ABOUT C. BLACK

I have been many things throughout my life. Like most humans living this crazy, beautiful experience called Life, for a great part of my journey I have often defined myself in many ways by those different hats and experiences. Thankfully I have always had a very strong knowing of who I Am – the Self beneath the undercurrent of Ego, though I did not have the understanding to give these things names. I only had awareness without the ability to define the construct.

Having walked outside of organized religion for most of my life, but with an intense connection to the Divinity Within, I stumbled through most of the first 40 years of this journey largely in the dark and on my own, relying only on my inner knowing and that strong sense of Presence as a compass to find and gather truths to myself. Searching for the lessons which I rapidly learned were always held within every challenge and hard thing (if we only choose to look for them), they shaped my spiritual path, clarifying to myself what it means to walk this human experience. With no external guide to teach me and no guidebook to help me navigate my way through, the truths that I learned through every single one of the experiences in my life were given firsthand.

It is only in the last 15 years or so, as I’ve been able to dive deep into the teachings of many different spiritual schools of thought, that I’ve recognized each of these truths within the wisdom of the Christ Consciousness, the four spiritual paths of Yoga, the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, Hinduism, Toltec Wisdom, Mysticism, and Native American spirituality. My own spiritual path is a collection of truths found scattered throughout these different roadmaps, and so my soul does not find home in just one way of receiving truth, but believes that the truth can be found everywhere when we allow our inner knowing to guide us.

“The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” – Rumi

I do not believe that any one school of thought contains the whole mirror, so to speak, but when those pieces are shared and brought together, they can provide a roadmap by which we might make our journeys back to Self and the Divinity Within quite a bit less bumpy. I believe that the resonance we have with any truth in a given moment is directly proportional to where we are in our individual journeys. Without readiness or the eyes to see, what is obvious truth to one is unseeable and unknowable to another. And so the truth of what IS will unfold differently for each one of us, depending on where one’s soul is in its own unique evolution towards self-realization, or “knowing thyself.”

At the same time, I know that there are as many different paths to that awareness as there are souls in the Universe and no two paths will ever look exactly the same. What resonates with one may not hold resonance for another at this moment in their journeys – this does not mean one is “wrong” and one is “right.” The “right” way is the way that moves you forward on YOUR path inward. In this time in our Western society, when the term “enlightenment” has become a buzzword thrown around with an air of superiority and without much real “enlightened” action, I shy away from it now as much as I used to shy away from the name “God,” which had been usurped by Christianity and left a residue of hypocrisy in my mouth.

True enlightenment cannot co-exist in the same space as superiority, much as judgement and lack of acceptance of others are the antithesis of the Christ Consciousness. To walk a path towards our own Divine natures, we must make the shift from a rote intellectual understanding of these Universal truths to a deeper knowing or realization that allows us to not just talk the talk, but to really walk it as best we can each day, giving grace to both ourselves and others in the process, knowing that we are each a work in progress.

That said, this blog is laced with the lessons which have informed my journey, a great many of them handed to me (or thrown at me, more like) by my kids as I stumbled my way through the minefield that was their childhoods. You will find many of those old blogs here, as they are a significant part of my own soul’s evolution, and you may recognize in them some resonance with the place you find yourself now, or have been in the past.

They also serve as a reminder to myself that 1) this too shall always pass, though it may be hard to see in the moment, 2) what didn’t kill me HAS made me stronger (and a bit wiser), 3) I survived (!!!), and 4) there’s no point in losing your sense of humor over it all. Afterall, ultimately, one of the keys to navigating this dance called Life is to find our way through it as joyfully and lightly as we can.

And so it is that I don’t like to define myself by the accomplishments of my Ego, nor with the labels and boxes into which Society is forever trying to force us, and by which it defines us. I hold no credentialing in the spiritual arts. My understanding of these immutable truths of the Universe comes from much trial, a lot of error, and a tremendous amount of practice and application. Life has been my greatest teacher.

I’m just another Soul on this journey back to Self and the Divinity that joins each of us together, much as the ocean connects each wave – unique in our own manifestation, but the same undercurrent connecting us all. It is simply my hope that within the experiences of my own journey, you may perhaps see life from a slightly new perspective to help make your own journeys back there a little easier.

We are, indeed, all One.

(And by the way, my kids, I am exceedingly happy to report, *did* make it to adulthood and are still some of my greatest teachers.)

Namasté beautiful people! 

c-