CC Leigh Interview

Summary

CC Leigh describes a path through unusual experiences, spiritual seeking, psychological collapse, and profound meditation discoveries. The discussion explores how awakening can coexist with human confusion, emotional struggle, and the need to live in an embodied, grounded way.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual awakening coexist with emotional struggle and ordinary human difficulties?
• What happens when spiritual experiences and altered states stop providing lasting answers?
• How can meditation reveal a deeper sense of identity beyond thoughts, senses, and personal history?
• How do you know when seeking has ended and a more open process of exploration has begun?

Key takeaways

• Spiritual experiences do not automatically remove the challenges of being human.
• Deep awakening can end compulsive seeking while leaving much to explore.
• Dark nights can dismantle false beliefs and expose deeper truths.
• Humility means showing up as you are rather than forcing life to fit your plans.
• Meditation can reveal an awareness beyond sensory experience and mental activity.
• Spiritual teachings should reduce guilt and self-judgment, not intensify them.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is CC Leigh. CC is a Waking Down teacher, or whatever they call them. We’ll get the terminology straight as we go along. I’ve interviewed quite a few of those, including Saniel and Linda Bonder, who founded Waking Down in Mutuality.

I’ve been thinking that these days embodiment is kind of a buzzword, and in spiritual circles everybody’s talking about it, whereas ten years ago the majority of people were talking about disembodiment: “Oh, you’re not a person,” and all that. But from the get-go, Waking Down has been all about, as CC’s book implies, becoming divinely human.

You know, there are people who say you are not a person. I suppose a Waking Down teacher might respond by saying, yes, of course you’re a person, you’re just not only a person. There are different dimensions to what you are. Waking Down in Mutuality, as I understand it—and we’re going to be talking all about it today—is all about integrating and stabilizing all those dimensions so as to live the full package rather than just some fragmented part of it. Is that a fair synopsis, CC?

CC: That’s a good way to begin, Rick.

Rick: Great. Let’s talk about you personally a little bit, and then we’ll go through your book and cover all kinds of points as we go along. There’ll be an opportunity for people to submit questions during the interview.

Just this morning I read your personal bio on your website, and I thought it was very interesting, so it might be good to go through that a bit, just off the top of your head, so people get to know you and get a sense of how your life led up to where it is now. Then we’ll talk more specifically about what you have in your book.

CC: Okay.

Rick: So you were born at a very young age, and?

CC: I was very small. Yes.

Rick: And there’s something about a sunflower. When you were a child, you were having subtle perceptions and communications with nature spirits, or some such thing.

CC: Right. I suppose I was, like many people, something of a magical child. I was adventurous; I didn’t always follow Mom’s rules. One day, I wandered away from home a bit farther than usual and came across a pair of sunflowers growing out by the road. I was gazing up at the big heads of the sunflowers, and all of a sudden I just felt completely enveloped, suffused, and awash in something I’d never felt before. It was like they loved me—just totally.

I think I ran home and told everybody about these amazing sunflowers, and I think I got grounded. “What were you doing way over there?” and “You’re making up stories” and “That’s just your imagination” and “Who are you to be…”

CC: What kind of magic mushrooms were you nibbling out there?

So I lost touch with that for a long time, until 1987, which I think was an awakening year for a lot of people—the Harmonic Convergence, if that rings any bells for people. I was sitting out in a field. I had a house in Scotts Valley near Santa Cruz, and I walked out into a big, dry field where there was no water and nothing planted, just weeds. There was a sunflower growing there, and I sat down and gazed at that sunflower. I felt taken back to that time when I was five, and it just connected everything up for me: the sense that there was something so vital, so alive, so profoundly loving, and I was part of that. That really sparked me to move into an active seeking phase at that point.

Rick: It’s interesting because I don’t know a lot about Native American spirituality, but as I understand it, very often when they go through some initiation during their youth, they end up resonating with some particular animal or something that’s going to be their connection to higher realities. It might be a wolf or a bear or something, and they end up naming themselves after that. So for you it was a sunflower. Kind of interesting.

CC: Right, but please don’t everyone start calling me Sunflower.

Rick: Sitting Sunflower.

CC: Although I do treasure sunflowers.

Experimentation and the call to wholeness

Rick: Yeah, all right, we won’t. Okay, so take us from there.

CC: Well, in my early twenties I experimented a lot. I came from a broken home. My parents split up when I was eight. My dad was a thousand miles away and just that far away emotionally as well—not very available. My mom was pretty devastated by the breakup, and she was quite emotionally unavailable as well. Somehow, she kept a home together, but it was very minimal as far as being a nurturing environment.

By the time I was in college, I was desperate for love and desperate to understand something, and I started experimenting a lot with boys and psychoactive substances. I got into a dormitory at the University of Massachusetts where dropping acid was the thing you did on Friday nights. That, of course, was mind-blowing. It took me way out of any frame of reference I’d had up to that point, and yet I was often disappointed that I wasn’t encountering the deity of mescaline, or whatever I was looking for.

But one of those journeys did absolutely take me down inside the very structure of how things are in reality. It’s like I was inside the frequencies, seeing the scale that went from solid to liquid to sound to light to color, and I was able to just travel in between all of those frequencies. I had no context for understanding that. I had no way to really even talk about it, but I remember it to this day, so that was useful as far as letting me know that physical reality wasn’t all there is.

Rick: That kind of thing was an eye-opener for many of us. Certainly not a long-term solution, but it definitely gave you an unforgettable glimpse into the fact that there’s more to life than meets the eye.

CC: Absolutely.

Rick: Okay, next step.

CC: Well, I majored in animal science in college, and after that I became what today we’d call a dog whisperer. I raised dogs, trained and showed them, and made my living by working with people, helping them raise their dogs and deal with behavior problems.

That was really interesting, although I also had quite an interest in psychology. I think I was guided—or maybe, because I was such a broken person, animals were a safer medium—but they also kept the heart open. It was a wonderful way to relate to people through the medium of dogs because they’re so heart-based. I learned a lot about people, teaching, and coaching through that avenue.

Rick: Yeah, I think a lot of people find that animals and dogs are a lot easier to deal with than human beings. They’re a lot less complicated, and as you say, they really bring some heart into the equation. Did you feel like your dog-whisperer work must have been tied in with the fact that you had some subtler perception dawning, and so you couldn’t just be a scientist studying blood samples? You had to bring your latent talents to bear in the field of your choice.

CC: It’s really true, Rick. When I was in college, I was encouraged to study things where you dissect animals—to be a scientist in that regard, in the laboratory, or even to do research on humans in psychological experiments. None of that felt right to me. I knew I had to be with the whole being, and the animating spirit of that being wasn’t going to be found in test tubes and laboratories.

Rick: Yeah, okay, and so next step.

CC: Okay, so I had a home, a dog kennel, and a husband, and I think those were my years of making a life—just learning how to navigate in the real world and have a business.

Then we come up to that shift point in 1987, and at that point things seemed to be falling apart. It was one of my first dark-night experiences, where things that had been working just started falling apart and not working. Lots of things went wrong, and that sent me to the meditation cushion.

Rick: Your marriage broke up at that point, didn’t it?

CC: Shortly after. I started sitting and inquiring and meditating—or trying to learn how to meditate, really—and that got too strange because I started channeling at that point.

Rick: Just spontaneously?

CC: Yeah, pretty much spontaneously, although I had studied metaphysics and channeled material, so I had a framework for what it was. I never in a million years expected it would happen for me, but when I started to get quiet and listen, I had responses coming back to me in my inner awareness.

I developed that into a form of communicating with guides who seemed to show up for my education, and that just weirded my husband out no end.

Rick: Just for your education, or were you actually helping clients with your channeling?

CC: I was leery of doing that. I’m glad I didn’t go down that route, actually. It felt like something I could learn from, but I didn’t see that taking money for it was the way to go.

Rick: All right, so your husband wasn’t exactly thrilled with this turn of events.

CC: Right, and the marriage broke up pretty quickly, and things led to things. Over the period of the next year or two, I ended up giving up that home and coming to dead ends for everything I was attempting at that point.

There were a few years of exploration and growth, experimenting with altered states and different contact with things. It actually felt very wonderful for a while, and then it stopped being productive and I hit another dark night, which was even more wholesale. At every level of my being, I just fell into self-doubt and felt all of my shadow, all of my self-judgment. My wicked inner critic went on a rampage, and I kind of just caved. I just caved.

It wasn’t about beliefs. It wasn’t about pictures of reality where you choose to believe this or choose to believe that.

Rick: The reason I’m having you go through this stuff is that people can relate to it. Often teachers get up on stages or on YouTube, and they present themselves as this shining example of enlightenment, and you don’t have any sense of what they might have been through or what they might still be going through.

People get this subtle feeling that, “Oh, I could never be like them.” I think it can be encouraging for people to realize that, as the Firesign Theater put it, “We’re all bozos on this bus,” and spiritual teachers who seem to really have their act together have been through all kinds of stuff over the years to get to where they are today, and are still going through stuff.

CC: Yeah, thank you. I think that’s very right on, Rick. In fact, I got so good at failure, I used to joke that I was going to teach a course called “Advanced Failure,” because people should teach what they’re good at. That was the way it was showing up for me.

What was really happening, I think, is that I had opened myself up to very beautiful belief systems about a multidimensional reality, and that I was a very special part of that, and that I had a special destiny. I really fell into that, into being almost seduced by it for a while.

I think what happened—and I don’t really know why, but maybe organically I was just ready to go deeper—is that I had to go deeper in order to really find what’s true. It wasn’t about beliefs. It wasn’t about pictures of reality where you choose to believe this or choose to believe that. That lost all of its interest for me.

And I said, “How can I get grounded in a way? How can I get here in a real way? And can I go deeper? Can I have an exploration that takes me to something that feels utterly true?”

Rick: That’s interesting about feeling you were special, because I think egotism can be insidious, and we’re the last people to know it when it’s creeping up on us. Others may be able to see it, perhaps, but it blinds us to itself. Many teachers, especially when they start getting showered with a lot of attention, praise, and love, can really let it go to their heads. I know that in Waking Down there are mutual safeguards against this kind of thing, but of course you hadn’t gotten into Waking Down yet.

CC: Well, I got humbled, Rick.

Rick: You got smacked down by circumstances a bit, huh?

CC: Yeah, it certainly wasn’t because I was wise and saw the error of my ways. It was because something smarter than me is looking out for me, to bring me to my knees and actually crack me open so that I might discover something much more important than this little person with her ideas about what reality is.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. That resonates with one of my favorite themes, and I’ve said this many times, which is that the universe is this big evolution machine and we’re here to grow. There’s an intelligence that is going to facilitate or push along our growth, whether we cooperate with it or resist it, kicking and screaming.

CC: Well, it certainly seems to be a theme that has pulled me along. It was pretty early to give me a sense of what my purpose is here in this life and then provide me all the challenges and reasons to be disillusioned and deconstructed in order to make me a vessel, we might say, to be able to support other people in awakening.

The fourth state

Rick: I sometimes think that the word “disillusion” really has a positive connotation for spiritual aspirants, because what spirituality is all about is coming out of illusion. So if we can get disillusioned, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, although it’s not always pleasant while it’s happening, but it can really be conducive to our growth.

CC: It’s pretty terrifying, actually, because the way we’re structured—or the way I was structured, certainly—I thought I had some idea about how to be in the world and how to take care of things. When all that started crumbling around me, I lost touch with my north, my compass, and it was quite bewildering and devastating in a way. I felt simultaneously like I wanted to make a contribution here through this life of mine and that I was utterly not up to it, that I was just not going to be able to deliver. I was so flawed and so broken.

Rick: After this rock-bottom period, where everything was falling apart for you and nothing was working out and nature was smacking you around, was there a light at the end of the tunnel that you eventually came into?

CC: Yes. Just like that earlier dark-night period brought me to the meditation cushion, this one brought me back and deeper. I had learned more by this point. I had more pointers on what to do. I got really curious about something that was called the fourth state: waking, sleeping, dreaming, and then…

Rick: Turiya.

CC: Turiya, the fourth state, the one that’s like deep sleep with no content, but you still have awareness. I got real curious about that from whatever inner guidance was bringing me along and giving me energy. I didn’t have energy for much at that point, but I had energy for doing that, so I would do these long meditations.

I had to do them lying down because I couldn’t sit up that long. They were long meditations in which I would subtract. There was a subtractive process, meaning I would close my eyes so I wasn’t seeing, and then eventually sounds would also subtract away. Body sensations would subtract away. Just a sense of breathing in my heart would be there, and then that would get slower and subtract away.

Then it happened that it seemed like that was a portal of sorts to something I can’t put into words. When all the activity stopped, I shifted and felt that I was in my true home, the heart of love, the utter essence, the womb. All these words are inadequate because they are not it. But that happened, and it was utterly satisfying, like I’d had to follow this thread until I got there because I had to know where I came from, where I was going, and what I truly was.

For about a year, every so often I would have another opportunity to merge into that.

Rick: Just once a year?

CC: No, throughout a year or so, maybe a dozen times.

Rick: Oh, okay. So maybe once a month you lie down and do this?

CC: Yeah, it wasn’t on a schedule, though. It was like somehow the right circumstances would show up, and it would be like something was opening up for me.

Rick: That’s pretty characteristic. It’s a classic description of the experience, really. The Bhagavad Gita likens it to a tortoise withdrawing all of its limbs into its shell. The senses withdraw from their objects, sometimes simultaneously, perhaps sometimes sequentially as you described, and then the self realizes itself by itself, without any sort of subject-object relationship going on anymore.

CC: Right. So that was a very important learning or discovery for me. For me in this lifetime, that was really important. It’s not always for other people, but for me it was totally important. It also opened up the next set of bewilderment, because it didn’t change me, it didn’t perfect me, and it didn’t remove the challenges of being human.

Rick: Well, at this stage, was it in any way sticky? Was it in any way permanent, or were you just having this experience once a month?

CC: It became a knowing. It became a trustable knowing, even though life, activity, sensing, and all that would turn outward again.

Rick: It was there in the background.

CC: It was there in the background, and by around 1995, it was just utterly trustable. And yet I was still dealing at that point with, “Now what does that do for my life? How do I live?”

Rick: That and a couple of dollars to get you a cup of coffee.

CC: Exactly.

Rick: So really, it didn’t have any impact whatsoever on your life? It didn’t sort of diminish the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to some extent?

CC: Well, yeah, it had a tremendous effect in certain ways. It just didn’t relieve the confusion about being a bewildered human. But to some degree, it relieved the confusion about who I was, and it was the end of seeking. From that point on, I really wasn’t seeking. I was just exploring: “Now, what does this mean?”

I’m still thinking, I’m still having emotions, I’m still reacting, and I’m still attached in various ways. I think I was quite clear that I wanted to help other people awaken, and yet I did not feel in any way like I was ready for that, or qualified, or knew how. I became more and more comfortable living in a state of not knowing, I’ll put it that way.

There’s definitely a time when a certain phase has passed and one feels a contentment, so that emptiness isn’t gnawing at you all the time. You do feel like there’s a relaxation of seeking, and yet, boy, there’s certainly plenty left to explore—no end of it.

Rick: I like your distinction between seeking and exploring. It’s somewhat in vogue for people to say, “Give up the search,” but that’s just words. A lot of times people hear those words and they’re still really in seeking mode. They haven’t had that experience you’ve just described, and so it leaves them kind of frustrated, I think, to try to follow such advice.

CC: Thank you. Yes, I think it’s an important one. I don’t know that you can stop the search by an act of will. I think it doesn’t stop until it’s completed itself in a certain fundamental way.

Rick: In fact, I think sometimes when people hear this advice to give up the search, it only adds a level of guilt, because they find themselves still kind of seeking and craving, and they think, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stop the search?”

CC: Oh, Rick, so much of what we encounter in spiritual teaching, I think, only serves to create anxiety and guilt and a sense of not being able to do it the way we’re supposed to be doing it.

Rick: We often get emails from people saying, “What’s wrong with me? I’ve tried so many different things, and nothing has worked.” It just becomes a way for people to beat themselves up, and it shouldn’t be that.

CC: Beating yourself up is something people are really good at, in my experience. It’s heartbreaking for me to see how people do that and how much pain and suffering happens along that line. That’s one of the things I really love about the kind of work I do with people. We really help people soften the edges around that.

Finding Waking Down

Around that time, I did drop out. So before 1995, in the early 1990s, I was in this dark-night passage. I was having discoveries, but I was also being undone, and I had no energy for being productive in the world.

That was my first time living in an RV. I borrowed it from the boyfriend I was breaking up with and ended up traveling for three and a half years, just in a kind of free flow of wandering in the wilderness.

Rick: How did you buy gasoline and food and stuff like that?

CC: Well, proceeds from the house I’d had in California bought me a little bit of gas and a little bit of food, and I lived quite frugally and stretched that out for as long as I could. I had to drop out. At that point, I was tuning into what my body wanted. More than anything, Rick, it wanted to sit under a Bodhi tree and have someone bring me meals.

So really, my odyssey, after this sense of knowing myself, knowing who I am, what I am, was stabilizing. I was still dealing with the emotional fallout of the pain of my life, or maybe the pain of being human.

I was experiencing that effect that people do get when people say, “Well, you shouldn’t be feeling that,” or, “You should be able to fix it. You know, if you just do your right healing work, that wouldn’t be happening anymore.” And yet there was this persistent kind of deep melancholy, sad, grieving feeling tone when I would sense inward.

Rick: Did you then, or do you now, have a sense that that kind of transcendence experience that you were tapping into was acting like a solvent and loosening things up that were all sort of stuck and calcified, and beginning to facilitate catharsis or transformation going on inside you?

CC: Well, it was definitely pulling things up to the surface, so that’s a good way to describe it. And I was going deeper and deeper with that and not just being on the surface, reactive, but I was sensing deeper and deeper and going into, “What is here at the base of my experience, and why isn’t it just totally peaceful?”

Because when I would shift away from outward experience and fall totally into that inner no-space, non-being, all the questions resolved. There was total love, total peace, total security, safety, and total relaxation as that. But there was this other stuff going on in me as well.

I had this sense that it was like apples and oranges, and yet I had this quest to find a way for them to integrate. I didn’t know how to make that happen, and didn’t really have much in the way of teachers at that point. I sensed that the solution was not simply to call my humanness unreal in any way and try to get out of it, but was to stay with it and find the integration.

Rick: People who have really emphasized calling their humanness unreal and trying to escape it—well, it’s pejorative to use the word “escape,” but people who have just really pushed on that angle—there are many cases being reported to me in which people have really gotten themselves in trouble by doing that.

It’s almost like they’ve intentionally cultured a schism or a split in their personality and brought on some kind of rather serious dysfunctionality in their lives. It can not only not be helpful, but can actually get people in trouble.

CC: Right. Well, we’re learning a lot. I think the whole exploration of the human psyche is growing by leaps and bounds, and we’re getting new discoveries, especially through neuroscience now, that are starting to corroborate certain things. Certain ways of psychotherapy that are body-based are bearing a lot of fruit for helping people get integrated in ways that probably weren’t much available to people in earlier ages.

Earlier spiritual teachings did the best they could with what they knew, and yet I think the potential now is for a lot more integration of the whole self—all the transcendent dimensions and all of the embodied dimensions of what it is that we are, including the interpersonal dimensions of what we are, the way we’re not separate from one another.

Rick: A lot of times what people call nonduality is really not nonduality. It’s a duality because they’ve estranged themselves from a whole major section of their life—their humanness, their body, and so on—and taken refuge in a detached or transcendent realm and considered that to be nondual. Which it is, in and of itself, but if it’s excluding a major portion of life, then it’s really more of a duality than we even started with.

If we want to think in terms of nonduality, we want something much more inclusive that embraces the whole package.

CC: Right. I like to use the term “radical embrace.”

The duality happens when we say, “I’m enlightened when I’m feeling peace and bliss, and I’m not awake or I’m not enlightened if I’m feeling sad, despairing, depressed, or angry.” That’s a fallacy. CC being angry is as much consciousness expressing herself as she is when she’s sitting quietly and just being at ease.

Rick: Sometimes you hear people talking in a way that, to my mind, sounds like it belittles enlightenment in the sense that, “Oh, yeah, you can be enlightened and still be suicidal or deeply depressed.” Isn’t an enlightenment worth the term a development in which extremes of darkness like that would have been worked through and infused with light or bliss or whatever, so that you’d no longer be susceptible to them?

CC: Well, you just opened a big discussion, Rick. I would make a distinction that there’s awakening and there’s enlightenment. Certainly, in the Waking Down framework, we speak of a second-birth awakening, and that one can very much coexist with any state, including deep depression, and does. And that’s because it’s not yet fully integrated.

As I become more and more integrated, there is a stability and there’s a sense of never losing touch with this profound self-knowing that’s profoundly at peace with life, with living, with everything here, and celebrates it and relishes it.

And yet, I’m also fully given into life. So let’s take the fact that I found my true love when I was about 50, and we had eight years together, which were so wonderful in so many ways. Devastating, wonderful, exciting, terrible, heartbreaking—you know, we had the whole love story.

Then I lost him. He did pass, and that was the most excruciating experience I imagine anyone could ever go through, walking forward into death with him.

We were so merged, it was like somebody was peeling duct tape off my skin to experience the bodily separation from him. So, my awakeness did not—I would say the opposite of it—it didn’t buffer me. It enabled me to stay fully present to every bit of that journey, all the way into and through, and of course ongoing, because it is still ongoing.

Rick: Maybe equanimity, as I’ve presented it, is not a buffer or an anesthetic so much as it’s a larger context in which to be grounded, such that tragedies or triumphs don’t rock your boat, or don’t shake your world to the core as much as they might if you had no such foundation.

CC: That’s well said, Rick. It enabled me to do what I did, to make it through, and also to be able to utilize support from many, many sources. That’s become a skill I have that I did not have before.

It cannot take away what I am. Nothing can take that away.

It’s very solid, and I fundamentally know that I’m okay, and that whatever happens is okay, and I can meet it—meaning, in the sense of, I can meet it, and I will meet it—and it cannot take away what I am. Nothing can take that away.

🏘️ Community, ethics, and mutuality

Rick: We’re moving you along here to eventually finding the Waking Down community, which I believe happened in the late ’90s. So, where would you like to pick up the story from where we left it?

CC: Right, so I’d say through the ’90s, I was often kind of traveling alone in the wilderness.

It was a chance, maybe a synchronistic happening, that I picked up a book Saniel Bonder had recently written called Waking Down.

As I said, during my apples-and-oranges phase, I was looking for a way to integrate. I was looking for a spiritual path that didn’t favor one end of the polarity over the other—the transcendent or the human. There were plenty of people who were doing one or the other, but not so many that I was seeing who were doing both.

It seemed to me that the point of Waking Down was that it was an attempt to do both: to embrace our humanness without pulling away, and also be fully awakening. That was enough to get me curious, so I traveled out to California to explore, and I got hooked.

I loved the people I met—Saniel and Linda and Fay and Ted and Hillary and Van, and the early teachers in those days. They welcomed me, and I just saw all the potential of it. In some ways, it was simply the potential to be around people who could recognize what was going on in me, could see me and reflect me back, because I didn’t have those kinds of people around me until then.

One thing that was very important to me was that the people who were involved were finding their own voice and their own unique expression. It wasn’t about parroting what one teacher was saying and quoting him and always trying to be like him. There was a real encouragement for people to be unique and awakening as exactly who they were, and to find their own voice.

Rick: That’s one thing I really like about the Waking Down community. There’s no parroting going on. It’s an interesting balance between having a certain structure and certain ethical guidelines and things like that, which are very important, and at the same time giving people free rein to do what they’re meant to do.

CC: So I didn’t have any money, because I still hadn’t found a very productive way to engage in the world yet. I was still squeaking by. In order to take advantage of the learning opportunity, I moved to California and volunteered to help Saniel in his work. Eventually, we helped him make some money, and he was able to then start paying me.

I worked for him for a couple of years, and then I became a teacher in my own way and moved back to Colorado, which was a favorite place of mine, and supported a community that was getting established there.

CC: In the early days, the people around Saniel—it was a bit of a Wild West, and anything went. There was not a lot of understanding of power differentials. I think that came in as the community around him matured: being able to notice the ways there were things that were out of integrity and to name them.

We started to create ethical policies. Everyone in teaching roles was expected to sign on to these ethical policies and agree to them. And they have teeth, especially as we formed in 2005.

So the work has changed over the years. In 2004 and 2005, Saniel was wanting to move away from the kind of guru-at-the-top, hierarchical organizational structure, and we were brainstorming different ways to accomplish that. We held meetings and did planning sessions, and eventually a team of three of us—Ron Ames, Krishna Gauci, and myself—took on the task of creating some new structures.

One thing we created was the Waking Down Teacher Association, which now has about 40 members and is very much different from the prior structure because we put all our agreements in writing. We got really clear about what our agreements with one another would be, and they became a requirement for maintaining membership.

So at that point we had teeth—not to be punitive to anyone, but to be mutually supportive of people and to raise our awareness around these places where teachers get hung up in their ethical problems: around money, around sex, around power. Those are the biggies.

So to be in a structure where we all meet together and stay in communication, and if anyone’s feeling like they’re in a gray area where their ethics are fuzzy, they can get counseled.

Rick: Yeah, like in your case, you were teaching that group in Colorado, and your husband-to-be, whom you didn’t know at the time, showed up and some chemistry started. So you had to step back and check with your fellow teachers and think, “All right, how do I proceed with this in a way that’s not going to violate the ethics of our group?”

CC: Right. So yes, I met Michael in 2004, at a Transfiguration retreat, which is a week-long intensive, and I was serving as a teacher at that event.

There was this rule that we couldn’t act on anything during the course of the retreat, of course. And yet, you can feel the energy starting to move. He approached me at the end of the event about spending some time together, and it was like, “Oh, we have to be really cautious right at this stage. I want to make sure he’s well supported.”

As it turned out, he was. He was working regularly with his own teacher, and he’d been in the work for a couple of years. He’d been through a lot already. He was very strong in his own being. So we were given a stamp of approval.

✨ Four stages of embodied awakening

Rick: Let’s start with something you have in the “Darkness Before Dawn” chapter, where you have about four stages of embodied awakening. It would be interesting to run through that.

CC: It’s my own model, and again, I’m not saying that everyone would agree that this is the best model ever written about human development, but there are a couple of things that I think are important in this model.

First of all, it’s a very simple model, and I’m the first one to say maps are not the territory, and no one is going to follow this to the letter. There are many different lines of development that aren’t being represented in this model.

I’m talking about a spiritual unfoldment model, and I call it four stages. It correlates with the subtle body development from gross to subtle to spiritual, and then integrating all of that. So, solid to liquid to vapor to what transcends and unfolds all of it.

And a very, very simple way of saying it might be, in what I call stage one, that your sense of the divine is completely other than you, completely separate. I’m just a human, and the divine is out there and all-powerful, and I’m subject to the whims of this divine.

The second stage would be where a lot of much greater sensitivity to subtle and multidimensional experiences starts to happen, where the person might be recognizing they, too, are part of a divine essence, energy of the universe. That’s what I was describing when I said I was on a really rapid spiritual growth path and I was channeling. That’s what I would say was my stage two journey.

Then what I call stage three is when an integration happens in a landing. Stage two is when we’re opening all the chakras and becoming much more open to all sorts of multidimensional experiences and levels of our being.

And then, as a way of speaking, you could say then our spirit comes home to inhabit the physical-emotional-mental being in a much bigger way. That’s why we say “lands,” as if it could come down and land right into the heart, right into the belly, right into the genitals, right into the whole being, and not just be floating around up here somewhere.

That’s what we call the stage in which the second birth happens. It’s also a stage of paradox, so I’m not one or the other, I’m both and. I’m spirit and I’m body, I’m spirit and I’m emotions. They’re all together, but they haven’t necessarily totally gelled.

We’re encountering paradox all the time and realizing that life is full of paradox, but there is a self-knowing that I am spirit, I’m consciousness, I am consciousness plus matter, and yet matter is not consciousness, it’s all consciousness. So it’s when they come together.

Rick: That was stage three, right?

CC: Right, and I call it stage three because it seems to me that when a lot of people hear about Waking Down and they hear about the second birth and they meet people who are in the early stages, the first few years maybe, of the second birth, they say, “That person doesn’t seem very enlightened. What’s going on here? Are they just smoking dope, or are they just kidding themselves?”

It’s because there’s this deep integration that is underway but is, like you said, churning up the shadow material. It’s pulling that up to the surface, it’s putting people through the deep rapids of the awakening and the challenges of that. We call it the “shakedown.”

It can be a very turbulent time for people, intensifying. So I then spell out a fourth stage, and to me that’s when it all really gels. It’s less about feeling paradox than it is about feeling a flow.

It’s like a kind of a surrendered or relaxed flowing. I call it “seamless onliness.” It’s an even deeper integration, merging, blending, gelling of all that I am into someone who is just being, but being in a way that’s so much more informed than it was in the past, so much more whole.

Dark nights and the need for support

Rick: How do you know if you’re in a dark night? I’ve had people actually send in emails and say, “Would you please ask everybody you interview about the dark night? I need to know more about it. I feel like I’m going through it.”

CC: If you find yourself running out of steam, if you’re not ready for another self-help program, you’re not necessarily looking for a guru, you suspect that maybe some of the stuff you’ve been taught is inaccurate and it’s not sufficient to what you’re dealing with now, you’re questioning all your beliefs, maybe your practice just doesn’t do it for you anymore, maybe you’ve left off your practice, maybe you’re just feeling like it’s not taking you where you want to go.

Rick: I would say that there could be degrees of darkness, couldn’t there, with dark nights? There could be dusk nights where you can still kind of stumble along, and there could be pitch-black nights in which you can’t find your way at all. And some could be just mildly depressing, while some could make you consider suicide or actually commit it. We don’t want to oversimplify the term.

CC: Thank you. I think that’s very true, and some might not fit that kind of dark-night description at all. What’s really happening is that there’s an undermining of the structures of our psyche, that the edges are softening.

So, like for me, there was a sense that, “Oh my God, everything I’ve been learning is all a belief about reality. It’s not necessarily reality,” and just falling through that and into “What do I know?” and that state of not knowing.

So, it might be a very internal thing, it might be very subtle, and people’s lives might go on just pretty much as normal. So, they may or may not feel like, “Oh, everything’s falling apart.”

CC: I do want to say that not all life passages that are painful are dark nights, and there is depression that’s not a dark night. So, just because you’re depressed doesn’t mean you’re in a dark night, and vice versa.

I do want people to get appropriate help, especially if they are feeling really dark and/or if they’re feeling like life’s not working.

Rick: I had a young friend who was still alive when I started this series, and he was a very spiritual guy and everybody loved him. He got into this real dark thing and he kind of gave it a spiritual spin, in terms of his not really belonging on the planet and things like that, and he ended up killing himself. It was a real tragedy.

So, I think what you’re saying there is important, that we should seek help if we need help, and not assume that what we’re experiencing is just some kind of spiritual transition and that we’re competent to handle it entirely on our own.

CC: Absolutely. In fact, part of my life purpose is that people don’t have to encounter this alone, and so I offer my support, and I have many colleagues who are offering their support.

It can be really tough to encounter the starkness and sheer hard time of being a human at times on your own. I really want people to know that support is available, and not necessarily only through people like Waking Down teachers. Obviously, there are all kinds of useful therapies that also are good and useful for people.

The core wound

Rick: So, there’s a whole lot in Waking Down about the core wound, and I’ve pondered what that means over the years. As I understand it, there is this paradox or juxtaposition between our divine nature and our human nature. The divine nature is unbounded and blissful and eternal and indestructible and all that stuff, and the human nature is flawed by necessity. There’s always going to be some screws loose or some wires crossed or some scarring from our past or whatever.

And so there’s always going to be a rub between the perfect dimension of our life, of our being, and the imperfect. That rub is the core wound. Is that correct?

CC: That’s pretty good, yeah. And it’s not just that we’re flawed, although that’s often true. It’s that we juxtapose in our mind what is currently—which always has limits—with what could be.

In our minds, we compare what is against our idealized sense of what could be, and then we tend to judge what is negatively.

And that’s a big part of what causes the pain that we call the core wound: the resistance to what is. It’s like, “Oh my God, this is just not a perfect world, and people do awful things here, and I hate it,” or, “It makes me terribly sad.” That comes from feeling that there’s something fundamentally wrong.

That feeling of something not being okay, or being fundamentally wrong or flawed or insufficient, is close to what we mean by core wound.

Rick: There’s something that comes to mind with regard to the way you defined it, which is that there’s that popular saying that we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. It may very well be that we have come from some place, or lived in dimensions at times in our lives, in the big sense of the word, where it really was quite heavenly and ideal. There’s some kind of residual remembrance of that more ideal state that causes us to feel like this is never quite good enough for me.

CC: I call the core wound the portal, because it’s the portal to embodied awakening. You don’t have to encounter or pass through that portal unless embodied awakening is where you’re headed. But if you want to fully land and fully be in that radical embrace of all that you are, the core wound is going to be very key to that.

You can’t will yourself into the core wound, and you can’t jump into the core wound in order to get out the other side. It is an existential condition of being a human being, and what you can do is let yourself touch into it and not assume that those thoughts you have are necessarily the whole story or true.

So we can get comfortable. The emotional quality I felt around the core wound was deep, deep sadness and grieving, as if the world was just this massive pool of sorrow. When I permitted myself to live as that, it was very important.

Instead of trying to fix it or trying to heal it or trying to make it go away, it just became that. And then I relaxed into it, and then it stopped. It shifted. It shifted, but not through any effort I made to make it go away. It shifted. So, in a way, I can still remember that, but I don’t live there now.

When you stop resisting, you can discover that you can live here as an embodied, conscious being.

Rick: Would you say that an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict, a TV addict—somebody who is just sort of an escape addict, trying to escape in any way, shape, or form—is, when you get right down to it, resisting their core wound?

CC: Oh, sure. I would. I would say that it drives the vast majority of human endeavor in some way or another.

People stay busy in all kinds of ways, not just negative but also positive ways. They stay busy keeping themselves preoccupied so they don’t really encounter that “ugh” at the core. And when they start meditating and start allowing themselves to drop deeper, then they usually start to get a little more aware of what that might be.

And it’s a good thing to feel. It’s a good thing to make friends with.

👁️ Green-lighting our experience

Rick: Let’s talk a little bit about green lighting.

CC: Green lighting is a fun concept, and it’s very, very useful. It’s often one of the things people report as the most useful, and that is permitting yourself to be as you are. Giving yourself permission to be. To be petty, to be selfish, to be flawed, to be incomplete, to be happy, to be miserable, to be whatever is happening, and to be good at certain things and not good at other things.

What happens for almost all humans is that we get so trained, and so conditioned, and so programmed to always be trying to second-guess if we’re doing it right. Then we get spiritual teachings on top of that which tell us what we should be doing to be doing it right, and/or how we should be feeling if things were right.

Green lighting is a first step of relaxing the knots in our being and just saying, “Okay, let me just be as I am for a while.” And get curious then about what I am. If we can let go of some of the ways we’re trying to make ourselves be a certain way and just allow, then amazing things can start to happen, and will start to happen, and it can be profoundly healing.

Rick: One might say, “Okay, I ate all the macadamia nuts and there’s none left for anybody else, but I was just green lighting, so hey, get off my back.”

CC: People often misinterpret, though, Rick, that green lighting means green lighting all of your actions. That’s not what it means, because if your action is to punch that person in the face, if that’s your impulse, or your impulse is to hurt people, then green lighting doesn’t mean you get to go ahead and do that. It just means the impulse to do it is human, and you can forgive yourself for having the impulse.

Rick: As with most things, there needs to be a balance; there needs to be discrimination. We shouldn’t take these concepts to extremes and use them as some sort of alibi for acting like a jerk.

CC: In our framework, green lighting is just a way of opening to what is so you can actually look to see what’s driving it.

Rick: So, next chapter, “In-Seeing.” I like this one. If you go to a conference and you hear all these interesting speakers, you get a glimpse of their perspective, but wouldn’t it be cool to be able to actually see the world through their eyes rather than just hear their talk? Then you’d really get a very visceral and real and full sense of what they were presenting.

CC: Right, that’s possible, and that’s a fairly advanced level of in-seeing. As I use the word, I start with using in-seeing as a way to become more fully aware of what’s showing up in me, in my reactivity, in my thoughts, in my feelings, in my ideas about life.

I find that these all are body-based, that there’s a way of using in-seeing to invite what I call the inner body to bring forward information that is below the threshold of my thinking mind. So, my thinking mind I call a linear thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought track. Then there’s the body-mind, which I say is like a sphere. It’s like it’s 360-degree information, so much more full.

Normally, we just keep that right below our neck. We’re not very aware of what’s going on in there, and yet it’s so rich and it gives us so much information. If we surface it more intentionally into our awareness, then we’re not going to be blindsided so often by it. We’re also not going to be subject to re-experiencing the same old kind of reactivity over and over and over again.

So, in-seeing is a way of bringing that forward consciously and with curiosity, warmth, and compassion to what I call the parts of myself. There might be a part of myself that’s like a little five-year-old or maybe a six-year-old going to school for the first time, and she’s a little scared, a little anxious, and she’s hoping the teacher likes what she says, and she might really want to run away and hide.

If I can bring some warmth and attention to her, she’s not going to necessarily have such an extreme reaction, and she might find it’s okay to come out and play. So, it’s hard to simplify what it is. It’s just such a rich, rich field of self-learning, self-knowledge.

Rick: And practically speaking, how does one do it? I mean, are there techniques in the Waking Down group for doing what you’ve just described?

CC: Well, the in-seeing is a technique. I have an eight-step process that you’d have to pretty much pick up the book and read. The in-seeing is something that I’ve put together; it’s not something all Waking Down teachers do.

I base it a lot on what I learned by studying focusing, which goes back to Eugene Gendlin and 50 or 60 years of experience with that, and it’s my own way of doing it that supports awakening. So, it’s bringing attention, it’s inviting things forward, it’s being a good listener to your own inner parts.

We also find that there are parts that are in relation to other parts, and they can be some of the more entangled places in our being and why we often feel stuck. There might be a part that’s very playful and wants to come out and engage, and there might be another part that’s saying, “It’s not safe to do that, shut up, don’t say that, don’t do that.”

And then you can just get frozen right there: “Do I, do I not, do I what, what, what?” And there’s a way to engage the different sides of ourselves and actually make room for all of them. And what can do that is presence, and that’s the next chapter: presence.

Rick: A lot of times things we’ve been talking about, and things various other spiritual teachers talk about, people hear them as words, and without presence it’s really hard to take them to heart or implement them. It’s like, it sounds good, but how do I do it?

CC: One thing is to say there’s no cookie-cutter answer to that because every person is unique. One of the things that I think Waking Down generally does well is that we have a lot of personal attention for people. It’s not just one teacher sitting up front with 50 or 300 people. It’s somebody who actually gets to know you, gets to track you, gets to find what works for you and support you in that and cultivate it.

But another reason I’m so big on in-seeing is that in-seeing utilizes a state we could call presence. And that’s a curious, warm, caring, compassionate state that can actually be cultivated like a muscle. When I’m supporting someone in discovering what’s going on internally, I’m helping them find that state of presence for themselves. The more they do that, the stronger it gets. The stronger it gets, the more they can begin to realize that presence isn’t just a state, but it’s also who they are.

Rick: How do you help them find it?

CC: I’d say a lot of it’s modeling. So, we could call it templating, or modeling, or transmission. Because I am in presence with them and coming from that place, they can see how it operates through me. They can experience it even in that nonverbal way. And the field of presence is being augmented by our interaction. That helps people to discover it for themselves.

Rick: Does that require physical proximity?

CC: No. No, it’s amazing.

Rick: Does physical proximity help?

CC: Oh, I think some physical proximity is a great thing and desirable when possible. But over phone lines, over Skype, it also works.

Gazing and transmission

Rick: So, in Waking Down, I know there’s this thing that you do, gazing. Since we’re talking about presence and transmission and all, would this be a good time to have a little gazing session?

CC: Okay, gazing is a form of connecting with another person nonverbally. When you’re connecting with someone who’s living in this embodied, awakened condition, you can take advantage to come into resonance with the frequencies of that. Your body can template off of that or come into resonance with it.

There really isn’t anything you have to do with it. You don’t have to have a particular attitude. You don’t have to feel anything in particular. In fact, anything could happen. You might feel resistance to it or dislike of it. You might feel your heart opening and feel wonderful. The whole range of things can happen, and that’s not really what it’s about.

It’s just about saying hello, being to being. Being as expressed through CC is here to call being forth in other bodies. And so that’s my love, and that’s what happens with gazing. That’s the potential, anyway.

Rick: You say that it can even be done with a photo or with a video. So, this is not going to just be you gazing with me, nor even just you gazing with all the people who happen to be watching live, but people who might watch this five years from now. It can have some kind of value for them.

CC: Right, yes. I will gaze with the camera, Rick, and all the people who might be served by this into the future.

Rick: Thank you. That was nice.

Nonduality and the human world

Here’s this one first: “My girlfriend is really into non-duality, and I would like to help her understand the world. She is depressed and is having an existential crisis. She is a seeker after enlightenment and inner fulfillment. I am struggling to understand what non-duality is all about. I would like to know what’s wrong with duality. Thank you.”

CC: Well, that’s an interesting question. There are so many things wrong with duality. Where do we start? I mean, in the world of form, there’s a million great things and a million tragic things, and he’s seeing some of that in his girlfriend and what she’s struggling with right now.

So, duality and non-duality are concepts, and I think it’s just more important to be real and be human and find our hearts and find what’s in the way of our hearts being able to connect. Generally, we’ve had lots and lots of experiences in life that have caused our hearts to shut down, to fold, to become armored, as if there’s Styrofoam packed around all our hearts.

A lot of our lack of satisfaction in life comes from the fact that we are not able to meet it with a full-hearted being. So, whatever you’re naming it, I think that’s the most important thing, and I hope that the author of the question knows that support is available and there are people who can support her.

Rick: It’s not an either/or situation. It’s not like we have to choose—as your book title implies—it’s not like we have to choose the world of duality, human humanity, over the world of non-duality, divinity. The two can mesh and intermesh and intertwine and coexist and co-enrich one another, and that’s really what we’re talking about today.

CC: Right, and both of those positions are a little bit too fundamentalist, maybe, and there’s the meeting place.

Rick: Yeah, the both/and.

CC: There’s a field, and I will meet you there.

Rick: Beautiful.

CC: Fundamentally, there isn’t any such thing as divine versus material world. It’s all one thing; it’s a whole cloth. That’s why I say it’s concepts. We like to play in the concept realm, which might actually keep us from direct experience.

❤️ Presence in relationship

Rick: Here’s another question: “What are some beneficial techniques that my boyfriend and I can use to clear shadow aspects of ourselves? We are really interested in using our relationship to consciously catapult our spiritual progression and heal past experiences and triggers that romantic relationships are so good at bringing up.”

CC: Oh, bravo! I’m glad you’ve got a partner to engage in that whole exploration with you, and I wish you all the best. I would recommend people start with in-seeing and start to cultivate that state of presence, learn what presence feels like, and bring that to their own parts.

Then the next step—I call that inner mutuality, Rick—is outer mutuality: realizing that the person sitting opposite you isn’t a whole lot different from the kinds of oppositional parts that we run into internally. Presence can be discovered to have room for even strongly divergent viewpoints to coexist without there necessarily being a conflict around it. There is a skill there, and it’s worth cultivating.

Rick: Which has interesting implications for the Israel-Palestine conflict or many other conflicts in the world. If there could be more presence in the collective consciousness, then these seemingly irreconcilable differences, I think, could be reconciled. Einstein had that famous quote about not trying to solve a problem on the level at which it was formed. You have to move to a bigger context, and then things which seem like there’s no way out can actually reconcile and resolve.

CC: As you speak and we’re using the term presence, I want to say how I use the term, because sometimes people use the term presence for what I would probably use the term consciousness for, which is the absolute dimension, the transcendent dimension.

I have a very specific way of using the term presence, and we could say that it is consciousness embodying, or consciousness as it touches form. As it comes into embodiment, it picks up qualities of heart like warmth, curiosity, compassion, and caring about the human condition.

For me, presence is a very dynamic and transformative principle, whereas consciousness is just the ever-present reality. But, as a manner of speaking, consciousness doesn’t seem to care. Presence cares deeply.

Rick: That makes total sense. What you’re saying is that whereas consciousness has this aloof, detached, quality-less connotation to it, presence is the same stuff but infused into life, infused into the world, into the relative, like sap in a tree. Then it flows and infuses and nourishes all the leaves and branches and so on.

CC: Right. In this sense, it’s the field that is very nurturing to all levels of aliveness. We can cultivate it as a state, but beyond it being just a state, I think it’s also a fundamental principle. We could say it’s capital-H Heart, our divine love.

Consciousness doesn’t seem to care. Presence cares deeply.

Presence isn’t just being present in the present moment, but it’s the sense of a field that’s really being here, that’s coming forward into embodiment and supportive of that whole process.

Closing thoughts

Rick: This has been an interview with CC Leigh, and it’s part of an ongoing series. As CC mentioned, there’s a whole archive on batgap.com which you can explore.

There’s an upcoming interviews page where you can see who’s scheduled, and you’ll see links to the live-streaming thing. There’s a donate button on the site which I rely upon people clicking in order to be able to devote as much time as we do to it. There’s also a place to sign up for my email newsletter, and there’s an audio podcast of the whole thing.

Thanks for listening or watching, and next week is someone who is not in the Waking Down tradition but who will also be talking about using the body as a way of tuning ourselves more deeply to the Divine. That will be John Prendergast.

Rick: Thanks again, CC. It’s great.

CC: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Okay, happy travels, drive safely. Bye. Bye.