Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done nearly 500 of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. My guest today is Courtney Amundson. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Amundson?
Courtney: Amundson, Amundson, either one works.
Rick: Courtney lives up in Minnesota and I don’t know if I would call this a claim to fame but she started at a very young age to have profound spiritual experiences and breakthroughs and don’t worry Courtney, at a certain point it’ll be considered rude to ask you your age, but or people will say you’re 40, big deal, so what,
Courtney: yeah
Rick: but at the moment she’s later this month, and when she was nine years old she started the practice of Qigong. You know Courtney, I was thinking about how you kind of got off to a great start, born in a family of very spiritual parents, right?
Courtney: Well, my mom introduced me to most of what I got into myself, she was into Qigong and that was about 2005 I want to say when she started practicing that and I was very interested in it, that was my first introduction to meditation and after that I mean it just changed my life, that’s when everything started to accelerate for me.
Rick: Nice.
Courtney: And yeah, so it’s pretty cool and my dad’s very supportive as well. ; I want to ask you about Qigong in a minute, but hearing your story reminded me of a few verses in the Bhagavad Gita which I thought you’d like. There’s a section where Arjuna asked Lord Krishna, well you know what happens if a person dies before they get enlightened basically, and Krishna says, “Having attained the worlds of the righteous and dwelt there for countless years, he or she is born in the house of the pure and illustrious, or he is born in an actual family of yogis endowed with wisdom, though such a birth as this on earth is more difficult to attain. There he regains that level of union reached by the intellect in his former body and by virtue of this he strives yet more for perfection. By that former practice itself he is irresistibly born on. So sometimes when I meet people who have these profound breakthroughs at a very young age, I kind of think, you know, they’re just picking up where they left off.
Courtney: That’s what it felt to me. It’s funny because my parents or my older friends will say to me, “Just calm down, you have so many years ahead of you to get to where you want to be,” and to me it feels like a long time that I’ve been working towards these things, and when I channeled my first book “Teachings from God,” it felt exactly like that, just a continuation, and it came out so fast that it was not something to question, it was just something to look at and see for what it was, and yeah, I’ve grown a lot from it.
Rick: Yeah, so I have a bunch of friends who are into Qigong, really into it, and I don’t know too much about it, but since you’ve mentioned it we might as well explain a little bit what it is. I mean, all I know is they hit themselves with sticks and break things with their heads and stuff like that, but I’m sure there’s more to it.
Courtney: Well, I practice Spring Forest Qigong, so the founder, Master Chunyi Lin, is here in Minnesota and he basically has taken many different thousands of forms of Qigong, because there is many thousands of Qigong, and he’s really simplified it to make it, you know, he says that the simpler the more powerful, and I really agree with that. I think that, you know, in working with the Qi of your own energy and the Qi, the universal Qi together, is, you know, the most powerful way to heal our bodies and grow ourselves spiritually, deepen, and there’s a lot of forms of Qigong out there that are very complicated and I think, you know, take hundreds of years, you know, for people to master. And so Master Lin, he talks about that there’s only good, better, and best, and so we use our hands to move the energy in our bodies. There’s very simple techniques that anyone can do, and the principle around it is visualization and telling your body what you want. So your body responds to messages in energy form back to you. So just going back to when I was a young girl and I started learning these meditations and these very simple movements, I would imagine butterflies in my tummy when I didn’t feel well, and you know, I knew that that was something that I could connect with and it worked. I could heal people. There’s another simple exercise called sword fingers where you imagine light shooting out of your fingertips, and I would, you know, help with my friends who had a, you know, they fell down or hurt their knee or something, and get out there with my sword fingers and start, you know, chopping up the blockage, and in your mind you’re saying, “Blockage is removed, completely healed, completely healed. The energy is back to normal.” And do that for two or three minutes and you will feel a difference. And so it was cool to me because something so simple can actually be the definition of magic on Earth. I mean, it’s just, so applicable to everyday life. You can use it for healing, you can use it for spiritual growth, you can use it to heal others. So I’ve currently been through level 4 out of level 5 of Master Lim’s Qigong training, and it’s just been, yeah, it’s been life-changing and definitely part of what I want to continue.
Rick: That’s great. When you were like 9, 10, 11, 12, how much time did you spend every day practicing Qigong?
Courtney: Oh gosh, well, I definitely spent like 30 to 45 minutes in the morning, practicing the active movements, which is really good for focusing on different organs of the body. So yeah, and also it doesn’t focus too much on the mind, it focuses on feeling the energy and moving deeper into your emotions. So you know, when we focus on the liver, you know, we’ll focus on happiness or focus on a certain color, and it’s really great to use for kids too because they are really already super good at visualization and feeling. So yeah, I would practice probably about 45 minutes in the morning a day, and if I got worried, you know, I’d practice the butterfly meditation that night, and you know, that was another 30-minute meditation that just put me in a state of calm. And I was always a highly sensitive kid, so I really needed these tips and tricks to get through a day. And so yeah, I consider it to be magical then and magical now. I apply it differently now because I’ve deepened into the practice. But yeah, I definitely recommend it to everyone and a lot of my personal clients as well, because you know, the spiritual aspect is one part and the body is also another really important part to going deeper into our consciousness.
Rick: And I heard you say in various interviews that at that age, you know, early teens, you were meditating a lot, sometimes hours at a time.
Courtney: Yeah, yeah. When I got into channeling, so the experience, it was not a huge revelation as such, because I had been meditating, I had listened to Abraham Hicks, I loved the Abraham Hicks for teens CD, I loved that a lot because, you know, it felt relatable that other younger people were asking the same kind of questions that I was asking in my mind, and it just happened one day that I had been listening to that and I sat down to meditate as I normally did, but this time I felt like I levitated off the couch and I felt this presence come through me.
Rick: You don’t think you really did levitate, do you?
Courtney: No, I didn’t. It was in my mind, it was in my body feeling that I had lightened up and then I felt this golden light come through the top of my head, and with that light it was just this unconditional love, and it’s something that even to this day I can’t put in words because it is such an experience. And I don’t think I’ve gotten back to that really pure feeling as I did that, that day when it first started because, you know, I had been asking for so long for this, you know, type of connection and I never wanted to be Esther Hicks, but I felt it and I knew it and I went down to the computer and my hands just started to move and there was that energy, just this sort of really strong energy coming through my hands and typing out the words and it was just, it was everything that I ever wanted to hear. It was affirmations, it was, you know, just this pure feeling like everything up until this point has been absolutely guided and not just for me but for every person on Earth, and I just knew that this was what I was supposed to do and that I could help other people do it, and that’s what drove me to be meditating so many hours after that initial contact was because, you know, I knew for myself that if you can understand your own consciousness, if you can understand your own emotions and your own soul purpose, then that’s cracking the code of why this whole body is even in existence. And so yeah, I would meditate for three or four hours and sometimes this oneness, a source of oneness would take me to other places and experience different times.
Rick: Like what? Elaborate a little bit.
Courtney: So one of my early experiences, I had a lot of like past life sort of experiences at first. One of the most juicy experiences, that’s the best way for me to say it, was I traveled to this place and I was in the sky but I could feel myself as this brilliant ball of light, and I was viewing below me that there was sand and there was an ocean and there was, you know, some birds flying by, but what caught me is that I was tasting the color of the sky, I was feeling the sound of the eagle. It was the most bizarre yet just calming thing that I had ever imagined and it was part of me as well, and I wasn’t something, I was just this ball of light, but I was feeling and sensing and knowing everything about this location. And it showed me that what we talk about when we say love and light and when we say everything is oneness, this was no longer just a word to me, this was a true understanding. And so I said to myself after that experience that I just want to go deeper, I want to understand myself so that I can share this with other people, and I knew that if I can kind of go through the layers of my own consciousness and view them and maybe even like try to heal some of the ones that were painful or, you know, you have some karmas about, it was a lot of work. You know, it’s not all beautiful and fun, some of them were difficult for me, but ultimately, you know, all of this was showing me that, you know, it was time for me at that point in my life to really just surrender and listen and continue to ask the deeper questions, because when you ask is when you receive. You know, everybody says that about the Law of Attraction, but it is the universal code and we can’t go deeper unless we ask the more challenging questions of ourselves. So I believe that’s why I got there and it always felt like a collaborative effort to get there as well. I remember this presence, you know, saying to me that, you know, they reveled so much in tasting the human experience, just as much as I reveled in tasting the more non-physical experience. So it was a time of transformation for me.
Rick: Were they tasting the human experience through you?
Courtney: Yes. Is that what you’re saying?
Courtney: Yes.
Rick: Okay, so by channeling them you were able to serve as a sort of a sense organ for those disembodied beings or something.
Courtney: Yeah, and you know to me it was sensed as a collective. In the beginning that wasn’t the case, there was different personalities that were very light, very airy-fairy. It made me giggle, like there would be times when I would, the lessons would just be about joy and experiencing our bodies, experiencing the joy of like going outside and sensing all the, you know, the bright things around you. And then there would be other sort of feeling energies that would come through that would be more down to business. And then that all evolved when I realized that I wanted to be service in a bigger way. So that turned when I said to myself, “I will write the book, I will do that.” And that transformed into really when it became a more grander presence, which I then called the oneness. And it started to feel like that too. It felt broad, there was no distinct energies anymore, it was just this big sense of unconditional love and awareness and source, and that nothing is separated from that.
Rick: Yeah, you know, I was running this abstract philosophical question by you before we started, and maybe this would be a good time to take another crack at it.
Courtney: Sure.
Rick: Just that, you know, as a human being we are a conglomerate of trillions of cells, and each of those cells has its own life. And you know, you could almost say the cell doesn’t even realize that it’s part of this collective of trillions, and yet it is. And on our level we don’t contemplate their existence very much, but we’re alive by virtue of it. So I’m wondering if in a similar way, you know, there are larger conglomerates of which we are a part, and when you mentioned the word collective, it made me think of that, that you know, this whoever it is or whatever it is that has been communicating with you, through you, and we’re going to get much more into the details of that. Perhaps that is actually, you are actually part of that, just as our liver cells are part of what we are.
Courtney: Absolutely
Rick: You think there’s anything to that?
Courtney: Absolutely, yeah. That’s what my book talks about, is that we are multi-layered beings, so the whole reason that we can connect with that source energy is because that’s the layer that is us, and it is the most dominant part of us, the non-physical. The physical component of us is small, but it is our dominant projection of awareness, is the best way I can say that, and the reason of that is because we chose it, and we chose to look through this lens, you know, almost solely like look through this lens and learn about emotions, learn about contrast, learn about environment, because it’s fun. Honestly, the way that I had experienced moving from the non-physical to the physical and back and forth and back and forth was that there’s just joy in recognizing something again, you know. If we were just in the wholeness all of the time, all knowingness all of the time, you know, there’s not as much play in that, and so it’s very interesting because from that non-physical point of view, when we choose it, it’s not a question of, you know, what are the pros and cons, we don’t think like that, you know, we just are, and we see the outlook and we see that all the paths are golden. That was one of the visions that I really physically had was, you know, I was above and I was viewing my birth before I came into this body, and I saw, you know, I saw these presences around me of light that were showing me to all of these different pathways, and they were all golden and they were so beautiful, there were hundreds of thousands of them, and I went over to one and, or floated or whatever it felt like, but I went there and chose that one, and I had this distinct sense that anyone that I would have chosen would have been correct, and I think that our consciousness is layered to help us to see that, you know, at these pivotal points of our human reality, we have, you know, a little chipping away of one of those layers to help us to see through enough to go, “Oh, there’s something there, there’s something there, I might not sure, I don’t even know if I want to look at it anymore, but like there’s something there,” and usually it’ll happen, you know, by some drastic accident or a relationship that fails or, you know, a death in the family or something like that. If you can, you know, if you can get there without that, that’s cool, but a lot of times, you know, it takes a sledgehammer to get us to realize that there’s something, we don’t have to drive the boat, basically is what I’m saying, and is that, you know, we’re trying all the time to be the driver, myself included. I caught myself yesterday, you know, going, “Wow, I’ve spent a year trying to be the driver, I better get back in touch with the reality.”
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Courtney: So, yeah, bring your question around again.
Rick: Sure, I’ve got three or four of them in the back of my mind.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: Regarding the driver thing, I think there are, you know, it’s like we don’t sort of snap from A to Z in our spiritual evolution, there are degrees of unfoldment and maturation and so on, and you know, regarding the driver point, I think there are degrees of surrender, where the authorship of action is not relinquished entirely overnight, it’s sort of shifted by degrees from a sense, kind of a rigid sense of individuality and I’m doing this, to, you know, God is doing it and I’m just an instrument of that divine intelligence and I’m not actually doing anything, but you don’t just go from one to the other in some abrupt shift.
Courtney: Right, and we’re also co-creators in the sense that, too, there’s free will in this human body. I know it’s different on different planes of reality, but as a human being, you know, it would also be cutting the story short to say that this presence is just doing it for us, because we’re also creating continuous opportunities for ourself to express in the way that we want to in the world. The illusion is that there is some pathway that we all have to follow. There’s some, you know, I know some people that think that fate is how we move through life and, you know, it takes the power away from us because when we think that there is just one path and that there’s right or wrong, that, you know, if we stumble and we fall for a minute that we have to start all over again or, you know, something is punishing us, it’s, to me the case is that we have to be in complete service to the co-creative aspect of our Divine Self with the grander Source Energy, which by the way are so closely linked, closer than people will realize. I do soul readings for people one-on-one. I have clients that come to me for a one-on-one reading and the biggest aha moment that every single person will have with me is that they, like this voice within you that is connected to Source Energy, that is all-knowingness, that is complete love, never turns off, it never turns off. And this is what you’re talking about with these levels of consciousness and that there is, you know, this sort of all-encompassing bubble that shelters all aspects of our reality and that I think is what you’re talking about as Source Energy or as Oneness. But as a human being, we often, you know, our consciousness remains at a lower level until we ask a question, “Why am I here? What’s the purpose?” And also with that comes a surrender to listen by knowing that this mind knows only through our human lens, it can’t see beyond that. So it’s a lot of saying to yourself, “I don’t know what I don’t know, so show it to me.” And that’s where you get there. But when you start arguing with God or with Spirit or whatever your word is, then you’re moving further and further away and I’ve been doing it and I’m reminding myself right now in the past few days, you know, it’s a constant involvement of that.
Rick: Yeah, it’s, you know, kind of like riding a bicycle, it sort of becomes second nature but you can always fall off and you’re not necessarily going to be like one of these stunt riders that can jump off barn roofs and do flips in the air and stuff like that.
Courtney: Right.
Rick: So it does become kind of second nature but it’s something that, you know, well let’s just shift that question a little bit. I mean there are teachers and philosophers who say that we don’t have free will. For instance, I think Sam Harris just wrote a book about that and there’s a guy Ramesh Balsekar and many others who say, “No, we don’t have free will, it’s all just conditioning and karma or something, or genetics.” But most people experience that they do seem to have free will, at least within a certain range. It’s like they can’t just sort of become a billionaire overnight or whatever, but they have a certain amount of wiggle room. They could get a better education and get a better job and do things to sort of move themselves in the direction of greater affluence, if we want to use that example. So you concur with that, that sort of we don’t have like complete free will, but we have a degree of it and we can use that degree wisely or otherwise to steer the course of our life in one direction or another.
Courtney: Yeah, I mean I think as you said there are multiple influences, you know, you mentioned karma for a second there, which is definitely an aspect of, to me it’s just a lens that is, you know, filtered through our lifetime. I’m just talking about this lifetime, but then you know, if you’re carrying things with you, which for negative or positive, you’re always going to be carrying things with you throughout different lifetimes. That’s just how this works. So you have to kind of get used to the fact that, you know, you’re going to come in with some things and you’re going to be forced to look at them, whether you store them for 30 years before you’re ready to look at them or you want to look at them right now, you’re going to have to go through that process, that shedding process or evaluation process, because again, consciousness by definition wants to realize itself. So even if you are not aware of any of this, it’s still happening. So I would say yes, free will, yeah, there’s many factors at play there, but in the sense that I was mentioning it, I was kind of saying that, you know, to unlock certain layers of our consciousness we have to be the ones to open the door. Take the initiative, yeah. Take the initiative, and furthermore, it needs to be within the consciousness of the earth and within the consciousness of humanity before it can be fully realized by any extent. So there’s another level of oneness there at play, not even going to the oneness of the oneness, but just between our consciousness and the consciousness of our physical planet, that has a signature too. So there’s karmas there as well.
Rick: Yeah, I think you’re kind of alluding to something we were discussing a little while ago, that you know there are sort of holes within wholes within wholes, W-H-O-L-E-S, that just get larger and larger, kind of degrees of collective consciousness and that we’re like, in a way, we’re like cells in a larger body.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: But just to touch upon the free will thing a little bit more, there are a lot of well-known sayings, for instance, Jesus says “Seek and ye shall find,” that implies taking some initiative, you know, “Knock and the door shall be opened,” and there are various gurus that say, you know, “Take one step toward me and I’ll take a hundred steps toward you,” or sometimes that’s said with reference to God, that if you take that sort of initiative then you’ll get a response, but you have to sort of start the ball rolling.
Courtney: Yes, yeah, absolutely, that’s been my experience, totally and completely.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: And you know, moments where I’ve been in resistance or, you know, whatever the case may be, when you think you know everything, that’s the moment where you have to check back in and really get real with yourself, because, and I think that’s the, you know, the positive part out of my entire life journey experiences, revelation, struggles, has been that I have never had the opportunity to feel like I had it all figured out. I’ve always been a little bit ahead of the game, you know, to know that there’s a lot that I need to work on within myself.
Rick: Yeah. That’s kind of a teenage syndrome in a way, of thinking they know everything and the adults don’t know anything, and then you become an adult and you realize, “Oh, yeah.”
Courtney: Right, I mean, just within, you know, the layers of our own consciousness, you know, just to feel that, you know, something might be blocking you from getting to the next level in whatever thing you’re trying to start up at the moment. It could be easy to get in your ego about it and try to figure it out and try to struggle your way through something, or you can just surrender and ask the Divine to show you. And for me personally, you know, I’ve had so many different awakening points in which I’m forced to go deeper into that, you know, because I don’t want to live alone. I’ve already seen what it looks like to live in a state where you’re connected. Once you get a taste of that, you don’t want to go back.
Rick: Yeah, boy, there’s so many things I want to follow up on with you. Well, first of all, I just want to throw in, just so people know a little bit more about you, that you were training to be a classical violinist
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: And hoping to go to Juilliard and things like that, and then, you know, when you got bitten by the spiritual bug really badly, you thought, “Alright, I’m gonna move on and not do that.”
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: But you still keep up with the violin? Do you play it now and then?
Courtney: I play it often in the sense of, you know, with kirtan. Kirtan is a call-and-response style of sacred yoga chanting, but I don’t play classical anymore. And you know, that was my earliest memory of feeling something huge and amazing. And you know, that was before everything else. I started playing the violin when I was nine, and I went to a Waldorf school, went to the Minnesota Waldorf school. So everybody starts a stringed instrument in the third grade. So I chose the violin, and it was just, you know, I was shut down in a lot of ways at that age, and music was the only thing that made me feel really tuned in, you know, aligned like this. And I felt that, and you know, I was very, very shy. Like I said, I was very sensitive as a young girl, and you know, I could not get up on stage or talk in front of people. But when I was with my violin, I could do any of that.
Rick: Yeah.
COURTNEY: And very quickly, you know, I joined the Minnesota Youth Symphonies when I was 11, and you know, playing at Minneapolis’s Orchestra Hall. You know, that seats a couple thousand people. That never bothered me, never. So it really showed me…
Rick: But you weren’t a soloist, right?
Courtney: Well, I have been a soloist many times, yeah. I competed, and I was in a quartet, and that was my thing for a large part of my life until the end of high school. But yeah, you know, my life did change drastically, because at the end of high school, that is when I started to experience these things, and I felt so different. I felt so weird and alien, but also so affirmed. And so it was a pivotal point for me to really choose my path and to do it fearlessly,
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: because nothing looking at me in that moment of crossroads told me it was logical to go and channel this book and put it out. I was, in a lot of ways, seeing situations where adults got the upper hand and that kids were the ones that needed to learn. So I never felt like whatever I had to share was wise or anything, I just knew the impact it had on myself. So it did, in a way, catch me off guard, the ripple effect that it had coming out.
Rick: Yeah. You know, Albert Einstein was an amateur violinist and he always liked to play it for recreation, so keep it up, you may solve the Unified field theory.
Courtney: Yeah, it was, you know, and music still is a huge part of my life. I’m always weaving through different things. I play the harmonium, which is an Indian instrument, and ukulele and djembe, so drums. So yeah, music is also very important to me.
Rick: I also wanted to ask you, like, when you first started channeling, I think you said you had your eyes closed, you just had your fingers on the keys and stuff was being typed and you didn’t even know what, and afterwards you read it and thought, wow, where did all that come from? I was just curious, were you a touch typist already? I mean, could you type without looking at your fingers anyway?
Courtney: No, no way, no way, no way. All of this was so foreign to me when it started happening.
Rick: So you didn’t even know what keys you were hitting, you were sitting there with your eyes closed even, fingers hitting keys, but you’re not a touch typist.
Courtney: I followed, so the energy would go through different fingers,
Rick: Yeah. that’s where I would type.
Rick: You just push.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: Wow.
Courtney: It was really like that, it really was, and I remember, you know, in the beginning it was very slow, it was very precise, and it was in a different language. I don’t know if I’ve said this on an interview before,
Rick: I though it was in English.
Courtney: It was not for the first couple pages, and so the next time I, not something I know, not a human language for sure, but I knew what it meant, right? I knew what it meant, and that’s when in my next meditation I was like, “Yo guys from the astral world, I need some English, throw me a bone,” and you know, they did, and that’s when it started to come out a lot more brilliantly, and what surprised me, I’ll give you a few different things that surprised me. The first thing was, yes, that I could have my eyes closed, and they would type furiously, I mean so, so quickly. I don’t even know what my words per minute were, but it was really fast, and so this energy streamed out my fingertips. Secondly, there was just this just amazing vocabulary that I had never used, and I was into writing before, you know, I loved English class, so I had some vocabulary obviously, but just the metaphors and the way of relating words together just like really amazed me, and I remember moments where things would come out, maybe like a little word in French or something, and I would have to like Google it and like look it up and see what that was, because I didn’t know. But yeah, there’s so many things like that, that really stick with me to this day, metaphors that I use just within my own mind every day, because they’re helpful and they’re easy. That’s what I really enjoy about teachings from God is that, you know, there’s a lot of really esoteric books out there, and I’ve been one to read them, but I think what we really need as human beings, a lot of us, is just everyday assistance to understand, of course, those things in a way that we can relate, but really, how do we love ourselves? How do we, you know, how do we enjoy our lives and treat other people the way we want to be treated, and just go deeper within our own selves and love ourself more?
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: So that’s kind of the purpose of it all, and it feels like my life purpose and also an honor to do it, because you know, I don’t feel like the author, I feel like the co-author, you know, when people say, “Oh, you wrote this?” I say, “Well, I co-wrote it.”
Rick: Yeah, I mean, just in case people didn’t miss this, and didn’t catch this, you weren’t a touch typist, you couldn’t type without looking at your fingers.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: I’m a touch typist, so I don’t, I even type in Dvorak, so it wouldn’t help me to look at my fingers, because all the keys are different than what you see on them, but you know, you weren’t, and yet you were sitting there with your eyes closed, I guess, and you were just sort of, pushing keys without even knowing what the heck you were writing, and then it all sort of came out coherent and actually meant something. So if anybody’s thinking that you just kind of dream this stuff up and the whole channeling thing is just a vivid imagination on your part, that kind of shoots that idea.
Courtney: I mean, I told you, I didn’t want to be Esther Hicks, I thought the information was good, and I wanted to take in that wisdom, but no part of me was expecting this to be my life. When I experienced that, there’s no way you wouldn’t want it, you know, it became less of an ultra-spiritual thing and more of a, “Oh, this is how life is supposed to be.”
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: You know, that’s why I really try to not fit in a category. I try to relate all of these things in the most human way, so that if I’m talking to somebody that’s Jewish or I’m talking to somebody that’s Buddhist, and you know, the word “channeling” is weird to a lot of people, I like to just say, “Hey, this is a way for you to love yourself. If you can sit down and you can just let your mind open and ask whatever your God is to help you, it’s going to work.”
Rick: That was one thing I really liked when I was listening to your interviews with other people, you’re down-to-earthness and sort of, you know, humility and humanity. One interviewer was saying things like, “Oh, aren’t we…” I’m exaggerating here, she wasn’t really this blatant, but she was saying, “Aren’t we wonderful as light workers and light warriors and how are we going to wake up all these ignorant people and stuff?” And your response was something like, “You know, we’re all just human beings and we shouldn’t kind of put ourselves up on pedestals or put on airs or anything.”
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: So it seems like you’ve been integrating real well as you’ve gone along and not making yourself seem otherworldly or extraordinary.
Courtney: I’m not at all. I’ve had those experiences and those are otherworldly. I’m not going to sugarcoat that, they are, and I at that moment, that year and a half that I was channeling this book, I can’t admit I was not here. I was somewhere else and my family can attest to that.
Rick: All the time?
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: Like sitting at the dinner table you were kind of checked out?
Courtney: Yeah, I was always places and I had this extreme piece about me that just couldn’t be, somebody could be mad at me and I’d just be like, “Okay.”
Rick: Were your parents worried about you?
Courtney: No.
Rick: They knew something good was happening? Yeah, they knew it. They took me to a Qigong master and he validated that this is really powerful, but they already knew. I mean, they sat in on the channeling as well. Both of my parents did, my sister in moments too.
Rick: I think one thing people might wonder about since we’ve all been through our teenage years and it was kind of difficult for most of us, is, you know, as you’re going through these experiences which are kind of unusual, how, what was your social life like? I mean, were you a loner? Did people think you were a weirdo? Were you able to have normal friendships and engage in normal activities or did you just kind of go it alone?
Courtney: I wasn’t a loner, but I definitely did not make it known what I was doing, because I felt insecure about it, even though I knew it was true. There was no part of me that was mistrusting of what was happening. I just didn’t feel that other people would understand. Other teenagers, first of all, I was doing online school, so my social life was basically my music people. So, I went to orchestra rehearsals on Saturdays and I had quartet rehearsals on Saturdays. So my Saturdays were packed with my music friends and they were my friends. But yeah, there was definitely this feeling like I’m just experiencing the world in a different way. And, I go home and I listen to David Permal. Other people go home and they watch the game.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: I just couldn’t. I remember saying once to one of my friends where we were at music camp and I started to get a little bit like, “Hmm, let me test the waters,” and people were having a stressful time and I put on David Permal’s healing mantras. Yeah, I didn’t like that response. They were like, “What is this? I want to listen to this.” So no, I just didn’t talk about it. I just didn’t talk about it and I did tell one of my friends about it when I was about 17 and she didn’t warm up to it at first. But last year, last spring, she contacted me and we talked but I didn’t expect that she was going to ask me for a reading. And I said, “Well, look at there. It took you six years but you came around and now you want to hear what it’s all about.” It really helped her. I think too, once people grow up, there’s an easier time having your own opinions about things instead of a slight blob of whatever your friends do with what you think is cool.
Rick: Well, when people are younger, they’re very susceptible to peer pressure. I remember when I started to meditate and most of my friends were into drugs and I basically just dropped them all and started walking around the beach with my dog every day just to reset my nervous system and my whole social orientation away from those types of people. There’s an ancient Bengali saying which is, “If no one comes on your call then go ahead alone.” And I think it’s valuable. In fact, at that time I turned my sisters on to meditation. One of them was 13 or 14, the other was a couple years older. And the 13-year-old stuck with it. She’s a full-time meditation teacher to this day, that’s over 50 years. And the other one said, “I don’t want to be different from my friends, I’m not going to do this.” But recently when she visited, after 50 years she said, “You know, I think I should start meditating again.” But anyway, I’m just a lot…
Courtney: It’s hard to be lonely.
Rick: It is.
Courtney: It’s the bigger, you know; now this is where the power of your guidance system shows you what’s really most important. And that was showing me that if I walk this way I’m going to be successful.
Rick: Yes.
Courtney: It might take some time, but you will find this connection to people. And I do feel like I have a lot of friends now.
Rick: Yeah, exactly.
Courtney: Sometimes all over the world, you know. But I feel connected. I know people have my back now. Any moment that I start to feel lonely, I have to kind of get over myself, because I know that that’s not true.
Rick: Yeah, you have friends on many levels.
Courtney: Yeah, that’s true, that’s true also.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: As we all do.
Rick: Yeah, we’ll talk more about that too. I just want to say to people listening live that if you feel like asking a question, if you go to the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com, then look at the bottom of it, there’s a form through which you can submit a question, and we’ll ask it during this interview. One came in from Dan in London, and it’s about our discussion of free will, so we might as well loop back to that and ask Dan’s question. He said, “My feeling is that in an absolute sense we have free will completely, absolutely. Paradoxically, there is absolutely no free will. Both of these things being true at the same time is a paradox which the logical human mind can’t comprehend. It can only be explored experientially, but perhaps not described in a succinct way except as a paradox. Do you have any thoughts on this?”
Courtney: That’s a loaded question. Trying to understand it.
Rick: Let me throw something else at you while you’re thinking, and it’ll make it easier for you.
Courtney: Ok.
Rick: So, you know, I was saying to you before we started recording that in my experience I have the sense that I can sort of look at or feel into any of these flavors at any time, but I’m everywhere, I’m nowhere, and I’m right here. And you know, in terms of the nowhere aspect, I’m not doing anything, it’s all just nothing, nothing’s even happening. Maybe the same with the everywhere aspect, although in that sense it’s more like I’m doing everything, but then the right here aspect is, “Hey, I’m Rick, I’m doing stuff, you know, I’m making an effort, I’m trying to be a better pickleball player or interviewer or whatever.” And so we all, like as you’ve said, we’re multi-dimensional and so we can at the same time have free will and not have it and kind of harmonize that paradox within our awareness.
Courtney: I see what you’re saying. so,..
Rick: That’s what I’m saying.
Courtney: So between different levels of consciousness, the aspect of free will.
Rick: Yeah, now we could say this, let me just interrupt one more time and I’ll shut up. My former teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to always say, “Knowledge is different at different levels of consciousness,” and he would also say, “Reality is different at different levels of consciousness.” He would emphasize that one level doesn’t invalidate the other level, they just are different. I mean, we see the same thing in physics, I mean the molecular level and the atomic level and the chemical, all these different levels are very different and they don’t really give a hint of what the other levels might be like, but they all sort of are part of one whole. Okay, now let’s just the same,
Courtney: Just the same that if you were in a channeling state right now, asking that question, I can guarantee you that the question would go away before you even had a chance to ask the question, because again, it has to do with those layers of consciousness and when we shift our vibration is when we can better understand those more multi-dimensional qualities, because when we’re here, when we’re operating from here, we can only receive from here.
Rick: And you’re pointing to your head for the sake of those who are just listening in audio, when we’re just in our heads thinking there.
Courtney: When we’re just in our heads, right, when we’re just in our heads, we can only receive to that degree.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: So to me, my work has been in understanding the more esoteric, multi-dimensional kind of qualities of reality, you have to go into that state to some degree, and that’s the biggest challenge of humanness really, is that we both yearn for the information, but we also forget that our brains are not the only thing working for us.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: We have, within our body we have the “Akashic records” as you call them, which is basically like a cosmic library, it stores all the information of all time and it stores our own personal history. So I believe that, you know, talking about free will, talking about being able to jump between those realities, we have free will in this human body to do that. The depth at which we can go is determined by how much we’re willing to let go of what we think we already know.
Rick: Yeah, and able to, I would also throw in the word able, you know because you just can’t
Courtney: And able to, exactly.
Rick: Because you can’t just…
Courtney: You can’t get everything, there is an end point, because we are still human beings and again, like I said earlier, that there’s only so much within the consciousness of humanity as a whole and within our planet that can allow us to know certain things. Some things just don’t work with this, I don’t want to say paradigm, because that’s not the right word, but this structure.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: So I would say to Dan asking this question, I would challenge you to maybe go within your own meditation and ask this question and see what you can come up with yourself, because nothing will validate that question as much as you feeling the answer. Somebody can give you a logical explanation and I think everyone will give you a different answer honestly, but I think it’s a feeling thing and you might even come across a deepening within your own self that you didn’t know was there.
Rick: Yeah, Dan’s a pretty deep guy, I know Dan.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: Well, I want to touch upon the word “able” again. Like, when you play your violin or used to play it, if it’s badly out of tune, there’s no way you’re going to be able to play Vivaldi or something like that, make it sound like anything anybody would want to listen to.
Courtney: Right
Rick: So you have to tune up the violin before you can play. So like that, I think that well, I think you see where I’m going with this, that if we think of ourselves as an instrument and is this instrument that enables us to experience spiritual dimensions and advance spiritually and so on and so forth, the tuning up process is very important.
Courtney: Totally, that’s why Qigong for me, that’s why I practice Qigong.
Rick: Right.
Courtney: And I eat vegan and I don’t want to, you know, I think that anybody can have the lifestyle that they want to have and they can go as far as they want to go. But there are points to see that you can deepen further if you do certain things, like work on your energy system.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: And yeah, I do like to think of the body as a temple and also as like a doorway at the same time to something greater. My deepest experiences have been after practicing a lot of Qigong, you know, being at a retreat and practicing a lot and to physically see like my mind turn off and just this presence that exists, that’s just there. And I mean, it kind of shows you, showed me, showed me in that experience, many experiences that, you know, the mind never shuts off, it’s just our ability to put it in the back seat enough for us to see what we need to see, you know, or be validated for something.
Rick: Speaking of the mind never shuts off, you know, there’s that second verse of the Yoga Sutra says, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” Have you ever gone into states where the mind does shut off, where it’s like a Samadhi state and it’s just pure awareness without any mental activity?
Courtney: That experience that I shared with you of oneness, that was a moment of that and that caught me off guard, because, you know, it’s moments like that where you start to think, “Am I here anymore? Like, am I in a body anymore or did I just check out?” Because there’s no way to know, there’s really no way to know and, you know, I was channeling at the same time I was typing at the same time as having this experience. So, what came out on the paper was kind of just like cliff notes. My experience j is just my experience, I can’t put that into words, but yeah, that’s kind of where I’m going with that, that if you can fine-tune your physical being every day with, you know, different things, and I think everybody has their different practice, so I won’t say do this or do that, but I will say that unlocking the physical body is a doorway to unlocking this spiritual knowledge in a deeper way.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: And I’ve definitely felt that absence of the mind and of the dialogue, and it’s weird, it’s really weird.
Rick: Yeah, I think it was Christ who said the body is the temple of the soul, and certainly yogis understand that, which is why they go through all this physical purification and stuff, and pretty much every tradition has that kind of thing, I think.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: I wanted to loop back to something you said a little while ago, you said when you had that initial experience when you were fingers, and you said you’ve never really felt that degree of purity before, and since then, I think you used the word purity, and I just wanted to comment, you know, that when we have a new experience, very often it’s contrasting, but then it integrates and we may still be having it and not even realize we are.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: Or it’s like if you’re in a dark room and you light a candle or something, whoa, you know, light, and you’re never going to experience that contrast again,
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: But now the light is on and the light can keep getting brighter and brighter, but you’ll never have as much contrast as you initially had.
Courtney: Yeah, that’s where I wanted to go with that,
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: Because I think you know, it’s funny because obviously I channeled the book so I was part of some of the writing of it, and as I would receive it, it would be integrated in a way that I can’t express. It was deeper than the words, it was like I can go back to a paragraph in the book and be realized of this deeper experience. And, now looking back though, I’ve noticed a huge contrast in my experience of reading these words and how it feels more like just my everyday existence that I’m thinking about the nature of reality versus sitting down and being aghast at what I’m seeing. There’s not that level of, “Oh my gosh,” anymore. It’s just sort of like, “Yeah, that’s what I do,” and even when I’m doing readings with people, it’s not the drastic in-and-out experience of being human and then being in this oneness. It just feels like my body is fine-tuned enough to know exactly how to do that, and I can still have my personality here. I’m not checking out in any sense, I’m just allowing the grander part to be funneled in, and that feels both… It was uncomfortable at first to notice that because I thought, “Oh, I’ve lost it, I’ve lost that,” but now I just realize, “No, it’s just…”
Rick: You’ve acclimated to it.
Courtney: I’ve acclimated to it, and I also have more human experiences these days that help me to relate. I can go deep, I can go spiritual, or I can go mundane humanness. I can have both tracks and relate them, and I like that, even though it’s a challenge.
Rick: I think that’s the name of the game.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: I mean, enlightenment, if we want to use that word, is not a flashy experience. It’s the sort of integration and stabilization of the ability to encompass the full range of reality within our awareness while functioning normally.
Courtney: Right, yeah, it’s a lot, and being that I was quite young when this all started, it gave me sort of a name for that, and I have to almost remind people that this is going to be a constant evolution for me, right? That that was no endpoint, that was a beginning point, and that was a first initiation, and there’s been many since, periods of feeling disconnect. I know, of course, you’re never disconnected, but that does happen, and I was watching, I don’t know if you’ve seen the film, Finding Joe, but it’s on Gaia, and it talks about the Gaia.com, it talks about the hero’s journey, and basically that, in essence, that we…
Rick: Was this about Joseph Campbell?
Courtney: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: I’ve interviewed Jean Houston not too long ago, and she worked on that whole thing with him.
Courtney: But I needed to be reminded of that cycle, and I wanted to kind of touch upon this, because it’s been some years now since the book came out, and since I started this, and I’ve shifted a lot, and going to that deep level right then and there, that can’t be the endpoint, you can’t be in bliss and peace 24/7. You have to have the contrast in order to go deeper next time, you know …
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: to move deeper into the reality of human consciousness as well.
Rick: But would you say that you kind of can be in bliss and peace 24/7, in the midst of Walmart, or riding a roller coaster, or getting in a car accident, or it can actually get stabilized to the extent that intense things don’t disrupt it?
Courtney: You definitely can. I’m not there yet, and I won’t pretend that I am.
Rick: I bet you are, to a great extent. There’s always more, but I bet you are.
Courtney: In that state, I definitely am. In my humanness, I’m learning a lot right now, I’ll put it that way.
Rick: Welcome to the club.
Courtney: Yeah, I know. I don’t want to pretend any which way, because people do make that assumption about me and about a lot of other well-known spiritual teachers that they just blurred out these wise words live. You have to be immersed in the humanness. You have to be immersed in the non-physicalness. You have to be immersed in the physicalness of your body, and learn that. It’s so much, and then to relate that to life around you is just a whole other subject.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: So, it’s, you know, I’m sure the next book that I write is going to be my own story, I feel.
Rick: Well, we’ll talk about that in a minute too. I just want to say the impression that has been forming more and more as I’ve been talking to you over the last hour is that, wow, this is what education should do for everybody. All young people should have this kind of opportunity from a young age to do whatever spiritual practice, whatever, to have an environment in which that’s supported, parents which support it, and schools which do, and so on and so forth, and what a different society and world we could have if that were the case.
Courtney: No kidding. I mean, it really taught me that my aggravation in school wasn’t that I didn’t know how to learn, it was that I was wanting to learn things that were applicable. I didn’t want to study facts…
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: That had already happened. I wanted to study myself and study my relationship to people, and just the fact that that wasn’t happening and there was no awareness of it, I mean, it drove me crazy. That’s what got me out of the system by eighth grade because I was just like, I can’t do this anymore, and what was weird to me is that other kids around me didn’t seem bothered by it at all. Yeah, it felt like an oddball, but it ultimately, I don’t want to say, like, just try to shut it all down. I think that contrast is what gave me the spiciness to broaden my horizons and make it happen for myself because I had so many unanswered questions.
Rick: Yeah, that’s great. The world needs more oddballs like you. Here’s a couple questions that came in. This is Jay from Victoria, maybe British Columbia, I’m not sure. I think there’s a place in Australia called Victoria too. “How can you tell if a channeled book is authentic? A Course in Miracles seems inspired, but other channeled books seem questionable. What would you recommend as a way to weed out the fake channeled books?”
Courtney: I love that question. I’ve dealt with it a lot myself in my own explorations. Like I said, I listened to to Abraham Hicks a lot, but I also picked up a lot of other works, and the way to best discern, to me is, how does it feel in your body? Don’t think, don’t use your head, but pick up the book and feel how it feels. If you’re questioning something already, I would say it’s not in alignment with you. I’m very much a feeler in my body, so when I pick up something that feels good to me, I’ll get like a jolt or I’ll get really excited or I’ll feel like my heart opened. If that’s not your primary language, your body, then I would say just ask yourself, put yourself through a little series of tests and make sure that none of them include thinking about the information, because that’s a sure way to get confused really, really fast. For me, if I pick up a book, a channeled book that’s very information-dense, and I’m not saying that one is good or bad or right or wrong, I’m just saying for me, I think the nature of reality is best understood when it’s simple, uses metaphors we can understand, it feels really loving, it feels really light-filled and you don’t feel overwhelmed at the first sight of it. That was my interpretation of the Seth books when I first picked them up. Yeah, no judgment, some people love them. That was the first channeled book I ever read. I didn’t make it through the whole thing because I was blown away by information. But again, all these things kind of showed me what my language was. My language is, I want to feel something. I want to feel this connection within myself. I was not inspired by just, you know, I didn’t want to entertain my brain. I wanted to entertain my heart. That was my goal. But if you’re somebody, if you’re a science person that really wants to understand the nature of reality just from a mind perspective and get that satisfied, I would say try that, go for it. But ultimately, if something rings true for you, you should feel it in your body. It’s like that when you meet a friend on the street. Sometimes you have this feeling like, “I’m going to be good friends with this person,” or “Maybe I don’t really want to talk to them again.” You can’t explain that, it’s just a feeling. You learn with channeling or just any whatever you’re relating in life to follow your first impulse about something and know that, that is correct. It’s not different. For somebody else, they might really enjoy something you don’t like. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong. There’s things that I don’t feel in alignment with that people have asked me to read and I just say, “Go for it. If you enjoy that, go for it.”
Rick: Yeah. Different strokes for different folks.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: Here’s a question that came in from Michelle from Keene, probably Keene, New Hampshire. “Courtney just mentioned being willing to let go of what we think we know in order to open to higher levels of reality/consciousness. This discussion reminds me of the multi-dimensional experiences and insights of teacher Kristen Kirk, who’s a friend of mine who’s been on that gap. Kristen refers to how in order to open to deeper and vaster dimensions of consciousness, the “I” or sense of self must surrender to the unknown and let go of knowing. Would Courtney agree or disagree about surrender as being comparable to what she has experienced or is describing in order to open to higher or deeper levels of consciousness reality?” Does that make sense to you?
Courtney: I think so. I’m going to repeat it back to make sure that I got it right, but I think what you’re saying is that in order to get to deeper levels of consciousness, you have to come to this agreement within yourself that there’s only so far you can take yourself before you have to surrender and let this unknown, bigger, grander source show you.
Rick: yeah.
Courtney: And I would agree with that that my own personal journey has been a lot about that, and that I realized that I can’t do it alone, I don’t want to do it alone. There’s a great metaphor in my book that talks about life is like a puppet show, and we so imagine the hand of God as being the puppeteer, and the puppeteer is moving our little arms and legs out on the stage, and there’s a curtain in between the two, and we don’t, until we ask, we don’t know that there’s a hand above us until we move the curtain ourselves. And it takes a level of surrender that I can’t physically do this by myself, you realize that life feels like it’s controlling you unless you surrender just a little bit. You don’t have to go crazy like the first time you meditate or whatever, it’s going to be a little question, then it’s going to be a bigger question, a bigger question. And I would say in my own life that I’ve gone through so many transformations and being in periods of disconnect after feeling periods of great connection can be difficult because you’re, you shift, so you have to learn a new way to surrender, you have to continue, it’s like the whole, like you said about Samadhi, that’s about being comfortable with dying, many, many times, being comfortable with that process of transformation is always, transformation is always. So yeah, I would say surrender and then deeper surrender and then deeper surrender and deeper surrender and even through those moments of like being really confused and maybe even angry or whatever that you continue to remember that you are connected to the wholeness through your own transport of divinity and that won’t cease even if you feel like you have lost your way, you never do, but yeah, it’s a challenge to continue to go deeper when you feel like you already reached such a level.
Rick: I mean, I think there’s a natural tendency to seek more and more in life, more happiness, more whatever, and once you’ve had a taste of it, remind me of an old beer commercial, you’ll want to come back again once you’ve had a taste of it, Rheingold is extra dry, but in any case, it’s like you’ve glimpsed something that is sweeter and more sublime than life has so far offered you and you think it’s natural to have a visceral desire for more of that and you just kind of continue to move in that direction and it’s like the Pavlovian thing where you get rewarded when you do and so there’s a reinforcing positive feedback loop.
Courtney: Yeah, and you will get feedback, you will get feedback when you do surrender because it’s just like what you said in some form of words you said that like if you take one step towards God, God will take a thousand steps back towards you, something along those lines. Yeah, I’ve caught myself in moments where I’m just pushing up against a wall of myself and I don’t let just a little bit in and the moment that I take one step and I did this yesterday, I’ll give you an example, I deactivated all my social media yesterday.
Rick: Really? Permanently or just temporarily? Just put them on hiatus.
Rick: Put it on hiatus,
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: But I’ve been known to be the social media girl who’s on there and posting all the time and that was my, this is two days ago, so I’m on
Rick: But now you’re doing an interview and thousands more are going to.
Courtney: Right, but I guess the point to me is that it absolutely does work when you take a step and even when that step feels like a lot and sometimes it takes all your energy to do that though,
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: It shifts something enough that your heart can be more open.
Rick: Yeah. ; You have to do that, I mean you do have to see when there’s those moments of resistance, what’s going to give and even it’s, it may seem small to deactivate your social media, but for me it was like, oh that was a big one for me and it did, it did turn things around immediately and will continue to.
Rick: Yeah, there’s all kinds of cool quotes and cultural things about this point. There was a German philosopher Goethe who said something about if you just sort of take a step basically as you’re saying, then all sorts of unforeseen supports and opportunities and whatnot come in that you wouldn’t have thought, you wouldn’t even know existed and you know I mean I’m thinking of the Lord of the Rings where Frodo just heads out and starts doing this thing and there’s this impossible task and yet all kinds of things come to his aid because he’s made that determination and also because he had a certain degree of innocence and simplicity which is I think apropos to what we’re saying here.
Courtney: Yes, yes, yeah, I think when you have an energy about service as well and I’m pretty confident that all of you that are watching have this sense about you as well that you wouldn’t be watching otherwise, but when your purpose is grander than just your own self, just your own survival, yeah, there is an energy again that supports you even deeper and I think acts of service really do support you and that gathers in your bank and when you need it, it’s there for you. One of the ways that I do this on a yearly basis for my birthday, because you brought up my birthday, is I write…
Rick: January 24th,
Courtney: Yep, January 24th. I write love letters, I write 50 love letters and I disperse them around town and I am anonymous, but people find them.
Rick: Just like put them on lampposts or something?
Courtney: Yeah, I just hide them around in various places, co-op and bookshops and it feels good to feel like you’re connected to a bigger world, a bigger universe and that they can be found and put on this website and it’s a good thing to remind yourself that these acts of service do help you. You don’t do them to get something back, but you do them because you realize the circle.
Rick: Yeah. it’s more blessed to give than to receive.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: We’ve kind of covered this, but maybe I’ll just ask this question, we can wrap up this point and move on to others and you can give a sort of final comment on this. Alejandro from Ravenna, Italy asks, “Does awakening never end or is there a continuous deepening?” I think he meant to say, does it ever end or is there a continuous deepening?
Courtney: Continuous deepening, 100%.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: You know, when I was younger I may have gotten in a moment of thinking that I was pretty enlightened. I may have thought for a second that I had reached some big point and I did, that’s true. I was experiencing a lot of crazy things at the time and now as I’ve shared a little bit, my life now is much more mundane but infused with all of these things that have happened to me and for me, I should add. But no, it’s a constant awakening process and that’s something that I’ve had to learn to roll with and it’s so hard to be graceful with it but it helps to know that that is the cycle. The hero’s journey is, you know, I forget all the points but you guys watching, watch Finding Joe on Gaia.com but it talks about, you know, the cycle of initiation and I guess it starts with something like you’re embarking and then there’s initiation and then the end point is like conquering the dragon in front of you and I think that the dragon can be multiple dragons in one lifetime. I think that you can, you know, you can conquer one dragon and be freed from that aspect and then there’s another cycle, another thing to present itself to you. So, I, you know, I’m not yet comfortable with that but that’s my journey of getting to it and that’s the journey of life in essence is that we learn that it’s never ending like that and you’re going to have moments of pain and suffering, you’re going to have moments of bliss and freedom and joy and eventually, you know, I would hope to see that that gap lessens, that you continue to have those cycles but it’s not so much like you completely burn, you know, and that you, you know, completely lose yourself. I think that that gap lessens. You look at the the Qigong masters, the Tai Chi masters, you know, these highly awakened people, they’re still experiencing life, right? They’re still in human bodies but they’re, you know, they have this baseline of well-being that can’t be conquered because it’s been, it’s been primed for many, many years and they’ve learned so much and gathered so much that they have that foundation but they still understand suffering, they still understand pain, they still understand, you know, human emotions and it won’t stop occurring. That’s something to understand is that we’re not trying to escape our humanness, we’re trying to reel it in, we’re trying to refine it.
Rick: Yeah, I mean there’s so many examples of that. I mean Ramana Maharshi died of cancer and it was very painful and all kinds of people were doing all kinds of experiments on him trying to cure it and he was just sort of like, whatever, do whatever you want but it’s not, it doesn’t touch me, I’m beyond all this.
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: And oh, you must be in so much pain and yeah, on some level there was pain but his inner reality of oneness was so predominant that it was kind of almost tangential to his experience from the things he was saying.
Courtney: Yeah, I definitely can understand that at that level that you wouldn’t, why would you want to stay attached? I mean, you know what it feels like to be in that state of oneness and freedom, why would you hold on to your body at that point? You know, there’s moments like Anita Morjani’s story, Dying to be Me, where it was her calling to come back into her body and that was her journey, that was what she chose.
Rick: She’s been on Batgap if anybody wants to check it out, she tells her story there.
Courtney: Yeah, she’s amazing. But yeah, I think the cycle is forever.
Rick: Yeah, okay, here’s a question from Crystal in Louisiana, she asks, “What is your view on Christ consciousness? Do you see this energy becoming more and more influential? Do you think Christ consciousness is oneness or is it just an aspect of the oneness?”
Courtney: So, I’m going to go to a metaphor of my book again to describe this, because a lot of people ask these kinds of questions to me and and there’s a metaphor in the book about a pot of soup. So, imagine oneness as a pot of soup and when you’re making a pot of soup, right, we have many different herbs, many different vegetables that we put in it, we don’t just use one ingredient, we have many things, a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper, a little bit of oregano.
Rick: You’re making me hungry.
Courtney: Yeah, me too. But right, once it is all made together, we can’t measure out the molecules of water before it came the broth. So, oneness is sort of like the same way that we taste soup, we can identify different flavors of this wholeness, but we can never undo it once it’s done. So, I think that this aspect of what you call Christ consciousness, if that’s your lens that you view through, I would say it’s very plausible that you can pull upon that aspect of the wholeness and make it your divine nature, you can make it part of your divine connection. I think everybody has their own spiritual master, you can make it a master like Jesus or Buddha or Lao Tzu, Mother Mary, or it can be kind of more along the lines that I have chosen, which is in a bigger sense, the oneness. I’ve definitely had moments where Jesus has come to me and I’ve experienced that feeling and that consciousness, and it is a flavor, but Jesus was also a human being that was aware that everything is connected, right?
Rick: I am my father of one.
Courtney: Yes, exactly. So, I think we can draw upon the teachings of all of these masters, be very clear that that’s not the end of the road, that they were helping us to see this bigger part that we’re connected to.
Rick: In India they have the notion of Ishta-Devatas, which means sort of the aspect of God to which you feel a personal affinity and different people choose different Ishta-Devatas, you know, they might relate to Shiva or, you know, I don’t know, Ganesh or Kali or different ones, or Christ for that matter, and so I guess yes, the understanding is that God is one and everything is ultimately one, but there are different manifestations or channels of that divine intelligence and different people have different affinities with one or the other.
Courtney: I love that, I love that people have different affinities and I like to learn from people when they do want to talk about Jesus or they want to talk about, you know, like you mentioned Ganesh. I have been through many different sort of cultural interpretations between between the, you know, my teacher Master Lin’s Chinese perspectives and through Qigong, you know, we work with those kind of masters more that he talks about, and then, you know, in the world of Kirtan we talk about, you know, we talk about Shiva, we talk about Ganesh, we pray to Krishna, so it’s and I don’t see them as separate, I really don’t, I don’t, I think that, you know, you may have heard or seen the memes that say, you know, we’re just all walking each other home, there’s a picture of all the masters together, and I really like that, I like that interpretation and the graphic with that, because I think it’s something we all need to be reminded of, that there really is no division, we’re creating the division.
Rick: Very true, yeah, there’s a sort of a human tendency to want to think my thing is the best thing and or my thing is the only thing, everything else is bogus and so on and so forth, it’s created so much strife in this world, but anyway, I wanted to ask you more, I heard you say that when you first started, when you first started doing this channeling thing, you churned out like 900 pages of it,
Courtney: Yeah, frequently so.
Rick: And the whole first part of it, you said pertained primarily to you personally, and then when you put the book together, I guess you didn’t use much of that, it was more a lot of the other stuff and you refined it down into 200 or 300 pages, so what was all this stuff that was for you personally that you didn’t put in the book?
Courtney: So it was about my own soul evolution.
Rick: Give us some examples.
Courtney: I will, yeah, I will. So as I mentioned, in the beginning I was shown through some astral travel, some different past lives and ways that I lived.
Rick: Anything noteworthy there that you want to share?
Courtney: It wasn’t noteworthy in the sense that it was interesting, it showed me a death, actually, re-experiencing death in one of the lifetimes, and that the story was incomplete and that frustrated me. And I was so, I have to say this, I was so involved in these stories that it really detracted from living my life at the time. It was one of the reasons why I felt so out of body a lot, is because I was literally traveling places and experiencing different lifetimes, and it would be hard to put into words because it was more a feeling sense, but I did experience a lot of pain in those lifetimes. Some of them felt more real than here, that I was learning things and then this one was cut short and then I’d move into this more not human aspect where it was more like a galactic being. So I would travel up to the sun to Mars and see things there. Again, these are all environments. I was viewing it like a movie and through my senses. So I was aware that I was traveling, you know, the oneness would tell me, “We’re going to take you here, just let go.” Again, back to that surrender point. I had no idea what was going on. I was like, “Show me the way.” Letting go. I’d get zoomed out. First of all, I would see a sort of this light body come up over the top of my body. So I’d be laying down on my bed and see this light body come out, detach, and then I’d go. I did not do this on my own. I had no comfort with this, but the guides, if you want to call them that, were doing it with me and for me. So I experienced, and then the one that I already shared with you of experiencing oneness, I didn’t mention that I also saw myself as a black man on the sand in that vision, and my hands were tied behind my back, and I was posted on a stake, on a cross, and put in the ocean. So somebody might ask me, “What was the purpose of you seeing all this?” Because it did upset me, seeing a lot of these things did upset me. What was the purpose of it? Well, I think that I was opening these doors so I could release these aspects so that I could move forward and …
Rick: Process them.
Courtney: Process them. Yeah, exactly. But it just didn’t have any, it was so personal, it didn’t have any relevance to anybody else. It was really my own journey of figuring out myself.
Rick: Yeah, well you know what’s interesting, it’s almost like this was preparatory to your writing the rest of the book, because
Courtney: It was.
Rick: It was like a purification or something that had to take place, so you could be even a more fit vehicle for the other stuff that came through.
Courtney: Absolutely, and I had to reach this equilibrium with the energy as well. At that point it was more, it wasn’t really the collective feeling that I felt when I really made the decision to make this a book. I called this energy Hannah, and the reason why–
Rick: Hannah, like Hannah Montana?
Courtney: H-A-N-N-A. My mom used to– when my sister and I would go to bed, she would have us visualize our guardian angel she called Hannah, that would protect our home. And so that was a name and frequency that I knew, and I used that word for many, many months to call upon that energy. So, yeah, and then they said to me, “It’s time for you to share these things. Now you’ve reached a certain point, and it’s time to go broader, and we’re going to help you through the process.” So I said, “Okay,” said, “I’ll do it,” but I also was sort of not believing that it was possible. I mean, I knew how introverted I was. Just the concept of writing a book seemed a little like, “I don’t know. I don’t know about that.” But the whole thing was so, so effortless once it began, and it was a continuation, but it was also a very clear start when it became a book, because it was directing to the collective. And they said to me, “When you’re in this state, other people are going to feel the state when they’re reading the words. They’re going to feel it, they’re going to remember it, and it’s going to have a similar effect on them. It’s timeless.” And they said, “Even as time progresses, the information will still stay relatable.” So in that sense, I really treated it like a sacred thing. It was a sacred time for me to be when I was writing it, and I did the best that I could to be as pure of a channel as I could be. And any moment that I had sort of a question or an insert that I wanted to put in it, I just reminded myself, “No, there’s something to be shown to me and to us.” So I really tried to just receive, and it did work well.
Rick: I have a printout here of all the chapter titles of your book, and there wouldn’t be time to go through them one by one and have you comment on each one, but in a summary kind of way, what are some of the things that people would find or learn in reading this book, the things that you consider most important?
Courtney: Well, on a very basic, basic level, people feel this sense of unconditional love and peace. People have picked up my book that aren’t interested in any sort of spiritual things, and they just read it because I wrote it, and they want to know what it is that I published. And those kind of people will feel a sense of peace and love, a deep thing. And some people say to me, “You know, I feel like it was written for me.” That’s the most common response that I get, is that people say they feel like it was written for them. There’s a few people that have come back to me with a more in-depth evaluation of its effect on them, and these are people who are already very dedicated to their personal practice. And in that sense, it’s changed people’s lives by the foundation of realizing that all of this information is within them, and they can unlock it at their own will. And the moment that that’s realized and really understood is pretty incredible. It’s pretty incredible what happens with people, because all of a sudden they stop calling me up, right? They don’t want to know what I have to say anymore. They figured it out. It shows because most of my clients I only have once. I don’t have many repeat clients. It’s usually one, and then they’re good for a while.
Rick: And when you say client, you mean like you have a Skype conversation with them or something and do a soul reading or a channeling?
Courtney: A soul reading, yeah. Really, what it teaches you is to tap into that own voice. The one that you’re reading on the page is the one that is within you, and there may be an essence of it that is me because I channeled it, but the goal really is when you’re reading those words and when you’re able to let go and feel them, that that voice starts to become activated within you and that you start to unlock those layers. And you start to realize a shift within your own life that you notice things, you notice the clarity of life around you more, you become less fearful of what other people think because you realize that you’re really the one that gets to guide your life. People take their life into their own hands.
Rick: I think that’s really important. Some of my most popular interviews have been with channelers. Who’s that guy Darryl Anka who channels? Somebody, I forget who.
Courtney: Bashar.
Rick: Bashar, right, and he’s like the number two on Batgap and then I’ve interviewed a few people who are healers and they become very popular. And I almost get the impression that there are certain types of people who want somebody to do it for them, channel something for me, heal me or whatever, whereas ultimately I think this is a do-it- yourself operation. We can get assistance from all kinds of places but ultimately we have to sort of do our own work and so I think it’s healthy what you’re saying that you often only have one session with people and then they’re kind of on their own, you give them a boost or kick in the pants or whatever, enable them to discover that it’s within them and then they can continue on that journey.
Courtney: Yeah, that’s proof of success to me and also to notice it within myself, the moment that I stopped listening to other channelers as well showed me that yeah, I have enough confidence and that I can do this within myself. And that’s something that you’re only going to get to once you surrender. We keep talking about that surrender word but it’s so true. I’ve had clients before where it starts off with a sort of fighting momentum that they just want the answer. They just want the answer to their life, they want to be told this is the way and all I have to do is say yes to this job or this relationship or moving to this location or whatever it is or some people even get caught up on a past life in figuring that out and the answer always comes down to right now is what is most important and you get to choose where you want to put your energy. If you want to live in the energy of everyone else has the answer for you and you have to keep clawing for the truth within somebody else, you’re never going to be free. So make up your mind, if you want to be free, if you really want to do this yourself then it means you have to get off the phone with me and you have to go in. So it’s always interesting to see, you know some people catch on really fast and some people it takes a little bit longer too.
Rick: It’s good for them to have some kind of practice or something because just telling somebody that all the we’ve all heard that the kingdom of heaven is within you and all that stuff but you kind of sometimes need a technique or a practice or some method of discovering that experientially and not just having someone tell it to you.
Courtney: Well, exactly. That’s ultimately what a person’s soul in these readings always tells them is that you can be told all day long from your best friend that they want you to take this job but until you are convinced within yourself that that’s something that feels in alignment to you, nothing can console you. So that’s really my job and I also have a real passion with working with people my age as well because there’s so much fear and anxiety and questions, like so many people just unsure of where to go and yeah, I like to think that I can, through my YouTube channel, through my videos, that I can help people to see that it’s not hard and you get to pave your own path and you can validate it for yourself, you don’t need somebody else to tell you. It’s okay.
Rick: Well, speaking of people your age, a question came in from Chris in Massachusetts and Irene, my wife Irene and Dan in London who works on these questions, both edited it down quite a bit. I think Irene edited it down, but anyway here it is. She and Dan both felt it needed to be sent. This is from Chris, he says, “I’m 21 years old and have been invested in meditation etc for around five years now. I’m now discovering I’m quite empathic and quickly picking up spiritual insights, but I recognize how tricky the spiritual ego can be. My ego gets attached to the ‘spiritual fireworks’ of my experiences. It’s led me down some distracting and unbalanced roads. I need love and grounding to make my insights integrated and useful for others and to stay balanced. I have a great relationship with my friends, family and spiritual teachers, but romance is something I’ve avoided. I’m realizing I’m closing myself off by believing I’m too “spiritually incompatible” for most people. How do you reconcile not getting distracted and being dedicated to the path while being graceful and open to romantic partners? And where can I find more of my people?”
Courtney: Okay, well first of all, I totally feel you on so many levels there because I’ve been through that of just feeling like on your own island and nobody you can relate to and and also being addicted to those experiences like you said.
Rick: Fireworks.
Courtney: Yes, the fireworks. Yeah, it’s hard to get off of that, but it’s also like in my own experience when I was astral projecting all the time and I was seeing other places, I had no interest in really having a talk about the weather to anybody else.
Rick: In other words, you didn’t want to talk about mundane stuff.
Courtney: No, no I didn’t. I wanted to relate on that plane with other people. My experience showed me that in order for me to be present in the world I needed to, and you already answered your own question to some degree, that you need to be grounded. You can be deep in your spirituality and be grounded at the same time. I would say that you are the one driving the boat as always, so you can ask for that to be shown to you in a different way that allows you to express more of your personality and go out with your friends and meet new people. You know, I made that adjustment when I started doing these interviews really a couple years ago, might be three years by now, that I’ve been doing these interviews and connecting with more people. And, you know, I think you just have to ask for what you want. Clearly you don’t want the experiences to go away, but you want to be more interacting with the world around you. So I would just, when you go into your meditation, make that statement when you connect to the universe and ask for it to be presented to you in a way that will continue to further your growth. If your goal right now is to meet new people and be relatable, then you don’t have to lose anything. I’m not saying lose anything, continue with what you’re doing in your practices. And refining that will adjust your vibration, and these types of people will be more attracted to you and vice versa. Just have an open heart because I would say that when you have this vibe about you that I’m so different from everybody else, you are actually closing the door to having real relationships with people. A big thing that I had to come to terms with is that I’m just a human being, right? Plenty of other people have had these experiences. I had to let go of my ego about all this stuff as well, and when I did that and realized that with my real open-heartedness that was the key, I started to relate more to my family and my friends. You don’t have to talk about your crazy firework experiences, but you can find that common ground and that openness of people, and that will translate to relationships as well when the time is right for you. But I would say first and foremost, just remember that you’re no different than anybody else. A lot of people, I’ve had probably very similar experiences as you have, so just treat it as that you’ve taken a different language course than your other friends, and there’s an opportunity for you to maybe at some point share those things and also for you to listen to them and what they have to share. Another thing I did was I got on meetup.com and started to find other people that were sort of like-minded as well. So it sounds like there’s a few different things going on that you can get out in the world a little bit more and connect with people and also just meet people where they are, because not everybody is going to relate to the world like you do.
Rick: Yeah, and I think that there’s enough people out there everywhere that are sort of on a higher wavelength, if you want to put it that way, that you don’t have to compromise by going hanging out in bars or something like that.
Courtney: Yeah, don’t do that.
Rick: Yeah, because there’s a lot of emphasis, I know in the Vedic tradition and probably in others, that it’s very important, the company you keep, you know, it definitely has a big influence on your evolution. And if you go into a coal mine wearing a white suit, you’re going to get dirt on it.
Courtney: Yeah, I would also just say, yeah, to that point, surround yourself with people that do get it as well. I’m not saying just downgrade yourself at all by any means, but it may be very supportive to you to find a meetup group or something where you can express some of the ideas that you are getting and receiving and have people you know, go, “Yeah, totally, I get it. Here’s what you do and here’s how you can keep cultivating that.” I found a group in my area when I was newly 17, new to all this, I hadn’t shared anything publicly, and I found a channeling group and that shifted everything for me, that’s where I got my confidence from.
Rick: And you also have a Kirtan group that you get together with and you do that kind of thing.
Courtney: Yeah. Apropos of Chris’s question, I hope you don’t mind my asking this, but do you plan to get married and have a family and do the whole thing?
Courtney: Sure, I’m sure, you know, life takes you where you are putting your energy, right? I continue to want to grow and expand and I think life is all about relationship in its many forms and, you know, I just love meeting people and feeling how they experience life and when you can have a really deep connection with people, that’s everything that validates my entire existence when I can find people like that. And I have a great group of people around me right now that I really value and they have my back and I have theirs and I think, yeah, just stick with that and see where that takes you. I also want to grow in other ways too and get to the point of of traveling more and sharing these things broader, but yeah, sure.
Rick: Yeah, Irene just passed me a note, there’s a song by the Moody Blues that goes, “I know you’re out there somewhere, somewhere.”
Courtney: That’s funny.
Rick: Yeah. And speaking of traveling, I’ve done a lot of traveling, you know, all over the world and there’s amazing people everywhere. I spent three months in Iran, you know, I’ve been spent nine months in the Philippines, all kinds of different places and there’s just these gems of people everywhere in the world. I’m sure you could go to any country, even some that are considered to be pretty dark places and you’re going to find some really nice people there. And I think they’re getting more and more plentiful.
Courtney: Yeah, I think just learning, you know, listening to people’s stories is so important in life because everybody has a different life experience and a different way of relating to a lot of these subjects we’re talking about as well. So I think it’s always interesting and and cool to see through other people’s lens and see how it all comes together in the end.
Rick: So we talked a little bit about what’s in your book, obviously there’s could be a lot more discussion about that and people can pick up the book in order to find out, but what’s going to be in your second book and how does that differ from your first book?
Courtney: My second book talks more about the energy of human consciousness and earth consciousness and how they are evolving.
Rick: Tell me more, that sounds interesting.
Courtney: Yeah, and you know, I haven’t, again, one thing I have to also eject into this conversation is when I’m channeling these books, especially when I haven’t been editing it many, many times through, which is the case with this one yet, I haven’t, I don’t remember the content, I remember pieces and bits, right?
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: But a lot of it has to do with, I know there’s a big chunk about like the actual, you know, how our earth is many different layers, it has different physical layers and so the book talks a little bit about these layers and how they are holding different kinds of information and consciousness and how it’s affecting our interaction with humanity and how we are actually doing this dance.
Rick: So when you say different layers, are you talking like geology, different deeper layers of the physical earth, like down to the core and so on?
Courtney: Yes, exactly, exactly, yeah, and yeah, that surprised me as well. I thought, you know, I wouldn’t have thought about it like that at all ever, but,
Rick: There’s also different layers obviously in the atmosphere and sometimes I’ve had amazing meditations up on on jet planes, you know, something about being up at 35,000 feet, I don’t know what it is, but…
Courtney: Right. Yeah, yeah, and I will continue to go deeper into these ideas. Like I said, I think this book, you know, it is an extension of the last one, but it goes more into the physicality of our nature and our earth and I think it is important because a lot of times I know, sometimes I’m feeling a certain way and I’m not sure, you know, how to separate it from my consciousness to the earth consciousness, to the humanity consciousness, you know, it’s all collective, right? Sometimes I feel muddy and this might help us to kind of deepen our relationship to that and also not get too, you know, scientific or, you know, in our minds about it.
Rick: But I think collective consciousness is really a thing and it’s a very influential thing.
Courtney: Absolutely.
Rick: It can uplift us, it can drag us down, you know, and it varies from one spot to another. There’s like community consciousness or national consciousness or whatever, you can even feel it when you cross a national border into another country.
Courtney: Yeah, totally, totally. That’s why, yeah, I feel like I’m always trying to refine my own senses so that I can, you know, I can review what is mine and not take on everything and more and more it seems like, and maybe this is my own perception or maybe, you know, you can talk about maybe some of your other guests that have felt this too, but I think it feels like the lines are more blurred these days where, you know, what is collective and what is ours is a little bit, you know what I’m saying?
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: It feels that way, it feels that way and it might just be my own.
Rick: Maybe they’re more blurred for you in particular because you’re more universal in your consciousness, you’re not so locked into the boundaries.
Courtney: Right, it could be that as well, but yeah, I think, you know, you can break it down to astrology or there’s a lot of ways to put this into language, I guess, but yeah.
Rick: A lot of shifts seem to be taking place, of course a lot of people in new age circles have been talking about, you know, golden age coming or whatever. Have you ever channeled anything about that or do you have any thoughts or insights?
Courtney: Yes, there is moments like that in the book where it talks about that and to my awareness what I remember is that, you know, it’s not like this is our first golden age, you know.
Rick: There have been others.
Courtney: Yeah, there’s been many, but with all of this, you know, how we’ve been talking about the cycle of, you know, one’s personal soul evolution throughout a lifetime and many lifetimes, I see it the same way as a collective, as an earth, I see that, you know, we’re going through those same sort of cycles as well, and, you know, I don’t think that in 2012 everything changed. I think that, you know, in 2012 there might have been a moment where, you know, there was a shift, but we’re having shifts every single day, every single day, and it’s all pulled by our collective consciousness as an earth, as a humanity, and also, you know, we have assistance. We have assistance as well throughout all of that, so my job personally is to try to stay open where I can move with that flux and continue to receive information about these things for myself and to share with all of you, but that’s why I say it’s like a constant surrender, right, because it’s always being upgraded and changed, the way in which you can receive, and if the physical body is out of whack then you can’t align this way as well. So…
Rick: I get the feeling talking to you, and this isn’t the first time I’ve thought this, that, you know, there are definitely sort of higher intelligences or higher beings or whatever that are very much concerned with, you know, the earth and with its destiny and with the human, you know, species surviving and evolving and so on. Do you have any comments or thoughts about that?
Courtney: I have received information about, you know, kind of what we can do to help, right, what we can do to help, but in terms of my own work and how the book is laid out, there’s never any words of, “You will, you know, like, this will be doom and gloom if you don’t do this,” you know. No, and it’s not even seen that way. Honestly, most of the book, you know, it talks in the sense of, like, there’s been a lot of pain and suffering on earth. Within your own collective consciousness, you know, there’s healing to be realized, but at the same time, you know, from the perspective of the non-physical, everything is literally light. Everything is seen as perfect. So, it’s, you have to, you know, when I was channeling this, it was almost like, you know, I had to receive it through the lens, like, of a human being asking the question about where our earth is going, because if you were to just receive the non-physical perspective about this, it would be, “Well, it’s all good, because your earth is going through a cycle, you’re going through a cycle, and it will continue.” So, that’s my direct line, but you might ask somebody who is tapping into a flavor, like maybe Bashar or Kryon of magnetic service, and you’ll receive, you know, a slightly different, but same answer, which is maybe, “Here are some things you can do to assist,” because they are more personalized flavors of the soup, where they come through as their, you know, unique personality to assist humanity, and really go deeper into these questions. So, yeah, I’d be interested to see, I don’t listen to those as much anymore these days, but it all does come down to the same thing in the end, that we need to continue to raise our own personal vibration each and every day, and if we buy into the fear being sold on the market every day in every form, then we’re not living up to our potential. I see it all the time, you know, people get really passionate about activism, but then they become the very thing that they’re fighting against, because all they’re doing is promoting more fear and more, you know, distractions and separation, and I say, “If you are trying to be a lightworker,” you know, in the sense of the new age way that everybody’s like, “Be the light worker,” you know, I say, “Okay, well then talk with your family member that doesn’t agree with you, and ask them what their life is about, and don’t just talk to the people that think like you, and you get snarky towards them because they don’t think like you.” That’s not being a lightworker. If you want to change the world, then you actually have to get in there. I mean, I just think it’s so funny, because I meet so many spiritual teachers that are like, they only hang out with their tribe, and they never really get to the root of humanness and emotion and contrast and separation, because they’re forcing themselves to just stay in that little bubble. Well, you can only go so far with that. So, I guess that’s my mission, is that I go into the depth of things, and I share things vulnerably that people see, and they’re like, “Wow, you kind of look funny doing that, because nobody does it.” A lot of people don’t want to share.
Rick: There’s a couple here in town that gets together groups of Republicans and Democrats and helps facilitate communication and find common ground between them and so on and so forth, and it’s kind of reminded me.
Courtney: Yeah, exactly, and you can do it in simple ways. It’s just, you know, if you know what you’re meant to do, then take it all the way. Don’t just be confined to a certain environment.
Rick: Yeah.
Courtney: Yeah.
RICK: So, let’s wrap it up a little bit. So, you’ve mentioned a number of times that you have sessions with people, I guess over Skype or phone or something. You want to just say a word or two about that, so that if people are interested, they’ll know what it is you’re offering?
Courtney: Sure. Yeah, so a soul reading with me is basically an opportunity to have a conversation with your soul in real time. And the experience for me is, you know, you’ve been probably listening about how I’ve channeled my book, “Teachings from God.” It’s the same process of of letting go and asking the universe to come through, although in the sense of working with somebody one-on-one, I ask for that essence of you to come forth. And it’s very specific to you, right? And so, I take you into a short meditation, and in that time, we kind of reach this equilibrium of energy. And then I let you know that we’re going to start the reading now, and I just tell you to focus on your heart and focus on a golden sun in your heart, and to just smile. Smile. And my teacher, Master Lin, says “Smile stands for start my internal love engine.” I always tell people that, and then I begin the reading, and usually they give an overview of where you’re at right now and what they’re seeing for you. It’s kind of like an energetic forecast. And then…
Rick: When you say “they,” this is the guides that are helping you with the reading.
Courtney: Right. The soul collective of you. And then they’ll say to you, “What do you want to talk about?” It’s really that simple. “What do you want to talk about?” You wrote down two days ago you should ask. It’s like, in this moment, “What do you want to talk about?” And they really try to help you to see that spirit is your best friend. Your soul is your best friend. It’s not some high, mighty source. It is part of you as well. So the more you can become friends with this aspect, the deeper you will go, and the more in tune you will be within yourself. So that’s the format of how I really conduct a private reading.
Rick: Do you end up getting into stuff that’s really specific to them?
Courtney: Yes.
Rick: Regarding health and relationships and all the stuff that people go through.
Courtney: Yeah, definitely. And it always gets down to the root of that energetic compound rather than just the question. It’s never a yes or no. It’s like, “Am I in the right relationship? Well, let’s expand upon that.” And we really go down to the root of that person’s psyche and why they’re holding themselves in a certain pattern and how they can release it. And it’s always just the simplest thing. And people can’t believe that it’s that simple, but it is. And I’ll get emails days later like, “Wow, I already feel so different. I already feel so different within my life.” And it’s just because you’re keeping things into your own hands and you’re no longer waiting for permission. So it’s profound in the sense that it’s simple and it allows people to walk away feeling empowered within themselves to go further on their own.
Rick: That’s great. That gives people an idea of it. So you’ve shut down all your social media accounts.
Courtney: I’m on YouTube.
Rick: Oh, you’re on YouTube. And people can contact you through your website, right?
Courtney: Yeah.
Rick: https://www.thechannelpanel.com/, Which I’m showing on the screen here right now. And you still have social media buttons on there, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Do those do anything or they’re kind of stuck because you’ve shut down your social media accounts?
Courtney: I’m planning to be very active on YouTube still. That’s my main platform, so I’ll encourage all of you to subscribe to my YouTube channel. I’m on Instagram, Courtney.Amundson. Less likely to be on there 24/7, but still there. The only thing I’m not on right now is Facebook and Twitter.
Rick: But people can email you through your website to get in touch,
Courtney: People can email me.
Rick: If they want to set up one of these soul readings.
Rick: Yes. Okay, great. Well, it’s been wonderful spending time with you and getting to know you both over the past week as I’ve been listening to things and reading your book and then having this conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Courtney: I really enjoyed it too. It’s been a couple years that I’ve been waiting for this to happen and it’s just great that it worked out and I feel really honored to be on your show. So thank you so much for having me.
Rick: Yeah, and obviously if you ever come down to Fairfield, get in touch.
Courtney: I will, I will, absolutely.
Rick: Maybe I’ll see you out at that conference.
Courtney: Yes, yes, I hope to be there. I tend to be there.
Rick: Yeah. All right, well thanks Courtney. Let me just make a wrap-up point here or two. So you’ve been listening to an interview with Courtney Amundson and we’ve just discussed how to get in touch with her. This is part of an ongoing series and if you go to batgap.com, just check out the menus. You can subscribe to be notified by email when new interviews are posted. You can subscribe to the YouTube channel and YouTube will help you and check out the other menus and you’ll see a few things that you might find interesting. So thanks for listening or watching and we’ll hope to see you for the next one.