Leslie Temple-Thurston: Awakened Spiritual Warrior, Mystic, Teacher of Teachers

[If] enough people awaken to their true, inner, divine nature, the whole of human consciousness can undergo the kind of evolution of consciousness that seems to be what is required of us if we are to survive as a species on this planet. ~ Leslie Temple-Thurston

In July 1994, one hundred women gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a conference titled "The Divine Mother Conference." Three women spiritual teachers led the conference, which took place over three days: Beth Hin, Sondray Ray, and Leslie Temple-Thurston. Leslie Temple-Thurston, a South African woman, living in the United States at the time, is an awakened mystic who was now sitting in public gatherings of meditation and teaching her spiritual psychological methods of transcending the separate ego, teachings she called "The Marriage of Spirit." This essay will provide an overview of the teachings and rise to awakened spiritual warriorship of Leslie Temple-Thurston, presenting her life and work as a representation of awakened spiritual warriorship from a Western woman's example. Calling herself a 'reluctant mystic,' she anecdotally often said in the years that I have known and spent time with her, that her dharma, her mission in life, had been to be a teacher of teachers. I write this as one woman who was at that conference 27 years ago and whose life has been immeasurably enriched by immersion in her teachings.

Kathy Stanley, Mohamed Nazmy, Leslie Temple-Thurston

Shortly after first sitting with Leslie, I discovered that her meditation and stillness practices were sublime, uplifting, and healing. However, the even more profound gift of her teachings was contained within the Marriage of Spirit processing methods she developed for clearing stuck places in egoic consciousness, a spiritual psychology rooted in Eastern mystic teachings of nonduality, coupled with a Western psychological approach to move beyond archetypal patterns such as victim, tyrant, rebel, and savior.

Leslie Temple-Thurston grew up in South Africa and received a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In her book The Marriage of Spirit: Enlightened Living in Today's World, co-authored with Brad Laughlin (2000), she describes the challenges of living in apartheid South Africa in the early 1970s and charts her path to mysticism which started in childhood and in which she found an outlet in painting. She describes a moment in 1971 where she had a significant mystical experience in her art studio that involved a transmission of higher awareness around polarization in our world and how that hampered humanity's progress towards more equanimity and peaceful unity consciousness (p. 7).

After moving to the United States in the 1980s, Leslie Temple-Thurston (2000) entered a period of several years of intensive spiritual practice which culminated in her spiritual awakening and the start of her teaching the Marriage of Spirit principles which she developed and describe:

The teachings are a way to re-create balance and harmony in the midst of ordinary, everyday consciousness. They are a deceptively simple way of addressing and clearing conditioned egoic patterns. The techniques have the potential to create an immediate easing of the problems arising in our lives from the knotted, limited and unconscious places in our patterning . . . The primary principle is this- by unifying all opposites held in our awareness, we will return to our original state of unity. Consciousness in this world is polarized into pairs of opposites. We see opposites all around us, and we hold states of mind which are polarized opposites. (Temple-Thurston & Laughlin p.16)

In the early 1990s’, Leslie Temple-Thurston and Brad Laughlin started the organization CoreLight (https://www.corelight.org), a nonprofit school of transformation which has actively operated since then offering courses, spiritual retreats, books, Meditations for Peace pilgrimages to global sacred sites, sacred activism and a sacred art gallery.

A testimony to the effectiveness of the methods taught by Leslie comes from psychotherapists Shannon Pernetti and Diane Steinbrecher (2019), in their book The Treasure Within: An Archetypal Unfolding to Your Infinite Potential. They describe the way that Leslie Temple-Thurston’s Marriage of Spirit work assisted them in their trauma work:

In the early 1990s, we studied with Leslie Temple-Thurston in a three-year teacher training course. We learned how to work with patterned knots in the unconscious and nervous system as well as with the patterns of polarization in society and in the individual. She helped us elucidate the underlying dynamic of our culture’s victim-tyrant polarity so prevalent in our time, and how to release and transcend these layers of unconscious patterning in ourselves and in others. (p. 20)

Leslie Temple-Thurston’s teachings emphasize clearing the personal shadow, held emotionally and mentally, as a critical path towards unity consciousness by examining the ways that archetypal patterns and polarized states operate within our psyches personally and collectively.

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. (2017), a former psychotherapist and professor of psychology and history, writes and teaches extensively on topics of developing emotional resilience in the face of the multiple global crises we face. She uses the Marriage of Spirit teachings developed by Leslie Temple-Thurston and describes them in her book Dark Gold: The Human Shadow and the Global Crisis:

In her 2000 book, Marriage of Spirit: Enlightened Living in Today’s World, Leslie Temple-Thurston offers a comprehensive toolkit for working consciously with the shadow. While the term “marriage of spirit” may sound esoteric, it simply means “making the unconscious conscious, bringing the shadow into light, and marrying spirit with matter. It’s about becoming conscious of the luminous core of enlightenment that is within each of us.” Moreover, “enlightenment” is not a condition or evolutionary stage, but rather an aspect of aliveness within each human being that we brought to this planet and which we can never lose . . . Thurston’s Marriage of Spirit offers an invaluable toolkit for transforming the victim, tyrant, rebel, savior dynamic. Additionally, these same tools can be applied on a larger scale to the collective shadow, and utilizing them, we can perceive incisively the power dynamics in local, regional, and international relations. While the victim, tyrant, rebel, savior dynamic does not encompass every aspect of the shadow and its activity, it is a splendid beginning for launching the journey of shadow healing. (p.16)

As Carolyn Baker notes, the Marriage of Spirit tools can be used in processing societal shadow issues and they are highly effective when used by groups of people with common interests to work on stuck archetypal patterns playing out in society.

Mystic and ordained Buddhist monk Lucia René (2009), in her book Unplugging the Patriarchy: A Mystical Journey into the Heart of a New Age, describes finding the benefit of Leslie Temple-Thurston’s processing methods at a time when she was suffering and places her in context with two other contemporary spiritual teachers:

When my teacher passed away in 1998, I was still wrestling with my arrogance and a fair amount of emotional baggage, as well, and I set out in search of help. I found three enlightened women. Leslie Temple-Thurston had developed processing techniques for reconciling polarities through a system called The Marriage of Spirit. Gangaji and Pamela Wilson advocated self-inquiry as taught by Ramana Maharshi, an Indian sage who taught Advaita, or not two. My teacher’s school of hard knocks had focused on warrior skills, an arena where emotions were always supposed to be kept under control. These female teachers, who investigated polarities held in the emotional body, made me weep with relief. They welcomed and accepted me just the way I was, emotional baggage and all. (p. 91)

After over three decades of teaching in public events, spiritual retreats, mentoring many students, writing two books, and leading Meditations for Peace sacred site pilgrimage tours to South Africa, Egypt and Greece, Leslie Temple-Thurston (2009) is now retired from public life and has returned to her beloved Africa. Describing her relationship with her birthplace in an essay titled “Beyond the Beyond” in an anthology about modern day alchemy and pilgrimages to Egypt, she has written:

I am an African, born and raised way down south on the African continent- white-skinned, but nonetheless proud to be an African. I have never been able to escape the fact that Africa, the place of the earth mother, is deeply embedded in my spirit and soul” (p. 48).

The location where she was guided to move to a few years ago lies at the foot of a significant earth meridian line called the Nilotic Meridian that stretches the length of the African continent from the Nile River and Pyramids in Egypt southwards into South Africa. In his book Living With Enlightenment: A Journey of Love, Brad Laughlin (2019) describes further information about the area that he and Leslie received from Credo Baba Mutwa:

We [learned] more about Modimole from the Zulu High Sanusi, Credo Mutwa, who many consider to be the grandfather of Africa and who carries within him hundreds of years of the oral tribal history. In a private gathering, Mutwa informed us that according to Zulu history Modimole’s sacred origins predates their tribal memory; it is the primordial place where the physical world was birthed. This was especially relevant to us, given Leslie’s experience in the canyon with the Elohim, referred to in Genesis and throughout the Old Testament as creator gods. Interestingly some of the oldest rocks on the planet were found at the Blyde River Canyon- an apparent geological corroboration of the Zulu legend. Mutwa indicated that the sacred mountain sits above Africa’s legendary underground river through which Earth’s spinal fluid flows. Known in Zulu as Lulungwa Mangakatsi, this river is the Earth’s primary meridian, like a shushumna or spine, which is on the longitude 31 Degrees E. (p. 197)

Leslie’s return to South Africa allows her to return to painting and communing in nature in a pristine setting daily. Her Marriage of Spirit teachings continue to inspire and deepen in the lives of all the students she has taught. CoreLight, the nonprofit organization she founded with Brad Laughlin is thriving as an active teaching school for transformation that serves to support spiritual seekers worldwide and make accessible her teachings and courses online. The Seeds of Light Foundation, the humanitarian arm of CoreLight (https://www.seedsoflight.org) that she founded in 2000, continues to work actively in supporting marginalized communities and AIDS orphans in South Africa.

Leslie Temple-Thurston's life and scope of her work have demonstrated the qualities and characteristics of selfless service integral to the calling of awakened spiritual warriorship. She has opened the doors to awakening for thousands of spiritual seekers and served the cause of social justice in her humanitarian work. Her teachings show us a path out of duality and towards unity consciousness. Leslie Temple-Thurston was always ahead of her time. The sophisticated yet straightforward teachings of how to process polarized states of consciousness and liberate the psyche personally and collectively from archetypal patterns of victim, tyrant, rebel, and savior have never been more relevant and needed than they are now. In this fraught and challenging world we find ourselves in, where so many overlapping and intersected issues like climate change, threats to democracy, and the pandemic overshadow our lives, the Marriage of Spirit teachings and work of Leslie Temple-Thurston offer a path to psychological liberation, equanimity and unity consciousness for spiritual warriors.

Visit the CoreLight website.

References:

Baker, C. (2017). Dark Gold: The human shadow and the global crisis. iUniverse.

Laughlin, B. (2019). Living with enlightenment: A journey of love. CoreLight Pub.

Pernetti, S., & Steinbrecher, D. (2019). The treasure within: An archetypal unfolding to your infinite potential. Archetypal Associates.

René, L. (2009). Unplugging the patriarchy: A mystical journey into the heart of a new age. Crown Chakra Pub.

Temple-Thurston, L., & Laughlin, B. (2000). The Marriage of Spirit: Enlightened living in Today's World. CoreLight Pub.

Temple-Thurston, L. (2009). Beyond the Beyond. In Faddoul, G., Nazmy, M. (Eds.). The modern day alchemist from the land of the pharaohs: Secrets of manifestation revealed to awaken the Alchemist within (pp. 46–67). QC Publishing.

Women's Spirituality, Spirituality, Sacred TravelKathy StanleyApril 22, 2022Leslie Temple-Thurston, CoreLight, spirituality