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: What’s New is Old & What’s Old is New—Making it Relevant

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When I first began channeling I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around the term. I just could not accept that channeling was what I was doing. It felt almost hokey, much too new agey for practical me. Instead, I preferred to say that I was connecting. Connecting became the term I used.

“I’m connecting with Jeanne,” I’d say. After a while I did accept the term channeling, since it seemed to explain to so many others just what it was that I was doing when I went into a deep meditative state and saw visions that somehow tumbled down on the page in front of me into words that made sense. I couldn’t really explain how that process happened, but as I went deeper into my personal history, recapitulating my past, I found that what I was doing was not all that unique. I learned that I was nothing special.

Now, as I face new steps in my personal story, I must also face what it is that I am supposed to do next with this most unspecial self.

Fearful, in the beginning, of attaching to the new age world, I have since understood its significance in our lifetime, but only as I have also understood the intent of the ancients, intentions set a long time ago. Once I understood that all knowledge is available to all of us, I was able to embrace the new age idea of channeling, finding it rooted deep within the shaman’s world.

As I did my recapitulation I found the answers to the questions I was asking about myself, seeking to know myself on the deepest levels. I wanted to find out as much about myself as I could, the answers to why I had the life I had, why I lived in the world I did, both my past and the world I live in every day. In the terminology and perspectives of the shaman’s world, and in the descriptions of experiences that mirrored my own to a tee, I found resonance. I also discovered that the shamans of ancient Mexico have a term for that new age phenomenon that we call channeling, that I had such a hard time embracing. They call it: reading infinity.

The practical me finds grounding in the shaman’s world, because I have learned that the shaman’s world is none other than this one. I don’t have to go anywhere else to have experiences that are meaningful. Everything I need is here. If I truly want to have shamanic journeys all I have to do is stay present in this life. There are plenty of experiences just waiting to take me journeying.

The so called new age phenomenon that has swept us off our feet for the past forty or so years is in fact also based in the world the shamans describe. New terms may have been applied, now commonly used, but in reality they are ancient practices that our modern world has eschewed in favor of modern science. The chemistry lab has replaced reality. Real experiences of body, mind, and spirit have been pushed aside; the ancient holistic approach to the human experience relegated to a few new agers. In fact, the intent of the ancients courses through all of us. We are all ancients and we are all new agers, we are all holistic phenomena just bursting to live in this world, in our own times.

In a pamphlet that he distributed to the participants of the Westwood Tensegrity workshop in 1996, Carlos Castaneda wrote the following:

“Silent Knowledge was an entire facet of the lives and activities of the shamans or sorcerers who lived in Mexico in ancient times. According to don Juan Matus, the sorcerer-teacher who introduced me to the cognitive world of those sorcerers, silent knowledge was the most coveted end result they sought through every one of their actions and thoughts.”

“Don Juan defined silent knowledge as a state of human awareness in which everything pertinent to man is instantly revealed, not to the mind or the intellect, but to the entire being. He explained that there was a band of energy in the universe which sorcerers call the band of man, and that such a band was present in man. …Silent knowledge, don Juan explained, is the interplay of energy within that band, an interplay which is instantly revealed to the shaman who has attained inner silence. Don Juan said that the average man has inklings of this energetic play. Man intuits it, and gets busy deducing its workings, figuring out its permutations. A sorcerer, on the other hand, gets a blast of the totality of this interplay at any time that the rendition of this interplay is solicited.”

“…In his effort to clarify his point further, don Juan gave me a series of concrete examples of silent knowledge. The one I have liked the most, because of its scope and applicability, is something that he called readers of infinity.”

Carlos goes on to describe how the readers of infinity viewed energy, as if they were watching a movie. This ability to shift into viewing energy as it flowed in the universe, without attaching to the permutations of the mind, allowed them to access a far greater intent: all knowledge, just waiting for all of us to leave the busy workings of our minds so we too can access it. Here is how Carlos described this ability to read energy:

“Don Juan made it very clear to me that to be a reader of infinity doesn’t mean that one reads energy as if one were reading a newspaper, but that words become clearly formulated as one reads them, as if one word leads into another, forming whole concepts that are revealed and then vanish. The art of sorcerers is to have the prowess to gather and preserve them before they enter into oblivion by being replaced with the new words, the new concepts of a never-ending stream of graphic consciousness.”

“Don Juan further explained that the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times, and who established his lineage, were capable of reaching silent knowledge after entering its matrix: inner silence. He said that inner silence was an accomplishment of such tremendous importance for them that they set it up as the essential condition of shamanism.”

Honing intent... grounded in this world

Personally, I find these descriptions fascinating. Channeling is indeed reading infinity as described by don Juan. The words appear and if one does not capture them in some way they are gone, the next ones taking their place. Access to inner silence, I can attest, is achievable through our life experiences, through blunt trauma, as well as in the inklings of reading energy that we all experience at various times throughout life. The challenge is to allow ourselves to go without fear and without judgment, by simply taking the journey as it is presented to us.

Can we hone our sorcery skills in order to be able to reach inner silence? Yes, we all can, as I did during my recapitulation. But the real challenge is, can we achieve these abilities while remaining firmly grounded in this world, staying in our everyday reality? Yes, that too is not only possible but essential.

We live in this world and we must stay in this world, have our experiences and make them relevant in our personal lives and for our times. We must not only learn to read infinity, but we must root our learning in our world so that a better balance of old age and new age may be achieved. We must help our world evolve into a holistic world once again, where the old-new phenomena are not only accessible but made meaningful and important to our times and our evolution. We must not dismiss what we don’t understand as hokey, as I once dismissed channeling, too afraid to face what it might mean about me personally.

It’s through deep inner work that we learn how to access infinity volitionally. But it’s also through deep inner work that we may lose our fears and attachments to the personal, to our self-importance, and learn that we are nothing special. Discovering that is discovering the root of the ancient sorcerer’s intent. When we get to that place, we can then turn our attentions to working on our greater personal intent for this lifetime, whatever that may be.

I am nothing special.
Jan

Jan's Blog, Recapitulation

A Day in a Life: The Recapitulation Sweeping Breath

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In my upcoming book, The Recapitulation Diaries, Year One: The Man in the Woods, I describe learning the sweeping recapitulation breath, a Magical Pass. As frightening memories began making themselves known I used it often to clarify those memories as they emerged from the foggy past, as well as to calm the central nervous system. In both instances it was very effective.

In her book The Sorcerers’ Crossing Taisha Abelar writes about learning this recapitulation magical pass as well, first from her mentor Clara and then later from a man she immediately recognized as the master sorcerer. This master sorcerer gave her some valuable advice. When he found her talking to herself while doing the breathing pass, he suggested that she wasn’t breathing properly. She describes this meeting and the suggestion that she breathe like this:

Set an intent and breathe in the morning light

“He inhaled deeply as he gently turned his head to the left. Then he exhaled thoroughly as he smoothly turned his head to the right. Finally, he moved his head from his right shoulder to the left and back to the right again without breathing, then back to the center.”

The master sorcerer also told Taisha: “When exhaling, throw out all the thoughts and feelings you are reviewing. And don’t just turn your head with your neck muscles. Guide it with the invisible energy lines from your midsection. Enticing those lines to come out is one of the accomplishments of recapitulation.”

He went on to explain that “… just below the navel was a key center of power, and that all body movements, including one’s breathing, had to engage this point of energy. He suggested I synchronize the rhythm of my breathing with the turning of my head, so that together they would entice the invisible energy lines from my abdomen to extend outward into infinity.”

Find the key of power

Doing the sweeping recapitulation breath is not all that difficult. In every instance of reading about it I found variations, so it was often confusing, but I stuck with what Chuck had originally taught me, taking the liberty to change the way I did it to suit the intent I set with each sitting. Often I sat for only a few minutes, but I was just as likely to sit and do the sweeping breath for as long as an hour or more at a time.

Once one gets the hang of it and lets the thinking mind go, without getting caught in wondering if one is doing it right, it automatically begins doing its magic. Chuck always told me I couldn’t do it wrong, and indeed in reading and hearing all the many ways in which it was and is taught, it seems to me that just setting the intent and actually doing it is enough. As Chuck says, it’s the intent that matters.

Breathe out the past

So today I leave you with this sweeping breath. Set an intent. Find that key center of power and begin breathing from there. And then see what happens. I found it to be a most magical practice indeed!

Setting intent, finding breath, and sweeping away, I offer you all love and good wishes on your journeys, as I return to the last few days of editing my book.
—Jan

Excerpts used in this blog are found on page 132 of The Sorcerers’ Crossing.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: A Little Bit of Magic

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Spirit knocks at the door. What do we do? Answer it! Where will it take us this time? Who knows, but can we allow ourselves to go? Can we hold onto our awareness and go, with fluidity? Can we accept that we really have no choice in the matter and find the beauty and the magic in every journey our spirit invites us to take? These are the questions that come up often in life. If we are aware of spirit and ready to take a different kind of journey, ready to accept a different viewpoint, we may just find that the door we open is indeed a magical door.

Facing the darkness

During my recapitulation I was constantly confronted with knocks from my spirit inviting me into the depths of my own soul. Did I really want to face what loomed up out of the darkness every time I heard those knocks? For a long time I didn’t. I ran away as fast as I could, the darkness and the shadowy scenes that popped up too frightening to contemplate. Eventually my spirit told me, in more ways than one, that it was dying, that it just didn’t want to do life the way I’d been doing it for almost fifty years. That was when I knew it was time to face the darkness.

As I tentatively took my first peek through that door into the depths of my soul, my first discovery was that the darkness, and everything else that had bothered me throughout my life, was actually inside me. I understood that, until I faced it, I would continue to bear the burden of it and all the stuff that was naturally piling on top of it. I saw that I was carrying a tremendous, depressingly heavy load. So, when the darkness called again, I didn’t run. This time I knew that if I didn’t face it I would die under the weight of it, and I wasn’t really ready to call it quits. I knew, as I’d always known, from the time I was a young girl, that I had to do something important with my life. I just could never get a handle on what that was.

I made the decision to face the darkness, circumstances leading me to the inevitable necessity of finding out what was wrong with me and what was wrong with my spirit. Once I set that intent, the universe took up my cause and one day I found myself sitting across from Chuck Ketchel. And that was the beginning of taking the next step into the darkness. He taught me how to face the darkness. He introduced me to the shaman’s world. He taught me magical passes, and a new perspective from which to view my life and all life, from a magical perspective.

The first little bit of magic that Chuck handed me was very simple. He said: “You’re on a spiritual journey.”

At first I wanted to spit it right back at him: “Yeah, I’m on a hell of a journey!” But something made me pause and in that pause I dropped into the depths of my soul and I knew he was right. That was enough to keep me on the path that I knew lay ahead of me, dark as it was and impossible to see.

Next he said: “You’re going back to find out what you missed the first time around. What are you supposed to find out about your child self?“

In constantly revisiting my child self I learned how fierce she was, a warrior without even being aware of it. She not only survived years of sexual abuse, but she transcended it again and again. As I recapitulated, I was constantly reminded that I had once been a magical being. The challenge then became to find the means to accept this fact, for my adult self, but mostly for my child self, to allow her full integration into my life, magic in its rightful place, inside me; now replacing the darkness that had once loomed so frighteningly.

We are all magical beings!

With this shamanic, magical perspective as my anchor, I traveled back in time and met my child self and relived her journey over and over again, in great detail. As I took that journey I gained knowledge of the shamans world, of reality as illusion, of everything as meaningful, of everything as leading to awareness. A little bit of magic in the beginning was enough to cut through the darkness and give a little bit of light and hope, enough to traverse the darkness in its entirety. Eventually, I learned that I was nothing special, that everyone is equally magical. And that too was a magical lesson.

It was hard work. Facing the darkness inside the self is perhaps the most challenging and frightening encounter we can undertake. But, in truth, it is where the outer world and the people we encounter, where our relationships and everything else is reflected. It’s where all our challenges really lie.

The inner world may appear as darkness to the uninitiated, but I found out that every time I poked my head up out of the darkness I was totally amazed at where I had been and what I had experienced. I knew then that I had to keep diving into the deepest, darkest self in order to evolve, to change myself and the direction of my life. My spirit showed me exactly where to begin.

We are all magical beings. Sometimes our journeys present us with our magic early in life, and then we must go and retrieve it from the past. Reuniting with the lost self is a magical journey. As tough as it is, it leads only to more moments of magic, if we let ourselves open up to the possibility that magic is indeed meant to be part of life. And yes, I still have my inner darkness—that never goes away—but now, with a little bit of magic in hand, I’m not afraid to venture there. I continue to challenge myself to dive in there and face what my spirit shows me I must still face. I find the inner process to be the most important, fascinating, and magical part of life.

I wish that all might find the magic within. It’s just waiting, the golden nugget inside that darkest hunk of coal. The next time spirit knocks, answer the door. Look into the darkness and contemplate it with the magical self. That too is there waiting within.

Sending a little bit of magic and love,
Jan

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A Day in a Life: Who Are You?

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When my children were first born I stared at them intently as they lay in my arms, wondering who they would become.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Where have you come from? Why are you here? Why did I get you? Where are you going? Who are you going to be?”

I was fascinated by those tiny, helpless creatures who seemed to know everything, yet who could do nothing for themselves. I sensed they held all the mysteries of life, yet it was my responsibility to teach them about life. How could I teach those complete little beings anything! I could only offer them utter respect and love, knowing they held memories of things I had long ago lost touch with. New to the world, I saw them as fully in touch with all knowledge, so recently coming from the wellspring of all life.

Who are you?

From the moment of birth, I saw them as miniature adults, intelligent, intuitive, beautiful beings that I was charged with launching into life. While preparing them for whatever life held in store for them, I rarely stopped to think about the daunting task that it really was. With my intent already set, I plowed ahead, carrying them forward, aware most of the time that I was challenging them; that I was doing what they needed me to do. Now they’re both freshly graduated from college, looking for jobs, and they are indeed those intelligent, intuitive, beautiful beings I always saw them as. And yet, I still look at them with awe and wonder who they will become in the future.

Why did I get them? Why does anyone get the children they get? I no longer wonder why.

I believe our children are our opportunities to transform. We are constantly asked by them to face our fears while at the same time we are challenged to free them of us. We are challenged to free them of everything we hold onto, both that which we hold sacred and that which we fear, so they can become thoughtful, aware, evolving beings. We are charged with unburdening them so they can move on, totally free, unencumbered by our darkest secrets, our inhibitions, our rules, our agreements, and yes, our fears. I was conscious of this from the very minute I first set eyes on my children. Even if we don’t have children we are asked to face these challenges in all of our relationships, whether with partners, parents, siblings, co-workers, etc. We are all offered opportunities to transform.

When I whispered to them that I would do the best I could, I was promising them that I too would transform. Perhaps that was the moment when I set my intent to do a shamanic recapitulation. I don’t know for sure, because I was far from embarking on that journey, but something inside me knew that I must not burden those kids with me. I knew my biggest challenge was going to be setting them free of me, so they could become the beings they had the potential to become and the only way to do that was to face who I was. And I have indeed had to face my own fears as I raised my children.

My two children don’t even know it, but they have always been the impetus behind my own healing journey. I see them now for what they truly are: they are beings of recapitulation, having brought me to this point in my life, for they have constantly challenged me as much as I challenged them, and as much as I challenge myself.

When I worry about them, I know I must turn my eyes inward and work on my own reasons for that worry. I know I must ask myself to take the worry off them and use it to cleanse myself, sending them off with the freedom from me that they deserve. I refuse to burden them with me. Even so I know they will have to do their own work on shedding the mother they got, and in the meantime I give them permission to do so, to go out into the world and truly become who they are.

In continually facing who I am, in reflecting back onto myself what I project onto them, I ask myself to become who I truly have the potential to become as well. We are all here for many purposes, for many reasons, and for many challenges. We are all imbued with the potential that I first realized in my infants, when I first allowed that they did not really belong to me, but only to themselves. I knew my job was to bring them into life in the best way I could. I chose to do that with awareness.

When I see them sad, I ask myself: what is it in me that is sad? When I see them angry at the world, I ask myself: where is my anger? When I feel their disappointments, I must ask myself where my own disappointments are. I know I must resolve those issues in myself so we can all be free.

I ask only that they go into life and embrace it as their own, for life is ready to embrace them in return. I ask that they let me go, accepting me as a separate being on a separate journey, as much as I accept this truth about them.

As Jeanne suggested in Monday’s message, I use heart-centered breathing to send them on their journeys into the next stages of life—I use heart-center breathing and Tonglen too. I breathe in my worries and breathe out their full potential. I breathe in my fears and breathe out fearlessness for them. I breathe in my maternal instincts and breathe out their own maternal instincts and abilities to care for themselves.

I unburden them of me. I feel it is my greatest duty as their mother, to set them free, of me especially. I don’t own them. I love them and cherish them for who they are. I watch with awe as they launch into the world, as I once watched with awe as they first learned to roll over, to sit up, and as they stumbled through their first walking steps.

When people tell me I have great kids, I know they speak the truth.

“Yes, they are great kids,” I say, “because they are themselves!”

I still whisper the same words to them each day that I once whispered when they were infants: “Be yourself, be who you are. I can’t wait to see who you will be!”

I’m still fascinated as I watch them take their next steps—I’m just as fascinated by all the people I know and meet. I wonder: Who are you going to be?

Love to you all,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Dream Guides

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During recapitulation, dreams may act as guides taking us deeper into our inner world, revealing repressed memory, stimulating senses, signifying where we need to go next. While undergoing my own recapitulation—a magical pass used by the Seers of Ancient Mexico to reclaim lost energy—I encountered lost parts of myself in my dreams. They had been sitting and waiting for me for years, to return and bring them into life. By coming forth to engage me in dreams those parts got my attention, often in striking ways. But it wasn’t until I was ready to fully accept that I was on a journey of significance, as we all are, that I woke up to what those dreams were trying to tell me.

Dreams allow us to explore our inner world without the overriding dominance of the mind and the judging personality, without the ego sticking its nose into an experience that may be transformative. Pay attention to your dreams, they may hold more than you think.

I once dreamed a situation that was, in fact, laying out my entire recapitulation process, showing me very clearly what was at the core of my discontent, laying out the future as well. In that dream, I encountered an aggressive figure that I recognized as being long dominant in my life. I lost all of my identification and wandered through unknown territory until I finally reached a place of peace. In fact, that was what happened to me as I began the journey of recapitulation within a short time after that. Portending my future, that dream opened the door to deeper exploration of who I was. In fact, “Why am I the way I am?” was the question I continually asked myself. I couldn’t fully answer it until I fully recapitulated.

The door to dreaming...facing fear

During recapitulation we do lose our identity, as my dream suggested. We shed all that we carry, things that we take on in our efforts to grow, as we struggle to be in the world, as well as burdens placed on us by others. We find ourselves continually freeing ourselves from old ideas and perceptions of ourselves and the world we live in, as we recapitulate. As we take the journey into the deeper self, we discover a new self. We are offered the opportunity to work our way into filling this new self with new ideas, thoughts, and perceptions. We are offered the possibility of fully taking on this new identity, one that is truly us. This may be a dream identity that we never imagined we could fully own. This may be a spiritual self we had distanced ourselves from. This may be an absolutely strange and amazing self, a magical self. We all have the opportunity to transform.

In wandering the strange lands of our dreamworld, with awareness, we’re offered access to our greatest potential. If we can dare ourselves to take a dream journey, facing our greatest fears in both our dreams and in real life, we offer ourselves the opportunity to totally transform. Some of those amazing dream worlds we’ve encountered while asleep are actually available to us in our everyday world as well. In taking hold of our dreams as significant participants in our journeys throughout life, we find the dreams themselves to be our most remarkable companions. Our dreams may be where our fullest potential is accessed, where our deepest issues are revealed, and where our past, current, and future challenges and potential lie.

In experiencing our dreams as our innermost caring and supportive guides, we may more quickly wake up to our true journeys. What path is your dream pointing out to you? Who visited you last night to show you where to go next, what to do, and how to go about it? I find great meaning and pertinent information in my dreams. Indeed, by paying attention to them I gave myself the opportunity to change. And don’t forget, our dreams may approach us while we are awake or asleep.

The importance of the recapitulation process reveals itself every day, in the work Chuck and I do, in the communications we receive, and in our own lives. We personally use the practice of recapitulation constantly, in pursuit of our greatest potential; always more to learn, to explore, and access. Our journeys are endless, our spirits constantly nudging us to keep going. In fact, anything that appears in our lives may actually be trying to alert us to something special and important about ourselves and our true direction in life.

There are indeed many ways to transform, and indeed recapitulation is really a natural process that we all engage in all the time: in remembering, in experiences, in thoughts, in illnesses, in repetitive habits and behaviors, in our choices and decisions, in the kinds of things we elect to avoid or pursue and yes, in our dreams. Do we dare to call life itself “recapitulation?” Do we dare to fully embrace our spirit’s call and give it a structure with a name? Are we really so daring as to go all the way to transformation? That is what we are challenged with really. Our spirits ask us every day: “Are you coming with me? Are you ready today?

In a few weeks, I intend to have the first volume of my book The Recapitulation Diaries available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book. One does not need to have a Kindle device in order to download e-books. Free apps and tools are available for all kinds of devices including phones, computers, and ipads. We’ll have all of that info available when the time comes. We’ve decided that we won’t be publishing a paperback copy at this time as I intend to immediately jump into working on the second volume. That being said, my greatest hope is that my book will aid others, showing what it means to recapitulate in the context of everyday life, offering the tools to undergo a shamanic practice in full awareness.

Dream on. And remain aware: dreams are just waiting to be fulfilled. What dream do you have that is knocking at the door? May you find your way to it, in whatever way works. Recapitulation is only one way, I know that, but I can only say that for me, it is the only way. Nothing else works. I always knew there were other worlds available to me. I just didn’t know how to get into them. Recapitulation, as a tool to transforming myself and the world I choose to live in, offers me total access.

Much love,
Jan