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
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