Courtney Amundson Transcript: Qigong, Channeling, and Spiritual Awakening

Courtney Amundson Interview

Summary

The conversation explores how Qigong, meditation, and visualization can support healing, emotional balance, and spiritual development. It also examines channeling, layered consciousness, free will, karma, surrender, and humanity’s relationship with a larger source of awareness.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can Qigong be used for healing and spiritual growth?
• What is channeling, and how can someone connect with higher guidance?
• How do free will, karma, and divine guidance work together?
• Can meditation and deeper self-inquiry reveal a person’s spiritual purpose?

Key takeaways

• Simple energy practices can support both physical healing and spiritual growth.
• Visualization and focused intention can influence how the body and emotions respond.
• A deeper layer of awareness remains connected to unconditional love and universal intelligence.
• Spiritual growth involves asking difficult questions and becoming willing to listen.
• Human beings are co-creators who can make meaningful choices within larger influences.
• Surrender does not eliminate personal agency; it helps align action with deeper guidance.

Transcript

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, or people will say, “You’re 40, big deal, so what?”

Courtney: Yeah.

Rick: But at the moment, later this month, you’ll be—

When you were nine years old, you 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 it. 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. My dad’s very supportive as well.

Rick: 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 asks Lord Krishna, “What happens if a person dies before they get enlightened?” Basically, 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.

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 like 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.” To me, it feels like a long time that I’ve been working toward these things.

When I channeled my first book, Teachings from God, it felt exactly like that—just a continuation. 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. 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 about 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.

Spring Forest Qigong and the Power of Simplicity

Courtney: Well, I practice Spring Forest Qigong. The founder, Master Chunyi Lin, is here in Minnesota, and he has basically taken many different forms of Qigong—there are many thousands of them—and really simplified it to make it accessible. He says that the simpler it is, the more powerful it is, and I really agree with that.

I think that working with the Qi of your own energy and the universal Qi together is the most powerful way to heal our bodies, grow ourselves spiritually, and deepen. There are a lot of forms of Qigong out there that are very complicated and, I think, take hundreds of years for people to master.

Master Lin talks about how there’s only good, better, and best. We use our hands to move the energy in our bodies. There are very simple techniques that anyone can do, and the principle around it is visualization and telling your body what you want. Your body responds to messages in energy form back to you.

Going back to when I was a young girl and started learning these meditations and very simple movements, I would imagine butterflies in my tummy when I didn’t feel well. I knew that was something 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. I would help my friends who had fallen down or hurt their knee or something. I’d get out there with my sword fingers and start chopping up the blockage. In your mind, you’re saying, “Blockage is removed. Completely healed, completely healed. The energy is back to normal.” Do that for two or three minutes, and you will feel a difference.

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, spiritual growth, and healing others.

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, spiritual growth, and healing others.

I’ve currently been through level four out of level five of Master Lin’s Qigong training, and it’s been life-changing and definitely part of what I want to continue.

Rick: That’s great. When you were nine, ten, eleven, or twelve, how much time did you spend every day practicing Qigong?

Courtney: Oh gosh, well, I definitely spent about 30 to 45 minutes in the morning practicing the active movements, which are really good for focusing on different organs of the body.

It doesn’t focus too much on the mind. It focuses on feeling the energy and moving deeper into your emotions. When we focus on the liver, we’ll focus on happiness or focus on a certain color. It’s really great to use for kids too, because they’re already super good at visualization and feeling.

I would practice probably about 45 minutes in the morning each day. If I got worried, I’d practice the butterfly meditation that night. That was another 30-minute meditation that just put me in a state of calm.

I was always a highly sensitive kid, so I really needed these tips and tricks to get through a day. I consider it to be magical then and magical now. I apply it differently now because I’ve deepened into the practice.

I definitely recommend it to everyone, and to a lot of my personal clients as well, because the spiritual aspect is one part, and the body is also another really important part of going deeper into our consciousness.

Rick: And I heard you say in various interviews that at that age, in your early teens, you were meditating a lot, sometimes hours at a time.

Channeling and the experience of oneness

Courtney: Yeah, yeah. When I got into channeling, the experience was not a huge revelation as such, because I had been meditating. I had listened to Abraham Hicks, and I loved the Abraham Hicks for Teens CD. I loved that a lot because it felt relatable that other younger people were asking the same kind of questions that I was asking in my mind.

It just happened one day that I had been listening to that and 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 and in my body—a feeling that I had lightened up. Then I felt this golden light come through the top of my head, and with that light came this unconditional love.

A First Experience of Profound Connection

It’s something that even to this day I can’t put into words because it is such an experience. I don’t think I’ve gotten back to that really pure feeling I had that day when it first started, because I had been asking for this type of connection for so long.

I never wanted to be Esther Hicks, but I felt it and I knew it. I went down to the computer, and my hands just started to move. There was this energy, this really strong energy, coming through my hands and typing out the words.

It was everything that I ever wanted to hear. It was affirmations, and it was just this pure feeling that everything up until that point had been absolutely guided—not just for me, but for every person on Earth.

I just knew that this was what I was supposed to do and that I could help other people do it. That’s what drove me to meditate so many hours after that initial contact. I knew for myself that if you can understand your own consciousness, your own emotions, and your own soul purpose, then that’s cracking the code of why this whole body is even in existence.

So yeah, I would meditate for three or four hours, and sometimes this oneness, this source of oneness, would take me to other places and let me experience different times.

Rick: Like what? Elaborate a little bit.

Courtney: One of my early experiences involved a lot of past-life sorts of experiences at first. One of the most juicy experiences—that’s the best way for me to say it—was that I traveled to this place. I was in the sky, but I could feel myself as this brilliant ball of light.

I was viewing below me sand, an ocean, and some birds flying by. But what caught me was that I was tasting the color of the sky and feeling the sound of the eagle. It was the most bizarre yet calming thing that I had ever imagined, and it was part of me as well.

I wasn’t something; I was just this ball of light. But I was feeling, sensing, and knowing everything about this location. It showed me that what we talk about when we say love and light, and when we say everything is oneness, was no longer just a word to me. This was a true understanding.

When you ask, you receive. It is the universal code, and we can’t go deeper unless we ask the more challenging questions of ourselves.

After that experience, I said to myself, “I just want to go deeper. I want to understand myself so that I can share this with other people.” I knew that if I could go through the layers of my own consciousness and view them, and maybe even try to heal some of the ones that were painful or that I had karma about, it was going to be a lot of work.

It’s not all beautiful and fun. Some of them were difficult for me. But ultimately, all of this was showing me that it was time for me at that point in my life to really surrender, listen, and continue to ask the deeper questions.

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 saying to me that they reveled so much in tasting the human experience, just as much as I reveled in tasting the more nonphysical 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?

Rick: Yes.

Okay, so by channeling them, you were able to serve as a sort of sense organ for those disembodied beings or something.

Courtney: Yeah, and to me it was sensed as a collective. In the beginning, that wasn’t the case. There were different personalities that were very light, very airy-fairy. It made me giggle. There would be times when the lessons would just be about joy and experiencing our bodies, experiencing the joy of going outside and sensing all 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.

Then that all evolved when I realized that I wanted to be of service in a bigger way. That turned when I said to myself, “I will write the book. I will do that.” And that transformed into a more grand presence, which I then called the Oneness. It started to feel like that, too. It felt broad. There were no distinct energies anymore. It was just this big sense of unconditional love and awareness and Source, and that nothing is separate from that.

✨ Layers of consciousness and free will

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.

Just that, as a human being, we are a conglomerate of trillions of cells, and each of those cells has its own life. You could almost say the cell doesn’t even realize that it’s part of this collective of trillions, and yet it is. 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, there are larger conglomerates of which we are a part. When you mentioned the word collective, it made me think of that. Whoever 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 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: that we are multilayered beings. 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 nonphysical. The physical component of us is small, but it is our dominant projection of awareness, is the best way I can say that.

The reason for that is because we chose it. We chose to look through this lens, almost solely, and learn about emotions, learn about contrast, learn about the environment, because it’s fun. Honestly, the way that I experienced moving from the nonphysical to the physical and back and forth and back and forth was that there’s just joy in recognizing something again.

If we were just in wholeness and all-knowingness all the time, there’s not as much play in that. It was very interesting because, from that nonphysical point of view, when we choose it, it’s not a question of, “What are the pros and cons?” We don’t think like that. 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. I was above, viewing my birth before I came into this body, and I saw these presences around me of light that were showing me all of these different pathways. They were all golden and so beautiful. There were hundreds of thousands of them, and I went over to one—or floated, or whatever it felt like—but I went there and chose that one.

I had this distinct sense that any one I would have chosen would have been correct. I think that our consciousness is layered to help us see that at these pivotal points of our human reality. We have a little chipping away of one of those layers to help us see through enough to go, “Oh, there’s something there. There’s something there. I might not be sure. I don’t even know if I want to look at it anymore, but there’s something there.”

Usually it will happen by some drastic accident, or a relationship that fails, or a death in the family, or something like that. If you can get there without that, that’s cool, but a lot of times it takes a sledgehammer to get us to realize that there’s something there. We don’t have to drive the boat, basically, is what I’m saying. We’re trying all the time to be the driver, myself included. I caught myself yesterday 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 it’s like we don’t snap from A to Z in our spiritual evolution. There are degrees of unfoldment and maturation and so on. Regarding the driver point, I think there are degrees of surrender, where the authorship of action is not relinquished entirely overnight. It’s shifted by degrees, from a rigid sense of individuality and “I’m doing this” to “God is doing it, and I’m just an instrument of that divine intelligence. 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 there’s free will in this human body. I know it’s different on different planes of reality, but as a human being, 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 ourselves 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. I know some people who think that fate is how we move through life, and it takes the power away from us. When we think that there is just one path and that there’s right or wrong, if we stumble and fall for a minute, we think that we have to start all over again, or that something is punishing us.

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, is so closely linked—closer than people will realize.

I do soul readings for people one-on-one. I have clients who 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 have this voice within them that is connected to Source Energy, that is all-knowingness, that is complete love. It never turns off. It never turns off.

But as human beings, our consciousness often remains at a lower level until we ask a question: “Why am I here? What’s the purpose?” With that also comes a surrender to listen, 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. I’ve been doing it, and I’m reminding myself right now, in the past few days. It’s a constant involvement in that.

Rick: Yeah, it’s 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 one of these stunt riders who can jump off barn roofs and do flips in the air and stuff like that.

Free Will, Conditioning, and Opening Consciousness

So it does become kind of second nature, but it’s something that—well, let’s just shift that question a little bit. 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. They can’t just 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 move themselves in the direction of greater affluence, if we want to use that example.

So you concur with that? We don’t have 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 think, as you said, there are multiple influences. You mentioned karma for a second there, which is definitely an aspect of it. To me, it’s just a lens that is filtered through our lifetime. I’m just talking about this lifetime, but if you’re carrying things with you, whether 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 get used to the fact that 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 consciousness, by definition, wants to realize itself.

Even if you are not aware of any of this, it’s still happening. So I would say yes, free will—there are many factors at play there. But in the sense that I was mentioning it, I was saying that to unlock certain layers of our consciousness, we have to be the ones to open the door.

Even if you are not aware of any of this, it’s still happening. So I would say yes, free will—there are many factors at play there. But in the sense that I was mentioning it, I was saying that to unlock certain layers of our consciousness, we have to be the ones to open the door.

Take the initiative, yeah. Take the initiative. Furthermore, it needs to be within the consciousness of the Earth and within the consciousness of humanity before it can be fully realized to any extent. So there’s another level of Oneness at play there, not even going to the Oneness of the Oneness, but just between our consciousness and the consciousness of our physical planet, which has a signature, too. So there are karmas there as well.

Rick: Yeah, I think you’re alluding to something we were discussing a little while ago: that 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, in a way, 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. “Knock and the door shall be opened.” There are various gurus who say, “Take one step toward me and I’ll take a hundred steps toward you.” Sometimes that’s said with reference to God: if you take that sort of initiative, then you’ll get a response, but you have to 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.

I think that’s the positive part out of my entire life’s journey—experiences, revelations, struggles. I’ve 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.

Integrating extraordinary experiences into ordinary life

Rick: Yeah. That’s kind of a teenage syndrome in a way, of thinking they know everything and the adults don’t know anything. Then you become an adult and you realize, “Oh, yeah.”

Courtney: Right. I mean, just within the layers of our own consciousness, just to feel that 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.

For me personally, I’ve had so many different awakening points in which I’m forced to go deeper into that, 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 are 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. Then, when you got bitten by the spiritual bug really badly, you thought, “All right, I’m going to 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.

That was my earliest memory of feeling something huge and amazing. That was before everything else. I started playing the violin when I was nine, and I went to a Waldorf school, the Minnesota Waldorf School. Everybody starts a stringed instrument in the third grade, so I chose the violin.

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, aligned like this. I felt that, and I was very, very shy. Like I said, I was very sensitive as a young girl, and 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: Very quickly, I joined the Minnesota Youth Symphonies when I was 11, playing at Minneapolis’s Orchestra Hall. 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.

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. 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 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. 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. 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. Music is also very important to me.

Rick: I also wanted to ask you, 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. You didn’t even know what it was, and afterward you read it and thought, “Wow, where did all that come from?” I was just curious: were you a touch typist already? 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, fingers hitting keys, but you weren’t a touch typist.

Courtney: I followed, so the energy would go through different fingers—

Rick: Yeah, that’s where I would type.

You just pushed.

Courtney: Yeah.

Rick: Wow.

Courtney: It was really like that. It really was. I remember, in the beginning, it was very slow, very precise, and it was in a different language. I don’t know if I’ve said this in an interview before—

Rick: I thought it was in English.

Courtney: It was not for the first couple of pages. It was not something I knew—not a human language, for sure—but I knew what it meant. I knew what it meant.

That’s when, in my next meditation, I was like, “Yo, guys from the astral world, I need some English. Throw me a bone.” They did, and that’s when it started to come out a lot more brilliantly.

The First Experience of Channeling Through Writing

What surprised me—the first thing was that I could have my eyes closed, and they would type furiously, so quickly. I don’t even know what my words per minute were, but it was really fast. This energy streamed out my fingertips.

Secondly, there was just this amazing vocabulary that I had never used. I was into writing before, and I loved English class, so I had some vocabulary, obviously. But the metaphors and the way of relating words together really amazed me.

I remember moments where things would come out, maybe a little word in French or something, and I would have to Google it and look it up to see what it was, because I didn’t know.

There are so many things like that that really stick with me to this day—metaphors that I use within my own mind every day, because they’re helpful and easy.

That’s what I really enjoy about Teachings from God. There’s a lot of really esoteric books out there, and I’ve read them, but I think what we really need as human beings, a lot of us, is everyday assistance to understand those things in a way that we can relate to.

Really, how do we love ourselves? How do we enjoy our lives and treat other people the way we want to be treated? How do we go deeper within ourselves and love ourselves 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 I don’t feel like the author. I feel like the co-author. 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 it: 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 even type by looking at my fingers, because I type in Dvorak. It wouldn’t help me to look at my fingers, because all the keys are different from what you see on them. But you weren’t, and yet you were sitting there with your eyes closed, just sort of pushing keys without even knowing what the heck you were writing, and then it all 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 down that idea.

Courtney: 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. It became less of an ultra-spiritual thing and more of, “Oh, this is how life is supposed to be.”

Rick: Yeah.

Courtney: That’s why I really try not to fit into a category. I try to relate all of these things in the most human way, so that if I’m talking to somebody who’s Jewish or somebody who’s Buddhist—and the word “channeling” is weird to a lot of people—I can just say, “Hey, this is a way for you to love yourself. If you can sit down, 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: your down-to-earthness and your 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?”

Your response was something like, “You know, we’re all just human beings, and we shouldn’t put ourselves up on pedestals or put on airs or anything.”

Courtney: Yeah.

Rick: So it seems like you’ve been integrating really 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.

At that moment, during the 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 peace about me that just couldn’t be shaken. 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?

Courtney: Yeah, they knew it. They took me to a qigong master, and he validated that this was really powerful, but they already knew. They sat in on the channeling as well. Both of my parents did, and my sister did 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, as you’re going through these experiences, which are kind of unusual, what was your social life like?

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 mistrustful 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. 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.” I go home and listen to David Permal. Other people go home and watch the game.

Rick: Yeah.

Courtney: I just couldn’t. I remember saying once to one of my friends—we were at music camp—and I started to get a little bit like, “Hmm, let me test the waters.” 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 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. I didn’t expect that she was going to ask me for a reading. 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, it’s easier to have your own opinions about things instead of being a slight blob of whatever your friends do and 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. 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.” I think it’s valuable. In fact, at that time, I turned my sisters on to meditation. One of them was 13 or 14, and the other was a couple of years older. The 13-year-old stuck with it. She’s a full-time meditation teacher to this day—that’s over 50 years.

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. 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. 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. I’m 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: Okay.

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.

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. I’m making an effort. I’m trying to be a better pickleball player or interviewer or whatever.”

We all, as you’ve said, are multidimensional, 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, between different levels of consciousness, the aspect of free will—

Rick: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.

Courtney: So—

Rick: 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.

We see the same thing in physics. The molecular level, the atomic level, the chemical level—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.

Courtney: Just the same, 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. Again, it has to do with those layers of consciousness, and when we shift our vibration is when we can better understand those more multidimensional qualities. 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—

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, multidimensional kinds of qualities of reality. You have to go into that state to some degree, and that’s the biggest challenge of humanness, really: We both yearn for the information, but we also forget that our brains are not the only thing working for us.

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, talking about free will and talking about being able to jump between those realities, we have free will in this human body to do that. The depth to 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,” 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 endpoint, because we are still human beings. Again, like I said earlier, 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. 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. 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 and 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. I think you see where I’m going with this: If we think of ourselves as an instrument, this is the 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, is why I practice Qigong.

Rick: Right.

Courtney: 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 where you can see that you can deepen further if you do certain things, like work on your energy system.

Rick: Yeah.

Courtney: I do like to think of the body as a temple and also as a doorway at the same time to something greater. My deepest experiences have been after practicing a lot of Qigong, being at a retreat and practicing a lot, and physically seeing my mind turn off—just this presence that exists, that’s just there.

It kind of showed me, in that experience—many experiences—that 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, or be validated for something.

Rick: Speaking of the mind never shutting off, there’s that second verse of the Yoga Sutras that 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. It’s moments like that where you start to think, “Am I here anymore? 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.

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 Cliff’s Notes. My experience is just my experience; I can’t put that into words.

But, yeah, that’s kind of where I’m going with that: If you can fine-tune your physical being every day with different things—and I think everybody has their different practice, so I won’t say, “Do this” or “Do that”—I will say that unlocking the physical body is a doorway to unlocking this spiritual knowledge in a deeper way.

Rick: Yeah.

Courtney: 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. Pretty much every tradition has that kind of thing, I think.

✨ Awakening as an ongoing integration

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. Since then, I think you used the word purity, and I just wanted to comment 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, 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, 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. 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 could go back to a paragraph in the book and be reminded of this deeper experience.

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. 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.” 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.

Integrating Spiritual Depth with Everyday Humanity

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 to mundane humanness. I can have both tracks and relate them, and I like that, even though it’s a challenge.

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 to 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.

Enlightenment is not a flashy experience. It’s the 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. 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 there was no endpoint; that was a beginning point. That was a first initiation, and there have been many since—periods of feeling disconnected. I know, of course, you’re never disconnected, but that does happen.

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 hero’s journey. Basically, in essence, it talks about how 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. Going to that deep level right then and there, that can’t be the endpoint. You can’t be in bliss and peace twenty-four seven. 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 twenty-four seven, in the midst of Walmart, or riding a roller coaster, or getting in a car accident? Can it 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 either way, because people do make that assumption about me and about a lot of other well-known spiritual teachers—that they just blurt out these wise words live. You have to be immersed in the humanness. You have to be immersed in the nonphysicalness. 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, 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 who support it, and schools that do, and so on and so forth. 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. 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.” What was weird to me is that other kids around me didn’t seem bothered by it at all. I felt like an oddball, but ultimately, I don’t want to say it just tried 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 of 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 Abraham Hicks a lot, but I also picked up a lot of other works. 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 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 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 that for me, I think the nature of reality is best understood when it’s simple, uses metaphors we can understand, feels really loving and light-filled, and you don’t feel overwhelmed at the first sight of it.

My language is, “I want to feel something. I want to feel this connection within myself.” I was not inspired by just—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 who 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 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 with anything you’re relating to in life, to follow your first impulse about something and know that it is correct. It’s not different.

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 and consciousness. This discussion reminds me of the multidimensional 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 and 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: I would agree with that. My own personal journey has been a lot about that, and 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 how life is like a puppet show. We imagine the hand of God as being the puppeteer, moving our little arms and legs out on the stage. There’s a curtain between the two, and until we ask, we don’t know that there’s a hand above us until we move the curtain ourselves.

It takes a level of surrender. 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, then a bigger question.

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 shift. So you have to learn a new way to surrender; you have to continue. It’s like the whole thing you said about samadhi. That’s about being comfortable with dying many, many times, being comfortable with that process of transformation. Transformation is always happening.

I would say surrender, then deeper surrender, then deeper surrender, and deeper surrender. Even through those moments of being really confused and maybe even angry or whatever, you continue to remember that you are connected to the wholeness through your own source 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’ve 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. Once you’ve had a taste of it, it reminds 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.”

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. You just continue to move in that direction, and it’s like the Pavlovian thing where you get rewarded when you do. So there’s a reinforcing, positive feedback loop.

Courtney: Yeah, and you will get feedback when you do surrender. It’s just like what you said: If you take one step towards God, God will take a thousand steps back towards you—something along those lines.

I’ve caught myself in moments where I’m just pushing up against a wall of myself. 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?

Put it on hiatus.

Yeah.

Courtney: But I’ve been known to be the social media girl who’s on there and posting all the time. That was my—this was 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, even when that step feels like a lot. 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. You do have to see, when there are those moments of resistance, what’s going to give. Even though it may seem small to deactivate your social media, for me it was like, “Oh, that was a big one for me,” and it did turn things around immediately and will continue to.

There’s all kinds of cool quotes and cultural things about this point. There was a German philosopher, Goethe, who said something about how if you just 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 of; you wouldn’t even know they existed.

I’m thinking of The Lord of the Rings, where Frodo just heads out and starts doing this thing. 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. I think when you have an energy about service as well—and I’m pretty confident that all of you who are watching have this sense about you, because you wouldn’t be watching otherwise—when your purpose is grander than just your own self, just your own survival, there is an energy that supports you even more deeply.

I think acts of service really do support you, and that gathers in your bank. 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 that I write love letters. I write 50 love letters and disperse them around town. I am anonymous, but people find them.

Rick: Just put them on lampposts or something?

Courtney: Yeah, I just hide them around in various places—co-ops and bookshops. It feels good to feel like you’re connected to a bigger world, a bigger universe, and that the letters can be found and put on this website. 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.

🛤️ Continuous deepening and the hero’s journey

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 percent.

You know, when I was younger, I may have gotten into 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 is much more mundane but infused with all of these things that have happened to me and for me, I should add.

No, it’s a constant awakening process, and that’s something that I’ve had to learn to roll with. 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. It talks about the cycle of initiation. I guess it starts with something like embarking, then there’s initiation, and the endpoint is conquering the dragon in front of you.

I think that the dragon can be multiple dragons in one lifetime. You can conquer one dragon and be freed from that aspect, and then there’s another cycle, another thing to present itself to you.

I’m not yet comfortable with that, but that’s my journey of getting to it. That’s the journey of life in essence: We learn that it’s never-ending like that. You’re going to have moments of pain and suffering, and you’re going to have moments of bliss, freedom, and joy.

Eventually, I would hope to see that the gap lessens, that you continue to have those cycles but it’s not so much that you completely burn or completely lose yourself. I think that gap lessens.

You look at the qigong masters, the tai chi masters, these highly awakened people. They’re still experiencing life, right? They’re still in human bodies, but they have this baseline of well-being that can’t be conquered because it’s been primed for many, many years. They’ve learned so much and gathered so much that they have that foundation.

But they still understand suffering, they still understand pain, and they still understand human emotions. It won’t stop occurring. That’s something to understand: 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 are so many examples of that. Ramana Maharshi died of cancer, and it was very painful. 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 doesn’t touch me. I’m beyond all this.”

People would say, “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 almost tangential to his experience, judging from the things he was saying.

Courtney: Yeah, I definitely can understand that at that level. Why would you want to stay attached? 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?

There are moments like Anita Moorjani’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.

✨ Christ consciousness and the many flavors of oneness

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 from my book again to describe this, because a lot of people ask these kinds of questions of me. There’s a metaphor in the book about a pot of soup.

Imagine oneness as a pot of soup. When you’re making a pot of soup, we have many different herbs and 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 once it is all made together, we can’t measure out the molecules of water before it became the broth. Oneness is sort of 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 the lens through which you view, is very plausible. 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, Buddha, or Lao Tzu; Mother Mary; or it can be 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 who was aware that everything is connected, right?

Rick: “I and my Father are one.”

Courtney: Yes, exactly. So I think we can draw upon the teachings of all of these masters, being 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. Different people choose different Ishta-Devatas. They might relate to Shiva, Ganesh, Kali, or different ones, or Christ, for that matter. I guess 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 Ganesh. I have been through many different cultural interpretations, between my teacher Master Lin’s Chinese perspectives and, through Qigong, the kinds of masters he talks about.

In the world of kirtan, we talk about Shiva and Ganesh, and we pray to Krishna. I don’t see them as separate. I really don’t. You may have heard or seen the memes that say, “We’re just all walking each other home,” with a picture of all the masters together. I really like that interpretation and the graphic that goes with it, because I think it’s something we all need to be reminded of: There really is no division. We’re creating the division.

Rick: Very true. There’s a sort of human tendency to want to think, “My thing is the best thing,” 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.

The personal material behind the book

Anyway, I wanted to ask you more. I heard you say that when you first started doing this channeling thing, you churned out around 900 pages of it.

Courtney: Yeah, frequently so.

Rick: The whole first part of it, you said, pertained primarily to you personally. When you put the book together, I guess you didn’t use much of that. It was more a lot of the other material, and you refined it down into 200 or 300 pages. What was all this stuff that was for you personally that you didn’t put in the book?

Courtney: It was about my own soul evolution.

Rick: Give us some examples.

Courtney: I will, yeah. As I mentioned, in the beginning I was shown, through some astral travel, 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, reexperiencing death in one of the lifetimes, and the story was incomplete. That frustrated me.

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, because I was literally traveling places and experiencing different lifetimes.

It would be hard to put into words because it was more of a feeling sense, but I did experience a lot of pain in those lifetimes. Some of them felt more real than here. I was learning things, and then one life was cut short. After that, I’d move into this more-than-human aspect where I was more like a galactic being.

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. I was aware that I was traveling. 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,” and I would let go.

I’d get zoomed out. First of all, I would see a sort of light body come up over the top of my body. I’d be lying 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.

I experienced the one that I already shared with you, experiencing Oneness. I didn’t mention that I also saw myself as a Black man on the sand in that vision. My hands were tied behind my back, and I was posted on a stake, on a cross, and put in the ocean.

Somebody might ask me, “What was the purpose of you seeing all this?” It did upset me. Seeing a lot of these things did upset me. What was the purpose of it? I think I was opening these doors so I could release these aspects and move forward and…

Rick: Process them.

Courtney: Process them. Yeah, exactly. But it just didn’t have any relevance to anybody else. It was so personal. It was really my own journey of figuring out myself.

Rick: What’s interesting is that it’s almost as if this was preparatory to your writing the rest of the book.

Courtney: It was.

Rick: It was like a purification or something that had to take place, so you could be an even more fit vehicle for the other material that came through.

Courtney: Absolutely. I had to reach this equilibrium with the energy as well. At that point, it wasn’t really the collective feeling that I felt when I made the decision to make this a book.

I called this energy Hannah, and the reason why—

Rick: Hannah, like Hannah Montana?

Courtney: Hannah. H-A-N-N-A. When my sister and I would go to bed, my mom used to have us visualize our guardian angel, whom she called Hannah, protecting our home. So that was a name and frequency that I knew, and I used that word for many, many months to call upon that energy.

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. We’re going to help you through the process.” So I said, “Okay. I’ll do it,” but I was also sort of not believing that it was possible. I knew how introverted I was. The concept of writing a book seemed a little like, “I don’t know. I don’t know about that.”

Channeling a Book for the Collective

But the whole thing was so effortless once it began. It was a continuation, but it was also a very clear start when it became a book, because it was directed to the collective. 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.”

They said, “Even as time progresses, the information will still stay relatable.” In that sense, I really treated it like a sacred thing. It was a sacred time for me to be in when I was writing it, and I did the best that I could to be as pure a channel as I could be.

Any moment that I had 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.

What the book offers readers

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. 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: On a very basic level, people feel this sense of unconditional love and peace. People have picked up my book who aren’t interested in any sort of spiritual things. They just read it because I wrote it, and they want to know what it is that I published. Those people will feel a deep sense of peace and love.

Some people say to me, “I feel like it was written for me.” That’s the most common response I get: People say they feel like it was written for them.

A few people 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. In that sense, it has changed people’s lives through the foundation of realizing that all of this information is within them and that they can unlock it at their own will.

The moment that is realized and really understood is pretty incredible. All of a sudden, people stop calling me, right? They don’t want to know what I have to say anymore. They’ve 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: When you say “client,” do you mean that 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 you’re reading on the page is the one that is within you. There may be an essence of me because I channeled it, but the goal really is that when you’re reading those words and when you’re able to let go and feel them, that voice starts to become activated within you and you start to unlock those layers.

You start to realize a shift within your own life. 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 who gets to guide your life. People take their lives 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. He’s number two on BatGap, and I’ve interviewed a few people who are healers, and they become very popular. 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.

Ultimately, I think this is a do-it-yourself operation. We can get assistance from all kinds of places, but ultimately we have to do our own work. I think it’s healthy what you’re saying: You often only have one session with people, and then they’re on their own. You give them a boost or a kick in the pants or whatever, enable them to discover that it’s within them, and then they can continue on that journey.

Courtney: That’s proof of success to me. Also, noticing it within myself—the moment that I stopped listening to other channelers showed me that I have enough confidence and that I can do this within myself.

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 where it starts off with a sort of fighting momentum. They just want the answer. They want to be told, “This is the way,” and all they have to do is say yes to this job, this relationship, moving to this location, or whatever it is.

Some people even get caught up on a past life and figuring that out, but the answer always comes down to this: Right now is what is most important, and you get to choose where you want to put your energy.

Some people even get caught up on a past life and figuring that out, but the answer always comes down to this: Right now is what is most important, and you get to choose where you want to put your energy.

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.

It’s always interesting to see. Some people catch on really fast, and for some people it takes a little bit longer.

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: You can be told all day long by 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 for working with people my age as well, because there’s so much fear and anxiety and questions. So many people are just unsure of where to go. I like to think that I can, through my YouTube channel and through my videos, help people to see that it’s not hard. You get to pave your own path and validate it for yourself; you don’t need somebody else to tell you. It’s okay.

🏘️ Grounding, relationships, and spiritual community

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—just feeling like you’re on your own island and nobody you can relate to—and also being addicted to those experiences, like you said.

Rick: Fireworks.

Courtney: Yes, the fireworks. 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 seeing other places, I had no interest in really having a talk about the weather with 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—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, go out with your friends, and meet new people.

I made that adjustment when I started doing these interviews, really a couple of years ago. It might be three years by now that I’ve been doing these interviews and connecting with more people. 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 interact more with the world around you. So, 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 to lose anything. Continue with what you’re doing in your practices. 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—“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 my real open-heartedness 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 in 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 from anybody else. A lot of people have probably had very similar experiences to yours, so just treat it as though you’ve taken a different language course than your other friends. 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 get on Meetup.com and start to find other people who were sort of like-minded as well. So it sounds like there are a few different things going on: 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 as you do.

Rick: Yeah, and I think that there are enough people out there everywhere who are sort of on a higher wavelength, if you want to put it that way, that you don’t have to compromise by going and 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, on how important the company you keep is. It definitely has a big influence on your evolution. 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, to that point, surround yourself with people who do get it as well. I’m not saying to 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 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 and new to all this. I hadn’t shared anything publicly, and I found a channeling group. 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 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?

Sure, I’m sure. 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.

I just love meeting people and feeling how they experience life. When you can have a really deep connection with people, that’s everything that validates my entire existence. And I have a great group of people around me right now that I really value. They have my back, and I have theirs.

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 traveling more and sharing these things more broadly, 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 all over the world, and there are amazing people everywhere. I spent three months in Iran, and I’ve spent nine months in the Philippines—all kinds of different places—and there are 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 and 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.

I think it’s always interesting and cool to see through other people’s lenses and see how it all comes together in the end.

✨ Earth consciousness and the next book

Rick: So we talked a little bit about what’s in your book. Obviously, there 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 I haven’t—again, one thing I have to also inject into this conversation is that when I’m channeling these books, especially when I haven’t been editing them many, many times through, which is the case with this one so far, 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 how our Earth has 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, 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 about geology—different, deeper layers of the physical Earth, like down to the core and so on?

Courtney: Yes, exactly. 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. Sometimes I’ve had amazing meditations up on jet planes. Something about being up at 35,000 feet, I don’t know what it is, but—

Courtney: Right. Yeah, and I will continue to go deeper into these ideas. Like I said, I think this book is an extension of the last one, but it goes more into the physicality of our nature and our Earth.

I think it is important because a lot of times I know I’m feeling a certain way and I’m not sure how to separate it—from my consciousness to the Earth consciousness to the humanity consciousness. It’s all collective, right?

Sometimes I feel muddy, and this might help us to deepen our relationship to that and also not get too scientific or too much 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, and it varies from one spot to another. There’s 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 I feel like I’m always trying to refine my own senses so that I can review what is mine and not take on everything. More and more it seems like—and maybe this is my own perception, or maybe you can talk about whether some of your other guests have felt this too—but I think it feels like the lines are more blurred these days. What is collective and what is ours is a little bit—you know what I’m saying?

Rick: Yeah.

Courtney: 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 I think you can break it down to astrology, or there are 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 a golden age coming, or whatever. Have you ever channeled anything about that, or do you have any thoughts or insights?

Courtney: Yes, there are moments like that in the book where it talks about that. To my awareness, what I remember is that it’s not like this is our first golden age.

Rick: There have been others.

Courtney: Yeah, there’s been many. But with all of this—how we’ve been talking about the cycle of one’s personal soul evolution throughout a lifetime and many lifetimes—I see it the same way collectively. As Earth, I see that we’re going through those same sorts of cycles as well.

I don’t think that in 2012 everything changed. I think that in 2012 there might have been a moment where there was a shift, but we’re having shifts every single day, every single day. It’s all pulled by our collective consciousness as Earth, as humanity. We also have assistance throughout all of that.

My job personally is to try to stay open, so I can move with that flux and continue to receive information about these things for myself and to share with all of you. That’s why I say it’s like a constant surrender, right? It’s always being upgraded and changed, the way in which you can receive. 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 there are definitely higher intelligences or higher beings, or whatever, that are very much concerned with Earth, with its destiny, and with the human species surviving and evolving, and so on. Do you have any comments or thoughts about that?

Courtney: I have received information about 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, “This will be doom and gloom if you don’t do this.” No, and it’s not even seen that way.

Honestly, most of the book talks in the sense that there’s been a lot of pain and suffering on Earth. Within your own collective consciousness, there’s healing to be realized. But at the same time, from the perspective of the nonphysical, everything is literally light. Everything is seen as perfect.

When I was channeling this, it was almost like I had to receive it through the lens of a human being asking the question about where our Earth is going. If you were to just receive the nonphysical 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 a slightly different but same answer, which might be, “Here are some things you can do to assist.” They are more personalized flavors of the soup, where they come through as their unique personality to assist humanity and really go deeper into these questions.

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: We need to continue to raise our own personal vibration each and every day. 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. 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, more distractions, and more separation.

I say, “If you are trying to be a lightworker,” in the sense of the New Age way that everybody’s like, “Be the lightworker,” I say, “Okay, well then talk with your family member who doesn’t agree with you, ask them what their life is about, and don’t just talk to the people who think like you and get snarky toward 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 just think it’s so funny, because I meet so many spiritual teachers who only hang out with their tribe. They never really get to the root of humanness, emotion, contrast, and separation, because they’re forcing themselves to stay in that little bubble. Well, you can only go so far with that.

I guess that’s my mission: to go into the depth of things and 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 who get groups of Republicans and Democrats together and help facilitate communication and find common ground between them, and so on and so forth. It kind of reminded me of that.

Courtney: Yeah, exactly. You can do it in simple ways. 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.

📚 Soul readings and helping people find their own guidance

Rick: So, let’s wrap it up a little bit. You’ve mentioned a number of times that you have sessions with people, I guess over Skype or phone or something. Do 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, a soul reading with me is basically an opportunity to have a conversation with your soul in real time. The experience for me is—you’ve probably been listening to how I’ve channeled my book, Teachings from God. It’s the same process 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.

It’s very specific to you, right? I take you into a short meditation, and in that time we reach an equilibrium of energy. Then I let you know that we’re going to start the reading, and I tell you to focus on your heart and focus on a golden sun in your heart, and to just smile. Smile.

My teacher, Master Lin, says, “Smile stands for Start My Internal Love Engine.” I always tell people that, and then I begin the reading. 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,” these are the guides who are helping you with the reading?

Courtney: Right, the soul collective of you. 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 that you should ask. It’s like, in this moment, “What do you want to talk about?”

They really try to help you 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. 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 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. 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.

We really go down to the root of that person’s psyche, why they’re holding themselves in a certain pattern, and how they can release it. It’s always just the simplest thing. People can’t believe that it’s that simple, but it is.

I’ll get emails days later like, “Wow, I already feel so different. I already feel so different within my life.” It’s just because you’re keeping things in your own hands and you’re no longer waiting for permission.

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. 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. You still have social media buttons on there—Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Do those do anything, or are they 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. I’m less likely to be on there 24/7, but I’m still there. The only things I’m not on right now are 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.

Courtney: Yes.

Rick: 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 of years that I’ve been waiting for this to happen, and it’s just great that it worked out. 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. 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. 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 find them. Check out the other menus, and you’ll see a few things that you might find interesting.

Thanks for listening or watching, and we hope to see you for the next one.