Becoming Divinely Human
by CC Leigh

Chapter 3: Relaxing into the Core Wound

Our Story: Our Story: We were frustrated and disappointed that our efforts at self-improvement had brought only limited results. We couldn’t fully control ourselves, our lives, or the world around us, no matter how hard we tried to follow the programs or teachings that were supposed to relieve us of the feelings of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, or “not-enoughness” at the core of our being. Once we realized that this “core wound” was the natural and inescapable result of the basic human predicament—intuiting that we are Infinite Souls but experiencing our lives as very conditioned, limited selves—we stopped being so hard on ourselves and began to relax and trust the wisdom and intelligence of Being.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong with me”
“Why can’t I be more successful?”
“Why can’t I get free of my self-doubt, judging, criticizing, and confusion?”
“Why do I feel so unworthy—still?”
“Why do peace, ease, and wellness seem so ephemeral?”
“If we’re really all One, why do I still feel scared and alone?”

If you’re like many people, you ask yourself these kinds of questions all too often. Despite your best efforts to master yourself and your life, something eludes you. You have a nagging sense that something’s not right with you, and your inner critic is more than willing to point out all the ways it must be YOUR FAULT.
I invite you to reconsider that conclusion.

The core paradox: freedom and limits
As human beings, we seem uniquely challenged to be content in our own skins. We often suffer from overactive minds and imaginations, intense self-criticism, crippling self-doubt, volatile emotions, unending stress, debilitating fear and/or scary rages. We have a difficult time loving ourselves, much less our neighbors, and we often bump up against painful limitations, either in our own skills and capacity or in the circumstances and people around us. Topping it off, we understand that our bodies have expiration dates, and our time here is not going to be endless. If we love, we will also sooner or later know the pain of saying goodbye to someone we have loved.

However, we also have the ability to sense or imagine our spiritual nature, that part of us that is infinite, unconditioned, and unlimited—that feels free, peaceful, impervious, spacious, and unreservedly loving of ourselves and all things. Whether we feel this directly as a part of our life experience, remember it vaguely as if from a time before birth, or simply have an intu- ition that it’s possible, we cannot help but feel the juxtaposition of our current experience against this spacious freedom as a sort of rub, or tension at the core. This core paradox is a fundamen- tal condition that results when the limitations or conflicts in our lives are contrasted against an idealized sense of wholeness, ease, and grace.

Every body experiences this core paradox, and when it’s not fully conscious, it can feel like a sore spot, or core wound. And each person will feel this core wound somewhat differently, according to their natural propensities. You might feel it as heaviness or deep sadness, or as tension that never lets up, or as pressure or heat, as if you sometimes want to jump out of your skin. Beneath these sensations, the core wound generally brings feelings of being confused in identity, separate in relatedness, or incomplete, as if you need to find or be something more than who and what you already are.

You might feel confused in identity if you’re never quite sure of what you are: are you an animal with a large capacity for thinking, or are you a divine spiritual being having a human life? Are you fundamentally good, or bad? Just what are you? And why do you frequently experience life as being so difficult or painful, even when your survival needs are more than sufficiently met?

You might feel a sense of separateness as if you’re enclosed in a bubble, with others being forever outside of that bubble no matter how much you long for closeness and intimacy. Or you might feel cut off from God, or Source, or Spirit— however you sense that quality of the divine. If you have any intuition or remembrance of a time when that was not the case, when the walls of separation melted and there was a flow of unity and infinite spiritual wholeness, you could feel a great angst when that beautiful sense of connection and flow is not available or present.

Or, you might feel incomplete, and frequently think, “There must be more than this,” or, “I need to be more than I am,” because, while you are aware of your limitations, you are also aware of your potential. Life can become an endless pursuit of more as you try to get a better education, a better job, more recognition, better salary, better home, better car, more stuff, more trainings, more skills, better romantic partner, etc, ad infinitum—until you begin to see that these things, in and of themselves, don’t really make you happy.

Or you might feel a constant nagging sense of dis-ease, as if you’re somehow wrong, or bad, or unlovable, or inadequate to the demands of your life. Or perhaps you feel afraid that you’re those things. You then make an unnecessary but reflexive leap in your thinking, and interpret the sense of not feeling good at the core as a sign that you’re actually not good (or good enough)— that there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.

Most people are not consciously aware of this core paradox. Because the tension, or rub of it, can be quite uncomfortable, especially when it is not understood, people tend to avoid feeling it at all costs. Instead, they use all sorts of things to try to tune out this feeling. They may keep themselves very active through work, creative projects, raising kids, hobbies, sports, sex, television watching, etc., or they numb themselves through consumption of mood-altering substances. Or they may try to engender euphoria through repeatedly falling in love. In one way or another, the unconscious core wound drives much of human endeavor as people restlessly try to stay one step ahead of simply feeling it. This is why it is so uncomfortable for people to sit quietly doing nothing: they might drop into the distress at their core. I remember someone once telling me, when informed that I was about to enter a 10-day silent retreat: “I would rather die than sit in silence for a week!” Although she had never tried it, she was afraid of what she would feel if she let herself be still and quiet. Stopping the rush of life and sitting quietly is quite difficult when you don’t understand what you’re feeling at the core and are afraid of what you might discover there.

Core issues are not the core wound
The core wound is not the same as core issues. Core issues are trauma patterns that resulted from particular events or situa- tions in our lives, usually in childhood but sometimes later on as well. A core issue can certainly bring with it feelings of distress or despair, as our current life events stimulate a reactivation of the original memories and physiological reactions. The core wound, however, lies beneath even these deep-seated configurations. Core issues are unique to each person and are related to their life story—they have a script, like “I feel insecure because my father was alcoholic and I never knew whether he’d be friendly toward me or angry and attacking.” On the other hand, the core wound is universal and occurs in every human being, even those who have experienced little trauma and seem to be outwardly well- adjusted. It has a subtle feeling, but no story line. It is intrinsic to being human, and everyone has a core wound, whether they are aware of it or not.

The core wound is not your fault
Humanity has a long history of struggling with the feeling that there’s something wrong or evil about human nature. Many different interpretations have been made, including the Judeo- Christian concept of original sin. The story says that at one time we lived in a state of grace, but with the advent of free will we misused that freedom, offended God, and fell out of the state of grace. Now we are expected to atone for “our sins” in some fashion or another. This framework—that we (or our ancestors) did something wrong and need to do something to fix it—is an understandable attempt to explain the way we feel at the core, and some version of it shows up in many spiritual teachings from around the world. But it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the core wound.

The core wound is NOT the result of something that we did wrong, nor is it something that needs to be atoned for. We are simply an evolving species that developed a remarkable capacity for conceptual thinking that we haven’t yet integrated with the other parts of ourselves.

Mind-body splits
In the early days of our evolutionary trajectory we were tribal animals in a challenging physical environment, gathered together into social groups. We could say that our earliest culture tended to be organic, fluid, and generally feminine in its orientation to life. It was more right-brained, adaptive and cooperative with the natural rhythms of life than what became the norm later on.

As the human capacity for logical, linear thought expanded, we became more objective, formulaic, and masculine. There was a shift toward left-brain dominance, with its innate tendency toward modifying and controlling the environment. Our newly
-arising capacity for conceptual thinking added a powerful new dimension in our ability to adapt and thrive on the planet. We began strategizing how to fix and improve our environment and our lives on many levels. We could anticipate and head off danger and we could imagine how to be more successful in endeavors of all kinds—from hunting to gardening to raising kids to building homes, and on and on. Over time, we began to focus more and more of our energy in the domain of thinking, and less in the domain of the body, emotion, and feelings.

As our capacity for conceptual thinking grew stronger, there was little understanding of how to reconcile this newer function with our already-existing instinctual/emotional behavior patterns—patterns the species had been relying on over the ages for its survival. The failure to integrate instinct, emotions, and thinking into a seamless unity led ultimately to the gap between mind and body becoming ever more exaggerated. The capacity to reflect and think speculatively about our experience also led to a greater awareness of our spiritual nature, and then with this awareness came the awareness of the core wound, that unpleasant juxtaposition of our human limits against our spiritual potential for experiencing infinity, deep peace, wellness, and freedom. Because feeling into oneself deeply might mean feeling things one would normally avoid, it was natural that people would suppress uncomfortable feelings. The useful masculine application of thinking to improve the environment we lived in then began to be distorted into exaggerated attempts to control our inner world as well—our bodies, thoughts, and emotions. Soon we began trying to override, control, or transcend our basic impulses as well as that uncomfortable feeling at the core.

As rational thought grew in stature, the cult of human mastery over nature was born. The western world entered the “age of reason” and remarkable achievements were attained using methodical, “scientific” approaches to tackling the problems of the world (though not without a price). The impulse to control the material world spilled over into control of our inner world:
control how you think as in “think and grow rich,”
control how you feel as in “keep a stiff upper lip,”
· and control your body and words as in “be a nice person.”

We’ve been taught that we are better people if we hold back our spontaneous thoughts, feelings, and needs for expression. And while these austerities have lessened their grip in recent years, there is still a prevalent attitude that it’s up to you to learn the right techniques to make your life work, and if it isn’t working, you’re somehow to blame.
In the eastern world, the focus was less on developing strategies to control the material world, and more about developing the ability to transcend spiritually. The stronger emphasis was put on using yogic or meditative self-discipline to develop a refined mental focus (transcendence) in order to bypass and dissociate from the baser, more instinctual aspects of our nature:
I am not this body
I am not these thoughts
I am not these emotions.
Here too, the belief is that you’ll be a better and more holy person if you distance yourself from your spontaneous, natural feelings and reactions. In all cases throughout this period of human evolution, there is evidence of an increasing split between the head and the heart—between mind and body, thinking and feeling.
This split still shows up in each of us today in our habitual ways of thinking and acting, and in particular in some basic assumptions we hold about ourselves that might not prove to be entirely true upon closer inspection. For instance, the mind projects from its ability to learn how to build a better mousetrap to thinking it can build a better person. Because it can control the environment by, for instance, turning the dial on a thermostat, it thinks it can control the inner environment by controlling what thoughts are permitted, or which emotions are felt. A huge “self-help” industry has arisen that is devoted to solving “the problem” of human emotions and feelings, in the attempt to make us all into super-achievers who feel good all the time. However, our default, patterned ways of reacting to life tend to be quite resistant to being controlled by our mind, hence we spend much of our time in inner chaos and confusion, with parts of us at war with other parts, causing much distress.
The tendency to apply a formulaic process to suppress our so-called negative aspects and fix and improve everything else can be called “hypermasculine” because it is an exaggerated form of the masculine impulse to solve problems by action in the external world.

The impulse to fix ourselves (to avoid feeling pain)
No matter what the specific formula is trying to address—“10 Easy Steps to Financial Security” or “10 Easy Ways to Mend a Broken Heart”—the underlying assumption is that so-called “neg- ative” feelings such as insecurity or pain are something that need to be fixed, or made to go away. This is due to the ancient distrust of what cannot be controlled—what is wild and spontaneous—and the impetus to press it down, tame it, or make it obey.

This is important enough to repeat: we misinterpret the distress of the core wound as a sign that there’s something wrong with us, and then find ourselves automatically being motivated to do something about it. We become obsessed with trying to do something to make ourselves “okay.” There’s a huge range of what we think it will take for us to be “okay” including all levels of success, wealth, accomplishment, ideal relationships, etc. but it all ultimately boils down to what will make us okay in our own eyes (generally influenced heavily by out particular cultural conditioning).

The hypermasculine approach to life has permeated practically every aspect of human existence, and it has become our default orientation. It is a survival function run amok. “Find it and fix it” is its strategy, and it has little tolerance for anything that doesn’t bow down to its control. It sets us up to be inwardly split, with some parts of ourselves rejecting or trying to control other parts, a condition of inner division that is quite painful to experience and only partially amenable to the many ways we try to alleviate it.
It is impossible to succeed more than temporarily by using a hypermasculine approach to resolving this predicament (although it is also impossible to avoid trying to do so). Any time we are shown a model for “what ails us,” it is practically inevitable to ask “What do I do to change that? Give me the formula, the technique I need to apply.”
We’re powerless in the face of the core wound
You cannot make the core wound go away by any means, be- cause it is simply how you are configured. It’s part of being human.
To repeat: you cannot make the core wound go away.
Attempts to make it go away or to avoid feeling it ultimately fail. Just as alcohol eventually fails to provide the anesthesia it once did, so too any attempt to override or “cure” the feeling of the core wound will ultimately fall short. Such attempts are at best only temporarily successful, and there is a big price to pay in the damage we do to ourselves in the process. All suppressed feeling is stored as a form of cellular memory which will resurface repeatedly until it is allowed, felt, and permitted to heal.

An example: a little child who has been upset by something and is beginning to cry is warned by his parent, “Stop crying right now or I’ll give you something to really cry about!” The boy, now also feeling fear, tenses up certain muscles in his face, shoulders, and hands and somehow shuts off the flow of tears. He is beginning to learn how to override the feeling of being upset and hold his emotions at bay. Years later, he experiences chronic tension in his face, neck, and shoulders and can’t let himself cry, even when faced with great loss.

Cutting off our spontaneous thoughts, feelings, and impulses also cuts us off from our vital energy, depriving us of our very aliveness. In the attempt to avoid feeling painful feelings, we create an ever greater amount of pain and suffering for ourselves as we deplete our vitality and depress our aliveness. This is reaching a critical point in the modern world: just look at how many people are resorting to antidepressants and other drugs to try to address a serious lack of inner wellbeing.

No way out
Now you may find yourself in a classic catch-22 bind: upon discovering that you are ultimately powerless to control or escape your human predicament through your own strategic efforts, you will likely begin searching for yet another strategy you can use to undo your previous strategies. This is pretty automatic and unconscious. It is also futile.

This would be a good time to stop and take a breath.

The only way out of the habit of endlessly trying to fix what’s wrong with you is for you to allow it to naturally dissolve from within. As I described in Chapter 1, at some point you find

yourself simply losing the drive to keep on striving to be different, better, more successful, or enlightened. You might not be satisfied with yourself as you are, but something is pulling the rug out from under the whole endeavor of trying to get it right. And this something is the thrust of your own spiritual unfolding. You are beginning to be capable of something else.

Falling into the core wound
As your impulse to avoid and override decreases, you will find that you can let yourself be, bringing greater awareness into the core wound itself. You will begin falling into the core wound to an ever-greater degree. It may seem a bit strange to say you “fall into” something that’s already a condition of your existence, but what I mean is that you allow yourself to consciously feel how it really is for you deep down inside yourself. When you stop always looking outward at the circumstances of your life, you naturally become more available for noticing how you feel inside. Going into the core wound may seem counterintuitive, because the natural reflex is to get away from discomfort any way you can. But experiencing your inner territory with full awareness of what you’re encountering is the very act that will ultimately set you free.

Being willing to feel into the core wound is the first step. It may be that you are already feeling the core wound, but you’ve been thinking there is something wrong with you and that you only need the right tool to fix it, to make it go away. It can be a radical shift to allow yourself to feel that sense of angst WITHOUT trying to make it go away. This is what I mean by relaxing: relaxing and allowing yourself to notice what’s here and how you are feeling, and to become more aware of the stories you tell yourself about what it means.

And while you are relaxing and noticing what’s going on inside you, also notice all the impulses that arise to do something. You can begin to notice how often you seek a program or strategy that will somehow make your life better or alleviate painful feelings. You can notice all the ways in which you don’t like how you feel (or even who you are) and want it to change. You can notice how quickly you reach for something to help you avoid feeling exactly the way you’re feeling, be it alcohol, TV, exercise, food, meditation, shopping, chatting with a friend, working long hours, drugs, parties, etc. You can notice the next time you’re tempted to sign up for the “next best” program that promises to make you more successful, beautiful, powerful, in control, prosperous, or whatever. You can remind yourself that what drives these impulses is less about any rewards you might get than it is about helping you avoid that disquieting feeling deep down at the core: the core wound.
The truth is, if you can avoid feeling the core wound, you will. It’s not that the pain is unbearable, it’s more that it simply feels irresolvable. Therefore we instinctively prefer to avoid dealing with it. The majority of people spend their lives in this pattern of avoiding the core feeling of their life. But for some, the lucky ones, the drive to stay on the surface and not go deep will wind down, and they will find themselves falling—and ultimately relaxing—into the core wound.
Fortunately, relaxing into the core wound does not mean you have to be endlessly awash in feelings of confusion, separation, or inadequacy. Once you begin unwinding from your conditioned avoidance strategies, you are naturally moving toward a more direct encounter with your fundamental Being. Remember, the key here is to relax and allow yourself to organically unfold out of your old and controlled way of operating into something else. You do not have to force anything now (in fact, more and more you’ll find that you simply can’t). Be as gentle on yourself as possible. It is totally okay to find a rhythm between touching in with the feelings at the core, and doing things to give yourself comfort and support during this time of transition and change.

It’s HARD to be here!
The bottom line is that it’s very often HARD to be here as a fully aware human being. It’s challenging to be here as a human being no matter what, and it’s especially hard to come fully alive to all that we are. We are full of ideals and expectations about life, and the more conscious we are, the more we have to face all the ways that life fails to be ideal. It’s not utopia, it’s not peaceful much of the time, it’s full of conflicts and war between people, and you can’t get away from the fact that animals EAT ONE ANOTHER here. Life isn’t fair, and before you know it, the physical body dies. This is the indisputable truth about how life is. And we’re not born accepting how things are: we quickly develop a whole set of concepts about fairness, love, safety, trust, and happy endings. We expect these things, and we suffer when they aren’t the case.

It’s no wonder that people often backpedal AWAY from being here about as often as they lean in, wanting to live life fully. Most people end up in some twilight zone of a surface life, not questioning things too deeply and allowing their automatic ways of being to carry them along.

But here YOU are, and if you’re reading this book you’re not “most people.” You probably already know that you are impelled to discover what’s true about yourself and about life. Like Neo in the Matrix movie, you are choosing the red pill. You are ready to give up the dream life and do whatever it takes to find out what’s really going on here. In the midst of the dark night you might feel like a failure on one level, but I’ll wager that on another level, you are beginning to sense that you are on a hero’s journey of epic proportions.

On one hand, you may not want to know what’s in store for you. On the other hand, it’s important for you to know that if you choose to go down this path you will be tested. You will encounter the hell-realms of your own psyche and have to face the demons there. Awakening is not a program where you can learn A, B, and C and your life is turned around. Quite the contrary: awakening happens when you permit all that is no longer relevant to your authentic self to fall away and lie in ruins, while the phoenix of your divine essence rises into new life.

To quote from The Way of Transformation by Karlfried Graf Durkheim: “Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable.”

I am not saying this to scare you, but only to level with you. If you are rotting out of your conditioned, hypermasculine ways of being, you are already in the midst of this process of total trans- figuration. You do not need to enroll; life has already drafted you into this program.

Does the core wound ever get healed?
By now, you’re probably wondering if there is going to be any relief, ever, from the pain of the core wound. Well, the short answer is “yes.” Much of the distress of the wound comes from our resistance to it—the way we dislike and try to rid ourselves of it. Once we consciously understand its existential nature—once we really get that it’s not a sign of personal failing—and accept that it’s just how it feels to be in a body, then our relaxation around all that can bring us a great relief. Instead of a wound, it is discovered to be a tolerable paradox. Relaxing with this paradox is a precursor to the shift of divinely human awakening, which in turn brings with it a profound wellness of Being, in which the core wound is transformed into the alchemical Core Mystery of conscious embodiment.
As long as you have a body you will always experience some degree of tension between the limits of embodiment and the freedom of Spirit. Part of awakening is learning how to live with this tension without it being so painful, and this book is here to give you tools and tips to help you do just that.

Try this: sensing inward
Here’s an experiment you can try. Right now, notice how your body feels. Tune into the feeling of your chair supporting you, and then notice the feeling of contact from your clothes on your skin. Then let your awareness go down into your feet, and into the palms of your hands. You might like to take a nice full breath, and notice any sense of enlivenment that comes with that.

Next, bring your awareness inward to the core of your body, the area that includes your throat, heart area, stomach, and abdomen. After a bit, see if you get a subtle feeling-sense that might be difficult to put into words—as if the whole of your life right now was contained in this vague, indefinable feeling. It might be a pleasant feeling, or unpleasant, or merely neutral— whatever it is, simply notice that you’re able to sense it somehow. Even if you think you’re feeling “nothing,” just notice that.

And now bring your awareness back into the room.
This is something you can do whenever you think of it— pause for a moment and sense inwardly, being curious to discover what’s there. You might not get down to the sense of the core wound/paradox quite yet, but it’s a start.

Learning to trust the intelligence of Being
There is much more to divinely human awakening than simply experiencing your core wound. When you begin to let up on the reins of control that you’ve been using your whole life, when you begin to let the horse that is your life-force have its head a little, you will make some discoveries about life that you might have been overlooking in your zeal to be in charge.

We could say that “Being” is life itself, the aliveness that quite magically transforms ephemeral spirit into tangible matter, and then gives sentience to that matter so it can delight in its creative expression. Being is vastly intelligent, and holds the templates for the evolutionary unfolding of all life. It also holds the template for your life’s unfoldment into its full and total potential.

Just as your body naturally maintains its life through its vast instinctive intelligence—with your heart beating rhythmically, your lungs expanding and collapsing, and a million processes going on simultaneously to maintain life—so too are you held and supported by a vast Intelligence that knows how to awaken you fully into your divinely human potential. You don’t have to figure this all out—any more than you have to tell your heart to beat. And because awakening takes you beyond what you currently know from experience, you cannot use familiar modes of reasoning to get you there.

So, you can let yourself relax a bit. Ease off the reins, and consider the possibility that your horse knows its way to the best pastures, to use an analogy, and is going to take you there even if you take a nap in the saddle.

Relaxing in this way doesn’t mean inaction, or stagnation. It just makes it easier to begin noticing what happens when you don’t try to manipulate your life from your ideas about how it ought to be. Your horse is a genius, in case you didn’t know, and she’s been waiting for a chance to show what she’s capable of.
In the next chapter, you’ll see how to go beyond merely relaxing and begin to actively greenlight your humanness in a way that most optimally supports your full unfoldment. But before we go there, a final note about relaxing. When you learn how you’ve been driving yourself to the brink through trying to control life, and when you’re given a context that an alternative is possible, you can begin to ease off, relax, and trust a little that maybe things can work out all by themselves. This is a first step.

There are further degrees of relaxation that you will be encountering. Embodied awakening itself happens after you fully and finally stop resisting and let go into just being as you are, making room for your Conscious nature to fully inhabit and be here. You cannot force this because, of course, forcing is not relaxing. It happens when all the conditions are ripe for it, and the timing is by grace.

And although the primary shift, or divinely human awakening, happens in conjunction with a fundamental, core relaxation, by itself it does not immediately undo all the other automatic ways of being that you adopted in order to survive being here in a body. That actually comes later, as you integrate that awakening more and more fully into who you are. Your conditioning will fall away as Being grows stronger in you. You will become more and more relaxed in yourself and in your life, and this is one of the real fruits of awakening: a much greater level of ease and grace will fill your days, as you trust that the divine in you, as you, will carry and support you through whatever comes your way.
But first steps first.