Category Archives: Jan’s Blog

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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: A Very Magical Time

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It’s been a little challenging lately to detach from all the political hoopla and hype, all the name-calling, finger pointing, joking, judging, and ugliness going on. In an effort to go into deeper solitude I’ve decided not to post what I consider apropos articles and blogs, even though they may certainly contain messages in alignment with what Chuck, Jeanne, and I regularly write about, because I find that my energy tends to stay stuck on them. Instead, I’m weaning myself off my usual checking-of-what’s-happening-in-the-media morning routine. Often just a quick fix—”Just to see what’s happening!”—I’ve decided to remove all the links from my bookmarks bar and stay away. Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping! There they go! I just removed myself from the Internet. It’s so easy and really so freeing! From this day forward I am not doing, as the shamans say.

Not Doing what I normally do allows for experiencing everything differently, even if ever so slightly. My intent now can focus on what’s most important to me personally rather than on what is being thrown in my face according to someone else’s intent, greed, passion, fixation, penchant or desire. No longer bombarded by ads, pop-up windows, moving icons, and numerous other distractions, I can stay focused on nature—the magic of real nature—inside myself and right outside my window.

As I experience the early morning hours, before most people are out of bed, I offer myself the opportunity to connect directly with nature’s process. I stir when the birds stir. I listen to their morning chatter, the darkness of the night gently moving aside as the sky begins to lighten in the East and I’m happy to be alive, right then, at that moment. It’s a special time. Just waking from dreams, I’m often still connected to other possibilities. Still softened by the night, I don’t immediately jump to thoughts, but let my senses, my intuition, my spirit speak to me. It’s a magical time.

The opportunities to do something personally desirable and fitting are fully available at 4:30 a.m. I can meditate, channel, pray, write in my journal, jot down my dreams, or simply stand on the deck and watch the birds, the deer, smell the dew, catch glimpses of the last stars and breathe in the cool morning air. It’s a magical time.

As I continue working on the final draft of my book, The Recapitulation Diaries: The Man in the Woods—the first of three volumes—I’m struck by how intensely healing it is to be able to squarely face our traumas, to relive them, and excise them from our bodies, minds, psyches and spirits. In so doing, we offer ourselves the opportunity to return to a natural state of being, or perhaps even for the first time to experience what it means to be calm and contented enough to feel present in this world. It was all I ever yearned for, to feel like I really belonged here and to find out why I existed. I could not have achieved the place of calmness I now inhabit had I not challenged myself to go on a journey of a lifetime: into myself. In fact, I am certain I would be dead, eaten away by the stuff that festered inside me.

Electing to take a recapitulation journey was perhaps the greatest conscious challenge of my lifetime, which led to my discovering that I was indeed opening up to a journey of magical proportions. My experiences, as I took that journey, unfolded most naturally, as I relinquished my hold on the things that I had always counted on, much as I did today in excising the media links from my web browser. As I took that recapitulation journey I had to turn my back on a lot of crutches, habits, behaviors, safety measures, and even relationships, that I thought I could not live without and throw myself out into the unknown. I had to dare myself again and again to face life and my recapitulating process with nothing familiar in hand. I had to continually challenge myself to break through the barriers that kept me from fully experiencing myself in the world. And truthfully, just as I experience early morning as a magical time, my recapitulation process was also a magical time.

Deciding to take a recapitulation journey is deciding to truly live—on personal terms—unfettered by opinions, judgments, rules, pacts, secrets and lies. It is choosing to deconstruct, sort through the mess, and reconstruct the self with only that which is personally relevant. At first it may indeed feel like a death, because it is a dying process as the old self dies and a new self, mostly unknown, dares to push into life. The process is natural. Like nature we too have the capability of dying to old ideas and old selves and allowing for new life.

Now, during this growing season, I watch the seeds I’ve planted bursting forth from the earth, thrilled at the speed and energy of this new life. As I listen to the birds and taste the wild strawberries, I am reminded that recapitulation, that death to new life, is the most natural of processes. As I walk, I find the road littered with the critters hit by cars, yet I know that the crows will soon swoop down and feed off the carcasses, death leading always to life giving energy. If we choose to view it as such, we clearly see that this is a most magical time.

In choosing not doing, I choose to live on my own terms. I choose to continue recapitulating, going even more deeply into myself, questioning my actions, my thought processes, my habits, challenging myself to keep changing, to keep doing things differently, to face life and to face death, knowing that both of them are part of the cycle of nature. I find that in studying nature and the ancients—the Shamans, the Buddhists, the Hindus, etc.; teachings connected with nature, spirit, energy, and the experiences of being in all worlds simultaneously—I am not so fraught with concern about the changes taking place on the world stage. I am not so caught up in the frenzy or worry, but taking it all very seriously nonetheless.

I know that I must do my part to energetically stay in alignment with nature, to trust that Mother Nature (Pachamama, Gaia) is doing what is appropriate—perhaps she too is recapitulating because she knows it is time to do so. The Earth, as a living being, is most powerful and decisive and I must trust that her own process must be as destructive as my own recapitulation process was when I began it ten years ago. I must continue to accept that destruction is necessary for new growth and that the things happening in the world are all in alignment with a far greater process that none of us can fully comprehend. It’s a magical time.

I look forward to not doing today and every day, to seeing what else comes to greet me, what naturally unfolds as I set about my workday. It’s exciting to be alive during this magical time. The energy of change is powerful. I choose to ride it. I hope you do too!

Meet you out there,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Moles of Recapitulation

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On my morning walk today I noticed several dead moles. I’ve been seeing them for days now, always at the same places in the road, at what I now call The Mole Crossings. I imagine many moles making the trek across the road each night and the cars that come upon them. Invariably one or two moles lose their lives each night. I find their tiny, silent remains when I walk. They look so peaceful, eyes closed, their long sharp claws turned slightly under, done with digging.

Why am I seeing so many dead moles? What is the significance? I can’t help but ask myself these questions because I know that everything is meaningful. The immediate answer to my questions is, as I see it, glaringly right: Recapitulation. Well, you might ask, how did you get that answer and why is it so right?

I see the mole as the perfect totem for doing a recapitulation, the one who goes underground, into the earth. Blind to the trappings of this world it is drawn into the energy of the underworld, where it picks apart, digging and gnawing its way through every tiny morsel of dirt and sand, pushing aside blockages of stone and gravel, working its way around and through stumps and roots on its quest for a place of deep inner solitude. That is very much the same kind of work that a recapitulation entails and the end result is a place of quiet calmness deep within the self. If you want to take a shamanic journey there is none like it.

There are many shamanic practitioners who, acting as seers, will journey on behalf of another and return with insight and information that is meaningful and significant for that other. This is similar to what I do when I channel for other people, seeking insight beyond this world that is specific to that person. I also act as a guide when people come to me for hypnosis, becoming the facilitator to accessing an inherent process rarely made available or even acceptable until it’s been experienced. Once a journey has been experienced, an opening has been created and the spirit wants more. I usually end a session by saying that anyone can do a journey anytime, they just have to learn to let go of their fears—both inbred fears and fears of the great unknown.

I’m not special and I don’t do anything to anyone, I simply offer a means to that opening. The fact that I can go outside of my conscious self and gain insight from sources beyond this realm is in fact a universal human potential. Innate though it may be, this ability is often first encountered and utilized during a traumatic event, as the impact of sudden trauma or intense fear allows it to naturally emerge in a superb act of survival. It steps in and acts as a protective measure but is actually, as I see it, a highly evolved spiritual self who knows immediately how to transcend this reality and thus the event that triggered its emergence.

During an out-of-body or near-death experience people discover that they can indeed leave the physical world, have incredible experiences and safely return to their bodies victorious and triumphant—this is the essence of a shamanic journey. Once undertaken, such an experience remains implanted in the psyche. Whether kept alive and utilized or allowed to sink into memory it nonetheless leaves an imprint and has an impact. It can play out over and over again, consciously or unconsciously, known and strikingly familiar or unknown and completely foreign. It is, nonetheless, alerting the journeyer that at one time an experience was had that was like no other.

Having once gained a shift in perception there is often increased interest in finding a means back to that moment of bliss and insight. This too may be a conscious or unconscious longing on the part of the journeyer. The truth is that once the spirit has awoken—made itself know in whatever transcendent way it needs to use—it tenaciously attempts to remind us of its full potential.

During a recapitulation one revisits the moments of trauma, fear, or even mystical experience that originally gave insight into true spirit potential, relives them, discovering this time around the true meaning of why they were had, what they meant, and what they mean for the future. When our journeying self ventures into recapitulation in full awareness, we are ready to encounter what our past holds for us. Our ability to dig like the mole is also simultaneously awoken, ready to be activated. If we so choose we can become the mole and tenaciously and voraciously eat our way through the muck of the shadowland inside us, the very earthen self who keeps everything buried. If we are prepared to once again transcend this reality and, with our claws of intent, dig in and through our visceral present-day selves we will eventually reach the wide-open land of our spiritual selves.

In our world, to take a shamanic journey may be seen as a strange or unique way to tackle the problems in life, highly suspect in some circles and highly valued in others. But, having gone on many shamanic journeys myself in many different ways, I know that it’s just another description of our innate human potential, offering us access to our ancient selves and the ability to perceive and experience many realities simultaneously. A shamanic journey lets us experience ourselves as energy beings, freed of the fears that bind us to this one-sided, flatly defined world that we live in most of our lives, obediently doing the things that are expected of us.

Electing to take a recapitulation journey, a shamanic journey, must become a conscious choice at some point, for if we are to reach our full potential we must keep our awareness about us at all times. If we continue to fight our spirit, if we refuse the journey it prompts us to take, we will be reminded of it throughout our present life. We are supreme students of denial. We learn how to suppress, repress, and push away access to the knowledge of this potential self for decades, but eventually it will get to us in one way or another.

We may fall into illness. We may suffer broken hearts, literally and figuratively. We may never achieve the peace and calm we know is possible. We may live angry, resentful, regretful lives, always certain that someone else is to blame for our misery. We may stubbornly refuse to face our fears and decide that we just don’t want to do the work of fulfillment in this lifetime. And all of that is okay, because even our spirit is part of that decision making.

But, having faced many of the above symptoms and many more besides, I can say that there is nothing like what we experience as we go through the tunnels of our psyches, our conscious and unconscious minds, and our bodies. Having become like the mole, having dug my way into my darkness, having wallowed in the muck inside myself in a transformative recapitulation process, I can finally say that I live a most fulfilling life, no longer burdened, sad, fearful, traumatized, or afraid to love. I have emerged on the other side of the tunnel of recapitulation, victorious and triumphant indeed, in a new land. It is what I wish for all.

I return to work on my book, the first year of The Recapitulation Diaries, soon to be published, hoping that my journey will inspire others to take a shamanic journey into the self, volitionally, with awareness and intent, allowing the spirit self to lead the way. A recapitulation journey is really a lifetime shamanic journey, for we are always offered moments of insight, like trying to figure out why there are so many dead moles on the road. What we encounter as we walk in this world is meaningful.

I’m always wondering what will appear next to guide me.
Until next time,
Jan

Jan's Blog, Quote for the Day

This is Serious

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These wild flowers and grasses may not be here in a few years

I’m posting a couple of articles that strike the dire note of truth, yet why do we still pretend? It really is time to prepare to live differently. The polar ice cap is melting at an incredible rate. Many cities along the coasts are already preparing for rising waters, taking matters into their own hands while some wayward politicians and the big industries pretend, for their own profit alone, that there is no looming global warming crisis. They know they are lying.

The rain forest is turning into desert, the wild weather over the past year is showing us just what we have to face in the future: tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, flooding.

It really is time to change how we live. Make some personal decisions. We can’t stop what’s happening, it’s too late for that, but if we each do something to change our current lifestyle we may be able to adapt to the new world. 2012 or not, the world is changing dramatically, as we speak. Take a look at the following articles, just a sampling of the truths being spoken and written about. This is the new reality—the future is now.

This regarding the truth about radiation leakage at Fukishima.

This about the real truth of global warming.

Not a bright message to start the day, today; I can only offer a very honest one. It’s time to get sober and really decide how to flow with the inevitable rather than continue fighting, lying about it, and denying it.

On a serious note,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Some Excerpts From My Book

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Over the past two years I’ve been hard at work on my book, The Recapitulation Diaries, which will be published in three volumes over the next couple of years. The first volume, which covers the first year of my three-year-long intensive shamanic recapitulation, is pretty close to finished with an expected e-book publication date later this summer. Our plan is to publish first as a Kindle e-book followed by a print-on-demand version through Amazon’s publishing house, a fine way to avoid needless costs, waste, and storage issues, as well as allowing for an extremely reasonable sale price.

The Recapitulation Diaries are compiled from the fifty diaries I wrote during my recapitulation process, which documented just about everything that was happening as I explored completely blocked childhood experiences. Today I offer some excerpts from that recapitulation process which began in earnest about ten years ago.

Here is an excerpt from a journal entry made on September 7, 2001:

“Soul in pain, mind in torment, in quiet moments the old stuff comes to haunt. I know I won’t be able to handle the onslaught of it alone and I wonder how long I can keep it at bay. It pushes at me, prodding for attention. I wish I knew where it all came from. Whatever it is that haunts me sits heavily inside, in hidden places, not where I can see, not where I want to go. It lets me know it’s there by protruding outwardly, poking at me, showing me images of ugliness, showing me painfully deep memories, like glimpses of old icons painted in excruciating detail or ancient rounded Mycenaean forms solidly built to stand erect for centuries, guarding, waiting for me to turn to them, for they hold the secrets. I see big-eyed Etruscans peering out from deep within, looking for daylight, begging to be let out, heavy stone sculptures, weighing on my soul, numbing my thoughts. A lump of stone catches in my throat. No forklift big enough to remove it, I carry its weight always within, barely able to breathe, to speak, to swallow.”

Here is what was coming through on September 16, 2001:

“What lies inside keeps eating away at me, chomping away, nagging at me until my insides are as raw as chapped lips, as painful as cracked and blistered hands. No one sees the pain, the bloody mess of memories I hold inside, like buckets of afterbirth torn and ripped from my body, leaving pain and cramps in a place no one can go. Even I can barely reach that far down to soothe and comfort the wounds that fester inside me.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I don’t remember enough, though so much stuff nags at me. I can’t seem to let it go and I can’t get past it either. No matter how hard I try to push it away, it won’t let me ignore it. There are too many things bringing back memories.”

“Visual images flash like lightning and in a split second I’m lost in the woods again. A sigh, a profile, the nape of a neck, and suddenly a flash of pain stabs through my heart, my gut, and something deep inside is torn out of me and thrown to the ground where it lies kicked and bruised and yet I cannot bear to tend to it, except to stuff it back inside, to push its bloody mass back inside.”

And then I finally have a breakthrough understanding:

“The pain of knowing has finally hit. Up until now, I have mostly been experiencing the realization that something was drastically wrong in my past, each new memory sending me reeling as I understood, for the first time, that something had happened to me as a child. But now, as each memory surfaces, I know that something happened to me when I was a child because I’m feeling it.”

“At first it was all in my head, as I tried to grasp, to figure out just how it could have happened, as I tried to get my head around the incredible disbelief of it. But now it’s settled in my body, in my stomach, a deeply buried, barely reachable pain of truth. And now I understand what Chuck meant when he told me that I didn’t need to go searching for the memories, that they would come of their own accord, when I was ready.”

Here is what it was like to experience an emerging memory:

“Too many memories, some clear, some hazy, are trying to make themselves known but I can’t shake the blurriness from my eyes to get the whole picture. It’s like trying to peer through a black scrim or screen, like squinting at a tiny television set at the end of a long dark tunnel.”

“Often I’m in the woods, those haunting woods filled with dread, doom, and fear. Then I step out from the woods into light and sunshine, leaving all the bad stuff behind. In just a few steps I go from intense fear, just a few small steps and I come out into goodness and light, shedding fear like an old snakeskin. But something stays behind in the damp cool woods. There’s a shadow sitting on the dirt-packed ground with the leaves and odor of decay.”

“As I go deeper into this memory of dark and light, I find that I’m able to turn around and look back at the woods once I’ve emerged into the light, but I cannot go into them. I am only able to walk out into the sunlight, over and over again…”

Thanks for reading! I’m looking forward to finishing the first book. My intent in publishing The Recapitulation Diaries is to share what total freedom means, offering a means of achieving not only total healing and freedom from trauma but also from the fixations and trappings of this world. The Recapitulation Diaries revision trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—and life itself—as a shamanic journey.

I’ve returned from that journey whole, unburdened, and with fluid access to heightened awareness. AND I no longer live every day in fear, as I once did. I have come out of the dark woods of my childhood into a clear new light. It’s what I hope for everyone.

Until next week—love and light,
Jan

Jan's Blog, Quote for the Day

Invitation to a Journey

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These sentiments remind me of the beginnings of a recapitulation experience when the anxiety of yet another memory appears out of nowhere and having no control over the situation the only thing to do is be open and ready for the journey that is about to unfold.

The adventure into the unknown awaits...

“…I begin to feel the anxiety that always sweeps over me when I’m going to a new place… I always get annoyed at myself for not planning ahead, but I almost never do. Plans and beginnings are hard for me; but that doesn’t stop me from going. I guess I know, deep down, that the anxiety is worth the pay-off of yet another adventure.” From Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman.