Day 332: Charmayne Kilcup
“But earth – there’s so much beauty here. I mean, the beauty of love, the love we get to share with each other, the wisdom we get to see in each other, just moments of holding someone’s else’s hand, that’s a beautiful, sacred moment. We don’t get to experience those kinds of moments when we’re not in body.”
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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Charmayne, for agreeing to be part of this Project, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?
Charmayne Kilcup: Yes, thank you, Toni. My name is Charmayne Kilcup, and I call myself a soul coach. I’ve been doing intuitive healing and guidance and consulting work for about five years now. I have a Master’s in counseling and kind of incorporate a lot of counseling into my healing work. Also, I’m doing a Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology.
Toni: Well thank you for being here. Charmayne, when you think of that word inspiration, who do you think you inspire, and how might that happen?
Charmayne: Well you know, I thought about that, and I thought about how it’s so hard to know how we inspire other people. I see so many people do so many things each and every single day, and I watch them, and they hardly even know I’m there, but they’re inspiring me. And so I think that, you know, it’s almost an impossible question for me to answer.
I think about a teacher I had in sixth grade — her name was Miss Trujillo — and she was just a wonderful, beautiful soul. I was a very painfully shy and sensitive sixth grader, and I got made fun of quite a bit for it. She was my English teacher, and I loved to write. When I wrote, I wrote very sensitive, kind of dark pieces about the problems of the world, and she actually encouraged me to go deeper into my sensitivity instead of to stay away from it like so many others had been doing at the time.
And I think of her, and that was years and years ago, but I still think about how much she inspired me and helped put me on my path, and she’ll never know. I have no idea where she is now, but I know she’s inspired me and other people, you know, in my same kind of situation. So I think of people like her and think about, wow, we rarely get to know how we inspire other people. I hope that I do.
Toni: Well, let’s think about that. When you do the work that you do – you said you’ve done client work for the last five years, right?
Charmayne: Yes.
Toni: So what happens? If I’m in engagement with Charmayne, what happens? Do you work with me to inspire a different way of thinking for me?
Charmayne: Yes, I would say that with my clients is mostly where I try to consciously inspire. And in essence, all it is is getting a person to see the truth of who they really are. In this society, we get so many messages about how awful we are, how bad we are, how worthless we are, how unlovable we are, and all of that is just a big lie. But there’s so much of it and it’s so dense that we really come to believe it.
When I work with clients, all I do is I can kind of see the light behind all of those negative messages – the beam behind it, the divinity behind it, the unique essence of a person, what they’ve come here to do, who they’ve come here to be and embody and express, and all I did was get them to touch back into that part of themselves. You know, it gets covered up very, very early in our culture. And so when I work with a client, I just look for where is the preciousness of this being? Who is this person standing before me? It’s so easy to see them as divine and divinity shining through all those negative messages.
So that’s the place where I say I consciously try to inspire people, but what’s funny about it is that they’re actually inspiring themselves. I’m just helping them get there. I’m helping them mirror back to them the fantasticness, if that’s a word, of who they really are. They’re doing all the work. They’re the ones seeing it and acknowledging it, and letting it in and choosing to radiate from that place.
Toni: How does that type of work then help someone to explore their own potential?
Charmayne: Let’s see. Well, what I’ve noticed is that kind of work, kind of mirroring back to the person their essence, it helps empower them from a really deep, deep kind of gut place. And when they feel that sense of empowerment, it gives them more courage to do the things that they really wanted to do in life.
Toni: Well, there’s some key words that you’ve used. One word that I have not heard in a while and that was precious, and you used it as preciousness — and that is a very cool word, and I haven’t heard it in a long time, so what a great word to use — and then courage, that you’re helping them to find their courage.
Charmayne: Yes, yeah. I would say that courage more than anything is what really inspires me when I see it in other people. Just the courage to be yourself. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do with all of the acculturations we get from, you know, our first day of being here.
Toni: Well, that would be a great lead-in for the next question, which is, what inspires you? And you mentioned courage and seeing the courage in others. What else inspires you, Charmayne?
Charmayne: Okay, well art and nature definitely; they seem to be the universal inspirers. Beautiful art definitely inspires me. I was in the New York Museum of Modern Art a few months ago, and standing in front of Monet’s Water Lilies, I mean, something happens to me. Something … I’m just in a different place and a different time. I’m just flooded with this sense of joy, this sense of peace, everything just stops.
So beautiful art, beautiful lines, the way light falls at dusk – it’s just so beautiful to me, and that will definitely inspire me. And it is just those small things. It’s watching people every day and seeing just how great they actually are. I ran into a two-year-old today and I was approaching where she was standing; she doesn’t know me at all. She looks at me, and just this huge smile. It was so beautific. It was so precious, again, and it just filled me again the way that Monet’s Water Lilies did at the time. It just fills me with this sense of “Oh my God – this is God. This is something deeper, right here, in this moment. This is the truth. This is who we really, really are.”
Toni: Charmayne, have you always been that way? Have you always come to the table this way, in this way of thinking?
Charmayne: Oh, that’s a good question. I would say so. Again, I was profoundly sensitive as a child, and really it was hard for me to see what we were doing to each other and what we’re doing to the environment and animals. I was a bit of an activist at eight years old and did not have many friends, let me tell you. But since then, something has, I guess, shifted in me, and it started probably in middle school or high school, where I started to see the beauty of people.
You know, photography really started to show me the beauty, even in the really awfulness that there is sometimes. You know, taking a picture of a beautiful, broken down wooden chair and seeing the beauty in that and seeing the divinity just in that. I think that helped me change how I see the world. Now it’s like every day I see people doing incredible things, even just strangers smiling at each other or, you know, the barista smiling at me and saying, “Good day.” These are the things that they really have a deep, meaningful impact on me when I let it in.
Toni: Do you find yourself now having made that transformation yourself and have that shift happen to you, is that part of the work that you’re doing with others? If someone comes to you and they are of the old mindset that you had, you know, before you realized the beauty and all of that – do you then try to help them to make that shift themselves?
Charmayne: Oh, definitely. I like to remind them that earth is actually a really wonderful place. I love earth. I didn’t want to be on earth for quite some time; it was just so difficult here. But earth – there’s so much beauty here. I mean, the beauty of love, the love we get to share with each other, the wisdom we get to see in each other, just moments of holding someone’s else’s hand, that’s a beautiful, sacred moment. We don’t get to experience those kinds of moments when we’re not in body.
So I try to remind them, I mean … the pleasure of a good piece of chocolate or a good meal, where else can you get that? There is a lot of beauty here. And even when I see the sadness around me, I think of that – well I know, I don’t think of it – I know that in all the horrors that I see, underneath it there’s a desire for wholeness, a desire for balance, a desire for loving again. There’s just a desire to come back into the fullness of all that is.
Toni: How do you continue to explore your own potential, Charmayne, to do the work that you’re doing?
Charmayne: Well, quite frankly I’m very inspired by my clients. When they see that light go on about who they really are, something happens, and I’m just filled with joy, and they inspire me to live courageously. I think courage is a really big word for me, because it just takes so much courage to live from the true self instead of the false self in this culture.
And so by seeing them kind of wake up to who they are, it reminds me every day – Oh, who do I want to be? How do I want to act? I want to act from my authentic self, my true self, and that takes courage, and so I just try and maintain that courage as much as possible.
Toni: It would be an interesting conversation to have at another time – maybe another interview, who knows – but to understand the differences when someone thinks they’re being their authentic self, but yet you can see that they’re not. Can you really see that?
Charmayne: Yes. Yes, it’s a marked difference. Yeah, true self and false self can be very different appearing, even though false self likes to say otherwise.
Toni: That’s really interesting. I can tell you, listening to you, that you’re very, very passionate about what you do and the way that you think. You’ve given … I’ve written a word down for you – there’s certain words that come up for me when I’m doing these interviews – and the word that I wrote down for you was graceful.
Charmayne: I like that.
Toni: And you’ve given a very, very graceful interview. We thank you very, very much, Charmayne, for taking your time out today and being part of the Get Inspired! Project. It’s been great.
Charmayne: Thank you so much, Toni, and thanks for doing this. It’s inspiring to me.
Toni: Thank you. You take care, and good luck to you.
Charmayne: Thank you.
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For more information about Charmayne Kilcup: www.charmaynekilcup.com
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