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Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is cc Li. CC is a waking down teacher or whatever they call them, we’ll get the terminology straight as we go along. And I’ve interviewed quite a few of those including Sanyo, Linda, Linda bonder, who founded waking down in mutuality. And, you know, I’ve been thinking that these days, embodiment is kind of a buzzword. And in spiritual circles, everybody’s talking about it. Were as 10 years ago, majority of people were kind of talking about this embodiment, oh, you’re, you’re not a person and all that. But from the get go, waking down has been all about, you know, well, as CC’s book implies becoming divinely human. You, you know, there are people who say, you are not a person, I suppose a waking down teacher might respond to say, yes, of course, you’re not, of course, you’re a person, you’re just not only a person, you know, there’s, that’s just there. They’re different dimensions to what you are, and waking down in mutuality, as I understand it, and we’re gonna 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 Leigh: that’s a good way to begin, Rick.
Rick Archer: Great. So what I’d also like to, let’s start, let’s talk about you personally, a little bit for a while, and then we’ll kind of go through your book and cover all kinds of points, I’m sure as we go along, and there’ll be an opportunity for people to submit questions during the interview. So 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 So people kind of get to know you and get a sense of, you know, how your life led up to where it is now. And then we’ll talk more specifically about what you have in your book and everything. Okay, so you’re born at a very young age, and
CC Leigh: I was very small. Yes.
Rick Archer: And there was something about a sunflower and when you were a child, you you were sort of having subtle perceptions and communications with, with nature spirits, or some such thing.
CC Leigh: Right, I suppose I was, like many people, something of a magical child. And one day, and I was adventurous, I didn’t always follow mom’s rules. I wandered away from home a bit further than usual and came across a pair of sunflowers growing out by the road and was gazing up at the big heads of the sunflowers and all of a sudden just felt completely enveloped and suffused and awash in something I’d never felt before. And it was like they loved me. And you know, just totally and 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 imagination and you know, who are you to be
Rick Archer: magic mushrooms are nibbling out there.
CC Leigh: So, so I lost touch with that for a long time until 1987, which I think was a kind of awakening year for a lot of people. The Harmonic Convergence, if you if that rings any bells for people, remember that. 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 no nothing planted, just weeds. And there was a sunflower growing there. And I sat down and gazed at that sunflower and 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. And that really sparked me to move into an active seeking phase at that point.
Rick Archer: It’s interesting because I don’t know a lot about Native American spirituality. But as I understand it, they you know, very often when they go through some initiation thing 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 ended up naming themselves after that. And so for you, it was kind of a sunflower. Kind of interesting.
CC Leigh: Right, right. But please don’t everyone start calling me sunflower?
Rick Archer: Sitting sunflower?
CC Leigh: Although I do treasure some flowers.
Rick Archer: Yeah. All right, we won’t. So, okay, so take us from there.
CC Leigh: Well, I in my early 20s, I experimented a lot, I came from a broken home, my parents split up when I was eight, my dad was 1000 miles away, and even just that far, emotionally as well, not very available. My mom was pretty devastated by the breakup. And she was quite emotionally unavailable as well. And somehow kept a home together. But it was, it was very minimal, as far as you know, it being a nurturing environment. So I, by the time I was in college, I was desperate for love and desperate to understand something and started experimenting a lot with boys and with psychoactive substances, I got into a dormitory at the University of Massachusetts, where dropping acid was kind of the thing you do on Friday nights. And that, of course, was mind blowing took me way out of any frames of references I’d had up to that point. And yet, I often was disappointed that I wasn’t encountering, you know, the deity of mescaline or whatever I was looking for. But one, one of those journeys did absolutely take me down inside the very structure of how things are 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, to light to color. And I was able to just travel in between all of those frequencies. And I had no context for understanding that I had no way to really even talk about it. But I remember it till now. So that was useful. As far as just letting me know that physical reality wasn’t all there is.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that was that kind of thing was an eye opener for many of us. Certainly not a long term solution, but definitely gave you kind of an unforgettable glimpse into the fact that there’s more to life than meets the eye.
CC Leigh: Absolutely.
Rick Archer: Okay, next step.
CC Leigh: Well, I majored in animal science, and college and after that, I became a weak Well, we today, we would call them a dog whisperer. I raised dogs I trained and showed them and I made my living by working with people, helping them raise their dogs and helping them deal with behavior problems. And 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. Maybe animals were a safer medium. But they also kept the heart open. And so it was a wonderful way to relate to people through the medium of dogs, because they’re so heart based. Yeah. And I learned a lot about people and about teaching and about coaching through that avenue.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think a lot of people find that, you know, animals and dogs are a lot easier to deal with and human beings, you know, they’re a lot less complicated. And so, we, you know, and as you say, they really bring some heart into the, into the equation. So did you feel like your animal communication thing your dog whisperer thing was, must have been kind of tied in with the fact that you had some subtler perception dawning or having gone at some point. And so you couldn’t just be a sort of a scientist studying blood samples or something, you had to sort of bring your your latent talents to bear in, in the field of your choice.
CC Leigh: It’s really true. Rick, when I was in college, there was a lot of I was encouraged to study things where you dissect animals, you know, to be sign a scientist in that regard, in the laboratory are, are even doing research on humans. And in Psych 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, you know, wasn’t going to be found in the test tubes and the laboratories.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Okay. And so next step.
CC Leigh: Okay, so that so I got, I had a home and 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 have a business. And then we come up to that shift point in 1987. And at that point, things seemed to be falling apart. It was one of the first I think one of my first Dark Night experiences were things that had been working well just all started falling apart, not working. And lots of things went wrong. And that send me actually sent me to the meditation cushion
Rick Archer: with your met, your marriage broke up at that point in,
CC Leigh: shortly after I started sitting and inquiring and meditating and trying to learn how to meditate really. And, and that got too strange because I started channeling at that point, just spontaneously, yeah, pretty much spontaneously, although I had studied metaphysics, and I’d studied channeled material. So I had a framework for what it was, I never in a million years expected that would happen for me. But when I started to get quiet, and listen, I had responses coming back to me in in my inner awareness. And I just developed that into a form of communicating with guides, who were seeming to show up for my education and learning and and that just weirded my husband out no end
Rick Archer: just for your education, or were you actually sort of helping clients with your channeling?
CC Leigh: I was leery of doing that. I’m glad I didn’t go down that route, actually. It it felt like something I could learn from, but I didn’t see that taking money for it was the way to go. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Alright, so your husband wasn’t exactly thrilled, this turn of events.
CC Leigh: And the marriage broke up pretty quickly. And things led to things. And I ended up 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. And, I mean, so I guess there was a few years of exploration and growth and experimenting with altered states and different contact with things that actually felt very wonderful for a while, and then it stopped being productive. And I hit another dark night, which was even more whole, whole scale. You know, every level of my being, I just fell into self doubt. And I felt in all of my shadow, all of my self judgment, my wicked inner critic, just went on a rampage. And I kind of just caved, and just caved.
Rick Archer: The reason I’m having you go through this stuff is that people can relate to it, you know. I mean, often teachers get up on stages and, or on YouTube or whatever, and they’re talking and, and they they kind of 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, which we’ll talk about later. But, you know, it’s, I think it’s can be and people get this subtle feeling that Oh, I could never be like them, you know, but I think it can be sort of encouraging for people to realize that as the FIRESIGN theatre, put it, we’re all bozos on this bus and, you know, people who have been, you know, spiritual teachers who seem to really have their act together. I’ve been through all kinds of stuff over the years to get to where they are today, and are again, still going through stuff. So I just wanted to throw that in there just to give your voice arrest for a second and put it in context.
CC Leigh: 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 their good hat. And that was, that was the way that was the way it was showing up for me. And what was really happening, I think, is that I had opened myself up to very beautiful belief systems about a multi dimensional reality, and that I was a very special part of that, and that I had a special destiny. And I really fell into that into being almost seduced by it for a while. And I think what happened? I don’t really know why, but maybe organically, I was just ready for to go deeper, I had to deeper in order to really find what’s true. And, you know, in beliefs weren’t, it wasn’t about beliefs, it wasn’t about pictures of reality that you choose to believe this or choose to believe that, that lost all of its interest to 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 Archer: That’s interesting about, you know, feeling you’re special, because I think egotism is kind of can be insidious. And it can. And, you know, we’re the last people to know it, when it’s creeping up on us. Others may be able to see it, perhaps, but, you know, it blinds us to itself. And, you know, and many teachers, especially when they Well, you aren’t at the teacher stage yet, but many teachers, especially when they start getting showered with a lot of attention and praise, and, you know, love, it can really go to their heads. And so I know that you’re waiting down there kind of mutual safeguards against this kind of thing. But if, of course, you hadn’t gotten into waking down yet. But anyway, it’s an interesting thing that you kind of recognized that in yourself on your own and sounds like move through it.
CC Leigh: Well, I get humbled,
Rick Archer: you got smacked down by circumstances a bit.
CC Leigh: Yeah, it wasn’t, 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 you, looking out for me to bring me to my knees and actually crack me open. So that, so that I might discover something much more important than, you know, this little person with her ideas about what reality is?
Rick Archer: Yeah. Yeah. Now I’m starting to talk more, then. So that that kind of resonates with one of my favorite themes is, which is that? You know, and I’ve said this many times, which is, you know, the universe is like this big evolution machine, and we’re here to grow. And there is an intelligence that is going to facilitate or push along our growth, whether we cooperate with it, or, you know, resist it kicking and screaming. But there there is that kind of core force that influences and governs and guides our lives. And it’s interesting to reflect upon that sometimes in discussions like this.
CC Leigh: Well, there certainly seems to be a theme that has pulled me along and was pretty early on to give me a sense of what my purpose is here in this life and then, and then provide me all the challenges and reasons to be disillusioned and deconstructed in order to make me a vessel. Yeah, we might say, to be able to support other people and awakening.
Rick Archer: I sometimes think that the word dissolution has really has a positive connotation for spiritual aspirants because we really, you know, 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, you know, conducive to our, our growth.
CC Leigh: Yeah, it’s pretty terrifying, actually, because the way we’re structured it’s, or the way I was structured certainly thought it had some idea about how to be in the world and how to Take care of things. And when all that started crumbling around me, I lost touch with my, my north, my compass, it’s like, and it was quite bewildering and devastating in a way just feeling I guess simultaneously like, I wanted to, 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. And, and it’s one, you know, humble sounds almost like a positive quality, but there’s a way in which it, it was more like, Oh, I’m just completely not fit, unable, inadequate. And hopeless. Yeah.
Rick Archer: I don’t know if that’s necessarily I mean, there are different ways of defining words. And that’s perhaps one way of, you know, defining humble is like, Oh, I’m so unworthy, and, you know, incapable, and all sorts of things like that. But another nicer way of defining humble is just, you know, not insisting that things happen any particular way, being willing to align with higher intelligence, if one can find find a way to align with it, so that you’re not getting in its way. That’s the way I’d like to define humble.
CC Leigh: Oh, I totally agree that that was the ultimate outcome. Yeah. You know, to just be, could say, just be really to just be, and not try to be something big or something small, you know, not just being exactly what size I am. And doing what I can in the moment and showing up. And that’s kind of just been how it’s been?
Rick Archer: Yeah, so I haven’t asked you for specifics about all these things that humbled you and knocked you down. And I don’t know if that’s even necessary, because everybody’s gonna have their own specifics, and might be good to stick to general principles. But so after this, I guess you might have called the might in breaking down terms, you might call this a rot period, where everything was falling apart for you, and nothing was working out. And, you know, nature was smacking you around. Was there a light at the end of the tunnel that eventually kind of came into?
CC Leigh: Yes, the again, it took me just like that earlier, dark night period kind of brought me to the meditation cushion. This one brought me back and deeper. And, and 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 through via 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, for whatever inner guidance was bringing me along. And giving me energy, I didn’t have energy for much at that point that I had energy, or during that. So I would do these long meditations. And I had to do them lying down. Because I couldn’t sit up that long, long meditations where 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 and my heart would be there and then they would get slower and subtract away. And then it happened that it seemed like that was a portal of sorts. to something I can’t put into words, that was when all the activity stopped. I shifted and felt that I was in my true home. My you know, the the heart of love the utter essence the womb, all these words are inadequate, because they’re not it. But that happened and and it was utterly satisfying. Like, like, I’d have I had to follow this thread until I got there. Because I had to know where I came from where I was going, what I was truly, what I was truly. And, and I for about a year, every, every so often, I would have another opportunity to merge into that
Rick Archer: just once a year.
CC Leigh: No, throughout the year throughout a year or so maybe a dozen times.
Rick Archer: Okay, so maybe once a month, you lie down and do this.
CC Leigh: Yeah, it wasn’t on the schedule, though. Okay, it was, it was it was like somehow the the right circumstances would show up. And it would be like, like, something was opening up for me.
Rick Archer: And that’s pretty characteristic. And 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, you know, that the sense of the senses, withdrawal from their objects, and sometimes simultaneously, perhaps, sometimes sequentially, as you described? And then, you know, the self is realizes itself by itself without any sort of subject object relationship going on anymore.
CC Leigh: Right. Yeah. So that was a very important learning for me, discovery, maybe discovery. That was, again, for me in this lifetime, that was really important. It’s not always for other people. But for me, it was totally important. And also then opened up the next set of bewilderment, because it didn’t change me, it didn’t perfect me, it didn’t remove the challenges of being human.
Rick Archer: Well, at this stage, was it in any way sticky? Was it in any way permanent? Are you just once a month having this experience?
CC Leigh: Eight, it became a knowing it became a knowing it became a trustable knowing even though life, you know, activity and sensing and all would would turn outward again.
Rick Archer: There in the background, it was
CC Leigh: there in the background. And by around 1995, I it was just utterly trustable. And yet, I was still dealing at that point with. Now what is that? What does that do for my life? How do I live
Rick Archer: that in a couple dollars to get you a cup of coffee? Exactly. So really, it didn’t? I mean, it didn’t have any impact whatsoever on your life? Or what did it just I mean, it didn’t sort of diminish the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to some extent are?
CC Leigh: Well, yeah, it had it had tremendous effect in certain ways. It, it just didn’t relieve the confusion about being a bewildered human. But But to some degree, it relieved the confusion about who I was, and it was the end of seeking. Yeah, from that point on, I really wasn’t seeking. I was just exploring Now, what does this mean? You know, I still have, I’m still thinking, I’m still having emotions, I’m still reacting. And I’m still attached in various ways. And I think I was quite clear that I wanted to help other people awaken. And yet did not feel in any way. Really. Like I was ready for that or qualified, or knew how there was, there was a I, I became more and more comfortable living in a state of not knowing I’ll put it that way. But at that time, I had no framework for how you’d be a teacher. If, if, if you’re living in a state of not knowing.
Rick Archer: Yeah, well, first of all, I like your distinction between seeking and exploring, you know, it’s somewhat in vogue to, for people to say, give up the search. But that’s just words. And a lot of times people hear those words, and they’re really not, they’re still really in seeking mode, you know, they haven’t had that experience you’ve just described and, and so it doesn’t, it leaves them kind of frustrated, I think, to try to follow such advice. But there’s definitely a time when a certain phase has passed and when, you know, feels a contentment, that so that sort of that emptiness isn’t gnawing at you all the time. And so you do feel like there’s a relaxation of seeking and yet, boy, there’s there’s certainly plenty left to explore no end of it. So I like that distinction. Anyway, just wanted to say that.
CC Leigh: Thank you. Yes, I think it’s an important one. And, and I don’t know that you can do Stop the search by act a Well, I think it it doesn’t stop until it’s completed itself in a certain fundamental way. Yeah, in
Rick Archer: 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 what’s wrong with me why, you know, when can I stop the search. And so it’s just good to have this understanding that that a certain phase of our development, it’s natural to have this seeking energy and a certain phase, it’s natural for it to drop off. And so just gotta be honest with where you are, and go with it.
CC Leigh: Oh, Rick, so much of what we encounter in spiritual teaching, I think only serves to create anxiety and guilt and sense of not being able to do it the way we’re supposed to be doing. Yeah,
Rick Archer: we often get emails from people saying, What’s wrong with me, you know, I’ve been tried so many different things, and nothing has worked and, you know, just becomes a kind of a way for people to beat themselves up. And it shouldn’t be that.
CC Leigh: Well, meeting people beating yourself up is something people are really good at, in my experience. And it’s heartbreaking for me to see how people do that, and how much how much pain and suffering happens along that line. And that’s one of the things I really love about the kind of work I do with people that we really help people soften those edges around that.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I will be talking about green lighting after a while. I think that probably relates to what we’re seeing right now. All right, well, let’s, let’s continue on with the, with the biography.
CC Leigh: Sure. Sure, um, around that time, I did drop out. I. So before 1995, you know, in those years, the early 1990s, I was in this dark knight passage. I was having discoveries, but I was also being undone. And I had no energy for being productive in the world. And I basically, that was my first time of living in an RV. I borrowed that off, 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, wandering in the wilderness.
Rick Archer: Buoyed by gasoline and food and stuff like that, or you had some kind of
CC Leigh: a well, okay, so proceeds from the house I’d had in California, bought me a little bit of gas, a little bit of food and, and I lived quite frugally and stretch that out for as long as I could. Okay. Yeah, I had to drop out. i At that point, tuning into what my body wanted. More than anything, Reckitt wanted to sit under a Bodhi tree and have someone bring me meals. Okay. Cool. Quick
Rick Archer: break here. This came around, had to introduce our new dog. This is Luna and we picked her up from an animal shelter down in Illinois. And she’s doing pretty good. She has a she has some kind of kennel cough thing going on that we haven’t totally figured out.
CC Leigh: It’ll probably pass.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Right. You take her Irene so she doesn’t get tangled up in the wires. Thank you. Okay. And she’s about 15 pounds.
CC Leigh: She says I’m sleeping.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
CC Leigh: We’re losing your head there, Irene.
Rick Archer: All righty. So. Okay, so sorry about that. When your dog comes around, you gotta lift. Lift them up, or here and yeah,
CC Leigh: Tucker. Can you hear me? Can we or fair enough Dog Break? 123 Come on. Here we go. Okay. This has to be in my lap.
Rick Archer: Hey, oh. What do you call us? Australian shepherds.
CC Leigh: Australian shepherd.
Rick Archer: I love those dogs.
CC Leigh: Tucker.
Rick Archer: He’s beautiful.
CC Leigh: He’s a little bigger. He’s 35 pounds. Say hi Tucker.
Rick Archer: I love that. Two different color eyes thing. They
CC Leigh: say hi to everybody.
Rick Archer: Hi Tucker.
CC Leigh: Can you asleep in
Rick Archer: beautiful high energy dog. He was able to get some exercise with him.
CC Leigh: Oh, well. He’s good for me in that regard. Yeah, get out there. If he’s a great frisbee dog, so yeah, he gets a lot of exercise while I just stand still. And
Rick Archer: oh, well, at least your arms are in shape. Okay, so where were we
CC Leigh: somewhere in the night, oh, my first stint in an RV dropping out world, I’m like so, so really by Odyssey after this sense of knowing myself, knowing, knowing who I am, what I am stable, I was stabilizing, I was still dealing with you the kind of the emotional fallout of the pain of my life, or maybe the pain of being human. And, and 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, if you just do your right healing work, that wouldn’t be happening anymore. And yeah, there was this persistent, kind of deep, melancholy, sad, grieving, feeling quality, feeling tone, when I would sense inward.
Rick Archer: Do you have a sense? Did you then? Or do you now have a sense that that kind of transcendence experience that you’re tapping into was acting like a solvent and kind of loosening things up that we’re all sort of stuck and calcified and, and, you know, beginning to, you know, to facilitate catharsis or transformation going inside you?
CC Leigh: Well, it was definitely pulling things up to the surface. So that’s, that’s a good way to describe it. And, and I was going deeper with that. And not just being, you know, on the surface reactive or, you know, but I was what I was feeling, sensing deeper and deeper and going into what, what is here? What is here at the base of my experience, and why isn’t it just totally peaceful? Because when I would shift in, and when I would shift away from outward experience and fall totally into that inner no space, non being, you know, they’re all the questions resolved, there was total love, total peace, total security, safety, total relaxation as that. And then, but there was this other stuff going on, you know, in me as well. And I just had the sense that there, 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 do that I didn’t know how to make that happen, didn’t really have much in the way of teachers at that point. But I sense that the solution was not simply to call my humaneness unreal, in any way, and try to get out of it, but was just stay with it and find the integration.
Rick Archer: That’s good. You know, it’s my I want to interject here that people who have really emphasized calling their humaneness unreal and, and trying to sort of escape, and it’s for Georgia to use the word escape, but who’ve just really pushed on that angle. There are many cases getting reported to me in which people have really gotten themselves in trouble by doing that, you know, it’s almost like they’ve intentionally cultured a sort of a schism, or, you know, splitting their personality and, you know, brought on some kind of, you know, rather serious dysfunctionality in their lives. So I just want to sort of bring that out again, because it’s still in vogue and some spiritual circles to try to do that, or at least the way that’s presented that people get the impression that they’re supposed to try to do that. And it can actually not only not be helpful, but can actually get people in trouble.
CC Leigh: Right, right. Well, we’ve learned a lot. 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. And 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. And 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. So the, all the transcendent dimensions and all of the embodied dimensions of what it is that we are, and including the interpersonal dimensions of what we are the way we’re not separate from one another.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I was just talking with Francis Bennett last night, it was a friend of mine, he just did a thing with Adyashanti, the night before, up there in California, and that was the whole theme of their presentation to about 300 people. And, you know, Francis made the point that a lot of times what people call non duality is really not non duality, it’s a duality because they’ve, they’ve sort of estranged themselves from a whole major section of their life, their their humaneness and their body, and, and so on, and just sort of taking refuge in in a detached or transcendent realm. And consider that to be non dual, which it is in and of itself. But if it’s excluding a major portion of life, then then it’s really more of a duality than we even started with. And, and so the direction we would want would be to have a large if we want non duality or to think in those terms, we want something much more inclusive, that that embraces the whole package.
CC Leigh: Right, I like to use the term radical embrace
Rick Archer: good. For Well, I just described,
CC Leigh: right? Yeah. Right, because we can radically embrace absolutely everything. And, you know, and it’s not about whether we like it or don’t like it, I mean, we could radically embrace our liking and our not liking. And our, you know, all of the range of experience can be can be welcomed, and included and it can be seen to be totally not. 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, or Despairing or depressed or angry. And, and that’s a fallacy. It’s a fallacy. I mean, CeCe angry is every much as consciousness expressing herself, you know, as she is when she’s sitting quietly and just being at ease.
Rick Archer: Yeah, but can that be taken to extremes? I mean, I can, you know, the traditional scriptures talk about equanimity and things like that not getting overly upset, and by failure, or overly rejoicing and success, but having, it’s like the analogy of, you know, if you’re a popper, you gain $10, it’s a big deal, you lose $10, it’s a big deal. But if you’re a millionaire, you can gain and lose hundreds 1000s. And it really doesn’t make it so that you still have your ups and downs in terms of those gains and losses. But it doesn’t shake your your status as a millionaire. And 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, or something like that. And isn’t Enlightenment worth the term a development in which, you know, extremes of darkness light that would have been worked through and, you know, infused with light or bliss, or whatever, so that, you know, you’d no longer be susceptible to them?
CC Leigh: Or you just, you just opened a big discussion, Rick, that’s five that will do that. Let’s do it. Because I think it’s important. I think there’s awakening, I would make a distinction that there’s awakening and there’s Enlightenment. And 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. And that’s what I was talking about in my apples and
Rick Archer: 90s phase. Yeah,
CC Leigh: right.
Rick Archer: Right.
CC Leigh: Right. It wasn’t fully integrated, and that full integration is taking years. And as I become more and more integrated, I am 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, it’s also fully given. I’m fully given into life, so I won’t say. 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, you know, heartbreaking. You know, I mean, we had the whole love story, you know, we
Rick Archer: So you had eight years, and for five of those, he had cancer.
CC Leigh: And for five of those, he had cancer and, and I’ll tell more of that story in a minute. And then I lost him, he did pass and, and, and that was the most excruciating experience. I, you know, I imagined anyone could ever go through was walking forward into death with him. And then it’s like, we were so merged, it was like somebody was peeling duct tape off my skin, you know, to have me experienced to separate the bodily separation from Him. So my awakeness did not, I would say the opposite of did, it didn’t buffer me, it enabled me to stay fully present, to every bit of that journey, right, all the way into and through, and of course, ongoing because it is still ongoing. Sure.
Rick Archer: So but maybe, equanimity, as I’ve discussed, presented, it is not a buffer or an anesthetic, as so much as it’s a well, it may serve as a buffer, but not by numbing you in any way. But rather by giving you a larger context in which to be grounded, such that 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 Leigh: That’s well said, Rick, that’s well said. I would say that’s quite true. Yeah. It enabled me to, to do what I did to make it through and also to, to be able to utilize support from many, many sources. Right. Now, that’s become a skill I have, that I did not have before. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Which many people in the world don’t have. And, you know, you see people utterly devastated by tragedies of various kinds, and, you know, severely traumatized, but you realize that if, you know, if they had more of a foundation of the type we’ve been describing, it’s not like they wouldn’t feel or they wouldn’t care, or, you know, or whatever, but they will just sort of, you know, there’s that saying in the Gita know that to be indeed indestructible, by which all this is pervaded, so that there’s a sort of an indestructibility that gets kind of awakened in your nature, that hell or high water cannot, cannot shake.
CC Leigh: Right? That’s very true. Yeah. It’s very true. It’s very solid. And it fundamentally knows, you know, I mean, I fundamentally know that I’m okay. Yeah, and that whatever happens is okay. And I can meet it, you know, meaning in that sense of I can, I can meet it, and I you know, and I will meet it, and and it cannot take away what I am yeah, not, not nothing can take that away.
Rick Archer: Solid. It’s even called the rock like in Sanskrit Natasja. It’s said to be like a rock, you know, imperturbable unshakable, indestructible. Okay, so, okay, we’ve got a few threads going on here now. And we haven’t totally got, you know, we were still, we left you back in the 90s. And we’re moving you along here and to eventually finding the waking down community, which I believe happened in the late 90s. So So where would you like to pick up the story from where we left to?
CC Leigh: Right. So I’d say through the 90s, I was often kind of traveling alone in the wilderness,
Rick Archer: metaphorically or literally,
CC Leigh: Well sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. And I was pretty much a loner, I did have people and teachers and books and we check into things from time to time but I didn’t have a community around me by any means. And it was a chance maybe a synchronistic happening that I picked up books annual had recently Sanyo bonder had recently written called waking down. And as I said, my apples and orange phase, I was looking for a way to integrate I was looking for a spiritual path that didn’t You know, favor one end of the polarity over the other. You know, the transcendent or the or the human, you know, there was plenty of people who were doing one or the other, but not so much that I was seeing that was doing both. So, it seemed to me that the point of waking down was that it was an attempt to do both to embrace our humaneness without pulling, you know, and, and also be fully awakening. And so that was enough to get me curious. So I traveled out to California to explore, and, and I kind of got caught up, I got hooked. I loved the people, I met Samuel and Linda and Faye, and Ted and Hillary and Dan and the early teachers in those days, and they welcomed me and I just saw all the potential of it. In some ways, just 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 that kind of people around me until them. And 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 fit into his try to be like him. There was a real and encouragement for people to be unique, and awakening as exactly who they were and find their own voice. So that was really important to me, I felt there would be room for me there.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s one thing I really like about the waking down community, which of course, I’ve only known as a interviewer, and as a friend of many of the people, but there’s no parodying going on, you know, it’s like, there is 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, you know, do what they’re meant to do. Nice.
CC Leigh: Right. Right. So I so in order, I didn’t have any money. So because I still hadn’t found a, you know, a very productive way to engage in the world, yet, I was still squeaking by. But I, so in order to take advantage of the learning opportunity, I moved to California and volunteered to help Samuel in his work. And eventually, we helped him make some money, and he was able to then start paying me. So 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.
Rick Archer: One thing interesting about Samuel, I’ve talked to him about this privately and all is it, you know, I mean, Adhidaiva was quite a character. And, you know, if you sort of get the inside track on some of the stuff that was going on with him, it’s scary. I mean, the the levels of decadence and indulgence in various things were shocking. And yet at the same time, he had this kind of incredible presence, apparently, and some very wonderful people have come out of that, like Samuel and Mercedes kinkel, and Sandra Glickman, and many others. So that in itself is a conundrum to me or kind of a paradox. But perhaps that was, in a way in a kind of a roundabout way. Just what someone like Samuel needed in order to establish something in which there was a respect for individual autonomy, and at the same time, but a kind of a, an adherence to ethical guidelines and respect for people and not, you know, a lack of, of taking advantage of and abusing people and so on. Just that thought just kind of came to me as I was thinking about Sanyo. And I didn’t know any comments on that.
CC Leigh: Well, complex subject, again, we’ve kind of touched on the fact that awakening doesn’t immediately transform personalities. And so,
Rick Archer: it can intoxicate egos. I mean, there can be powerful awakenings which can just make you a total egomaniac.
CC Leigh: Right, right. So so there’s so there’s a couple Certain there, and that’s the, you know, it’s become a sad story that we’ve seen repeated many times of people who become awake enough that they attract other people to be followers and those people project onto them. Powers and perfection that they may or may not be really intact enough to handle. And, you know, and there’s there gets to be all kinds of confusion around that, you know, what is okay? What’s not okay, if I’m awake, if I’ve already accomplished that, then whatever I do should be, you know, considered to be an expression of divine being. Yep. And that, you know, I’m sorry, I find that to be bullshit.
Rick Archer: Sometimes we’ll say that explicitly. And, and, and can go away off on tangents in terms of their treatment of people. I mean, Andrew Koan is a case in point, I interviewed Andrew shortly before he dropped out of his teaching role and went off to India and kind of disappeared. And he, you know, he’s sort of a good case in point in a way in which he kind of realized that he had, you know, despite his awakening, which was genuine, had really been kind of a screw up in many respects, and decided, I just can’t, I don’t belong in this role anymore, I’m going to go and work on myself for however long it takes. And he’s still out there doing that, pretty much no one has heard of him or heard from him since, whereas others, you know, they just get deeper and deeper into it, and oh, no, I’m an avatar, you know, and it just gets more and more kind of weird.
CC Leigh: Well, so the early days, the people around Staniel is a bit of a wild west. And, and anything goes and there was not a lot of understanding of power differentials. And I think that came in as, as the community around him was maturing, being able to notice the ways, there were there were things that were out of integrity, and call them, you know, name them. And we started to create ethical policies. And everyone in teaching roles was expected to sign on to these ethical policies and agree to them and, and they have teeth, you know, especially as we formed in 2005. So the work has changed over the years in 2005 2004 2005, there was, Sanyo 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. And held meetings and did planning sessions. And eventually, a team of three of us, Ron amnis, Krishna, Bouchy, and myself, took on the task of creating some new structures. And one thing we created was the waking down Teacher Association, which now has about 40 members, and is very much different than 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, and they became a requirement for maintaining membership. So so at that point, we had teeth we had, you know, and not to be punitive to anyone, but to be mutually supportive of people. And to become raising our awareness around these places where people were teachers get hung up in their ethical problems. So around money around sex around power, those are the biggies. And, yeah, so So to be in a, 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 they’re not real, where their ethics are fuzzy, they can get counseled. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Like if they’re, well, 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 in some chemistry started. And so you had to kind of step back and, you know, check with your fellow teachers, I guess, and stuff and think, Alright, how do I proceed with this? And in a way that’s not going to violate the ethics of our group? Right.
CC Leigh: Right. Right. So yeah, so 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. And so yeah, absolutely. There was this rule that we couldn’t act on anything during the course of the retreat, of course. And yet, you know, you can feel the energy starting to move. And 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. You know, I want to make sure he’s well supported. And 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 so we were given a stamp of approval.
Rick Archer: Yeah, with the chaperone, of course,
CC Leigh: exploring without a chaperone.
Rick Archer: Okay, so I think what we’ve done so far now is we’ve kind of giving people a sense that this waking down group that you’re part of, has a nice structure to it has certain standards that help to prevent, you know, a lot of the horror stories that happen sometimes in spiritual groups, but we still don’t know much about what it is. And so I’d kind of like to use your book as a, you know, as a outline, for walking through what waking it down is. And so some of its important principles. It’s a really well written book, and I’ve read most of it and really enjoyed it. So do you have a copy there yourself? I do. Good. So let’s kind of walk through it a little bit, and use the chapter titles and so on, and some of the sub heads as main point so that we really get a comprehensive vision of you know, what waking down is, is that sound like a good plan?
CC Leigh: Right, correct. But I would like to tell our viewers that my book isn’t exact, it’s not like the Bible of waking down. Sure. It’s my experience with people from my own, in my own words, and with my own slant on it. So again, in waking down, we have room to do that. So some of the things in here are maybe not shared by all the teachers of waking down, right. And yet, the general gist of it and the heart of it, I like to think truly does represent what my colleagues would are also embracing and espousing and dealing with people.
Rick Archer: So there really is no Bible of working on even books Samuel has written you wouldn’t consider the Bible of waking down because Samuel is not his word is not the gospel truth necessarily. And but everyone’s making their contribution. Right.
CC Leigh: Right. Right. Right. Samuel has his own unique voice and way of expressing things and he is also a fallible human being, as is every one of us. And we do have something we call core Dharma and teacher dharma. So core Dharma would be the basic principles of awaking down and mutuality. And that we all would say, Well, of course, yeah, we. And then the teacher, dharmas are the individual variances on those themes, or maybe the further discoveries that we’ve been making, since the early days when the kind of core principles are drawn out?
Rick Archer: And is it kind of expected that the teacher Dharma will, you know, be in a certain orbit around the core Dharma and not not go too far afield? Or else it really can’t be associated with waking down? I mean, if somebody decides, Okay, we’re all gonna drop acid and get into jello wrestling or something, then yeah, go better go do that on your own.
CC Leigh: Exactly, exactly. So we call it related, really, you know, waking down related. And, of course, any any individual can do whatever floats their boat. But it wouldn’t be recognized as a related offering.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Okay. So let’s start by something you have in the darkness before dawn chapter where you have stages of embodied awakening, and about four stages. Be interesting to run through that. And keep in mind that we have maybe an hour now to kind of go through the various points in the book. And so let’s pace ourselves. So we get through it all, but cover things deeply, as deeply as we can.
CC Leigh: Okay. Well, thanks for bringing up the four stage model that I threw there in that first chapter. It’s, it’s my own model. And again, I’m not saying that everyone would agree that this is, you know, the best model ever written about human development. But I think it I, there’s, there’s some, there’s a couple things that I think are important in this model. First of all, it’s a very simple model. And I’m first one to say maps are not the territory. And you know, no one’s gonna follow this to the letter. But I, and it’s, and they’re all slides of development. Many different lines of development that aren’t being represented in this model. Well, I’m talking about kind of a spiritual unfoldment model. And I call it four stages, I call it something that correlates with the subtle body development, from gross to subtle to spiritual, you know, and then integrating all of that. So solid to liquid to vapor, to, you know, what, what transcends and unfolds all of it. And a very, very simple way of saying it might be in the, in the, what I call stage one, it might be that your sense of the Divine is completely other than you completely separate, you know, I’m just a human, and the Divine is out there all powerful, and I’m subject to the whims of this divine second stage would be where a lot of a lot of much greater sensitivity to subtle and multi dimensional experience is starting to happen, where the person might be recognizing they too, are part of a divine essence energy of the universe. And that’s what I was describing when I said I was on a really rapid spiritual growth path. And I was channeling and that’s what I would say was my stage two, journey. And then what I call stage three, is when an integration happens in a landing. So again, as if stage two is when we’re opening all the chakras and, and becoming much more open to all sorts of multi dimensional experiences and levels of our being and then again, as a way of speaking, and the words are never that whole story, but you could say, then, then our spirit comes home, to inhabit, the physical being the physical, emotional mental, being in a much bigger way. And that’s why we say lands as if it could come down and land, you know, float 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. And, and that’s what we call, you know, the stage in which the second birth happens. And it’s also a stage of paradox very much. So. I’m not one or the other, I’m both and I’m spirit and I’m body and spirit, and I’m emotions and, and they’re, they’re all together there. But they’re, they haven’t necessarily totally gelled. We’re just encountering paradox all the time and realizing that life is full of paradox. But but there is a self knowing as I am, spirit, I’m consciousness. I am consciousness plus matter. And yet, matter isn’t not consciousness. It’s all consciousness. So it’s, it’s when they come together.
Rick Archer: That was stage three, right?
CC Leigh: Right. And I call it stage three, because it seems to me that a lot of people, when they hear about waking down, and they hear about the second birth, and then 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. You know, what’s going on here? You know, they just smoking dope, are they just kidding themselves? And it’s because there’s this deep integration that is underway, but is true, like you said, turning up the shadow material, it’s pulling that up to the surface, it’s putting people through the, you know, the deep rapids, of the awakening and the challenges of that. We call it the shakedown. It’s pretty can be a very turbulent time for people intensifying so. So I, so I then spill out a fourth stage and to me, that’s when it all really gels and, and it’s less about feeling paradox than it is about feeling just a flow. It’s like a cert, it’s like a kind of a surrendered or relaxed a flowing. We call I call it seamless own leanness. So it’s an even deeper integration, merging blending gelling of all that I am into someone who’s just just be But being, you know, in a way that so much more informed than it was in the past. So much more full. Nice. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about those. I think it’s a useful model for people to, to play with.
Rick Archer: Sure. A question just came in from one of the viewers that I’d like to ask, do you, in my process of integrating my awakening? It seems sometimes there’s still some kind of energetic pressure in my head, and sometimes in my neck, can you say anything about energetic pressure during the waking down process? Thank you.
CC Leigh: Wow, probably nothing simple. I mean, all kinds of phenomenon happen during the awakening process. And that can include Kundalini energy moving in all kinds of different ways. And it may be pooling in particular areas. For this person, you know, where the attention is going to certain areas and amping up the pressure or the energy in that area, it may be that it’s potentially beneficial. And it’s actually helping to open up certain areas that might have been constricted, or it might be it might be that it’s too much, you know, that’s more than the system can handle. So it might be useful to get some support and coaching for running the energy in different ways, grounding it, you know, bringing it pulling it down, and not necessarily having it just all be building up in one particular spot. But it’s a complicated, I mean, it’s a challenging and complicated process to awaken as a human, and have so much energy coursing through our systems. Again, it’s like, it’s like, running higher voltage through thin wires, and thin wires can’t handle that. So part of awakening, and part of why I think light comes and goes for people is that when it recedes, what it seems to have left is an opportunity for our wiring to catch up, you know, and then the next time we get to run a little bit more voltage through the system.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think that’s very important. I mean, obviously, the body is the instrument through which anything is lived any experience, what to say, an awakening or Enlightenment. And so it’s pretty well traditionally understood that for a really significant shift in the way we view the world and the way we live life and the way we experience, there’s going to have to be a correspondingly significant shift in the instrument through which we do that. And the body of the nervous system, subtle levels of it, chakras and all that as a waking down teacher and teachers in general and waking down to do they sort of recommend other therapies and things like you might say, Oh, you maybe you should go and get a massage or get Reiki or go to a psychiatrist, for that matter if if somebody seems to need something to supplement what you’re doing with them.
CC Leigh: Absolutely, absolutely. And we’re fortunate now that there are so many practitioners in so many related fields, that have good skills and good technologies to help people. So absolutely. And there’s no blanket answer to that. Other than yes, we’re very open to having people find the right kinds of support processes to ease their journey.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So moving into your book a little bit more here. Dark Night? How do you know if you’re in a dark night? That’s a very I’ve had people actually send in emails and say, Would you please ask everybody interview about the dark night? I need to know more about it? I feel like I’m going through it. So you know, you’ve referred to it in terms of your own experience. How does a person know if they’re in a dark night?
CC Leigh: Well, I actually chapter one, give a list. That might be helpful for people, but I do. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah, if you find yourself, we could say running out of steam. If you’re, 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. But it’s not sufficient to what you’re dealing with now. You’re questioning all your beliefs. Maybe you’ve your 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 Archer: I would say that there could be degrees of darkness couldn’t there with dark nights. I mean, there could be dusk nights and there could be you know, where you can still kind of stumble along and there can be pitch black nights in which you can’t, you know, find your way at all and You know, some, which could be just mildly depressing some, which could, you know, make you consider suicide or actually committed. So we don’t want to oversimplify the term.
CC Leigh: Thank you, I think that’s very true. And some might not have any outward, you know, just it might not fit that kind of Dark Knight description at all, it’s really, what’s really happening is that there’s an undermining of the structures of our psyche, that they’re, they’re soft, the the edges of those are softening. So, like, for me, there was a sense that oh, my God, everything I’ve been learning is all about a belief about reality. It’s not necessarily reality, and, and just falling through the, you know, falling through that and into what do I know in that state of not knowing so. 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.
Rick Archer: I wonder if the darkness of a dark night might be in way related to how invested you have been in something, which ultimately, you would be in your best interest to? You know, shut off.
CC Leigh: That that’s, that’s good. consideration. Yeah, I do want to say that not all life passages that are painful are dark nights. And there’s, there’s 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. And so 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, you know?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think that’s really important. I had a young friend who was still alive when I started this series, and ended up and he was a very spiritual guy, and everybody loved him. And he got into this real dark thing. And he kind of gave it a spiritual spin, you know, in terms of his not really belonging on the planet, and things like that, and he ended up killing himself. And it was a real tragedy. So I’m thinking, I think what you what you’re saying there is important that we shouldn’t just sort of like, we should seek help if we need help, and not assume that what we’re experiencing is just, you know, some kind of spiritual transition that and that we were competent to, you know, handle it entirely on our own?
CC Leigh: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, that’s part of my life purpose is that people not have to encounter this alone. And so I offer my support, and I have many colleagues who are offering their support, I think, it’s, it’s really tough, it can be really tough to encounter this darkness. And, and just sheer hard time of being human at times, on your own. And I really want people to know, that supports available. And, and not necessarily only through people like waking down teachers, obviously, there’s all kinds of useful therapies that also are good, and, and useful for people. So
Rick Archer: yeah, and I think, you know, I think John George Harrison wrote a song called This too shall pass, or maybe it wasn’t one of his albums. But, you know, you got to realize that everything is a phase, and whatever we may be going through, even if we can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, there’s going to be one, sooner or later, we just have to sort of, like, keep on keeping on, you know, and not, not despair. And that’s easier said than done, perhaps especially if one is in a really dark time. But you know, you were saying earlier about a realization that you are loved by some higher intelligence in the universe is something however, one can whatever one can do to remember that and realize that there is a brighter future, if even if the President is dark, and if we just kind of have the the intention to keep keep evolving and growing. And I’m kind of dwelling on this stuff. Because here in Fairfield, there have been a number of suicides over the years, and they’re actually they’re starting to take it seriously and have meetings at the local university and in town and try to prevent any more. And these are, you know, largely people who had a spiritual background, you know, grew up meditating, perhaps has children and so on. And so it’s really a tragedy when that sort of things happens and Anything we can say in this interview that might prevent that from happening to one, even one person would be well worth spending the time on, you know?
CC Leigh: Absolutely, Rick, absolutely. It’s just heartbreaking how, how deep people can go into darkness and despair, and especially if they feel it’s hopeless, I think, of course, it’s, it’s easier to say it than it is to do it. And yet, from within a place of depression, we project that it’s permanent. I mean, it just seems to be part and parcel. That, that we, we assume that time is going to stretch out forever into into the future, and it’s always going to be this way.
Rick Archer: It’s like, you have a terrible flu. You can’t remember ever having felt healthy now and you feel like, I’m always gonna be like this. And then you know, a couple weeks later, you’re feeling pretty good.
CC Leigh: Alright, I’ve made a pact with myself when I’m sick like that, never to make any, any conclusions about reality. Yeah, because my conclusions at that point are going to be really grim.
Rick Archer: Here’s a nice little comment that somebody put sent in and will that will continue on, he said, it’s great to see this woman expressing real and true and present pain. It is so often missing from spiritual teachers. This lady sounds like the wise woman who built her house on in the rock. Nice.
CC Leigh: Thank you. Thank you.
Rick Archer: So there’s a section in your book on page 33. That, you know, when you gave me some notes on what to read, if I couldn’t read it cover to cover you wanted me to make sure to read which was heart openings and other surprises. And then right after that this is action on divine the human teachers are divinely human with the emphasis on human we kind of already covered that. But what did you want to say about this heart openings?
CC Leigh: Don’t know, what did I say?
Rick Archer: Don’t worry about it. I gotta reread it now. Alright, let’s see. Go ahead.
CC Leigh: I think I think it was done, you know, we were speaking I was speaking about transmission. And so transmission is that kind of body to body non well, it can be verbal, but also can be very nonverbal communication. When somebody has fully living from that grounded condition in spirit that they, other people can template off of that confidence in being. But what also can happen is that you might find yourself falling in love. And
Rick Archer: mentioned the word. What was it? Contract initiations?
CC Leigh: tantric initiations. Yeah, that’s a, it’s a interesting fun term for what can happen when, when kids has to be seen by another to be seen deeply, is something we longed for. It’s also something that tends to terrify us. But when we’re seen and refined, that it’s safe, and it’s kind and it’s compassionate, where our hearts just respond and open. And, and that can be mistaken sometimes for it being this is going to be my partner, you know, or it can it can include a lustful sexual component to it. Because again, we are, we’re connecting up all parts of our beings. So it might not just be hard, it might be hard plus generals plus, you know, desires. And so it’s something that has to be navigated carefully. You know, not to mistake it for something it’s not. And yet at the same time, it can be a very beautiful thing that’s very, very grateful for all parties.
Rick Archer: So I mean, everybody in his brother and a sister ends up having a infatuations and affairs and whatnot in this world. So whether or not they’re a spiritual person, so how are we just putting kind of a spiritual spin on a universal phenomenon by calling it a tantric initiation?
CC Leigh: I, I wouldn’t reduce it that far. I would say that it has there’s a divine, quote unquote, divine purpose to it. It’s being recognizing being. And maybe that does happen with ordinary infatuations to some degree, but this tends to be a more whole being very accelerating, kind of very catalytic kind of thing that happens. I think I’ll go ahead, I’m sorry. Well, and it can it can really take over, you know, bring somebody forward in a way that they hadn’t been brought forward before.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And I think you said something in your book about the way to deal with it might very well be to rather than acting out in some way to just kind of cook in it, you know, to sort of cook in the longing or whatever phrase you used, and that that can be very good. It was that word and alchemy was trans commutative, you know where it can, it can help to sort of energize and enliven your system without causing wrecking havoc in your life.
CC Leigh: Right? Well, especially if it’s if you’ve, if you’ve got this kind of opening happening with someone who’s not your, the person you’re in a committed relationship with, then, you know, it’s not necessarily about throwing that out the window and going and jumping into bed with someone new. You can cook in it, and you can, you can also meet it with consciousness and understanding and get support around it. And sometimes it is the beginning of a powerful relationship, as was mine with Michael.
Rick Archer: So there’s a whole lot in waking down about the core wound. And I’ve kind of pondered what this means over the years. And I actually reading your book gave me some insights into it. I don’t think I got before. Maybe just because I’ve had so many more years of growth under my belt, but let me give a stab at what what you mean by it, and then correct me and elaborate, as I understand it, what you mean by it in not only you but waking down community is that, you know, there is this paradox or juxtaposition between our divine nature and our human nature. And the divine nature is, you know, 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, you know, some, some scarring from our past or whatever. And so there’s always going to be kind of a rub between our, the, the perfect dimension of our life or being and the imperfect. And that rub, is the core wound, is that correct?
CC Leigh: That’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s not just that we’re flawed. I mean, although that’s often true, it’s that we juxtapose in our mind, what is currently, which always has limits, you know, like, I live in a house on wheels. And I have what a lot of people think, is just a whole bunch of freedom. I mean, I can go all over the place, and I do enjoy that freedom. But if I, if I get into a beautiful spot in the National Forest, the Ranger comes around after two weeks and tells me I have to leave. So there’s a limit, you know, so there’s a limit, but I, I’m, in my mind, I’m saying, you know, why can’t I live, you know, by the ocean, you know, you’re around for free. And, you know, the reality is, somebody comes and kicks me out, and tells me I’m trespassing or whatever. So, in our minds, we compare what is against our idealized sense of what could be, and, 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, you know, when people do awful things here, and, you know, and I, and I hate it, or I, or makes me terribly sad. And so that’s comes from feeling that there’s something fundamentally wrong. And so that feeling of something not okay, or fundamentally wrong, or flawed or insufficient, is close to what we mean by core wound.
Rick Archer: So you just kind of defined it with reference to the contrast between what life is as we experience in what life ideally could be like, you know, whereas I was just define it by Cohn with the contrast between, you know, the, the relative and the absolute sort of, I suppose that might be another dimension of it.
CC Leigh: Right, right there both. Those are both true. Yeah. You know, there’s like an extension, existential truth of what you said. And then what I said is more about how the human how my human self responds to that truth. You know, by feeling like, I’m not good enough, or I’m flawed, or life sucks.
Rick Archer: No, there’s something that comes to mind with regard to the way you defined it, which is that, you know, there’s that powerful I mean, there’s that popular saying that we’re spiritual beings having a human experience, you know, it may very well be that we have come from someplace or lived in dimensions at times in our lives, where in our lives in the big sense of the word, where it really was quite heavenly and ideal. We were in some realm where things were really sublime and celestial. And then here we are in this gross, demanding, flawed, apparently world. And so there’s some kind of residual remembrance of that more ideal state then causes us to feel Look, you know, this is never quite good enough for me.
CC Leigh: Right? So I call the core wound the portal. Because it’s the portal to embodied awakening, you don’t have to encounter the portal, that portal, you don’t have to pass through that. 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. And 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’s just an IT is an existential condition of being human being. And what you can do is let yourself touch into it. And not assume that these thoughts you have are necessarily the whole story are true. So we can get comfortable, like my, my, 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. And when I permitted myself to live as that was, was very important, it instead of trying to fix it, or try to heal it, or try to make it go away, it just became that and then 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 it’s still in a way I can still remember that, but I don’t live there. Now.
Rick Archer: Yeah, so it did get healed, but it was more like, well, you when you say you relaxed into it, it was more like, well, if we have a wound in our hand, it would cut it, you know, it’s like we can sit there and will it to heal and you know, obsess over the fact that our hand is cut or something and bemoan our fate, and so on and so forth. Or we can just apply appropriate measures, maybe have some stitches or put a bandaid on and nature will heal it. Because nature has a healing tendency. So, you know, the whole use of your of the word wound implies that the wound can be healed, maybe a scar will be left maybe it can’t be healed entirely. But you’re not saying I suppose that the core wound is is an unhealable thing. You’re? Well, maybe it is in terms of ultimate complete, utter 100% healing. But you’re also saying that the approach to healing it is not through, you know, individual volition so much as a kind of a relaxation and a sensing and dropping into an allowing ourselves to feel it. I’m talking too much about you, I’m putting words in your mouth to go ahead and take it over.
CC Leigh: Yeah, that’s, but that’s good. Rick, that was that was well said. So the, the existential condition is just the existential condition of being human. And that’s always going to be creating that juxtaposition or potential rub. And I, you know, and I find I bump up against it in all kinds of ways I bump up against it when I’m watching, you know, what our governments doing with other governments, you know, I mean, so, so the, but the, the wound part, the distress there is mostly, primarily in a big way due to resisting it, yeah. People go out of their way all the time to avoid feeling the core wound, and when you actually allow it permitted, breathe there, you know, then it, you don’t have to resist it. And when you stop resisting, and again, I’m not saying you can do this volitionally Okay, I’m not going to resist it anymore. I’m going to force you can’t you know, me, but you will, you will. If you get support, and you start getting curious about it, you can discover that you can live here as an embodied conscious being. Yeah.
Rick Archer: So would you say that an alcoholic, a drug addict, sex addict, TV addict, that, you know, somebody who was just sort of an escape addict, you know, trying to escape in any way, shape or form is when you get right down to it resisting their core wound?
CC Leigh: Oh, sure. Yeah, I would, I would, I would say that that drives it drives the vast majority of human endeavor in some way or other, that 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 at the core. And when they start meditating, you know, and start allowing himself to, you know, to drop deeper than they start to usually get a little more aware of what that might be. And it’s a good thing to feel it’s good thing to make friends with.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Okay,
CC Leigh: so
Rick Archer: go ahead.
CC Leigh: I just want to do a time check. How are we doing?
Rick Archer: Oh, okay. No half hour or so.
CC Leigh: Okay, good. All right. Just wanted to see,
Rick Archer: yeah, we’re doing good. So, the cover, I think we’ve pretty well done justice to the core wound, it’s, you know, I’m sure we could talk about that for the next half hour. But let’s move on here. Just want to make sure to cover all the good stuff into in your book. Green Lighting, let’s talk a little bit about green lighting.
CC Leigh: Green Lighting is it’s a fun concept. And it’s very, very useful, it’s often one of the most pink things people report it 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, you know, to be whatever’s happening, and to be good at certain things and not good at other things. And 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. You know, and then we get spiritual teachings on on top of that, which tell us what we should be doing should be doing it right. And, or how we should be feeling if things were right, or we, we encounter the secret and positive thinking, and then we think, oh my god, I’m not able to always control my thoughts. So I’m going to be creating tragedy in my life, and, and we tie ourselves up in all kinds of knots. And 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. You know, so if we can let go of some of the way we’re trying to make us 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. It’s not just it’s not just saying, Okay, I’m great who I am. And, you know, and you know, and blowing off everybody else.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I was gonna say, one might say, Okay, I ate macadamia nuts. And there’s none left for anybody else. But I was just greenlighting, you know, so hey, yeah, get off my back.
CC Leigh: Well, that, you know, then, of course, gets to a further chapter in the book on actually recognizing are not separate from others, and that their experience matters also. Yeah, yeah. So people often misinterpret though, Rick, that green lighting means green lighting, all of your actions. And that’s not what it means. Because if your action is to punch that person in the face, you know, if that’s your impulse, or your impulse is to hurt people than green lighting doesn’t mean you get to go ahead and do that. It just means the impulse to do is human, and you can forgive yourself for having the impulse.
Rick Archer: But so 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 Leigh: Right. Right. Although acting like a jerk may be inevitable part of, you know, being who we are at times. Yeah, you know, hopefully, we won’t be a homicidal jerk, you know, or really, you know, we won’t be we’ll be permitting ourselves to be bringing things conscious in such a way that they’re, they’re held in a in a benign way.
Rick Archer: Yeah. In the TM movement, there used to be a term called unstressed thing where you’re releasing stress, you know, and especially on long courses, and people would sometimes do jerky things. And then then they would, they would excuse themselves by saying, Oh, I’m just stressing, you know, so it’s like, it was almost like an alibi for eating all the last slice of pizza or whatever, you know, that they were doing.
CC Leigh: Right, right. 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. Yeah. And, yeah, okay, and it’s import We’re going to look and see what’s driving it. Because otherwise you, you’re not going to be bringing that consciousness all the way through your being.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So, next chapter in seeing I like this one, that if we could, you know, it’s, it’s interesting, if you go to a conference or something, you hear all these interesting speakers, and you’re kind of getting a glimpse of their perspective, but wouldn’t it be able, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to actually see the world through their eyes, rather than just hear their talk, and then then you’d really get a very visceral and real and full sense of what they were presenting.
CC Leigh: Right? That’s possible. I mean, and that’s a fairly advanced level of in seeing as I use the word it’s, 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, and my feelings, in in my ideas about life. And 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 like a linear, like a linear thought thought thought thought thought a thought track. And, and 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. And normally, we just keep that right below our neck, you know, we we not very aware of what’s gone on in there. And yet, it’s so rich, and it gives us so much information. And if we surface it more intentionally, into our awareness, then we’re not going to be blindsided so often by it, we’re not also going to be subjected to just re experiencing the same old kind of reactivity over and over and over again. So insane is a way of bringing that forward, consciously, and with curiosity and warmth and compassion to what I call the parts of myself. So there might be a part of myself, that’s, you know, that’s okay, 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. And 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, it’s hard to simplify what it is, it’s just such a rich, rich field of self learning self knowledge.
Rick Archer: 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 Leigh: Well, the unseeing is a tech, I have an eight step process that you’d have to pretty much pick up the book and read. And then seeing is something that I’ve put together, it’s not something all waking down teachers do. So when I base it a lot on what I what I learned by studying, focusing, which goes back to Eugene gendlin, if yours 5060 years of experience with that, and it’s my own way of doing it, that supports awakening. So it’s bringing your attention, it’s inviting things forward, it’s being a good listener to your own inner arts. So and then, it also will also find that there’s parts who are in relation to other parts and they can they can be some of the more entangled places in our being and why we often feel stuck. So there might be a part that’s very playful and wants to come out and engage and there might be another part that saying it’s not safe to do that Shut up. Don’t say that. Don’t do that. And, and, and then you can just get frozen right there. You know, do I do or not do it what but but you know, and, and there’s a way to engage the different sides of ourselves and actually make room for all of them and what what can do that is presence, and that’s the next chapter, is presence. Presence is capable of having space enough and room for all of that to be occurring without it having to be fighting, fighting or You know, posing. So,
Rick Archer: yeah, I was gonna say I mean, a lot of times, things we’ve been talking about and things, various other spiritual teachers talk about, you know, or just people hear them as words. And without presence, it’s really hard to take them to heart or implement them. You know, it’s like, it sounds good, but, you know, how do I do it? What, what to do? So I kind of feel like, and your whole story started in a way with presence, you know, having that experience where you go deep into the transcendent, and then things would start to shift. So what do you do as a teacher? Or does waking down to as a group to culture, the capacity for deep presence in people?
CC Leigh: Well, that’s, that’s so individual. So one thing is to say, there’s no cookie cutter answer to that, because every person is unique. And one of the things that I think waking down generally does well is that we have a lot of personal attention for people. And so it’s not just one teacher sitting up front with 50 or 300. People. It’s somebody actually gets to know you gets to track, you gets to find what, you know, what works for you, and support you in that and cultivate it. So that’s part of it. But another reason I’m so big on in seeing is that in seeing utilizes the state we could call presence. And that’s a curious, warm, caring, compassionate state, that can actually be cultivated like a muscle. So when, when I’m supporting someone in discovering what’s going on internally, I’m helping them find that state of presence for themselves. And 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 Archer: How do you help them find it? Part of individualized again,
CC Leigh: I’d say a lot of it’s modeling. So we could call it templating or modeling or transmission. So because I am in presence with them, and coming from that place, then 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. And that helps people to discover it for themselves.
Rick Archer: Does that require physical proximity? No, no, it’s amazing. Does physical proximity help?
CC Leigh: Oh, I think some physical proximity is a great thing. And, you know, desirable when possible, but but over phone lines over Skype, it also works.
Rick Archer: So in waking down, I know there’s this thing that you do gazing with, since we’re talking about presence and transmission, and would this be a good time to have a little gazing session?
CC Leigh: Oh, you could do that. Okay, well, why
Rick Archer: don’t we do that and you want to explain what it’s about first, before we start, and then when you when you do it, just do it, as long as you feel like a minute or two or whatever, you know, you feel is appropriate. And then we’ll talk a little bit more after that.
CC Leigh: Okay. Okay, gazing is a form of connecting with another person non verbally. And when you’re connecting with someone who’s living in this embodied, awakened condition, you can take your take advantage to come into resonance with the way that the frequencies of that, I guess, that that your body can template off of or come into resonance with is about all I can say. And 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 fact anything could happen you might feel you know, resistance to it or dislike of it, you might feel your heart opening and feel wonderful. So the whole range of things can happen and that’s not really what’s what it’s about. It’s just about saying hello being to being my being as expresses through CC is here to call being fourth and other bodies. And so that’s my love and that’s what happens with with gazing and that’s the potential anyway. Yeah. And you
Rick Archer: 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 but you nor even just you gazing all the people who happen to be watching live but people who might watch this five years from now or something, it can have some kind of value for them.
CC Leigh: Right? Yes, yeah, yes and and just let it be whatever it will be for you and I will spend a little time I’m going to gaze with the camera Rick. And all the people who might be served by this into the future
Rick Archer: glasses on or glasses off or doesn’t matter
CC Leigh: is a reflection of problem
Rick Archer: it’s a little bit reflecting but whatever you feel like
CC Leigh: you can see my eyes Okay.
Rick Archer: Thank you that was nice? Well, while you should I ask a question or two now or more silence. Okay, good. Well, while you were asking, while you’re doing that some questions just came in. So let me just rather than start off on somebody else, I’ll ask these. My Okay, 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. He 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 Leigh: Well, it’s an interesting question. There’s so many things wrong with duality. Where do we start? I mean, in the world or form, you know, there’s a there’s a million great things and a million tragic things and, 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, and think it’s just more important to be real and be human and, 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, you know, as if they’re Styrofoam packed around our hearts and in a lot of our Teflon or Teflon, right. A lot of our lack of satisfaction in life comes from the fact that we’re not able to meet it, you know, with with with a full hearted being so. So whether it’s, you know, whatever you’re naming it, I think that’s the most important thing, and I hope that he real this person, the author of the question knows that support is available, and there’s people that can support her.
Rick Archer: So it’s, I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s not an either or situation. It’s not like we have to choose As the as your books in book title implies, it’s not like we have to choose the world of duality human 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. So, if non duality has been used as some sort of escape, then, you know, Steven Wright said, I broke up with my girlfriend because she was really into meditate, cuz I wasn’t really into meditation, and she wasn’t really into being alive. So, you know, there has to be an enrichment or an integration.
CC Leigh: Right in both of both of those positions are a little bit too fundamentalist. Maybe, you know, and there’s, there’s the meeting place. Yeah, there’s, there’s a field and I will meet you there. And, and fundamentally, there isn’t any such thing as divine versus, you know, material world. You know, they’re, it’s all one. It’s all one thing, it’s a whole cloth. So that’s why I say it’s it’s concepts we play, we like to play in the concept realm, which might keep us actually from direct experience.
Rick Archer: Here’s another one from someone. Well, here’s one, that’s a follow up from that earlier question about the pressure in the head, I think the person said, Thank you for answering my question, bless you, if possible, is there a technique you could recommend for getting the energy to move down?
CC Leigh: Oh, gosh, the simplest one of you put your feet on the ground,
Rick Archer: walk around barefoot or something.
CC Leigh: Or the floor, it can be the floor. But yeah, put your feet on the ground. And actually you can, you can visualize energy moving down, moving down your spine, out your tailbone down into infinity down into bedrock, you can ground through your feet, you can ground that way we can lay on the ground. I mean, some of it can be done through breathing, you know, breathe into your heart, breathe into your belly, you know, get curious about what’s going on down there. You know, and all that can help. Another thing you can do, you can open the back of your neck, almost as if you had you had doors that could be opened there. Sometimes energy pools right there. Because it’s, you know, it’s just a Nexus. And you can you can open it out and and visualize the energy moving.
Rick Archer: Cool. And also, I would say, you know, sometimes physical stuff like gardening or certain kinds of exercise and all swimming, you know, things like that can be
CC Leigh: Yes.
Rick Archer: Nice and grounding.
CC Leigh: Yes, yes. Yes, walking?
Rick Archer: Yeah. 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, he’ll past experiences and triggers, that romantic relationships are so good at bringing up
CC Leigh: Oh, bravo, and 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, I would recommend people start within seeing and start as they start to be cultivating that state of presence, learning what presence feels like, and bringing that to their own parts. Then the next step, I call that inner mutuality, Rick, and then out of mutuality, is realizing that the person sitting opposite you isn’t a whole lot different than then the kind of oppositional parts that we run into internally. And, and presence can be discovered to have room for even, you know, strongly divergent viewpoints to coexist without necessarily being a conflict around it. So there’s a there’s a skill there, and it’s worth cultivating,
Rick Archer: which has interesting implications for like them, you know, ISRAEL PALESTINE conflict or many other conflicts in the world. If there could be more presence in the collective consciousness, then these seemingly irreconcilable different differences, I think, could be reconciled, you know, it’s just like, you need to sort who was what Einstein had that famous quote, of not trying to solve a problem on the level at which it was, you know, it was formed or something, you have to kind of move to a bigger context. And then things which seem like there’s no way out can actually reconcile and resolve.
CC Leigh: Right, right. Very true. Rick, I’m, as you speak, and we’re here we’re using the term presents. I want to say how I use the term because sometimes people use So term presence for what I would probably use the term consciousness for, which is like the the absolute dimension, the, the transcendent dimension. But I have a very specific way of using the term presence and I, we could say that is consciousness embodying. So consciousness as it touches form, again, we’re just speaking as a matter of speaking. As it comes into embodiment, it pull, it picks up qualities of heart. So warp, curiosity, compassion, caring about the human condition. And, and so for me, presence is a very dynamic and transformative principle. Whereas consciousness, which to me is, it’s just the ever present reality. But as a matter of speaking, consciousness doesn’t seem to care. The presence cares deeply. Yeah. So. So I just want to try to
Rick Archer: total sense. And, you know, I would say that what kind of what you’re saying is that, whereas consciousness has this aloof sort of detached and quality LIS connotation to it, presence is the same stuff, but infused into life and fused into the world into the relative, kind of like, you know, SAP, but in a tree, but then it flows and fuses and nourishes all the leaves and branches and so on.
CC Leigh: Right, right. In this sense, it’s, it’s is the, it’s, it’s the field, in our that, that is very nurturing to, to all levels of aliveness. Yeah. And, and again, as I say, we can cultivate it as a state. But beyond it being just a state, I think it’s also a fundamental principle. And, you know, we could say it’s capital H heart, you know, our divine love, but, but presence, I like the term presents, because it’s not 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. Yeah. And supportive of that whole process.
Rick Archer: That’s good. And, and I think it really does have societal implications. I mean, people are always talking about how there seems to be a global awakening taking place, and so on. And you know, and so that’s why I mentioned the Arab Palestinian thing. I mean, the Palestinian Israeli thing, I think that there’s a kind of, it’s like a springtime taking place in the world where the SAP begins to flow in the trees and so on. But so that that kind of abstract absolute unmanifest consciousness is becoming more enlivened, more embodied in all of its expressions. And I think ultimately, that is the key to the resolution of so many of the terrible problems that, you know, prevail on Earth, environmental, and social and ethical, and, you know, racism and all these different things is for people to become more divinely human. Well, the title, title of your book, you know, it’s for the divine to enter into the human to a much more profound degree than it has in ages past. And I really think that there’s that process is underway, which is part of the reason I started doing this show to do my little bit to help facilitate it.
CC Leigh: And thank you so much for doing your show, and your incredible archives such a credible wealth of information that you’ve amassed, and that you’re sharing with the world so freely, it’s beautiful.
Rick Archer: It’s just my joy to do it, you know, I do know, you’re doing the same thing. We’re on the same team here. So I’m sure there’s a million things that you book we could discuss, but there’s only so much time so people can buy it, and they can get in touch with you. And as always, I’ll have a page about you on batgap.com and a link to your book and the link to your website and so on. Which your website is divinely human.com, is it? That’s correct. Okay, good. So we’ll link to that also. And, you know, you obviously offer individual sessions and you travel around and all kinds of possibilities. Do you want to just enumerate those quickly? Or shall they just find that on your website?
CC Leigh: Well, I just started something that I’m really having a good time with. And that’s a year long program based on the 12 chapters of my book. And it says so it’s I have a group of people, unfortunately, already underway, so I can’t take any more right now. But we’re doing we’re working through the chapters but also doing small groups by Skype and have a Facebook page and I think that’s got a lot of potential. And my idea about doing it for years to slow things down and really give people an opportunity to deepen together and be mutually supportive. So that’s something I’m happy about. And we’ll probably be repeating again in the spring of next year. And
Rick Archer: so what be locked in so people, is there a place on your website where people can sign up to be reminded by email when you start the next one or something?
CC Leigh: Well, there’s a signup box on the front page of my web. My website, we’re working on it right now. Should be pretty well done in the next day or two. Okay, good. If people sign up, sign in, get on my mailing list, they’ll certainly hear about that. I also am planning courses in insane to help people deepen in that inner inner and outer mutuality effect. So that will be people don’t
Rick Archer: have to wait a year to get into your next thing. There’s things they can do now if they want to contact you. Yes, yeah. Yes. Okay. Great. All right. Well, thanks, Cece. This has been a lot of fun.
CC Leigh: Yes, indeed. Happy, happy travels that went fast. does so much territory to cover. Thank you for inviting me.
Rick Archer: Sure. As Kermit the frog said, times fun when you’re having flies. So, general wrap up points, then this is been an interview with CeCe Leigh Leigh, and it’s part of an ongoing series. As CeCe mentioned, there’s a whole archive on batgap.com, which you can explore. And if you go into the past interviews menu, see it categorized four or five different ways check that out. There’s a upcoming interviews page where you can see who’s scheduled and you’ll see links to the live streaming thing. So if you note when the interview is going to take place times given or in the Midwest, US timezone. When if you come at that time to that page, click on the link, you can go to the YouTube page where it’ll be live streamed. There’s a Donate button on the site, which I rely upon people clicking in order to be able to do this devote as much time as we do to it. So that’s very much appreciated. There is a place to sign up for my email newsletter, you’ll see that link, and which in which you’ll be notified once a week or so when each new interview is posted. And there is an audio podcast to the whole thing. So you can just listen while you’re commuting or riding your horse or whatever, which people do get reports of people listening under all sorts of unusual circumstances. So you’ll see a page for that too. There’s a whole page devoted to the different ways to sign up for that. So thanks for listening or watching and next week is someone who is not in the waking down tradition, but who will we’ll also be talking about sort of using the body as a way of tuning ourselves more deeply to the divine. That will be John Prendergast. So I’m looking forward to speaking with him. So thanks again, Cece, it’s great.
CC Leigh: Thank you, Rick.
Rick Archer: Good, Happy Travels drive safely. You’re welcome. Bye bye.