“Lucid Living holds a vision of an enchanted new world.” So begins the vision statement for Lucid Living, a company founded by Leza Danly. Some years back, I had heard a class offered by Leza in which she talked about emotions and authenticity. I bought one of her tapes, entitled, Loving Your Inner Child and Adolescent: The First Gateway to Spiritual Adulthood. This year, my own coach is in the midst of a year-long course offered by Lucid Living. Her own transformations have so inspired me that I asked Leza Danly if I could talk to her to learn more.

Leza’s style statement is Sacred Dramatic, but she wanted me to know that “Cherished” was a close runner-up for her lead type.

That is such a great word, LUCID. How did your business name come about and what is lucid living?

Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming? It is a particular kind of night dream. When you are in the dream state, you suddenly become aware that it is a dream. As soon as you realize this you can actually effect what happens in it. So the foundation of lucid living is to know that you create your own reality in our waking world. Once you become aware that you are, in fact, creating it all, you can explore the mysteries of how that happens. In our 5-part course, we spend a whole year on this idea; it is a joyful adventure to discover who you really are at the level of Soul and Spirit, and to connect to that.

Can you give me an example of what that means for you?

Part of the spiritual path is to always be seeking a higher truth. Discovering that you create your own reality is a higher truth than believing yourself to be a victim of circumstances. Ultimately, there will be a truth beyond creating my own reality, but for now it is a very expansive place to master. It takes courage to keep seeking a higher truth, to move forward with faith knowing that I may have a more enlightened perspective tomorrow. The highest truth I stand on is that I am fully loved– and we all are. It is a huge part of my passion and what Lucid Living is about for me. I want people to wake up to the fact that they are loved for no reason– Not for what they do or how they help people or because they obey the golden rule or anything external. You are loved because you are divine and part of all that is. You can’t decrease it or increase it. So, you can stop earning and proving – just accept it and consider, “how do I want to live my life as an expression of the gratitude for all that is?”

Wow, there is real power in that belief for you. Can I ask what in your personal life led you to this work?

I think I’ve always been seeking a True Love. I grew up as most people did, where love was conditional. I always had a sense there was something more. Early on I had a sense of God that came from my relationship with nature in a Chicago suburb. There were these huge cottonwood trees and when a storm would come everything was magical. At age 12, I was sent to summer camp in the Grand Tetons and those mountains just did something for me. They are SO magnificent; being in that dramatic earth spoke to me. In high school, my search for connection took the form of being the person who people told their problems to. I thought if I loved others enough, the love I wanted would come to me. This faulty approach led to a painful marriage in my twenties and it ended 5 years later. I had hit total rock bottom by 31. I had been hurt, I was broke and everything I thought would be true was not. Losing it all was an opportunity to look and say, my approach doesn’t work and I have to find something that does. It was then I began to connect with God/Goddess in a clean way, not trying to earn divine love, but learning to receive what was already there. Had I not been so utterly lost I don’t think I would be able to offer what I can now. I understand when people are lost and blaming and full of rage. They are starving for love and don’t know how to connect to it. I have been there.

One more thing that helped is that as bad as things got, I always had hope. Here is my definition of hope which I believe in the depths of my bones:

It is a genuine, positive expectation of the future. You genuinely expect the future to be bright and loving. You may not know how the heck we will get there but you have a deep knowing and a deep sense that we are headed to a more loving, compassionate and wise world. You feed that loving future with your expectation.

So, there is a knowing buried deep inside that I have been excavating all my life. I believe we come in to this world knowing we are loved and it can get horribly obscured depending on the life you have. Over the course of my life I have explored so many different spiritual paths from becoming a rebirther with Sondra Ray to eastern approaches with Ram Dass. I have found my home in the teachings of Lazaris.

How can lucid living help our relationships?

It is the nature of relationships to show us who we are-to be reflective. After that falling in love period and the attraction, you start to see the things you don’t like so much. That is when you get to face yourself and look at your own judgments and the reflections of yourself that you don’t like. You get to see where you do not love you. At Lucid Living, this is actually something we don’t tackle until late in our courses because you need to be intimate with your own emotions, you need to know what the different parts of you need and develop a nurturing parent voice to be able to bring a whole person into your relationship.

If you know that you create your own reality then you can come into any relationship, a sexual partnership or a business partnership, and bring that willingness to be responsible for yourself. If you are responsible for everything you create, and your partner is also willing to be responsible, then the two of you can go on the most miraculous sacred exploration; It can be a structure of the most spiritual rigor.

I can tell you that today I really know how to create loving relationships that last. I am in a marriage that has lasted over 20 years. It is one of the things I am proudest about: have learned how to love and be loved. I also have a magical partnership with Jeanine Mancusi, my best friend and partner at Lucid Living. To have two incredible partnerships is an extraordinary gift I keep learning to receive.

What books have inspired you in your work?

Well there are so many, but over the last 5 years three books are special to me:

1. The Secret life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd
   It really speaks to the power of the feminine and the mystery of love.
2. Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert
   I am not fully aligned with all her beliefs but I relate to her journey and I admire her capacity to share that journey with such vulnerability, humor and artistry.
3. Expecting Adam, by Martha Beck
   Her first memoir is enormously compelling. I have given this book to probably 30 people. She was a Harvard grad student and pregnant with her second child, diagnosed with Down Syndrome. It is the story of her spiritual awakening that happened through that pregnancy and birth of her child.

Who are your lucid living role models?

The bottom line of Lucid Living is to take responsibility for creating all your life and the way to do that is to own and honor the full range of your emotions. Sometimes it’s hard to know who in the world is really doing that, but certain people stand out. There are people I admire for their passion and their artistry and realness. I adore Ellen Degeneres. Of course I admire and love Oprah. Yet, when I look to see who my real role models are, I have to say they are the people who share their deep vulnerability with me regularly– my husband and my business partner and my students. I look at them and see how they love themselves and continue to courageously face themselves and surpass who they have been. I am watching them blossom as they uncover deeper and deeper love.

What are the lessons you find yourself learning (and teaching) over and over again?

1. The incredible power of authentic emotion. It is by going deeply into our emotion that we reclaim the power to transform our lives. Blame, Pity and Guilt are feelings, but they are not real and vulnerable and authentic. They try to separate you from the truth. I have to keep learning how to accept all of my emotions and have them be allies in creating my dream.
2. The experience of being fully loved for no reason. It is so important to simply admit that you are loved and start experiencing it.
3. The joyous freedom of true adulthood and with it the enormous power of responsibility. Most people shrink from ‘adulthood’ and ‘responsibility’ because they are synonymous with duty and obligation. Being responsible for what you truly want moment to moment- that is true adulthood that is fun, and incredible freedom.

What advice do you have for us that we can put into place right now to bring us closer to lucid living?

1. Pay attention to what you are feeling. Be more intimate with your emotions - stop judging them and discover how you can feel and release the ones that are less effective and nurture the ones that are more effective.
2. Feel the impact of what you create. An example is helpful here: Let’s say you lost your job- don’t come home and ask yourself, “Why did I create that?” Give yourself time to fully experience the emotions first. You’re betrayed, martyred, what else? There are no wrong emotions, just feel them. Once you get through the arc of the emotions (it could take 20 minutes or a few days) then ask why you created that. “What is this showing me?” “How is this a reflection of something I need to see?” Don’t turn the question against yourself (e.g. What is wrong with me?).
3. Start looking for evidence that you are loved for no reason –even if you don’t believe it! You get what you look for. If you want to look for evidence of being misunderstood and wronged you can do that. But that is not the higher truth. So start looking for the love everywhere, even if you have to start with the sun on your face, or the smile of a stranger. In what ways can you let yourself be touched? You have work, a roof over your head, people to serve…

At the end of our interview Leza challenged me to sign up for her course. I am sorely tempted but haven’t committed yet. Stay tuned. And let me know if you do it first!

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Photo courtesy of h.koppdelaney.