CC’s passion for helping people awaken came to the foreground in 1989 when she had a startling vision of a star appearing near the ceiling of her bedroom and streaming forth a download. The message was clear: she was to play a role in helping humans awaken, and in paving a new understanding of spirituality for the world. But first, she had to awaken.
After some years of rapid spiritual growth and openings to subtle dimensions, CC landed in the darkest of nights as her early attempts at offering her gifts to other seekers “failed” rather dramatically. She lost her livelihood, home, community, and self-esteem, and ended up living in a small RV borrowed from an ex-boyfriend for 3½ years in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, she learned the truth of these words by Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack, a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets in.”
And the light did enter. The depths of disillusionment, despair, and ruthless self-judgment gave way to deeper explorations and radical samadhis, and led, by 1995, to a profound, permanent knowing of herself as the infinite ground and totality of Being. The next phase of her life was about trying to integrate that awakening with her human patterns of thinking and reacting—no easy matter. Yet she felt called to embodied awakening even when her Advaitic-oriented friends were telling her to bypass her human tendencies and simply abide as Consciousness.
After years of attempting to make her human life make sense in light of her awakening as Consciousness, at first on her own and then in the company of a group of people practicing “Trillium Awakening” (formerly called “Waking Down”), it all gelled into a sense of undivided (though often paradoxical) Onlyness. At that point, CC began teaching again. She loves to bring light to other seekers, especially those who find themselves lost, confused, alone or discouraged by the difficulties of being a conscious person in a deeply unconscious world.
In 2005 CC co-founded the Trillium Awakening Teachers Circle to provide an alternative to guru-centric, strongly hierarchical spiritual communities, and to help stem the tide of ethical lapses on the part of spiritual authority figures. The teachers of the WDTA meet regularly in mutuality and hold one another to standards and ethics around their teaching work, as well as experimenting with a more democratically-oriented society of awakened and awakening divinely human beings.
CC’s unique approach to teaching focuses on radical awakening to our true and total nature as both Consciousness and matter (divinely human), but does not stop there. Her Inseeing Process TM helps people experience radical self-acceptance, deep compassion, and “inner mutuality” which in turn leads to a much greater ability to feel compassion and tolerance for other people: “outer mutuality.” That and much more is spelled out in CC’s highly-acclaimed handbook, Becoming Divinely Human: A Threefold Path to Embodied Awakening.
Following the heartbreaking death of her beloved husband Michael in the spring of 2012, CC again spent several years living in a (slightly larger) RV with her dog Tucker and cat Bodhi. Then in 2015 CC settled near Boulder Colorado, and added another dog, Ziva, to her pack of furry friends.
CC’s embodied awakening and integration is continuing and becoming ever-more “seamless.” She reports that Michael’s essence is frequently quite palpable. He offers support and inspiration for her teaching work, which includes a variety of online courses as well as private and group coaching, and of course, there is love.
Websites:
Interview recorded 3/28/2015
Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.
YouTube Video Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – Introduction to Waking Down and Mutuality
- 00:03:59 – Awakening to Higher Realities
- 00:08:09 – Communicating with Animals and Discovering Channeling
- 00:12:24 – The Dark Night and Self-Doubt
- 00:16:20 – Finding Grounding and Humility
- 00:20:55 – The Definition of Humility
- 00:25:31 – Discovering the Background Knowing
- 00:29:48 – The Search and Guilt
- 00:33:31 – Dog Break
- 00:37:44 – Integration of the Whole Self and Radical Embrace
- 00:41:59 – Embracing All Ranges of Experience
- 00:46:15 – Equanimity and Support in Times of Tragedy
- 00:50:47 – Finding My Voice in the Waking Down Community
- 00:55:21 – Ethical challenges in spiritual teaching
- 00:59:51 – Beginning of Exploration with Caution
- 01:03:50 – Four Stages of Embodied Awakening
- 01:08:27 – The Stages of Awakening and Integration
- 01:12:39 – Supplementing with other therapies and support processes
- 01:16:35 – Seeking help and recognizing the difference between depression and a dark night
- 01:20:43 – The Illusion of Perpetual Suffering
- 01:24:29 – The catalytic power of connection and longing
- 01:28:25 – The Core Wound: Portal to Embodied Awakening
- 01:32:44 – The Existential Condition of Being Human
- 01:36:59 – Green Lighting and Opening to What Is
- 01:40:56 – In-Seeing and Inner Body Awareness
- 01:45:27 – Cultivating Deep Presence in People
- 01:49:35 – Gazing into Being with Suzanne
- 01:55:10 – The Meeting Place of Non-Duality and Integration
- 01:58:58 – The Transformative Power of Presence for Conflict Resolution and Society
- 02:03:27 – Year-Long Program based on the 12 Chapters of the Book
- 02:06:46 – Support and Updates
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