Christina Donnell PhD: Encounters with Living Language
Christina Donnell PhD is a classically trained clinical psychologist, author, and spiritual teacher, who studied Eastern traditions and the shamanic energy practices of the Q’ero (Care-o) Indians of Peru for nearly three decades. She has experienced a lifetime of what many would consider phenomenal occurrences, including her own near-death experience, deep transcendent states of consciousness, and interdimensional communications with beings who have crossed over from their human lives.
An Interview with Christina Donnell, PhD – Encounters with Living Language
She is the founding director of The Winds of Change Association, a Minneapolis-based educational organization offering programs that cultivate humanity’s evolving consciousness. Her multiple award-winning first book, Transcendent Dreaming: Stepping Into Our Human Potential, a foray into the quantum nature of the human body, chronicles her radical spiritual awakening through a form of dreaming that expands consciousness, allowing dreamers to identify with the intelligence that animates the universe.
Trained as a clinical psychologist, Christina Donnell PhD received a BA in Psychology from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Health Sciences/Chicago Medical School. She became an associate clinical professor and clinical director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the Department of Psychiatry of Saint Paul Ramsey Medical Center in Minnesota.
In the early 1990’s concerns about the increasing role of managed care and the absence of focus on the human spirit in the mental health profession motivated Christina Donnell PhD to leave her clinical position to travel to Peru to explore the healing practices of indigenous tribes. She spent decades learning the shamanic energy practices of the Q’ero Indians, working with sorcerers and shamans of the high Andes. Christina Donnell has also spent nearly three decades studying Eastern traditions, practicing martial arts, and Zen meditation.
A dreamer and a “Mistress of Language,” Christina’s love of writing began when she was very young. Yet it was after a near-death experience with yellow fever in the high Andes, that she heard a voice calling her, “It’s time to do what you were born to do. Be language’s mouthpiece.” After returning to Minneapolis, Christina Donnell PhD resumed her private counseling practice and began writing about her experiences.
Her most recent book, Encounters with Living Language: Surrendering to the Power of Words awakens readers to the intrinsic energy of language, where we can experience its multidimensional transmissions connecting us to the oneness that underlies all of life. Her book provides a riveting account of these discoveries and an invitation for readers to welcome an embodied experience with the living language and explore the dormant places within them still waiting to awaken.
Christina Donnell PhD maintains a consultation practice, teaches, and speaks worldwide; her lyrical prose and audio series are fused with transmissions of the unseen, captivating audiences of all ages.
“There are many of us on the planet who are here to be the womb that births the unseen into the manifest world. We go by many names—we are poets, mediums, psychics, mystics, teachers, and astrologers—who speak from a mother language of the unseen. We are here to bring forth a new threshold of tomorrow.” — Christina Donnell PhD
OMTimes had an exquisite opportunity to sit down with Christine to talk about Language and the Power of Words.
OMTimes: As a spiritual teacher, what lies at the core of your work with students?
Christina Donnell PhD: The common thread that runs through my teachings is awakening others to the unseen dimensions of life and witnessing how creation brings the unseen to be seen in the manifest world. It happens in all of nature, and it happens through us. This is a threshold for a new tomorrow. Ultimately, I am speaking to the miracle of our omnipresent body, awakening and anchoring awareness here, which is our sovereign birthright. It can renew our human bearings to prompt recollection and re-establishment of the rootedness of human awareness in the surrounding ecosystem. An encounter with living language has taught me this beautiful possibility.
OMTimes: In your newest book, Encounters with Living Language: Surrendering to the Power of Words, you share many experiences, what you call illuminations. What is an illumination?
Christina Donnell PhD: For me illumination has two essential characteristics. Both the quality and the structure of awareness change. The qualitative change involves a heightening of sensations and the meaning conveyed. The structural change involves a unification of all parts of awareness to form a total system.
In embracing this unified system, the field of consciousness expands far beyond its normal limits. Past and future are no longer experienced as absent and separate from the present, but as an integral part of it. The notion of a separate self disappears, coupled with a sense of participation in the outside world. When somatic-sensory experiences of the spoken or written word goes deeper into us, not stopping where it used to, new dimensions of reality are revealed.
OMTimes: What do you mean by living language?
Christina Donnell PhD: Language is living when conceptual thought gives way to a direct somatic-sensory experience of the spoken or written word awakening to realities beyond the everyday world. Experienced in this way, words become virtual cups of light, patterns of information, that open-up the dimensional capabilities of our awareness to experience other states, other things, and other places.
OMTimes: What is it like to have an illumination?
Christina Donnell PhD: Startling. They come out of nowhere. I find myself inside a reverberating field, in the presence of a generative act that both includes and encompasses me—a place where word becomes spirit. So expansive is this state that it feels as if the cosmos is inside me. As the silence deepens, I feel my customary analytical consciousness dissolving, along with my usual insistence on explanations.
During each illumination, I find myself merging with the primordial language, its vibrating sound permeating my inner being while the external world recedes. Just before I feel myself become language, time slows down and my consciousness changes. Simultaneously, a subtle emotion fills me from the roots of my hair to my heels. My awareness is absorbed into the internal sound then into vastness, like stars as they shine. Archetypal forces behind words invade the spaces and I’m imbued with a palpable sense of knowing. The surroundings, like sacred vessels, suddenly fill with lucidity.
Next, words often attach themselves to other elements in the room—objects, people, wind, breath—it’s as though they are feeling through me and I through them. Each element is no longer distinct but a continuous flow, including the interplay between me and the other elements, all forming a whole. I sense an exquisite musical harmony in the exchanges between my inner and outer worlds. I’m reminded of T. S. Eliot’s homage to music “heard so deeply that it isn’t heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.” The spirit, no longer a trespasser in the territory of matter, is now a creator in the field of matter. Illuminations, I realize, portray some latent force being born into the visible world through language.
OMTimes: How have your illuminations altered you?
Christina Donnell PhD: Through these states, my encounters with language awakened me to realities beyond the everyday world, where conceptual thought gives way to direct knowing—an immersion into what I have since come to call “living language.” The silence from which a word emerges and returns becomes a radio receiver through which the voice of the Universe is transmitted.
The consciousness springing from encounters with living language teaches me what it is like to embody the eternal—unseen forces that, coursing through the body, can unveil a deeper reality and arouse from its slumber a sense of the primordial life I share with all creation. Extraordinary experiences with language have led me to a destiny of incarnating the eternal in temporal time.
OMTimes: In your first book, Transcendent Dreaming: Stepping into Our Human Potential you introduced a new form of dreaming where dreamers can identify with the Intelligence that animates the universe. How is transcendent dreaming different from the more common dream state, or lucid dreaming?
Christina Donnell PhD: In ordinary dreaming, the dreamer is primarily a passive participant witnessing the form of a dream. Another level of dreaming is lucid dreaming. This occurs when a person is able to awaken within a dream, maintain awareness of dreaming, and often control the course of the dream. Lucid dreams are also much more vivid than ordinary dreams. As a dreamer becomes proficient in lucid dreaming, other capacities open-up, such as the ability to experience consciousness in more than one place at a time, to interpenetrate matter, to coexist in the same place with things.
Transcendent dreaming has all the qualities of ordinary and lucid dreaming yet offers more. In transcendent dreaming the dreamer has waking consciousness while merging beyond the form of the dream into its source. The source of the dream is the same intelligence that guides creation. When we awaken within this source, we become one with it and our infinite nature emerges. In this way, transcendent dreaming serves as a bridge between the manifest and nonmanifest reality.
OMTimes: How is transcendent dreaming different from an encounter with living language?
Christina Donnell PhD: Encounters with living language does not require a sleep state. Yet, it results in the same expanded awareness, and is occasioned by language.
OMTimes: How do you describe a transcendent human?
Christina Donnell PhD: A transcendent human is one who has experienced and can navigate a reality that exists that surpasses the material realm.
OMTimes: In both books, you speak of “expansions in consciousness,”—some of which were intense. What have you learned from these events?
Christina Donnell PhD: I have learned that we as human beings can absorb and assimilate all different kinds of energy and be in harmony with them. The body is made for it. When we assimilate more and more energies, the world of separation eventually disappears. Notions of “good” and “bad” right and wrong, even the need for protection, fall away and transcendent capabilities emerge. But the old structures–whether physical, biochemical, or perceptual – are not always quiet about fading out. I am reminded of a quote by the late yoga teacher and mystic, Sri Aurobindo, who once remarked, that to discover the “new country within us” we must first learn how “to leave the old behind.” Accommodating expansions in consciousness takes fortitude. And, it is a bodily experience.
OMTimes: Can one learn to summon illuminations, or are they spontaneous, delivered by an inner or higher source?
Christina Donnell PhD: For now, I suspect a higher source delivers illuminations. I cannot summon an illumination. They appear spontaneously and sometimes in inconvenient moments. I know that when the mind is quiet and stillness appears, the quantum realm becomes available to the awareness.
OMTimes: With the proliferation of the use of psychedelics and mind-altering substances now being used to treat mental health issues, are your illuminations stimulated by any substance?
Christina Donnell PhD: I have never used substances. Likely the capacity grew from a practice of meditation and stillness of mind, as well as my lifelong experiences from transcendent dreaming. In meditation, transcendent dreaming, and privileged moments with language, conceptual thought recedes, trap doors open to a sensory experience, and the knowledge obtained is that of one no intellectual undertaking can yield. A new dimension of attention opens that goes beyond usual forms of consciousness.
OMTimes: What is Holy Word Power? As in John 1:1, we are told that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. As you wrote in your book, you have realized the “unfathomable power of words” and that a word could conceivably influence “the wholeness of creation.” This certainly opens an avenue of consideration about living language.
Christina Donnell PhD: Yes. The Word! In the beginning was the silence. The silence was everywhere Nothing existed. And then there was the Word. As the cosmos was born, the silence was broken in the fiery violence of becoming. As the planet settled in the cold endless nights of our universe, silence was restored. And it was a silence of great depth and breadth. And we can imagine the sound of the first Word/wind as it billowed on earth against the curvature of new mountains and warmed over the restless oceans. The rippling of waters and the breath of the wind were the only sounds until the arrival of vegetation and animals. Ever so slowly, the earth developed its own music. Streams gave voice to the silence of valleys. Between the mountains and the oceans, rivers ferried the songs of landscapes. Yes. The Word.
Ultimately, the power of any word depends on the mindset of the person using it and the depth of embodied awareness from which it arises. The Hindu sage Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation, spoke on Vedic grammar by saying, “Grammar teaches not only the relationship and mutual coordination of different words. Grammar uncovers the reality contained in each word.
“What is a word? This is a word which at its core has eternal, infinite, unbound being. … What is to be unfolded to knowledge and experience through the word is that which lies beyond the obvious. That which lies beyond the obvious must be experienced to be known. Experience ends in opening the awareness to the unboundedness. Unless that unboundedness is experienced, language has lost its true value. Something will be gained…, but not the totality which is contained in every word. At the deeper levels there will be more connectedness, more connectedness, until it reaches the ultimate connectedness. Inert, now it is lively.” Maharishi’s view of the transcendent use of words struck a chord in me. That a word could influence the “wholeness of creation” awakened me to the unfathomable power of words — a phenomenon I call “holy word power.”
I regularly experienced high-ranking Q’ero medicine people in the ceremony who can call in dry lightning strikes on a mountaintop. Ultimately, the power of any word depends on the mindset of the person using it and the depth of interconnected embodied awareness from which it arises. The power of words has the capacity to activate somatic-sensory templates that unlock dimensions of interconnectedness that have barely been realized.
OMTimes: You have studied with the Q’ero medicine people of the high Andes of Peru for three decades. What drew you to this culture?
Christina Donnell PhD: What attracted me to the ways of the Q’ero medicine people was not only their mastery of the energy real but also the purity of their hearts. They are truly a people who live as if every moment is sacred. They do not live in linear time. They live in a construct of time that is poly-synchronous. All is happening now. They also do not live with a “me” cosmology (the way we locate meaning), but rather a “we”. They easily call in the rain and lightning. They have a beloved relationship to the forces of nature and creation. They have achieved a mastery of the energy realm through a relationship to power that is sourced from dominion with all of life verses dominance over it. I believe they hold open a window to ways we can all live. It would be hard not to continue my work with them.
OMTimes: You had a near-death experience while in Peru, far from a hospital. After having your own near-death experience, what would you like to share with others that might help understand this phenomenon?
Christina Donnell PhD: If it were not for the recovery, I think everyone should have a near death experience. I contracted yellow fever in the high Andes while trying to secure parental rights for my godson in Peru. I went into a second stage of yellow fever most do not, experiencing a fever of 104 and 105, which results in death for many. When I reached this place in the illness, I experienced the threshold in the subtle realm where one “crosses” over, where the breath and awareness leave the body. I remember I simply was ready to relinquish life. For me, the dance with this threshold is alluring and intoxicating. I mentioned in Transcendent Dreaming that I would on occasion be called to the medical center to help families determine when to take someone off life support. I would travel in the subtle realms with a patient and receive different kinds of information. In being able to do so, my own awareness became bathed in this intoxicating, luring subtle realm. My own near-death experience was the same, yet I did not have any control. Had I, I likely would not be here right now. Instead, a luminous light bathed my entire body, and I heard the command, “I am the original light that illuminates the living word. It is time to do what you were born to do. Be language’s mouthpiece.” The experience was mystifying, and sublime. I then came crashing back into a very ill body which took several months to recover from the effects of the illness.
OMTimes: How can the human body meet the mystery of light inside language, opening the door to a quantum reality? Most people are not consciously aware of an incredible quantum tool in our possession – the body.
Christina Donnell PhD: There are 100 trillion atoms in one cell of the body. One atom—a neutron, proton, and electron cloud which can orbit at any frequency and be in multiple places at once. 100 trillion atoms in one cell. 99.5 percent space and light. Where does the solidity we perceive come from when underneath it is made of space, movement, and light? What happens when we anchor our awareness here? To the quantum realm and space? In the body? I suspect one direction of our human evolution is coming home to this quantum space of which quantum physics has been talking about for 100 years. Now, we simply need to experience it. Because language is a virtual cup of light (Quantum) an interior trap door can be opened in our body to awaken and anchor another and far more expanded awareness.
OMTimes: Who is your new book for?
Christina Donnell PhD: Encounters with Living Language is for anyone who has ever been moved after hearing or reading a poignant line. It is for anyone who has experienced the luminous power of language and, as a result, felt compelled to explore its quantum nature ushering in new dimensions of awareness. It is for a new generation of speakers who are articulating for the first time quantum awareness which is their mother language. I’m thinking of many nonspeaking autistic young adults who, once they learn how to speak through letter boarding, are sharing a quantum reality through language for the first time. Many speak different languages they have never been introduced to, are telepathic and clairvoyant, and their awareness easily resides in multiple places. Perhaps this is an evolution in human consciousness starting as a mutation like many other advances begin. Ultimately, its universality is the enduring beauty of human awakening occurring through a deeper interaction with language.
I offer my chronicles of surrendering to the power of words as inspiration for others to explore the immeasurable potential of language, which exists in each of us.
Connect with Christina Donnell PhD at https://www.christinadonnell.com
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