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, The Virginia Chronicles

A Day in a Life: A Clandestine Meeting

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“Is this a clandestine meeting?” my elderly aunt asked me when I arrived at her hospital bed yesterday morning.

“Yes, it is,” I said, and we laughed.

We had spoken the night before. She was ready to move on, done with this world, in her 93rd year eager and happy, contented and determined.

“Will you see me through?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll see you through.”

So began a process that we both knew had begun eons ago, lifetimes ago, not clandestine in the usual sense of the word, but more like a final meeting that we both knew was meant to be fulfilled. Not only had we conversed over the past few years and weeks about her death, but we both knew that we had been a part of each other’s lives many times before. There was no doubt that we had sat at each other’s deathbeds before, prepared to “see the other through.”

The woodpecker came to visit this morning, that most determined of birds who drums the heartbeat of life itself, including new life.

The day began with determination and focus. She was ready and the mission was begun. We went over everything together, making sure that she knew what to expect as we took her off the machines, and that all of her wishes were attended to. She thanked her body for being such a pleasant and steady vehicle her entire life, letting it know that it would be handled with respect when she left it behind. We talked about the dying process as like being born. In fact, this had been our conversation for many weeks. She had called me the night before.

“Why can’t I die?” she pleaded.

“Well, I’m going to be very straightforward with you. You are dying,” I said, reminding her of what we had spoken about. “You are in the process. You are going through the labor of dying just like you once went through the labor of being born. Your body remembers it even if you don’t. It will happen, you are already on your way. It takes patience and release.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

We talked about her diving in and swimming into the light and not looking back or getting distracted. She was thankful for an image that she could work with as she lay dying.

“I’m ready to swim into the light,” she said when our preparatory talk was done, and so began her final journey on this earth.

In a most profound experience we spent the next twelve hours together, both of us going in and out of worlds. She spoke a few last wishes and then relaxed into the process. A few relatives came and went, the priest came and gave her final rites. We prayed for her. The prayers of my Catholic childhood, not spoken in many years, came easily to my tongue, spoken for her, a devout Catholic. I prayed for her in my own way too throughout the day, the things we had already spoken of: that her journey be peaceful, joyous, and happy, that she leave this world and its worries behind and go freely now.

I had told her that I would see her as far as I could, but then she would have to take over.

She nodded, and then asked, “When?”

“You’ll know,” I said, “when you’re ready.”

“Okay,” she said, and that was all we needed to agree on; we would both know when the time was right. I bent down and whispered in her ear, giving her encouragement throughout the day, until I felt my job was done. Then I let go of her hand and sat back.

Chuck came and joined me in the evening. We sat beside her together as she breathed her last breath. We experienced her energy calmly leaving her body, not looking back, her spirit freed, swimming right into the light.

We all have a clandestine meeting with death. My aunt knew this. She was well prepared, unafraid, looking forward to the journey. Today I feel her having that experience, as profoundly and fully as we had our experience together yesterday.

I too will one day swim into the light, and I look forward to going as peacefully and with as much dignity as my aunt did yesterday. I thank her for allowing me to be part of her long journey in this life and I wish her Godspeed on her new journey in infinity.

Jan

See also Chuck’s blog: Here Comes The Judge, on the same subject.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Get What You Want

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Be careful what you wish for…you might just get it! This phrase has been going around in my thoughts for weeks now. It has been echoed by Mick Jagger’s voice, singing:

“No, you can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you just might find
You get what you need”

The other night, I dreamt of flying over the Valley of Death, a dark landscape of half-exposed corpses stuck in a black bog, thousands of them rotting away in the stagnant scene below me. From my perspective I did not perceive the rotting corpses as horrifying or nightmarish, but as a natural consequence of being human. At one time I might have startled awake, shaking in fright, but this time I calmly noted: “Yes, our bodies will become like that, corpses rotting in a bog when we no longer need them. They are carcasses that will one day reside in the black Valley of Death, but our spirits will live on.” Indeed, as I thought this my dreaming spirit heard a voice that said: “Go toward the light, turn always toward the light.”

I know that once the body’s work is done, we must leave it behind and, without attachment, go into new life.

One outlook

The Buddhists and the Shamans alike suggest that we create our own reality. If we focus only on negativity, in thought alone, we keep ourselves stuck in negativity. Negativity and negative entities will attach to us, as we become feeding grounds where they know they will find sustenance. We actually compound the situation, bringing more on ourselves, one bad event leading to another as we energetically attach to crisis upon crisis. If we constantly bemoan our state of affairs, crying that our lives are terrible, that nothing goes right for us, that only bad comes to us, then that is what we will get.

I have experienced this myself. In fact, I once believed that I had to accept everything that came to me. “I can handle anything, good or bad,” I said to the universe, feeling powerful, “bring it on!” But one day I got fed up. “I’m sick of bad,” I said, “I only want good now!” And with that simple though hard-earned declaration things began to change significantly for the better. My whole outlook on life began to change too as a result of a new, more positive attitude.

As good began to arrive in my life, the negative slunk away. I learned in the process how to accept goodness from the universe, from others, and, most significantly, from myself. I softened and began to learn how to love myself. I learned the lessons of the Buddhists and Shamans: that I am largely responsible for the world I live in, in fact, that I create it.

Another perspective

In asking for good, I also had to confront what that meant. I got what I needed to propel me forward as I reconnected with my spirit and listened to the truths it told me. I had to leave a lot of my old life behind, leave it to rot in the Valley of Death, without regret and resentment. Those were some very challenging times, but they were also the most transformative times of my life as well.

The biggest challenge of that transformative period, during which I did my recapitulation, was learning how to face myself and my life lived without fixating on having been bad. I learned what it meant to be without judgment. I learned that everything that had happened in my life was necessary. I had to get to the point where I could view everything from a different perspective, as I did in my dream the other night, and clearly see how everything fit together, how everything was meaningful and significant and absolutely necessary for me to get where I am now.

As I turned away from the Valley of Death in my dream and looked into the light all around me, I knew that our spirits always seek the light. They seek what lies beyond the negative, nightmarish outlook we tend to attach to with fear. In the light there is no fear.

If we shift our focus, as the Buddhists and Shamans suggest, to focus on the light, the darkness will shrink away from us. If we change our thoughts to thoughts of joy and peace, love and kindness, as we reject the entities that seek to siphon our energy, we will begin to understand the necessity of their presence in the first place. Shifting our perspective begins with closely and honestly looking at our fears. Rather than focus on them as frightening, and on the Valley of Death as a horrible outcome, we must question the meaning of such symbols in our lives. Where are they leading us? What are they showing us? What are they trying to tell us? Eventually, as we face the darkness within ourselves with curiosity rather than fear, the darkness without will sense our disinterest. It will loosen its hold on us, and our attachment to it will diminish as well.

A whole new viewpoint

We may not be able to control how our lives unfold, but we can certainly control how we react. We create our world with our thoughts and what we choose to attach to, but there will come a time when our spirit will ask us to shift our perspective and it will be up to us alone to accept responsibility for doing so.

Accepting responsibility for our lives is perhaps one of our biggest challenges. We may spend a lot of time blaming others, blaming our circumstances, the raw deal we got, the universe colluding against us from the moment of birth. But living life that way, steeped in victimhood, gets pretty stale after a while. Eventually, we learn that our life will not change if we do not make a move on our own behalf.

Today, I wish that joy and peace may be yours, that goodness may come your way, that your thoughts may turn positive, that you may turn toward the light, and that self-nurturing healing and transformation may always be yours,

Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Going Out Of My Mind & Loving It!

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Once, a long time ago, when I was explaining to Chuck how I had gone out of my body, frightened that I was losing my mind, he blurted out with a big laugh: “It’s good to go out of your mind!” Anyone who works with Chuck will hear him say this at some point.

Every time he said this, it shook me. Every time I had another out-of-body, out-of-mind experience, I’d hear his voice telling me that it was good, that I should just let it happen, as often as possible. I could hear him telling me to keep training myself, in a shamanic sense: to let go of the constructs of this world by releasing my mind from attaching to them.

Like the frozen pond through the woods, our spirit lies waiting...

I knew he was right, but it took me a long time to be comfortable with letting myself go out of my mind. Now I can’t wait. Each day, as I sit and meditate, I await the moment of release from the things my mind grasps at. Sometimes I’m able to easily free myself, at other times I must sit for a long time as I work through the cogitations of my mind.

So what does that really mean, to lose the mind? In a shamanic sense, it means letting go of our judgments, our critical voices that tell us we cannot possibly be having this experience. It means shutting down our attachments to the known world and allowing ourselves to experience something outside of our body and our brain, momentarily forgetting everything our scientists, our religions, our parents, our teachers have told us is possible. It means freeing ourselves, even momentarily, from all that we perceive as real, tangible, and solid, and just letting ourselves have the experience.

Losing the mind in this way is a very sought after shamanic move, as Chuck always taught me. When Chuck suggested that I lose my mind as often as possible, he was asking me to face the dissolution of this world, this reality, and everything that I had been attached to my whole life. This went far beyond thoughts and perceptions. In fact, it extended even to letting go of the experiences themselves as anything to attach to. It took me a long time to understand this as well. Why wouldn’t I want to attach to those most amazing and transformative experiences?

Where are we caught? What are we attached to? What is attached to us?

In fact, Chuck was suggesting that, rather than seek out the experiences themselves, what I wanted was the enhanced awareness they offered. When we allow ourselves to lose our minds, we offer ourselves glimpses into infinity, glimpses of greater awareness. As we allow ourselves to have experiences that are out of the ordinary, we allow ourselves freedom from the attachments that hold us back in our daily lives too.

I had always had magical experiences in my life, but they got dismissed because of course they could not be true. They just could not happen in the world I lived in. But once I learned of the mystical experiences of the saints of my Catholic school upbringing, I had an inkling that in certain circles such phenomena were totally acceptable. But how would I ever be in a position to discuss such things? Even the Catholic Church, though it reveres such experiences, does not do so easily. It was in talking to Chuck about the shamanic view of the world that I finally found such experiences valued. What he described offered explanations for everything I had experienced, allowing me to release my lifelong fears that I was just plain crazy.

Under Chuck’s tutelage, I learned to balance the mystical experiences of my spirit while living in a world of solid objects and solid declarations of reality. In my inner world, I knew that reality did not work the way I had been taught. My spirit had always sought a far greater worldview. It had already experienced a world without boundaries, without limitations, without judgments. However, greater acceptance that such a world was actually a viable reality and fully accessible was not a process that happened overnight. It took a lot of work and incremental acceptance of a new sense of reality, based on my personal experiences.

In learning shamanic concepts, my psychic experiences, my meditation experiences, my magical, out-of-body experiences found a home, in a place of deep resonance. And that is when I learned that the experiences alone are not meant to be attached to, as Chuck had once suggested. For a time they were deeply meaningful—present and necessary to aid in growing—though eventually they wore thin. And then, the only thing that mattered was what came next to challenge me. It was in this manner that I began to understand that it was not the experiences themselves that were important in the long run, but just how open I could be to keep going, to keep changing myself, and to keep breaking through my attachments to a known world.

Grasping self pecks away, challenging us to change, to keep going...

Every day I ask the universe to lead me, to teach me, to show me something important, to challenge me to let go of my mind, my self-importance, my grasping, needy, ignorant self. I ask that I learn from my experiences, and then I ask that I be freed from those experiences so that I can be open to another, and another, and another, with the intent that I never cease growing.

What am I to learn today? What am I to be shown; what gift of experience will I be offered? And can I accept it? Can I use it to go to a new level of my life on this earth, and enhance my spiritual awareness as well?

The world is now a far larger place, extending far beyond the mind and body, beyond what is real, as I have embraced a new idea of self as energy driven by a spirit that does not want to return to slumber. Real, to me, is no longer restricted to what others have taught me is real, but is open to interpretation. Real is what I experience. And that kind of real is enough for me.

To those who seek greater awareness, I humbly pass on what I have learned, as I ask myself to constantly face my ignorance and continue on this same path of enlightenment: Be open. Let your experiences come to you and, without judgment, release yourself from the cogitations of the mind. Come back to the world you live in more firmly grounded, more balanced in spirit and body, with a greater awareness of the possibilities that exist for you.

Your experiences will be uniquely yours, as mine are mine. But remember, the possibilities in this world are endless. Seek without grasping; experience will seek you.

Offered most humbly,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Facing the Inevitable

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The changing moon... early this morning

We make the decision to change and then we must face the challenges of having made that decision, each day, as the old world seeks us out and attempts to draw us back into our old comforts. With the advent of the year 2012 many people are suddenly aware of change. However, such change was intended long ago, set in motion and already in full swing before most of us were aware of it.

We too set our own intentions, activate change by our thoughts and desires, often unaware that we are doing so. Life itself has its own agenda, nature taking us all on a journey of change that we might only contemplate when we are older and ready to face the inevitable.

I believe that all of us who are alive now have been participating in a transformative energy our whole lives. Why are we suddenly so enamored, so struck, so frightened of this transformative energy?

I personally experience this energy as powerful yet also as subtle. This energy is confrontational though it also gently moves us along in the direction we need to go in. This energy asks us all to change and to face the fact that we are helpless in its wake.

Every day we are challenged to lose our self-importance, to embrace a larger world view with compassion and genuine love for all beings. At the same time we are asked, by the energy of now alone, to simplify our lives so that rather than contribute to a crumbling world we acquiesce to the truth of it. In a very grassroots way, we are asked to support a new world based on honesty, integrity, openness, compassion, and kindness across the board.

The Internet alone has expanded our views, introducing us to a far greater sense of the beauty and intelligence of ourselves as a species, as well as the ignorance and ugliness of our species as well. We are all part of this expanded view that the Internet affords us. We are all intelligent and ignorant, beautiful and ugly. We are all struggling to understand the meaning of our existence and the reason for our frailties. And we are all responsible for somehow finding a balance so that we, as human beings and the earth itself, may align in creating a far greater world. All struggles are valid, all actions necessary if change is to happen.

The energy of human progress constantly takes us outside of ourselves. As we face another day of challenge and conflict in the world around us, we must not forget that there is another world that constantly challenges and calls to us as well: the inner world.

On this day, as our Internet freedoms are challenged and their restrictions protested, as Wikipedia and many other sites go black, I will be in a most unique and humble position, attending a most natural part of our existence: death.

I will turn away from what is happening in the world to sit beside an elderly relative who is facing the end of her life. I will turn toward the timelessness of all life, the inevitability of nature to take us where we all must go. I will face the ultimate truth: We are all going to die. I am going to die. You are going to die.

I don’t mean to be morbid, but I also know I cannot stop what is natural. The intent that we must all change was set long ago; before we even existed we knew that one day we would die. There comes a point when we will all be challenged to face the inevitable. We must learn now, while we are alive and well, how to acquiesce and go with the flow, with awareness.

I see the little and big changes that we must face every day as no different from death. They are teaching us how to face death when it comes. Every day, as we are challenged to keep pushing ourselves to grow, to move into new lives as our circumstances change and our spirits push us, we are preparing ourselves to face our deaths.

If we see each moment of change as a little death we prepare ourselves for our final death. We learn what it means to be aware, what it means to acquiesce, what it means to go with the flow, and our fears of death diminish, for we have practiced for it our whole lives. When we are able to face death as just another moment of change into new life, when we accept the inevitability of both death and new life, we have indeed transformed. You see, important times of transformation don’t have to wait, we can experience them every day, as we challenge ourselves to constantly grow and change.

I am grateful for the position I find myself in today. And, as the shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s line say: I am a being who is going to die.

I keep this in mind every day.
Jan

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A Day in a Life: Inner Child Work

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I’ve been doing inner child work for years. I’ve learned so much from long encounters, from hours of what Jung termed active imagination, from weeks of inner focus, as I’ve attended to my spirit. I sometimes feel that it’s like driving a car; sometimes I’m aware that I’m doing it, alert and conscious of everything I pass along the way, at other times I arrive at my destination wondering just how I got there.

I do inner child work especially when confronted with a dilemma or when conflicts arise. I know that it’s imperative that I constantly check in with my inner child and see how she’s doing. Although my personal challenges are, for the most part, clearly defined now, I also know that sometimes they are not the issues that need attention but that something else is calling to me, some deeper more profound need is making itself known.

Self-reflection?

I have a dilemma. How do I solve it? I ask for guidance. I wait for an answer. Meanwhile I have my own agenda. For the time being my personal agenda rules. It takes over. It’s all I can think about: how to set it in motion, how to contrive to make it happen, how to make it meaningful. I can’t get away from it. As I allow it to assert itself, it begins to dominate not only my thinking but my actions as well. This feels like part of the process I must go through, but deep inside I feel restless. Something else is stirring in me, raising a protest, asking me if this is really what I intend to do. I push it away.

“No,” I say, “I want it to happen my way. I want to be in control. I want to set up my life in such a manner that I can determine not only the process but the outcome as well.”

“Sorry,” I hear. “You are not going to be granted that wish today. Today you are going to have to struggle and eventually you are going to have to let go.”

“No, I don’t want to. I want things to work out my way!”

As this tug-of-war goes on, I know, deep inside, that I must stop playing this game. From experience, I know that the sooner I acquiesce to a process that is already in progress, already laid out for me, the better things will unfold. This is how I resolve my dilemma: I acquiesce to the process, but it takes deep work to get to this place of acquiescence.

I know I must dissect my personal agenda and discover why I am so attached to it. I must face the fact that I may be trying to hold onto old ideas, old agendas, and old comforts that no longer serve me. I must face that even though I may want those things, they are not good for me; they no longer serve who I am becoming, who I have the potential to become, and whom I need to become to evolve.

Once I’ve studied my personal agenda, the next step is to turn inward. I must get quiet in order to do this. I must let myself have a few moments of meditation or simply sit quietly and comfortably. I must ask myself: What is really going on here? What am I missing? Am I just reluctant, avoidant, affronted? Am I being shown something I must embrace; or the opposite, that this is something I must refuse?

Sitting in calmness allows the voice of our inner child to be heard. If we listen carefully we will hear truths spoken that we may not have wanted to hear before, that we may not have been ready to hear until now. If we allow ourselves to become a frightened child again, knowing that we are facing changes that we don’t want to happen while we also remain our adult selves, we may reach a new level of understanding about how we tend to function on a normal basis.

We all have a needy, wounded child inside us. No matter how much inner work we do that child will always be present, suggesting deeper issues that need attention. Its needs are endless, ancient needs. Eventually we learn that they stretch far back, into eons, into past lives full of similar needs left unresolved.

Ready to get off the well worn path and enter the abyss?

As we do inner child work, our spirit will repeatedly guide us in how to sit alongside our child self, perhaps in discomfort at first, but later in full acceptance as we face the ancient knowing child self and ask it to tell us what comes next. What must I face this time? Where are you taking me?

We must be prepared to face our fears. We must accept that our inner child self of this lifetime is frightened of change. We must accept that our adult self of this lifetime is afraid of change too. Both parts of us must constantly face the truth that change is challenging us to face our fears and conquer them with awareness.

Whenever I sit in calmness with my adult self and my frightened child self, I know that there is something else beneath the fears that I must also face. I must go even deeper. I must reach down to that far more evolved ancient child self, the one who has already lived these life challenges before. This is the knowing self that constantly challenges me to go beyond my present self. This is the place where I will gain clarity on what to do to resolve my dilemma.

Clarity often comes in calmness, delivering a direct blow. Much like getting hit over the head, it strikes quickly and with utter clarity. When we are ready we are able to accept it and immediately act upon it. If we are not ready it will remain churning inside us until we are ready.

When our world is challenging us, even collapsing on us, our deepest dilemma is often in learning how to acquiesce, to let go, to not fight as we have been taught, but to let the process guide us. Often we may find the deeper meaning inside, rather than in constantly looking for reason and answer outside. Sometimes we just can’t have things our way.

There is so much more to doing inner child work. As we work with what our inner child presents, going deeper and deeper, we get to know just who that child is, and just who we are and why. Eventually, we all arrive at that place where the ancient child self speaks. Often the sound of that ancient child’s voice may be distant and difficult to decipher, but if we let our personal agenda go, for even a second, we may be able to accept the truth it brings us. Sometimes just a hint of something different, a deep inner knowing, may waft up and offer us just enough to help us along, to make a decision that will indeed set us on a new path.

What lies in the vastness of the inner world?

The inner world is vast, bigger than the outer world. Jung once noted that once we do inner work we will no longer be able to ready novels, because nothing can compare to what we have already encountered inside the vastness of the self. I have found this to be true. I personally can no longer read a novel. I am quickly bored, knowing that inside the self reside all the mysteries and horror stories that I once enjoyed reading, the adventures and relationships I loved to tap into, other people’s lives I’d turn to. All of those things, and more, reside inside us, in the vastness of our inner world, just waiting to be tapped into.

As we let ourselves be guided through the terrors inside us, we arrive at precipice after precipice. And each time we stand on the brink of change we know that we must take the leap into the abyss that yawns before us, if we are to keep evolving. That is where our riches lie, where our thrills await us, where our adversaries lurk, where our beauties hide, and where our spirits will greet us.

Going ever more deeply inward, we soon discover that our outer world is less threatening, less frightening, less terrifying, for we discover that it cannot present us with anything as frightening as we have already faced within. This is what Jung learned and this is what we also may learn as we continue our inner child work.

Thank you for reading, and may you all enjoy the adventure of a lifetime, inside the self.

Love,
Jan