284. CC Leigh

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. 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. Websites: divinelyhuman.com trilliumawakening.org Transcript of this interview Interview recorded 3/28/2015 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