forward.

We must accept that we are the student, the teacher, the infant, and the bridge too, but we must also acknowledge that we are the gas men and the old guard as well. But the energy that we channel and our dreams are telling us that we must live through our spirits now, accepting full responsibility for them, allowing them to grow in the real world by taking them out of our dreams and taking them across the bridge that now lies before us.

Crossing the bridge means living out that spirit to the fullest, telling it like it is, refusing the old, waking up—even at the last second, as we seem to be doing at this critical time in the evolution of our world—and accepting the grand opportunity that lies before us: to enact real change. One person at a time, by refusing to live our lives according to someone else’s plan, by taking a path of heart, we can change the world.

We do all stand on the same bridge now. It’s time to take all that we’ve learned is wrong and turn it right, not by looking back or going back, but by moving on to something new and totally different. With compassion for all living beings, we must do what’s right.

I take my dreams seriously, for I know they are my deeper self, my ancient self, speaking words of wisdom and truth. I have been trusting their guidance for a long time now and in my own life I can say that taking the bridge to change has indeed led me on amazing, transformative journeys. In fact, I am living in a totally different world now. By aligning with my spirit’s intent for life and taking the path that appeared before me, I changed my entire world. Now it’s time for all of us to take it to the next level, I see that in my dream.

I must personally take the next step, the same step that we must all take. I am not only me, an individual, but I am also you, and what I do impacts you. This is the lesson of the ancients, the lessons of my dreams, and the lessons I have learned as I have traveled the paths of a seeking life.

Cross the bridge now for self and others. Don’t stop. Each step lightens the way.

Crossing the bridge,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Where Do We Go From Here?

September 19, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place. So goes a Zen expression. If I think about that statement in relation to where we are now in our evolutionary process as human beings, as spiritual beings, as Americans, as Citizens of the World, I immediately go calm. As I ponder my own process of growth and those who are closest to me, I go calm as well. For I sense that we are all in perfect alignment for evolutionary advance, that we always are, and when we are ready we will know what to do, in calmness.

Evolution is defined in Webster’s Ninth as: a process of change in a certain direction: UNFOLDING; the action or an instance of forming and giving something off: EMISSION; a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state: GROWTH; a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social, political, and economic advance.

I define evolutionary advance in my personal life in the same manner: I must allow life to unfold, letting go and giving off that which is unhealthy or unproductive, and get myself into a better state where growth, gradual and peaceful, can take place.

Just as no snowflake ever falls in the wrong place, so are we constantly falling into the places we need to be. Life, the force of the universe inside all of us, by its very nature is in constant flux, and so are we. If we allow ourselves even a few minutes to sit quietly and meditate, we will find that life force calmly waiting inside us to take its next natural step on the journey that awaits us.

The other night I woke at 2 a.m., worry spinning through my head, and being that it was night the worry spun its crazy web, as worry does in the dead of night. It spun and spun until I found myself helplessly caught in its sticky web, thought and intrigue, and more thought and more intrigue tightening around me. Shifting away in disgust, I turned onto my back, opened my eyes, and stared into the darkness of the ceiling above me.

“Please help me stop this worry!” I called out to the universe. “I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to be free of it. Help me to be free!”

The next thing I know I’m dreaming. I wake up in the dream, fully alert, and clearly see that worry does not exist in my dreaming state. I see that worry is nothing more than thoughts conjured by the mind, but now the mind is asleep. I see that it does its thing because it’s programmed that way, but as I look at it from my dreaming state I see that it really has no power at all, it’s simply a machine. And I can turn it off as quickly as I can flip a light switch.

“No worry,” I say, “how nice,” and I fall right back into my dream.

In the morning, I wake up totally refreshed, the worry of the night totally shed, and again I see it for what it is, a spinning machine. But at the same time I accept it in my life, for I know its value in teaching me.

Worry is like the snowflake that never lands in the wrong place. A petty tyrant of the highest magnitude, it comes to teach us. If we attach to it, it will swoop us up like leaves on a brisk autumn day and take us traveling on many adventures. I find, however, that the biggest lesson worry teaches is how to let go, how to become calm and detached. Worry by its very nature asks to be switched off, just as life by its very nature asks to be lived. Worry teaches us how to get ourselves in alignment with where we have landed. By flipping its switch to the OFF position, we are free to sit in calmness, to find our bearings, and know what’s right for us to do next.

I know that switching off worry is not that easy to do, but trust me; it just takes a little practice. The first step is to see it for what it is, to redefine it as I did in my dream. If we can separate ourselves from the thoughts in our head and give them a name, such as spinning machine or petty tyrant, we begin a process of change and we learn the real lesson of worry: detachment. Redefining things in this way offers not only a fresh perspective, but empowers us to begin taking action on our own behalf.

Was my worry of the night justified? Would it solve any problems, for me or others? Would it help in any way? Absolutely not. It had no impact on anything in reality. The only impact it had was on my energy and my sleep. It was a machine that I decided I did not want in my life anymore, and so I found a way to turn it off, kick it out of my bed, and get some sleep and dream insights instead—much preferable to the sticky web of incessant worry!

In these times of political, social, and personal energetic turmoil, I find that this simple Zen quote—No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place—is as calmly shifting and direct as my shift away from worry and into dreaming. In repeating it to myself throughout the day, I find myself calmly accepting of where I am, of where the world is, of where those closest to me are.

I believe we are all exactly where we need to be at this moment in time, in our lives, and in the evolution of our world. If we can accept this, then we can begin making choices in alignment with growth. Perhaps we see that where we are is necessary, that our next move in life is evolutionary, that we are in fact being shown what it means to be in alignment with our spirit, that where we have landed is leading us toward a gradual, peaceful unfolding of a life truly worth living.

I have landed where I have landed. Each day I wake up and remind myself of this, that I am where I should be, where I need to be, learning what I need to learn for my personal evolution. And then I dare myself to calmly take the next step, in alignment with where my heart tells me to go. I let my worry about this or that go; I let my fears about this or that go too. And I remember my dreaming self clearly perceiving worry as outside of myself, not mine, but conjured by the energy outside of me seeking attachment, wanting to feed off my energy, like the good petty tyrant that it is.

I don’t want to feed the petty tyrants anymore.

Love,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Everything Is Meaningful

September 12, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

During my recapitulation I learned that everything in my life, waking and dreaming, was supporting my recapitulation journey. I also learned that everything in my life had always been supporting my journey, though it was not until this very intense time of inner work that I was granted this knowledge in a very keen and extremely significant way, on a daily basis.

As I began to piece together how everything not only supported the inner work I was doing, but how it all seamlessly wove together pictures of my past with current situations, I saw how all of it was mirrored and supported in my nightly dreams as well. In a shamanic sense, I was training my awareness, as I went through several years in a perpetual state of heightened awareness as everything, in every moment of my life, greeted me with messages, insights, puzzles to be solved, and issues to be resolved. Since the completion of that recapitulation, I have continued to be taught by life itself, by what appears in daytime and nighttime, in awake experiences and dreaming experiences, by what my own body presents me with on a daily basis.

I know now, without a doubt, that I am guided through this life, that I have always been and always will be, that we all are. Only through offering myself the gift of innocent vision during my recapitulation, constantly asking the busy rational mind to sit by the wayside, as I turned to allowing the creativity and imagination of my adult and child self in cohesion to guide me, was I able to shift how I perceived the world and achieve this understanding. It takes some amount of daring to reject everything we’ve learned and turn inward, to turn to our child self—the defended, rejected, abandoned, frightened child self in my case—and allow the evolving adult self to show the child that, although it is all those things, it is also much, much more.

Perhaps the idea of expending the rational, the voice of reason, the voice that upholds the known and proven world, keeping us safe and comfortable, and turning toward the totally irrational, and listening to a new voice, is a crazy notion, but once the process is begun there is no going back. Once the magic begins, there is no going back to an old way of thinking, perceiving, or living. At this point, life becomes a most fascinating journey, as we accept what comes to us as meaningful, as we accept that each day and each moment in each day holds important information for us.

Once we are in it, there is no going back to the boredom of waiting for life to change or something exciting to happen to us, because we are fully aware that excitement is inherent in each moment. We are living it, painful or otherwise, and at least we can say that we will never again complain about life being boring. We just have to keep remembering the magic, remain open to it, and learn to constantly reinterpret our life and our experiences from new perspectives.

I don’t take much for granted; there is always something else behind the screen of normalcy, of convention, of the usual spin, something that is different, even magical or enchanting, and ultimately the real truth. We just have to learn how to constantly shift our thoughts away from the conventional and into the world of possibility. I trust possibility more than I trust convention, so you won’t find me believing much of anything I hear or see. I prefer to find my own answers and truths. All of this is leading me to relate an experience I had the other night, one in which I allowed my dreaming self to show me something.

It was a cool night; the sliding door in our bedroom was wide open to the brisk night air when the loud shriek of an owl startled us awake.

“An owl!” I said. “It sounds close. It must be perched on the deck outside our door.” We could hear its claws scratching against wood. It shrieked again and again.

“Why is it doing that?” Chuck wondered. “It’s hunting, shouldn’t it be quiet?”

“I don’t know, perhaps it’s calling to others, a mate or young,” I whispered. We listened to it until it grew quiet. As I drifted off to sleep I wondered why it had come.

“What does it mean?” I asked my dreaming self. Sometime later, Chuck made a sound in his sleep, waking me. I didn’t want to wake up, I’d been dreaming and I wanted to finish my dream, but the truth was that I was awake. I wondered if I could go back into my dream anyway.

I kept my eyes closed and looked into the darkness behind my lids, into the amorphous, fluid and multicolored darkness. I noticed that my left eye shut down completely and only my right was seeing. Peering sharply into the darkness behind my lid, it honed right into my dream, parting the curtains that had descended when I was startled awake a moment before.

Like a microscope, my right eye honed in on where I had left off and magically finished the dream. Fully awake I dreamed to completion. Satisfied, I opened my eyes and told Chuck what had just happened. It was then that I remembered the owl in the night and I understood the message it was bringing. It was asking me to hone the skills that I work at every day, to use the special ability of the owl to hone in on its prey with microscopic vision, even in the dark, abilities I now know I have inside me, that we all have inside of us.

“Yes,” Chuck said, “the shamans say we all have everything we need inside the human body to do everything the shamans do.”

“It’s true,” I say. “You taught me that when I was recapitulating too, as a means of keeping me focused on the inner journey, offering me some badly needed self-confidence, but really allowing me to accept my experiences as important, to not dismiss anything, but to learn how to perceive everything as meaningful.”

And that’s what I still focus on, allowing everything to be important and meaningful. All experiences are magical if we allow ourselves to experience them that way, not with ego, not by trying to be shamans, but by awakening and utilizing everything that is present in our human state, inside our bodies. The rational mind might not take offense at being pushed aside while we take a ride through our dreams at night, but it sure puts up a struggle during the day. We just have to work at assuring it that it will be okay, that it will be safe, as we let something else guide us to see a new reality, a dream reality during the day too. Our nightly dream training is showing us what we are all really capable of all the time.

Healing ourselves through deep inner work is the first part of learning just what we are capable of doing and experiencing. As we recapitulate, we are asked again and again to suspend judgment and take a look at what really happened, to not blame or attach to anything, but to let ourselves re-experience everything from a new perspective and in so doing experience just what it means when the shamans say that everything we need is inside the human body. Trusting that is the first major obstacle to leaving the rational world and the first major leap into the magical as well. Try it, in waking and/or in dreaming today; see what comes to guide you, out of your own body self, showing you the magic in your own life. Believe me there’s plenty there!

It takes trusting our inner spirit, the innocence comprised of the purity of knowing and perceiving that is ready to embrace our experiences and help us advance in this lifetime. It’s not so hard to defy convention and look at life as magical; it’s quite inspiring, fascinating to imagine that every day we are indeed being guided to learn some of the magic that resides inside all of us. I also now know that the owl’s message is to use that ability to hone my sight during the daytime too, with my eyes open. If I can hone so microscopically with my eyes closed, I should be able to do it with them open as well. That’s my next challenge.

Thanking the owls that come in the night,
Jan

Riverwalker Press

Category Archives: Jan’s Blog

A Day in a Life: It’s Time To Live!

A Day in a Life: Choice

A Day in a Life: Crossing The Bridge

A Day in a Life: Where Do We Go From Here?

A Day in a Life: Everything Is Meaningful

Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR