Becoming Divinely Human
by CC Leigh

Chapter 11: Sacred Reconfiguration

Our Story: We endured some challenging passages of integration, as our newly-awakened divine nature began reconfiguring our whole being so that we could embody greater freedom, wholeness, compassion, and love.

Integrating your divinely human awakening
The shift into the divinely human orientation is only a beginning. It must be integrated before the potential it offers can begin to be fully expressed.
As I described back in chapter 1, before the shift you were primarily operating out of two energetic bodies (matrixes): gross (physical/ emotional), and subtle (mental/psychic). Regardless of which modality was dominant, those were the frameworks of your experience. With this shift into divinely human awakening, a third, causal (spiritual/formless) energy body comes fully on line, and it brings with it a new set of potentials, sensitivities, and perceptual abilities. At this point, your operating system needs some time to work out the kinks so that all three energy bodies can function optimally in light of the new parameters.

Among the new qualities that will become more available over time is a greater sense of direct knowing, or insight, that doesn’t depend on logic or emotional responses to discern the truth. It is an inner felt sense of “rightness” or “wrongness” that isn’t about judging in a moral sense, but about discerning what is right and true for you personally. It’s not about beliefs. This is a deep sense of what’s true in the marrow of your bones, what matters, what’s right for you. And perhaps what’s right for the world, as well.

It’s unlikely that this change will show up right away in a full-blown form; instead, it will gradually develop over time. You will encounter this new configuration as you are trying to figure out how to live your awakening, and it may be puzzling at first. You may not get any direct sense of “what to do,” but it is likely that you will begin to know, beyond any doubt, what is not right for you. The inner no’s are often stronger at first than the yes’s.

The good news is that you don’t have to know how to make integration happen—your whole being will naturally bring you what you need for your most auspicious unfoldment. Much like puberty, your body-mind knows on some level how to navigate these changes. Patience and understanding will be your most powerful allies during this challenging time.

Another way of saying this is that Consciousness claims and inhabits the body-mind in a way it never has before. It’s more intimate and more immediate, more up-close-and-personal. I’m not saying that you will be taken over by some alien agency. By now you hopefully realize that your Conscious Self is the self that has always felt the most true to you, the most core-level you. By awakening this deep Self, you’re bringing it forward into manifestation so that it is able to live and breathe and act in the world, where in the past it might only have whispered its words of inspiration to you in the most subtle ways.

However, awakening in and of itself does not magically transform patterns of thinking and behavior established over a lifetime. That is the job of the reconfiguration period. While “how you’ve shown up” has been adequate to your life up till now (whether you have felt satisfied in your life or not, you’ve been sufficient or you wouldn’t still be here), there are likely areas of wounding and survival patterning that no longer feel authentic. As you begin to move and express your greater wholeness, you will bump up against these tight places or knots in your psyche, and feel the impulse to find greater ease and freedom.

Honeymoon period
At the time of awakening, you may experience a grace period, or “honeymoon,” that lasts days or months (and for a rare few, years), when the feeling-quality that arises from the intersection of your Conscious divine self and your physical body-mind is primarily ease and wellness of being. You may experience a release of lifelong tension or fear at a deep core level, and marvel at the freedom you feel. This wonderful phase is often described in spiritual literature as the pearl of great price, the gift of enlightenment.

However, the human side of the divinely human equation will reassert itself at some point, sooner or later, because its patterns run very deep in the psyche. There are some similarities with falling in love. For a brief glorious period, we are euphoric and see ourselves as our lovers see us—wonderful and magical, with all of our goals and aspirations within our grasp. But as always happens, “reality” resurfaces along with its inherent self-doubt, distrust, and other painful limits.

Where did the sense of freedom and ease go? At this point, it is only natural to fear that you have “lost” your awakening. And maybe to conclude that this realization isn’t all you were expecting.

“Lemon of a realization”
There’s a story about a woman who awakened only to fall smack dab into the pain of her brokenness. One day she brought a bowl of lemons to her teacher. As she set the bowl before him, she said, “Thanks for giving me a lemon of a realization!”

No matter how many times you’re cautioned that embodied awakening isn’t going to suddenly remove all of your conditioning and broken zones, nor put you into a permanent state of bliss, you may continue hoping that it will do just that. And when that doesn’t happen, you may feel a keen sense of disappointment or disillusionment.

Feeling this way after experiencing the unconditional positivity that often temporarily accompanies embodied awakening is totally understandable. We naturally crave the experience of openness, relaxation, trust, compassion, hopefulness, and intimacy that are possible when we are not being run by the conditioned states of contraction, anxiety, distrust, fear, and animosity which we might have been more familiar with in our life to date. It is only natural to want to abide permanently in the more “positive” states, but it just isn’t possible—no matter how much you might wish it to be so.

Is it permanent?
If your awakening was a true shift into the divinely human condition, you will never lose it because it is a stage shift, not a state. States come and go, whereas stages are progressive and only evolve in the direction of greater complexity and coherence. However, as mentioned in the previous chapter, it is common to experience oscillations as you are nearing the shift point. It is possible that an outshining of Consciousness could be mistaken for an awakening shift, in which case it could subside again, leaving you back in “ordinary human consciousness.” This will not be a problem for long, because chances are you will naturally stabilize or hit the point-of-no-return sometime soon.

Occasionally, an awakening that is in progress will fail to fully bloom. Perhaps a life crisis intervenes and requires all of your attention and energy, so your spiritual progress gets tabled for a while (though some crises seem to catalyze deeper awakenings, so there is no rule of thumb here). Or perhaps for one reason or another you pull back from the experience, isolate yourself, and occupy your time so as to minimize exposure to the tectonic forces attempting to forge your divinely human Beingness. We see this sometimes in people who avoid mutuality, or who avoid claiming their awakening. At least in theory, you can sideline your awakening for some prolonged period. However, if you are destined to awaken, you are unlikely to be able to delay it indefinitely, and will probably find yourself increasingly uncomfortable until you lean into the potential that is available to you.

Feeling like you “lost it”
So, to recap, you cannot undo an embodied awakening once it has occurred, though at times it may FEEL as if you have lost it because of the arising of unwelcome states that you had hoped were gone for good. It can be very puzzling to feel fear, for instance, once you’ve discovered your essential invincibility as Being. Or to feel distrust of others once you’ve recognized fundamental non-separateness. Or to feel the pain of lack in the light of infinite abundance, or the sting of self-doubt or shame when you’ve discovered your fundamental goodness and divine right to be here exactly as you are.

What happens is that the momentum inherent in these conditioned states is causing them to reappear in your experi- ence, generally when some aspect of your life triggers them into activity. Remember, this is one of the main ways by which you are programmed to survive as a biological entity. Humans are pattern-formers and pattern recognizers: whenever a situation appears on our radar, we subconsciously scan to see if it is similar to a past situation that was dangerous or in which we experienced injury. If so, the past situation gets overlaid upon the present one, bringing with it the full complement of distressed feelings that occurred during the original event.

I discussed these “broken zone” experiences in Chapter 5. What’s new after the shift is that the embodiment of Presence provides an ever-greater capacity to re-experience these broken places of the psyche. You may think you’ve completed your healing work with a particular issue only to find it showing up again, even more stark, raw, and intense than before. Although you might feel discouraged by this turn of events, it is actually a wonderful opportunity. It turns out that the only time an old trauma can be fully released and healed is when it is fully activated—when you are re-experiencing it vividly. There seems to be an intelligence of Being that brings these opportunities forward as part of fully landing in, and integrating, your awakening.

Deeper passages
In order to have an embodied awakening, you will have faced and surrendered your resistance to feeling the core wound. However, there will likely be other deep-seated issues that you are still resisting, or trying to deny or override with cheery positive counter-thoughts. Being will find a way to bring you an encounter with them—not out of perversity, but out of a natural reach toward freedom and wholeness. Some of these passages can be very challenging. Deep-seated issues can take weeks or months to fully surface from the depths where they have been hiding.

Ultimately, given time and perseverance (and skillful support) you will have met and mapped the territory of your shadow pretty well, and gained a degree of release from many of your traumas. And the light of Presence in you, as you, will continue to grow ever stronger. Think of a dimmer switch on a lamp. Awakening turns the light (of Presence) on to its lowest setting, and while it never goes out, strong obsessive thoughts or emotional storms can obscure the light. However, as you progress through the integration phase, the light gets gradually dialed up until emotional storms are no longer able to obscure it. At this point, you will no longer question whether you might have lost your awakening, because you will know Presence is always there, always available, always underlying, registering, and supporting all of your experiences. The strength of your now-awakened Presence will both draw more things to the surface for healing and give you a greater capacity to be with what shows up.

Exquisite sensitivity
You may find yourself to be more aware and sensitive now, as if the buffers you used to have in place—those ways you were protected from feeling things too strongly—have been removed and now your skin is thinner and more permeable, and your encounters more stark and immediate than ever before. This sensitivity is part of coming fully alive and awake; sort of like waking up a foot that had gone to sleep. You certainly notice it!

Your emotions may be more raw and close to the surface, as well. Perhaps you cry more easily, for instance, or flare into anger more often than you used to. Or you are really moved by a story, or a piece of music, or a poem—being easily transported into that other reality with full-heart and full-feeling. And your empathy for the plight of others might be especially strong these days.

Although you might feel like you’re coming undone at times, successfully navigating the upheavals and storms of this integration phase is possible, and will be aided by continuing what you’ve been doing with greenlighting, Inseeing, and bringing compassionate Presence to whatever is arising.

Primal insanity
This passage is sometimes called the “wakedown shakedown” because it may go so deep that, at some point, you begin to fear that you are losing your grip on reality. You get inside your own dysfunctional patterning to such an extent that you start experiencing what you might call “craziness.” This can be a frightening recognition, but it doesn’t mean that you are uniquely handicapped—we ALL have some degree of insanity lying, usually, beneath the threshold of awareness. Encountering it in a vivid way can be very unsettling, and this is when it will be most important to have a good support team. Your support system may, for a while, have to supply perspective and good judgment when your own inner navigation system is proving unreliable. In other words, it is important to have a support system that is stronger than the voice of your primal insanity.

When you meet and integrate these “crazy” parts of yourself, you will become very strong, knowing that you are inherently intact even if there are parts of yourself that don’t know that. Please use this information only as cautionary, not as predictive or as something to scare you away from embodiment. Yes, this process can get intense at times. After all, it IS a hero’s journey, and at times it will feel daunting to dive deeply into your own underworld. But you can and will survive, and far more than that. You will blossom into a whole, intact, deeply-feeling person who can, in turn, help support others through their own hero’s journey.

It’s a good idea, before things get particularly difficult, to find a skilled and trusted therapist to guide you, so that your passage is no more difficult than it needs to be.

Divinely YOU emerging
With awakening, your old conditioned personality gets dismantled, bit by bit. As the reconfiguration goes ever deeper, you become freer to be more creative, more expressive, and more authentic than ever before. You may experience some real confusion for a while, however. After all, who are you if not who you’ve always been?
You may discover the answer to that question not as an idea but by observing how you begin to show up in the situations you find yourself in. You may be surprised by what tumbles out of your mouth, for instance, or find yourself signing up to do something you never would have considered doing in the past. Or maybe new boundaries show up, and it becomes easier to say “no” to things that would previously have drained your energy. Take some time to get to know yourself in this new incarnation of you. I bet you’ll be pleased with each step you take that expresses what feels real and authentic.

New encounters
It’s important to give the newly-emerging YOU support at this time. Find out what nurtures you—what recharges your batteries, relieves your tension, and makes your body say “Yum!” It is every bit as important to your long-term wellness to include pleasure and play as it is to face the scary parts of your deep psyche. Perhaps even more so, because it will help counter- balance the inevitable stress of being fully here as a physical being in a challenging environment.

You may find yourself drawn to explore new situations and/ or new relationships at this time. New interests may show up, or old interests that you had set aside and practically forgotten once again call to you. People who have known you for a long time typically expect you to behave in familiar ways, but when you are with new people you may find more freedom to be, and freedom to experiment and play with, who you are becoming.

Sometimes the impulse to explore new possibilities will carry you toward a new intimate relationship in which you are (hopefully) fully seen and met as a whole and divinely human person. A powerful tantric relationship can, indeed, help bring you forward into embodiment in profound ways. (See Chapter 7 for more about tantric initiations.)

However, if you are in a committed relationship and find yourself being attracted to someone new, please do not assume that it means you have to ditch your current relationship for a new one. Sometimes a tantric flare-up is just a symbol, a message from the part of you that longs to be fully seen and met, or to be more freely expressed in relationship. Many have turned that same passion and fire back into their current relationship, discovering more potential for real engagement there than they had thought possible.

Try this: inner yes’s and no’s
To help you discover what’s most alive for you now, you might take some time to start noticing your inner yes’s and no’s. A good time to practice this is when you have a choice to make between two options that are not too weighty. For example, trying to decide whether to go see a movie or go out to dinner.

Begin with a pause. Perhaps take a nice full breath as you close your eyes and begin to sense inwardly. Take a minute to let your attention go to your feet, then your hands, then to the sense of contact between your hips and your chair. However works best for you. Then bring your attention inward, into the area that includes your throat, chest, stomach, and belly.

With your attention resting in this area, notice the vague, undefined sense of the whole of your life right now. And then bring in the first option, going out to a movie. Imagine the experience: arriving at the theater, buying your ticket, the aroma of hot popcorn, the carpeted hallway, the darkened theater, the anticipation, and then the sensory wash of the movie’s sights, sounds, and storyline. And now notice the overall feel of your inner body. Is it more full—as in full of energy or light—or more flat—as in tired or deflated?

Then switch and do the same thing with the other option. Imagine the experience of going out to eat: arriving at the restaurant, being seated by the waitperson, scanning the menu, interacting with a friend, ordering, anticipating and then eating a delicious meal. And notice the feeling of your inner body. Is it more full or more flat?

No matter what you normally prefer, your body’s response will be unique in any given moment. With practice, you will get to know your own body’s way of saying yes and no.

Of course, there will be times when following the yes wouldn’t be advisable. Given a choice between a day at the beach and a day at the office, your body might prefer to play hooky. In a case like that, you might acknowledge what your body wants even while choosing to honor your work commitments. But when it’s practical, you might try going with your inner body’s yes’s and avoiding the no’s, and see what happens in your life. By tuning into your yes’s and no’s, you are inviting a fresh, whole-being perspective instead of relying primarily on your mind’s habitual leanings. Let your body show you what it likes, and, in turn, embodiment will come more alive for you.

Governing worldviews
During the darkness before dawn, you began encountering some pretty tough limits, the places where you couldn’t just intend a change and make it happen. You were being unraveled at the core, and surrender became the name of the game for a while, rather than empowerment.

Once you have awakened, this process of coming up against your most deeply broken places continues. You might even find yourself in the midst of a deep, prolonged passage where you can’t really see an end in sight. This is a time of encountering your governing worldviews, the unconscious assumptions you’ve held about life that have been coloring everything—the ones you really didn’t want to acknowledge, but down deep really believed.

Example: About 9 months after the shift into con- scious embodiment, Michael found himself plunged into a deep, black time that felt a lot like depression. He lost his ability to take pleasure in much of anything, or to motivate himself to do anything constructive. He felt flat, and his life felt meaningless and empty. He was aware that most of his life up to that point had been a search for meaning and joy—in other words, something in him had been trying to disprove his belief that life was mean- ingless. His quest for awakening was itself an attempt to bring fundamental meaning and purpose to his life.

However, once he had fulfilled his seeking impulse, he found himself confronted with the even deeper dilemma— that his life still felt empty and meaningless. He could no longer hope that awakening would make it better. He was confronted with the stark “reality” of life’s fundamental meaninglessness, and his own aversion to that fact. His depression was compounded by assuming other people had more joy and sense of purpose than he did, and that he was somehow seriously flawed.

Gradually, he discovered that “meaningless” wasn’t automatically bad. “Empty and meaningless” are just ways of saying that life is not pre-written, that it doesn’t have a pre-set meaning that we have to discover. Instead, life’s meaning is something we create as we go along. As part of his awakening, Michael found that those things that used to make life seem fulfilling were really empty for him, so for a while he drifted in a vacuum without pur- pose or motivation, while living deeply into the question of “is life empty and meaningless, and if so, what does that mean?” Along the way, the whole topic began to lose its sting, its ability to fill him with despair. He began to say “Okay, there is this empty quality to life, but so what? Here I am, and life keeps rolling along.”

And life did go on from there. Michael’s black funk gradually faded to gray, then lifted significantly, enabling him to take up new endeavors that he found personally meaningful. But he had been changed in a profound way by finding himself up against something he could not change by any act of will: he developed a deep understanding of how indelible certain aspects of human conditioning can be. And as a consequence of that experience, he became far more patient with the other people in his life, knowing how difficult it can be to generate lasting changes in deep-set patterns of behavior. And, perhaps most importantly, he was able to find fundamental peace while fully in the presence of this recognition about the nature of human life.

Helpless in the face of our human limits
The truth is that there are some aspects of how you’re wired that you simply can’t change through your own efforts. What you can do is be willing to see them, and bring Presence to them. Changes, if and when they do come, happen by grace rather than by self-willed actions.

Before you are humbled to this fact, you run the risk of being heartless and even violent toward yourself and others, with an arrogant assumption that any state of being that isn’t “positive” can be willed away. “Just get over it!” is a typical inner attitude to anything showing up that you don’t like. The (unawakened) assumption is that the power to make these changes is in your own hands, as your personal willpower. But when you come up against something that just won’t shift—that really has you by the balls and doesn’t let go—then you have to bow down to what’s living you, to the Source of your personal sense of self.

Great intelligence, creativity, and accomplishing power streams into life from this Source and, as you consciously surrender to it, and integrate it, you will find yourself empowered to accomplish many things. But it is a new kind of empowered, that has more to do with cooperating with the wisdom and intelligence of Being than trying to impose personal will upon it.

Core mood states
Similar to governing worldviews (unconscious assumptions about life), core mood states can be very persistent. My core mood state used to be a melancholy sadness that was gloomy and bittersweet. Kind of like the feeling that gets evoked by a mournful Irish ballad. It was so close to my core that I hardly ever questioned it. I even justified it: after all, life is very sad, isn’t it? Think of all the hurting people, animals, even the planet itself (and me too). How else would I feel?

I was identified with this feeling-state. It felt like “me.” If it happened to dissipate for a while, when it came back, like clouds gathering over the sun, I would recognize how familiar it was. Gradually, I began to notice that I felt some virtue in having this feeling, like it was part of my character. “I’m a good person because I feel things deeply and grieve for all those who are in pain.” Wow! In a weird way, I liked feeling this deep melancholy sadness. It felt like home base, or a default setting in my wiring. And when it was gone I felt a little strange.

At a certain point I became able to just greenlight it as a part of me, no longer feeling any pressure to make it go away or to try to be more upbeat. And then, in that mysterious way things evolve when they’re fully permitted, the clouds began to lift and my mood with it. More frequently I would enjoy feeling an open, clear state I began to call “neutral Presence.” It’s like being in life without any particular mood at all, just available for whatever life brings my way.

Core mood states come in a variety of flavors, of course. For example, a core mood state might take the form of chronic anxiety because life on earth is dangerous, or perhaps show up as frequent irritation at how unjust everything is. After all, that’s how life is, right? And it’s normal to feel this way, right? Yes.

Your core mood state may stem from how your particular physiology reacts to the core wound. It’s not right or wrong. You might not begin noticing this “mood” until you clear some of your more dramatic reaction patterns and spend some time quietly with yourself. It will be interesting to notice how it shows up for you. When greenlighted to be as it is, space can open up around your core mood, and you might discover that it is shifting and making room for new possibilities.

The core wound becomes conscious
At this point, you may be thinking that sacred reconfiguration will bring all your shadow issues, persistent patterns, and core mood states to light and soon you will be free of them. But that’s not the whole picture.

The unconscious core wound characteristically feels tight, or squeezing, or pressured, as if the limitations of your life are rubbing up against your intuited sense of freedom and spaciousness. When you realize that the angst at your core doesn’t mean there’s anything fundamentally wrong with you, at some point a deep relaxation occurs. It’s not that the wound gets healed once and for all, but when your subconscious resistance to the wound ends, so does most of what made it so uncomfortable. For the most part, it just ceases to be a problem. Where there was tension before, now there is greater ease and wellness of Being.

At times, the juxtaposition of limits and freedom will just be what is, without feeling any particular way. But at other times, the limits will come crashing down again, with all the accompanying distress they ever brought (if not more). It seems inevitable, as long as you have a body with its pain, its aging, its grieving of losses, and its longing to fulfill its dreams, that all these things will at times bite deeply. So will the mental and emotional snarls you fall into from time to time, no matter how much shadow work you’ve done. Awakening does not—and cannot—take away all of your conditioning. In some ways you will still be the person you have been. Part of fully integrating your awaking is to come to terms with that, and realize it’s not a bad thing.

Keep in mind that life is a dynamic process. In between plunges into broken zones, governing worldviews, and core mood states, the delicate new shoots of your natural, authentic self will begin emerging and growing with new vigor. Most people report that the periods of ease and flow become a greater feature of their lives in the first years after awakening, and the dark, stormy passages tend to be less frequent, or pass more quickly. But this is only a broad view: each person will encounter ups and downs in his or her own unique timing and rhythm.

Sooner or later, the pain of resisting the core wound dissipates as you become more able to feel and live a most-interesting paradoxical existence. The sense of wound gradually gives way to something that feels more like a divine Mystery—unknowable yet also somehow self-revealing, as you continue to discover the wonders and miracles of divinely human life.

This passage of integration will get easier over time. Don’t give up! Persist, endure, and cooperate with the process. It’s so important to keep leaning in, keep meeting with others who understand what’s happening, and keep exploring the possibilities as well as the pitfalls. Periods of happiness and wellbeing will become longer, the ease of “neutral Presence” will become second nature, and trust in Being will grow ever stronger. Over time, you will more fully experience yourself as a divinely human being until one day you won’t remember what it was like to not know who you really are.
But awakening and integration is not the end of the story. You still need to get a life, and that is the topic of our final chapter.