Becoming Divinely Human
by CC Leigh

Chapter 4: Greenlighting

Our Story: As we relaxed out of trying to be the way we thought we “should” be, we began to honestly see and “greenlight” ourselves as we are in order to further our embodiment. We said yes to our total being, permitting ourselves to show up however we were being in the moment.
Much deeper than mere “acceptance,” greenlighting does not mean complacency or resignation. Instead, it is an active curiosity, an ongoing inquiry that leads to deeper understanding and whole-being integration.

The power of loving what is
Consider this: you can’t fully control thoughts and impulses.
There is a widespread idea that we can control our destiny by controlling our thoughts and/or the beliefs that underlie them. Sometimes the message is overt: think and grow rich! And sometimes the message is subtle, as in “Whatever were you thinking (that made you do that stupid thing)?” Although the intention of most positive-thinking teachings is to help empower people to be successful in their lives, there is a hidden shadow side to this framework that can be insidious.
In reality, you cannot fully control the thoughts you have, at least not directly. Thoughts are mysterious! Some are echoes of what you’ve ingested from media—from news, advertising, TV programming, music, movies, books, etc. Some are echoes of things your parents, teachers, bosses, and peers have said to you over time, both positive and negative. Some are repetitions of conclusions and decisions you made (beliefs) about yourself and the world in response to the situations and events you encountered.

Some of your thoughts and impulses will be positive and optimistic, some fearful and pessimistic, some judgmental and critical, some angry and reactive, some creative and playful, some sad and/or dissatisfied with life. Sometimes you will feel healthy, energized, and ready for whatever life brings. And sometimes you will be feeling anything but that, and simply want to crawl into a hole. Not only do you have a vast array of thoughts, and the feelings that correlate with those thoughts, you also have feelings about your feelings. You probably think it is only “natural” to like how you feel when you are “up” and to dislike how you feel when you are “down.”

The blame game
Because we have the ability to reflect on our internal states of being, and because we are hard-wired to try to figure out what causes us to feel as we do in order to prevent a recurrence of unpleasant feelings (as well as to create more instances of “good” feelings), we tend naturally toward assigning blame for our feelings onto something. Commonly, that something will be a person or situation in our lives that appears to be blocking our happiness. It may be something in the present, or an incident from the past that, in our judgment, left us permanently damaged and unable to be happy now.

Problems occur when you eventually get tied up in knots of your own making. There is no longer such a thing as simply feeling whatever you’re feeling: the thought or feeling now has a whole story around it, plus some ideas about how to change it—either to have more of a good feeling or to get rid of an uncomfortable one. You might feel overly responsible for all the thoughts and emotions that you have, and the result is embarrassment or shame when you are unable to deliver the idealized life experience you’ve been taught to desire.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the last chapter, we spoke of relaxing out of your conditioned way of being, as you tire of trying to make your lives work through your own efforts. The next step beyond relaxing is to begin actively greenlighting yourself, including all of your thoughts, feelings, impulses, and beliefs about reality.

Greenlighting is not passive resignation
“Greenlighting” is a term borrowed from the film industry. When a producer decides a script is basically good enough to take it into production, they say they are greenlighting the project. It means the project will go forward. It doesn’t mean it’s a final product yet—indeed, it may go through a whole series of rewrites and improvements along the way. But greenlighting means it is fundamentally okay and worthy of further development.
In a similar fashion, we can greenlight ourselves in our fundamental okay-ness and worthiness. Greenlighting is a powerful tool to help counteract all the programming we’ve internalized in our lives that tells us that we are NOT okay or worthy. It’s not about passively resigning ourselves to how things are. Instead, greenlighting is based on the framework that we, like that film script, are a work in progress.

Greenlighting is not an affirmation
Affirmations and positive thinking practices attempt to assert the “truth” of something that is not currently apparent. For example, “I am showered with financial abundance,” or “I am totally healthy.” While this may have some value, the limitation of affirmations is that no matter how many hundreds of times you say or write such a statement, the conditioned part of you that holds a different view will not be displaced and will tend to reject the affirmation as wrong or untrue. It simply doesn’t work to try to stuff feelings or paper over them with a false positivity. What is ignored, or not felt, will remain the same—it will keep coming back, over and over.
With greenlighting, we permit ourselves to think and feel as we do without trying to change those thoughts or feelings, or replace them with a different idea. We radically embrace what is with compassion, and then experience how it naturally moves toward greater wholeness.

Greenlighting is an active investigation
You are greenlighting when you actively permit exactly what’s happening in you now—all of your faults, failings, and shortcomings as well as your gifts and strengths—in a spirit of curiosity about what can be discovered. Perhaps you feel ashamed of not living up to your ideals, or not being as good a person as you aspire to be. Perhaps you’ve hurt others, been dishonest, or committed something you (or your family, community, or church) considers wrong or a “sin.” As you greenlight the resulting discomfort, you also greenlight the shame itself—meaning you allow yourself to feel it so you can learn more about what’s going on. When you embrace whatever you’re feeling, you can begin to investigate it in a way that begins to restore your natural wellness of being.

If you’ve been taught that you’re responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and life experiences, you may harshly blame yourself for what you judge to be your weaknesses, limitations, and failures. You will also tend to blame yourself for your lack of success, for your lack of perfection. Self-blame leads to shame, and feelings of shame keep most of us in deep hiding, from one another and from ourselves.

We think of this as only normal. In our daily interactions, we put on a smile and pretend to be upbeat. We speak only of the things that we are proud of, and edit our story to avoid talking about the places where we feel less than successful, or the ways in which we are unhappy. We tell ourselves that we don’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable, but what are we actually doing? We are presenting a false picture of being someone who has his or her act together. And as a consequence, most people go around thinking that everyone else has better lives, are more successful, and are happier than they really are. And in our innate tendency to compare, we find ourselves lacking. This leads, in turn, to an even greater sense of shame and a greater impulse to lie to keep others from finding out.

Subtle hypocrisy
Many spiritual organizations foster an especially insidious type of hypocrisy when they outline a blueprint for acting, for example, as a “good Christian,” or a “good Buddhist,” or a “good New Thought (or New Age) Practitioner.” Perhaps the ideal is described as someone who is always even-tempered, generous, upbeat, and never agitated. When there is a value scale around desirable and undesirable emotions, people begin to imitate the desired feelings when others are watching in order to be accepted, and hypocrisy is born. They say the “right” things and perhaps do the “right” actions, but it doesn’t come from genuine spiritual awareness on their part—merely from trying to follow “the rules.” The downside of this shows up when there is no tolerance for being a real, live human being who feels and thinks things that aren’t in line with the prescribed dogma. Feeling this judgment can increase the desire to avoid letting others see you as you are, and increase your sense of being different or not fitting in. This can, in turn, lead to more shame, or, ironically, more arrogance, or both.

This need to project an image of being happy and successful is especially pronounced in those who take on the role of teachers, ministers, spiritual leaders, or advisors. After all, don’t you want those you look to for advice to be accomplished at what they are teaching? If they are teaching about success, their lives must be the epitome of success, and if they are teaching about inner peace, they better not ever be agitated! This kind of expectation can become a prison to such a teacher or a leader, preventing them from being authentic in their expression. And it can perpetuate, for the student, a myth of false perfection that they strive (and inevitably fail) to emulate.

The saga of love, hate, and fear
We have been told by some of our greatest spiritual teachers that we should choose love over fear, that love can conquer all, heal all wounds, and make the world a better place. We have been led to believe that fear is undesirable; that it is the opposite of love and that it prevents us from realizing our dreams and potentials. It is easy to hate fear. And in a similar fashion, we are told that hatred is also the opposite of love, and that it prevents real brotherhood from arising. It is easy to hate hatred, and to want it to disappear from our world. But is this the best way to look at our human tendencies?
What is the deeper truth here? Isn’t it obvious that love is more desirable than fear? Isn’t it obvious that fearful people are more selfish and also more prone to create armies and weapons and even wage war? Wouldn’t the world be better if we could stop reacting from anger, hatred, and paranoia? Wouldn’t we feel better inside, too?

Let’s take this apart carefully. When you hate and try to get rid of any part of what you are, you are being violent towards yourself, and this inner-directed violence contributes to outer-directed violence. You try to exert violent (as in forceful) control over yourself and then expect others to do the same with themselves—or you offer to do it for them. But what does this actually accomplish? We have not succeeded in eradicating fear, anger, or grief by these methods. They are too intrinsic to our nature to be eliminated. Instead, we’ve driven these emotions underground where they fester, only to blow up unpredictably and with high blast velocity due to the repressed energy suddenly being released.

You have an inherent survival mechanism that is on the alert for threats, and responds with fight, flight, and freeze signals that you feel as anger or fear. And even though you might rightly see the horrific violence that can result from the unrestrained actions of people motivated by these emotions, the very place where love can begin to grow is in the radical embrace of your survival-based feelings, thoughts, and emotions. They have an important function. You simply cannot eliminate your survival mechanism—it is essential to the continuation of the body-mind and hence, to all of your spiritual growth as well.
What you can do is learn to attend to all of your feelings with patience and compassion, and learn to value the messages they bring. When brought into the light of Presence and integrated into your whole being, they become allies, bringing you wise counsel. I’ll talk more about how to do this in Chapter 5.

It’s not easy being human
As members of a spiritual community or religious congrega- tion we may go along with their hypocrisy in part because we want to believe there is a way for our lives to work out and for everyone to find happiness and peace. We want to believe that a better world than the one we live in is possible or at least that there is a way to find peace in the midst of the craziness. We want to think that there are authorities we can turn to who know more than we do and can show us the way. Many of us want others to tell us how to live our lives, because down deep we feel quite lost. We want our teachers and leaders to be paragons of virtue and success. And when they fall from grace, which they will sooner or later because NO ONE has a perfect life, we find ourselves deeply disappointed and disillusioned.

The inescapable truth is it’s hard to be here. It’s hard to be a human being. It’s hard to live in this bewildering world where there is so much competition, chaos, and unpredictability. It is hard to live with all the impulses vying for our attention, and with the clamor of our thoughts judging, criticizing, and second- guessing our every move and feeling state. It’s hard to experience the pressure we feel to get our lives in order, to be successful, and to be happy. Not to mention the pressure to take care of our children, our parents, our jobs, and our partners, and help them find happiness. And on top of all that, we’re supposed to love everyone—when we haven’t even learned how to be genuinely kind to ourselves. In this scenario, happiness is almost guaranteed to be out of reach!

You’re not responsible for your past
Consider this: you didn’t consciously choose to think the way you do, to draw the conclusions you have about life, or to have the particular set of gifts and limitations you have. You didn’t consciously choose to be beautiful or plain, tall or short, male or female. You didn’t consciously choose many of the traumas life brought you, or to have to re-experience those traumas every time a life situation reminds you of them. You didn’t invent your con- ditioning—it just happened because you were a fairly blank slate that was inherently highly impressionable and easily influenced.

Even if you believe the opposite, that you chose your parents and your gender and the body you would have, and even the events that happened to you, in order to learn certain things about life, that doesn’t mean that you are somehow guilty, or at fault for generating the painful parts of your life to date. The kindest way to be with yourself is to consider that how you got to be the way you are happened quite automatically due to the intersection of your unique genetic tendencies and the environment you found yourself in. You are how you are because you are. You are not to blame. In some mysterious way, you could not be other than you are—a mixture of abilities and limitations that gives you an utterly unique perspective on life that is colored by all that you are and all that you have encountered.

Greenlighting ego
Another reason you might be prone to self-loathing is due to spiritual teachings that caution about something harmful and destructive within, that you have to get rid of somehow. That something is commonly (and over-simplistically) called “the ego”—the part of you that considers itself an individual, separate from other individuals and in need of defending itself from outside threats. The ego’s instincts for self-preservation are sometimes said to be the root of all evil.
These teaching go on to say that the only way you can achieve peace is to “kill the ego.” And they thus set you up to distrust yourself, to fear that there is something insidious operating within you that you need to turn against and cast out in order to be okay, or good, or worthy of grace. But the ego is a necessary part of being human! It learns through experience and holds patterns of energy, thought, and emotion that enable you to quickly recognize and avoid danger and also navigate in complex social environments. It’s true that egoic reactions can sometimes be extreme or inappropriate, but you would not survive long without the inborn self-protection mechanisms of the ego. Because the ego is the first line of self-preservation, it will do everything it can to avoid its own destruction. Killing the ego would be suicide!

I am not saying that it isn’t useful to study and address the challenges created by ego. If you are overly-focused on self- defense, your relationships, which are nourished by openness and trust, suffer. There needs to be a balance between self- interest and the kind of openness and vulnerable sharing that promotes intimacy and allows love. There are other ways to support open-heartedness without violently attempting to remove intrinsic aspects of yourself.
Resisting and fighting a part of your own nature only serves to perpetuate internal splits, and leads to self-loathing. You are not likely to get to genuine self-love through this route. What if, instead, you were to greenlight the ego in all of its expressions of self-interest, greed, fear, and distrust, and actually appreciate how those impulses help to keep you alive? Without survival, there can’t very well be awakening!

What’s more, it is not necessary to rid yourself of ego in order to awaken to your true and total nature. Once again: it is not necessary to eliminate egoic patterns in order to awaken. In the past, it was assumed that Spirit could not come fully alive unless the ego were nearly eradicated first, but as we are making a more detailed study of what actually happens in the awakening process, we are discovering that it’s just not so. Spirit comes alive and awake right alongside our self-interest and even pettiness, and then begins to soften and transform our humanness so that it supports an ever-greater expression of our divinely human potential.
The good news is that the arising of greater Presence brings a new influence to bear on how the ego is structured and how it operates. The more we relax, and the more we greenlight, the more trust in Being grows. And with greater trust in Being, the ego begins to let down its guard a little, and its rough edges begin to get rubbed off. Once ego no longer feels solely responsible for our survival, and sees that there is something far bigger than its narrow self-sense operating to help with that, it gets to relax. Not go away entirely, because it is part of what keeps us alive, creates our personality, and helps us interface with the world around us. But much of what it thought it needed to do begins to dissipate.

Your story matters—because YOU matter
A corollary of ego is your personal story. Some teachings would have you believe that your personal story is only an exaggerated “drama,” and that you should not indulge yourself in thinking that it matters. But it does matter because you matter! Your unique expression and history are utterly unrepeated anywhere, and it is precious. So many of us have been conditioned to feel embarrassed about our personal story, about the drama that is our life, but I would like to encourage you to reframe that. Sure, it is worth considering that you have selective memory, and that you have a particular interpretation of the events of your life that might be perpetuating some pain. But as we study the way the body stores traumas, we are learning that trauma patterns are deeply embedded. They are not merely thoughts that can be summarily banished, nor can the feelings they engender be bypassed by treating them as if they were somehow imaginary or unreal. If you have a body, you have a history that is recorded in the very energy matrix that is interwoven with your body.
The most effective and humane way to respond to being a human with a past is to take it seriously, and to bring loving attention to the places where the trauma patterns keep getting triggered, in order to help them heal into wholeness and freedom. We’ll talk more about this in the next chapter, Inseeing.

Compassion for yourself as you are learning
Greenlighting applies to all of our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and reactions. Yes, even self-hatred or resisting greenlighting. Greenlighting includes the ways we resist and fight against how things are, and all the ways we automatically judge things. It may seem a little strange at first, but if you think in terms of giving friendly, curious attention to the thoughts and attitudes showing up within you—including feelings that are anything BUT friendly—you’ll be on the right track.
Try this: three special words
Here’s a simple step you can take right now. Whenever you feel an uncomfortable feeling, say to yourself, “something in me is feeling (fill in the blank).” When you use these three magic words, “something in me,” you are shifting your perspective from small to large. You are taking one step back from the emotion and getting bigger than it is.
Example: “I’m sad” becomes “something in me is sad.”
Example: “I’m so upset” becomes
“something in me is so upset.”

Give it a try with some difficult or uncomfortable emotion that you’re feeling or have felt recently. Can you sense the difference?
When you say “something in me” you are not trying to change or push away any feeling. You are simply bringing the more spacious aspect of who you are into the picture, that part of you that has room for whatever is arising and can welcome it. Being bigger leads to compassion, and compassion leads to natural, unforced healing and forward movement.

As you allow yourself to feel whatever the feeling is, you can also let your hand move gently to the place in your body that feels upset. In this way, you begin to give friendly, soothing contact to that something in you that feels uncomfortable or distressed, making space for it to be as it is.

Greenlighting impulses too—and the sensual delight of being alive
Greenlighting also applies to impulses—those prompts you feel from deep within. When you greenlight your life- affirming impulses, you begin freeing up parts of yourself that have been long-suppressed, perhaps from your earliest days, to come more alive and express your true nature. As you begin to experiment with saying “yes” to your impulses, you will make many discoveries about who you are and what really matters to you in life.

Get into the sensual delight of being alive! Allow yourself to explore what actually feels good to your body and spirit. This could mean breathing fresh air and feeling the sun on your skin, or moving your body in dynamic ways like exercise, sports, yoga, dance, qigong, etc. It could mean receiving more touch, from loved ones, or from massage or other bodywork. It can mean eating delicious things—simply giving yourself permission to follow some of those impulses you have to do things that feel great. And of course, your sexuality is one of those things that you might want to greenlight.

In all cases, I’m not suggesting you do things that would be harmful to yourself or others, or to your existing relation- ships. But for many people on a path of spiritual discipline, or even on rigorous programs of self-development, there’s been way too much emphasis on austerity and denial of impulses. As you begin to awaken, it is through allowing yourself to exper- iment with what feels wonderful that you will rediscover your true nature. You may have forgotten how to be spontaneous in your quest to always do the “right” thing. So, consider giving yourself a vacation from that sort of self-control, and try some improvisation. Your body will thank you for it. It’s much easier to come alive in a body that is content and experiences pleasure. There is more than enough pain in life; we need to also have pleasure and joy to counterbalance that and make life worth fully encountering.

Note that I am not advocating that your life become all about hedonism. Ultimately I’m inviting that which is deepest and truest in you to come fully alive and find expression here. As you are experimenting, stay in touch with the feedback you get, with how your body feels afterward. Did that really satisfy something, or not? Underneath a more obvious urge (like eating a pint of ice cream), there might be a deeper, more significant impulse that would be important to discover. Perhaps you are longing for a deeper connection with someone? Or maybe you’re frustrated in your job and need to find opportunities for greater self-expression?

If you’ve been turning down too many of your impulses, you might also be missing some important clues about what will move your life forward in the most auspicious ways.

Can greenlighting go too far?
What I’ve been saying may be triggering some concerns and fears. Am I advocating that you greenlight ALL your impulses, including those that are destructive or that hurt others?

First, let me make a distinction between impulses and actions. An impulse is an urge, a prompt from somewhere inside you, and yes, I do recommend greenlighting all the impulses, thoughts, and feelings that arise in you. By greenlighting, you show yourself compassion for how you are predisposed to think and feel in certain patterns. But as far as acting out your impulses, that’s a different story. I strongly advocate acting only upon impulses that feel life-affirming, for you and for any others who might be affected. Of course, you would not be advised to act on an impulse to do violence to another person (except in the extreme case where you or your loved ones are in imminent danger). Nor should you encourage another to act out those sorts of impulses.
If for any reason you are having trouble with basic levels of impulse control, or find yourself too often giving in to impulses that are socially disruptive, please find a good therapist to work with to help you gain a greater level of mastery. You will need a good foundation to build upon as you progress through the many steps of your awakening process.

Greenlighting the world
You are the way you are because you are, and, in a similar fashion, the world is as it is because it is. There is something about the structure of the world that generates the balance required to maintain life—the balance of life and death, of growth, sustenance, and destruction.

We can observe the net perfection that maintains homeostasis on earth all around us. Life is continually adapting and renewing itself. The whole ecosystem of the earth has been likened to a body, with a natural system for rebalancing. Our earth is amazingly intelligent and resourceful at maintaining herself, much as our bodies do a great job of maintaining their health, given half a chance. This is not to make light of the ecological crisis currently stressing the planet, for it is possible that the earth has never been faced with this kind of predicament in the past. We do indeed need to take deliberate action to support the restoration of the natural balance—to give the earth enough support so she can shake off the many serious challenges that are threatening the continuation of life as we know it.
Just as each person experiences a core wound when they contrast their sense of possibility against their very finite limits, so too do we often suffer from the painful limits we see in the world around us, because we compare them against our idealized sense of how we think the world should be. It’s heartbreaking, as well as bewildering, to witness senseless destruction, horrendous violence, wars, genocide, starvation, oblivious disregard for the environment, and so on. It’s no wonder we find it painful, and want it to change.

If you’re mostly focusing on what’s wrong, you might feel panicky about the state of the world and have a hard time greenlighting it, seeing primarily the many problems, inequities, and ways that things appear to be veering dangerously out of balance. But much as greenlighting our personal thoughts and feelings gives us a better opportunity to look at them and help them move toward greater wholeness, greenlighting the world can be a first step toward understanding and cooperating with her natural healing processes.

The alternative is to be at war with how things are—to be continually noticing only what you don’t like or approve of, or to be judging what you observe as if you could do a better job if you were made king or queen of the universe. Many people operate as if the way to make things work is to hate all those things that they don’t agree with, in some misguided attempt to coerce others (or themselves) to comply with whatever arbitrary standard or ideal that they hold. But in the long run, what is accomplished? There is more hatred in the world, and the cult of dissatisfaction simply gains another disciple.

But what if we were to greenlight the world as well as ourselves? We could stop blaming anyone or anything including God (however you define “God”) for how things are. We could remind ourselves that things simply are as they are, and that life has managed to continue so far. And from that open-hearted place, we could begin to envision how we might become better shepherds of life so that its systems work even more successfully. We do not have to hate how things are in order to care for them and support their fullest unfolding. It is far more effective to focus on what we do want for ourselves and the world.

A balance of freedom and limits
In practical terms, the setup here includes both freedom (potentials) and limits (specific conditions). Every situation in life contains elements of both. If the situation leans strongly toward one end or the other, it will sooner or later be swinging back to the other polarity. It cannot be other than this given the nature of the world.
Once I fully got this—deeply understood this and began applying it to all the situations of my life—I relaxed into life much more deeply than ever before. The idea that I could experience only the parts of life I wanted and exclude the rest was revealed to be a myth that I was holding onto, a myth that caused me a lot of discontent. It was only when I surrendered to the inevitable limits that I became able to open myself to the potentials that were also present in every situation. Greenlighting life, far from being a resignation to “how things are,” unleashed me to explore creative possibilities as never before, not from fear of terrible consequences if I failed to control things according to my ideas of right and wrong, but out of love for life, love for my fellow humans, and love for the earth herself.

Unleashing the power of greenlighting
Remember that greenlighting does not mean passive complacency, but is a generous attitude of accepting how things are in the moment with an eye to how they can evolve most auspiciously in the future. Most of us have not experienced much greenlighting, and we will need to have it modeled for us in order to learn how to do it. Being told is not enough. And it does not happen overnight.

This is why the biblical injunction to “love one another as yourself” is so difficult to follow. Sure, you might intend to be loving, but if you’ve experienced many demands, expectations, and criticisms from others, you might not have an inner template of how to do that. Being loving means to be kind, and to be kind begins with greenlighting. Another way of saying this is to hold ourselves and one another blameless for what has happened in the past, while actively exploring why we feel and react as we do. Then we can help one another relax and grow in the light of love, rather than in the toxic domain of judgment. This is why it is immensely valuable to have association with awakened teachers and others who are learning to relate in this fashion. Teachers who have embodied greenlighting are able to provide a form of re-mothering—relating to us as we always wished our mothers would relate to us—and thereby provide what many of us never got enough of. They see and support our efforts without blaming us when we fall short of our ideals and goals. They gently remind us when we are being overly hard on ourselves or others, so that we can begin to relax our tight grip on our lives. They embody a sense of trust in the natural wisdom of Being that supports life and wholeness and helps us find our way. It is through templating on conscious, embodied teachers that we begin to be able to greenlight ourselves. This is the beginning step of self-love, which can eventually spread to love of our neighbors and our world.

It is not necessary to so despise your nature that you can no longer see the beautiful being that you are. That’s heartbreaking! But how can you know otherwise, if that’s what was modeled for you? The solution to this sorry state of affairs is to find and keep company with people who are learning a different way of being, and to absorb their healing energies and their loving kindness—to “tank up” on their greenlighting. And when you have absorbed enough, you will in turn become a source of that same healing energy for others.

Once you’ve begun to relax out of your old strategies for living, and have begun practicing greenlighting of yourself and the world as it is, you are ready to begin learning more about what makes you tick. In Chapter 5, we’ll explore how the practice of Inseeing can help you discover the many aspects of who you are, and how to use the power of Presence to help you evolve most auspiciously.