CC Leigh Interview

Summary:

• Introduction: Rick Archer introduces CC Leigh, a teacher of Waking Down in Mutuality, and discusses the shift in spiritual circles towards embodiment.
• Personal Journey: CC shares her early life experiences, including a magical encounter with sunflowers and her path to active spiritual seeking after a profound experience in 1987.
• Professional Background: She talks about her career as a dog trainer and how her subtle perceptions influenced her work.
• Spiritual Awakening: CC describes her deep meditative experiences and the realization of a ‘fourth state’ beyond waking, sleeping, and dreaming.
• Integration Challenge: She emphasizes the importance of integrating transcendence with human experience, rather than escaping into spiritual detachment.
• Waking Down in Mutuality: CC explains how she was drawn to the Waking Down community for its emphasis on embracing both human and divine aspects of self.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is CC Leigh. CC is a Waking Down teacher, or whatever they call them. We’ll get the terminology straight as we go along. I’ve interviewed quite a few of those including Saniel and Linda Bonder who founded Waking Down in Mutuality. I’ve been thinking that these days embodiment is kind of a buzzword and in spiritual circles everybody’s talking about it, whereas ten years ago the majority of people were talking about disembodiment, “Oh, you’re not a person” and all that. But from the get-go Waking Down has been all about, as CC’s book implies, becoming divinely human. You know, there are people who say you are not a person. I suppose a Waking Down teacher might respond to say, yes, of course you’re a person, you’re just not only a person. There are different dimensions to what you are. Waking Down in Mutuality as I understand it, and we’re going to be talking all about it today, is all about integrating and stabilizing all those dimensions so as to live the full package rather than just some fragmented part of it. Is that a fair synopsis CC?

CC: That’s a good way to begin, Rick.

Rick: Great. Let’s talk about you personally a little bit and then we’ll go through your book and cover all kinds of points as we go along, and there’ll be an opportunity for people to submit questions during the interview. Just this morning I read your personal bio on your website and I thought it was very interesting, so it might be good to go through that a bit just off the top of your head so people get to know you and get a sense of how your life led up to where it is now. Then we’ll talk more specifically about what you have in your book.

CC: Okay.

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

CC: I was very small. Yes.

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

CC: Right. I suppose I was, like many people, something of a magical child. I was adventurous; I didn’t always follow mom’s rules. One day, I wandered away from home a bit 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. It was like they loved, 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 “That’s just your imagination” and “Who are you to be” …

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

CC: So I lost touch with that for a long time until 1987, which I think was an awakening year for a lot of people, the harmonic convergence if that rings any bells for people. I was sitting out in a field. I had a house in Scotts Valley near Santa Cruz and I walked out into a big dry field where there was no water and nothing planted, just weeds, 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. That really sparked me to move into an active seeking phase at that point.

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

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

Rick: Sitting sunflower.

CC: Although I do treasure sunflowers.

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

CC: Well 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 a thousand miles away and 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 very minimal as far as it being a nurturing environment. 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 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 the deity of mescaline or whatever I was looking for, but one of those journeys did absolutely take me down inside the very structure of how things are in reality. It’s like I was inside the frequencies, seeing the scale that went from solid to liquid to sound to light to color, and I was able to just travel in between all of those frequencies, 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 letting me know that physical reality wasn’t all there is.

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

CC: Absolutely.

Rick: Okay next step.

CC: Well, I majored in animal science in college and after that I became what today we’d call a dog whisperer. I raised dogs, 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, animals were a safer medium, but they also kept the heart open. It was a wonderful way to relate to people through the medium of dogs because they’re so heart-based. I learned a lot about people, and about teaching, and about coaching through that avenue.

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

CC: It’s really true Rick, when I was in college, I was encouraged to study things where you dissect animals. To be a scientist in that regard in the laboratory, or even doing research on humans 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 wasn’t going to be found in the test tubes and in the laboratories.

Rick: Yeah okay, and so next step.

CC: Okay, so 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, and have a business. Then we come up to that shift point in 1987, and at that point things seemed to be falling apart. It was one of my first dark night experiences, where things that had been working just all started falling apart and not working, and lots of things went wrong and that sent me to the meditation cushion.

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

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

Rick: Just spontaneously?

CC: Yeah, pretty much spontaneously, although I had studied metaphysics, and I’d studied channeled material, so I had a framework for what it was. I never in a million years expected it would happen for me, but when I started to get quiet and listen I had responses coming back to me in my inner awareness. I developed that into a form of communicating with guides who were seeming to show up for my education, and that just weirded my husband out no end.

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

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

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

CC: Right, and the marriage broke up pretty quickly and things led to things. Over the period of the next year or two, I ended up giving up that home and coming to dead ends for everything I was attempting at that point. There’s a few years of exploration and growth and experimenting with altered states and different contact with things. It actually felt very wonderful for a while, and then it stopped being productive and I hit another dark night, which was even more whole scale. 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 went on a rampage and I kind of just caved. I just caved.

Rick: The reason I’m having you go through this stuff is that people can relate to it. Often teachers get up on stages or on YouTube, and they present themselves as this shining example of enlightenment, and you don’t have any sense of what they might have been through or what they might still be going through, which we’ll talk about later. People get this subtle feeling that, “Oh I could never be like them.” I think it can be sort of encouraging for people to realize that, as the Firesign Theater put it, “We’re all bozos on this bus,” and spiritual teachers who seem to really have their act together have been through all kinds of stuff over the years to get to where they are today and are still going through stuff. I just wanted to throw that in there to give your voice a rest for a second and put it in context.

CC: Yeah, thank you. I think that’s very right on Rick. In fact I got so good at failure I used to joke that I was going to teach a course called “Advanced Failure” because people should teach what they’re good at. That was the way it was showing up for me. What was really happening I think is that I had opened myself up to very beautiful belief systems about a multi-dimensional reality, and that I was a very special part of that, and that I had a special destiny. I really fell into that, into being almost seduced by it for a while. I think what happened, and I don’t really know why, but maybe organically I was just ready to go deeper. I had to go deeper in order to really find what’s true. And you know, 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: That’s interesting about feeling you were special, because I think egotism can be insidious and we’re the last people to know it when it’s creeping up on us. Others may be able to see it perhaps, but it blinds us to itself. And many teachers, and you weren’t at the teacher stage yet, but many teachers, especially when they start getting showered with a lot of attention and praise and love, it can really go to their heads. I know that in Waking Down there are mutual safeguards against this kind of thing, but of course you hadn’t gotten into Waking Down yet. Anyway, it’s an interesting thing that you recognized that in yourself on your own and it sounds like you moved through it.

CC: Well, I got humbled, Rick.

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

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

Rick: Yeah, yeah. That resonates with one of my favorite themes, and I’ve said this many times, which is that the universe is this big evolution machine and we’re here to grow, and there’s an intelligence that is going to facilitate or push along our growth, whether we cooperate with it or resist it kicking and screaming. But there is that core force that influences and governs and guides our lives, and it’s interesting to reflect upon that sometimes in discussions like this.

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

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

CC: It’s pretty terrifying, actually, because the way we’re structured, or the way I was structured certainly, thought it had some idea about how to be in the world and how to take care of things. When all that started crumbling around me, I lost touch with my north, my compass, and it was quite bewildering and devastating in a way, feeling simultaneously like I wanted to make a contribution here through this life of mine and that I was utterly not up to it, that I was just not going to be able to deliver, I was so flawed and so broken. And humble sounds almost like a positive quality, but there’s a way in which it was more like, “Oh, I’m just completely not fit, unable, inadequate, and hopeless.”

Rick: Yeah, I don’t know if that’s necessarily … I mean, there are different ways of defining words and that’s perhaps one way of defining humble, “Oh, I’m so unworthy and incapable,” and all sorts of things like that. Another nicer way of defining humble is just not insisting that things happen any particular way, being willing to align with higher intelligence if one can 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: Oh, I totally agree. That was the ultimate outcome, you know, to just be, really to just be, and not try to be something big or something small, but to just be exactly what size I am and do what I can in the moment and show up. That’s kind of just been how it’s been.

Rick: 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 going to have their own specifics and it might be good to stick to general principles. But after this rot period where everything was falling apart for you and nothing was working out and nature was smacking you around, was there a light at the end of the tunnel that you eventually came into?

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

Rick: Turiya.

CC: Turiya, the fourth state, the one that’s like deep sleep with no content but you still have awareness. I got real curious about that from whatever inner guidance was bringing me along and giving me energy. I didn’t have energy for much at that point, but I had energy for doing that, so I would do these long meditations. I had to do them lying down because I couldn’t sit up that long. 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 in my heart would be there and then that would get slower and subtract away. Then it happened that it seemed like that was a portal of sorts to something I can’t put into words. When all the activity stopped, I shifted and felt that I was in my true home, the heart of love, the utter essence, the womb, all these words are inadequate because they are not it. But that happened and it was utterly satisfying, like I’d had to follow this thread until I got there because I had to know where I came from, where I was going, what I was truly. For about a year, every so often I would have another opportunity to merge into that.

Rick: Just once a year?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick: It was there in the background.

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

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

CC: Exactly.

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

CC: Well, yeah, it had tremendous effect in certain ways. It just didn’t relieve the confusion about being a bewildered human. But to some degree it relieved the confusion about who I was and it was the end of seeking. From that point on, I really wasn’t seeking. I was just exploring, “Now, what does this mean?” I’m still thinking, I’m still having emotions, I’m still reacting, and I’m still attached in various ways. I think I was quite clear that I wanted to help other people awaken, and yet did not feel in any way like I was ready for that or qualified or knew how. I became more and more comfortable living in a state of not knowing, I’ll put it that way. But at that time I had no framework for how to be a teacher if you’re living in a state of not knowing.

Rick: Yeah. Well, first of all, I like your distinction between seeking and exploring. It’s somewhat in vogue for people to say, “Give up the search,” but that’s just words. A lot of times people hear those words and they’re still really in seeking mode. They haven’t had that experience you’ve just described and so it leaves them kind of frustrated, I think, to try to follow such advice. But there’s definitely a time when a certain phase has passed and one feels a contentment, so that emptiness isn’t gnawing at you all the time. You do feel like there’s a relaxation of seeking and yet, boy, there’s certainly plenty left to explore, no end of it. So I like that distinction anyway, just wanted to say that.

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

Rick: Yeah, in fact, I think sometimes when people hear this advice to give up the search, it only adds a level of guilt because they find themselves still kind of seeking and craving and they think, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stop the search?” It’s good to have this understanding that at a certain phase of our development, it’s natural to have this seeking energy and at a certain phase, it’s natural for it to drop off. Just be honest with where you are and go with it.

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

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

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

Rick: We’ll be talking about green lighting after a while. I think that probably relates to what we’re saying right now. Alright, let’s continue on with the biography.

CC: Sure, sure. Around that time I did drop out. So before 1995, in the early 1990s, I was in this dark night passage. I was having discoveries, but I was also being undone and I had no energy for being productive in the world. That was my first time living in an RV. I borrowed 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 in the wilderness.

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

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

Rick: Okay.

CC: Oh, look who we got.

Rick: Dog break here.

CC: Oh, dog break.

Rick: She came around and had to introduce our new dog. This is Luna.

CC: Luna.

Rick: We picked her up from an animal shelter down in Illinois, and she’s doing pretty good.

CC: She’s beautiful.

Rick: She has some kind of kennel cough thing going on that we haven’t totally figured out.

CC: It’ll probably pass.

Rick: Yeah. Alright. Here, you take her Irene so she doesn’t tangle up in the wires. There we go. Thank you. Okay.

CC: Oh, so sweet.

Rick: She’s about 15 pounds.

CC: She says, “I’m sleepy.”

Rick: Yeah.

CC: We’re losing her head there, Irene.

Rick: Alrighty. So, okay. So, sorry about that. When your dog comes around, you got to lift him up right here.

CC: Yeah. Tucker, come here. Come here. Fair enough. Dog break. Come on. Come. Come. Ready? Jump. Come on. One, two, three. Come on. Jump. Come on. Let’s go. Here we go. Okay. This has to be in my lap. All right.

Rick: Hey. Oh. What do you call those? Australian Shepherds?

CC: Australian Shepherds.

Rick: I love those dogs.

CC: This is Tucker.

Rick: Oh, he’s beautiful.

CC: He’s a little bigger. He’s 35 pounds. Say, “Hi, Tucker.”

Rick: I love that two different color eye thing that they have.

CC: Hi. There we go. Say, “Hi,” to everybody.

Rick: He’s great. Hi, Tucker.

CC: He was sleeping.

Rick: Beautiful. High energy dog. You must get some exercise with him.

CC: Oh, well, he’s good for me in that regard.

Rick: Yeah. Gets you out there.

CC: But he’s a great frisbee dog.

Rick: Yeah.

CC: He gets a lot of exercise while I stand still and throw the frisbee.

Rick: Oh, well, at least your arms are in shape. Okay, so where were we?

CC: Somewhere in the night. Oh, my first stint in an RV, dropping out from the world, from life. So really my Odyssey, after this sense of knowing myself, knowing who I am, what I am, was stabilizing. I was still dealing with the emotional fallout of the pain of my life, or maybe the pain of being human. I was experiencing that effect that people do get when people say, “Well, you shouldn’t be feeling that,” or, “You should be able to fix it,” you know, “If you just do your right healing work, that wouldn’t be happening anymore.” And yet there was this persistent kind of deep melancholy, sad, grieving, feeling tone when I would sense inward.

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

CC: Well, it was definitely pulling things up to the surface, so that’s a good way to describe it. And I was going deeper and deeper with that and not just being on the surface reactive, but I was sensing deeper and deeper and going into “what is here at the base of my experience and why isn’t it just totally peaceful?” Because when I would shift away from outward experience and fall totally into that inner no-space, non-being, you know, all the questions resolved. There was total love, total peace, total security, safety, total relaxation as that, but there was this other stuff going on in me as well. I had this sense that it was like apples and oranges and yet I had this quest to find a way for them to integrate. I didn’t know how to make that happen, and didn’t really have much in the way of teachers at that point. I sensed that the solution was not simply to call my humanness unreal in any way and try to get out of it, but was to stay with it and find the integration.

Rick: That’s good. You know, I might want to interject here that people who have really emphasized calling their humanness unreal and trying to escape it, well, it’s pejorative to use the word escape, but who have 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. It’s almost like they’ve intentionally cultured a schism or a split in their personality and brought on some kind of a rather serious dysfunctionality in their lives. I just want to bring that out again because it’s still in vogue in some spiritual circles to try to do that, or at least the way it’s presented, people get the impression that they’re supposed to try to do that. It can not only not be helpful, but can actually get people in trouble.

CC: Right. Well, we’re learning a lot. I think the whole exploration of the human psyche is growing by leaps and bounds and we’re getting new discoveries especially through neuroscience now that are starting to corroborate certain things 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. Earlier spiritual teachings did the best they could with what they knew, and yet I think the potential now is for a lot more integration of the whole self, all the transcendent dimensions and all of the embodied dimensions of what it is that we are, including the interpersonal dimensions of what we are, the way we’re not separate from one another.

Rick: Yeah, I was just talking with Francis Bennett last night, he’s 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 three hundred people. And 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 estranged themselves from a whole major section of their life, their humanness, and their body, and so on, and taken refuge in a detached or transcendent realm and considered that to be non-dual, which it is, in and of itself, but if it’s excluding a major portion of life then it’s really more of a duality than we even started with. If we want to think in terms of non-duality, we want something much more inclusive that embraces the whole package.

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

Rick: Good, for what I just described.

CC: Right, because we can radically embrace absolutely everything. And you know, it’s not about whether we like it or don’t like it, we can radically embrace our liking and our not liking. All of the range of experience can be welcomed and included. 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.” That’s a fallacy. CC angry is as much consciousness expressing herself as she is when she’s sitting quietly and just being at ease.

Rick: Yeah, but can that be taken to extremes? I mean, the traditional scriptures talk about equanimity and things like that, not getting overly upset by failure or overly rejoicing in success. It’s like the analogy of, if you were a pauper, you gain ten dollars, it’s a big deal. You lose ten dollars, it’s a big deal. But if you’re a millionaire, you can gain and lose hundreds, thousands, and you still have your ups and downs in terms of those gains and losses, but it doesn’t shake 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.” Isn’t an enlightenment worth the term a development in which extremes of darkness like that would have been worked through and infused with light or bliss or whatever, so that you’d no longer be susceptible to them?

CC: Well, you just opened a big discussion, Rick, by that.

Rick: We’ll do that.

CC: Let’s do it, because I think it’s important. I would make a distinction that there’s awakening and there’s enlightenment. Certainly in the Waking Down framework we speak of a second birth awakening, and that one can very much coexist with any state, including deep depression, and does. And that’s because it’s not yet fully integrated, and that’s what I was talking about in my apples and oranges.

Rick: Yeah, in the 90s phase, yeah.

CC: Right. It wasn’t fully integrated, and that full integration is taking years. As I become more and more integrated, there is a stability and there’s a sense of never losing touch with this profound self-knowing that’s profoundly at peace with life, with living, with everything here, and celebrates it and relishes it. And yet, I’m also fully given into life. So let’s take the fact that I found my true love when I was about 50 and we had 8 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.

Rick: So you had 8 years and for 5 of those he had cancer.

CC: And for 5 of those he had cancer, and I’ll tell more of that story in a minute. Then I lost him. He did pass, and that was the most excruciating experience I imagine anyone could ever go through, walking forward into death with him. We were so merged, it was like somebody was peeling duct tape off my skin to experience the bodily separation from him. So, my awakeness did not … I would say the opposite of it, it didn’t buffer me, it enabled me to stay fully present to every bit of that journey, all the way into and through, and of course ongoing, because it is still ongoing.

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

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

Rick: Yeah, and which many people in the world don’t have. You see people utterly devastated by tragedies of various kinds, and severely traumatized, but you realize that 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 whatever, but they would just… you know, there’s that saying in the Gita, “Know that to be indeed indestructible by which all this is pervaded,” so there’s an indestructibility that gets awakened in your nature that hell or high water cannot shake.

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

Rick: Solid. It’s even called the rock-like in Sanskrit, kutastha, it’s said to be like a rock, imperturbable, unshakable, indestructible. Okay, we’ve got a few threads going on here now. We left you back in the 90s, and we’re moving you along here to eventually finding the Waking Down community, which I believe happened in the late 90s. So, where would you like to pick up the story from where we left it?

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

Rick: Metaphorically or literally?

CC: Well, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically, and I was pretty much a loner. I did have people and teachers and books and would 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 a book Saniel Bonder had recently written called “Waking Down.” As I said, my apples and oranges phase, I was looking for a way to integrate, I was looking for a spiritual path that didn’t favor one end of the polarity over the other, the transcendent or the human, you know. There were plenty of people who were doing one or the other, but not so many that I was seeing that were doing both. It seemed to me that the point of “Waking Down” was that it was an attempt to do both, to embrace our humanness without pulling, and also be fully awakening. That was enough to get me curious, so I traveled out to California to explore, and I got hooked. I loved the people I met, Saniel and Linda and Fay and Ted and Hillary and Van and the early teachers in those days, 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 those kinds of people around me until then. One thing that was very important to me was that the people who were involved were finding their own voice and their own unique expression. It wasn’t about parroting what one teacher was saying and quoting him and always trying to be like him. There was a real encouragement for people to be unique and awakening as exactly who they were and find their own voice. That was really important to me. I felt there would be room for me there.

Rick: That’s one thing I really like about the Waking Down community, which of course I’ve only known as an interviewer and as a friend of many of the people, but there’s no parroting going on. It’s an interesting balance between having a certain structure and certain ethical guidelines and things like that, which are very important, and at the same time giving people free reign to do what they’re meant to do. Nice.

CC: So I didn’t have any money, because I still hadn’t found a very productive way to engage in the world yet. I was still squeaking by. In order to take advantage of the learning opportunity, I moved to California and volunteered to help Saniel in his work, and eventually we helped him make some money and he was able to then start paying me. I worked for him for a couple of years, and then I became a teacher in my own way and moved back to Colorado, which was a favorite place of mine, and supported a community that was getting established there.

Rick: One thing interesting about Saniel, I’ve talked to him about this privately and all, is that Adi Da was quite a character, and if you get the inside track on some of the stuff that was going on with him, it’s scary. I mean, the levels of decadence and indulgence in various things were shocking, and yet at the same time he had this incredible presence apparently, and some very wonderful people have come out of that, like Saniel and Mercedes Kinkle and Sondra Glickman and many others. So that in itself is a conundrum to me, kind of a paradox. But perhaps that was, in a roundabout way, just what someone like Saniel needed in order to establish something in which there was a respect for individual autonomy and at the same time an adherence to ethical guidelines and respect for people and a lack of taking advantage of and abusing people and so on. That thought just came to me as I was thinking about Saniel and Adi Da and all. Any comments on that?

CC: Well, complex subject. Again, we’ve kind of touched on the fact that awakening doesn’t immediately transform personalities.

Rick: And it can intoxicate egos. There can be powerful awakenings which can just make you a total egomaniac.

CC: Right, right. So there’s a concern there and 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. 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 considered to be an expression of divine being. And, I’m sorry, I find that to be bullshit.

Rick: Some teachers say that explicitly and can go way off on tangents in terms of their treatment of people. I mean, Andrew Cohen 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’s sort of a good case in point in a way in which he realized that, despite his awakening, which was genuine, he had really been kind of a screw-up in many respects and decided, “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 from him since. Whereas others, just get deeper and deeper into it. “Oh, now I’m an avatar,” and it just gets more and more weird.

CC: Well, in the early days, the people around Saniel, it was a bit of a Wild West and anything goes, and there was not a lot of understanding of power differentials. I think that came in as the community around him matured, being able to notice the ways there were things that were out of integrity and to name them. We started to create ethical policies. Everyone in teaching roles was expected to sign on to these ethical policies and agree to them. And they have teeth, especially as we formed in 2005. So the work has changed over the years. In 2004-2005, Saniel was wanting to move away from the kind of guru at the top, hierarchical organizational structure and we were brainstorming different ways to accomplish that. We held meetings and did planning sessions and eventually a team of three of us, Ron Ames, Krishna Gauci, and myself, took on the task of creating some new structures. One thing we created was the Waking Down Teacher Association, which now has about 40 members and is very much different 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 they became a requirement for maintaining membership. So at that point we had teeth, and not to be punitive to anyone but to be mutually supportive of people and to raise our awareness around these places where teachers get hung up in their ethical problems, so around money, around sex, around power. Those are the biggies. So to be in a structure where we all meet together and stay in communication and if anyone’s feeling like they’re in a gray area where their ethics are fuzzy, they can get counseled.

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

CC: Right. So yes, I met Michael in 2004, at a Transfiguration retreat, which is a week-long intensive, and I was serving as a teacher at that event. Yeah, absolutely, there was this rule that we couldn’t act on anything during the course of the retreat, of course. And yet, you can feel the energy starting to move, 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. 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 we were given a stamp of approval.

Rick: Yeah, with a chaperone, of course.

CC: To begin exploring, without a chaperone.

Rick: Okay, so I think what we’ve done so far now is we’ve given 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 a lot of the horror stories that happen sometimes in spiritual groups, but we still don’t know much about what it is. So I’d like to use your book as an outline for walking through what Waking Down is and some of its important principles. It’s a really well-written book, and I’ve read most of it and really enjoyed it. Do you have a copy there yourself?

CC: I do.

Rick: Good. So let’s walk through it a little bit and use the chapter titles and some of the subheads as main points so that we really get a comprehensive vision of what Waking Down is. Does that sound like a good plan?

CC: Right, Rick. But I would like to tell our viewers that my book isn’t the Bible of Waking Down. It’s my experience with people in my own words and with my own slant on it. So again, in Waking Down we have room to do that. Some of the things in here are maybe not shared by all the teachers of Waking Down, and yet the general gist of it and the heart of it, I like to think, truly does represent what my colleagues are also embracing and espousing and doing with people.

Rick: So there really is no Bible of Waking Down. Even books Saniel has written you wouldn’t consider the Bible of Waking Down because his word is not the Gospel truth necessarily, but everyone’s making their contribution, right?

CC: Right. Saniel has his own unique voice and way of expressing things and he is also a fallible human being, as is every one of us. We do have something we call “core dharma” and “teacher dharma.” So core dharma would be the basic principles of Waking Down in Mutuality, and that we all would say, “Well, of course.” 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 core principles were drawn out.

Rick: Is it expected that the teacher dharma will be in a certain orbit around the core dharma and not go too far afield or else it really can’t be associated with Waking Down? I mean, if somebody decides that, “Okay, we’re all going to drop acid and get into Jello wrestling or something,” then yeah, you better go do that on your own.

CC: Exactly, exactly. So we call it Waking Down related. And of course, any individual can do whatever floats their boat, but it wouldn’t be recognized as a related offering.

Rick: Yeah, okay. So let’s start with something you have in the “Darkness Before Dawn” chapter where you have about four stages of embodied awakening. It would be interesting to run through that. Keep in mind that we have maybe an hour now to go through the various points in the book, and so let’s pace ourselves so we get through it all but cover things as deeply as we can.

CC: Okay. Well, thanks for bringing up the four-stage model that I threw in that first chapter. It’s my own model, and again, I’m not saying that everyone would agree that this is the best model ever written about human development, but there are a couple of things that I think are important in this model. First of all, it’s a very simple model, and I’m the first one to say maps are not the territory, and no one is going to follow this to the letter. There are many different lines of development that aren’t being represented in this model. I’m talking about a spiritual unfoldment model, and I call it four stages. It correlates with the subtle body development from gross to subtle to spiritual, and then integrating all of that. So, solid to liquid to vapor to what transcends and unfolds all of it. And a very, very simple way of saying it might be, in what I call stage one, that your sense of the divine is completely other than you, completely separate. I’m just a human and the divine is out there and all-powerful and I’m subject to the whims of this divine. The second stage would be where a lot of much greater sensitivity to subtle and multidimensional experiences starts to happen, where the person might be recognizing they too are part of a divine essence energy of the universe. That’s what I was describing when I said I was on a really rapid spiritual growth path and I was channeling. That’s what I would say was my stage two journey. Then what I call stage three is when an integration happens in a landing. So, again, stage two is when we’re opening all the chakras and becoming much more open to all sorts of multidimensional experiences and levels of our being. And then, as a way of speaking, you could say then our spirit comes home to inhabit the physical-emotional-mental being in a much bigger way. That’s why we say “lands” as if it could come down and land right into the heart, right into the belly, right into the genitals, right into the whole being and not just be floating around up here somewhere. That’s what we call the stage in which the second birth happens. It’s also a stage of paradox, so I’m not one or the other, I’m both and. I’m spirit and I’m body, I’m spirit and I’m emotions. They’re all together, but they haven’t necessarily totally gelled. We’re encountering paradox all the time and realizing that life is full of paradox, but there is a self-knowing that I am spirit, I’m consciousness, I am consciousness plus matter and yet matter is not consciousness, it’s all consciousness. So it’s when they come together.

Rick: That was stage three, right?

CC: Right, and I call it stage three because it seems to me that when a lot of people hear about Waking Down and they hear about the second birth and they meet people who are in the early stages, the first few years maybe, of the second birth, they say, “That person doesn’t seem very enlightened, what’s going on here? Are they just smoking dope, or are they just kidding themselves?” It’s because there’s this deep integration that is underway but is, like you said, churning up the shadow material, it’s pulling that up to the surface, it’s putting people through the deep rapids of the awakening and the challenges of that. We call it the “shakedown.” It can be a very turbulent time for people, intensifying. So I then spell out a fourth stage and to me that’s when it all really gels. It’s less about feeling paradox than it is about feeling a flow. It’s like a kind of a surrendered or relaxed flowing, I call it “seamless onliness.” It’s an even deeper integration, merging, blending, gelling of all that I am into someone who is just being, but being in a way that’s so much more informed than it was in the past, so much more whole. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about those. I think it’s a useful model for people to play with.

Rick: Sure. A question just came in from one of the viewers that I’d like to ask 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: Wow, probably nothing simple. I mean all kinds of phenomena 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, where 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, that it’s actually helping to open up certain areas that might have been constricted. Or it might be that it’s too much, that it’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, pulling it down and not necessarily having it all be building up in one particular spot. 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 running higher voltage through thin wires and the thin wires can’t handle that. So, part of awakening and part of why I think it comes and goes for people is that when it recedes, when it seems to have left, it’s an opportunity for our wiring to catch up. And then the next time we get to run a little bit more voltage through the system.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s very important. Obviously the body is the instrument through which anything is lived, any experience, awakening or enlightenment. So it’s pretty well traditionally understood that for a really significant shift in the way we view the world, in the way we live life, in the way we experience, there’s going to have to be a correspondingly significant shift in the instrument through which we do that, in the body, the nervous system, subtle levels of it, chakras and all that. As a Waking Down teacher and teachers in general in Waking Down, do they recommend other therapies and things? Like you might say, “Oh, maybe you should go and get a massage or get Reiki or go to a psychiatrist for that matter if somebody seems to need something to supplement what you’re doing with them.”

CC: 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: Yeah. So, moving into your book a little bit more here, “Dark Night.” How do you know if you’re in a dark night? I’ve had people actually send in emails and say, “Would you please ask everybody you interview about the dark night? I need to know more about it. I feel like I’m going through it.” So you’ve referred to it in terms of your own experience. How does a person know if they’re in a dark night?

CC: Well, I actually, in chapter one, give a list of points that might be helpful for people.

Rick: You can read some of them, yeah.

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

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

CC: Thank you, I think that’s very true, and some might not fit that kind of dark night description at all. What’s really happening is that there’s an undermining of the structures of our psyche, that the edges are softening. So, like for me, there was a sense that, “Oh my God, everything I’ve been learning is all a belief about reality. It’s not necessarily reality,” and just falling through that and into “What do I know?” and that state of not knowing. So, it might be a very internal thing, it might be very subtle, and people’s lives might go on just pretty much as normal. So, they may or may not feel like, “Oh, everything’s falling apart.”

Rick: I wonder if the darkness of a dark night might be related to how invested you have been in something which ultimately would be in your best interest to shuck off.

CC: That’s a good consideration. I do want to say that not all life passages that are painful are dark nights, and there is depression that’s not a dark night. So, just because you’re depressed doesn’t mean you’re in a dark night and vice versa. I do want people to get appropriate help, especially if they are feeling really dark and/or if they’re feeling like life’s not working.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s really important. I had a young friend who was still alive when I started this series, and he was a very spiritual guy and everybody loved him, and he got into this real dark thing and he kind of gave it a spiritual spin, in terms of his not really belonging on the planet and things like that, and he ended up killing himself, and it was a real tragedy. So, I think what you’re saying there is important, that we should seek help if we need help, and not assume that what we’re experiencing is just some kind of spiritual transition and that we’re competent to handle it entirely on our own.

CC: Absolutely. In fact, part of my life purpose is that people don’t have to encounter this alone, and so I offer my support, and I have many colleagues who are offering their support. It can be really tough to encounter the starkness and just sheer hard time of being a human at times on your own. I really want people to know that support is available, and not necessarily only through people like Waking Down teachers, obviously there’s all kinds of useful therapies that also are good and useful for people.

Rick: Yeah, I think George Harrison wrote a song called “This Too Shall Pass,” or maybe it was the name of one of his albums, but 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 keep on keeping on and not despair. It’s easier said than done, especially if one is in a really dark time. You were talking earlier about a realization that you are loved by some higher intelligence in the universe, and doing whatever one can do to remember that and realize that there is a brighter future even if the present is dark, if we just have the intention to keep evolving and growing. I’m dwelling on this stuff because here in Fairfield there have been a number of suicides over the years, and they’re starting to take it seriously and have meetings at the local university and in town to try to prevent any more. And these are largely people who had a spiritual background, grew up meditating perhaps as children and so on. So it’s really a tragedy when that sort of thing happens, and anything we can say in this interview that might prevent that from happening to even one person would be well worth spending the time on, you know?

CC: Absolutely, Rick, absolutely. It’s just heartbreaking how deep people can go into darkness and despair, especially if they feel it’s hopeless. I think from within a place of depression we project that it’s permanent. It just seems to be part and parcel of the pressure that we assume that time is going to stretch out forever into the future and it’s always going to be this way.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like when you have a terrible flu, you can’t remember ever having felt healthy and you feel like, “I’m always going to feel like this,” and then a couple of weeks later you’re feeling pretty good.

CC: Right, right. I’ve made a pact with myself when I’m sick like that never to make any conclusions about reality, because my conclusions at that point are going to be really grim.

Rick: Here’s a nice little comment that somebody sent in and then we’ll 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 in the rock.”

CC: Hmm.

Rick: Nice.

CC: Thank you, thank you.

Rick: So, there’s a section in your book on page 33 that 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 there’s a section on “Divinely Human Teachers are Divinely Human,” with the emphasis on human. We’ve kind of already covered that, but what did you want to say about this “Heart Openings”?

CC: I don’t know, what did I say about it?

Rick: Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m not going to re-read it now.

CC: I think I was speaking about transmission. Transmission is that kind of body-to-body communication, it can be verbal but also it can be very non-verbal, when somebody is fully living from that grounded condition in spirit that other people can template off of that confidence in being. But what also can happen is that you might find yourself falling in love.

Rick: You mentioned the word, what was it, “tantric initiations”?

CC: Tantric initiations, yeah, that’s an interesting, fun term for what can happen. Because to be seen by another, to be seen deeply is something we long for, and it’s also something that tends to terrify us. But when we’re seen and we find that it’s safe and it’s kind and it’s compassionate, our hearts just respond and open. That can be mistaken sometimes for it being, “This is going to be my partner,” or it can include a lustful sexual component to it, because again we are connecting up all parts of our being, so it might not just be heart, it might be heart plus genitals plus desires. It’s something that has to be navigated carefully, 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 growthful for all parties.

Rick: So, everybody and his brother and his sister ends up having infatuations and affairs and whatnot in this world, whether or not they’re a spiritual person. So are we just putting a spiritual spin on a universal phenomenon by calling it a tantric initiation?

CC: I wouldn’t reduce it that far. I would say that there’s a “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, very catalytic kind of a thing that happens. It can really take over, bring somebody forward in a way that they hadn’t been brought forward before.

Rick: 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 sort of cook in the longing. And that can be very, what’s that word in alchemy, transmutative, where it can help to energize and enliven your system without wrecking havoc in your life.

CC: Right, well especially if you’ve got this opening happening with someone who’s not the person you’re in a committed relationship with then 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 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: So there’s a whole lot in Waking Down about the core wound, and I’ve pondered what that means over the years. Actually, reading your book gave me some insights into it that I don’t think I got before, maybe just because I have so many more years of growth under my belt. Let me give a stab at what you mean by it and then correct me and elaborate. As I understand it, what you mean by it, and not only you but the Waking Down community, is that there is this paradox or juxtaposition between our divine nature and our human nature. The divine nature is unbounded and blissful and eternal and indestructible and all that stuff, and the human nature is flawed by necessity. There’s always going to be some screws loose or some wires crossed or some scarring from our past or whatever. And so there’s always going to be a rub between the perfect dimension of our life, of our being, and the imperfect. And that rub is the core wound. Is that correct?

CC: That’s pretty good, yeah. And it’s not just that we’re flawed, although that’s often true, it’s that we juxtapose in our mind what is currently, which always has limits. 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 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. But I’m in my mind, I’m saying, “Why can’t I live by the ocean year-round for free?” The reality is somebody comes and kicks me out and tells me I’m trespassing or whatever. In our minds we compare what is against our idealized sense of what could be, and then we tend to judge what is negatively. And that’s a big part of what causes the pain that we call the core wound, the resistance to what is. It’s like, “Oh my God, this is just not a perfect world, and people do awful things here, and I hate it, or it makes me terribly sad.” That comes from feeling that there’s something fundamentally wrong. That feeling of something not okay or fundamentally wrong or flawed or insufficient is close to what we mean by core wound.

Rick: So you just defined it with reference to the contrast between what life is as we experience it and what life ideally could be like. Whereas, I was defining it with the contrast between the relative and the absolute. I suppose that might be another dimension of it.

CC: Right, right. Those are both true. There’s an existential truth of what you said, and then what I said is more about how my human self responds to that truth, by feeling like I’m not good enough or I’m flawed or life sucks.

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

CC: Right, right. I call the core wound the portal, because it’s the portal to embodied awakening. You don’t have to encounter or pass through that portal unless embodied awakening is where you’re headed. But if you want to fully land and fully be in that radical embrace of all that you are, the core wound is going to be very key to that. You can’t will yourself into the core wound and you can’t jump into the core wound in order to get out the other side. It is an existential condition of being a human being, and what you can do is let yourself touch into it and not assume that those thoughts you have are necessarily the whole story or true. So we can get comfortable. The emotional quality I felt around the core wound was deep, deep sadness and grieving, as if the world was just this massive pool of sorrow. When I permitted myself to live as that, it was very important. Instead of trying to fix it or trying to heal it or trying to make it go away, it just became that, and then relaxed into it, and then it stopped. It shifted. It shifted, but not through any effort I made to make it go away. It shifted. So in a way I can still remember that, but I don’t live there now.

Rick: Yeah, so it did get healed, but when you say you relaxed into it, it was more like, if we have a wound in our hand, we cut it, it’s like we can sit there and will it to heal and obsess over the fact that our hand is cut and bemoan our fate and so on and so forth. Or, we can just apply appropriate measures, maybe have some stitches or put a band-aid on, and nature will heal it, because nature has a healing tendency. The whole use 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 that the core wound is an un-healable thing. Well, maybe it is in terms of ultimate, complete, utter, 100 percent healing, but you’re also saying that the approach to healing it is not through individual volition so much as a kind of a relaxation, and a sensing, and a dropping into, and allowing ourselves to feel it. I’m talking too much now. I’m putting words in your mouth. You go ahead and take it over.

CC: Yeah, but that’s good, Rick. That was well said. So, the existential condition is just the existential condition of being human and that’s always going to be creating that juxtaposition or potential rub. I find I bump up against it in all kinds of ways. I bump up against it when I’m watching what our government is doing with other governments. But the wound part, the distress there is mostly, primarily, in a big way due to resisting it. People go out of their way all the time to avoid feeling the core wound. When you actually allow it, permit it, breathe there, then 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 myself.” You can’t, you know what I mean? But, if you get support and you start being curious about it, you can discover that you can live here as an embodied conscious being.

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

CC: Oh, sure. I would. I would say that it drives the vast majority of human endeavor in some way or another. People stay busy in all kinds of ways, not just negative, but also positive ways. They stay busy keeping themselves preoccupied so they don’t really encounter that “ugh” at the core. And when they start meditating and start allowing themselves to drop deeper, then they start to usually get a little more aware of what that might be. And it’s a good thing to feel. It’s a good thing to make friends with.

Rick: Yeah. Okay. Go ahead.

CC: I just want to do a time check. How are we doing?

Rick: We’re doing okay. Another half hour or so.

CC: Okay. Good. All right. Just wanted to see.

Rick: Yeah. Now we’re doing good. I think we’ve pretty well done justice to the core wound. I’m sure we could talk about that for the next half hour, but let’s move on here. I just want to make sure to cover all the good stuff in your book. Let’s talk a little bit about green lighting.

CC: Green lighting is a fun concept and it’s very, very useful. It’s often one of the things people report as the most useful and that is permitting yourself to be as you are. Giving yourself permission to be. To be petty, to be selfish, to be flawed, to be incomplete, to be happy, to be miserable, to be whatever is happening, and to be good at certain things and not good at other things. What happens for almost all humans is that we get so trained, and so conditioned, and so programmed to always be trying to second-guess if we’re doing it right. Then we get spiritual teachings on top of that which tell us what we should be doing to be doing it right, and/or how we should be feeling if things were right. Or we encounter the secret in 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.” We tie ourselves up in all kinds of knots. Green lighting is a first step of relaxing the knots in our being and just saying, “Okay, let me just be as I am for a while.” And get curious then about what I am. If we can let go of some of the ways we’re trying to make ourselves be a certain way and just allow, then amazing things can start to happen, and will start to happen, and it can be profoundly healing. It’s not just saying, “Okay, I’m great the way I am,” and blowing off everybody else.

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

CC: Well, then that of course gets to a further chapter in the book on actually recognizing we’re not separate from others and that their experience matters also. People often misinterpret though, Rick, that green lighting means green lighting all of your actions. That’s not what it means, because if your action is to punch that person in the face, if that’s your impulse or your impulse is to hurt people, then green lighting doesn’t mean you get to go ahead and do that. It just means the impulse to do it is human, and you can forgive yourself for having the impulse.

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

CC: Right, right. Although acting like a jerk may be an inevitable part of being who we are at times. Hopefully we won’t be a homicidal jerk, or really, we’ll be permitting ourselves to be bringing things conscious in such a way that they’re held in a benign way.

Rick: Yeah, in the TM movement there used to be a term called “unstressing” where you’re releasing stress, especially on long courses and people would sometimes do jerky things and then they would excuse themselves by saying, “Oh, I’m just unstressing.” It was almost an alibi for eating the last slice of pizza or whatever they were doing.

CC: 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.

Rick: Yeah.

CC: And it’s important to look and see what’s driving it because otherwise you’re not going to be bringing that consciousness all the way through your being.

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

CC: Right, that’s possible, and that’s a fairly advanced level of in-seeing. As I use the word, I start with using in-seeing as a way to become more fully aware of what’s showing up in me, in my reactivity, in my thoughts, in my feelings, in my ideas about life. I find that these all are body-based, that there’s a way of using in-seeing to invite what I call the inner body to bring forward information that is below the threshold of my thinking mind. So, my thinking mind I call a linear thought, thought, thought, thought, thought, thought track. Then there’s the body-mind, which I say is like a sphere. It’s like it’s 360-degree information, so much more full. Normally, we just keep that right below our neck, we’re not very aware of what’s going on in there, and yet it’s so rich and it gives us so much information. If we surface it more intentionally into our awareness then we’re not going to be blindsided so often by it, we’re not also going to be subject to re-experiencing the same old kind of reactivity over and over and over again. So, in-seeing is a way of bringing that forward consciously and with curiosity and warmth and compassion, to what I call the parts of myself. So, there might be a part of myself that’s like a little five-year-old or maybe a six-year-old going to school for the first time, and she’s a little scared, a little anxious, and she’s hoping the teacher likes what she says, and she might really want to run away and hide. If I can bring some warmth and attention to her, she’s not going to necessarily have such an extreme reaction, and she might find it’s okay to come out and play. So, it’s hard to simplify what it is. It’s just such a rich, rich field of self-learning, self-knowledge.

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

CC: Well, the in-seeing is a technique, I have an eight-step process that you’d have to pretty much pick up the book and read. The in-seeing is something that I’ve put together, it’s not something all Waking Down teachers do. I base it a lot on what I learned by studying focusing, which goes back to Eugene Gendlin, 50, 60 years of experience with that, and it’s my own way of doing it that supports awakening. So, it’s bringing attention, it’s inviting things forward, it’s being a good listener to your own inner parts. We also find that there are parts that are in relation to other parts, and they can be some of the more entangled places in our being and why we often feel stuck. There might be a part that’s very playful and wants to come out and engage, and there might be another part that’s saying, “It’s not safe to do that, shut up, don’t say that, don’t do that.” And then you can just get frozen right there, “Do I, do I not, do I what, what, what?” And there’s a way to engage the different sides of ourself and actually make room for all of them. And 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 or opposing.

Rick: Yeah, I was going to say, a lot of times things we’ve been talking about and things various other spiritual teachers talk about, people hear them as words and without presence it’s really hard to take them to heart or implement them. It’s like it sounds good, but how do I do it? What to do? Your whole story started in a way with presence, 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 do as a group to culture the capacity for deep presence in people?

CC: Well, that’s so individual. One thing is to say there’s no cookie cutter answer to that because every person is unique. One of the things that I think Waking Down generally does well is that we have a lot of personal attention for people. It’s not just one teacher sitting up front with 50 or 300 people. It’s somebody who actually gets to know you, gets to track you, gets to find what works for you and support you in that and cultivate it. So, that’s part of it. But another reason I’m so big on in-seeing is that in-seeing utilizes a state we could call presence. And that’s a curious, warm, caring, compassionate state that can actually be cultivated like a muscle. When I’m supporting someone in discovering what’s going on internally, I’m helping them find that state of presence for themselves. The more they do that, the stronger it gets. The stronger it gets, the more they can begin to realize that presence isn’t just a state, but it’s also who they are.

Rick: How do you help them find it? Or maybe it’s individualized again.

CC: 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. That helps people to discover it for themselves.

Rick: Does that require physical proximity?

CC: No. No, it’s amazing.

Rick: Does physical proximity help?

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

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

CC: Oh, we could do that.

Rick: Okay. Well, why don’t we do that. And you want to explain what it’s about first before we start? And then when you do it, just do it as long as you feel like, a minute or two, whatever you feel is appropriate. And then we’ll talk a little bit more after that.

CC: Okay, gazing is a form of connecting with another person non-verbally. When you’re connecting with someone who’s living in this embodied, awakened condition, you can take advantage to come into resonance with the frequencies of that. Your body can template off of that or come into resonance with it. That is about all I can say. There really isn’t anything you have to do with it. You don’t have to have a particular attitude. You don’t have to feel anything in particular. In fact, anything could happen. You might feel resistance to it or dislike of it. You might feel your heart opening and feel wonderful. The whole range of things can happen and that’s not really what it’s about. It’s just about saying hello, being to being. Being as expresses through CC is here to call being forth in other bodies. And so that’s my love and that’s what happens with gazing. That’s the potential anyway.

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

CC: Right, yes. Yes, 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: Glasses on or glasses off or doesn’t it matter?

CC: Is the reflection a problem?

Rick: It’s a little bit reflecting, but whatever you feel like.

CC: If you can see my eyes.

Rick: We can see them. We can see them.

CC: Okay.

Rick: Okay.

…

Rick: Thank you. That was nice. Should I ask a question or two now, or do you want more silence? Okay, good. While you were doing that some questions just came in so let me just rather than start off on something else I’ll ask these. 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. She is a seeker after enlightenment and inner fulfillment. I am struggling to understand what non-duality is all about. I would like to know what’s wrong with duality. Thank you.”

CC: Well, that’s an interesting question. There are so many things wrong with duality. Where do we start? I mean in the world of form, there’s a million great things and a million tragic things and he’s seeing some of that in his girlfriend and what she’s struggling with right now. So, duality and non-duality are concepts and I think it’s just more important to be real and be human and find our hearts and find what’s in the way of our hearts being able to connect. Generally, we’ve had lots and lots of experiences in life that have caused our hearts to shut down, to fold, to become armored, as if there’s styrofoam packed around all our hearts. And a lot of our…

Rick: Teflon.

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

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Also, I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s not an either/or situation. It’s not like we have to choose, as your book title implies, it’s not like we have to choose the world of duality, human humanity, over the world of non-duality, divinity. The two can mesh and intermesh and intertwine and coexist and co-enrich one another and that’s really what we’re talking about today. So, if non-duality is being used as some sort of escape, then, as Stephen Wright said, “I broke up with my girlfriend because she was really into meditation, because I wasn’t really into meditation and she wasn’t really into being alive.” So, it has to be an enrichment or an integration.

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

Rick: Yeah, the both/and.

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

Rick: Beautiful.

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

Rick: 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: Oh, gosh, the simplest one would be to put your feet on the ground.

Rick: Walk around barefoot or something.

CC: Or the floor, but yeah, put your feet on the ground and actually you can visualize energy moving down your spine, out your tailbone, down into infinity, down into bedrock. You can ground through your feet, you can lay on the ground. Some of it can be done through breathing. Breathe into your heart, breathe into your belly, get curious about what’s going on down there, and all that can help. You can also open the back of your neck, almost as if you had doors that could be opened there. Sometimes energy pools right there because it’s a nexus, and you can open it out and visualize the energy moving.

Rick: Cool. And also I would say, sometimes physical stuff like gardening or certain kinds of exercise, swimming, things like that can be nice and grounding.

CC: Yes, walking.

Rick: 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 and triggers that romantic relationships are so good at bringing up.”

CC: Oh, bravo! I’m glad you’ve got a partner to engage in that whole exploration with you, and I wish you all the best. I would recommend people start with in-seeing and start to cultivate that state of presence, learn what presence feels like and bring that to their own parts. Then the next step, I call that inner mutuality, Rick. Then outer mutuality is realizing that the person sitting opposite you isn’t a whole lot different than the kind of oppositional parts that we run into internally. Presence can be discovered to have room for even strongly divergent viewpoints to coexist without there necessarily being a conflict around it. There is a skill there and it’s worth cultivating.

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

CC: Right, very true, Rick. As you speak and we’re using the term presence I want to say how I use the term because sometimes people use the term presence for what I would probably use the term consciousness for, which is the absolute dimension, the transcendent dimension. I have a very specific way of using the term presence and we could say that it is consciousness embodying, or consciousness as it touches form. As it comes into embodiment it picks up qualities of heart like warmth, curiosity, compassion, caring about the human condition. For me presence is a very dynamic and transformative principle, whereas consciousness is just the ever-present reality, but as a manner of speaking consciousness doesn’t seem to care. But presence cares deeply.

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

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

Rick: Well that’s good. I think it really does have societal implications. People are always talking about how there seems to be a global awakening taking place. That’s why I mentioned the Palestinian-Israeli thing. I think that there’s a springtime taking place in the world where the sap begins to flow in the trees and so on. That abstract, absolute un-manifest consciousness is becoming more alive and more embodied in all of its expressions. I think ultimately that is the key to the resolution of so many of the terrible problems that prevail on earth, environmental and social and ethical and racism and all these different things, is for people to become more divinely human, to quote the title of your book. For the divine to enter into the human to a much more profound degree than it has in ages past. I really think 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: And thank you so much for doing your show and your incredible archives, such an incredible wealth of information that you’ve amassed and that you’re sharing with the world so freely. It’s beautiful.

Rick: It’s just my joy to do it, you know?

CC: I do know.

Rick: Yeah, you’re doing the same thing, we’re on the same team here. I’m sure there’s a million things in your book we could discuss but there’s only so much time. 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 a link to your website and so on. Your website is divinelyhuman.com is it?

CC: That’s correct.

Rick: We’ll link to that also, and you obviously offer individual sessions and you travel around and all kinds of possibilities. You want to enumerate those quickly or should I just find that on your website?

CC: 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. I have a group of people, unfortunately it’s already underway so I can’t take any more right now, but we’re working through the chapters and 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 a year is 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 will probably be repeating again in the spring of next year.

Rick: Is there a place on your website where people can sign up to be reminded by email when you start the next one?

CC: Well there’s a sign up box on the front page of my website. We’re working on it right now but it should be pretty well done in the next day or two. If people sign in and get on my mailing list they’ll certainly hear about that. I also am planning courses in in-seeing to help people deepen in that inner and outer mutuality effect.

Rick: So people don’t have to wait a year to get into your next thing, there’s things they can do now if they want to contact you.

CC: Yes.

Rick: Okay, great. All right, well thanks CC. This has been a lot of fun.

CC: Yes, indeed. Thank you so much.

Rick: Happy travels.

CC: That went fast.

Rick: Yeah, it does.

CC: So much territory to cover. Thank you for inviting me.

Rick: Sure. As Kermit the Frog said, “Time’s fun when you’re having flies.” So general wrap up points then. This has been an interview with CC Leigh and it’s part of an ongoing series. As CC mentioned, there’s a whole archive on batgap.com which you can explore and if you go into the past interviews menu you’ll see it categorized four or five different ways. Check that out. There’s an upcoming interviews page where you can see who’s scheduled and you’ll see links to the live streaming thing. If you note when the interview is going to take place, times given are in the Midwest US time zone. If you come at that time to that page, click on the link, you can go to the YouTube page where it will be live streamed. There’s a donate button on the site which I rely upon people clicking in order to be able to devote as much time as we do to it. So that’s very much appreciated. There’s a place to sign up for my email newsletter, you’ll see that link, in which you’ll be notified once a week or so when each new interview is posted. And there’s an audio podcast of the whole thing so you can listen while you’re commuting or riding your horse or whatever, which people do. I get reports of people listening under all sorts of unusual circumstances. There’s a whole page devoted to the different ways to sign up for that. Thanks for listening or watching and next week is someone who is not in the Waking Down tradition but who will also be talking about using the body as a way of tuning ourselves more deeply to the Divine, that will be John Prendergast. I’m looking forward to speaking with him. Thanks again CC, it’s great.

CC: Thank you Rick.

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